Lawrence Block - Step by Step

And so we walked, out of Toulouse and on toward Andorra. I don’t know how far we went the first day, or indeed on any of the days during that first week. We walked to a café, and got something to eat, and then we walked until we found a hotel, and took a room. And we got up the next morning and did it again.

We must have been out of our minds.

Before our Buffalo hunt, I’d spent hours in libraries, and more hours with Rand McNally. We’d be in familiar terrain, and within easy reach of friends and family.

Our preparation for the pilgrimage, in contrast, consisted of a single lunch with Jack Hitt, the fellow who’d told Don and Abby about the whole business in the first place. Jack turned out to be a splendid fellow, with a great supply of anecdotes and a fine sense of local color, but all that lunch really did was convince us to go.

And so we’d gone — without reading a single book about the pilgrimage, in modern or contemporary times, without doing a lick of research, and without undertaking any training for the physical ordeal we were about to undergo. We were living in New York now, we had moved back just over a year ago, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, and as New Yorkers we were of course in the habit of walking a couple of miles a day, because that’s how one gets from place to place. And I’d joined a gym upon our return, and got there two or three times a week, working with weights and dutifully slogging away on the StairMaster.

Lynne assumed walking would be no problem; after all, she’d been doing it all her life. I figured it might be slow going at first, but that we’d get stronger as we went along, and would eventually be able to take the physical side of the trip in stride, so to speak.

Some long city walks during the months before our departure probably would have been a good idea. They’d have been good practice, especially if we’d worn our backpacks. But we didn’t even have backpacks until a week or so before we set out.

We bought them in a rush one afternoon, along with a pair of sleeping bags and a tent. We took back the tent the following day, having realized it was just going to be too much to carry, and it’s a good thing, because otherwise we’d have thrown it overboard sometime during the first week in France. Because, even without it, our packs were too heavy.

I don’t know what they weighed. After the first day, mine was the heavier of the two, because we shifted much of the load from Lynne’s backpack to mine. That was essential, because I was stronger and better able to manage the weight, and because she’d brought more with her. We’d both kept clothing to a minimum, but she’d brought along her full complement of Erno Laszlo skin preparations, and those little jars weighed a ton.

So my backpack was the heavier of the two, but both of them were heavier than we’d have liked. The clerk at Paragon had tried to sell us aluminum-frame backpacks, and they’d struck us at the time as cumbersome; if we’d taken his advice, we’d have been better off. Our packs weren’t designed to distribute the weight, and the straps cut into our shoulders.

Before long, Lynne decided her backpack was the problem. It hurt, it tired you out, it slowed you down. There was, she realized, a far better way to transport one’s possessions.

“I want a shopping cart,” she announced.

I had the hardest time trying to explain to her why this wasn’t a good idea. It did no good to point out that people who did this sort of thing all the time always wore backpacks and never pushed shopping carts. All that meant to her was that she’d thought of something that hadn’t occurred to anyone else.

A loaded shopping cart, I told her, would be very difficult to push up a hill. And it would be at least as hard to hold on to on the downhills. And it would probably lose a wheel or fall apart altogether before too long, because those things were designed to move at a leisurely pace up and down supermarket aisles, with no surface under their tires more abrasive than a parking lot. They didn’t roll up a whole lot in the way of mileage, and none of it was apt to be on dirt roads or trails, and—

But I wasn’t getting anywhere. Several times a day she’d resume whining about the shopping cart.

Everything I’d told her was the truth, and what good did it do me? So I switched to fiction. Maybe a shopping cart wasn’t that bad an idea, I told her, but it just didn’t sit right with me. See, I’d be deeply embarrassed to be seen in the company of somebody pushing a shopping cart.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, okay.”

Because once it was a question of style, she could accept it.

Nowadays I’ll frequently see young parents trotting along while pushing an infant in a three-wheeled Baby Jogger. (Once, in perhaps the eighteenth hour of my first twenty-four-hour race in Wakefield, Massachusetts, I saw a woman jogging along behind a triple stroller, its three compartments filled with triplets. I’m still not entirely certain she wasn’t a hallucination.)

The Baby Jogger, I’ve since learned, is the vehicle of choice for a good number of solitary cross-country runners and walkers, those hardy souls who choose to cross a state or a region or the whole of America on foot, and without benefit of a support crew in a camper. The first time I saw footage of someone so engaged and so equipped, I was struck by his resourcefulness and ingenuity; then, when I’d had a chance to think about it, I realized what I’d just seen — Lynne’s shopping cart, God help us, reborn in its ideal form.

Of course the folks with the Baby Joggers didn’t have to deal with much in the way of hills, let alone the Pyrenees or the mountains of Galicia. And those joggers were built for the task at hand, and they weren’t boxy crates last seen in a checkout line at the local Safeway.

Still, credit where it’s due and all that. Maybe my bride was on to something.

The first day out of Toulouse it rained some, but after that the weather was pleasant, and the days were not without their satisfactions. Each night found us at a two-or three-star inn, and the rooms were comfortable and the meals more than acceptable. The walking gave us an appetite, and afterward we didn’t have trouble sleeping.

In the morning we’d have breakfast, and then we’d reclaim our passports from the desk and set off again. One morning, after a night in a very nice inn in the town of Foix, we omitted the reclaim-our-passports step. That was my job, and we’d walked the better part of an hour before I realized my error. I left Lynne at the side of the road, shucked my backpack, hurried back to Foix, collected the passports, and hurried back to Lynne.

She sympathized with me, having to do all that extra walking, and I told her it hadn’t been so bad. It was a nuisance having to cover the same ground again, but at least I hadn’t had all that weight on my back. And, before she could put in another word for shopping carts, I sympathized with her, having to stand around all that time.

“It was okay,” she said. “I didn’t have the backpack on, and I didn’t have to walk anywhere. I could just sit in the shade. It was very pleasant, actually.”

The route got worse as we went along. Because we were getting into the Pyrenees, and while they are not right up there with the Himalayas, they are nevertheless mountains, and that meant that the road we were walking was going forever uphill.

It was on a Sunday, our sixth day on the road, that the elevation became most pronounced. The terrain was steep enough that the road had been built with switchbacks, to make the angle of ascent more manageable. From a physical standpoint the switchbacks were essential — otherwise we really would have felt as though we were climbing a mountain — but this was somewhat offset by the psychological effect; we would walk south for fifteen minutes, then turn and walk north for fifteen minutes, and it felt as though we were working very hard and getting nowhere.