Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It was also getting colder, because we’d gone far enough into the mountains so that there was still snow on the ground, and from time to time there’d be an avalanche off to the side. It would have been nice to stop somewhere and get something to eat, but that was never an option, because in each of the few villages we passed, everything was closed up tight. Which is why I happen to remember that it was a Sunday.

I don’t know what time it was when we finally came upon an inn, but it was already getting dark. The proprietor had enough English to assure us that she did indeed have a room for us, and could provide an evening meal. And where had we parked our car? Because she hadn’t heard us drive up.

We said we’d walked. She looked at us. “We’ve been walking all the way from Toulouse,” Lynne told her, “and we’re going to walk over the mountains, and then we’ll walk all the way across Spain.”

“Ah,” said the woman, eyebrow arched. “ Très sportif. ”

Sportif indeed.

It’s been sixteen years since we walked across Spain, and what strikes me now as most remarkable about the experience is not so much the physical demands of the ordeal, or the sights we saw and the people we met along the way, or even the spiritual results of such a pilgrimage, whatever they may have been. All of that somehow pales beside the astonishing fact that we dropped out of our lives entirely and spent a little over three months in total isolation. Our whole world during that stretch of time was the world of our immediate environment, the world of the Camino.

In today’s world of cell phones and Internet cafés, it’s hard to grasp the extent to which we were cut off from our lives back home. No one had any way of getting in touch with us, and we had made the decision before our departure that we would not even try to contact anyone. We could probably have made phone calls from several points along the way, but to what purpose? To establish that the people we’d left behind were alive and well?

If anything was wrong, there was precious little we’d be able to do about it. Even if some family emergency were to call for an abrupt return, abruptness wouldn’t come easy to a pair of pedestrians in a remote area of rural Spain. Wasn’t it simpler to assume everything was all right back home?

Simpler, but by no means certain. Because the last time we’d been in Spain, we’d received a call from the States that put us on the next plane home.

Let’s return to the Andalusian Express, where we first heard about the pilgrimage and knew at once that it was something we had to do. In our own minds, we had signed on for it then and there. But it took us almost three years to start walking.

In Gijón, our contingent of international crime writers spent a week as window dressing at Semana Negra, a Spanish festival with dark film and literature as its theme but simple revelry as its clear purpose. We participated in a couple of panel discussions, where we took turns bloviating on literary and political topics, with a couple of harried translators waiting to turn what we said into something the audience might possibly comprehend. This works best when one speaks in sound bites, so the translator can take in and process a couple of sentences at a time rather than have to hold long paragraphs in his mind; few of us were adept at this, however, and it wasn’t hard to guess why the audience looked puzzled most of the time.

At one point Don Westlake quoted some Russian who’d observed that he and his colleagues were all mice in the pocket of Gogol’s overcoat. I thought the poor translator was going to kill herself.

Lynne and I were having a fine time, dining late (though rarely by Spanish standards) at fine restaurants, with Don and Abby Westlake or Ross and Rosalie Thomas or Em and Martin Cruz Smith for company. And the week was drawing to a close, when we got word that my mother had been in a serious auto accident. (My cousin David Nathan managed somehow to track us down, a neat trick given that no one on earth knew where on earth we were.)

We flew home the following morning, with no way of knowing whether we’d find her alive or dead. She was alive, but just barely, and shortly after we got there she slipped into a coma and remained unconscious in Intensive Care for a full month. We moved into her apartment and spent our days at the hospital, until it became clear that her condition had stabilized and there was nothing we could do for her.

We drove west, and picked up a Buffalo in Ohio, and visited friends in Yellow Springs. And came back, and were there when she came out of the coma and was transferred to another ward.

Her return to consciousness was very disconcerting, though no more so for us than for her. At some point, unconscious, she had decided to live, and now, conscious, she was clearly not entirely happy about that decision. She didn’t much want to be here.

All I could think of, spending time at her side, was a novel of Stephen King’s called Pet Sematary . In the book’s titular graveyard, those interred can return to life, but they’re not really the same as they used to be. And it seemed for a while there as though my mother had come back from just such a place, with a different personality than she’d had before — and not a very nice one, either. She snapped at her nurses, and was altogether unpleasant to be around.

Return to consciousness, I came to see, wasn’t just a matter of flicking a light switch. It was a more gradual process, and in fact constituted not only a return to consciousness but a return to oneself. As the days passed, she did in fact become increasingly herself. Her intellect returned, and her personality, and even her humor.

In respect to that last element, I made an awful mistake. I went to a bookstore in search of something that might amuse her, preferably something that wouldn’t involve a whole lot of reading. I picked up a collection of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons, and after I gave it to her I came to realize what a bad choice that was for someone who’d just spent a month with her brain on lockdown. Cartoons that would have been catnip for the woman were now incomprehensible; they didn’t strike her as amusing, and she couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be funny about them.

Nor could I do much to explain them. Larson’s offbeat humor wasn’t going to work for her, not until she was a good deal better, and I wanted to take the book away from her so that she could stop using it to make herself crazy. But she didn’t want to give it up, because she was afraid her inability to get what the rest of the world regarded as funny was a sign that her deepest fear had come true, and that her mind was not working properly.

Well, it wasn’t, not entirely, but it was getting there. The improvement was evident on a daily basis, even if The Far Side was still murky. And it wasn’t long before she picked up a book of Double-Crostic puzzles and knocked one off in her usual twenty minutes. Once that happened, we all relaxed; it was evident that she was going to be fine.

Three years later, when we were preparing for the pilgrimage, I could hardly avoid recalling what had happened on our last trip to Spain. This time around, not even a chap as resourceful as my cousin David could be expected to find a way to reach us.

I was concerned that something would go wrong, and that Lynne and I would be powerless to do anything about it, that we wouldn’t even know about it until it was far too late for us to take any useful action. My mother’s health was good, although she would never get around as well as she did before the accident. But she was almost eighty years old, and so was Lynne’s mother, and—

I talked it over with a friend, who asked what specifically I was afraid of.