Lawrence Block - Step by Step

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From the revered
bestselling author comes a touching, insightful, and humorous memoir of an unlikely racewalker and world traveler.

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My life, too, has been rich and satisfying, but it hasn’t stayed the same over the years. Enthusiasms have come and gone, passions have waxed and waned.

You’ll recall that I’d completed five marathons in 1981, along with thirty-five shorter races, and that within a year I’d quit racing entirely. And, while we never deliberately abandoned the Buffalo hunt, it had pretty much stalled out by the time we moved back to New York in 1990. Our lives had changed, we weren’t driving around much and in fact no longer owned a car, and after the Spanish walk we found ourselves more interested in adding new countries than unearthing new Buffalos. We had just picked up Andorra and Portugal, and in the years that followed we spent a good deal of time traveling, and reached some fairly remote parts of the planet.

Sometimes walking was involved. We spent two weeks with my three daughters on an escorted walking tour of Tuscany, with our bags transported from inn to inn and each day’s walk interrupted by a splendid picnic lunch that would materialize magically in front of us when we rounded a bend in the path. Another walking tour on another summer, with a daughter and a granddaughter in tow, consisted of more rigorous hiking in the Alps, and added Switzerland and Liechtenstein to our country list.

A couple of years before that, in 1993, I was thinking about taking another crack at the Camino. I’d go by myself, and I’d cross the Pyrenees in September, and I figured I could cover the route in five or six weeks. But I had time to mull it over, and before I booked a flight or went shopping for a better backpack, I realized with a mixture of relief and regret that I didn’t really want to go. I didn’t much like the idea of being away from Lynne for that long, and the more I pictured myself sleeping in refugios and foraging for bocadillos de queso, the less appealing the prospect became. And, dammit, I’d been there and I’d done that, and maybe once was enough. Either it wouldn’t be as I remembered it, in which case I’d resent the changes, or it would be exactly the same — so why go through it all over again?

It’s not as though I let my legs atrophy after we flew home from Lisbon. A New Yorker typically walks a couple of miles a day without giving it much thought. That’s how one gets around, and it’s why Lynne, without any advance preparation, was able to acquit herself capably as a peregrino.

I continued to go to the gym, though my attendance was inconsistent; sometimes I got there three times a week, and sometimes it was more like three times a month. Gyms come and go, and when mine closed it sometimes took me a while to find another and join it.

At one point Lynne responded to some pretty broad hints and bought me a stair climber. We installed it in my office, an apartment two flights up from our residence, and I used it daily at first, the way everybody does who gets one, and then I stopped — like everybody else. When I tried to get back to it, the machine sputtered and quit working, and it was easier to use it as an extra clothes rack than to find somebody who’d make a house call and fix it. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a garage, or it would be there to this day, but instead we found a building employee who was willing to take it off our hands. I suppose he fixed it up and sold it, or else it’s in his garage, because I haven’t noticed that he looks any fitter for owning it.

At the gym, I mostly worked with weights, but now and then I’d hop on a treadmill and work up a sweat for twenty minutes or so. I would walk, to save my knees, and my gait was a racewalker’s, with my arms swinging at my sides. I couldn’t do this without being reminded of the year when I’d been a marathoner, but I never gave any thought to returning to those golden days.

If I’d thought about it, I probably would have told you it was impossible. I’d been having a little trouble with my feet lately, and my right foot in particular tended to go partially numb now and then, and to ache from time to time. Sometimes I’d be walking along on the street and I’d get sharp pains in my foot; they’d bother me for a while, and then they’d go away.

A doctor told me it probably had something to do with my sciatic nerve, and that I should try stretching. That’s not what it was, and while stretching didn’t do me any harm, neither did it do any good. I didn’t know what was wrong, and didn’t really want to find out. I got on the Internet and read about intermittent claudication and diabetic neuropathy, and the symptoms sounded about right, but I didn’t think either of those was what I had.

And it wasn’t that bad. My foot would feel a little numb and tingly in the morning, but that passed as the day wore on. And I was still doing what I always did, and getting around as much as ever. All it really meant was that my marathoning days were over, but they’d been over for years, and I didn’t really miss them. And it probably meant, too, that I wouldn’t be able to walk the Camino again, but I’d already decided I didn’t want to do that, either.

Well, hell, I was getting older. I was past sixty. Pretty soon I’d be lucky if I could walk at all. Or remember how to find my way home.

My eldest granddaughter, Sara Reichel, has a pronounced and longstanding affinity for penguins. Accordingly, in December of 2001 Lynne and I celebrated Sara’s bat mitzvah by taking her and her Aunt Jill to Antarctica, to see her totem animal in its natural habitat.

Then in the spring of 2004 I was scanning the Earthwatch catalog. That worthy organization provides opportunities for volunteer travel in aid of some environmental goal; for a not-too-steep fee, one might join an expedition to count the endangered red pandas in the Trobriand Islands, or distribute free flyswatters in a malarial swamp, or build a dam somewhere to take the burden off the beavers. Lynne and I had been getting their catalogs for years, and had reluctantly begun to conclude that we just weren’t sufficiently high-minded to sign up for one of their trips; if only we were better human beings, we’d be eager to inoculate villagers in the Cameroun against dengue fever instead of, say, knocking back on a cruise of the South Pacific. But I always made myself take a quick look through the catalog before throwing it out — I felt it was the least I could do — and the next thing I knew I’d signed up Sara and myself to rescue penguins in South Africa.

I hadn’t even known they had any. But they did, in great profusion, until an oil spill a couple of years earlier decimated the population and threatened its ultimate survival. Robbin Island, the prison colony where Nelson Mandela had been the most famous inmate, was home to many of the birds, and as Earthwatch volunteers we’d be joining an ongoing project designed to monitor the little guys.

We’d be flying to Cape Town in August, and I got a rude awakening when I started packing for the trip. It would be their cold season, which meant long pants. I’d been wearing shorts all summer, and when I tried on my long pants I found they didn’t fit. I’d put on weight without quite realizing it, having bought shorts at the start of the summer, and... oh, never mind. I was fat and my pants didn’t fit.

All that meant was a trip to our basement storage cupboard, where a box of my fat clothes filled a large carton, waiting patiently for me to grow into them. But it certainly didn’t make me feel very good about myself, and the day before we left I ran into a friend and found myself carping about the whole business.

“Hey, so you’ll do something about it when you get back,” he said. “Remember when we first knew each other? One day you went into the Attic Gym on Twelfth Street, and you didn’t come back out for three years. You’ll do the same thing again.”

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