Cinque Terre

                                              

The path is about a foot wide and makes just the slightest dent into the side of the steep hill.  Its surface is extremely uneven and full of holes.  Stones, pebbles, pine needles and leaves stick up through the reddish-brown dirt.  I don’t dare take my eyes off the ground as I firmly plant my trekking poles before taking each descending step.  I’m sure this path is meant for goats not humans.  I’m also sure if my backpack was one inch wider it would be enough to bounce me off this hill and into the sea five-hundred meters below.  I wonder if any of my kids climbed up or down here when they were visiting Cinque Terre.  If they did, I’m sure glad I didn’t know about it at the time. 

This is Day Three of our three-day or rather three-season hiking trip in Italy.  A travel brochure could have truthfully stated:

“Day One: winter.  Hike in pelting snow with a wind chill factor cold enough to make ice chips in your water bottles and freeze solid your Swiss knife.

Day Two: late fall.  Be dazzled by large snowflakes falling gently on olive, lemon and orange trees.  Enjoy the absence of strong head winds.

Day Three: spring.  Break out your sun block and sunglasses.  Indulge in gelato al limone. 

But the gelato is still to come.  In my head I can see the gelatoria by the harbor with its sixteen flavors of ice cream.  I debate between ordering my usual limone et fragole and trying something new like caramello o caffè.  I wonder what flavors the others will get.  But the continuous descent is too precarious to engage anyone in a discussion about anything let alone ice cream flavors.   I look down below at the women ahead of me to see if they all have trekking poles.  They do.  But I know some of us don’t.  They must be behind me higher up on the hill.  I wonder if they regret not bringing some.  Do they need poles?  My poles?  Should I, can I, offer them mine or at least one of them?  But I know immediately I can’t give my poles away.  Not even one.  I realize right then and there I will never die a martyr—at least not on this hill.  I don’t have what it takes.  My martyr illusion falls silently into the reddish-brown dirt.  No guilt, no regret. That’s just the way it is. 

We continue to criss cross down the hill cutting through terrace after terrace of empty  vineyards.  Every now and then I remember the reason we’re hiking here: to see the breath-taking views.  So I stop, breath, steady my feet, raise my head and look around:  the world is one immense vista of turquoise sea and sky.  For five minutes I stop thinking about gelato.

I like Day Three of hiking.  By now I’m so worn down and tired out that I let go of all the chatter in my head: the worries about first impressions, last impressions; the anxieties about what clothes to wear or what to talk about; the burden of impossible expectations or imagined failures.  I have no energy left for these things.  I have just enough energy to get myself down the hill.  By Day Three the trekking outside my head finally takes precedence over the trekking inside my head.  It’s all so much easier now.

It wasn’t that way on Day One when I fell into step as the group headed out to walk the Sentiero #1.  There are two kinds of hikers in the world: those who thrive and those who die on hills.  Guess which one I am?  Yup, no matter my good intentions, level of fitness or pure stubbornness, I find myself slowly falling back closer and closer to the end of the line as one by one my fellow hikers pass me.  Finally, it is just Mark, our sweeper and the only man in our group of twelve, and me at the end of the line.  Quite often I stop, suck in air (sometimes snow) until my heart settles and the heart attack is delayed once more.  Luckily I didn’t realize when we started out in the morning that the plan was to immediately hike straight up from sea level to thirteen-hundred meters, then cross the summit—well, not really cross, more like go up and down at least twenty hills all  three-hundred meters or higher all the way to the other end of Cinque Terre.  Late in the afternoon, long after the ice chips have formed and the knife has frozen solid,  at the site of yet another “here we go up again” I think, really and truly, “This is my Waterloo, bury me here.”  But it wasn’t and they didn’t.  All I can say is that crossing the Pyrenees in a white-out was easier, hands down, than hiking Cinque Terre’s Sentiero #1 on Day One.

It’s now 6:30 a.m. on Day Four.   I’m leaving Hotel Punta Mesco heading for the train station.  For the first time this week I am walking alone.  A part of me relishes being alone yet another part keeps looking behind to see if any of my friends are coming down the street.  On my right huge white waves surge onto the beach while on my left the terraced hills rise steeply behind the line of shorefront stores.  Grey rain clouds fill the eastern sky but bits of blue peek out between the white clouds in the west.  Oddly then the emerging dawn breaks through these bits of blue giving the impression that the sun is rising in the west.  I look down the beach to scan the coastline for the four other Cinque Terre villages.  Nestled in the folds of the hills their lights still twinkle in the predawn light.  I count them making sure I see all four. 

Standing there listening to the waves I trace the path we hiked this week: an arc runs from Monterosso, the westernmost village, up to the summit, across and down to Riomaggiore, the easternmost one.  I then trace our steep winding path connecting each village to its own sanctuary high up on the hillside and then down again into the next village.  Finally, the coastal walk between Riomaggiore and Manorola underlines and completes our three-day trek.  Not bad for a group of twelve city dwellers from the flatlands of Paris, London and New York City.  And unlike last year’s hike in Corsica, no one had to be air-lifted off the mountain with three broken bones in their foot.  But that’s last year’s story.

Looking up I couldn’t tell anyone the altitude, mileage or names of all the sanctuaries we hiked up to or a hundred other details that it seems my fellow hikers register and remember with ease.  (In fact, any such details in this piece are surely suspect.)  Instead my world is quite hazy made up of impressions, feelings and just being there.  But now looking at the steep terraced hills spotted with lemon and orange trees and cream, pink and green-colored stucco houses although I don’t know all the names or facts of this place, I do know the place itself through the soles of my feet.  I came to know it well through that narrow, not quite one foot wide, uneven path we walked for three days through winter, fall and finally spring.