The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding

Author:Lavinia Spalding [Spalding, Lavinia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV010000
ISBN: 978-160952-063-2
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Published: 2012-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Fanny Stevenson died in California twenty years later, but her ashes were brought back to Samoa and interred with her husband’s, as she’d wished, under a tribute he’d once written for her:

Teacher, tender comrade, wife,

A fellow-farer true through life,

Heart-whole and soul free,

The august father gave to me.

I took the “hard’’ trail down, the steep one that grieving Samoans had cut right after Stevenson died so they could carry his body to the mountaintop. It wasn’t littered with tree trunks, but in places it was nearly vertical.

It felt like the last run of the day on a ski slope, when you’re so tired you lose control, and sure enough, I did fall—hard—trying to hug a tree as my feet slid away. At least that tree was upright.

The heavy air coalesced into rain. By the time I got back to the trailhead, it was pelting down, but I was too sweat-soaked to care. It cooled me, actually—made me feel cleansed, as if I’d swum in Stevenson’s pool myself, in the lovely glen where Vailima’s waters gathered.

It’s true that pilgrimages aren’t supposed to be easy, but neither is the way they end. Even hardship doesn’t prepare you for that. I mean, what do you do after you reach your Everest?

I just walked back to the main road, bought a two-liter bottle of cold water at a tiny grocery shack and drank half of it without stopping to breathe. Then I flagged down one of the island’s gaily-painted ex-school buses, rode it into central Apia and trudged back to my hotel room for dry clothes.

Only later did I celebrate—at Aggie Grey’s, a legendary and expensive hostelry that looks like a set from “South Pacific.’’ I went into Aggie’s air-conditioned bar, pulled up a stool, ordered a bottle of the local beer—fittingly, the brand name is Vailima—and drank a toast to the Teller of Tales.

Home is the hunter, I thought.

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