This Place a Stranger by Vici Johnstone

Author:Vici Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthology
ISBN: 9781927575987
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Hills Are Alive

Sarah Paynter

Walking alone for four weeks had a profoundly calming effect on me. Without even trying to have a significant meditative escape or “find myself,” I somehow managed to shed any heavy thoughts. With each step, I took individual anxieties about work, family, regret and so on, mentally examined them and discarded them one by one as if into thin air. I read of a similar experience in Being Caribou, where Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison follow the porcupine caribou on their annual migration in Northern Canada. Karsten recounts singing every song he’d ever known before finding silence. He needed to encounter each song before his mind was clear.

On the Adlerweg, or “Eagle’s Way,” trekking route, my brain was a washing machine. It was too easy: All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other for 320 kilometres. Stop to rest when tired.

I rarely worried about my safety, despite walking solo on some precarious paths and scrambling along some “ropes-optional” routes. The Austrian huts and villages were safe. I never felt threatened. I was not concerned that a fellow hiker would harm me and didn’t see any evidence of thieves hiking along remote trails to catch unwary travellers.

I did, however, meet a man who was walking the same stretch of the Adlerweg as me. He wasn’t dangerous, but he quickly became a royal pain in the ass.

He was an Austrian father hiking the Eagle’s Way alone. He was the only other person I met who was trying to complete this obscure long-distance route through Tirol in Western Austria. He had walked the rest of the track over two years and was trying to finish the final section that week in his third and final year. He was loud, racist, stinky, mostly drunk and apparently trying to break some sort of record for burps per minute.

Worst of all, he was a “mansplainer.” He was going to tell me what I needed to know about Austria, the European Union, tourism, the alpine hut system, the cost of food, parenting, Germans, Americans, and so on and so forth.

I’d spied him while rehydrating at a pasture farm called Hintere Tarrentenalpe, a rest point that was miraculously open in late September. The Alps are spotted with farms and shacks that sell drinks, and sometimes food, to travellers throughout the summer walking season. As I continued on alone, each time I stopped to catch my breath I could see him downslope working hard to catch up with me.

Eventually he did. “Hello, so you are from Canada?” he asked. Apparently he’d overheard me speaking with the farm owners earlier. “You are hiking alone?” He was smoking.

We were standing on a ridge about six hours’ walk from any road or village and I almost said, “No, my husband’s joining me soon,” a common lie I’ve told on trips before (“My husband is at a conference, I’m meeting him for dinner later.”)

“Yes, I’m walking alone,” I replied, stepping back and waving my hand at the smoke now surrounding me.

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