Blog

A walk across Italy offers an excellent excuse–not that any such excuse is required–to spend time rereading Italy’s greatest writer, Italo Calvino. So my journey began with If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which felt more than appropriate for the occasion. The novel’s conceit is a joyride through postmodernist narration, with the author first addressing the reader directly before yielding to the text of the novel proper, only to discover that a printing error has resulted in the replacement of the intended text with a Polish one. Further hijinks ensue. The two readers of the novel, needless to say,… Read more: Tour d’Italia, Days 1 & 2 – Matera-Castellaneta – 70km

From the moment that I decided to step away from my teaching role and commit to at least a couple of years of walking and writing, I knew, of course, that I would finish the US walk. At the same time, though, I also had this walk through Italy top of mind, to the extent that they functioned as a sort of paired set. There are a few reasons that Italy held such prominence for me. First, and simplest of all, it has been a long time since I walked in Italy. After I led my first student group on… Read more: Tour d’Italia, Day 0 – Matera

One week from today, I fly to Italy to set forth on part one of what I’m dubbing the “Tour d’Italia,” which will lead me across the country twice. This spring, I’ll walk (mostly) south to north, looping down around the heel and then up to the Slovenian border. In the fall, I’ll start on the Swiss border and work my way to Palermo, Sicily. This happens to be a Jubilee year in Rome, so it’s one in which the pilgrimage routes in Italy are receiving added attention and investment, and there will be an even greater swelling of tourists… Read more: The Tour d’Italia – Part One

One of my frustrations with Camino guidebook-writing is that, by the nature of the format, it requires a mile-wide, inch-deep kind of discussion. There are a million interesting stories on the Camino, which means each gets a line or two in the book and no more. This isn’t a knock on guidebooks; it’s just a limitation of the genre. My goal for my new book, then, which I’m referring to in my head as The Camino Companion, is to spotlight those stories in more detail, giving them room to breathe. I’m still using guidebook stages as an organizational tool, so… Read more: A Preview of My Upcoming Camino Book

Note: in March 2022, I used spring break to squeeze in a shorter pilgrimage from the medieval monastic center of Cluny, France to Le Puy-en-Velay, where the Via Podiensis begins. I never posted this account here, but it’s worth sharing given the dearth of available information on this route. No single place, aside from Santiago de Compostela, is more closely associated with the rise of the Camino than Cluny, so it’s a place all pilgrims should consider integrating into their plans. —— I’m usually a planner, thinking and overthinking every part of a trip. This one, though, is an outlier.… Read more: From Cluny to Le Puy-en-Velay

What’s the point of an epilogue, anyway? I’ve been listening to some mysteries while on the road. It’s not a genre I had consumed much in previous years, but it’s a better fit for audiobooks than more classically literary stuff. I’ve noticed how important epilogues are to these kinds of stories. The final chapters often accelerate to the finish, with the endgame unfolding at high speed as the brilliant detective hustles to avert disaster, thwart the villain, and save the day. The epilogue, then, offers the value of distance and perspective, as characters look back on the events, pull back… Read more: Days 102-104 – 10/16-10/18 – Portland to Cape Meares, OR – 84 miles

The sun burst over the Eastern Gorge, the Columbia River glittering below, as the hills were cast in a soft, pink hue. An early departure from The Dalles saw me climbing steadily into the hills, accompanied by a resurgent urgency. Only two stages–admittedly, two long stages–stood between Portland’s eastern fringe and me. A much shorter third stage would deliver me home. I climbed to the short summit on Seven Mile Hill Road, leaving those views behind, and then transitioned immediately into the descent to Mosier, passing through a series of peach and apple orchards. The sounds of Mosier Creek Falls… Read more: Days 99-101 – 10/13-10/15 – The Dalles to Portland, OR – 101 miles

If you’ve followed the journey thus far, you know that there wasn’t a singular Oregon Trail, with a tidy, uniform line of wagon wheels rolling westward in perfect formation. On the Platte River, for example, Mormon pioneers tended to follow the north side, while the Oregon and California Trail folks held to the south. And even there, they spread out widely, in order to track down water and eat less of one another’s dust. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure aspect of route-finding only increased once the travelers reached the Columbia. For some, the walking and riding were concluded for a spell, as they… Read more: Day 98 – 10/12 – Biggs Junction to The Dalles, OR – 24 miles

Modern pilgrimage, for all the echoes we’re fond of highlighting, is awfully different from its medieval predecessor. That’s hardly a controversial statement. I wonder, though, if we’ve ever fully grappled with the profound ways that flying (or taking the train or bus) home–as opposed to walking home, making that same long journey in reverse–fundamentally alters the experience. Alexander John Shaia first got me thinking about this. In his book, Returning from Camino, he encourages pilgrims to reframe Santiago (or Finisterre/Muxia) as the turnaround point, as opposed to the destination. It’s a notion that aligns with the popular wisdom that the… Read more: Days 96 & 97 – 10/10-10/11 – Boardman to Biggs Junction, OR – 68 miles

There’s an old saying in baseball that momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher. It might be the only accurate statement ever made about momentum in sports. It’s a classic narrative move, focusing on a single, distinct action, like a turnover or a dramatic score, and then extrapolating a larger trend from there. There’s something intuitive about this–as fans, we certainly feel an emotional surge when something important or surprising occurs, and it seems logical enough to believe that this would also translate into athletic performance. The analytics explosion in sports, though, has exposed the faultiness of the momentum narrative.… Read more: Days 94 & 95 – 10/8-10/9 – Pendleton to Boardman, OR – 56 miles

Sometimes, an entire story unfolds over the course of a walk. It helps, of course, to have 57 miles and two days to allow that runway to unfold in full. The road signs leaving La Grande are aggressive. Not only do they alert drivers to the 17% grade looming ahead on the dirt track, but they remind them in a series of subsequent warnings, with a level of intensity paralleled by dour-faced figures on street corners announcing that the end is nigh. As it turns out, though, the first travelers through this area were rattled by the ascent. Narcissa Whitman,… Read more: Days 92 & 93 – 10/5-10/6 – La Grande to Pendleton, OR – 57 miles

A quiet road led me northward from North Powder, climbing gently through rolling hills. Suddenly, an agricultural vehicle veered off the road directly into my path, slowing to a halt as the driver leaned halfway out the cockpit. “Just a heads up–we’re about to be herding 800 cattle on this road. They’ll be coming right towards you, towards the white gate up ahead.” Like most pilgrims on the Camino, I’ve become familiar with rural traffic jams, with small packs of cows lumbering along the country roads, but this would be on a whole different scale. As it turns out, he… Read more: Day 91 – 10/4 – North Powder to La Grande, OR – 31 miles

When did the Wild West end? It’s a contested issue, in part because the whole notion of the “Wild West” is contested, but also because any prolonged, ill-defined era is going to suffer from arbitrary endpoints. If you pin down a historian, though, and make them commit to a year, they’ll probably squirm for a while, equivocate profusely, and then finally give up and say 1890. By that point, the railroad’s spread was largely conclusive, the open range of cattle range was mostly a thing of the past, and the US Census Bureau had declared that the frontier was closed.… Read more: Day 90 – 10/3 – Baker City to North Powder, OR – 21 miles

I have a vivid memory from the first time I left North America. No, it doesn’t involve some UNESCO World Heritage site. I was watching television in England. Some BBC channel. The idea behind the show was that people who found potentially interesting, historical objects buried in their yard could bring in experts to conduct a formal dig and offer insights into the extricated items. In that particular episode, a man had discovered something genuinely old–pots or vases or some such that were more than a millennium old. (By contrast, I remember finding an “old” beer bottle tossed in the… Read more: Days 88 & 89 – 9/30-10/1 – Ontario to Baker City, OR – 85 miles

How long can divisions flourish, can polarization mount, until the center can no longer hold and things fall apart? Perhaps we’ll have an answer before too long. Few current or former Republicans have paid as steep a price as David French for adopting a Never Trump stance. I recognize that critics could respond that his positioning as a “good” conservative in liberal eyes has opened up professional opportunities for French, including a New York Times gig, but he and his family became popular targets of online abuse by MAGA supporters, including some genuinely heinous stuff (not to mention this screed).… Read more: Days 86 & 87 – 9/28-9/29 – Caldwell, ID to Ontario, OR – 46 miles

As delightful as yesterday’s walk was, today’s was equally unpleasant. Early on, I was able to wind through some upscale residential neighborhoods, but as the day unfolded I increasingly had to resort to the major arterial heading westward towards Caldwell, which also happened to be the site of a good bit of construction and traffic. When one sees a street name in the USA, if it’s not a letter, a number, a tree, or a state, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s commemorating a dead white dude. When I first saw the name of this road–Chinden Boulevard–that was certainly… Read more: Day 85 – 9/27 – Eagle to Caldwell, ID – 15 miles

Of all the towns and cities I’ve passed through, Boise may embrace the literal Oregon Trail the most. Sure, many of the towns littered along the route have museums and pioneer-themed iconography sprinkled around, but the actual tracks followed by the pioneers are long gone, buried under tons of cement. By contrast, Boise preserves miles and miles of the historic path, starting well before the city’s southern limits. I departed Mountain Home shortly after my 4am wake-up, which translated into nearly three full hours of walking in darkness. Some obligations in Portland had shifted my plans for the day, requiring… Read more: Days 83 & 84 – 9/25-9/26 – Mountain Home to Boise to Eagle, ID – 63 miles

You’ll often hear people talking about the importance of getting off to a good start, and that’s certainly sound advice. Finishing well is a valuable skill in its own right, though, and it’s one that I’ve struggled to cultivate at many points in my life. As a student, I quickly learned that a strong fall made for a lazy spring. Once you stockpiled a few 103s and 104s, thanks to liberal extra credit policies, two things occurred. First, you obviously had a comfortable margin for error, allowing you to miss some points here and there, without it imperiling your grade.… Read more: Days 81 & 82 – 9/23-9/24 – Bliss to Mountain Home, ID – 53 miles

Most of today’s walk carried me westward, north of both I84 and the Snake River valley, before finally turning north in Hagerman, just as the river made the same move. By day’s end, all three–my route, the river, and I84–would converge in the small town of Bliss. What stands out to me the most about the walk, though, is the beginning, when I walked in darkness along backroads, disrupted only by hulking, lumbering shadows, reminding me that I was passing through cattle yards. It was in that darkness that two vehicles stopped alongside me, checking to make sure I was… Read more: Day 80 – 9/22 – Jerome to Bliss, ID – 32.5 miles

If yesterday was in the running for the most boring day of the trip, today is on the shortlist for the best. That has nothing to do with the first third or the last third, both of which were fairly mundane road walking through close-cropped wheat fields, with a surprising amount of traffic whipping past on this fall Saturday. No, it was the second act that did the heavy lifting on this momentous day, as those miles brought me down into the canyon carved out by the Snake River, past Dierkes Lake, around Shoshone Falls, and then westward along the… Read more: Day 79 – 9/21 – Tipperary Corner to Jerome, ID – 24 miles