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Overview
A nonfiction debut about an American’s solo, month-long, 400-mile walk from Lake Geneva to Nice.
In the summer of 2015, Jonathan Arlan was nearing thirty. Restless, bored, and daydreaming of adventure, he comes across an image on the Internet one day: a map of the southeast corner of France with a single red line snaking south from Lake Geneva, through the jagged brown and white peaks of the Alps to the Mediterranean sea—a route more than four hundred miles long. He decides then and there to walk the whole trail solo.
Lacking any outdoor experience, completely ignorant of mountains, sorely out of shape, and fighting last-minute nerves and bad weather, things get off to a rocky start. But Arlan eventually finds his mountain legs—along with a staggering variety of aches and pains—as he tramps a narrow thread of grass, dirt, and rock between cloud-collared, ice-capped peaks in the High Alps, through ancient hamlets built into hillsides, across sheep-dotted mountain pastures, and over countless cols on his way to the sea. In time, this simple, repetitive act of walking for hours each day in the remote beauty of the mountains becomes as exhilarating as it is exhausting.
Mountain Lines is the stirring account of a month-long journey on foot through the French Alps and a passionate and intimate book laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity. In the tradition of trekking classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Snow Leopard, and Tracks, the book is a meditation on movement, solitude, adventure, and the magnetic power of the natural world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510760066 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2021 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Sales rank: | 875,189 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
When I was a kid, perhaps in first or second grade, I was obsessed with maps. I could stare at them for hours memorizing the names of countries, capitals, rivers, and mountains, trying to cram and hold as many six-point-type details into my head as I could. The way some children can lose themselves in the minutiae of baseball cards, or video games, or stories about magicians and dragons, I could lose myself in maps.
I'd start with the big places — Russia, China, Canada — and fill in the blanks. South America was easy with its nice, chunky countries and pretty names. Europe east of Germany was a little trickier, all nervous borders and ever-shrinking republics. And Africa was impossible, too big, too thick with jungles and savannahs and deserts. But every once in a while, all the pieces would click into place, fall together like a jigsaw puzzle, and for short, bright moments I could close my eyes and picture the entire world framed in a perfect rectangle. I knew who shared borders with whom, and where Tibet was, and that there was a place called Elephant Island near Antarctica. I even knew the oceans and seas and lakes, the negative spaces that held everything in its proper place.
I loved the tiny countries especially, the ones you really had to look for: Andorra, squeezed between Spain and France; Vatican City, hiding in the middle of Rome; Mauritius, way down next to Madagascar, smaller than my fingernail. For a child as consumed as I was, these were the discoveries that turned any page with lines, land, and a compass rose map into a treasure map.
I can remember a map we had on our classroom wall. It was old and neglected, left over from the Cold War. Huge sections of it were totally obsolete. I must have been eight or nine. Faintly, I can see the lamination peeling back at the corners and each country in a different color: pink, yellow, green. The oceans are the exact color a child thinks of when he hears the word "blue"; Antarctica is snow white. When you're young you wonder if Morocco really is the pale pink color of flamingoes. If Australia is mustard yellow. You trace the Nile with your index finger from the top of Africa, through Egypt, through Sudan, to somewhere in the middle, a lake, but you can never remember the name of it. You draw connections between words you've heard somewhere, like Baghdad or Jerusalem or Bosnia, and places that actually exist, places you can point to, places you can go to. You wish that Alaska and Russia would touch because then it would at least be possible to walk around the world. Starting at the tip of Argentina, you would go up through the Amazon, through Mexico, Canada, Alaska, across Russia, into Europe, and down to the bottom of Africa. You could circumnavigate (a new word) the globe on foot; you could do it without ever leaving the ground.
You never look at America, because it's all one color (except for the dirty white smudge where you live, smack in the center) and it seems like everywhere else there are places with names that barely sound real: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Bhutan.
In my mind, the map is huge, wider than my wingspan. It holds the entire world. But when I think about it, it's not nearly big enough. Maps, even the huge ones, have no choice but to render everything in them maddeningly small. Still, it's thrilling, getting lost in this map in particular. Time disappears when I do, when I think about how long and thin Chile is, how lonely Tahiti is out there in the middle of the sea, how many places there are. At the bottom, where the paper curls from being rolled up all the time, are the flags of every country in the world, in alphabetical order. Every country in the world in perfect rows and columns, like a checklist.
It's impossible, I think, to read stories of other people's adventures and not want an adventure for yourself. At least for me it is. If I so much as glimpse a headline about an archeologist digging in the Gobi Desert, a hiker lost in the Yukon, or a woman sailing alone around the world; or if I read a dispatch in a magazine from someone canoeing down the Mississippi or hopping trains across Central Asia, I become possessed, briefly, by the idea of dropping everything to go on some grand adventure — travel Africa top to bottom, move to Cambodia, cycle across Siberia. Sometimes the names of certain places — Krakatoa, Karakoram, Kamchatka — alone are enough to absolutely hypnotize me. All of a sudden, I need to move. It's a potent feeling, like a drug. And just like with a drug, the feeling inevitably wears off and I'm left with the crushing reality that, for a thousand small reasons, I will probably never cross a desert on a camel, summit a mountain, or hitchhike the Silk Route.
The problem, or one problem (there are many), is that I'm an intensely lazy person. But like all lazy people I'm easily seduced by romantic visions of myself as an emphatically nonlazy person, a real go-getter, someone who fixes motorcycles, researches indigenous tribes in Papua New Guinea, owns a company selling rare coffee beans, and has a side gig as a conflict photographer. Clearly I'm doing something wrong, sitting here at a desk, tapping on a computer, reading about other people's exciting lives.
Still, I love adventure stories; I can't get enough of them. But I read them jealously. I think: It should be me out there. Or rather, why shouldn't it be me out there? What do these "adventurers" have that I don't? What do they know that I don't? I remember reading Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia as a teenager in Kansas. Most of the book, with its enigmatic atmosphere that I would come to love later on, went over my head at the time, but the idea of leaving a boring career behind to travel alone to one of the most remote regions of the world made perfect, profound sense.
But just because I "got it" did not mean I knew what to do with it. Which is not to say I haven't traveled, just that it never feels like I'm doing it right. The truth is, in my own languid way, I've gone after adventure — small, safe doses of it, anyway — whenever the opportunity arose. As a student, I spent half a year living in Cairo — which is to the Kansas City suburb where I grew up what the lost city of El Dorado is to the El Dorado you can easily find in southern Kansas (pronounced eldor-ay-do, population thirteen thousand). The university put me up in a roach-infested hotel on the west side of the Nile, which meant crossing the river twice a day to get to school and back. For the equivalent of a dollar or two, I could take a black-and-white taxi all the way to Tahrir Square, where the university was located. Depending on traffic, the drive took anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours. In the summer heat, any exposed skin stuck to the seat and after a few minutes it was like being rolled slowly through an industrial oven. When the drivers spoke English, or felt like wading through my Arabic, they loved chatting. They would complain in tight, tourist-English phrases about Mubarak (who was still in power), or gush at length about their families and their kids who spoke three languages better than they spoke one but who still couldn't find work, about the other jobs they would do when they weren't driving, about how they hoped to visit America one day. And then when the heat succeeded in stupefying us beyond the possibility of conversation, I would read.
Before I left for Egypt, an English professor had given me a copy of an old Granta, a travel writing issue from the early eighties. Even now, over a decade later, I can remember the cover, soft on the corners, slightly tattered, and I can rattle off the names of the writers — Theroux, Chatwin, Thubron, Raban, Morris, and a handful of others. It's astonishing now to think they were all there, together, in one book. I treated the worn paperback as a map of sorts, not to any one place but rather to the kind of life I wanted for myself. I studied sections of it until whole passages were committed to memory. I must have read the book a half dozen times that year in the front seat of beat-up old taxis while they inched me across the Kasr al-Nil bridge, past the sooty stone lions that guard the entrance, and the opera house at the southern end of Gezira Island, around the massive traffic circle with the hulking government buildings. I would read a few lines and drift off to Siam, or Saigon, or Milan, only to be brought back to reality by the ear-splitting shriek of a horn or my driver's attempt to steal a few inches of open road from the car beside him. (Three years later, I watched thousands of ecstatic young Egyptians on TV march across the bridge and thought of how good it felt to come into the city dreaming.)
In my twenties, I went to Europe a few times as a tourist (though never, it seemed, to the right places). And I even lived in Japan for several years. Every time I'd get ready to leave home, my father would say, "Another big adventure." He meant it. He grew up in Kansas City and has spent most of his life in two states, logging hundreds of thousands of driving miles as a traveling salesman in the Midwest. To my father, a road trip to the Bootheel of Missoura is a tale worth telling.
"Another big adventure," he'd say. And I'd agree, even though it never really felt like a real adventure, a proper Shackleton-in-Antarctica, Burton-in-Africa, Thesiger-in-Arabia adventure. What it felt like was just moving my relatively predictable life from one side of the world to another while doing my best to dodge, delay, and altogether avoid growing up. And then, in the blink of an eye, as they say, I found myself settled in New York City at twenty-nine years old, where I spent the vast majority of my time either in an office or asleep. Dreams of a life spent wandering the world in the mold of my travel-writer heroes still taunted me, but now they did so from the past, rather than the future. On the road to adulthood, I'd somehow blown right past my turnoff. Hell, I hadn't even seen it go by.
Then, while I was visiting my sister in Seattle, something snapped. It was winter, and when the sun was high, the sky barely managed a soft pale gray. It rained constantly and everything iced over at night. It was absurdly melancholy, the "damp, drizzly November" in Ishmael's soul that never failed to send the man to sea (albeit from the other side of the other country). I knew then that I couldn't spend another winter in New York, nor another summer. I'd had it. Some tiny thread — whatever was keeping me there — had been cut and all I could think about were the places I'd rather be: Tokyo, Lisbon, Berlin. Anywhere, really. I quit my job a week later, subleased my apartment, sold most of my stuff, and made arrangements to leave.
On my last night in the city, I took my dad, who had flown up to see me off, to a jazz club I liked, a basement room in the West Village. You had to drop a flight or two just to get inside. It was late and the band had already started by the time we got there. We took the only two open seats we could find, just to the right of the stage, which wasn't a stage at all, just the floor.
The band worked its way through a handful of songs, pushing and pulling the melodies, moving themselves from one end of the tune to the other as if on a tightrope. Good live jazz is surprisingly physical; the players wrestle with the music, toy with it, play it one way then another, size it up, look at it from a few angles. The band was great that night, but it's the drummer I remember. He was old, in his seventies at least, rail thin with light brown skin and deep creases in his face. He was a legend, actually; I knew his name from some records from the late 1950s. He'd played with everyone at one time or another. He wore elegant gray trousers and a striped button-down shirt, clothes that would have fit him when he was a little bigger. Now, they all hung loosely, making him appear like a dressed-up skeleton. But when he played, it was not hard to picture him in a room just like that one, fifty years younger.
His face flickered and flashed with expression, like he was watching a movie. His eyebrows lifted into question marks. He smiled when the pianist strung a few clever notes together. Every once in a while, he'd make himself laugh with something he did on the drums. The bandleader kept passing him solos and he'd take them, beat out a few bars on his own, and then count the band back in. The audience clapped. He smiled bashfully.
My dad and I were sitting on the wrong side of the lights, so the crowd was dark to us. The piano player was on the other side of the sax player, who had his back to us nearly the entire time. The only person we could see was the drummer, sweat pouring down his face, his body bent close to his kit like he might fold himself up into it. He played another solo, and another.
On the last song, the drummer really dug in. He played up and down the toms, called out on the snare, answered with a crash on the cymbals. The audience went quiet and he kept playing, alone. He played so lightly at one point, the drums whispered. We leaned in to listen. He played louder and faster until we were on the edges of our actual seats, thinking, now maybe he should stop — he might give himself a heart attack. The sweat around his collar bled dark in the spotlight. My dad leaned over and whispered in my ear: "He's going to kill himself doing that."
Finally, his face went calm; he cued the band. They came back in to roaring applause from a plainly stunned (and relieved) audience. But even as the song settled back into itself, it was clear the drummer was struggling. He took deep breaths, made nervous eye contact toward the back of the room. Someone said, somebody get him some water. We passed a glass up to him and set it down next to his hi-hat. Abruptly, he stopped playing. Standing up, he took a few weaving steps to the seat next to me and sat down, very still between breaths. Another drummer stepped in to continue the music. My drummer put his head in his hands. I could see his bony body under his shirt trying to fill itself with air. Another breath, slower this time. He grabbed his chest. I leaned over to him and asked if he was all right.
"Yes," he said, "I'm fine. It's just a heart thing." He smiled and looked at me through soft, yellow eyes. He said, "It's what I do."
He took a few sips of water, a few more deep breaths, and sat up straight. With a quick look to the sit-in drummer, he stood up gently. The audience erupted. He gave us an easy smile, sat down behind the drums, and picked up where he'd left off.
After the show, my dad and I climbed the stairs to the street where the cool air was waiting for us. It was a cold January night. I hailed a cab for him, and he gave me a hug. "Another big adventure," he said.
I started walking home — past Washington Square park, down Bowery, through Chinatown, and across the bridge. Anyone crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at night turns around to look at the city, and even though I'd seen it a hundred times, halfway across, I turned to see it again. But by the time I did, a curtain of clouds had fallen over Manhattan. The city twinkled and glowed silvery white from somewhere deep inside, but I felt stuck outside of it.
I turned back toward Brooklyn and, with an ache somewhere in my own chest, I walked until my feet hurt.
CHAPTER 2I flew to Japan the next day, landing at Narita on a clear afternoon. I like seeing big cities from the air. It's the only way to get a sense of their natural borders, the odd shapes they take. Even from the tallest buildings, it's hard to see the end of Tokyo. But from six and a half miles up, it's a scale model with a blue sea on one side and candy mountains on the other. It's dotted with bright green parks and covered in toy cars. Only from the sky can something so massive, sprawling, and complex seem so straightforward, so simple.
I had gone to be with my girlfriend, who had moved to Tokyo a year earlier because she hated New York and (I suspect) missed good soba noodles. We broke up almost immediately after I arrived, which felt inevitable as soon as it happened, and the weeks that followed exist in my memory as one long, gunmetal-gray afternoon. I wandered around the city visiting the perfectly manicured gardens and the temples swarming with tourists. I practiced my half-forgotten Japanese at Yoshinoya counters. I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room reading Hemingway novels wishing I'd lived a century earlier and daydreaming myself into heroic wartime fantasies. It was February and cold; short days without sunshine and long, looping walks to Harajuku, Omotesando, Asakusa, and back to my hotel. I exhausted myself tramping around the city. When it rained, I walked underground through the connected subway stations. I would leave my hotel, pick a direction, and walk until I was sure I'd pass out when I got back. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that I was moving in literal as well as metaphorical circles because I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I couldn't go home; that would be too pathetic. I couldn't stay in Japan, because what would I do there? All I could do was walk, in circles. The soles of my feet still flinch when I think of Tokyo.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Mountain Lines"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Arlan.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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