When our son Niko was two months old, we went to Costa Rica. We carried him in a backpack, close to us. We went to the Caribbean coast, but the hurricane season was in full swing, so we changed our plans and took a twelve hour bus ride to the Pacific coast. It was tricky to travel with an infant, but the locals, seeing how far we had come with a newborn, were extra helpful and somehow we made the best of it. When Niko turned three we decided it was time to go on a long hike. That winter we went to a volcanic island in Nicaragua and spent a week walking around its periphery. My wife Jessica carried Niko in a backpack and I carried everything else, which consisted mostly of a massive bag of Diapers.
Walking all day has the effect of reducing everything to the very basic and elemental. Where will you sleep? What will you eat? How long is the walk that day? How challenging is the terrain? When life becomes this simple you tune everything nonessential out and just concentrate on a task at hand. Your daily routine becomes how to satisfy some basic but vital necessities, and you are too tired to think of much beyond that. It’s a respite from so many tasks, and thoughts, and confusions of daily life. It's like the classic Zen story, about when a student asks his teacher, “What is enlightenment?” and the master replied, “When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.” Sometimes neither is possible, so you talk about eating and sleeping and fantasize about all sorts of luxuries unattainable at the moment. And when you finally arrive at a place where those luxuries are available, you’re flooded with a great sense of appreciation.
We walked from one village to the next, knowing there would be some place to stay, but having no idea how it would be or what it would look like. Each day was a complete discovery and we all fell into a kind of rhythmic trance. Niko hung in the back and pointed at things he saw, made approving sounds and sometimes even said things. Each day we improvised. There were no cribs, all the beds were high off the floor and the floors were hard tile or cement. One night we woke up to a scream in the middle of the night. Niko had rolled off the bed and fell onto the hard tile floor, surprising himself and us. The following night we made a platform of pillows around the bed and from then on we collected him from the floor each morning.
And so, we traveled as a family, the three of us, mostly to places where we could walk for days, sometimes weeks on end. This became our annual or semi-annual ritual. During those weeks we became very close and shared such intimacy that I cannot imagine life, or family life, without it. There’s nothing more intimate than becoming hungry together and knowing that you need to cross this hill and walk for another 5 kilometers before someone is kind enough to cook for you. Or talking for days on end about blisters that won’t heal. Or riffing on some silly joke over and over as you walk through the Spanish countryside. Traveling like this and walking was something Jessica and I had done as a couple before becoming parents, but we also wanted to share this with Niko, to make it a part of his world.
When Niko was six we were in Mexico, walking in the Oaxacan mountains, crossing countless streams. At first, we stopped at each stream and removed our shoes and held them in our hands as we crossed. We soon tired of this pointlessness, so we just left our shoes on and let our feet get wet. This was not supposed to be a very long or arduous walk, but as sometimes happens, the farther we walked the more we wanted to keep going. We knew this path was leading somewhere and somewhere along the way, the advantages of turning around and walking all the way back, seemed to recede. We had been reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe out loud to each other in bed for days and on this adventure, we imagined ourselves transported into our own magic kingdom. At some point during this hike, maybe when we needed some extra encouragement, we put our hands together and came up with the chant, “we are the kings and queens of narnia”. This became our little pact and battle cry.
This year Niko turned fifteen. He has now traveled to more than a dozen countries and has hiked over a thousand miles in Europe, Central America, Asia and the US. Being a teenager, I don’t know how much longer he will be interested or willing to travel with us. Whereas when he started to hike we had to walk short days in order not to overburden him, he can now easily run past us, wait at the top of the hill and make it seem completely effortless. During our last hike he said, in his sweet way and careful of our feelings, that it’s not that he doesn’t want to keep hiking, but next time he may not want to hike for an entire 2 or 3 weeks and may want to do other things instead. So this transition seems like the right time to close this chapter.
