IF I COULD BRING YOU THINGS YOU NEVER HAD
Does every goal seem less attainable
if a number with many zeroes is attached
to it? Pilgrims trek 2,640,000 feet or roughly
500 miles on trails winding from the French
border through Galician villages on the Camino
de Santiago, sleeping in farmhouses or inns
along the way. The journey takes anywhere
from 20 days to a couple of months, depending
on one's speed and how often
stops are taken.
Labyrinth walkers, in comparison, sketch
a smaller compass: a little over a thousand
steps in silence, spiraling from the outside
to the center then back again. Nowadays,
many sport a circlet of rubber around one wrist,
which counts out time spent walking, running,
climbing stairs, sleeping; the rate at which
the heart's hidden engine pulses
at work and at rest.
And my brother-in-law does
long performance walks: once, on foot, he pushed
a custom-made cart filled with drawing supplies
on Route 45 from Chicago to Kankakee and on to
Urbana. The end of his journey was a gallery
where he began a drawing marathon, not stopping
until he filled all 128 pages of notebooks made
by hand for that trip. The title of this duration
performance was If I Could Bring You Things
You Never Had—a kind of meditation on the idea
of both journey and arrival.
Rain slowed him down—
the going not made easy by encounters with different
kinds of surfaces, motorists, and people who might not
have understood his purpose. At stops, he posted pictures
and updates: one of them about the quiet at 4 AM, another
about the longing for someone to rub his aching feet.
Before he started, he told an interviewer the only
incentive that mattered in planning for such a walk
was that someone or something was waiting for him
when he arrived.
In World War II, when the Japanese
Imperial army rounded up men and forced them on
the Death March to Bataan, 650 American prisoners
of war and close to 10,000 Filipino males perished
before they reached their destination. My father
(much younger then than my brother-in-law)
lost his left pinky fingernail on that walk.
Or it was pulled out. In this too there is no
one version of a finish line— No one waiting
with a wreath of laurels or a medal, no one
in stands to cheer and wave banners. Alone
in a field, it might be possible
to ask Why
am I here? How do I travel? There’s no
universal stopwatch, no good or bad
time to completion; only the moment
in which the figure enters
the landscape,
adjusts the straps or handlebars, puts one
foot in front of the other again and yet again.
