Hiking for Chestnuts

I am a member of a new Italian/international trekking club, Intertrek, which is a spin-off of two established hiking organizations: the State endorsed Club Alpino Italiano, responsible for marking and mapping out Italy’s various trails; and Boscaglia, or the “Deep Walking” organization, affiliated somewhat with the Slow Food movement in that, rather than regarding hiking as a competitive sport, a race to the summit, as it were, this group seeks out trails that invite day-long to week-long meanderings, welcomes detours that encourage participants to identify flora and fauna, pick mushrooms and berries, gather chestnuts , smell the roses, suck the honeysuckle. We at Intertrek are a hybrid group of primarily (make that all) middle-aged walkers of the old school. Think Rousseau or Wordsworth (don’t think Proust, he was sick)—the knapsack, the sketch book, the bird watching log.

Last Sunday we had planned an ambitious hike from Patrico to Porelle and up to the summit of Monte Fionchi--all hills beyond Monteluco, the mountain that slopes down toward Spoleto and is connected to Spoleto through the Roman aqueduct the Umbrian town is known for. Monteluco can be a one-hour steep climb to a summit boasting one of the best restaurants in the region, Ferretti with its ravioli con porcini and limone, grilled meats, and spina…or open tap of Umbrian fine wines. Monteluco can also dazzle with its multi-peaked winding interior, among the peaks, Monte Fionchi and mysterious points in between. There’s an actual hermit who lives deep in the hills behind the hills one usually frequents, living in a handbuild hermitage at the end of a stony path one had best walk, because driving—if not impossible—is a sure danger to any vehicle’s chassis. Monte Fionchim a good four hours past the chosen lunch spot--the agriturismo Patrico--and Patrico a good four hours' walk from Ferretti , which in turn is a good hour’s walk from Spoleto’s aqueduct, promised to be a challenge to even the indefatigable Yoga teacher among us, but alas we did not make the trek because of sudden rains.

We may be middle-aged, but we are not lazy or even the kind of industrious yuppie who looks forward to any excuse to spend Sundays in bed with the New York Times or Repubblica. Torrential rains merely had us negotiating through cell phone text messages: Okay, maybe not Monte Fionchi, but why give up walking altogether? We could do something dolce/easy…an hour in the rain. Who was up for it?

Everyone was up for it, wherever that hour of walking would be spent, an hour was just an hour, and as long as the ground was level enough, not too rocky, not too slippery, we could even possibly stand hiking in our ponchos a couple of hours, maybe three, maybe four.

The place Boscaglia veteran Pierluigi chose for us was an “anello”—a ring, ranging from Pompagnano to Pampagnano in a perfect circle through various quaint and even some abandoned hill towns—among them Cerqueto and Castagnacupa, or “gloomy chestnut” where this very Sunday chestnuts were being harvested under the loveliest trees you have ever seen, centuries old surely, noble and sheltering. We could take a leisurely hike around the anello and detour here and there to fill our knapsacks with chestnuts that we would soon roast for San Martino—when the nuovelle wines are decanted. Traditionally one eats roasted chestnuts with the new wines.

Adriana was the one to say outright: Pierluigi’s idea of a four hour hike would more than likely wind up being a seven or eight hour one. Not because of “deep walking” or even “slow walking” but because of some perverse need in him to show us all what stuff we are made of. A psychological trick really: Tell the hikers they need only walk four hours and then after four hours, begin the litany of “we are almost there, we are almost there” just another oretta…or little hour.

The problem with this pleasure hike turned out not to be rain. The rain stopped miraculously as soon as we got started. The steady sun began to bear down on us, even hot for an October morning. The problem was the motor-cross competition that had chosen as its circuit the very trail we had stumbled upon and had torn up the ground, leaving great gullies and churned up rock. They were masked, robotic-seeming creatures from a netherworld in their bold colored space suits, astride their cacophonous machines bearing down on us at every turn, threatening to overcome us, drive us into the ground, the very roar of their imminence sending us careening into the thorny side brush. This is not restful, we kept telling each other. This is not peaceful. Something HAS to be done.

It occurred to us all that every walk has its own living allegory: our day’s walk was the walk not chosen; the menacing masked men who heaved over the undulating paths like demons of the machine age were ours to overcome. We were judicious enough to argue that motorcyclists also need their trails and their paths, though this was the second Sunday hike in two consecutive Sundays that we had felt persecuted by these faceless fellows on their merciless machines. We relaxed in the knowledge that surely they would stop somewhere for pranzo at 1:30. In just another oretta, we could claim the land as our own and walk undisturbed.

It was on the road leading down from Castagnacupa toward the ghost town, Catinetti that we began the fascinating process of stomping on the spiny husks we found along the ground to break them open and discover inside—the burnished shell of the chestnut, two or three clustered in the cushiony interior of that strange barnacle-like outer layer too prickly to touch with a bare hand, yet so yielding to a single stomp of a waffle-soled hiking boot. These were not ipocastane, or horse chestnuts, but the good kind, the fat marrone, the kind to roast on an open fire and eat straight out of the shell, or let boil in wild fennel, which we would pluck from a field near Pompagnano.

Perhaps time stood still because of the chestnut and our sudden primitive need to fill our knapsacks with them, as though hording for winter, the kind of nourishing fare that would preclude us from ever having to deal again with such conundrums as the modern supermarket. The sun began to recede and the sheltering trees cast their shadows on the endless road that would lead us back where we began, but even so, what was the hurry, and who would, who could leave these wondrous nuts to rot? There was the sense, that if we took our time, took as much time as we possibly could, gathering the bounty of chestnuts, some new possibility for living would meet us at the end of the road. The century would clear of its menacing machines, and sudden aggressive noises; time would become elastic, if not still, the sunset holding out for us to get wherever we were going when we got there.

The Compassionate Conductor

There comes a time in most everyone’s life when he or she is forced to board a train without a ticket. As a teenager I did this frequently on principle, just to show that it was possible to stow away in the bathroom, go from Naples to Rome and back again while skipping school the day of algebra tests without tapping into the funds reserved for important things like cigarettes and the Panini with mozzarella we used to buy at the salumeria near our high school. As an adult, my attitude toward ticketless travel has, naturally, changed. I no longer live with a sense of invulnerability. I prefer to play by the rules. I don’t much like Russian-roulette anxiety or adrenaline rushes, especially during the sacred time of train-travel during which I experience preferred kinds of rushes: creative energy for story-writing, novel reading, iPod listening, paper grading, people watching and the periodic trap-door moments of falling into someone else’s life and story. It will not do to be distracted by the possibility of being caught without a ticket or booted off the train or, God forbid, forced to pay the multa/fine as happened last April 1st when I thought it was March 31st and had my abonamento/monthly pass right there in my hand believing it still valid (April’s Fool!). And yet it turned out, Tuesday, that I found myself in Rome without a train ticket or money to buy one, and rediscovered the magic of being an outright renegade.

When I found myself without train fare (long story; I’d eaten up my daily budget on the early morning Eurostar) I did consider borrowing the small sum from a colleague. When I encountered no one in the course of my teaching day free enough from a clutch of students to approach, I mustered faith that I’d find a ten euro bill shining on the yellow brick road between Piazza Navona and the station or, if I did not find either bill or yellow brick road, something else would save me: a friend encountered serendipitously in the station, or even coins forgotten in the “change” compartments of the many vending machines lined up near Piazza Cinquecento (never mind that I am sure every beggar and gypsy in Rome would beat me to that source of revenue). I’d been listening to the Tao te Ching on the iPod most of the walking-morning and felt strangely immune to panic or mistrust in things working out the way they should. I would follow the Tao and I would know mercy. It was the pranzo hour and the conductors of the train I was about to board could all be out to lunch. Things are never as bad as our fears paint them. I believed in the Tao, in Mercy, in things working out they way they should. Even if I did get caught, even if I did get arrested, even if I did get deported—I’d trust the Water Course Way to lead me where I naturally belonged.

It was truly a sense of surrender that led me to my seat by the window, Carrozzo 5, smack dab in the middle of the train, away from either end where I imagined the conductors could be holed up eating pasta from cartons. But no sooner had I sat down than a conductor did manifest, the selfsame conductor who had charged me the fine on April 1st for a delinquent pass, a mean and unforgiving man, all grizzle and beady eyes, who on occasion had even tried to kick me off the train for traveling with my dogs in an aisle-compromising dog-stroller. A kind of panic brought me to my feet as I considered hiding in the bathroom as I had as a teenaged-stowaway. I stood. I started walking in the opposite direction of the grizzled conductor, and ran smack dab into a second one, a lean and affable-looking fellow, shooting the breeze with a group gathered near the doorway. His eyes met mine outright—vivid with instant concern: What is wrong? What is wrong? Why are you leaving your seat so soon into the journey? He accosted me. I ditched into the bathroom, but imagined that during the calculated minutes I stood staring at myself in the warped mirror (who are you, you vagrant teenager?), that this genial, puppy-eyed conductor stood outside the door, hyper-vigilant with the concern I had seen. I was sure that I must have been glowing indigo, drawing attention to myself, the guilty party, the fugitive from justice. But I did not dare stay sequestered in the toilet for longer minutes than it takes to pee. I summoned the spirit of surrender along with images of gang planks and guillotines, and lumbered down the aisle, past the conductor who was indeed still watching me, toward the seat I had established for myself.

It surprised me how long it took for him to reach me. I could not read or listen to the Tao te Ching , I was so anxious about his pending approach. I am sure he backtracked to the most distant carozza, ate his lunch, and then progressed, seat by seat for at least five cars, punching the little square holes in the ticket. I sat with my forehead pressed into the glass wondering would I feign ignorance: search my purse, scream with horror, blame it on a pickpocket, or try honesty, confession, sincere appeal. I resolved on the latter and it felt like free-falling, the hour or so I sat there, assured of confrontation.

Mercy is a beautiful thing: perhaps I had understood that my fate was entwined with the conductor’s fate the moment his eyes met mine when I was lunging toward the safety of a locked bathroom. There had indeed been something familiar in the way his eyes had met mine and beseeched me: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I have taken the train from Rome to Spoleto, from Spoleto to Perugia, and all possible vice versas so often over so many years that there probably does not exist a conductor on this line whom I’ve not met before, even countless times. The familiarity of this particular man was not so much a surprise as was the connection we made almost instantly, as though he had been poised there precisely to be the one to catch me and save me at my moment of crisis. I had the clear and distinct sensation that we were participating in a story together and each recognized the other as co-protagonist, so that when he finally did reach my carozza and my seat, rather than ask for my ticket, he sat down beside me and began what has now become a kind of love affair of endless discussions regarding train culture, destiny and other mysteries.

“I have been riding this train back and forth, back and forth for thirty years. I’ve watched you for years. I watch everyone. At this hour of the day in this month of September the only people who take this train are those who fanno la pendulare/commute. Take you, for example, I know you have an abonamento. Do you know how many times I’ve checked your abonomento?Your name is Cinzia. You were born in August. Do you know we are the exact same age? I never understand why people don’t come right up to me when they board the train and tell me they don’t have a ticket. I’d much rather they tell me these things a quattro occhi—face to face. Most people have a good excuse for traveling without a ticket. I could write books about the people whose lives I’ve watched unfold traveling back and forth on this short stretch between Rome and Perugia. Did you see the boy without a nose, sucking air through that tiny hole of a mouth? The whole family—mamma, papa, big brother were traveling without tickets to Assisi to take him to a special clinic to see if it will be possible to make the poverello an artificial nose. Do you think I am going to kick that family off my train? Do you think I am going to charge them a multa of 200 euro when they didn’t have enough money for a 7 euro fare in the first place? What kind of person would charge a family with such hardship a multa?? Most people who travel without tickets are suffering some kind of hardship. Unless they are delinquent kids. I have a radar for such things. Delinquent kids I park on one of the fold-up seats by the door and make them get off at the first station we come to. Of course I find them boarding the train again the next time we pass. What else can they do? They’ve got to get home. You know the Romanian who puts a saint’s card in all the seats asking for a donation to feed his family? I bet you think he’s a gypsy. I bet you think he’s a vagabond, sneaking on these trains and jumping off before I can catch him and fine him. But no. He’s just like you. He has an abonamento/a monthly pass. He is actually employed by a high-official at the Vatican. I swear I can tell you stories. I may never leave this train but the whole world finds me here. I live a new novel every day. Isn’t it extraordinary?”

I think it was love at first sight, certainly at first conversation. I often wonder if it was the look he gave me when I was ditching into the bathroom, the “what’s wrong, what’s wrong?” and the way his eyes seemed to drink in my entire soul, or the earnestness of his voice when he said to me: “I swear I can tell you stories. I live a new novel every day.” How could this man have possibly known that I live for stories, especially train stories, and that I suddenly felt myself living a thousand and one nights with him, captured in a kind of reverse Scheherazade role, calling forth from him story after story after story hoping the stories will never end lest he pause long enough to ask to check my ticket.