Arrows of Chance

"When did you feel the most free? Write about it."

San Sebastian. A night train into the city left me with a traveler's hangover. You go through the motions after a while, just like everything else, except when you're backpacking a stranger in more than one strange land, you must remember how vulnerable you really are once you step off that train. This is not what the travel guides described. This is not what I thought I'd write home about. I suppose this is where I shed the romantic hue to it all. The beginning of the end. There are always fellow backpackers to befriend along the way, but it was somewhere along the transfer of trains on course to San Sebastian that the feeling of solitary existence hit me. Everyone had their separate destination, taking another train to another site. I tried best to avoid the worn backpacker's trails through these destinations, which often led me to the mundane. Definitely not what my family expected to hear about. 'Not all who are wandering are lost' was the axiom that repeated through my head as I scraped the most out of those traveler's mistakes I frequently made. That's what you get when you opt for the road not taken. There's no romanticism to latch onto when you're out of money and still feeling unsatisfied.

But San Sebastian lay there. I tumbled out of the train like a drunkard looking for the next den of indemnity. There was nothing that this morning in this sleepy port town could offer a weary traveler. I sought refuge much the same way I had always done as a runner: look for high ground and conquer it. I found the highest point, Urgull, and cut through every small alley to reach it. A stranger wandering through Basque neighborhoods at 6:30 in the morning hardly seemed the image I wanted to send the locals. Still, the doors remained closed as I passed through, climbing higher.

I finally reached the peak as the sun began its mark on the day. It was then that I had that Whitman-esque connection with it all. The quiet of the earth, the vastness of the sea, the arch of the rainbow--all left me feeling that it was all worth it. My sense of freedom was born from initial feelings of loneliness and despair. No matter how hard I tried to break away from the beaten backpacker's path, there were always fellow travelers with me headed in the same direction. Not on this day. Not a traveler's soul in sight. I was the only creature awake up on that mountain as I looked over the bay of San Sebastian. This was freedom, even for a moment until the world around me awoke, until the others caught up with me, until I decided to return to the mortal minutia below.