I Walked Barefoot Across the Middle East, Searching for Answers

After giving her baby up for adoption when she was 16, a young woman sets out on a reckless trip, losing more and more of herself along the way—until she finally finds something resembling hope.

Illustration by Cornelia Li/Narratively archive

I read most of this piece with my jaw agape — literally. I could not believe what the author had been through, what she was subjecting herself to, how far she kept going. This incredible story is the latest in our Creative Nonfiction Classics series, in which we’re republishing classic pieces from the Creative Nonfiction archive. This one is also included in the new book, Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue, a collection of the finest work from the magazine’s 78 issues. The rawness, the stillness and the essential humanness of this essay — which Hall later expanded into a New York Times bestselling book — has stayed with me since. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did! —Jesse Sposato, executive editor

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“Don’t be mad,” I telegram Steve, care of the American Express office in Amsterdam. “Heading off alone. See you in India.” The telegram takes a startling $4.50 out of the $70 I have left after paying for my hotel. Steve has the other $600. I feel some concern about this, but I stuff the $65.50 into my jeans pocket and walk out of the telegraph office into the streets of Luxembourg. It is a cold, drizzly, metallic winter day. I am scared, but I like the feeling. The city is just waking up: Delivery trucks park on the sidewalks, and men in wool jackets lower boxes and crates down steep stone steps to men waiting in basements below. Bare bulbs hang in the gloom; voices come in bursts of yelling and laughter. I can’t understand a thing they are saying. I shoulder my new, red backpack—56 pounds, including the lumpy cotton sleeping bag I bought at the Army/Navy store—and shift its weight on my small shoulders until it feels less painful. The men on the street stop their work and turn to watch me walk by. One of them smiles and tips his cap. There is a murmur among them and then laughter. I am 22 years old and afraid. I feel shaky and powerful, recognizing a reckless potency as it takes over decision-making. Nothing can hurt me. I smile back at the workers, lean forward against the weight of the pack and choose a direction. Luxembourg is silver in the morning mist. Men and women come out, one by one, onto the sidewalks to make their way to work. I walk among them, the human stream, but I have been outside that life for a long time and make my way alone now.

Steve and I had been playing for a few months at the edges of love. It was winter, 1972. I lived on Dartmouth Street in the Back Bay section of Boston, in a small, shabby apartment with high ceilings and stained-glass windows in the bathroom door. At night, I sat in the big bay window at the back of the house with the lights low, watching rats take over the nighttime alley. A man, across the alley and up a story, stood each night at his window, watching me through binoculars. I stared back. Sometimes I filed my toenails for him or read poetry out loud. I returned each night after work to the rats, my books, the man who watched me. I resisted spending time with Steve. He was a good and earnest boy who wanted me to love him, but I had little to offer. Sometimes I left a note for him on my door, saying I had taken off for a while and would call when I got back. But when he came one snowy December night and asked me if I wanted to go to India with him, I immediately said yes. Maybe, on the road to a faraway country, I would find release from the griefs of my past.

The plan was that Steve would fly ahead to Amsterdam. I would follow two weeks later, flying to Luxembourg on a cheap flight and taking a train to Amsterdam, where I would meet him. He would simply wait at the station on Jan. 6th until I climbed off one of the trains, and we would start our four-month hitchhiking trip, joining the flow of American and European hippies, young people seeking adventure and, maybe, enlightenment in India. I was nervous as I flew to Reykjavik and on to Luxembourg, anxious about getting from the airport into the city alone and finding a place to spend the night. I decided I would just sleep in a chair at the train station, but when I got there, it was locked up. It was a very cold and damp night. I didn’t have the right clothes; I had packed for India, forgetting the continents in between. As I made my way into a nearby hotel, I felt inept and alone. I went to sleep worried about the train ride to Amsterdam the next day and what would happen if Steve, for some reason, never showed up. He had almost all our money and our maps. Our only line of communication was through American Express, the hub for hitchhikers in Europe. Our plan seemed, in the damp, lonely room, flimsy and uncertain.

Before it was light, I was up, frightened. I washed in cold water at the stained sink behind the door, watching myself in the mirror. I was a girl in big trouble, and I knew this as I stared back at myself: at the guarded, haunted eyes; at the tight, closed face—a record of loss.

I had a baby when I was 16. My mother kicked me out. Then my father kicked me out. I gave my baby away.

My baby, 5 years old now, was somewhere, maybe loved, maybe not. Mourning with no end and a sense that I had lost everything— my child, my mother’s love and protection, my father’s love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself—hollowed me out. Every day, I floated alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years, I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside me, inviting me to step into its current.

Something shifted in the early morning’s coming light as I looked back at the broken life reflected in the mirror. In that moment, the river swept in close beside me, the current smooth and swift. I stepped in finally, reckless and grateful, a calm giving up. I had nothing more to lose. I walked toward the telegraph office. I did not care what happened to me anymore.

The winter air is heavy with sweet coal smoke as I walk and hitchhike, following the Rhone River through eastern France. I am walking blind, with no maps, and learn the names of the cities I am passing through from small, brown signs: Nancy, Dijon, Lyons, Montélimar, Arles. Everything—buildings, fields, chugging factories, workers’ faces and clothes—is gray. Snow falls and turns to slush. I am cold and wet, but I am strangely excited. My money is going fast on bread and cheese and hot soup. Each late afternoon, I have one purpose—to find a dry place to sleep where no one will find me. I am furtive as each day closes, slipping into farm sheds and factory storerooms and derelict warehouses. Sometimes I am caught, and an angry or indignant man or woman sends me back into the night. I sleep lightly, listening for footsteps. If I am near a town in the morning, I like to find a public place—a cafe or market—and spend a few minutes warming up, my backpack resting against my legs near the sweaty windows. Often, the owner realizes I have no money to spend and shoos me out. Sometimes a man or a young woman—a mother with a small, wide-eyed child, perhaps—smiles and motions me to sit down. My French is poor: “Yes, I am walking to India,” I say. “Thank you,” I say, again and again. I eat a pastry and drink a bowl of steaming coffee. Sometimes the men who pick me up in their green Deux Cheveaux or blue Fiats or black Mercedes pull over at a market and buy me bread and tins of sardines and cheese. The world feels perfectly benign, generous even, and I go on my way, following the river.

I think of Steve, hoping he did not sit long in the train station waiting for me before he realized there was trouble, before he made his way to the American Express office and ripped open my telegram. I half-expect to see him waving at me across an intersection where roads meet and part again. I have no idea where I am.

One cold, windy day, as I walk through another little town with no name, I meet a man named Alex, who is absent without leave from the British Army. He is tall and very, very thin, with hollowed-out cheeks and sunken eyes. His boots are rotting away; he has tied newspapers around the soles, in his dirty, wet canvas satchel, he carries a brown wool blanket, which is thin and filthy, and a miniature chess set. He has no passport. He has not contacted his family for over a year. He looks haunted, as if he no longer belongs to the world. He teaches me to play chess in the back stairwell of an apartment building. He is curt with me and never smiles. He smells unwashed, but, more than that, he seems to be fading from the world. I feel as if I am looking at myself a year from now.

The next morning, Alex points down the empty road and tells me, “Go that way until you reach the Mediterranean Sea. Turn left there. It will take you to a warmer place.” I leave him sitting on a heap of stones at the edge of a field and head in the direction he pointed.

My backpack is lighter. In dirty Genoa, I sell two pairs of Levi’s; my tall, red suede boots; a black lace shirt; and a bra to a girl from Chicago who is hitchhiking with her boyfriend. She gives me $20, and the rising worry about money, which I have been trying to ignore, eases. I have lost weight in just three weeks and think about food as I walk.

Now that I have reached the warmer Mediterranean coast, I see lots of kids traveling together. Like me, they carry heavy backpacks and stick out their thumbs for a ride. They look happy and well-fed, and each night, they sleep in youth hostels they have chosen from their “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” guide. They congregate—little international communities—in cafes and clubs and parks in the centers of the quaint southern towns, finding a common language and sharing tales of their adventures. I avoid them, feeling detached from their youth and the ease with which they travel through the world.

The hole in me grows. I am becoming more and more isolated and recognize that I am walking my way into perfect disconnection. I think of my baby, a boy, every single day now. I make up stories: My baby is a boy named Anthony, with black, black hair. My baby is a boy lying on his back under a maple tree, watching clouds—just like those above me—spin by on an easterly wind. Like me, he has blond curls and crooked fingers. He is shaped like this hole in me. I think of my mother. I think of my father. Under the weight of my backpack, I walk away from home.