Free The Other by David Guterson Page A

abysmal most of the time, especially in my tent after dark. Once, in some Navarran village or another, I sat at an outdoor table writing postcards and reading the International Herald-Tribune, and just the act of putting down my home address agitated my loneliness.
    In August, I took a train over Brenner Pass and came down into the Alto Adige. I had a beard now, dark and dense, and a pair of used boots from a secondhand store in Innsbruck. They didn’t fit right, and I was reliant on moleskin, which I cut with a pair of dull tailoring scissors. With these same scissors I cut my hair one night, while sitting cross-legged in front of my cartridge stove waiting for some orzo to boil. I was ill-prepared for the August weather at night in northern Italy, and in San Vigilio bought a surplus Austrian military ragg sweater, a cap with padded earmuffs and a chin strap, and a pair of fingerless wool gloves. I was sitting beside a trail the next day with this getup on, as well as my glacier glasses with their sweat-stained leather side shields, taking my incessant and obligatory travel notes and comparing the Dolomites with the North Cascades, when I heard faint voices. There was a conversation going on in American English among the spruces and pines on the ridge below—I could pick out a few words and phrases of it coming toward me on the wind. While listening, I wrote about the view from there: San Vigilio in its valley with its larches, lindens, and broad Ladin roofs; immediately above it, hayfields and poppies; and above that, closer to me, white cows grazing on bits of grass growing between barren rock. The trails in the Alto Adige all look rutted by centuries of use and sometimes pass by rustic chapels, situated in the lee of the wind, in which are gathered pots, cans, nails, worn shoes, bits of wire, even lost handkerchiefs, and I was sitting beside one of these, which had in it, besides the usual debris, a number of rusted iron spikes and some small pharmaceutical vials of thick glass, with stoppers. I took notes on these things, too, of course. Then the loud hikers came into view against a backdrop of scree. Silent now, saving their breath and leaning forward under their packs, they came up the hill. They were still small, and mostly what I saw of them was the tops of their heads and some bright-red pack fabric. I hadn’t spoken in English to anybody for some time and was eager for that suddenly, after all the pidgin talk and hand signals with continentals. On the other hand, I also felt antagonized, because of all of the work I’d done to come to grips with lonely travel. However it was, my compatriots passed beneath striated rock faces, white rock ribbed or marbled with black, and, in making the ridge, began to walk more upright. I could see that they were women after that, two tall women in hiking shorts. This was early in the day, and because the sun was behind them on a bright, cloudless morning, I had to leave my glacier glasses on as they approached in order to see very much. Between the glasses, my chin-strapped cap with its padded earmuffs, my beard, and my fingerless gloves, I must have looked ridiculous to the two women coming up the trail. In fact, I know I did, because one is now my wife and she’s told me how I looked, how she made a ridge in the Dolomiti and found a guy there with a journal in his lap, suggesting, maybe, as she once put it, an explorer who’d stopped taking care of himself. Her name is Jamie Shaw. There was no love at first sight, a thing some people claim is real but, frankly, a concept foreign to both of us. I did think she was pretty, with her knobby knees and pointed elbows as she pulled on her wind pants, and I liked the look on her face right away, which was openly skeptical. She kept covering her mouth with her thin fingers and pushing a lock of hair behind an ear, and I was drawn to these gestures and to her outdoor-ish athleticism, but not especially drawn to them, not at