Excerpts

Chapter 23 My Mother's Boots Ten years ago I spent a week walking the chalk downs of Wiltshire, a county about seventy-five miles west of London. It was May, and the paths I tramped were sloppy. But I was prepared, because I'd packed a pair of thirty-year-old boots my mother had produced from the bottom of a closet before I left and bestowed on me, her youngest daughter. Those boots served me well in England, led me past ruins of Iron Age forts, took me up the mossy steps of medieval churches, and finally came home encrusted with gray Wiltshire clay. I had no reason to summon my mother's boots to duty again until a year or so later, when I was assembling my gear for a Kentucky spelunking adventure. At the time, I was just starting to really travel, which is why that trip became an exercise in taking risks and testing my limits. On it I did a lot of things I probably shouldn't have, like climbing into caves without a flashlight and hiking alone on trails known to be sunbathing spots for poisonous snakes. I still like to get a rise out of my mother, so when I got home, I told her about my adventures. She has been a worrywart for as long as I've known her, but she just smiled and said that a person can strike out in boots like hers without fear of snakebite. After many excursions in my mother's boots, I've begun to suspect that they are magic. I never wear them without seeing inspiring sights, experiencing life and nature more deeply, and coming home changed. I can rarely say how, but more and more this is the reason I travel. My mother's boots are chestnut tan, Boy Scout standard issue, purchased about the time she bought a virtually identical pair for my brother, while suiting him up to win a chestful of merit badges. They are lined with wrinkles now, familiar to a certain Italian shoe repairman in the West Village of New York, who told me to throw them away two springs ago before I went for a hike along the Brittany coast. But I insisted that he sew the tongues back in, flew to France, and set off, at first barefoot in the sand north of Saint-Malo and then trustingly shod all the way to Mont Saint-Michel. I do know how that walk changed me. I realized that there is no good reason to be cynical when you're eating oysters in Cancale and lying in clover above the Atlantic Ocean at the Pointe de la Varde. The world is still beautiful, if you have boots to see it from. Back home, I called my mother and told her so. But she wanted to know something more mundane. "Are the bindings of the boots coming out? The bindings were coming out the year I didn't climb Longs." For nearly ten summers during my childhood, my family spent two weeks at a YMCA camp just outside the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. My mother broke in her boots while hiking over the Front Range. Whenever I lace them up, that place comes back to me, especially 14,256-foot Longs Peak, the patriarch of the Front Range. "Why didn't you make Longs?" I prod. "Dad and Johnnie did." "Because of you," she says, and then I recall the pain I was to her when she took me for a climb. I remember crying all the way up Deer Mountain-puny by anyone's estimation, except mine, at ten. My mother loved the mountains and cut a dashing figure among them, a red bandanna around her neck, her hair blowing free-so unlike the woman who, back home, cooked dinners, ironed, and spent every Saturday morning at the beauty parlor. When she tried to leave me at the Y's children's program, I cried and screamed, in effect holding her hostage while my father and brother conquered Longs. We talk about this, she without rancor. "I'd rather be a mother than a mountain climber," she says. But then, "I know I could have made Longs." Indeed, she could have. She has been to places I may never see, sunk her feet in the sand around the pyramids and touched Alaskan glaciers. A social studies teacher, she saw travel as a way of learning. Because of her, my vacations are never vacant. Places mean something, and it's up to me to find out what it is-that's my mother's mandate. Besides being magical, her boots symbolize this. But as a symbol, they're complex. When I climb mountains in them, I feel as if, by rights, my mother should be there, even though she's too old to do much walking now. I never could imagine making the kinds of sacrifices she made for her children, which is partly why I never had any. And she never pushed me. I've wondered, though, what I'm missing. Could it be that life is really more about making sacrifices than reaching mountain summits? Is this what I'm to take from my mom-a woman who, in all respects, seems to me successful? Then why did she give me her boots, if not to urge me to climb on? "We think back through our mothers if we are women," Virginia Woolf wrote. On my fortieth birthday, I climbed Longs, in my mother's boots, of course. I had a fellow hiker record my ascent with a camera, mostly for the benefit of my doubtful father and brother. When I got the pictures back, I stood in the camera shop amazed, because in the picture of me at the top, I look so oddly like my mother. Oddly, because I'm the image of my dad. But on the top of Longs, I looked like her. My mother's boots are one legacy I guess I won't pass on. Maybe they are more a link than a legacy, between mother and daughter, two travelers on the same journey. Excerpted from French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond by Susan Spano All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.