This mountain path is nothing less than a miracle. It manifested as we approached the road’s end and dissolved like an insignificant tributary into the river of an avenue miles later. Then it suddenly appeared again around another bend in the road, as if by sleight of hand. Now, three hours into the day’s journey, the path ferries us along with such gentleness, sheltering us from the sounds of all human enterprise but our own footsteps and the murmurs of our backpacks shifting on our backs. With every step we are cradled in coolness, refreshed by its microclimate of fragrance and moisture, a natural refrigerant formed by heard but unseen mountain waters making their course into the valley some 600 meters below. 

The sun is all but rumor here.  Or it would be, were it not for the acanthus flowers burning like candles along the understory, the phoenix-wings of the cyclamen purpurens igniting the air as if they were magenta suns in a lesser galaxy. By the loveliness of these wild mountain flowers, by the places where the path offers a firm foothold between artillery shells of loose limestone, we maintain our course. 

“The best things in life are free,” Luca murmurs, breaking the companionable silence we have held for hours. There is a small waterfall greeting us, about halfway into our six-hour descent into Perugia’s Nera Valley. He dips his yellow bandana into the stream before tying it back onto his head. Without saying anything, I turn away to begin crossing the small footbridge that connects one face of the switchback with its mate.  I appreciate and understand his sentiment, but it rings untrue; the best things in life are never free. 

I am in love with the world. In the very short history of the affairs of my heart, it is the most surprising. Had you asked my parents which of their three children would be most at home in the woods, I wouldn’t have even been on the list. A child who possessed sensory processing issues, I found summer wildly disorienting. The prickle of the grass on my feet and legs felt like weapons, the stickiness of ice cream and sand were forms of torture. While my friends and siblings enjoyed long hours in the yard and at any number of parks, I became bookish and cozied up on the couch in comfortable silence. On those rare occasions when I was punished for a misdeed, restitution was always followed by the demand that I go outside. During those sentences, I did little more than stand on the cement patio in the backyard or at the edge of a cotton blanket as if they were island prison colonies, biding my time.

But I am enamored of the earth. And as with the greatest of love stories, it is a relationship that evolved so slowly as to have been stupefying, an utter surprise . . . just the same as one tainted by pride and prejudice, or one that brewed within a casual friendship. And yet, no greater passion have I ever known than this devotion. It is, as the poet Robinson Jeffers names the phenomenon in The Tower Beyond Tragedy, as if I have fallen in love outwards.

As we descend, the grade becomes steeper. The limestone stones that litter the two-foot-wide path have become larger, looser, and more dangerous to ankles, the toes of quick-stepping feet. I slow in anticipation of a break in the tree line I see up ahead—the path glows golden where it is being bathed in a pocket of light. As we pass into the four by fifteen feet clearing that clings to the rock-face, our bodies strike a wall of heat.  The light is radiating off the white and gray limestone so intensely, I am momentarily blinded by the sun. I draw in toward the cliff and pause until my eyes adjust. There is nothing to do in the interim but to breathe deeply. Here, along this sharp face of the mountain, Spanish broom is exploding on its thin stalks everywhere. The fragrance, so different than the subtle sweetness of the cyclamen, hangs like a silken veil for us to pass through. When we enter the jaded understory again, it is gone.

I cannot help but think of Luca’s appeal to that old maxim as the coolness regains its advantage. No, the best things in life are never free. Especially this. 

Paths within Europe are often legally protected rights of way, but they didn’t come into being sui generis.  And they don’t maintain themselves, no matter how lovingly they are trod on by the passing pilgrim masses. At every level the preservation, protection, and appreciation of trails such as the Via Francesco comes at a significant cost.  From the expenses of constructing blazes and maintaining the grade, to those of mowing the trail’s head and assessing/clearing the path for rock and treefalls, the trail must perpetually remain a priority to a consortium of farmers, foresters, landowners, and local authorities. Many of its stewards will never step onto it.  Nonetheless, it remains an investment held in protection by them, a host of regional volunteers, sponsors, and authorities. 

Perhaps the costs are justified by the religious heritage of this place, or for how it contributes to the regional tourist industry, but there are tax dollars levying this pleasure. That, and an opportunity cost as well.  For where communities prioritize one initiative, another is looked over.  

Nor did this ecosystem emerge freely. Forest biospheres are tenacious but wildly fragile, their plants competing for limited resources, and highly susceptible to environmental damage. Protecting them involves a whole host of opportunity costs—from restricting truffle hunting, forestry, spring acquisition rights, and other natural resource industries. There are a whole host of perennial fiscal costs too.  Costs associated with energizing and educating the public on what a mountain biosphere in Puglia is, Costs associated with informing citizens who, again, may never walk these forest paths but whom are stakeholders in its wellbeing, why it is important and how it is vulnerable.  And significant costs associated with researching environmental impact, and advocating for and pursuing environmental policies that will reduce pollution and other environmental impacts on this land community. 

More than even those costs though, there is the cost born by the individual who is a fundamental thread in the life-web of this place.  It is the dearest of the costs of keeping this place integrated, a sacred whole, and sadly, it is all too often viewed as too expensive, too onerous.  It is the cost of paying attention.    

In his book Thinking Outside Your Head, philosopher Matthew B. Crawford makes a compelling case that humans only come most fully into their reasoning capabilities, (and therefore into their fullest humanity), through an embodied encounter with things in the world. “It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible,” he argues, before taking care to explain how our abilities to learn, to acquire and master skills, to navigate the processes of critical inquiry and to meta-cognate all demand embodied engagement with other bodies, beings, tools, natural and technical forces. Things which create resistance create us.

The truth of this comes to mind when think of the long arc of my love for the earth. The great outdoors once physically repelled me; now I am most at home in myself and in the world while laboring alone on a trail.  How did that happen?  

Worlds upon worlds have arisen from a series of choices I made, starting when I was seventeen and, needing a summer job, accepted a position at a kayak and canoe school near my parents’ new home in northern Wisconsin. I was a city girl through and through, and the idea of spending three months in a place I secretly called Bumblefuck wasn’t in the least bit thrilling. “It pays decent,” is all said when my relatives asked about it. And then halfway into summer my bosses decided I needed an orientation so that I could talk to guests about our paddling school program. It involved being thrown into a kayak for a week-long class. 

Let’s just say that the first second I touched the rough wetsuit I would have to wear was enough to make me consider resigning. And it wasn’t even wet yet. 

Even though orientation was miserable, and the realities of kayaking made me shudder for well over a year after that, something slowly and determinedly changed. I became curious about some facets of paddling and was invigorated by the challenges of others. I made a group of friends whose companionship offset the disgusting inconveniences of being in a squeaky, leaky boat. And by the by, skill development happened, and delight, and a whole lot of knowledge about a whole lot of things. I found myself able to read and navigate a river system by the force and pull of the current and started being able to read the weather forecast in the insects’ call patterns. I began identifying bird calls and types of granite, only feeling a deep intimacy with this place and the knowledge it had instilled in me over many, many, years.

Years later, when my children were young, I made a choice to devote an hour of my life each day walking them in their baby carriers, then strollers, then by hand and alongside their small bikes. The time I took to do this was time I took away from so many other things—work obligations and volunteer commitments, calls to distant family members, laundry and toilets . . . things that were of more immediate social or fiscal value. What value could I ascribe to those hours and hours of walking?  To be sure, through days and years, the land community of our neighborhood became familiar, its particular character revealed through the changing of the seasons, the emergence and departure or destitution of flora and fauna, the particular quality of the precipitation on any given day of rain or snow fall. Does any census register that?  How much capital, for that matter, did it accrue?  I can only say that as my children grew, I did too. I moved into a cycle of walking without them. Then, over time, I moved into a cycle of walking fully with the world. Realizing that what we do not possess a vocabulary for we can never truly know, I began identifying the flowers, the trees, and the insects.  I discovered phenology and began nature journaling.  And the Earth became my muse. 

In the final 500 meters of the mountain path, we turn onto a hairpin switchback.  It positions us just above the blacktop road. Luca, who always has a guidebook close at hand, has said at this point we have walked ten kilometers, and still have seven to go—all of which, he adds, will follow the Nera along the bright and open valley floor. 

Whether it is due to an over-abundance of self-compassion or an over-abundance of risk-avoidance, I don’t know, but I have mostly lived a life without longing or regret for what has passed. Each joy I experience I let float in my hands like a balloon.  Each of the men whom I have loved, I have loved without holding on to. Each wonderous stage of my childrens’ lives I have celebrated, then packed away in my memory as the next emerged. There is little suffering I have ever experienced at the approach of an ending, and yet I feel myself ascending into its mountains even as I descend this one, stumbling upward into sentiment, preoccupied with the beloved mountain path that exists behind me. Each step toward the overbearing tunnel-opening of light, I feel more and more like Eurydice, feeling the pull to turn around and gaze lovingly upon the land community I am leaving. I feel pain at the inevitability of our separation. 

In her 1975 memoir Looking Backwards, Colette remarks “One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.” Switch out the subject of affection, if you need to, but recognize the truth: love is an acute practice of listening with one’s whole body, so to speak. Paying attention—decoding another’s seasons and smells and looks and cries and waverings—it happens through our senses. I love the Earth because over years and years, I have learned to pay attention to it, willed myself to pay attention to it, to seek out and constantly find ways of discovering and rediscovering its nuances and seasons, and tinctures.  The world has become an appropriation of my attention, so to speak. And as Crawford reminds us, “appropriations of our attention are […] an especially intimate matter.” 

The hiking paths of Europe are like thin golden threads woven into precious silks. The ecological systems that are bound together with them are complex and fragile and wonderous—full of lives and resources that are precious and all but silent. Some of these land communities are facing grave futures due to global warming and land mismanagement.  Others are simply under surveillance, pressure, as human development constantly threatens to encroach. 

Fall in love hard, fall in love fast, fall in love forever.  The well-being of one land community or another is no more a matter than our attention, and thereby our affection, allows. There is a very real cost to not paying attention to the pilgrim paths you walk along, the land communities you walk through: the cost is the best things in life, which have never been free.  

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