I fell down and broke my legs while hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc mountain

A few days after I’d flown across the world, I sent a text message to my parents, telling them I loved them.

 

We’re pretty close, and I knew they were itching for updates. My mom was first on the reply: “Love u too how r u?”

 

“I’m good.”

 

“Done for the day?” she asked. I told her I was. “How was today’s hike?”

 

I thought for a minute. Took a deep, shaky breath to settle myself. Started to sob, anyway.

 

I was sitting alone in a nook of the earth, lost in the woods of the Italian Alps. I was bleeding freely from a lightning-shaped cut below my left knee.

 

I had not seen another person for hours. No one had responded when I’d shouted, “Hello!” No one had been there later, after I had fallen and was screaming for help. You never really know what you sound like at your loudest until you have reason to try.

But I didn’t want my mother, back in Florida, to know this. I didn’t want to tell her how scared I was, how much I had messed up, how that scream you never practice scrapes the back of your throat, how your loudest, in the end, is not loud enough to save you.

 

“How was today’s hike?” she asked.

 

I took another breath, and I typed, “Beautiful.”

 

• • •

 

In February, I decided I wanted to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. I wanted to go alone. It’s more than 100 miles, it’s across the Atlantic Ocean, through Switzerland, Italy and France. I didn’t have much experience hiking, but there you go. I booked my flights to Geneva for the first weekend in July and began accumulating the things one needs to hike for eight days straight: a backpack, a compass, poles, boots, stuff.

 

The first day I thought I was going to die from exhaustion. I had been cavalier before, responded to worried friends with a “Hiking is just a fancy word for walking, and look, I’m walking right now.” But you go up and up and up, on paths with more in common with rock climbing walls, and you wonder if you’re ever going to catch your breath. Then you’re going down, down, down, bracing your knees and using your poles to keep balance as you try not to crash-land on the ground again.

 

But the views — the views were spectacular. Snow-capped mountains everywhere I looked, fields of flowers, cows, sheep, blue skies all above. Sometimes I would stop and wonder how I had done something so right, had schemed and planned and put myself right into this panoramic postcard of a day.