Pandemic walking
Ursula Martin crosses Europe as best she can in the time of Covid
WHERE WERE YOU when you heard the news about your country’s first lockdown? Me? I was wild sleeping, camped underneath a little chapel deep in the forest of the Ligurian Alps in western Italy. There was an open archway leading to a small, sheltered area with a long wooden table and benches. It had smoke-blackened walls from dozens of ineffectual fires in the crumbling corner fireplace. The mist drifted through the trees, the birds sang their merry morning tune and I stared at my phone in disbelief. “Italy is on nationwide lockdown.
All citizens to go to their homes and stay inside.”
I wasn’t a citizen, though. I didn’t have a house.
I had no plans to go home, no return ticket, no house in the UK either. I was walking across Europe – a longterm journey that I’d completely committed to. It had been a year and five months already since I’d started in September 2018 – from Ukraine through Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans and Slovenia, finally reaching Italy to spend New Year’s Eve 2020 in Venice.
‘STAY AT HOME’
Coronavirus wasn’t even a rumour then. I remember pushing through the crowds in St Peter’s Square, the narrow streets already full by 10pm, before retreating to my hostel island and standing outside with one of my 15 dormitory roommates to jump up and down in excitement at the lavish fireworks.
News came little by little during January as I walked the width of Italy along the flat Po Valley, the white wall of the Alps gleaming alongside me to the north. Down here it was bleak and misty, herons flapping solemnly away from the canal banks that gridded the land into square fields.
As I climbed the mountains of Liguria, I met people who talked about a strange illness affecting towns behind me. I tried to think back to when I might have walked through those areas – had I passed through anywhere it might have been? I started counting dates on my fingers as if I’d missed a period.
The chatter grew and grew, and so did the worry; trying to think about where you sat in a café in relation to the other customers, looking askance at the greengrocer coughing into her scarf as she served up bananas. Saying goodbye to the hotel owner the next morning, we awkwardly waved where we might have hugged. Some towns to the north were closed now. It all felt very uncertain.
I tried to keep focused on walking, not worrying about what wasn’t directly affecting me – until bam,
I woke up on the morning of 9 March 2020 to find the whole of Italy had gone into lockdown.
What a very strange feeling to be without a safe retreat when all the country was shutting its doors and every interaction came with a new sense of contagion.
I walked half the morning to a bar at a crossroads. A notice on the door said they were closed, but they let me in to charge my phone. The whole family sat staring at the news channel, chain smoking.
An Italian-speaking friend called a few hotels for me. They were closed, not taking new guests. There was nowhere for me to go in this country and I made the decision to walk into France.
It’s hard to remember just how frightening those first weeks were, the unknown threat sending news outlets and social media fizzing into a frenzy of terrified speculation. Italians had been told to stay in their homes, but were borders closed? Could foreign nationals cross closed borders? Who did the rules apply to?
I dipped in and out of the final few towns on my way to the heights of the border crossing. People waited nervously in queues outside the pharmacy, eyeing me as I walked past towards the supermarket. I felt like a fugitive, uncertain of the action I was taking but not feeling like I had any other option.
Then came the confrontation. Along a quiet back road I was stopped by a police car. “You’re supposed to be inside,” were his first words, waving me back when I leant down towards the window. We passed through the unusual circumstances in my basic Italian; where I’d been, where I was going.
“I’m going to France,” I admitted, unsure of whether he’d tell me I couldn’t.
“You’re supposed to stay inside,” he said again. “I can’t,” was all I could think of to say.
I really couldn’t explain in that immediate moment
"'You're supposed to stay inside', the policeman said. 'I can't', was all I could think to say."
that there was nowhere safe for me to go. He looked at me for a long, exasperated minute, probably thinking through the problems of taking responsibility for my homelessness… and then he waved me away.
Hurdle crossed, I headed over the mountains for France, arriving tearful and exhausted in La Brigue.
I’d imagined the plague bell ringing, felt as if the word ‘Italy’ was stamped on my forehead, that the hotel or passing police cars would demand to see where
I’d come from. But nothing happened. I checked in without a passing glance and collapsed onto the bed, deciding I should ask friends if they knew anywhere I could stay in southern France.
A few messages later I had access to a holiday home 200km away. It was exactly the right thing to do – France went into lockdown the day after my arrival, and I found myself pressed down under the weight of isolation and pandemic fear, along with the rest of Europe.
BACK ON TRACK
Ninety days that first lockdown lasted: from the final frostings of winter to the first greening fuzz of bare trees and then into fully blossoming summer, while I stayed inside except for an hour a day.
Life behind glass didn’t suit me at all. I stood indoors and watched the spring come into being, experiencing life at a remove and feeling like a zoo animal – confused, frightened and frustrated to madness at the abrupt restriction and these alien circumstances.
I’d been walking for more than 18 months, wild camping most of the week, taking a single day in a hotel to rest, but otherwise living outside. I missed the freshness of the forests: sitting in silence watching the dappled sunlight through leaves with no thought of time, no deadline on my return home, no limit on how far I could walk from the house. I missed spontaneity and freedom, walking all day with no knowledge of where I would sleep that night, no decision needing to be made until a couple of hours before sunset.
I feel at my calmest when I’m walking long distance. It’s the motion of movement and new stimulation.
The certainty of a destination point but no pressure to get there. The wondrous pleasure of wild camping; sleeping in the forest or field corner and waking up with rain or birdsong.
It’s when the essentials of life are the closest to meaning everything. You come to understand the engrossing simplicity of food, water, shelter, pain, sensation, sweat, stink, appreciation, wonder.
Could I have gone back to the UK? I suppose; but going home felt like giving up. Flitting across borders – putting myself into enclosed transport tubes,
exchanging air with other humans – also seemed like the worst way to catch the infection. Much easier to wait where I was and keep walking alone in the fresh air whenever restrictions would allow. There was nothing to go home for anyway – just the horrible pandemic in a different place. No job, nowhere to live, and the disappointment of only half a journey completed. Better to stay abroad. I speak to friends online wherever I am – it’s not like we could have hugged at home, is it?
In June 2020, once French citizens were allowed more than 100km from their homes, I went back to the Alps and started walking west. I crept across France and Spain, playing ‘Grandmother’s footsteps’: creeping up on my target while trying to avoid being seen.
The original plan was to reach Finisterre at the end of the Camino de Santiago and then walk back up to Calais and through the UK. I did my best to stick to it, spending the summer crossing the south of France, napping under trees in afternoon shimmering heat – and then the autumn in the Pyrenees, attempting the Haute Route but being beaten down to lower ground by early snowstorms.
I stayed in France for their second autumn lockdown and then braved Spain. When Spanish infection rates soared after the Christmas celebrations, I spent a month in a closed pilgrim hostel waiting for it to feel safer again.
In a wave of exultation, I made it to Finisterre. Standing above the sea looking out towards the sunset, I had reached the furthest west I could walk. All I’d expended to get to this point – the journey from Kyiv, braving a Romanian winter, crossing the Carpathians twice, the Stara Planina, the Dinaric Alps, a glorious summer in the Balkans, and then the oppression and fear of a global pandemic – all of it had slowed me down, but it hadn’t stopped this journey altogether.
On the way back towards France they closed for their third lockdown and I made the only route change to the journey, deciding to take the ferry at Santander rather than wait to safely enter France. I felt I’d achieved enough – it was time to get home now, not wait longer for Covid problems to ease.
In what I hope will be the final pandemic twist to this curly journey, my ferry was cancelled when I was less than a week away from Santander. Foot passengers weren’t accepted. After a day of desperation, some friends contacted me; they were on their way back from Portugal and could give me a lift onto the ferry. It has been the kindness of both friends and strangers that has helped me through the turbulence of needing urgent shelter, time and time again.
OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
How has travelling changed during Covid times?
I’ve lost the conversations with strangers – people who would hail me from the other side of the street and call me across to find out what I was doing, where I was going. Now I sneak in and out of bars, placing myself inconspicuously at a corner table: a shadow presence. There are no more shared meals, no more invitations to coffee. It’s harder to chat. People have retreated to the safety of their known bubbles, less interested in strangers.
I have felt, throughout the pandemic, very aware of being the unknown quantity: the travelling stranger come from far-off parts bringing risks of other places. That’s the part I feel uneasy about, even though I’ve only been moving when it’s legal to do so.
In many other ways, I’ve experienced the pandemic at a remove. As a lone walker, always moving on between temporary relationships, the stress of rules about the numbers of people in your bubble and how many households can mix together or sit at a table have simply gone over my head.
I spend most of my time alone, walking in rural areas, never taking public transport.
The liminality of long-distance walking has saved me throughout this experience, I think.
In the effort to control large populations, my unusual circumstances have meant I’m an outlier.
I’ve fallen through the cracks and it’s helped me to be free to continue – as did the fact that I’d reached the Schengen area of Europe when the pandemic started. I have two world-walking friends who were trapped in Georgia and Azerbaijan respectively, trying to continue walking east. Very strict border closures have meant that their journeys have been thwarted for much longer than mine.
I cannot recommend this experience one bit.
It’s been awfully oppressive and stressful at times, as everyone’s pandemic has been; we have all suffered in a myriad of different ways.
But soon, when I have completed this journey and walked across Europe – more than 5000 miles, from Kyiv to Llanidloes – and continued struggling on through a pandemic, I will look back and feel immensely proud.