I wake with a start. Where am I? Through the parting fog of sleep I remember that I am in İstanbul. A hot sun is shining through the window. I am sweating in the humidity. My walk starts in a week.
I want to go back to sleep. I want the walk to be over. I wish my plan had been a dream. I wish that this morning I could shake it off, shower, drive to work at a familiar office, sit at a familiar desk, and click away on a familiar computer emailing familiar people.
Instead, in one week I will lace up my boots, pull on my backpack, and walk out onto a hot, dusty highway — my home for the next seven and a half months until I reach the barbed wire fence that separates Turkey from Iran.
God, this bed is soft. Can’t I just stay here?
I’ve mapped out the route in great detail. I’ve even made a spreadsheet breaking the entire thing down into 11-kilometer (7-mile) segments. For every one of those segments, I know the beginning elevation, the ending elevation, and the average temperature of that area for that time of year. For every one of those segments I know if there is a gas station or a village, and whether the road bends to the left or to the right.
I have gone out of my way to eliminate as much of the unknown as possible, but there are two things I can’t answer beforehand:
- Where am I going to sleep at night?
- Am I going to die from a scorpion sting on the Central Anatolia plateau?
I laugh nervously when I tell people that last one, about the scorpion. What I don’t tell them is that I actually have two bigger fears:
Will someone kill me in my sleep? Will my death prove all those others right who said, “But it’s dangerous.”
The second is that the next decade of my life will look like the previous one. I had been planning to build a small business empire — not huge, just large enough to sustain my family and me. I was going to find “The One”, settle down, get married, and have children. I would come home at the end of the day to a house filled with people who loved me. I would eat dinner with children who called me “Daddy”. At night I would fall asleep next to the woman I loved and wake up next to her in the morning.
I started a couple businesses, but they struggled, and I closed them down. I found the woman I thought was “The One”. We got married, but by the end of the decade we divorced.
I want to hit the reset button on my life. Is this walk the right way to do it? Or am I about to engage in a colossal waste of time?
—
In 2012, Matt sold off or gave away almost everything he owned. He strapped whatever was left to his back, flew to Turkey, and walked across it. Every foot, from one end of the country to the other. Along the way he slept in mosque gardens, dined with strangers, and stumbled into refugee camps.
This is the story of that journey. We’ll be publishing one chapter each week from his book. If you would like to read the whole thing at once, you can purchase his book titled Heathen Pilgrim: Walk Across Turkey on Amazon.
