On Friday morning, my fourth morning in Horsunlu this time around, I woke up and got ready to begin another day of working my foot. I didn’t know yet what I would do on that day, maybe start with some laps on the dirt road, and then graduate to walking out to the main road. As I stood on the stone walkway trying to decide, Fatih, one of the villagers I had come to recognize, walked past. He spotted me and paused for a moment, “Come with me,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“To my shop, of course.”
“You mean, the one out on the main road?”
“Yes, of course,” he laughed.
I briefly thought about how that would be skipping ahead a few steps in my self-imposed rehabilitation plan for the day. But the “always say yes” part of my personality won out.
“Sure, sounds good, let’s go.”
I walked, gingerly, with Fatih out to his shop on the main road. We took a seat in the shop’s small, cramped office. I drank çay while Fatih returned some phone calls and Feridun, his assistant, looked over some papers.
Each time a customer poked his head into the office, I was introduced as an honored guest, and I told my story again. Yes, I was from America. Yes, I was walking across the country. Yes, I was walking alone.
Fatih had some business he needed to attend to elsewhere, so he left me with Feridun. I moved to a table outside in the yard. Feridun came over with a hammer and a paper bag filled with hazelnuts and spread the nuts out on the table before me to keep me busy while he attended to the customers. I sat at the table breaking open the hazelnuts with the hammer and drinking çay while Feridun picked up a hose to water down the dusty yard in between helping customers who came in for bags of cement or bricks for their construction projects.
After a couple hours in the yard, Feridun’s assistant Emin arrived and jumped into the passenger seat of a fully-loaded coal delivery truck. Feridun hopped into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and drove the truck over to me.
“Hop in,” Feridun called out to me. “Where are we going?” I asked. “Out for some coal deliveries,” he replied. I jumped into the delivery truck, squishing Emin to the center, and the three of us took off up the highway into the hills and surrounding villages to make the deliveries.
While we were making the deliveries, Feridun had a huge smile on his face. He waved hello to every car, truck, and tractor we passed, slowing down to hang out the window and chat with the drivers, one hand still on the steering wheel. Most people would see it as an afternoon delivering coal, but to Feridun it was apparently an opportunity to work for the crowds.
We stopped to make a quick delivery at a corner market. I hopped out of the cab to buy a bottle of water. Feridun took the opportunity to make small talk with some of the other shop patrons and seemed to relish the opportunity to explain to them who the foreigner was.
Next, we stopped at a house where four elderly people sat in the shade sorting figs. For some reason, one of the water mains was open and fresh, cool water was gushing out, flooding the street, the entrance to the yard, and part of the yard itself. Feridun was embarrassed. He wanted me as his guest to have as little interruption as possible. But I was happy to see all this abundance of clear, clean water. I took my shoes off and sloshed around through the mud and let the cool, clean water that was rushing over the cement ice and bathe my feet, one of which was still hurting kind of bad. I took a photo of my feet in the water.
At a later stop, a woman was removing the pits from green olives and then stuffing the olives with red pimentos. While Feridun and Emin unloaded dozens of bags of coal, I climbed down from the truck’s cab to watch the woman do her work. She used scissors to cut pieces of a big pimento into little pieces. Then she would take one green olive out of one bucket, stuff a pimento piece into it, and put it into another bucket. All my life I had eaten stuffed olives, but it had never occurred to me to think about how they had been stuffed.
As much fun as the deliveries was, I am a homebody at heart, and I wanted to get back to the familiarity of my tent and the public park that had become my home. So I was happy when the last delivery was made and we stopped at a tea garden next to the highway, for one final tea before driving back to Horsunlu.
Not surprisingly, Feridun seemed to know almost everyone in the tea garden. He made his rounds, pressing the flesh while Emin disappeared to another location and I took a seat at one of the tables. One of Feridun’s friends came to my table and pulled up a chair next to me.
“Hello, how are you?” he asked me in Turkish.
“Fine, thank you, and you?”
“Good, thank you. You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.
“That is correct, I am not from around here,” I replied, “I am from California.”
“Is that in the United States?”
“Yes, it is. Have you been there?”
“No,” he replied. He peered into my eyes, searching for something. I wondered what.
“Is it true that Obama is interfering in Syria?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, Obama is interfering in Syria,” he stated.
“That’s good to know.”
A political conversation was about to start, and I didn’t want to have any part in it, as my language skills weren’t good enough to handle the nuances it would take.
He asked again: “Is it true that Obama is interfering in Syria?”
“I don’t know, I’ll ask him next time we have lunch.”
He asked again: “Is it true that Obama is interfering in Syria?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, “It is absolutely true that you said he is.” A phrase like this was at the limits of my Turkish, so I waited to see how badly I had messed it up. The man looked at me, confused.
He asked again: “Is it true that Obama is interfering in Syria?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, again, “It is absolutely true that you said he is.”
He paused, peered closer into my eyes, smiled, wagged his finger at me, and said, “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m not.”
He nodded. “Then let’s drink some tea.” He raised his glass to mine, smiled again, and said cheers. We drank our tea and made tense small talk about the weather and the fig harvest. I commented on how beautiful the valley was, and how friendly the people had been.
Feridun, who had been walking around saying hello to everyone and shaking hands, came back over to our table. He tapped me on the shoulder. “It’s time to go. Let’s go back to the truck,” he said.
I was relieved to have an excuse to duck away from my questioner. I followed Feridun back to the truck. Emin re-appeared, as if by magic, from wherever he had disappeared to. The three of us hopped into the cab. Feridun fired up the engine, and we pulled back out onto the main road and headed back to Horsunlu.
Scrunched into the cab with the two of them, looking out the window at the farms we passed, I wondered if Feridun’s friend back at the tea garden had signaled to Feridun that he hadn’t been pleased with me, but apparently, all was okay. Feridun was as good-natured as he had been all day.
About 10 minutes later we arrived back at the cement yard in Horsunlu. It was getting late, and I wanted to get back to my tent in the park, so I thanked Feridun and Emin for a great day and took my leave. My right foot was still hurting a bit, so I limped the 5 or so blocks back to the park.
I had enjoyed my day with Feridun and Emin. While I limped back to the park, I congratulated myself on my day delivering coal in rural Turkey and how unusual I would probably seem to the people back home.
I’m one of the few, I am uniquely adventurous, I am one of a kind.
But then I thought of the self-satisfaction I had felt the week before, at breakfast on the second day of the walk, and how quickly my self-congratulatory bubble had been burst when the two Polish guys walked up to my table.
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, I cautioned myself, you never know what’s about to happen.
I got back to my tent before the post-dinner crowd came out to the park for their evening socializing. It had been a long day, so I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep without eating dinner. It had been an unplanned day, but a good one, and my foot was still hurting a bit, but I was itching to get back out on the road. I needed my beauty sleep.
Friday, 14 September
Friday morning I rose before dawn and knocked down my tent. I wrote a note to Hüseyin’s family, posted it under their door, and walked out to the main road to catch the minibus back to Sarayköy to continue my walk into Denizli. My spirit had been restored, and though my foot still hurt, it had healed enough to carry my pack if I walked carefully.
—
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.
