When I arrived at the docks Joy Anna was already there, playing fetch with a mangy stray dog while she waited to join me for the first day.
Joy Anna was a 30-year-old American woman from Florida who had moved to Ankara and worked for Turkayfe, a group that promoted Turkey online. They had called me when I was in Istanbul to let me know they would like to help sponsor me for the walk. They also wanted one of their people to join me for the first day. Joy Anna was that person.
We greeted each other. Then, while Joy Anna continued playing with the dog, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small scrap of yellow paper on which I had scrawled my pre-walk checklist of things I had to do before the walk. I had made this checklist months before, knowing that I would be too nervous at the start of the walk to remember what I needed to do.
The checklist said:
- Take whiteboard and marker out of pack and write “This day’s walk is dedicated to the employees at the Starbucks in Reedley.” Put on Fowler Nursery’s mesh cowboy hat with the leather hatband, and take a selfie.
- Erase the Starbucks message.
- Write on the whiteboard “This walk is dedicated to Pryor Gibson” and take selfie.
When those tasks were finished, I stuffed the whiteboard and marker back into my pack, and crumpled up the note and stuffed it into my pocket. I relaxed a bit and made some more small talk with Joy Anna. Two nearby taxi drivers stood around watching us idly, probably bored by their early morning wait for fares. I smirked to myself, noting that I was about to embark on the biggest journey of my life, and my send-off party consisted of a stray dog, two bored taxi drivers, a bunch of cruise ship passengers sleeping on the ships a few meters away, and Joy Anna.
Joy Anna asked one of the taxi drivers to take our photo. “I’m sure these drivers have no idea who they are taking a picture of right now,” Joy Anna commented under her breath. I thought, Well yes, that’s probably true.
In order to get to this point, I’d already convinced myself that no one else really cared or needed to care who I was or what I was doing, because nobody else was going to do the walking for me. I had to be motivated to do the walk by myself. Being known could not be one of the motivations for it.
I handed the camera to one of the taxi drivers. Joy Anna and I stood next to the dog, cruise ships behind us, and tried not to squint into the sun while the driver took a few photos.
A local newspaper had asked if they could be there to start the walk with me. But they hadn’t arrived yet. “It’s 8 o’clock,” Joy Anna said. “Should we get started without them?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Let’s do it.”
So Joy Anna and I started walking through Kuşadası, negotiating the traffic, the potholes, and the hills. The dog and the two taxi drivers stayed behind at the docks.
Once outside Kuşadası, we began climbing some especially steep hills. This was my first experience climbing hills with my huge backpack, and I immediately began to realize that I wouldn’t be able to move quickly to dodge traffic, so I would probably need to stay off the road, on the left shoulder where I could see oncoming traffic approach.
As we were climbing one of the grades, two young men rode up on a motorcycle and stopped. They were the journalists who were going to cover us for the local Kuşadası newspaper. They found us walking past a private rest stop with a restaurant that had shade and a place to sit and drink tea. I asked them if they’d like to interview me sitting in the shade at the rest stop, but they said they preferred to do it by the side of the road for authenticity.
They spoke only Turkish and asked us if we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We told them no. They asked me why I was doing the walk. I had thought about it plenty of times before, but I had never been able to explain it to myself, never mind others, so I hesitated for a moment while I searched for the words. One of the journalists filled the momentary silence with “You must be walking for peace,” and I said “Yes, that’s it” and let it go at that.
After the journalists rode off, Joy Anna and I were thirsty, so we sat in the garden at the restaurant for a while and shared a bottle of water. Then we started walking again. We walked through a number of small villages of about 1,000 to 2,000 people.
I was sweating like a pig by that time and had soaked through my black T-shirt, but Joy Anna decided that it was time to take a picture, so I posed next to one of the village entrance signs hunched underneath my heavy pack, while Joy Anna took a photo.
As we walked through the village we saw a bus full of high school students. The bus was parked at the side of the road and the driver had run into a nearby market. I left Joy Anna at the side of the road and walked up to the bus. As soon as the students inside saw me, they got excited and stuck their hands through the windows. I shook some and gave high fives to others. With the students worked up now, I turned towards the side of the road with a big grin and walked back to Joy Anna.
“Do you know them?” Joy Anna asked me, puzzled. “No, of course not,” I said. “Then why did you do that?” she asked again. “I don’t know, that’s just what I do. I don’t think about it.”
Joy Anna and I walked together until at 13.00 we came to Havutçulu, a small village of about 700 or 800 people and my destination for the day. Now I would have to find a place to spend the night.
Earlier in the day Joy Anna had taken some of the fear out of that task by telling me that it was perfectly fine for strangers to use the mosques to wash up and to rest. In fact, it was expected and welcomed.
I’d once been told a story about Abraham that is popular in Turkey, and Joy Anna reminded me of the story.
A stranger comes and pokes his head in Abraham’s tent door and says, “I’m a stranger out walking from point A to point B. Would it be alright if I come in and have some tea with you and your family?” Abraham invites him in and they are sitting around the stove eating their dinner and drinking their tea when this guy says something bad about God. Abraham is famous for being a big devotee of God and he gets really angry and says, “No one can come into my house and badmouth God and be welcome here. You must go now.” Abraham throws the guest out and the guest walks off into the darkness. Then God appears to Abraham and says, “You know, I’ve been working on that guy for all of his life and he badmouths me and still I’m patient with him, so who do you think you are to decide this for yourself and kick this guy out? It’s your job to welcome him also.”
Turks grow up on this story. They refer to any stranger or unknown person as a “guest of God.” I was happy that Joy Anna had reminded me of this.
Before I set up my tent in the garden, I left my backpack at the side of the mosque and walked Joy Anna out to the main road where I waited with her for a dolmuş (mini-bus) to take her back to Kuşadası. After a few minutes one stopped and I said goodbye to her as she boarded.
Then I walked back alone to the mosque to set up my tent.
—
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.
