Tuesday, 18 September
Tuesday morning I awoke with a start to my cell phone alarm. I panicked. Oh my god, I am still at this gas station! I should be making better progress. I am letting myself down and everyone back home, too. I came here to walk across the country, not to dine with pretty girls!
Okay, okay, I quieted myself, just wait a minute, all is not lost. I walked yesterday, and all I need to do to continue making forward progress is stand up, stuff my things into my backpack, and catch the bus back to where I left off yesterday. Everything’s fine.
I stood up and packed my bag and walked out to the shoulder to catch the bus. While I sat by the side of the road waiting for the bus I pulled a note from my pocket. I’d awakened in the middle of the night thinking of Ayşe and had written a note to her in English. I began translating it into Turkish so I could text it to her later. When the bus pulled up, I stuffed the partially-translated note into my pocket and boarded.
I rode the bus the 18 kilometers back to Kocabaş and stepped off where I’d taken the selfie under the giant Turkish flag. From there I resumed my walk.
About one kilometer ahead of me loomed an unusually large pedestrian overpass crossing the lightly-used highway. The only reason for its existence, it seemed, was for villagers from Kocabaş to cross the unused highway to their jobs at the local prison on the other side. I set my sights on that overpass.
Get past that overpass, I told myself, and you’ll be out of the Denizli orbit and on to the next town.
I knew I had to break the spell of Denizli, and I hoped forward momentum would do it. My goal for the day was Bozkurt, a small town of about 12,000 people 27 kilometers east of Kocabaş, the first town I would reach when I finished the climb onto the Central Anatolia plateau. In my mind, getting onto the plateau would mark the end of the walk’s first stage in the Menderes River valley. It would mean I had finished the beginning.
The day’s climb followed a steep section of the highway through a sparsely-populated area. Sometimes I found myself walking past flat, wide expanses of tall, dry grasses and then suddenly I’d find myself in a section of rolling hills with groupings of oak trees and scrubby-looking shrubs. Like me, the land couldn’t seem to make up its mind what it needed to be. When I would see the oak trees and shrubbery reminiscent of the walk into Denizli, I would feel the pull of Denizli tempting me backward. When I would see the tall, dry grasses hinting at the plateau to come, I would feel a push forward.
I began to get hungry but paused just before a lunch of köfte ve pilav (meatballs and rice) to pull the note from my pocket and type my text to Ayşe.
After lunch, Ayşe called me back. I stopped walking to take the call. My phone Turkish is even more basic than my face-to-face Turkish, so the conversation was neither deep nor long. She had received my text message and was also apparently reeling from dinner the night before.
After our brief conversation, I resumed walking and reflected on the past few days — Ayşe, Metin, and the others I had met in Denizli that weekend. I thought about the wedding. I chuckled about drinking in the hills with the guys after the wedding.
I wanted to hop a bus back to Denizli and settle down and spend the rest of my life there.
What craziness was that? Ayşe didn’t speak English and I spoke Tarzan Turkish. We had different lives and I was old enough to be her father. I needed to break the spell of Denizli if I were going to do the job I’d set out to do.
My back muscles were aching from the climb, so I stopped and sat by the side of the road to rest for a while and to process the flood of images that had taken over my mind.
After a time, I was finally able to stand up and finish the climb to the top of the plateau. The transition onto the plateau was quick and dramatic, like climbing up a long flight of stairs and stepping out onto a landing. In less than 100 meters I went from the climb, marked by scattered oak trees and short bridges over dry stream beds, into Bozkurt, a village perched on the edge of the plateau with grassy expanses as flat as boards. There were mountains off in the hazy distance, but the road directly in front of me was flat and straight now.
Hello plateau, nice to meet you. I’ll be with you for a while now.
I stopped at the first truck stop in Bozkurt where I thought I might sleep. My head was still whirling with images. The truck stop was busy. It had multiple restaurants. There was plenty of grass but there were too many people and it was too close to the road. I needed quiet. As tired as I was, I walked further into Bozkurt.
I found a gas station, but the grounds were completely paved over and there was no place to pitch a tent. I called out to one of the attendants anyway, “I’m walking through. Is there a place I can camp in Bozkurt? I have everything. I have my tent. I have my sleeping bag. Can I camp here for the night?”
He said, “No. There is probably no comfortable place here for you. You should probably move on.”
Another half kilometer and on my third try, I found a gas station with a covered area and tall grass away from traffic. It had a restaurant. It had bathrooms. There were few people. It was perfect. I paused in front of the office, unprepared for the effort I knew it would take to converse in Turkish with the people inside.
The rational me said: I’m going to need you to be mentally present for this conversation.
The irrational me replied: No, I don’t want to be present. I want to stay in my dream world. I like the people back in Denizli, and I don’t want to leave them.
Rational me: Sorry, but you’re here now with these people and you’re going to have to leave the others in Denizli in order to have this conversation.
It was getting dark, and I knew the rational me would have to win the tug of war really fast if I were going to find a place to sleep that night. I shut down the voice whining to go back to Denizli and walked into the gas station office.
During the mercifully brief conversation with the station owner, I got clearance to set up camp and have dinner at the restaurant.
After dinner, as I nestled into my sleeping bag, I took a deep breath of the cool night air. At the higher altitude of the plateau, the air was crisper and fresher than it had been in Denizli, and I was camping on green grass under the stars, not laid out on the floor in the office of a gasoline station breathing someone’s second-hand cigarette smoke.
Before I went to sleep I calculated how far I had come. I had walked 242 kilometers or 11.5% of the distance. I noticed that at some point earlier I had written in my notebook that if you can finish 10% of anything, and are determined to do whatever it takes to finish the project, you are highly likely to make it to the end. I asked myself if I was determined to do whatever it takes to finish the project. The answer was yes. I relaxed and snuggled further into my sleeping bag. Everything was going to be okay.
—
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.
