Homeward Bound

Tomorrow, we fly back to San Francisco. A place we haven’t been since September of 2024. It’s been a lucky and sad and strange and wonderful and terrible time to be away from home. We’ve seen the changing of the seasons, been in beautiful places uncrowded with tourists. Crops harvested and planted. Trees losing leaves and flowers blooming. Birds leaving and returning.

Some of these befores and afters were not so pleasant or bucolic. Before the election, when I told people I was from America, they responded with a sort of bemused bewilderment. “They won’t do it again, will they?” they asked hopefully. Looking for some sort of reassurance that Americans were not so dangerous as to elect the megalomaniacal criminal again. After the election, more bewilderment, but this time mixed with pity and fear. When I told an Italian woman on the Camino that I was from the US, she said “mama mia” under her breath - I half expected her to cross herself.

My election day walk in Wales

Andy and I have joked that while my fellowship was to study walking, what I’ve really been studying is dictatorships. Visiting the recently exhumed graves of people murdered by Francoists. Reading about the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Traveling to Leipzig to visit the church that helped birth the movement that toppled the Berlin Wall. It could be argued that the theft of the commons during the enclosure movement in the UK was its own kind of authoritarianism.

It’s not hard to understand why I was drawn to this subject. While I deliberately tried not to follow what was going on back home too closely (knowing all the details while being so far from the US and not being able to do anything was a recipe for spiraling into madness), I knew the gist.

What interested me was not so much the authoritarian regimes themselves, but how they fell. How people did the boring and brave and tedious and necessary work of organizing, sometimes for decades. Those organizers were building the groundwork so that when something happened - the death of a dictator, an economic crisis - and suddenly people realized that the authoritarian regime was so much more fragile than it appeared, the people were able to take the future into their own hands. These examples from history gave me something to cling on to, a hope that I’m taking back home.

There’s a lot I’m taking back. The experiences with many kind people I’ve met from all over the world. A deeper appreciation for nature. A newfound ability to slow down a bit.

I started out on this trip as a burned-out organizer with grief and trauma from the past few years weighing me down and clouding my mind. I thought I could “work through it” and “process” it all, but I’m not sure you really can. Not fully. But I’ve expanded my life around my grief; perhaps that’s the best you can hope for.

I’d like to end this little ramble with two thanks. First, to Andy. I’ve spent almost every waking hour with him for seven months straight and somehow love him more?!?! I’m glad you came on this adventure with me. Second, to you, dear readers. Thank you for your support and encouragement (including the financial support; feels bananas to get paid for this). I’d write this even if nobody read it, but you’ve all made this experience so much richer. I’ve had so much fun writing that I’m going to continue to write about my walks back in the States, so stay tuned. But for now, sending you all my thanks and love.

O