One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” I said as we pulled up to the lodge. It looked out at the valley, with hawks turning in a blue sky over green forests and gorges running away in long knuckles and crooked elbows to the distant, silver Mediterranean.

  “Why isn’t anyone else here?” she asked.

  She had a point. The lodge was old and made of yellow pine and it might be busy in the winter when the snow reaches down the mountainside, but in frostless summer it felt like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There was no one to greet us. Rabbits nibbled at weeds growing through the tennis court. There was an empty indoor swimming pool. I wandered through the dusty slatted shade of the lobby and found a bar neatly stocked with empty bottles. The corridors were endless, carpeted and dark, and all the doors to the rooms were unlocked. It reminded me of a bad dream I couldn’t quite remember.

  There was one manager who didn’t speak English and a cook who also didn’t speak English and the manager’s wife who didn’t speak English either. We were the only guests. It turned out that the cook wasn’t actually a cook, he was someone’s nephew. That night we sat in the kitchen while the manager cooked shish kebab over a coal fire and the nephew poured us warm Efes lager.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my partner.

  “I love this place,” she said.

  After dark a couple of shepherds came in, smelling not unpleasantly of sweat and hillside and sheep, and sat on the floor and watched the news on a small television mounted on the wall. The news was in Turkish so I wasn’t following it, but when the shepherds started laughing and cheering I looked up and saw the story was about some new financial crisis in Greece.

  The shepherds stayed up drinking raki while we went to bed. The manager gave us candles because the electricity goes off at ten. Late that night I woke to the sounds of drunken shepherds roaming the corridors, looking for an available room to doss down.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said to my partner, and she started laughing.

  The next morning she looked nervously at the mountains all around.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t maybe get a lift to the next place, and start from there?” she said.

  “You can, if you like,” I said. “I’ll walk and meet you there.”

  “I can’t let you walk on your own,” she said.

  “Of course you can. Look. I brought a compass.”

  “Do you know how to work a compass?”

  “Anyone can work a compass.”

  *

  The first day’s walk was short: four hours down an easy path with occasional climbs to an old Roman bridge over the Kemer River and a nearby inn. I decided we should leave most of our gear in our suitcases. I had a map and compass and there were red-and-white way markers painted on tree trunks and pale boulders. We couldn’t possibly get lost.

  Around the third hour I realised we were lost.

  I hadn’t seen a boulder or a tree trunk with a way marker for twenty minutes. I backtracked with an air of doing all this on purpose, and picked up the trail again, but it started climbing and became harder.

  We entered a forest.

  “Is this the right way?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Definitely.”

  I have never been one of those guys who refuses to ask directions when he’s lost. I would happily have asked directions from anyone. But there wasn’t anyone.

  I had a cellphone with me and a number for the company that had provided the route maps and the transport for our bags. What I didn’t have in the mountains was any cellphone reception. I carried the phone in my hand as we walked, surreptitiously checking it from time to time for a sweet spot.

  We stopped to rest in the shade of a pair of large, smooth boulders. The air was sweet with pine resin. I had an orange in my backpack and we ate it thoughtfully while I casually studied the map. I don’t know if you have ever looked at a map of the countryside, where there aren’t any streets or landmarks. It’s basically a blank piece of paper.

  It was hot and we were thirsty, but I thought maybe we should start conserving our water. But water wasn’t on her mind.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “If you don’t feel like doing the swim, I don’t think you should.”

  “What?!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What makes you think I don’t want to do the swim? I’ve been training. It’s why we’re here.”

  “Well,” she said, “does it really matter why we’re here? Being here’s enough, isn’t it? Anyway, if you don’t think you’re ready, what do you have to prove?”

  “It’s a quest. We decided it together, remember?”

  “Of course I remember, and the point of a quest is to do something while you work something out. You’ve done something. I don’t know if you’ve worked it out yet, but if you haven’t, swimming across a river isn’t going to do it for you.”

  “It’s not a river. It’s the sea.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you get to the end. If you want to swim, then swim, but if you don’t, then don’t. Here’s what I think you should do – I think we should finish our walk, then we should have a couple of days drinking beer by the sea. Then we should go home and you should resign from your job and you should take the time to make things right with Clarence and tell him you want to be his best man, and then you should spend the next five years or ten years trying to write those things you want to write.”

  “What if I can’t write them?”

  “Then you can’t. Then you can find something else to do. Meanwhile, I’ll help you pay the rent, and if I go broke or we break up or you’re starving to death, then you can start manufacturing crystal meth or something and make some money. It’ll be an adventure.”

  I sat staring at her with my mouth open. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a person like this before.

  “Well,” she said, getting to her feet, “we can talk about it later. Which way do we go from here?”

  I stood too. My fingers were sticky from the orange and I was having difficulty folding the map. I squinted at the sun, and looked around. I took out my compass.

  “Are we lost?” she asked.

  “No, definitely not,” I said. “That way’s north.”

  “Should we be going north?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “How does knowing which way’s north help us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But we’re not lost?”

  “Certainly not.”

  A little way further there was a ledgey outcrop and on the edge of it I found one bar of signal.

  There was no answer.

  “Are you calling the company?” she asked.

  “Yup. Just letting them know we’re running a bit late.”

  I called again and someone answered. I told her in a low voice that I didn’t know where I was.

  “Are you going toward the sea?”

  “I don’t know. Sort of.”

  “You should keep going toward the sea.”

  “I can see the sea in two different directions.”

  “Hmmm.”

  I explained that I went over a ridge and then another one, and now I seem to be going down.

  “There are lots of canyons around there,” said the woman.

  “Yes.”

  “Just so long as it’s not Göynük Canyon,” she said. “Don’t go into Göynük Canyon.”

  “How do I know if it’s Göynük Canyon?” I demanded. “What’s Göynük Canyon?!”

  And that’s when the reception cut out.

  I looked at my partner, and she smiled at me.

  “We’re not lost,” I said.

  “Okay, Bove,” she said.

  An hour later, I couldn’t see the sea any more. Somewhere on the way she had stumbled and twisted her ankle slightly, and she was limping and leaning on a tree branch we’d broken down to use as a walking stick. The sun was touching the peaks of the mountains.

  “That way’s west,” I said
helpfully.

  The good thing was that I had a torch and warm clothing and something you could huddle under for shelter in the dark Turkish night. The bad thing was that I had left it all back in the suitcase.

  I started to feel afraid.

  “I think,” I said, “there’s the possibility that …” I folded my arms to keep my voice steady, “… we might be lost.”

  She smiled bravely. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’ll get us out.”

  You’ ll get us out.

  I thought about that.

  I thought about what I’d done.

  I’ve brought her out here on my damn fool quest. I’ve been obsessing about myself and my own life non-stop for six months. I’ve let friendships lapse and good sense suffer and I’ve sucked up all the oxygen from my relationship for myself. I’ve made her walk when she didn’t want to walk and I’ve lost us with no food and dwindling water in the Taurus Mountains and even here, even now, even after all this, she hasn’t uttered a word of anger or recrimination or expressed the slightest desire to be anywhere else.

  I feel unbearable shame. I can’t meet her eye.

  “I promised I’d look after you,” I said.

  “And you will,” she replied.

  “We may have to sleep out here.”

  “As long as we’re together,” she said, “it’ll be all right.”

  I stood and stared at her, lost in the darkling woods with the sweat beginning to cool on our skin, and I realised what I’d found.

  Not everyone gets lost, at least not with the frequency that I do, but everyone will have the moment in life when the sun is dropping on a cold, dark mountain and you don’t know the way home, and it’s only then you’ll discover the real character of the person walking beside you. I had discovered it, and it shone like the sun on the distant sea and took away my fear.

  And I realised I didn’t want to call her my partner any more. And I didn’t want to call her my girlfriend. She has a name, and it’s Keren.

  I didn’t have a ring but I wound a stalk of grass around her finger and went on one knee and I promised Keren I would always look after her, only a bit better in future, and I asked her if she would carry on looking after me since I seemed to need it more than she did, although I’d try to need it less, and I asked Keren if she would marry me.

  There was a silence while I considered the down-on-one-knee manoeuvre, and wondered if it looked dumb and sexist. There are definitely people on Twitter who would tell me it’s sexist.

  She looked down at me and wiped the sweat from her eyes, and I thought, Oo-er, have I misread this? This will make for a very awkward journey home.

  But then she said yes and we carried on walking, and about twenty minutes later she discovered she’d lost her ring, but it was okay, because there’s plenty more grass growing in the world.

  *

  We carried on walking, Keren and I, down the pebbly slope into the valley of the shadow of Göynük Canyon. You can’t turn back and there’s no point standing still. All you can do is keep going.

  The sun had dropped behind a ridge and it was becoming dark. You can’t keep walking down hillsides in the dark. But if we stopped, that would be the moment we’d have to accept we were sleeping there, out on the mountainside with no shelter.

  Then I saw a flash of light, a torch beam, on the slope below.

  “Hello!” I yelled. And then: “Help!”

  “Is that Darrel?” came a voice.

  Twice in one hour. Obviously I’m becoming better at asking for help.

  *

  There is a limit to the number of times a man can be rescued in his adult life. After that he must start rescuing himself.

  It’s the day of the swim now, and this is where we came in. I’m standing here in my Speedo, and the water is cold on my feet. It isn’t as cold as the snow-melt waters of April and May, but it’s still cold, and my legs are still skinny and naked.

  Keren knows I’m afraid. She knows it better than I do. At breakfast this morning she tried again. You’ve learnt all you’re going to learn from this, she said. Why do you need to do it?

  Because I said I’d do it. That’s what a man does.

  And she replied: Is that a man speaking now or a boy?

  And it’s true. It’s a boy’s idea of manhood. To a boy, a man goes to the bitter end because he always has something to prove. I don’t know if I’ve learnt anything through all this; I don’t know that anyone over the age of eighteen ever learns anything that they don’t on some level or other already know. But maybe remembering is as good as learning.

  I don’t want to swim. I haven’t trained enough and I’m afraid of it. I can summon the will to overcome the fear but I don’t want to any more; it no longer feels as important and I don’t feel incomplete. I’ve already made my crossing and I’ll be needing my will and my strength for bigger things. There’s nothing for me out there but water.

  “But I can’t just not swim. What about the book?”

  “A book’s not a good enough reason.”

  “If you went to see a movie about a guy trying to do something, and then at the end he doesn’t even try, you’d be pretty pissed off.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But there’s a difference between a movie and a book.”

  “If I don’t swim it now, I’ll never swim it.”

  “So what?” she said. “Anyway, don’t be so dramatic. There’s next year, or the year after. There’s ten years’ time. You have more time than you think.”

  Epilogue: The Sun Also Rises

  I didn’t swim.

  Maybe that’s cowardly and disappointing, and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so and I’m sorry to have brought you so far only to wimp out at the last minute, but what can I do? I’d already written most of this before I went to Turkey. Consider yourself lucky: at least you didn’t have to fly ten hours in economy class and get lost in the mountains with me.

  Hemingway would have swum it. James Bond, Bogart and Byron would have swum it, but I’m not any of them, and it’s time to be okay with that. There’s no way of spinning it: it’s a defeat, but one of the things you learn when you’re middle-aged is that sometimes the defeats are more useful than the wins. And sometimes, depending on how you think about it, there’s no difference between them at all.

  So I turned and walked back out of the water and Keren didn’t think any less of me. Strangely enough, nor did I.

  I’ve booked again to swim it next year. I’ll go with some friends and maybe Clarence and his wife will come too. It won’t be a quest and I won’t be doing it to answer any questions; it will just be something fun to do.

  I’ll have more time to train for next year, because after I came home I quit my job. Maybe that’s stupid but it feels okay so far. I’ll have less money next year, but of all the things you absolutely need, money’s the easiest to get more of.

  It will work out. Life will work out. You have to trust your stars. And even if it doesn’t work out, you have to live as though it will, because that’s the only way to get good things done. And even if we have no stars, and there are no stars to have, isn’t it pretty to think so?

  Acknowledgements

  Some very small amounts of the material in this book have appeared previously, in substantially different form, in Men’s Health and Getaway magazines – my thanks to Jason Brown and Justin Fox. The timing of some of the events of this book have been adjusted to provide a continuous narrative.

  One of the sentences in Chapter 5 starting “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation …” is a parody of the opening line from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl – I hope I don’t need to mention that, since the joke doesn’t work if it’s not recognised, but you can never be too careful. The final sentence of the book is an echo of the final line of Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. While writing this book I started reading Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, subtitled “Life is long if you know how to use it”. I didn’t finish it
, but it’s a good idea.

  My thanks to Stephen Haw at The Times for what he gave back to me and to Marlene Fryer and Robert Plummer for their faith and the lifeline, and to John Vlismas and Ami Kapilevitch for agreeing to read the manuscript, although in the end I never sent it. My heartfelt thanks to Gretchen van der Byl for her cover design. Please feel free to judge this book by its cover.

  Do you have any comments, suggestions or feedback about this book or any other Zebra Press titles?

  Contact us at [email protected]

  *

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  Also published by Zebra Press

  I Moved Your Cheese

  THE LAZY PERSON’S GUIDE TO HELPING YOURSELF

  The problem with the self-help books that litter the shelves of the bookstores and bedside tables of the nation, besides the fact that they are poorly written by unattractive authors, is that they expect you to do all the work. You are required to read them, remember key words, perhaps even put their teachings into practice in everyday life.

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