My Answer to the $64,000 Question: "Are You Safe?"
“If you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don’t take short hikes alone, either – or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom you will probably live to be a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time.”
As a child, whenever we crossed a state line on a road trip, my mother – from her position as bandleader in the front passenger seat – led my sisters and me in a rousing rendition of her self-composed border-crossing ditty. No words. Just two refrains of harmonic vocal trumpeting belted out at the top of our collective lungs in celebration of our arrival on the shore of some novel land. New Jersey, for instance. Delaware. We intrepid explorers sang our anthem going into each new state. We sang going out. And I sing it still, to myself nowadays, at every border crossing, the child in me walking hand-in-hand into each new adventure alongside the adult I’ve become.
From the furthermost edge of the riverbank in Praia do Camarido, Portugal, staring at Spain across the expanse of the Minho River dividing one country from the other, I had already begun humming when a man accosted me. He appeared out of nowhere on the otherwise empty street and stepped right in front of me, blocking my way. Eyeing my backpack, recognizing me as a pilgrim on the Camino’s coastal route, he said, “You need to go that way,” pointing left at the beach.
I did not need to go that way. The mapping app that I’d downloaded before starting the Camino (and had updated the night before, when I had WiFi, to make sure the details were as up-to-date as possible) told me to turn right and walk three kilometers to the town of Caminha where a ferry would shuttle me across the river into Spain. Cross-checking the Bible of guidebooks, reprinted this year, it too said the ferry was three klicks further northeast. I tried to step around the man, but he stepped with me, refusing to let me pass.
“You need to go that way to cross the river,” the man said, raising his arm and pointing left.
“No, I’m going that way to catch the ferry,” I said, raising my arm and pointing right.
No, go this way, he said, swinging his arm more emphatically left. No, I’m going that way, I said, swinging my arm more emphatically right. This way, he pointed. That way, I insisted. From a distance, had there been an observer, we’d have looked like an Ernie and Burt Muppet skit, our arms crisscrossing each other in the air, deadlocked in our discordant gesturing. But we were alone on a deserted street and it wasn’t funny to me. I tried to step around him again and this time he grabbed my arm and held me back. “My friend is waiting on the beach to take you across the river in his boat,” he said, and I heard, “My friend is waiting on the beach to bury your body in a shallow grave.”
Fear is a beast with whom I have long wrestled.
Over a decade ago, I was diagnosed with chronic PTSD stemming from two separate attacks: one in the autumn of 1993, one in the spring of 2001 [i].
In both cases, I escaped relatively unharmed physically and did my best to pretend for a long, long while that this meant I escaped unharmed entirely. We humans camouflage so competently: we carry so many burdens so quietly, so privately, so far. We can be such masters of disguise. The stretch-hard-to-see-it silver lining to subsequent legal battles with the man involved in the second incident is that eventually there could be no more hiding the impact on myself from myself: years of insomnia, emotional lability, paralyzing hypervigilance, and rather more needless night terror than a soul can stand. In the autumn of 2016 I phoned the regional VA hospital – for the VA employs all the best PTSD practitioners – and begged the lead psychologist to take me on as a private client, for though I am no soldier I recognized how much I resembled a stricken one. Bless her for making an exception to see me, for saying yes when a stranger asked for help. Oh, friends … my un-haunting has been such hard and relentless work. It’s work I’ve tended to, in stages, for years, because sadly, once preyed upon, it is vexingly easy to unwittingly write oneself into all future stories as prey. It’s work I circled back to most recently when I realized I wasn’t going to be moving through the world partnered anymore but on my own; when I realized I would be alone, at night, every night, in the dark, in unfamiliar places, and I would need to rely on myself, exclusively, to navigate such circumstances healthfully.
Our culture doesn’t make this simple. Like most American women, I was raised on apple pie and stranger-danger, trained to calculate compound interest and drive my knee into groins, and I committed to youthful memory both the Pledge of Alliance and the CDC’s 1-in-5 statistic about my lifetime odds of being raped. From the moment I was tall enough to peer over the conveyor belt at the grocery store check-out lane I’ve feasted on a steady diet of Chiclets and ChapStick and chaos, for the dollar is king and capitalism favors glossy magazine headlines celebrating scandal, gore, and violence against women. In the U.S., the country I have long called home, there were more mass shootings than days in 2023. And the year before that. And the year before that. And so on, ad nauseum.
Feminist icon Margaret Atwood is famous for her portentous novel The Handmaid’s Tale and for saying, “Men are scared that women will laugh at them. Women are scared that men will kill them.” Social critic Camille Paglia believes we women are wise to walk through the world shouldering such fear. “Feminism keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere,” Paglia writes. “No, they can’t. Women will always be in sexual danger.” To illustrate her point, she relates the story of one of her male students who slept in a passageway of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. “I will never experience that. I am a woman. I am not stupid enough to believe I could ever be safe there. There is a world of solitary adventure I will never have. Women have always known these somber truths.”
So it’s not for nothing that when a strange man grabbed ahold of me on a vacant street in Portugal and said, “My friend is waiting on the beach to take you across the river in his boat,” I heard, “My friend is waiting on the beach to bury your body in a shallow grave.” Old habits die hard. But even so, for the first time in a long, long time, held in the grip of a man determined to bend me to his will, I wasn’t frightened. I was wary; I was alert; but I didn’t revert to a pattern of panic. I simply realized I was in a bit of pickle. This, my friends, is progress. Progress apparent not only in my relative calm in this one situation, but by a sense of safety in all the others: throughout all the months I traversed the Iberian peninsula and surrounding countries, I was conspicuously free of the fear that for so many years had been a too-consistent companion. I’d shed my fear like an outgrown coat, and I refused to don her again, even when the man grabbed me.
I kept my head and got away by playing compliant. When I agreed to follow the road left toward the beach as he wanted me to do he let go of me, and I walked in the direction he pointed, waving goodbye and shouting insincere thanks to him over my shoulder the whole way. But the minute he averted his eyes I darted down a side street, intending to run a big circle around him and get back on track. Instead, I ran directly into four American women exiting a hotel and told them what had just happened, taking the advice of storied world traveler Thalia Zepatos who suggests that at the first sign of trouble female travelers should seek out nearby women. They, too, have spent a lifetime being harassed by men, Thalia says, and their empathy will incline them to help you. The four American women had approached the town via a different route and had actually passed the local man’s boat but refused to get in, seeking refuge instead in the local pharmacy where the pharmacist elaborated on the schtick the man in the street was selling: told them they had to accept the ride in the local fellow’s boat because the ferry was shut down.
“Did you believe him?” I asked.
“Of course not,” the American women said. “We assumed he was in cahoots with the guy on the road and the man in the boat so we went to the hotel next and asked the manager at the front desk. And he said they’re all right: the ferry’s shut down.”
“And did you believe him?” I asked.
“Of course not,” they said. “We asked to borrow the phone and called the ferry company.”
“And …”
“And the ferry’s shut down. Too much silt has accumulated on the river bed. The ferry stopped operating three years ago.”
We powwowed. Cursed the guidebooks and apps and word-of-mouth, all of which failed to alert us to a shutdown of three-years’ duration; cursed the warped method-of-persuasion that involved grabbing strange women on a street and trying to drag them toward the help they didn’t know they needed [ii]; cursed the fact that we have been so well trained by the American male to mistrust men’s motives that even in the face of common sense (the whole town and the secretary answering phones at the ferry office could not possibly all be colluding in an impromptu scheme to murder us that afternoon) we still had a hard time reimagining the local boat as something other than a watery grave.
Long story (not short but) shorter, we walked to the boat. Where sat three Scandinavian women who had trusted the local men intrinsically and boarded immediately when told of the shortcut [iii]. Everyone had been waiting, passage postponed, while the friend of the motorboat skipper set off in search of the five American women who had disappeared into the town against all advice. The local men didn’t want us to be left behind. They wanted to make sure we got across the river safely.
I want to model my future self on those Scandinavian women: discerning, perceptive, possessed of an open heart and mind that sees clearly, not through a dark and hazy scrim of fear. I want to be wisely wary (no overnighting alone in a passageway in the Great Pyramid in Egypt for me) while actively choosing to let go of a lifelong acculturated belief in my own insecurity. I want to give faith a fighting chance; I want to assess risk not merely by counting potential calamities but by weighing the positive possibilities as well. I realize that nothing will guarantee my safety, but I also know that nothing will guarantee my unhappiness faster than chasing safety as if it were my life’s only goal. I think this is how I might heed my history without allowing it to dictate my future. I believe this is how I might write new stories of me, and of the world – as I long to do – in which men who grab my arm may be ungraceful and inept but may not be monsters; in which men might ferry me across otherwise impassable waters out of kindness, not nefariousness.
On the shore of Spain I leapt from the boat, unharmed and undaunted, and splashed my way through the shallows to the beach where I parted ways with the other Americans who followed the road back to the mapped route. Instead, I heeded the advice of the boatman who said there was an alternate way and that it was beautiful. In the company of the Scandinavian women I strolled down the beach per his direction until it turned into a boardwalk that meandered toward town with the ocean on one side and a forest on the other. I will admit, I edged toward mistrusting the skipper, again, for someone had painted white slash marks on the tree trunks that seemed a blight and I wondered: Where is the beauty here? But then I turned a corner and shifted my gaze and suddenly the haphazard graffiti on all those trees aligned in miraculous pattern to become Celtic symbols dancing across the wood. All it took was a perspective shift for what had seemed to be a wounding to reveal itself as a blessing.
I came to see the beauty the boatman promised, and so much more. In the days to come I rode the midnight bus into Barcelona and let the drag queens escort me home. I arose in the dark and set to walking a high mountain pass beside a stranger with a flashlight who offered to light my way. I lingered on a Cathedral stair until the lights came on for the castellers who delighted me with their human towers and I joined in gleefully when they invited me to practice with them. I said yes when the artist dancing in the street with the buskers took me by the hand and said come with me and secreted me away to the roof of an abandoned building where Henri Matisse stood to paint Les toits de Collioure and I saw with the artist’s eye the beauty of all that unfolded before me. I said yes, and yes, and yes a dozen times more where once I might have said no.
Sometimes valor is a mighty and obvious act of courage, and sometimes it is a quiet decision made on a foreign shore to unchain oneself from an old vision and to see the world with fresh eyes.
I was judicious. I was safe. I was free.
[i] If you follow the link referencing the incident in spring 2001, you’ll land in a story about domestic violence. It bears stating very clearly: this was at the hands of my first spouse, not my second. My second, the farmboy, would never. In fact, the farmboy spent years standing squarely between my first spouse and me in a relentless act of gallantry the likes of which I have rarely witnessed and can never repay. The farmboy is one of the good ones.
[ii] For those in the cheap seats, for whom this may not be obvious, allow me to state clearly: Guys, there are better ways to communicate than by grabbing ahold of a woman and manhandling her into doing what you want. Physically overpowering someone in an effort to get them to listen is not helpful. It is not effective. It is paternalistic, patriarchal, and predatory.
[iii] All over Europe the European women (and particularly the northern European/Scandinavian women), appeared, by and large, much less fearful for their safety than American woman. There’s a lot to unpack regarding this (anecdotal) observation, and I’ll save that for another day, but I will note here that having spent time chatting about this with dozens upon dozens of women of various nationalities the observation largely held true across the board. In my experience, the people most crippled by fear for their personal security are American women inside the USA (who, in an interesting act of projection, often imagine they’ll be so unsafe outside their home country that they’re scared to leave). Conversely, those American women I met and spoke with abroad also universally agreed that they felt safer every moment after leaving the United States. The reason they cited was always the same: guns. Or, better stated, the lack thereof in Europe. Every single woman I spoke with – which, admittedly, is a relatively small sample size reflective of the particular women I’m inclined to spend time with – referenced the liberating moment when she realized (often when she stepped off the plane into a European airport) that she didn’t need to quickly identify a place to hide, or the closest exit, because the laypeople around her weren’t carrying guns and therefore weren’t apt to be potential shooters. Woman after woman mentioned a weight lifting, or a sense of being able to breathe deeply after years spent holding her breath without realizing it. Local European women, overhearing these conversations, were stunned to hear American women reference their habit of identifying escape routes from groceries and movie theatres and malls; Europeans were flabbergasted to hear that our children practice active shooter drills at school and, worse, go into all-too-real lockdown mode due to gunmen on campus. (Both my children experienced such lockdowns at two different schools in the Portland, Oregon, area during their adolescence; the majority of the American travelers with whom I conversed about this had children who had experienced the same.) It’s not that there’s no gun violence in Europe, it’s just that there’s so much less.
Artwork on the trees at the Piñeiral do Muíño Arboretum in Spain.