Two Roads Diverging in a Wood
“I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
Note: This essay addresses my recent divorce rather directly. Out of respect and continued love for my former husband, I shared and discussed this with him before posting it. While his point of view diverges in places from my own, as is to be expected, it is with his okay and with his support that I share it with you.
I walked beside a man for fewer than five minutes on a wooded stretch of the Camino in Spain and have, as yet, been unable to shake loose the memory of the interaction from my mind. I was in the company of a young girl from the Netherlands when, setting a brisk pace, we overtook the man on a road where the two main Camino routes out of Portugal merge. Exchanging pleasantries, we quickly identified he’d come up the popular Central route, which carries 75% of Portugal’s pilgrims along a direct north-south trajectory, whereas the girl and I had come up the lesser-traveled Coastal route which hews west along the Atlantic coast.
“Oh, that’s too bad for you,” the man said. “The villages on the Central route are so beautiful. But the Coastal route is nothing but tourist traps.”
There is a white-hot debate raging on the Camino – and on every online forum dedicated to the Camino – as to which route (among the seven+ main routes originating in and beyond France, Portugal, and the northern and eastern edges of Spain) is the best to walk. A year before I set out, pummeled by conflicting arguments about the merits and disadvantages of each pathway, I’d tied myself into such a tight knot over the question of which one to follow that I realized I was either going to paralyze myself with indecision and never walk or I was going to make a choice and marry myself to it, alternatives be damned. In the end, I felt inexplicably drawn to water and decided that was as good a desire to honor as any other and that’s how I wound up walking the Portuguese Coastal route. But in those first few days out of Porto, before the two Portuguese routes fully split (only to reconnect a few hundred kilometers later in Spain, where I met the man), there were people, so many people!, already walking yet still waffling over their choice: wanting to be sure to get it right, trying so hard to maximize their experience, making themselves sick with worry and regret in the process.
“On the Central route everybody’s so welcoming,” the man continued. “The townspeople greet you and share food and water with you and play music for you while you walk. You would have totally missed out on all that walking the Coastal route.”
None of that matched my experience so I asked him when he’d walked the Coastal route, thinking perhaps things had changed since whenever it was he’d experienced it. He said he never had.
The man spoke English, which is not the Dutch girl’s first language, so when we’d outpaced him enough so as not to be overheard she asked me to clarify when he’d walked the Coastal route, thinking she must have missed something in translation. I reiterated that he never has.
“Then how can he be so sure the Central route is better than the Coastal one?” she asked.
“He can’t,” I replied.
“Then why would he say that?” she asked, still thinking she’d misunderstood.
“I can’t say for sure,” I said, “but my best guess is that in order to feel satisfied with his choice he’s convinced himself it’s the only possible good one, which sadly leaves him certain that everyone who chose something different is wrong.”
“Do you think we made the wrong choice?” she asked.
I wondered aloud if she’d seen the sunset a week and a half ago, the one that erupted like fresh lava from behind the dark clouds and scorched the whole western horizon with an orange flame that glimmered on the shoulders of the waves? And did she see the thousand-year-old chapel with the stone cross some ancestor of ours hoisted into place atop it, perched on a rocky outcrop jutting into the sea, a prayer and a warning to unwary sailors: beware this ragged maw? Did the sheep nuzzle her as she walked through the swathes of heather unmolested by the tides? On those 90-degree days did the breeze off the water fan her skin softly, did the sand cushion her footfalls, did the boardwalk wending in and out of bamboo groves feel like a maze waiting to be discovered? Does it feel to you, I asked, as if you made the wrong choice?
She smiled. “It was the perfect choice for me.”
“And it was the perfect choice for me, too,” I said, clarifying: “For the me of today.” She glanced at me inquisitively so I explained that I think there often are not wrong choices, just different ones. There are paths we could have taken that would have been amazing in ways we will never comprehend and hard in ways we can’t understand because it’s impossible to know where the path we didn’t choose would have taken us. It’s also plausible that the paths we spurned on this trip might have felt perfect to us on some other day, at a different time, in an alternate life.
I wish I were still married to my husband. I could not have stayed in that marriage. Both statements cannot possibly be true at the same time. Both are.
There is a path on which I met an introverted man – not on a road in Spain but in a town in the U.S. nearly 15 years ago – who dreamt of a simple existence in the Oregon countryside and he met an extroverted woman who dreamt of a colorful existence in a foreign land and we decided opposites really do attract and there’s no obstacle we couldn’t overcome, together, so logic be damned: we’d marry and tackle his dream first and fold in mine later, as circumstances allowed.
In the version of our life in which we actualized his dream first llamas leaned thru the backdoor of the trailer where we lived for years in what became our hayfield and annually from October to June while it rained relentlessly we slogged through mud cementing foundations and raising barns and the wind whipped through cracks in the windows and blew the curtains into our faces while we huddled under blankets together laughing and the children climbed into the rafters as the walls went up and the neighbors carried injured animals to us and we nursed them and set them free to live their wild lives and my husband helped me settle down and I helped him open up and we exhausted our bodies and challenged our psyches and expanded our minds and it was hard and good and everything I ever imagined life with a farmboy might be when I was a child of the city daydreaming about horses and wide open fields to charge through with abandon.
In the version of our life that saw the path bend, when it came time to fold in my dream, too, to pick a sunny country to shelter in through the endlessly dreary Oregon winters, he decided he wasn’t up to such an adventure after all; wouldn’t join me and neither could he bear me going without him, too wounded by my willingness to go alone, even just for short bursts. Give up that dream, he said, and choose the life we already live, with no substantive change, or choose divorce. Lining up the words on paper they sound so harsh, they are so harsh, but he is not harsh, it was fear talking through that beautiful gentle man who craved an impossibly still and steady life with a free-spirited wife possessed of an obsessive in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound nature that he thrilled to when it shone in his direction but languished without when my passions pivoted toward the other people, causes, and aspirations that also feed my soul. In the sacred center ‘space of us’, a space intersected by the trajectory of maturing children and aging parents, unshared hobbies and shared workloads, we engaged too regularly in a tug of war between us, him feeling fairly enough that he never got enough of me, me feeling fairly enough that I had nothing more to give. I can understand why he’d have been wary of starting somewhere new with such a spirit, outside his element, fearing loneliness in a new space might be even less manageable than in the home he loves, which I can’t begrudge him for not wanting to leave, even temporarily. Dreams given wing are hard to ground.
And yet. And yet. I hadn’t anticipated his fulfillment might come at the expense of mine. I’d embraced his desires and had benefited greatly from the sumptuous world we built but had also sacrificed much to make it a reality. There had been paths not taken, lives not lived. Some of those spurned paths represent a fair-enough trade. In the thousand-acre maze of morals & ethics & values through which we all wander daily I had a partner who instinctively took nearly every turn in tandem with me, a partner whose mind kept me endlessly intrigued, and those are miracles for which I’m endlessly grateful, so here: I’ll trade this private ambition, that personal goal, for such bounty. But other tradeoffs were a Faustian bargain. He is better than I at knowing and establishing boundaries, but his boundaries can be too rigid; I am better than he at flexing to create space for others in my world, but I am apt to bend too far. There is a reason I was hungry enough to write the first of these essays while waiting at the airport gate at 6am the day I departed. There is a reason I carried the extra weight of a laptop in my Camino backpack, not wanting to waste any opportunity to write. I am so long out of practice; there is time to be made up.
The last three lines of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken are so incessantly quoted that every American can recite them by heart:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Few, however, are familiar with the fuller body of the poem or, perhaps better stated, its heart; the backstory behind that famous conclusion:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could ….
The life in which I didn’t agree to quit writing to preserve a marriage in which my mindshare was a commodity everyone coveted is the path-not-taken I stare back at with the most self-reproach. And yet. And yet. It was a regrettable choice made for worthy reasons from which many blessings flowed, so I will call it misguided but how can I call it wholly wrong? It bought me eight extra years in the orbit of a man I adore who gets tripped up by his own anxiety sometimes, as I do too, yet still and always will be in my estimation a prince among men. It preserved for my children idyllic childhoods full of joys they may not always remember but I will: watching meteors cut through the midnight sky from a bed of grass, licking bonfire-warmed marshmallow off sticky fingers on our sandy beach, stockpiling fresh-plucked clover for bunnies napping in pockets, hanging upside down from trees with scuffed knees and dirty faces and full hearts. These joys built a bank we can all draw from til the far end of our futures, even as those futures chart an altered course.
“I think there often are not wrong choices,” I say to a Dutch girl on one of those future paths, “just different ones.”
So I try to be gentle with myself and with that farmboy of mine, and not judge too harshly the choices we made together, the sometimes graceless way we navigated the boulders in our path, for our missteps were made with love, in love, always love. And now, I am doing what needs to be done to correct my course and prove true to myself. Faced with the Solomonic choice of standing still together or walking forward alone, I am embracing the inevitability of change; I am charting an unplanned solo route.
At this crossroads all the many lives lived and almost-lived fan out around me, all possibilities visible still, but barely, stretching like ghost roads into the fog. Behind me the comfort of the life we lived together begins to fade into a cherished memory while off to one side, just out of reach, the wistful longing for the life I thought we’d been planning – the life of compromise that merged two dreams into one – vanishes on the distant side of a bridge-too-far. In another direction, still so close I can almost touch him, my beloved farmboy is sprinting away in pursuit of new connections – which is a heartrending thing to witness even as I wish for his happiness – yet here between us the promise of some new way forward takes shape: a gentle connection weaving between his route and mine, paved with friendship and kindness and respect. And there, ahead of me, a pinprick of light pierces the darkness on the unmarked path that is to be mine.
At the convergence of these ghost roads where all possibilities still feel so tangible – our glorious compatibility and our divergent dreams; our unity of purpose and our differing drives; the bountiful love between a wife who tried but couldn’t make her world any smaller for her husband and a husband who tried but couldn’t make his world any bigger for his wife – it has been an almost impossible thing to make myself move on. My feet know where to aim. My mind can explain why. But oh, my heart. It is a fickle guide: pointing one way in one moment, somewhere else in another. It has been hard not to waffle, hard not to tie myself into knots inspired by fear. Grief is such a dark and weighty thing; it is a struggle to get out from beneath it. It makes a muddle of what might otherwise be clear.
This is clear enough: Every one of these paths represents a good life; none necessarily better or worse, none fully right nor fully wrong. Just different. One best suited for one version, one era, of me; one best suited for another. Now it is time to gather myself, to pick myself up off my knees where I have been wailing at this crossroads. Time to let go. Time to accept what is done. Time to say thank you for what was and welcome to what will be. Time to let the choices-not-made and the people attached to them follow their own course. Time to stop second-guessing; time to get moving. Time to marry myself to an imperfect decision that can turn out perfectly for the me of today. Time to walk in the direction of way-markers I can’t yet see but know will be out there.
For me, then, it shall be the Coastal route, literally and figuratively; the less-traveled road that has called to me for so long. If I listen carefully, I can hear the sound of waves beating on shores that are not yet visible. Some may call it a siren song but I think it’s just as plausible it’s the sound of my own heartbeat, waiting for me to catch back up with it. So I deliberately turn my eyes to the horizon and watch for a beautiful sunset to erupt from behind the dark clouds, as the sun and as beauty both reliably do. I turn intentionally in the direction of miracles yet to come and watch for the glimmer on the shoulders of the waves. For they will start rolling in, awash in a new kind of splendor; I am as sure of it as I am of anything. And I will be here for it. I will be fully present in my own life.
And that will make all the difference.
The sunset over the Atlantic, as seen from the stormy shore in Labruge, Portugal, on September 21, 2023.