Vacation Memories : When Father and Son Shared a Walk Along the Steep Cliffs of Life

He always stayed a little ahead of me, Kevin did. He had reversed the roles of childhood when I’d have to walk slowly to let him catch up--and sometimes end up carrying him. But he was 23 now; his stride had lengthened, mine had shortened, and that is the way of life.

I’m tempted to say he walked with a determined stride, but that wouldn’t be true. No, there was a slight swagger about his movements, from a few years back. When he had his triumphs in school life, sports and music, he stopped taking things all that seriously. Now he preferred life’s ironies, its shadings, rather than the black and white; he’d learned to approach life on a slant rather than hit it head-on.

It was he who had suggested we take “a long hike” from Riomaggiore, the southernmost city of the Cinque Terre, the “five lands” along Italy’s Ligurian coast. The other towns heading north on the mile-long stretch include Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare.

We’d arrived in Riomaggiore in late afternoon; it was a remote stop, but not unlike the many we’d chosen on our four-week rental car meanderings.

Through Five Countries

With Kevin and my 14-year-old daughter, Jenny, I’d poked about in five countries--big cities, small towns, unforgettable mountains and valleys, planning only a day at a time, our leisurely drives punctuated by the sounds of the many cassette tapes they’d brought along, Kevin’s favorite Beatles songs among them.

Something about Riomaggiore must have struck a chord with Kevin--the cliffs and mountains that isolate the town from its neighbors, the terraced slopes filled with grape arbors, the houses piled up around a postage-stamp harbor, the precipitously steep walks that call for slow and carefully placed steps.

We had come to the end of the road: Either turn around and drive back to busier places like the port of La Spezia or try to find a place to stay. Jenny was thirsty, so I set out in search of aqua minerale and lodgings.

We found both. The guest house came at the end of a narrow path flanked by fruit trees--peaches, apricots, and, of course, the all-encompassing grapes that soon would convert to the fine wines of the Cinque Terre.

Our room overlooked the sea; on the balcony we heard the waves settling against the rocks, and on lines conveniently hung we put out our clothes, freshly washed.

“We should do our hike in the morning, Kev,” I said. Jenny was pressing for a shopping visit in the village, and by then it was after five. He agreed. Later we drank the wine I had bought from our proprietor after he’d decanted it from gallon jugs, and later still we walked to the village below and had a leisurely dinner of calamari.

We went to bed early, the rhythm of the surf gentle in our ears.

A ‘Walk of Love’

At 7 the next morning we were out, leaving behind a contentedly sleeping Jenny. The sun sat low, the air was cool, and Riomaggiore’s shuttered houses looked pale in the morning light.

We walked past the railroad station. Local trains, we knew, served the towns of the Cinque Terre quite efficiently. But we sought a higher adventure, the Via dell’Amore, or “Walk of Love” that connects Riomaggiore with its neighbor, Manarola.

The route, paved with stones, is wide and flat, carved as it was out of the cliffs. Manarola was only half an hour away, and I was about to remark how easy our hike was when the trail virtually disappeared, losing itself in narrow, steep, foliage-shrouded steps.

It was our entree to Manarola. Our only guide was the faint blue-and-white flags painted at various points along the way.

We made it to the top and walked briefly through the town. We saw the boats strewn halfway up the street and the lines of wash (just like ours) hanging from the windows above. Then we decided to go on to Corniglia--remote, forbidding, on its own promontory, the sun’s glint reflecting off of its church, its stack of houses.

It was remote. And far off. Along the way the coastline softened a bit, producing some small, rocky beaches that were not easy to get to. Now and then we walked by a trail, barely seen, that led to a beach house, its roof just visible down the slope. We passed sleeping backpackers and maintained a respectful silence. Finally, Corniglia, smallest of the five villages, loomed ahead, a cluster of white and beige against the green hills.

I remarked to Kevin about the cars parked along the road leading down to the train station. How did they get there? From what I’d read, no roads led to Corniglia, the most difficult of the Cinque Terre towns to reach either by land or sea. But 14th-Century Italian author Boccaccio had once praised its wines, and, still without breakfast, we needed to find a cafe.

Like Lombard Street

“It looks like Lombard Street,” Kevin said of the famed San Francisco landmark as we faced a maze of steps that zigzagged up the hill to the town. The steps--all 377 of them--were spaced to reduce the grade, but the “Z” patterns crisscrossed endlessly. At least on Lombard Street it was downhill. And you could drive.

Walking up I thought of San Francisco and Berkeley--and of Kevin’s start there in what was to have been his academic blossoming. It ended after a year and a summer, the debilitation of drugs sapping his quest for knowledge.

The struggles since then had often separated us, but all that was changing, I realized, especially here during the trip. Kevin revisiting Europe, finding a quiet source of inspiration, and he and I, over countless rolls, coffee, pizzas and beer, finding each other again.

Entering the town we walked past a small piazza fronting the 14th-Century parish church, then found our cafe down one of Corniglia’s cavernous, winding streets.

We favored Cokes and mineral water over coffee, and Kevin, who liked to sample exotic bolognas from all the cheese-and-meat stops we made, contented himself with a jelly doughnut. Refreshed, we bought a cold bottle of mineral water to sip on our journey, then stepped outside to pursue our next town--Vernazza.

Where was it? we wondered, standing in the sunlight, crowded in by the terraces of grapes at the northern edge of town. We could see no well-marked cliffside walk; instead, far, far up on the hill, was a village, its church spire dominating the scene.

A Distant Village

“Is that Vernazza?” I asked an elderly woman who had stopped to talk with a fellow villager. “San Bernardo,” she said, and with my sketchy knowledge of Italian I quickly learned that Vernazza was on the other side of it, distant and unseen.

I looked at Kevin and thought of Jenny, who was soon to wake up. “Shall we head back?” I asked.

Vernazza had eluded us, as it would later in the morning when we tried to reach the other towns by car. Jenny was in the back seat then, lost in her Walkman; Kevin was helping me navigate a tortuously narrow road, one that for long stretches turned into dirt and rocks.

Wherever Vernazza was, we missed it. We did find Monterosso, though, the northernmost and largest of the Cinque Terre cities and the only one to sport a bathing beach. We walked along its promenade and later lunched in a cafeteria on the beach. The sight of hundreds of tents and umbrellas filling up the small space smacked of Mr. Hulot and his quintessential desire for a holiday. “I almost expect to see him darting about,” I said to Kevin. It was a film we had shared years before.

From our lunch place looking south we thought we could see the 12th-Century tower ruins of the mysterious Vernazza, but it didn’t matter much then--as it hadn’t earlier in Corniglia--when, with a warm sun high overhead, we decided to return to our little house in Riomaggiore.

Sense of Direction

Kevin found the blue-and-white flagged walk again, even after I’d questioned some of his turns. But by then I was learning to trust his sense of direction; it was much better than mine. Time and again he would drive through the metropolitan cities and uncannily find the way back to our hotel or pension.

He showed some of that same sense of purpose as we walked back. I like to think he was heading toward something . . . maybe with larger purposes, at that. We talked about the trip, the inadequacies we both felt about European history--the need to know more, the books we should read.

We spoke of working on languages again, although Kevin had brought a German text with him and was using every occasion to practice. “Ent - . . . schuldigen Sie . . . “ (excuse me) he would say in his gentle voice.

It was nearly 10 a.m., the end of our three-hour walk. We were close to Riomaggiore, back again on the Via dell’Amore, when he began to talk about the future: his music, the hopes he had of creating something of value. “Whenever I start to write a song,” he said, “it always sounds like one I’ve heard, and so I give it up.”

I told him there were only so many ideas out there, but to take one and express it your own way--then it would always be original. And I spoke of my own writing, how I have to sit down, work at it, and, above all, give it time. And then we’d turned the last corner, saw our house with the laundry flapping in the ocean air, and realized that Jenny was still asleep.

Time. It was something Kevin didn’t have, and all the songs he might have written must remain forever in a corner of my imagination. We were back in Los Angeles in only a matter of hours when he died, suddenly, in a drowning accident. We hadn’t even recovered from jet lag; the glow of the trip hadn’t even begun to mellow.

Mellowing Memories

And it would mellow, I had promised him; we would talk about it, savor it in our minds for years. The places we visited, the food we ate, the companionship we shared--all of it would amplify with new meaning as it filtered through our memory.

Now, as I think of the conversations we had--and the many we didn’t--the recollection is all too solitary, and filled with a haunting poignancy I could not have imagined.

I intend to go back to the Cinque Terre some day and walk again along its steep cliffs. But “knowing how way leads on to way,” it may never happen.

On an evening, however, around twilight, I can sit outside, perhaps to the accompaniment of a Beatles song--”Yesterday,” or “Let It be.” There, in my mind’s eye, I will see again his lean form striding ahead of me . . . and I will feel again the warm sun rising above the hills of Riomaggiore.