El Caminito Del Rey (The King’s Little Pathway)
This path is not for the
faint of heart.
It is a high, narrow gorge,
crumbling rockface,
handrails chipped and falling
350 feet to the river below;
it is somber concrete set on
rails and pocked with holes,
blind curves, places where the steel
shows through, slender bars you traverse
barely more than a tight rope where
once there was road.
It is El Caminito del Rey,
The King’s Little Pathway pinned
along steep walls
in El Chorro.
This path is not for the
faint of heart.
It is Mount Huashan; it is
feeling an ancient and slowly
yielding face with sweating palms,
desperate to know each crack, each
contour, each handhold, body pressed
tight to stone, seeking comfort,
while in return,
you are swooning in the embrace of
an indifferent lover whose
own arms are rigid: one moment,
jagged enough to cut; the next, too smooth
for purchase; you are
dancing a waltz of perpetual sideways
steps one inch at a time
on slender boards
bolted together, suspended
on jutting blocks, uneven as
ancient stairsteps while
chains sweetly kiss the majestic
neck of this gray Goliath
leading you on,
one rusting link at a time.
This path is not
for the faint of heart.
Bolivia’s Road of Death
running the Andes for 70 kilometers,
plunging down almost 3,600 meters,
racing with hairpin turns twisting
sinuously above a fog-soaked abyss—
or like the Norweigien Trollstigen
with its 9 percent incline and
eleven lunular bends leading
to long miles of interior shots,
dark shadows, damp basement; it is
silence stretching out into the distance,
echo-less; there is no cell reception,
no ringing, buzzing, whirring;
there is no touching—flesh
is a solitary thing, chafing against
fabric, turning dry and coarse in the
absence of attention.
It is unadmired words; it is
digging deep in the backyard
for buried treasure;
it is a werewolf met in the dark
at the height of the full moon
when the fire has
burned too low to see that its jaws
are gaping open and
dawn cannot bring you sudden redemption.
There is no step taken that is
lacking in courage. There is no forward motion
that is not met by an unrelenting need
to grow beyond this current incarnation, to
spill out of this skin that is burning, to flee
this path, with all its treacherous
misdirections, and yet
there is nothing more exhilarating—
scaling this mountain of challenge, stepping onto
the exposed steel of dreaming, caressing rockface
at an elevation that unveils a
silver ribbon of road set deep in emeralds,
leading nowhere else but to the wide open
expanse of self.