In the summer of 2000, David Hlavsa and his wife Lisa Holtby embarked on a pilgrimage. After trying for three years to conceive a child and suffering through the monthly cycle of hope and ...disappointment, they decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, a joint enterprise-and an act of faith-they hoped would strengthen their marriage and prepare them for parenthood.Though walking more than 400 miles across the north of Spain turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated, after a series of misadventures, including a brief stay in a Spanish hospital, they arrived in Santiago. Shortly after their return to Seattle, Lisa became pregnant, and the hardships of the Camino were no comparison to what followed: the stillbirth of their first son and Lisa's harrowing second pregnancy.Walking Distanceis a moving and disarmingly funny book, a good story with a happy ending-the safe arrival of David and Lisa's second son, Benjamin. David and Lisa get more than they bargained for, but they also get exactly what they wanted: a child, a solid marriage, and a richer life.
In the summer of 2000, David Hlavsa and his wife Lisa Holtby embarked on a pilgrimage. After trying for three years to conceive a child and suffering through the monthly cycle of hope and ...disappointment, they decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, a joint enterprise—and an act of faith—they hoped would strengthen their marriage and prepare them for parenthood.
Though walking more than 400 miles across the north of Spain turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated, after a series of misadventures, including a brief stay in a Spanish hospital, they arrived in Santiago. Shortly after their return to Seattle, Lisa became pregnant, and the hardships of the Camino were no comparison to what followed: the stillbirth of their first son and Lisa’s harrowing second pregnancy.
Walking Distance is a moving and disarmingly funny book, a good story with a happy ending—the safe arrival of David and Lisa’s second son, Benjamin. David and Lisa get more than they bargained for, but they also get exactly what they wanted: a child, a solid marriage, and a richer life.
4 DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
For lack of other material on the plains, my journal of the trip mostly chronicles our various physical injuries and marital spats. In a sense, without anything else to keep track of, I am keeping ...score, not so much of who wins our daily rows, but of how quickly we’re able to move through them. Early in our marriage, we would have luxuriant fights that lasted for days. Now, who needs it? We aim for efficiency.
It’s not hard to see why we’re fighting. For the first time since she was a child, Lisa is completely dependent. She has no
PROLOGUE DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
Near the beginning of the medieval morality playEveryman, Death walks up to Everyman with the message that Everyman must go on a pilgrimage.
Death is a stranger to him, so it takes a while for ...Everyman to understand what is happening and togetthe message; he’s been living his life the way most of us do, preoccupied with making a living, getting along, trying to get more of what he enjoys and to avoid what he doesn’t. Absorbed in the everyday numbing push and pull of craving and aversion, Everyman is so unmindful of the very existence of
3 DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
Our twelfth day on the Camino, we rise before dawn and set off into windy starless darkness. Our destination is the cathedral city of Burgos, eighteen miles away. The uphill path is steep, and Lisa ...isn’t feeling well. By the time we reach a place where the path levels off, passing through straight rows of planted pine forest on a red dirt road, she has already vomited several times. We pass a monument “To the Fallen”—which fallen, it’s hard to make out.
By early afternoon, I figure we are within five miles of the city, but Lisa is weak
1 DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
In the summer of the year 2000, Lisa and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, more than four hundred miles across the north of Spain from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. ...Shortly after our return, Lisa got pregnant. James was the only name we considered for a boy. Inasmuch as anything can prepare you for a birth, I suppose walking the Camino prepared us for his. And inasmuch as anything can prepare anyone, it prepared us for his death as well.
Unlike Everyman’s decision to go on pilgrimage, ours was neither involuntary nor did
14 DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
Lisa’s journal reads, “I had a normal experience—quiet and peaceful (except me—I was yelling).”
If anything so painful and so hazardous can be called normal, I suppose Lisa’s labor was at least ...within hailing distance of normal. But then, I’m a man, so what do I know? Like many of our generation, Lisa and I had done the reading on natural childbirth, and so—even after her previous experience with labor—we still had a certain idealized vision of what the experience might be: drug-free, in specially designed warm-water tubs, soft music playing, the allopathic male doctors at
15 DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
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My father wasn’t at my birth. Told that my mother was not likely to give birth for some time, he went home to get some rest. I once asked my mother if she resented his absence, and she said no. “It ...was another time.” “Besides,” she added, “your father didn’t do very well with blood and pain.”
Or shit, apparently. When my parents came to see their newborn grandson, and I had Ben on the changing table, my father remarked that he had never changed a diaper. “Great!” I said. “Here’s your chance. I’ll show you how.” He grinned, declined
EPILOGUE (2015) DAVID HLAVSA
Walking Distance,
08/2015
Book Chapter
I’m now well past my fiftieth birthday, the age at which a man looks in the mirror and sees his own father ever more clearly, and at which he can feel the increase of gravity, in ways both subtle and ...unsubtle, that comes as the ground gets steeper on the downward path to the grave. But I am enjoying my life now more than I ever did before, because lately the happy ending—in what I thought was this book’s final chapter—just keeps getting better, not just for me but for the people I love.
My mom, who, at
