The descent is endless. I have been hiking down for hours. My knee is swollen, thick with a fluid that crackles as I move. My oozing blisters seem to cry out with every step. I feel like I am limping into hell, and all I can think about are trekking poles.

It’s September 11^th, the first year I won’t be meeting Dad at his downtown office to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, as he had fourteen years earlier on the day we now call 9/11, when the planes struck the towers across the street from his office. I am thousands of miles away. I’ve been thinking about home all morning.

The mountains smell like parched grass, like the last breath of wildflowers. This is September in the Italian Alps. The air is still with what may be the last heat wave of the summer. I stop to wipe my forehead, tapping to ensure Jimbo, my stuffed animal monkey, is secure in his perch atop my pack. My steps kick up white dust, displacing small pebbles, sending crickets to honk and flee. Around me tower the fierce silhouettes of mountain peaks. I am hiking in their shadow. Below, the trail falls away as far as I can see.

My feet are seething; red lobsters in boiling water boots. With each step I lift my lead legs and suck them from the mud. With each footfall my toes splinter against the front walls of my boots.

Ten days ago, I left from Munich to trek to Venice. I pictured myself running across the Alps. Impatient to start, I decided to attempt the trek in two-thirds time, twenty instead of thirty days. This meant for the first half of the hike I doubled the recommended distance, moving up to thirty miles each day, up and down tens of thousands of vertical feet.

I had fourteen blisters by the second afternoon. My feet were bloody stumps, and with every step I punched them into salt. At first the pain was surprising; my peeling, sun-cracked forehead, the rash of chafe across my hips, the boils on my back from pack on skin. Then came the knee pain—the smashing windows pain, where you grab for anything to hold you up. The last few days, the sirens of my knee blared above the rest, firing their alarm for the ten—twelve—fourteen hours it took to limp twenty-five miles at a time.

Below me the hillside opens up. I pause, tracking its rise and fall, the slope shifting from bunch grass to patches of stubby trees. As I step forward again, I slip on loose rock. My knee jams. Nerves shiver through my spine, rattling my teeth. Grimacing, rubbing my knee, cursing my blisters, I continue forward. Pain has been my only company on this trip.

Last night, when I finally winced into the hut after hiking fourteen hours, I was sure the discomfort couldn’t get much worse. A father had walked ahead of me, holding his son’s arm like a collar, coaxing him up the trail. He was patient, loving. He reminded me of my father—not of the one I know now, but the one I conjure from home videos, when I am an infant, crying, bouncing in his arms.

I followed the father and son into the hut. It was late. Most of the other hikers had already come off trail. They sat at coarse wood tables swapping stories. I nursed my knee and looked around. They spoke German and Italian. I didn’t need to understand the words. I too have leaned toward friends with a smile that says my legs are sore, my back is sore, my heart is flying.

I could tell the man next to me was also going to Venice because he smelled as bad as I did. He raised his hand and said “un bier.” As if to loop me in, he followed with “A beer, please.” He asked where I was from.

"New York," I said.

“Really? Were you there for September 11^th?”

I nodded. I wanted to tell him how I hate to talk about 9/11—how everyone seemed to feel the need to tell me where they were, which was not New York City, but somewhere across the world. He began explaining how he had been in Munich. He had heard the news at work.

---

School had just begun when the first plane hit the North Tower. My dad did not leave his office at first. He could not look away. He was two hundred feet away from the World Trade Center, staring up at flaming towers, watching with horror as people fleeing flames on the hundredth floor made the choice to jump. When he finally left, he moved with a seething mass of people across the Brooklyn Bridge. Three times, as people almost panicked, he called out for calm.

He picked me up from my fifth grade classroom at my school in Brooklyn Heights. He hugged me so hard it hurt. When we left the school, instead of heading home he took me to the Promenade. By the time we got there, a black cloud engulfed Lower Manhattan; each bridge an arm reaching desperately into nothing.

“They collapsed,” Dad whispered. He started to cry.

I didn’t understand. All I could do was stare at the black cloud, so immense it seemed that it would never end. The air smelled like steel and melting plastic. This is what cancer feels like, I thought—cancer to the city; cancer to the air.

The subways at Borough Hall weren’t running so we took a bus, and the bus driver wouldn’t let us pay. Then we were home. I tried to turn on cartoons. I didn't understand. I was just a boy. I hadn’t seen the towers burning. I had only seen the cloud.

Dad cried again. Mom held him and he said, “Burn or jump. That's what they had to choose.”

Sometime later, I went out for a walk. Outside, in the warm September air, snow was falling; flakes of burnt papers, memos, budgets, invoices; fragments of people’s lives.

---

I am back on the trail, back in Northern Italy, on my endless hellish blistering descent from the mountains atop the world. I am crying. The tears quiver my lip and run in big droplets down my cheek.

I didn’t understand hate. I couldn’t. I was too young. I understood sorrow and loss and parents crying. I could grasp that what had happened was very bad and that the wars to come were worse. But the enduring image of 9/11 was not hate or lust for vengeance. What I remember is that the bus driver refused to let us pay.

I draw my arm across my eyes. I feel sheepish. I can’t help but laugh. I’m alone, thousands of miles from home. I ran into the Alps—ran myself into blisters, into knee pain, into a limp. I ran until I could barely walk, racing, inexplicably, back to the life I had been so eager to escape. I ran as if to prove something, without ever knowing what. I limp on, hoping that any moment I will reach Pfunders, the Alpine town where I can finally rest and, God willing, finally buy some trekking poles.

Before I left for the hike, my uncle had offered me his. I had smiled—immortal, invulnerable—and said, “Thanks, but no. Poles would only slow me down." Now I am purgatoried by pain. I have put my knee into a blender. I am composting my feet.

I catch sight of a few buildings.

My God, Pfunders.

It’s only a small farming outpost, the first in the German-speaking part of Northern Italy. I limp along the town’s one cobbled street. I can feel pity shuttered behind windows. I see a sign. Two hours to Pfunders. I nearly stop right there.

At the last house, a man waters his garden from a hose. He stands shirtless, showing off a belly that suggests he has a good Italian wife. I hold up my empty bottle. He nods and I approach.

“Hallo. Wie geht es dir?” His voice sounds like turning the ignition on a truck. I shake my head.

“English, sorry.” The screen door slams and his wife, hands on hips, is standing at his side.

“He doesn’t speak English,” she says, glaring at her husband. “But I do! Are you going to Venice?” I nod, grateful that I can’t be the first person to look and smell like me and ask for water from their hose.

“Where do you come from?”

“Olpererhütte,” I say.

“In the world.”

“Oh, New York.” Her eyebrows raise.

“New York! Das ist bescheuert.” She turns to her husband. “New York!” Then back to me. “What are you doing here? No, you told me, going to Venice, but really.” She shakes her head. I take the chance to ask the question that has weighed on me for days.

“Does Pfunders have a gear store?”

She laughs from her belly, a rumbling laugh like rocks turning in a rapid. It’s good-natured but it cocoons me and I feel small.

“There are no stores in Pfunders!”

As she sees my face I can tell she is a mother. I can tell she didn’t know how bad it was; that I am deep inside a pain cave, that I have no hope for getting out. It will be four days before I cross another town. I might not make it two hours more to Pfunders.

Then she is somber. “What are you looking for?”

“I need poles," I say. "I can barely walk.”

She turns to her husband. They talk in German. He nods and walks toward the woodshed. The man creaks the door open, rummages and returns, dusting cobwebs off two trekking poles.

He hands them over. In a heavy accent he says, “Made in Italy.”

I stare at the poles as though I’ve regrown a severed limb. I can’t speak. I can’t look the farmers in the eye. I open my pack to pour my Euros into their hands—sixty, one hundred, three hundred Euros. My Euros and my phone; my passport; a blank check; a life debt; the names of my future children.

“You cannot pay us,” she says. “We wish you good luck on your trip.” I stand in disbelief. She smiles. “Maybe when we come to New York, you can get us stocks.”

As soon as I am out of sight, I crumple into tears. I cry because they will never know how much it means to me—because my thank you’s sounded empty; because the act of kindness seems to echo so loudly it threatens all the violence in the world.

I cry because the bus driver wouldn’t let us pay, because the merchant in Lower Manhattan stood outside his shop and passed shoes to students evacuated from their dorms. I cry because the way my father hugged me was not with fear but gratitude; that he took me to the Promenade because life had made it time to come of age. I cry because of the way New Yorkers reached out their hands and helped each other up, and how the city of strangers had never felt so much like home.

It was not on the 11^th, or the 12^th, or the 21^st, but some months later. The days became darker and shorter, the smoke settled, and the silence became loud. One night the towers came back again, two spotlights beaming in the sky. For that moment, the holes in our lives filled with light. We saw ourselves, limping on, alive.

I think of my farmer angels. Maybe it’s not much, what they offered me. Maybe it’s a common thing. Maybe these moments of kindness wrap across the world; the capacity for strangers to reach down and help each other up. Maybe these are the precious peaks that carry us through pain.

I wince. I smile. I lean into my poles.