“I lift up my eyes to the hills…”—Psalm 121:1

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Many popular travel books describe the joy of climbing mountains. I’ve done a little of that, but for the most part, I prefer hills. Walking up a hill requires less physical effort, so I’m more aware of the view and less aware of how much my legs hurt or where to put my feet or that I’m afraid of heights. The scenery tends to be more familiar than from a mountain top, yet at the same time, as I climb a little higher, I get a different perspective, see the familiar in a new way.

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Ten years old, I run from my house on the side of Bridge Street hill up to Main Street. Cresting the hill is like opening the door to a huge and wonderful world. Depending on the time of day or the time of year, I can go left down to Vaughn’s Pharmacy and have a root beer, or continue to Pride’s Market for a candy bar. I can go right to the movie theater and watch Hopalong Cassidy, or keep going to grade school. I can go straight across the street to church, or cut around the church to the ball field. Any direction will get me to one of my friends’ houses.

Food, education, God, sports, and friendship—values I still prize— are all just up the hill.

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For four summers in high school, I walk up the hill to meet Willy and Scott. We amble down Main Street, past the boat yard and then up Pleasant Street hill to go to work in Bornheimer’s Market Garden, where I grow four inches, turn as brown as a walnut, and broaden my education far beyond what I learn in school. I gain knowledge of dirty jokes, what putdowns are okay and which aren’t (no mothers!), and, during lunch hour, how to improve my jump shot. I also unearth the joy of being out of doors, the self-confidence that comes from being in good physical condition, and the satisfaction of finishing a difficult job. I plant plans for my future and cultivate friendships that will continue into that future.

Oh, and I also learn to like eating vegetables.

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Much of what I know about the up and down nature of love and lust and loneliness comes from walking hills. Going to and from my high school girl friend’s house means walking up and down Willow Street Hill. At first, I feel as if I’m floating instead of walking, until the afternoon Susan and I break up, and life becomes for a time all downhill. I follow the same path in 1972, when my wife, my two-year-old daughter, and I move into a brand-new house at the top of Main Street in Ellsworth, Maine. At first, the house represents our chance to build a future together as a family. Then, as the cellar walls crack and wind blows around the windows, our neighbors party loudly into the night, and the lawn turns brown in the summer, I realize the cracks and the leaks in my marriage, how often we fight into the night, and how love can wither. Going up the hill to my house becomes more and more difficult.

But when, remarried, I return to my home town to buy what was for fifty years my grandparents’ house just around the corner from “The Meeting House on the Hill,” I rekindle the joy and wonder I used to experience when I was a kid going up hills. I finally learn what it means to love someone and be loved in return.

I will need that love in the coming years, as my life becomes an uphill struggle with the deaths of my father, my grandmother, and my daughter, all within four years of one other.

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In the old city of Jerusalem, I stumble up the Via Dolorosa, traditionally the street where Jesus was forced to carry his cross to his crucifixion, following Franciscan Brothers on their Friday “Walk of Devotion” to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It’s hot and the narrow street is steep and crowded and everyone seems to be yelling at me to buy a sheepskin or an icon or a plastic model Israeli airplane. Suddenly, in my mind it’s December, and I’m walking alone from the Ronald McDonald House to the Eastern Maine Medical Center where my eighteen-year-old daughter lies dying of cancer—up an icy hill past lonely gray houses with mansard roofs and an obscene spray painting on the side of an abandoned brick building, which in two years will become the setting for a Stephen King movie.

A hill in Jerusalem, a hill in Bangor, Maine: both physically and psychologically difficult, surrealistic, full of meaning that I won’t grasp for years, and yet which will mark me, turn me into the person I am today.

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Almost twenty years later, Mary Lee and I walk St. Cuthbert’s Way, from Melrose, Scotland to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne off the east coast of England. We spend the summer preparing for our sixty-two-mile pilgrimage: we read books on St. Cuthbert, we walk from four to ten miles a day, we increase L.L. Bean’s profits for the year. What we don’t plan for are the hills. Funny, they didn’t look that steep on any of the YouTube videos we watched. At some point, laboring up Wideopen Hill, gasping for breath, I realize that while the hills may not be any steeper than many I’ve climbed in my life, I and my lungs, scarred from years of smoking, are older. I see in the low clouds rolling over the heather, perhaps for the first time, my mortality.

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These days, any time I want to be reminded of mortality, I have only to walk up Bridge Street Hill past my old house. By the time I get to Main Street, my lungs are burning and my legs feel like anchors. Most of the time, growing up, I never even thought of Bridge Street as a hill. Still, as the hills in my life—both emotional and physical—keep getting steeper, it helps to think of them as part of a life-long pilgrimage, seeing some of the same views, the same people, but from a little higher perspective, while at the same time looking back to see wrong turns I’ve taken, and also times when I might have taken a wrong path toward disaster, but didn’t.

These hills also make me curious to see what kind of world will open for me when I crest that last one.

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