I HIKED ARCTIC SWEDEN TO WORK THROUGH GRIEF. THEN MY ANKLE GAVE OUT.

For the Traveler’s Tale series, we ask fiction and nonfiction writers to share one of their most indelible travel memories.

I WAS 150 MILES into a planned 270-mile hike through northern Sweden when the pain set in. Other aches and twinges—hip, knee, back—had already come and mostly gone but were never severe enough to make me consider quitting. This pain, a stabbing in my left ankle, said, You must stop. But my mom had died exactly two months before, and that pain said, You must keep going.

It was early September, and I was alone on a trekking route called the Kungsleden, or the King’s Trail, which, when you start from the north, begins in the village of Abisko, a winter mecca for northern lights hunters, and terminates at a ski town called Hemavan. In walking its length, I’d cross many glacier-flattened mountains and glacier-gouged valleys. Hikers can sleep (and sauna) in huts along the way, but I chose to camp in a red one-person Hilleberg tent, gladly enduring the cold in exchange for freedom from chitchat.

On the morning of my 13th day, I made great time over a tundra plateau. After crossing the Arctic Circle, I descended into a spruce forest of lush moss and slanting sunlight—novel after the spindly, hardy birches of the far north—and suddenly it felt like a bear trap had clamped around my ankle. My stopping point was 6 miles away. I took one step and another, pressing on, slowing by the mile. Overwhelmed by misery and frustration, I hurled a trekking pole at the ground and shouted into the silence. Nothing happened. I picked my pole up and kept going.

That night, green auroras frilled the sky. I thought sleep might cure me, but when I reached the hamlet of Jäkkvik the following afternoon I could barely hobble. A hundred miles of trail remained. But Jäkkvik had a bus stop, a way out.

No one else can feel our pain; no one else can evaluate it. Pain shimmers and flares and vanishes, an aurora of our inner cosmos. In Jäkkvik, from a church hostel, I started texting people. Would it be prudent to quit, or would it be weak? Would continuing be foolish or brave? No one could tell me. They asked how much it hurt. A lot. I couldn’t gauge whether it would even be possible to carry on, to walk every mile I had said I would. I didn’t want to suffer, but I did want to know that life could still go according to plan, that not everything had to be broken and incomplete, that I could endure.

My mom’s chronic lymphocytic leukemia was relatively manageable for 14 years after her diagnosis, but that spring, seemingly because of asymptomatic Covid, her platelets had bottomed out. As she went in and out of the hospital, her doctors were still confident they’d get things under control. Then, one night, she had a brain hemorrhage and died. My father, widowed after 52 years of marriage, channeled his shock and bewilderment into a fixation on bureaucratic details. He called me four times one Saturday about my mom’s phone bill, left a long voicemail on my birthday about the details of her death certificate. My grief felt too close, too clingy and smothering for me even to get a good look at it. I needed to unfurl it in space and quiet. I needed the Arctic.

On the trail, I was responsible only for feeding myself, for moving forward and for finding a campsite. I reread Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” in my tent, communing with the urtext of grief hiking. Most days, my only communication with the outside world was via satellite texts to my then-boyfriend-now-husband. If my dad was struggling to transfer frequent flier points, I didn’t have to know. Putting miles behind me affirmed my ability to carry on. Once, I stopped in my tracks and bent double, sobbing for my mother. After a few minutes, I straightened up and kept walking.

In Jäkkvik, I bought ibuprofen and a bus ticket. In what felt like both a compromise and a gamble, I decided not to quit completely but to bypass 50 miles of the trail, rejoining it at the next access point, Ammarnäs. For four days, I slept in beds, took hot showers, ate food I didn’t have to rehydrate and vainly searched the supermarkets of rural Sweden for an ankle brace. I suspected the cause of my injury was simple overuse. I’d taken dozens of missteps, little tweaks that, under the weight of a 40-pound pack, accumulated into significance. I’d also made the mistake of not building in rest days. Instead, I’d planned to power though all 270 miles without a break, turning myself into a little armored vehicle of exertion and intent. The powering through, in my mind, was the break, the safe haven. But pain can always find you because its potential lives inside you. It is you.

In Ammarnäs, I bought Snickers bars and the kind of medical tape you’re not really supposed to put on bare skin. I wrapped it around my feet and ankles like a kickboxer. There would be no way to get off the trail until the end, 50 miles south. Setting out, I climbed through clouds of electric-orange foliage. Summer had ended. At first, every pang in my boot caused a jolt of anxiety, but soon I began to believe I’d be OK. The 50 miles I’d skipped felt like a loss but not a failure. By yielding temporarily to my pain, I had given myself the strength for those last four days between Ammarnäs and Hemavan. They were the best days. Through a wilderness luminous with autumn and crisscrossed by reindeer, I walked a precarious line between suffering and euphoria. I felt my aliveness, which was the whole point of the trip. Which is, perhaps, the point of everything.

Maggie Shipstead’s most recent novel is the Booker Prize-shortlisted “Great Circle.” (Knopf)

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