My PhD advisor only once gave me poor advice. “It’s best not to make career decisions based on geography,” he said.
My idea of one of the purposes of a postdoc was in direct conflict with this advice. I thought a postdoc was a free opportunity to go live somewhere I might never have the chance otherwise to do so, even another continent.
He was a genius. So I took a detour to Nashville, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt University, for a few years until I found a way out. I left Music City, a nice affordable town, the place of my first postdoc, to move to San Francisco and the University of California, San Francisco, for a second postdoc. I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head to travel west. As an American kid growing up east of the Mississippi, it has to be a subliminal message from our history lessons to go west. I loaded my Ford Thunderbird again with my belongings and a few friends who also had the dream of driving across the West.
I loved living in San Francisco and when I fell into the genetics of brain tumor development, I thought I had found my purpose at the lab bench, at last. I eventually managed to transition from my postdoc status into a salaried position in the Department of Neurological Surgery. Before I started that position in the fall of 2001, I took six weeks to travel through Europe and the Seychelles for diving. Something about a guy drove me to it.
I improvised the trip after landing in Zurich, Switzerland. I got up the next day, went to the train station and picked a town in the Alps as my first destination. I would figure it out as I went along from there. That was the extent of my plan.
I crossed over the border after a couple of nights in Switzerland into northern Italia and worked my way down in an odd way from Bolzano, Cortina d’Ampezza, and Venezia and then west across through Garda, Milano, and Valle d’Aosta. Then I went south to the seaside town of Rapallo to visit one of my favorite towns, Portofino, and hike, er, stroll through, Cinque Terre. I arrived on 10 September 2001.
I woke up on 11 September 2001 a full six hours earlier than the East Coast of the United States. My plan was to hike a trail along the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean in Liguria.
My dad once said when I was a minute too late to enter the amphitheater in the beautiful jewel above the sea, Taormina, “There’s always a reason to go back to some destinations.”
This trail was one of those reasons to go back. I became aware of it a few years before on a trip to Italia with my parents, but didn’t have time to do it.
I took a train early from Rapallo to Camogli and walked up from the small seaside village to the cathedral San Rocco di Camogli where the trailhead begins. I didn’t have to climb that high to experience the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea. I could have swum in the sea for the day, or gone diving. But from above, the color of the sea, yes, azure, an overused adjective in travel articles about Italy, in full sunlight, triggers a chemical reaction within the neural networks of your brain that becomes a visual memory, unless you have aphantasia. I still carry with me the image of my first view over the cliffs at the start of the trail at the beginning of a bright day.
Hiking alone was a looney idea. I had read the few paragraphs about the trail in my Lonely Planet “Hiking in Italy”. What I got out of it was, hike to Portofino and take the ferry back to Camogli. Simple. Even from that precipitous scenery, I didn’t consider how dangerous it might be to hike alone along those coastal cliffs.
I realized it when I noticed two men ahead of me. They were the only others on the trail. I thought, “What a dumb idea for me as a young woman to hike alone.”
I imagined them doing whatever they wanted with me and then conveniently throwing my body over the cliff to rest at the bottom of the Mediterranean never to be found, with my family wondering whatever happened in my last moments.
Then I thought they might be a couple, lovers. I preferred the second idea but nothing about them gave me any clues as to what they might be up to. While my brain was cooking up thriller type scenarios out in the wild away from work, away from technology (it was 2001), they stopped ahead of me and turned around.
“Uh oh,” I thought.
I took my chances and moved towards them. When I caught up to them, they asked if I wanted to join them on the trail. They were just two guys taking a day off from work to go for a hike. Graziano and Marco were hiking buddies. Serious ones I would later find out; ones who knew the value of a good pair of hiking boots but didn’t dress in any other name brand outdoor wear. Graziano was older with a close cropped head of curly graying hair. Marco was younger with long blond hair and green eyes.
Only Marco spoke some English. I knew less in Italian and yet, I laughed throughout the day. Maybe it’s the hiking, the flood of endorphins coursing through my body, that set me up for the laugh fest of my trip. But there’s always something funny about trying to communicate with people you want to communicate with in another language.
Or maybe what we talked about was funny.
Words like “asine” and “balina” (whale) entered my speak-like-a-toddler Italian vocabulary. And I had some lessons in how to use the words uscire and partire which both mean to leave. I’m not sure I’m able to always discriminate, but I know partire is the word you use when leaving the country.
Graziano told me his single, 36 year old brother was still living with his parents and that Graziano himself had been at the same job for 21 years. He also wasn’t much of a fan of the south of Italia. Roma was not the center of the universe for the people of the north, and yet, the northerners felt they had disproportionate economic responsibility for the south.
“Italia’s politics went all downhill after Julius Caesar,” Graziano concluded.
Graziano and Marco wanted to know why or how it was possible a woman would be traveling alone. I launched into a narrative about a sort of relationship with an attractive hapa musician that went nowhere. I just wanted to escape me and my nerves around men I’m attracted to. Ironically, wherever I went in Italia (and afterwards the Seychelles), I met men. One woman in the Seychelles even suggested, “You must be looking for something.” She didn’t mean love.
Why I would bother to bring up another disastrous date in my life on that glorious day I’ll never know. Saying the words out loud made me feel silly, even if they were in a language Graziano didn’t understand.
After a long winded explanation, I just said, “It was a broken heart.”
“Delusione di amore,” Graziano said, which seemed more accurate.
Graziano didn’t understand why I would want to try to learn Italian. “Because you speak English,” he said.
I told them my family’s history, my last name is “Nigro”, and that I had to, to meet Italians. I didn’t think I needed an explanation on this day.
It was a good thing they stopped for me. Some precarious areas of the trail we had to navigate via some iron cables. I must have skipped reading those details of the trail in my book.
I had planned to go all the way to Portofino. It meant going down into San Fruttuoso to sea level and then ascending again to eventually descend into Portofino. Graziano and Marco were ending their day at San Fruttuoso and invited me to take the ferry back to Camogli to join them for panini and bira.
Done. Not much effort had to go into convincing me to celebrate our day together with panini and bira. I was all for that.
And I had a crush on Marco, the one I could speak some English with.
When we arrived in Camogli, we went into the small café where they always ordered panini.
Marco went in to order, and soon came running out. His words, in Italian, accompanied by dramatic hand signals, I translated as, “An airplane flew into the White House, the White House!”
I had to say, “What?”
“Casa bianca!” he repeated a couple of times again.
That’s the thing about learning another language. You sometimes think what you’re hearing doesn’t make sense. That you don’t understand. That they hadn’t gotten the news right.
Graziano and Marco drove me back to my hotel – the day had gone that well – and Marco suggested I wait another day so he could hike Cinque Terre with me. I wasn’t sure, but we exchanged information and Italian kisses.
When I got back to my hotel room, I turned on the TV and saw the Twin Towers crumble into dust. Delusione di amore. My heart was broken.
I felt strange to be an American traveling overseas in the following days. Many people asked what I was doing in Europe. I was already there. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even fly home if I had needed to. A waiter at breakfast suggested drastic measures to solve the conflict, as if the death of more innocent people on the other side of the world would help. Most offered their sympathy to my country.
My brothers worried about me traveling alone when I left the USA. After the attack, they imagined me sitting on a beach burning my ticket home.
I flew to the Seychelles after a few more stops in Italia. I even met a scientist in the Seychelles who had been near New York City when the attack occurred and watched the city go up in a cloud of smoke and dust. He said flags flew everywhere along with flyers looking for the missing.
So much had changed on my return to the USA. I couldn’t even board my flight with an eyebrow tweezers in my carry-on. At home, uniformed men were holding machine guns in the airport.
I didn’t need a terrorist attack to embed the events of the day within the neural network of my brain. Graziano and Marco were two gracious, entertaining guys who indulged me for those few hours in their language and a bit of mine. I would have remembered that day anyway.
Graziano and Marco sent me a book of short stories in Italian for Christmas one year. And I did read it. Over time, the emails became less frequent. But about 10 years after that day, Marco wrote and asked if I remembered him.
“How could I forget you?” I wrote.
Watching the tragedy over and over on my TV alone in my room that day didn’t make it seem any more real. Someone asked me once how I felt after the attacks. I could fear for my life ending in some tragic event. It was harder to understand how one of the best days of my life could be one of the worst days in the lives of so many of my country men.
What I really thought about, was what if I had not taken that break from my career, to travel and to have that day. I thought and continue to think I was glad I wasn’t sitting in front of my computer on 11 September 2001 and that when I did go home, it was to San Francisco, a city I had always wanted to live in.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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