He made it! Nicholas Crane succeeded in walking along Europe's continental divide from Northeastern Spain to Istanbul. He survived cold, storms, hunger, sheepdogs, and Eastern Europe, and travelled every inch on foot, except for one unavoidable ferry crossing.
The book seemed as long as his journey, though it was never uninteresting. It started off with a great deal of humour but the charm declined as the kilometres accumulate. The sudden change in living conditions as he entered Eastern Europe was a shock, and got worse the further he went. It got to the point that he had to descend to the valleys for the home stretch because the mountains were just too dangerous (which is saying a lot for a man who seems constitutionally oblivious to personal danger). A combination of post-Communist economic collapse, epidemic drunkenness, and the Balkan conflicts made the latter part of his journey a disappointment. I think he had hoped to find peoples untouched by the modernity of Western Europe, but instead he found people broken and helpless after losing their traditional way of life to communist collectivism and then losing their socialist support system after the fall of the Soviet Union. The old independent ways of living off the land had been almost entirely erased from memory and corruption prevented the people from progressing under capitalism. They were trapped in a sort of no-man's-land.
However, the book is not a political treatise. It's theme is really Crane's personal respect and fondness for mountain peoples. He visited many historic sites, mostly battlefields where mountain peoples fought for (or against) countries whose height-of-land boundaries often cut their territories in half. Being a lowland person I never realized how mountain cultures are particular victims of the artificiality of national borders. These boundaries have changed so often in Europe that Crane used ethnicity and geography to identify the people he met, rather than nationality. To emphasize this, the maps in the book don't have borders, though they do have some country names floating around in the lowlands. I pretty much had to give up trying to guess which country he was in once he got into Eastern Europe.
The writing is very good, though Crane had an annoying habit of not explaining all the foreign terms that peppered his story. Most of them are the names of objects specific to the various cultures he encountered so you're not likely to find them in an English dictionary. Much of the book is about his day to day struggles to navigate, survive the weather, and find food. He had his fair share of ailments, doubt, and near-disasters, but for Crane these are just the price of admission. His love of the outdoors and the freedom it gives is really what he has in common with mountain peoples. On the last mountain peak of his journey, he had this final thought about what drew him to mountains and to the people who know their secrets:
The view from this colossal pyramid was as wild as anything I'd seen. And in the time I spent on that arid summit I realized that I could never live without wilderness, and that to destroy it and its myths would be to remove an essential part of the human psyche. The need went beyond an uplifted horizon; the need was in the storms and long dark forests as much as in the Arcadian corners where brooks bubbled by velvet turf.
