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Chapter 1: Mobility

I have been alone in purgatory in Portugal for nearly a week now. Our traveling family had not ventured from France in more than two years. So when we detected a small triangle of opportunity formed by the kids’ two-week winter school vacation, Covid numbers beginning to descend from the latest exhausting wave, and all five of us at the pinnacle of boosted Covid protection, we decided to jump on the chance to visit Eirik’s father and companion in southern Portugal—with an opportunistic tour of Lisbon in the mix. In the ongoing Covid-19 context, we knew that this trip was a gamble, so I planned a cautious itinerary and even bought supplementary travel insurance for the first time in our years of world travels. Perhaps it was all my effort to cover the contingencies that tempted the fates to throw me for a big loop.

Planning our trip felt to me like a fantasy exercise from the outset. After all this time of Covid confinement and learning to embrace a stationary life, the prospect of overseas exploration, adventure and a fresh taste of our former worldschooling life was surreal. Of course I jumped into research and preparation with two feet. We engaged in a week-long series of family dinnertime documentaries on Portuguese history, cuisine and the national treasure of mournful fado music, capped by an atmospheric Wim Wenders feature film, Lisbon Story. I solicited tips from friends who had recently visited Portugal (their own trip marked by the cautionary tale of a positive but thankfully symptom-free case of Covid that kept one person in quarantine). Even as I indulged in developing a detailed itinerary and we packed our bags, it was hard to believe that such mobility was truly going to happen.

We landed in Lisbon late on a Thursday evening with a simple plan: to enjoy three days in and around the capital city, followed by a drive South for three days of family and pretty beaches. We stayed in the historical neighborhood of Alfama, at a quaint third-floor AirBnB apartment in a building tucked into a hillside, accessed by foot via an ancient cobblestone staircase, and boasting a view of the city’s red-tiled rooftops all the way down to the bay. Friday was our day for Alfama and fado music—we meandered up and down vertiginous streets, oohing and awing at the variety of ornamental tile covering walls and buildings, followed a flock of sauntering peacocks through old castle grounds, studied up at the Fado Museum, and dined in an intimate fado house with live music and conversation with some incredible musicians. Saturday we took a streetcar to Belém for a seabreezy walk to historic monuments and for the neighborhood’s famous custard cakes, pasteis de nata, lusciously fragrant and warm from the oven. On Sunday we headed by train to the higher altitude, royal summer retreat town of Sintra to tour whimsical palaces and gardens under a magical, misty rain. It was strange and exciting to be traveling as a family again, and we were beginning to catch a lovely, lighthearted stride, as we returned to Lisbon chatting about the next phase of our journey starting tomorrow.

Control Z. It is the keyboard backtracking maneuver I would like to be able to make in real life for what happened next. As we hustled amidst crowds down some metro stairs to change trains, I slipped on a rain-wet step. My hand above the rail did not catch it, but I was going to find my footing anyway, and then I clearly wasn’t, but that was OK, and then crack! I was abruptly seated on the step with my left leg folded unnaturally beneath me. I knew immediately that my leg was broken and just as quickly held out hope that I was wrong, as I tried to breathe and considered standing. No dice. When one of the two bones below your knee breaks clean through, its pieces get all jangled with the other bone, and your foot feels like it is going to fall off. At least that is how it felt to me. It turns out that my mobility was indeed fleeting, but not for the reasons I had half-expected.