Sleeping on haystacks is misunderstood. It is not only tramps and thieves that find refuge amongst the mice and the mules, but also pilgrims, wanderers, and occasionally a clean-cut, suit and tie sales dog.

How I went from slipping on a suit and tie in the morning to waking alongside a mule with hay shooting out of my ears is a story that begins on a rooftop in the casbah.

Besides a couple of mangy-looking cats with ballooned bellies, Levi and I were the only sorry inhabitants of the cheapest hostel in Marrakech. The North African sun made our room feel as hot as an oven if an oven could ever get hot enough to melt itself. Our window was the size of a Bible (the travel-friendly edition), and the creaking fan in the corner couldn’t spin fast enough to cough any of the stale air towards our feverishly hot bodies. We were perspiring profusely into the mattresses that had drunk the sweat of every other sorry traveler that had passed through this wretched dungeon.

This is how we arrived at the rooftop. It was the only place in the entire building where you weren’t guaranteed to be slow roasted.

In a desperate attempt to pass our time less miserably, Levi and I began arguing about who we thought were the best travel writers.

He mentioned Kerouac, Bourdain, and Pico Iyer. I sided with Walt Whitman, Rolf Potts, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Levi didn’t know Fermor, so I introduced them.

“Levi, meet Fermor: An English chap who left his country in 1933 and walked to Istanbul (Constantinople then) with nothing but a knapsack stuffed with dried bread. He was 18 when he left.”

“Cool.” he said with an uninterested sigh. “Shame you couldn’t do it today.”

“Why not?”

“Come on man! Give me a break. And pass the water why don’t ya!”

He took a swig and made the face a child does when trying a lemon.

“Eghh! Where did you fill this bottle? What? The shower? Dude!”

He took another swig, and we traded spots for the shade.

“Levi, be serious. Why can’t it be done today?”

“For one, you have bigger highways and faster cars. Finding a safe route would be difficult. But that’s not even the hard part. People have changed, man. No one is living slow anymore. This world is about efficiency, production, money. Haven’t you noticed? Nobody cares about anyone but themselves. And to walk that far alone, you’d have to get help from strangers practically every day. I mean, where do you think you’d sleep? There’s not going to be a cheap, cat-infested hostel every 20 kilometers. You’d be like, I don’t know, having to ask farmers to sleep in their barns or something!”

A smile cracks over my lips as I try kicking the hay back into a shape somewhat resembling a mound. That conversation replays almost daily on my walk across the Balkans.

I push back the barn door, careful not to rouse the spotted pig, and walk through the wet grass towards the stout and solid farm house, which is already puffing a stream of blue smoke through its crooked chimney.

Without packing a tent for the walk, rainfall meant I’d be knocking on doors until a good samaritan offered me a couch (or in this case, a haystack). That’s how I came to meet my host, Željko.

This is the first time seeing him in daylight. If you couldn’t see the decades of hard labor through his misty eyes, you’d notice it in his physique. He’s built just like his house. Smokes like it, too. The table was set with a steaming pot of deliciously dark sludge with the consistency of wet cement — commonly known as Serbian coffee — a basket full of thick slices of white bread, a jar of homemade pickles, and a plate of hot dogs.

Even after 700 miles, accepting help is still hard for me. Asking for it has gotten easier. You can get used to scared looks and doors shutting in your face. That’s understandable. Certainly more understandable than a stranger welcoming you into their home and feeding you.

This isn’t how I thought the world worked. Not so long ago, I was clean-shaven in a suit, being lectured by another guy in a fancier suit. As of this morning in South Serbia, my face hasn’t seen the sharp end of a razor in what feels like years, my outfit looks like something a forest ranger-turned-hobo would wear, and I’m sitting across from a friendly farmer who keeps pushing a plate of hot dogs towards me every time I show signs of being full.

He doesn’t know me. He won’t see me again. We can’t even communicate with words. We’ve fallen back on the true lingua franca: a complex system of grunts, nods, and photos from our pasts.

And yet, he has shown me more kindness than I’ve shown my sister’s boyfriend of three years. Okay, maybe that’s not too hard, but you get the idea.

It doesn’t make sense. Not when you were programmed in the pragmatic world of the West where time is money and money is worth more than experiences. My sales professor (the one in the nice suit) used to begin each lecture by saying: “Congrats, you’ve lasted another day in the world of eat or be eaten. Now flip to page…”

Asking for help, let alone accepting it, was inconceivable. Vulnerability didn’t exist in my vocabulary. It couldn’t. Vulnerability was weakness and weakness is what separated the top sales performers from the chum fighting over bottom-barrel crumbs.

This mentality plagued the beginning of my walk. Unwilling to accept the kindness of strangers, I alienated myself from serendipity: the true adventure of the road. I’d strut through villages in Northern Croatia (where the journey began) with my wool hat pulled low and a toothpick sticking out the side of my mouth, as if I was casted for a Clint Eastwood movie.

Kids would run up to their fence line to watch me pass. One of them once called out “Indiana Jones!” before darting back inside. Grandmas in head scarves would peer at me with curious eyes from behind window panes. The bold ones would walk right up to me to ask where I was headed and if I needed anything.

I can’t remember how many of them I disregarded, by saying I couldn’t stay or accept their gifts of apples, sausages, or homemade loaves of bread wrapped in parchment paper.

While I no longer resembled him in face, the suit-wearing, sales-chasing version of myself still dominated my mind. He believed that accepting help would cheapen the experience. It would make the success no longer his own.

After forcing down my fourth hot dog, Željko finally seems satisfied with my appetite. We shake hands and I start down the type of long driveway that all farms have. He’s still at his doorstep when I glance over my shoulder, so I wave my hat over my head and offer one last grunt, a wild, hollering grunt, to bid farewell.

My destination is an ancient Greek monastery overlooking the Aegean Sea. I picked it because it seemed like the best place to close a journey of solitude. It’s about 300 miles away from Željko’s place which should take me no more than 25 days, leaving room for a couple spontaneous side quests. My feet have hardened where they used to blister, and my shoulders no longer feel the weight of the bag. I let my mind wander with the sound of my steps.

The man in the suit is still here with me. He’s telling me to walk faster, longer, further. He wants to rush the journey. Treat it like everything else in his life by finding a way to strangle it into a clean, measurable bullet point on his resume:

“By walking this far in this little time through this many places, I improved my cross-cultural communication and problem solving skills.”

But what was that breakfast with Željko worth? How did it feel to sleep on a haystack? How are you going to slap your silly numbers onto experiences like those?

As soon as one quantifies the journey, they sacrifice the integrity of the internal story for the fleeting validation that may or may not come from comparing it with others. You can sit in any hostel around the world and witness this phenomenon:

“You hitched for your first time? Not bad. Have you ever tried walking 1,000 miles?”

“Only 20 countries? Ha! You’re just getting started.”

“You said you’ve been traveling for six months? You shouldn’t be offering backpacker advice until you reach the two-year mark, at least.”

Meanwhile, they condemn all 9-5 workers for their self-destructive pursuit of status.

I step off the road and yank a stick free from a pile of wooden debris. Searching for a walking stick gives me such a thrill that every evening, no matter how much I liked it, I retire the day’s walking stick so I can locate another one the next day, and the next. I tap it against the roadside to knock the mud off. It feels good, sturdy and light.

It brings back memories of childhood summers. The days where all you needed for an adventure was a stick, maybe a mound of dirt, too.

The more I walk, the more I believe those days aren’t totally lost. I can feel my imagination returning. Maybe it’s because I’m surrounded by nature. Or maybe it’s because I decided to walk unplugged.

The man in the suit was so obsessed with not wasting time that whenever he ate or showered or drove, he’d listen to some form of “productive” content. No wonder he never had bursts of creativity or interesting ideas of his own. He didn’t leave any space for his imagination to breathe.

The stick’s handle is becoming more comfortable. This one will be hard to retire. A fantasy of mine is to one day retrace the route and unsheath my old swords,as I call them, from their hidden resting places.

The next village is 15 miles away, and I haven’t the slightest clue where I’ll sleep. There’s an itch to book a place online. To have more security. 50 days ago, I probably would’ve succumbed to that thought. Now that I know where it’s coming from, who it’s coming from, I’m able to let it pass.

No matter how far I walk, I know he’ll always be with me. I’ve come to accept that. I’ve even accepted him for what he is: a man scared of vulnerability.

The world has changed. Levi was right about that. The modern scale of comparison drives most of us into a maddening pursuit of more. Typically, more of the things that we can quantify. 

But, like the child within, I believe that goodness still exists in everyone. In fact, I know that to be true. Željko proved it. The only thing required of us is that we trust that inherent goodness.

That we open ourselves to the possibility of sleeping on haystacks.

***

This story was first published by Intrepid Times and awarded runner-up for their travel writing competition in June 2024.