The Voice of the Boss

To take time off for the Camino, I first had to get permission from my boss.  It wouldn’t be easy.  My boss is what Yiddish speakers call a nudge.

The view from Jersey City.

What’s a camino? he said.

A camino, in Spanish, is, literally, a way, or a path.  Figuratively it can be a kind of path too.  The Camino de Santiago is a 1000-year-old pilgrimage route across northern Spain, and its most famous route, the Camino Frances, is just shy of 500 miles long, and you are supposed to walk it.

To do what? 

Walk it. 

The Spanish do have cars, or so I’ve heard.

Not the point.

But you hate walking.  It’s like standing, but slower.  Gives you backaches.  The worst is walking and standing, like in a museum.  You like the idea of museums, but you’d like them more if someone pushed you through them in a wheelbarrow.

Can’t I pretend the Camino is like hiking?

It’s not like hiking.  It’s relatively flat, other than the first day.  When we hike we burn our legs and our lungs, and our heart races, and then we get to be on the top of something.  We burn fat, build muscle, and win.  And that’s the American Way.

It’s true:  I’m a hiker at heart.  (It’s also true that my boss lacks any and all boundaries.  My boss being, of course, myself).  When I’m in shape, I’m a merciless hiker.  I used to go up Colorado’s Fourteeners at a clip of about a thousand vertical feet every forty minutes,

Ortstock in the background, 2009

for hours.  I powered my way up Braunwald’s Ortstock, in the Glarner Alps of Switzerland, and back, in only a handful of hours, in time for a late lunch; my aunt, who’d lived there for forty years, didn’t believe I’d actually found the top of it.  But walking has never interested me.  I’ve always wanted to get to the top of something, wanted to put my legs, lungs, and heart to the test.

I didn’t even know how long it took to walk 500 miles.  I had once accidentally biked over 80 miles, in Ireland (there was a certain map issue), in part of a day.  But then I hadn’t been able to sit down the next day.  I’d hiked to the top of 14,000-foot-plus Long’s Peak, outside of Denver, in a sixteen-hour gain of thousands of vertical feet.  But afterward I barely made it home without falling asleep at the wheel, even with the radio blaring and Chris Cash riding shotgun and encouraging me to stay awake thus:  zzzzzzzz.  I’d camped at Yosemite for a few days.  But we had driven there (Alejandro Pena-Prieto, Adam Weiss, Mark Thompson, and I) from San Francisco; only an ass would have walked it, I think we can all agree.

Turns out the Camino typically takes four to six weeks.

My boss spit out his coffee.  And he doesn’t even drink coffee.  Weeks?

Weeks.  But I’ll confess, I had envisioned the usual vacation length:  two weeks.

That’s because you are an American, my boss said, and that’s what Americans do:  we work.  96% of the year.

We spend as much time at work as we think the economy requires, and we seem to think the economy needs us not to practice any real family values by actually being with family, or to take the time out for the physical and mental rest that would reduce our health care costs and make us more productive.

With one exception that took place between jobs, I hadn’t taken a vacation longer than two weeks since, well, since I entered the working world at the ripe age of 25.  I had hid out in law school as long as they would let me, but after three years they asked me to leave.  They even threw a party, gave me a costume and a hat and let me speak on whatever came to mind.

And ever since then, vacations got two weeks, max.  Two weeks in Germany and Switzerland in 1993.  Two more, adding Austria, in 1997.  A week in Spain in 1998.  Twelve days in Switzerland later that year.  Many other trips to Switzerland or Italy or both, 13 days or less.  Long weekenders to Canada.  Fourteen days in Israel.

And that’s just the half of it.  As I said in my last post, I thought the timing of the trip could not have been worse.

I had spent well over a year pushing a boulder up a hill to get divorced.  It seemed every part of my being was straining to push the process along, so that I could move on.  What could have been accomplished in a six- (or eight-) hour negotiation seemed to me to have taken only slightly less time than the universe has spent cooling since the Big Bang.  Fourteen grueling months of weeks without end, the longest I think I’ve ever waited for anything, the most I’ve ever wanted anything.  I couldn’t start my new life soon enough – which is another way of saying that I was resisting the present with all my might.

I was determined, when it was over, to stand on the summit I’d been climbing toward and look in the direction of my new life, and then to begin to head in that direction.  I was in for a big surprise.

The False Summit

Few undertakings in life require the willpower of mountaineering.  You may be freezing, your legs noodles, burning, nearly useless, your lungs seared by bellows-like breathing at altitude.  You don’t think you can go one more step, but you keep going because you can see the summit, it’s there, just ahead, always in front of you even as it plays hide-and-seek behind clouds and even its own lower flanks, and you tell yourself you will last until you reach the top.  You can last until that final step, and then you will have no more left, no mas.  You will be spent, but you will have conquered your summit.

And every mountaineer knows the crushing disappointment of reaching the longed-for peak, utterly spent, only to realize, from its improved perspective, that now, visible at last, is the real summit, and it’s so far away, impossibly far away.

As my divorce became final, I realized that my own longed-for summit remained tantalizingly in the distance.  Getting divorced, I realized, is just part of the battle, or, to be less martial about it, it’s only one step in the transition.  Once you’ve wrestled the past into submission and tied it up neatly, there’s still the fairly momentous matter of what to do next.

Who am I now?  Where shall I find myself?  With whom shall I surround myself?

Are you asking me? my boss said, bemused.  Of course he was useless on such things.

The questions were large, and the answers remained as out of reach as the actual summit I could see, far, far up ahead.

Somehow, I kept taking one step after another.  I made dozens of trips to Home Depot and furniture stores and fixed up the house in which I was living, in Bend, turning it into a vacation rental with some promise.  I put it on the market for sale.  I continued to run Feroce Coaching and Hot Blue Coaching, as well as to share the management of Charles River Recruiting.  With strangers living in my house and paying me to go on vacation, I found myself trying on Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle.  I slowly cut through the desperate procrastination impulse that did.  Not.  Want.  To.  Do.  Two years of back taxes.  All very slowly, or so it felt to me.

The good news was that all of this work required only a laptop and a phone.  The bad news was that, because I work for myself, no one pays me when I don’t work.  I was nervous about not working for over a month.

And who will run the vacation rental while you’re traipsing around Spain?  Someone would need to run the vacation rental. 

I hadn’t thought of that.

Of course you hadn’t.  Even if you find a person, you’ll have to train that person.  A salary will cut into the profits.  Who’s going to answer potential renters’ questions by email and phone asap, so as to land them and their lucre, and who’s going to book them and send them contracts and run their credit cards and send them follow-up emails with instructions?  Something will go wrong with the vacation rental.  The cleaners aren’t very reliable either. 

I was unhappy with the idea of tenants complaining, which seemed to be as important to some vacationers as the actual vacation itself.

You won’t be able to take new coaching clients.  You’ll make less money.  You just took off two weeks, in May, to go to Israel!  How will you coach even your existing clients?  You can’t guarantee them connectivity from the road in rural Spain, and making appointments is one of the sine qua nons of coaching.  You’ll also need a new phone, a Europe-ready phone.  You’ll need to find some kind of wireless capability for your computer, so you can get emails without relying upon hostels in rural Spain.

Already exhausted by my haul up the mountain of divorce, already hyperventilating from the realization that the peak for which I’d been straining was really only a false summit, even overwhelmed and at times depressed, I simply hadn’t the energy to contemplate all of it.

My boss, which is to say my self, was just shaking his head.

How are you going to do everything you need to do before September 16?

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please

Up until very recently, I didn’t really want to go on the Camino.  But it did not matter what I wanted to do or not do.  I was going.  And on the eve of my departure, I may have finally figured out why.

Surely there is something else to do.

For weeks this thought – a boss thought, if you will – has plagued me.  Over the last few years – marriage and assumption of step-parent status, move to a new city (Seattle), start-up craziness and coaching, drafting a book proposal and writing a book, the decline of the relationship and the separation-cum-endless-divorce-process – I’d become quite adept at watching my thoughts.  I realized I was catching this thought, or more likely what I call a wordless impulse, more and more often.

My to-do list had seemed endless for so long that, excepting brief moments, such as in yoga or skiing, by this summer I found it nearly impossible to relax, to quiet the jumpiness of my mind and the sense that there was something else I should, I must, be doing.  Once I told my mother I’d join her on her pilgrimage, my already long to-do list threatened to suffocate me under its weight.

On top of everything else, you are going to plan a 500-mile walk and how to manage your life from rural Spain?

Always something else to do, to be doing, and yet to what end I was now rather far less sure.  I thought of Dante’s opening lines to The Inferno, “In the middle of my life’s path, I found myself lost in a dark forest with no straight path I could see anywhere.”  (M.L. Rosenthal translation, one of about 20 quite different variations).

In the middle of my life’s path, then, I found myself on a dark-blue couch in Jersey City, New Jersey.  The couch belonged to my good friend from law school, Adam Weiss, and it was during a month in Jersey City, having run like hell, for weeks, not just to climb but to move the mountains between me and leaving Bend, and my house, and the money I put into it in a triumph of hope over experience, that the clamor in my mind began at last to subside, and I decided I knew at last the reason I was walking across Spain.

It was time to slow down.  I was going to Spain to slow down.

It wasn’t I who actually decided to walk across Spain.  That was decided, in a manner of speaking, for me.  My mother, whose ovarian cancer of a decade ago appears to have returned in unknown measure, told me in July that walking St. Jacobsweg, as she initially called it, was something she very much wanted to do before she had to drag her thoughts to the abyss of surgery, chemo, and radiation.  She asked if I would come along.

I’m not even sure there was any process of thinking, of intellection.  I pictured a two-week trip.

“Yes,” I said.  What are you going to do?  Mom has cancer.  Mom has a dream.

Yes.

But I didn’t know why she wanted to do it.  As the wonderful Karen Armstrong, historian of religion, points out in her fine little book A Short History of Myth, we are meaning-seeking creatures.  We constantly crave and make meaning in our lives.  If we can’t make something meaningful, we can’t get excited, or motivated.  It would take me a few months to rationalize my “yes”, as we humans must always do, by arriving at a bit of reasoning that explained why I would want to walk in rural Spain.

Two months ago, I just said, “Why this walk?  You’ve never mentioned it before.”

“I saw it in a German documentary,” she said.  “It looked like a wonderful experience.”

I would rather she had asked if I would accompany her into the Alps.  In any of the several countries in which they appear.  Mountains, especially the Alps, are chock-full of meaning, and memories, for both of us.  In contrast to walking, which I didn’t like at all, I loved hiking.

The Dolomites would be good too.  You could hike from rifugio to rifugio, gorging yourself on pasta in rabbit sauce, spending the night, and working it all off at altitude the next day.

I persisted.  “But does it have any meaning to you?  You’re not even Catholic” – the camino is a 1000-year-old Catholic pilgrimage route – “and I know you don’t believe it’s some kind of penance you need to do in remission of sins.”

I certainly hoped not.  Overcoming disease is a lot harder when you believe, as many people do, as society has often told us, that you are sick because there is something wrong with you – something defective in your character, your self, your soul.  In effect, that you are sick because you have sinned.  This is a line of thinking most famously indulged in by the Hebrew prophets, who spent a great deal of time lecturing suffering Israelites that they were so miserable beneath the boots of centuries of oppressors, that God was repeatedly breaching his promise to throw off the oppressors and make them into a great nation, because they were not obedient enough.  (This is more contract law than theology, the idea being that God was not breaching the contract because the other side – none of whom had themselves agreed to any contract, come to think of it — already had).

They were bad, so they must suffer.  This simple equation is as true of how Judeo-Christian societies still think today as e is equal to m times c squared.  (Following her own bout with cancer, Susan Sontag wrote a whole book, Illness as a Metaphor, in an attempt to refute the former equation).  Is it coincidence, I wonder, that we speak of both sins and cancer as things that can go into, or be put in, remission?

In any event, Mom said the Camino would have enough meaning for her.  (You can see from her passion on this blog that she’s found plenty of purpose).  Over time, through conversations with her and by reading her blog posts, I would begin to understand what it meant for her, and some of the risks of the meaning she has invested it with.

Just one problem.  No, two problems.  First, walking across Spain didn’t have any inherent meaning for me.

Second, it threw a major wrench into my post-divorce life and plans, which included the weighty, time-consuming undertakings of accepting that I would suffer a big loss on selling my house, actually selling my house, continuing to advertise and rent it until it was sold, doing two years of back taxes held up by the divorce, running my coaching businesses, deciding where in the world I wanted to live, selling furniture and a Land Rover (bumper sticker, with Union Jack:  “All of the parts falling off of this car are of the finest British craftsmanship”), packing, and moving to a new city and self.  My plans also appeared to include worrying about all these things, as well as taxes owed, credit card debts, loss on the sale of the house (I know, join the party), and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of a do-over.

In short, for the first two months after Mom told me about the Camino, I thought a walk through Spain, for several weeks, starting in mid-September, was spectacularly bad timing.  As I’ll explain further in a later post, it was awfully inconvenient.

But in the two months since I agreed to go, I have been learning the truth of a quote (or paraphrase) from Joseph Campbell that has run through my mind, and remained there, arms crossed and a knowing smile on its face, for weeks:

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to be ready for the life that is waiting for us.

It’s a beautiful summer day in Seattle, a city that’s particularly beautiful on beautiful summer days.  I’m sitting on the sidewalk of Espresso Vivace, a coffee shop across the street from the flagship REI store north of downtown.  For those of you who don’t know, REI began in Seattle, and it’s based here, and the main store is situated on a block that’s like a forest, complete with waterfalls and trails, in the middle of the city.

With the help of a phalanx of knowledgeable REI staffers, including a good fellow named Ron who lavished at least an hour on my wanderings in the store, I spent over three hours and six hundred clams on a good portion of all that I’ll carry in Spain. It makes me wonder what people do who hail from countries without REIs.

It’s expensive, traveling light!

Everything but the pack is super-light, and you pay extra for the technology that makes things light. Here’s a list, from memory, of what I bought to take along, and why:

The centerpiece, a 48-liter backpack, weighing in, according to the Camino scuttlebutt I have read, at a relatively hefty 3 pounds 10 ounces.  Some Caminoderos boast of packs under a pound, which sounds suspiciously like wearing a g-string.  But I’m carrying a heavy laptop (4-6 pounds) too, and I decided that, perversely, a heavy pack with appropriately padded shoulder and waist straps was the best thing to support all the increased weight.  If the recommended limit to carry on one’s back is about 20 pounds, you can see I’m starting heavy.

A camera pack.  I don’t know what most walkers do for cameras, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life looking at pictures taken on a cell phone camera, or any other camera that fits in a shirt pocket or can be skipped across a pond.  Those cameras are to photography what iTunes files are to real music files:  a pale imitation of the real thing.  Fitting the camera pack on the front of the backpack took some carabiners and some doing, but with Ron’s help I think I found a solution.  Only testing the contraption around Bend, and maybe New Jersey, will tell.

Convertible, wicking walking pants and two fitted, short-sleeved smartwool shirts.  I love smartwool.  I’ve skied for two winters in it, and it not only wicks away moisture but, unlike synthetic fabrics, you simply can’t stink it up, no matter how hard you try.

Five-toed wool socks to go with my Vibram FiveFingers footwear.  That’s right:  I’m not wearing boots, as all the Camino chatrooms insist you must do.  I’m wearing the equivalent of padded rubber gloves on my feet.  If God had meant us to walk long distances with our feet all enclosed he’d not have given us balancing toes and high arches.  More and more evidence is showing that our ancestors ran after game for unimaginable distances (like 100 miles – the whole tribe, old men, young, and women with infants), and that our bodies are perfectly formed – that is, sans shoes – for running barefoot.  See Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run for a fascinating read; it’s one of the most provocative and fun-to-discuss books I’ve read in years.

A heating element and metal cup for tea, coffee, and hot toddies.  It wouldn’t have occurred to me to get this, but Mom mentioned it.  She probably needs her morning coffee and doesn’t want to rely on the hostels.

A compression sack for my mummy-style sleeping bag (probably over 10 years old, my REI aide told me it’s still pretty light; it’s warm to 20 degrees F).  Camino vets recommend a large backpack, like 60 liters, but I decided to strap the 16-liter compressed sleeping bag to the outside of the pack and save on the internal space.