Monthly Archives: September 2011

Walking into the Future: Pamplona to Puente La Reina

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We spent a few hours yesterday in a café-bar in Pamplona.  The woman tending bar there thought I looked like a certain actor.  I left to get a haircut.  Several places offered them for 30 Euros, but I found one that was available for only 18 if you were willing to get your cheek cut with a razor.  When I got back to the bar, the bartender said, “You are very handsome today.”  Today.  Mom thought this was just grand.

Morning, Zubiri.  Is it really necessary that pilgrimages begin before first light?  I can just as well do my penance in daylight.

“Well,” said Julio, from his bed, “there was no concert,” said Julio, “last night.”

“Oh yes there was,” Mom said.  “David and my son.  My son snored all night.  I was hoping someone would adopt him.”

An ever-smiling woman from Salt Lake, Lela, heard of my mother’s struggles to get some healthy food and handed her some packets of greenness, some kind of dietary supplement.  She refused to take payment.  She asked to see the calf.

“Got some mental blocks today, eh?”  She was under the impression that my calf issue was, in addition to being psychosomatic, something new.

“If I’ve got mental problems they pre-date today,” I said.  “But I was very handsome yesterday.”

She began to massage the calf.  “Oh, it’s very hot,” she said.  “You do have some inflammation there.”  After a bit, she hugged and kissed Mom, saying, “You’re so cool!” and took her pack and was off.  I don’t think she had stopped smiling since the day before.

We said goodbye to the turtles in the pond, to the grounds of the albergue in some disrepair, and the hopeful, half-finished second-floor addition that had been interrupted when the Jesus y Maria albergue in nearby Pamplona came about.  And then we left Cizur Menor.

Stiff and tender.  The left calf, of course, and now a flash of pain in whatever that part of the foot is called that’s at the very top.  Thankfully it was on the same foot, so one limp took care of both of them.  So I had that going for me.  We had 19 kilometers to cover.

It was beautiful country.  It put me in mind of both Northern California and Tuscany.  Once again we were blessed by the weather gods.  Stick, stick, stick.  I did some walking meditation as I’d learned it from the Shambhala Center in Portland, attending to the feeling of the feet hitting the ground, the way they rolled, the feel in my ankles and knees and hips.  It was good.

“Walking into the future”.  A nice thought, that of walking toward Santiago and arriving in my future – with firmer ideas of where

I’d live, for example, and what writing projects I might do — but it’s still just a story, not a reality.  I have thought many times that I have seen or felt the last of something, or someone, and been wrong.  For example, coming here I thought certain things were behind me.  But there last night, defeating all storylines, was an email from someone who shall remain nameless, declaring me responsible for all the bad that had happened in the world in the last half-century, with the possible exceptions of the Kennedy assassinations, the modern concept of jihad, and U.S. representative Michelle Bachmann.

So sometimes I was not in the present, the only place joy is found.  Sometimes I was in the past, and at others, I was in the future.

Ungrateful . . . take responsibility . . . victim . . . ow . . . foot . . . get those personality disorders under control . . . hungry . . . interesting landscape . . . wind turbines . . . like north of San Francisco . . . OKCupid . . .  New York . . . thirsty . . . chocolate . . .

Mom sang German lullabyes.  I filmed one of them.  “I used to sing that when you were young,” she said.  “Before I started yelling.”

“Ah, you didn’t yell that much.”

“I know.  I was just always so stressed out.  I always wanted it to be later on so I couldn’t be in the moment.  ‘If it was only ten years from now,’ I’d say.  Now I’d do anything to get those years back.”  Stick, stick, stick.  “But I could never have imagined in a million years I’d be here.”  She then gave thanks to her beloved brother Gunter, now deceased fourteen years, and his wife Elfriede.  “Because Gunter earned it, and Elfriede saved it and then passed some of it on to me when she left.”

 

I asked Julio about women.

“Well,” he said, as if approaching a subject of some enormity.  “I am using –“ he stopped and searched for a word.  “I have been using—“

“In English we say hookers,” I prompted.

“No, not hookers.  That was in Cuba.  Recently I put an advertisement for someone to travel around the world.  For one year.  Man or woman.  Most of the responses I received were from women.  And they were not so interested in traveling as in finding a husband.  So that’s that.  Maybe I will try again.”

“But what about dating?”

“I tried twice and it did not work.”

“I don’t mean Marie Anne.  Dating now.”

What he said was complicated, but it seemed to involve his lack of interest in women who either spent all day before the mirror or wanted men to repay several hundred years of chauvinism immediately.  “And when they start talking about a family I go the other way,” he said.

“Do you think you could be what we call a commitment-phobe, Julio?”

“Maybe,” he said.  “It could be.”

“I used to think I was.  I thought the solution would be to get married.”

“Of course,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

 

Puente La Reina.  The public albergue charges only 4 euros, and we sleep in rooms of eight.  I met a social worker from Tel Aviv, Schlomit, who had heard of the Camino only two months ago, a young Brit, Jethro, who’s been walking for three months, from Britain, and an Italian, Marco, who runs a hostel in southern Brazil.  Mom and I explained to Jethro that English accents make everything sound more intelligent and more funny.  And he was in fact quite witty.  He said he was out of money, so I invited him to join us for dinner with the understanding that he would entertain.  He didn’t disappoint. Marie Anne had somehow turned rice and mushrooms and other ingredients into something like a great risotto.  Marco also joined us for dinner.  He and Jethro and I watched YouTube videos of James Brown, and then we all went to bed.

Real Obstacles

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I don’t mind pain.  It’s damage that concerns me.

Today I seem to have struck a new collective bargaining agreement with the unions that operate my right calf, but the left is implacably opposed to my designs.  In past days it would warm up once I began walking, until at some point I usually could barely feel it anymore.  But today the soreness and tightness persisted for all of Julio’s and my 5K walk from Pamplona to Cizur Menor.  I suppose it’s possible to limp another 470 miles.  I can manage some pain and inconvenience.  But is it wise?  Could I be doing permanent damage?

Pamplona

Pamplona is a fine little town of around 200,000 people.  The old part of town has narrow cobbled streets and a cathedral with fine examples of medieval art.  The other jewel is the Plaza del Castillo, surrounded by fine buildings with metal work and balconies reminiscent of New Orleans.

Hemingway wrote of the town with great affection.  He is the one who drew worldwide attention to the Festival of St. Fermin, also known as the Running of the Bulls.  The places where he ate and drank – and Hemingway seemed to enjoy only writing about shooting and killing more than he loved writing about eating and drinking – have been prominently marked by their owners.  We tried to have a morning coffee in the Iruna Café, full of elaborate carving and glazed mirrors, but its announced 8a.m. opening time was apparently aspirational.  At about 8:20 I jokingly suggested that Julio alert some nearby policia, who came over to take a look into the café after he called to them.  I was hoping they would batter down the door, or at least drag the owner out of bed, but after a brief conversation they departed.

Marie Anne said I spoke Spanish with a South American accent, and spoke, or maybe it’s more correct to say pronounced, French with — well, she didn’t have a word, she just glowered and mimicked spitting out the words.  “Very grrrr!”

“It’s Vichy French,” I said.  She burst out laughing.

Mom’s energy was quickly waning.  She felt dizzy and lacked the energy to walk.  Was it because of the diet here?  “They think ham is a vegetable,” she told a young peregrina from Germany yesterday.  She’s expressing a lot of surprise at how different her energy is compared to when she’s able to eat her healthy diet.  Once we were in Cizur, though, Marie Anne, who was born in Morocco, made a wonderful meal of cous-cous mixed with salad.  I took her suggestion of adding salt and cumen.

In Pamplona… no bull

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Finally got Internet and permission to use lap top. What can I say about the past few days? I absolutely loved Saint Jean Pied de Port. I was in high spirits with looking, tasting, and walking up and down the town. Lovely flowers everywhere, cute shops and tiny cafes. Walking the cobblestone streets on a beautiful autumn day, well, my cells were happy. Then, a lovely meal with our friends in a lovely restaurant.

When I first laid eyes on the Pyrenees, I thought, “My, how very gorgeous.”  Then I noticed how steep it climbed and my heart sank. I have to go up there? With this pack? O.K. then. Let’s start. It’s one thing to read about it and see pictures but quite another to actually having to do it. It’s very easy to have courage from afar.  I set one foot and the next onto the path.  On and on and on. Mist was rising and the surroundings were green and dotted with cows and houses. I stopped to catch my breath. After a couple of hours climbing, my spine was on fire, pushing Quasimodo (my name for my backpack) into my intestines. My thighs were shaking, my throat parched and dry and my feet hurt.

That was only the beginning. (Did I mention my bloody hemorrhoids???)  I told Carrie, who was soldiering on and trying not to moan, that we had to remember how eager we were to do this. On and on, up and up. It couldn’t possibly turn into Jacob’s Ladder? Past cows and sheep, past other Peregrinos. Suddenly, my right boot hurt and my sole was on fire. Changed to my sandals, drank water, walked on. One more steep and rocky incline and finally, we thought it was done. We were on the way down. Basically that was correct. Except this “down” was miles of a very steep path, in the middle of a huge forest.

I knew I could not rest because I could never get back up. Carrie was getting exhausted as well but I told her we had to get out of this forest as we had no more food nor water. We could not rest. Well, she got her second wind at that and walked past me. Finally, we saw sunlight and there stood Julio. I nearly cried with relief but was too tired to produce tears.

We had lost Eileen somewhere but could not wait. This was an 11 hour and 21 minute long trek over rough and difficult terrain. BUT… we hmade it. I saw grown men cry and here we were. Carrie, my brave teen, and I.

I think there’s a law against serving people food earlier than 8:30 P.M.  Well, tapas excepted. I can’t deal with those anymore. I am soo missing my greens and fresh fruits.

I can feel my energy seeping out. Bread, carbs, eggs, fries and then… again. Walking 22 km yesterday from Roncesvalles to Zubiri was not too hard as I had sent Quasimodo along. Here, I will state, that I had absolutely no separation anxiety.

This Basque country is beautiful. Some of the camino was sun dappled forest and great paths along the hill side. Some other people joined and we had nice conversation, usually in 4 languages, until we were in Zubiri. At one point I heard a snappy, lively tune out of an open window and I broke out in some happy dance steps.

Our refugio was in an old monastery, clean and bright with a very nice kitchen. We also got to wash our clothes in the machine and not by hand, as well as a nice shower. Except the water turned off every 25 seconds or so. I guess that’s the way to save energy. As we went to the kitchen, our Korean friends were there already, cooking their rice and veggies. Our friend Julio fixed two huge pots of lentils and we all sat around a big table with more people from Israel, Ireland, Belgium. What a lovely, fun-filled dinner. We laughed so hard we cried over Julio’s rabbit antics.

 

For photos, remember to check out the albums on our Camino Not Chemo Facebook Page.

Roncesvalles to Zubiri to Pamplona

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Waking Up in Roncesvalles

Roncesvalles, Spain.  Wednesday.  The monastery’s automated klieg lights flipped on at 6a.m.  Like a small child, I thought if I put my hands over my eyes, the lights would go away.  The showers operated on a timer set to 25 seconds.  For those of us reprobates who could not actually shower in 25 seconds, it was necessary to depress the temperature control to earn another 25 seconds.  I found this was much easier if I stood with my back against the control and simply leaned back every so often.  I did this several hundred times, until I’d had a proper shower.  There was nothing to be done about the lights that turned off after 60 seconds.

For breakfast at the restaurant that had turned us away the night before, we had café con leche and bread with butter and apricot jam – the only thing on the menu.  Mom said, “I was in so much pain last night I don’t think I got to sleep before two or three o’clock.  How did you sleep, Carrie?”

“Like a rock,” she said.  “Once I get down, there’s no waking me up.”

Zubiri

We caught the 9:20 bus to Zubiri, where we found an unsmiling and unhelpful woman at the public albergue in town.  She was cleaning, so I figured she was the cleaning woman and not the public face of an albergue heavily trafficked by pilgrims.  We were then lucky to find on the street several extremely helpful fellows who gave us all sorts of information.  One was local, one from Catalonia.  We walked to the one item of interest in the town, a bridge that had brought pilgrims from the Camino to the town for nearly a millennium, though the bridge had been rebuilt in the 14th century and repeatedly thereafter.  (A guidebook said the Romans had probably had a bridge in the same place.)

I remembered my disappointment upon learning that the Great Wall of China was not as old as its origins – it has been built and rebuilt up to the present time, so that you could never point to a piece of wall and say, “Look, someone fashioned that with his bare hands nine thousand years ago.”  It might have been built or repaired in 2005.

In the village we found a bar where Mom was able to get some eggs, salad, and patatas, which were actually in French-fried form.  She didn’t eat them.  I went to the bathroom.  Ten seconds after I sat down, the automatic light went off.  The toilet was a good twelve feet from the light switch.

We returned to the albergue to find the cleaning woman, now changed out of her blue cleaning outfit, presiding over the registration desk, and not noticeably more oriented to customer service than before.  We paid only 6 Euros, though, which made me happier than before.  Julio met her when he arrived a bit later, and on the trail the next day, he would say, “Oh, my God!  That woman!  I wanted to ask her, How much do you want for a smile?  Two or three Euros?  Jesus Christ!  Bloody spinster!”

Mom inspected the cooking facilities and announced that only stew would be practical; she and Carrie went shopping for ingredients.  I napped and Mom made stew.  An Australian couple who had been living in London asked if they could join us, and of course Mom said yes.  Eileen showed up later, too, and Mom invited her to eat with us as well.  It’s surprising to me that pilgrims, like Christians generally, don’t place much emphasis on the fellowship of breaking bread together, for Jesus is constantly portrayed in the New Testament as eating and drinking wine with people.  The religious scholar John Dominic Crossan has made a persuasive case that communing over meals was an integral part of Jesus’ ministry.

Magic

 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke

I took my MacBook Air to a nearby café-bar and logged on to the Internet there.  Soon I was in Skype instant-message conversations with most of the people in my life whose names began with A:  Adam, Alejandro, and Ashley.  Alejandro called me up on Skype video.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I said.  I turned down the volume.  Alex, a Dominican friend from law school, said he was working out of the DC office of his firm for a week.  I spoke some more and noticed the proprietress watching me speak to my computer.

She was about to alert the Guardia Civil, but her curiosity got the best of her.  She came around the bar to stand behind me and shook her head in wonderment at the image of Alejandro speaking on the monitor.  “Say something nice to her in Spanish,” I said.  “She’s been very kind to let me stay here so long.”  He did so, and she was charmed.  Later, I called my friend Ashley, who is impossibly beautiful in any culture, and we talked over Skype video too.

Mujer? the proprietress asked, raising her eyebrows.  Wife?

No.

Amiga?  Friend?

Si.

The proprietress had let me stay in the bar beyond closing time, but it was time to take my leave.  I left a large tip, carried my MacBook Air and my Skype conversation with Ashley into the alley outside, and sat down on the cobblestones to continue it.

To Pamplona

The trail to Pamplona, Thursday.  Last night I had the best night of sleep since I arrived, and interesting dreams.  In one, both a Labradoodle and an attractive European woman showed me great affection.

We were up before light.  There is really no choice in the albergues.  While the night-time policy that turns out the lights at 10p.m. works well to allow people to get to sleep, pilgrims have worked out no agreement for how they get up in the morning.  Small, clumsy children, and most breeds of cattle, could be quieter in a small room.  Pilgrims crinkle plastic bottles while they whisper, stomp around in their boots (while whispering), or even call out to their fellows in the next bunk in the sort of library voice that would be most appropriate if one had accidentally set fire to the library.

The trail wound through bucolic country.  Parts of it were so lush I was reminded of Oregon.  A stream burbled on our right for a long way and we walked in shade.  There was only the sound of our walking sticks clicking, and Julio’s occasional irruptions of singing and jokery.

On the trail ahead of us Eileen was walking next to another man.  They were chatting.

“She has found,” Julio announced, “a candidate!”

The day before, he had seen Eileen talking to a Flemish man.  “Be careful!” he cried.  “She is looking for a husband!”

Julio

Seven years ago, Julio, now 57, retired early from Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank – “They own every corner of Spain!” – and has been hiking the world ever since.  “I think nature is often the answer,” Julio told me during our walk today.  “When I mentioned to my colleagues that I was going to Israel for a month to do walking, they said, ‘Julio, please go see a psychiatrist!’”

Julio speaks fluent Spanish and French, nearly fluent English, and apparently passable Basque.  He speaks enough Catalan to excite at least one 60-year-old retired Catalan banker.  Julio says everything emphatically, one could almost say explosively, and that, combined with his sturdy Spanish accent, makes most things he says very funny.  Whatever language he speaks in, people laugh.  He is a character fit for his own TV show, and the reality TV people should grab him while he’s still in fighting trim.  For thirty-five years he has hiked or walked at least once a week.  Five years ago he ran a marathon in three-and-a-half hours, a respectable time even for an habitual runner, which he had not been until he took up training 18 months earlier.  For the moment, I suspect he could grind me into the earth on a long hike.  He is indefatigable.

He’s also a real gentleman.  I saw this over and over, as he helped one stranger after another.  “Thank you,” they would try to say, but he would cut them off.  “Come on!  Be serious!”

On the way to Pamplona, we took a break in a small, unmarked store.  “Julio is the king,” Marie Anne said.  “Cameron, ‘e is ze prince,” she added, which put me in mind of regicide.  This was not necessary, in the end, for only a half hour later Julio fell into a stream so small it could not have put out a match, and Marie Anne announced that “Julio is no longer ze king.”

Wasting Time

It has been a very long time since I spent my time so pointlessly.  I’m not sure what to do with myself, which, I guess, is part of the point of just being.  I don’t think about the vast majority of things that occupied my thoughts, even to near-obsession, over the prior 16 months or so.  I don’t even catch myself thinking about where to live next.  I look at rocks and trees and think about what to write here.  Occasionally the boss does have something to say – usually about the failure of Orange’s USB device to give my MacBook Air internet access.

You need to figure out that Internet deal.  Orange’s “Internet Everywhere” is a slogan designed by Orwell.  Your clients may be getting annoyed that you can’t make the Skype appointments.

The Trail

We were a little ways outside of Zubiri when we came upon a sign put up by Magna, a large industrial and mining company.  “BEWARE:  YOU ARE ABOUT TO TRAVERSE MAGNA, S.A. INDUSTRIAL SITE.  PLEASE, DO NOT LEAVE THE PATH.”  But I didn’t notice the content of the sign at the time, because I was too busy reading what my fellow pilgrims had left behind, in three different hands:

T’AS COMPRIS JACQUES?  [Do you understand, St. James?]

THIS CEMENT FACTORY IS APPROVED BY ST. JAMES & CO.

You are soon leaving Zubiri . . . thank god!

Julio found some blackberries.  “Sour!” Mom said.  “But that makes you feel happier.”

Near a pasture, I bent down to regard a particularly fine-looking cow.  It drew closer.  We gazed into one another’s eyes.  Then it reached out a large pink tongue and licked me between my upper lip and nose.  “You have beautiful eyelashes,” I said.

Marie Anne decided to offer Spanish lessons.  “El cielo es azuuuuul!” she cried, pointing her walking stick at the sky.

She kept up like this for some time before Julio said, “You have forgotten to take the second pill again!  Come on!”

We decided that today would be the day we laughed only like Maurice Chevalier.

Mom pointed out the flower pots in the windows.  “Makes the heart smile,” she said.

 

Julio sang love operas.  “Sing some marching tunes,” Mom said.  “Something we can walk to.”

“I do not want to sing marching songs!” he said.  “I learned them all in the army, and I do not want to think of Franco!”

Marie Anne began to sing the Marseillaise.

Allons enfants de la Patrie, Arise, children of the Fatherland,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! The day of glory has arrived!
Contre nous de la tyrannie, Against us of tyranny
L’étendard sanglant est levé, (bis) The bloody banner is raised, (repeat)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes Do you hear, in the countryside,
Mugir ces féroces soldats ? The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras They’re coming right into our arms
Égorger nos fils et nos compagnes ! To cut the throats of our sons and women!

“Mariana!” Julio cried.  “You should have taken singing lessons when you are a little girl!”

Mom sang songs from “My Fair Lady” (“All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air”) and the “Sound of Music” (“Do, a deer, a female deer” and “I’m just sixteen, going on seventeen”).  I smiled as I walked ahead of her, thinking I would remember this for many years.

Carrie hummed along.  What a sport she has been!  I have been listening intently for a single complaint, and none have been forthcoming.  What’s with this teenager?  What do we have to do with her?  We’ve thrown at her everything we have:  more than three types of food; miles and miles of hiking with heavy packs; group living; foreign languages; conversations exclusively among adults, often in foreign tongue and with allusions to history and politics; and a total inability to check a cell phone or Facebook page for days at a time.

And not a peep.

 

Still above the valley, we came upon a few houses.  On the street outside of one, there were two vending machines, looking like sore thumbs among the quaint and crumbling farm buildings.  There was an entrepreneur in the area.  I heard a plate.

“I just heard a plate,” I said, transforming my experience, like all the great poets, into art.  Around the corner, we found a man and his wife serving up hot dogs, something that looked like a combination of pizza and quiche – and that ran out before my hungry eyes – and beer.  (A shy young Korean woman offered me her pizza/quiche, but I couldn’t).  About twenty pilgrims were looking very pleased.  The prices included an obvious convenience surcharge, and we all paid it gladly.  Julio held court.

After about half an hour, we were back on the trail.

“I am drunk,” Marie Anne announced.  She began to sing.

“The second pill!” Julio cried.

 

500 Miles Without Calves?

I began the day with a little soreness in the same left calf, but the right calf had earlier served notice that it would not be without problems.  When I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, my left calf and Achilles tendon operated as if made of solid glass, and my right, in sympathetic solidarity, was also now barely working.  For the first 18 kilometers of the walk, things were fine.  But somehow, though the walk had very few inclines and declines, the last five clicks were brutal.  Every part of my legs from my knees to the bottoms of my feet screamed in pain.

Right now, between the left calf and the near-blisters on my feet, I can barely walk.  In an attempt to give my calf a break, I had switched from the FiveFingers to the Salewa trail-running shoes I’d worn through Israel, but I think I’d have some real blisters if we’d walked another few kilometers.  Adding socks and shoes simply adds layers of things that can abrade the skin.  Tomorrow I may switch back to the FiveFingers and my status as the most amusing tourist in Pamplona.  I have borrowed a very large ibuprofen pill from Mom’s mobile pharmacy.

Haysoos eee Maria

The Jesus y Maria hostel in Pamplona was a find.  Only 6 Euros, and it had Internet service, washing machines, and a serious kitchen, not to mention a sheet and pillow case.  Julio disappeared for a while and returned with lentils.  A while later, he came in from the kitchen.  “We are going to have two pots of lenteels,” he announced.  “One healthy one, and one with chorizo sausage.  One with cholesterol, one without cholesterol.”  He had made two pots of about five gallons each, so that we were obliged to force food on a passing Irishman, an Israeli, a young English couple, and the seven Koreans from the night before, who had come to the kitchen to make another mouth-watering meal from scratch.

I complained jokingly that we never had enough wine to get drunk.  The Irishman disappeared for a while, and returned with three bottles of Rioja.  I turned on the iPod and out spilled Dean Martin and the Gipsy Kings.  There was some singing involved, though thankfully little of it from Julio, who was busy doing his escaping-rabbit-made-from-a-handkerchief trick on Eileen and one of the friendly Korean boys.

 

Pilgrims’ clothesline at the albergue in Zubiri

For photos, remember to check out the albums on our Camino Not Chemo Facebook Page.

“It is the first stage, to Roncesvalles, that breaks people”

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St. Jean Pied de Port, France.  Monday.  A charming village marks the beginning of the

Mom in Seventh Heaven

Camino Frances, the French Camino that is the most popular of the routes to Santiago de Compostela.  We’re still in Basque Country, but the Spanish has been replaced by French and the jamon by jambon.  The streets are cobbled.  English remains a luxury.  Painted shutters and flowers enliven the winding pedestrian streets.  A river runs through it, and a citadel presides over it all.  St. Jean sits in a valley surrounded by rolling hills and small mountains.

Mom is excited to be started.  During a carb-loading dinner of spaghetti (which she

Marie Anne and Julio listen to Mom's story

normally forbids herself, pasta being pure sugar-in-waiting), she explained to Julio and Marie Anne her diagnoses, what little she knows of her prognosis, and the diet that she’ll live with for the rest of her life.

There are 16 people in our dormitory.  An older Frenchman who has done the Camino eight times is here, and another man who could be his grandson; Julio has engaged the older man in conversation.  A couple, the woman from Peru, who live in San Francisco.  Four Koreans, all in black glasses and three already asleep.  Our group of six.  Two others, one of whom either does not know he snores or doesn’t care, for he sleeps on his back and saws away.  Carrie and Marie Anne giggle.  I’m relieved it wasn’t Mom, who is still reading.  I pass around a container of earplugs, but no one accepts.  Lights are out at ten, a little over half an hour away.  Today’s early morning wake-up and my melatonin pill are getting me ready for sleep.

 

I have some concern about tomorrow.  The road to Roncesvalles is almost entirely uphill, and it’s either 28 or 25 kilometers, depending on your source, or about 18 miles – farther than I have ever walked in a day, I think, and certainly farther than I’ve ever gone with a pack of 25-30 pounds.  But while I may feel some species of misery during the trek, I’m more worried about four other people in our group, which has grown to six with the addition of a New Yorker named Eileen, who joined our group this morning.  Mom has been training for almost two months, and at high altitude – but she is 67, and for a decade her health has prevented her from getting any vigorous exercise.  Less than two years ago she had plantar fasciitis and could barely walk at all for seven months. As if that weren’t enough, a few weeks ago she had surgery to remove one of her tumors.  The other women are not in visibly better condition, and they lack her mental attitude.

We have all been lightening our packs.

 

We were underway at about 7:30.  No one had slept past six, and many of us hadn’t slept

Leaving St. Jean at Dawn

much before that either.  It turns out the fellow from last night is a champion snorer, the Rafael Nadal of nasal chainsawyers.  Does anyone build earplugs that actually work?  I’m amazed that stores keep selling the same little pinchable plugs that you can feel growing their way out of your ear canal as soon as you have pushed them down.  Is the point that you have to make contact with the brain in order for them to stick?  No matter.  Our champion could have gotten around them.

“A most interesting concert,” Julio said to me, from the bottom bunk.  Julio has stayed in many hostels, and he’s aware that with the low cost come trade-offs, such as privacy and quiet.  You don’t sleep with 15 other people and expect that no one will snore.

The newest member of our party, Eileen, was not feeling so charitable.  “Are you married?” she asked the man, who sat bleary-eyed on the top bunk near the door.  He must have said he was not.  “Well, there’s a surprise,” she said, laughing.  She had the attention of the whole room now.  “Do you have any idea how badly you snore?”  I was watching the man to see how he was taking it all, and he was grinning.  “Where are you sleeping tonight?” she asked him.  “Where will you be?”  This went on for some time.

“No understand,” the man said.

Marie Anne asked him if he understood English.  He answered in Spanish and she translated his response, which I didn’t hear.

“I’m serious,” said Eileen.  “’Cause I want you to let me know.  If you see me coming, just tell me to turn around and go the other direction.”

“He says he has a date tonight,” Marie Anne said.

“A date?” Eileen asked.  “Seriously.  Are you –“

“That’s enough,” I said.

 

Julio was talking to the older Frenchman who had done the Camino eight times.  “It’s the first stage,” he said solemnly, “that breaks people.”

Breakfast was bread with butter and jam.  We were given bowls for our tea or coffee.  In only a few hours, I would be running on spaghetti bolognaise fumes.

We set out before first light in high spirits.  Julio sang various French and Spanish show tunes and, for all I knew, burlesque.  I sang “We’re off to See the Wizard,” or at least the refrain.

Our first few kilometers were given over to adjustments.  Within about two kilometers I was sweltering beneath two layers of wool.  Mom’s tinkling jangling tin cup, swinging from the back of her pack, threatened to turn me into Norman Bates.  I put it in her pack and then found that her scallop shell swung just as much, banging into a carabiner.  “I’ll walk behind you,” she said, seeing my face.  She was breathing heavily, but walking gamely.  The way was steep, and it continued that way for miles.  I felt my torn calf muscle tugging at me, nagging for my attention.  I decided to ignore it.

I stayed with Mom for a while, but at one point had an urge to go hard.  I began to take long strides and plant my poles and reel in the pilgrims who’d begun ahead.  I caught up to Julio and we were soon way ahead of the others in our group.  My calf, warmed up, stopped hurting.  This may have been misleading.  I thought about putting on my trail-running shoes to see if they exercised the calf less than the FiveFingers, but didn’t do anything about it.

We gained altitude and walked through the mud and shite-grimed stones, and yet everywhere saw the half-foot-tall spoor of apparently rather athletic cows.  We stopped for lunch at a place that had flattened out and watched the sun burn off the fog in the valley, which was dotted with trees and the signature white houses with dark-orange roofs of much of Europe.  A bird of prey wheeled through the sky above off-white cows.

Most of the pilgrims seemed to be carrying smaller packs, and likely without the density of electronics I was schlepping around.  A few had backpacks of the sort to which you see preschoolers harnessed.  Some of them were using a car service to transport their things.  Carrie had been carrying about 10 kilos, she said – this was less than my pack’s weight, but at her size, it was like carrying a small furniture store on her back.  Her art teacher had given her assignments that required oils and paintbrushes, all of which she had with her.

“Are you also carrying canvases and frames?” I asked.  She laughed.  By the first break she would leave her Spanish-English dictionary with an albergue’s book collection.  Mom tried to convince her that it would be okay to get rid of her painting gear as well.  She can paint later, after the walking is over.

Julio and I stopped at a false summit with beautiful views and ate sandwiches.  I pulled out the

The author at work (note to IRS)

laptop and sat on a rock.  I took pictures of the valley and mountains and a large hawk circling for carrion below.  About an hour later, Mom hove into view, puffing hard.  I walked down toward her and turned on the video camera.  She was doing great for someone who could still feel the incisions.  “I can feel them, pish, pish, pish,” she said, making a motion with her fingers from her skin outward.  “And I’ve got a bloody hemorrhoid too.”

“On camera, Mom,” I sang.

“Oh!” she said.

As I passed people in my Five Fingers, they smiled, but not in a friendly way.  “Buen

Barefoot, sorta, over the Pyrenees

camino,” said one man, a few years younger than me, the way you might shake your head and chortle “good luck” to an aspiring pilgrim who happened to be wearing a straitjacket.  Some French stopped to take pictures of my feet.  I heard the word pied, “feet”, over and over.  Pilgrims tittered and pointed when I passed, as school children will when one of their fellows who has been born hunchback walks by.

During the breaks the French insisted on speaking their insane patois, though they must have known, or at least sensed, the presence of Americans in the immediate vicinity.  At one overlook we could all see for miles and miles.  “Look!” I said, pointing, and then a bit too loudly, “The Maginot Line!”

“Yu argh ponting to ze norse!” one of them cried, and they all laughed some more.

 

I probably shouldn’t have, but I really felt like getting in a workout.  I told Mom I’d see her later and began to step long and pole hard.  In flagrant violation of all that is sacred, at least to others, I turned on my iPod to my skiing/driving mix.  And I grew wings.  Up above treeline I hiked, through grasses and gorse, stepping lightly over the tight black grenades of sheep dung, reeling in one Frenchman after another, but there seemed to be an infinite supply of them.  I hadn’t sustained such a high heart rate, for such a long time, in a very long time.  I came upon the Koreans from the albergue, kerchiefs wrapped around their faces, wearing hats and gloves and long sleeves like mountaineers.  “Buen Camino,” I said, four times.

Up ahead, a German.  I knew him for a German by the short-shorts dangling precariously over his muscled alabaster legs.  He was poling hard himself.  Here was a worthy competitor.  He saw me and kicked it up a notch.  I drew abreast.  He began to lean into the hill, stabbing his poles harder and harder.  I turned on my iPod to “Shoot to Thrill”.

Shoot to thrill, way to kill

Too many Germans and too many hills

Against AC/DC there is no known defense, and though he pulled on his own earphones and threw down some Def Leppard, and then, with increasing desperation, “99 Luftballoons,” soon the German was behind me as well.

I knew this would be my only day in the hills, and I ran it hard even as my calf began to protest.

There would be plenty of time to slow down tomorrow.

 

Actually, I did slow down eventually.  I passed a fork in the road and initially took the wrong path, a metaphor I choose not to dwell on.  I was concerned that Mom and Carrie might do the same, so I set up shop on a nearby boulder and wrote most of this post.  For a while, I continued to listen to my skiing and driving mix on the iPod.  I did some stretching.  I relieved myself and from the color decided I wasn’t drinking enough water.  Then I turned off the music and just sat, cross-legged, and stared at the grass, as well as some brown eggshells that some pilgrim had left behind.  I heard the bells of cows, or perhaps some of the belled horses I had seen, from far away.  Birds cheeping.  I tried to imagine sitting and watching the grass during the madness of summer, and even eggshells, and failed.  I couldn’t have done it.  Had there even been birds in Bend, this summer?

After about an hour, Mom, Carrie, and Marie Anne came into view.  I watched them confer at the junction, and then they took the right path.  “Is that my son?” Mom asked Carrie.  They walked some more.  “Hello, handsome!”

She was dragging, but still in good spirits.  She and Carrie had both changed their boots for flip-flops, which were, so far, working well.  (Before long, Marie Anne would also change to different shoes).  But we had no idea what was still in store for us.  The climb continued.  Soon our group was taking up the rear, and we would only fall farther behind the rest of the pilgrims.

We seemed to be above treeline, judging from the total absence of trees, but I couldn’t figure out why – the highest point of the day was under 1100 meters, or just over 3300 feet.  We walked now among belled sheep and horses – the cows had long since given up – and sometimes over grass.  We were a little more than halfway when Carrie, a few hundred meters back from Julio and me, began to cry.  I watched from a distance as the women tried to cheer her up.  I could hear Eileen telling her to ask for what she needed; I would later understand that she was telling her to ask the universe for whatever energy she needed.  “But if you don’t ask, nothing will happen.”

Then the terrain changed and we were on sharp white rocks in the midst of beech trees.  We stopped at the Fountain of Roland, derived from another of the legends of the area, with about the same factual basis as St. James’ remains making it from Israel to Santiago de Compostela, in a wooden boat, and in seven days.  Another hundred meters and we had crossed the border into Spain.  A sign said it was 18 kilometers to St. Jean Pied de Port, and 8 to Roncesvalles.  Just over two-thirds of the way there.  Some of the way was flat, but the climbing continued.

“This is the last top,” Marie Anne kept saying to Mom, and Mom would repeat, “You said that the last time!  When is it downhill?”

“That sounds just like my divorce,” I said.  I was limping now.  My calf had gone on strike, and would stay on strike for the rest of the day and night.  I limped for the last four or so miles, wondering how I’d be able to walk the next day.

There were more last tops than I care to count.  I could now feel my hips groaning under the hours of carrying the pack uphill.  Eventually we reached the saddle between two modest hilltops and saw below us something unprecedented for the day:  a valley.  A thing with no way but down.  But this was not actually good news.  In the first example of poor route design of the Camino so far, the first downhill section went straight downhill, at a steep grade, with no switchbacks.  When your thighs are already spent, going downhill is tortuous.  Going downhill without switchbacks – well, it took its toll.  And several of our group suffered from bad knees.

Julio and I got ahead, as usual, and we just kept going.  Throughout the long day, our group would stretch out and then those in the lead would stop and wait for the others.  Near the end my limping got so pronounced that at times I could no longer keep up with Julio.  The 3.6 promised kilometers seemed erroneous to both of us.  (Julio has gone hiking at least once a week for 35 years, and knows from kilometers).  We agreed we had done at least five kilometers, all without switchbacks, until we reached the monastery.  Julio and I arrived at about 6:30p.m., or around 11 hours after we began.  The monastery was a most welcome sight.

The monastery at Roncesvalles

Julio had recently done the same stage in 9 hours, and he estimated that he and I could do it in 6.5 if we didn’t have to wait.  Mom arrived at 7:10, just shy of 12 hours, and collapsed into a chair at the hostel restaurant where I was sitting.  Carrie was with her.  Marie Anne had arrived a little earlier.

“I almost cried all the way down, Mom said.  But I was too tired.  I have never worked so hard for so long, except when I saved my life that time in the mountains.”  This was in 2000, after she got lost in the wilderness of Colorado.  “A few times I just wanted to sit down and sleep right there.  I had to make myself like a robot, not thinking, just to keep moving.”  She said she wanted to take the bus tomorrow and have a day of relaxation.  I had thought she might want to do this, and each time she asked if I thought it was a good idea, I assured her it was.  It wasn’t just tomorrow I was thinking about.  I knew my calf problem wasn’t so temporary.

We waited for Eileen for a few minutes, and then Julio, the most functional of us, went to look for her.  He didn’t find her.  We decided to wait a bit longer.

We had our own adventure, turned away from the first hostel restaurant we tried because it was full, and put on the patio in the cold.  We went to the second restaurant and found Eileen nearly an hour later, sitting in the lobby of the restaurant with tears in her eyes.  “I can’t move my body,” she said.

“We went looking for you!” Mom said.  “Where were you?”  We learned that she had come to the junction that said .5 miles to the monastery, and had somehow taken the route that said 3.2 to the same monastery.

“I just want to go to bed,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.  She was a pitiful sight.

“You should come to dinner with us, Eileen,” I said.  “Come on.  You’ll need the calories tomorrow.”  Mom insisted as well, but Eileen refused.  She was inconsolable.  She had arranged for a taxi driver to take her closer to the hostel, though as far as I could tell he could only get her a block closer and she’d have to walk the equivalent of two or three blocks on the monastery grounds to get to the registration desk.

We had to wait about forty-five minutes for the second restaurant to clear out.

Just as we were about to be let in, a mobile and energetic Eileen came into the lobby and walked up to us.

“I just want you to know I’m very disappointed in you.”  I could already sense there would be no placating her.  “I know you don’t owe me anything but you didn’t make a reservation for me and now I’m staying in the old hostel across the street and I don’t even know where I’m having breakfast tomorrow.”

“We don’t either,” Mom said.

“Yes you do.  And you didn’t reserve me a place.”

I remembered Julio dismissing Mom’s question about there being enough room, saying, “Are you kidding?  There are 500 beds there.  Not to worry.”  I also remembered him repeating what I’d read, which was that you needed your credentials in order to prove you were a walker entitled to hostel privileges.

I said, “We weren’t able to make a reservation for you, Eileen –“

“Yes you were.  Three people told me you could have.  And all your names were on the list, and mine wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Eileen,” I said.  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“I came all the way over here out of courtesy to let you know where I am staying, if you care.”  She turned and walked out.

 

We were dead-tired, but dinner was nice.  In addition to Mom, Carrie, and I, Marie Anne joined us, as did a Spanish engineer who worked for Westinghouse and had spent time in Pittsburgh, but said he didn’t remember much English; two young Spanish women who were shy about their English; a Basque man; a German couple, of whom the woman spoke good Spanish; and a young Frenchman who insisted he didn’t speak much German but spoke good English.  The conversation was pleasant and took place in four languages.

Lights were out at 10, but I kept typing until nearly 10:30.  There is one light snorer here so far, and a Darth Vader heavy breather.  Mom has the sleeping bag so I am wearing lots of wool.  There are no sheets or blankets here, and I left my sleeping bag in Bilbao.  Tomorrow we will take the bus for 20 minutes to the next town, Zubiri, and Julio and Marie Anne will likely arrive by foot in six hours’ time.  Mom simply can’t walk any more, and because the pack is hurting her kidneys, she has decided to hire a service to carry her pack from town to town.

But I am very proud of her, and very impressed with her fortitude.  That hike kicked my butt.  I can’t even imagine what she went through to finish it.  “I compare it to childbirth,” she said.  “Something you do once and then say, ‘Never again!’”

“For what you did today,” Julio said, in that energetic way of speaking he has, “you are my heroine.”

Hours after falling asleep, I woke up to what appeared to be my own self-immolation.  My eyes cried, my nose ran, my mouth produced saliva by the bucket, and my chest was on fire.  It was the worst heartburn I have ever had.  In fact, it should have been donated to science for further study.  I thought it was the chorizo sausage, but Mom, who had tried last night’s red wine before rejecting it on the basis of her stomach’s veto, said it was probably the wine. I swallowed and swallowed and turned to and fro, hoping to dislodge the burning embers.  I burned for an hour and finally got back to sleep.

Thus will the Camino be branded upon my heart forever.

Mom in Seventh Heaven
Leaving St. Jean at Dawn
Leaving St. Jean at Dawn
The author at work (note to IRS)
Barefoot, sorta, over the Pyrenees
The monastery at Roncesvalles
Marie Anne and Julio listen to Mom’s story

Bilbao and the Bus to Bayonne

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On the bus to Bayonne, 7:30a.m.

Heading to the subway and bus station en route to Bayonne and St. Jean Pied de Port

The rain continues, but the fog and mist add a cozy spice to the mountainous terrain and lush forest of the Pyrenees. Julio took us to a wok restaurant last night, in a largely successful attempt to get Mom her first cancer-smart meal.  Thus far it has not been easy.  It’s not possible to find a restaurant in Bilbao that will cook a meal before 8:30p.m., so if you want to eat before then, you must choose from among various bread-heavy pintxos (peenchos), known everywhere else as tapas, which, whether containing brie or salmon or crab, sport large dollops of what appears to be the regional spice of choice, mayonnaise.

At the wok restaurant, I wanted a glass of red wine.  Julio ordered a bottle, saying Spanish wine was predictably good if it cost more than 5 euros, but that if it cost less than that, your head would let you know.  (“I woke up with a headache,” I would tell him the next morning.  “At 3, 4, and 6 a.m.”)  Julio drinks his wine like I drink water.  When I returned from supervising the cooking of my food in the wok area the bottle was nearly empty.  “Did you spill the wine?” I asked, looking under the table.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the flower puppy

Bilbao is a lovely city, and one of the main cities of the Basque Country, a relatively autonomous region of Spain with a strong independent streak.

“Last night Real Madrid was beaten by a football club of beginners,” Julio announced when we met him this morning.  “There will be suicides before it is light.  But the rest of the country could not be more happy.”  Madrid is the locus of the Spanish central government, and the people of both the Basque Country and the equally fiercely independent Catalonia love to see it fail.

While in Bilbao we visited the truly astonishing Guggenheim Museum, a sculpture far

Santiago Cathedral in Bilbao, with the trademark scallop shell of St. James and the Camino

more impressive than the rather precious concept art we saw inside it.  We walked along the Gran Via, Bilbao’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue, enjoyed the transparent, Art Nouveau shell-like entrances to the subways (called Fosteritos by the locals) that had been designed by English architect Sir Norman Foster, took in cityscapes enhanced by the Rio Nervion, ducked into our first Santiago Cathedral, complete with the trademark scallop shells on the exterior, toured the extraordinary multi-use Alhóndiga, each of whose dozens of giant inner columns were unique, and walked the pedestrian streets of Casco Viejo, the charming older part of town in which our hotel was located.  We’d have to carry for hundreds of miles anything we bought, so, in spite of all the great shopping to be had, we bought nothing.

Julio says that the city was transformed almost overnight by the Guggenheim.  Initially, he said (and I recall reading this in news reports), many people did not understand the strange new structure, and they did not like it.  The estimate of 200,000 visitors in the first year was exceeded by 2.2 million, though, and Bilbaoans soon went from seeing themselves as a city of industry to a city of aesthetics, tourism, and cutting-edge design.  Now there are many fine examples of modern architecture, a nice complement to the many beautiful older buildings, from the Gothic cathedrals to the Beaux Arts municipal building and Teatro Arragio.

We were up at 6a.m., never an easy task on one’s second morning of jet-lag, and at the bus station by 7.  A young man with a backpack approached Mom, Carrie, and me while Julio was away.

“Excuse me,” he said.  “Do you have a map of Spain?”

“No,” Mom said.  “But our friend will be back in a minute.”

The man looked confused.  I explained.  “We decided to bring along a Spaniard instead.”

Now we wend our way through the forested hills, lulled by the hum of the bus and the sound of water against the tires.  In the forested cleft of a misty mountain to my left I notice a sinuous thread of fog in the shape of a question mark.

I am writing this post largely in order to take my mind off my body, which is contorted fiendishly in seats that appear to have been designed and manufactured for, and perhaps by, small children.  They’re so narrow that Julio and I are forced to cross our arms just to co-exist.  The seats also come equipped with an anti-lumbar feature, surely patented, that sends the lumbar spine backward in space.  Higher up, my middle and upper back are forced forward, after which the seat, also too short, again curves away, so that in order to rest my head it is necessary to throw it back and look up to the ceiling.

My knees are jammed tightly into the seat in front of me, kneecaps crushed against the grey plastic.  Even to type these words, my hands must dangle from my chest like the useless appendages of a T. Rex.  When the three-hour ride is over, I will require work by both a chiropractor and a shrink.

St. Jean Pied de Port is an hour away by train.

Heading to the subway and bus station en route to Bayonne and St. Jean Pied de Port
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the flower puppy
Santiago Cathedral in Bilbao, with the trademark scallop shell of St. James and the Camino
Charming, Picturesque Bilbao

Lisbon, Part 1 of 2

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Lisbon.  The adventure begins.  It was a six-hour flight from Newark, which left early, at 6p.m., so that we could start the day when everyone was beyond ready to go to sleep, at midnight Newark time.  I caught maybe an hour of sleep.  The flight was uneventful, if we can say it is a non-event that the audio system on the in-flight entertainment did not produce sound, and that the in-flight meal consisted of a slab of Tillamook cheese (from Oregon!), a filet of fish that had probably once been canned before being breaded and pressed into service, and broccoli that, surely as a precaution against terrorism, had been bludgeoned, boiled for eight hours, and electrocuted on its way to my plate.  At the Lisbon airport, I was two-and-a-half hours early for my flight to Bilbao, though in the end I barely made it on time.

This was because the airport authorities of Lisbon (I think we may safely refer to them as Lisboners) had contrived to herd over 400 people into the passport control line, where the heat and stench and shuffling of mammals resembled nothing so much as a corral of cattle on the way to the abbatoir.  There were people in the line, and I may have been one of them, who had not, on all the evidence, showered since 1987.  (Most of them seemed to be clustered around me, come to think of it).  The line led to 10 booths for passport control personnel, of which seven were productively occupied.  (An iPod proved a boon against the long trudge around the ropes.)

Two hours after I stepped into the line, I was pleased to be reminded why we had to endure it:  the tough grilling by alert passport controllers, ever on the lookout for terrorists. Why are you here? Who do you know in the country? Where will you be staying? Are you sweating? How much cash do you have? Do you agree that America sucks?  I took a deep breath.

“You came in from Newark?” the uniformed passport controller said to me.

“Yes,” I said, and to speed things up, added, “and going to Bilbao.”

He grunted and stamped my passport, then jerked his head to indicate I should walk on.  It was, I had to confess, a brilliant display.

You may be saying to yourself, But a computer with an electronic stamper, or even a monkey, could have asked if I had come from Newark! But here’s the thing:  a computer could not have listened to my potentially terrorist-revealing response, and a monkey would not have understood it.  That’s why being herded behind ropes with 399 people at 6a.m. to be asked the hard questions is so crucial to protect us from those who hate our freedom.

Lisbon, above the ropes

Shutting Up My Boss

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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.

Letting Go of the Life We Have Planned

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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.

Tearful farewell

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Yesterday, I was running last errands, getting things ready and house sitter in place. I whittled 3.5 more pounds off my back pack. The sleeping bag was too bulky and heavy and I exchanged it for a nice, light, small, barely 1.5-lb. cutie. I also sacrificed one top and my Black Canyon rain/sun hat as it was too heavy as well.

I splurged on a Pedicure. To spoil my feet one more time. They’ve no clue what’s in store. I hope they will carry me on their allotted task without major mishap.

I also spent some time with my  little buddy, whom I’ve been privileged to have in my life, since his birth. When it was time to leave, it was a heart-rending fare well. He cried and held on, telling me he loved me all the way to Jupiter and back. He complained how very long a time five weeks was for me to be gone. I am so thankful that his parents share him with me. He’s funny, bright, and makes me laugh when times are tough. He’s my special boy.

As I sat still and reflected on this trip , with the external noise factory silenced, I was in awe. I am steady and straight. I have great energy. My mental faculties are present. (Well, most of them anyway.) I have a sense of well-being that is not supposed to be in conjunction with this ‘cell problem’. This divine force which propells me to the camino, clear and bright. I thought, if I wanted to have an ‘adventure’ picked by me, my choice would’ve been with lots more comfort (and gourmet food). Not to walk so many miles in whatever condition. But, it’s a strong voice and I’m heeding it.

The phone rang all day with family and friends wishing us well and the promise of saying prayers, each day, for us. The life line to home. My daughter, who will be our home center.

It is with a grateful heart, to our Lord, that I start this path. That I am well enough to even contemplate such an undertaking. I trust that HE knows what he’s doing.

I woke early this morning, not even a cricket in sight or sound. Just going over my check-off list. Carrie is still sleeping. She too, had a tearful farewell with her family, but it’s tinged with excitement.

So. I’m signing off and the next time I’m writing, it will be from Spain. Y’all take care.

“Buen Camino”