Author Archives: Cameron

How Did the Camino Change Me?

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Everyone seems to want to know:  How did the Camino change you?

So far, I have had a few surprises upon my re-entry to the Ordinary World.  And that’s not even counting the fact that I recently bought a fresh red pepper for the first time in my life, and ate it, and enjoyed it.  In fact, I find that my appetite for healthy food has increased.

The First Surprise

During the walk across Spain, I longed for a good yoga stretch.  I’d grown so fond of my yoga classes over the last year and more that I really missed yoga while on the road.  On the road I was sure I’d never needed yoga more; after all, I was walking thirteen or more miles a day, with all that means for the legs and back, and I was carrying a pack, with all that means for the back and neck.  I imagined myself a stiff mass of bunched-up muscle and ligament.

So I was very excited to get to my first yoga class in about six weeks, in uptown Hoboken’s Devotion Yoga studio.

What I found surprised me.  Far from being rusty and out of

Balancing in Montauk, New York

practice, I was more balanced.  I could easily get into and hold balance poses that had been more difficult before the Camino.  As I flipped up into a crow pose and held it easily, I felt as if an Olympic gymnast had just taken over my body.

I may have even been more flexible, or unstuck, in other poses that I had never been able to do well — the upside-down wheel, for example, which something in my neck — the knots? — had always made difficult.  But here I was in the most complete wheel I’d ever done, as if my (tight, burdened?) shoulders had at last gotten out of the way.

Experienced yogis will say that the mat is a microcosm of life.  On the mat, you practice being comfortable with discomfort, you practice slowing your thoughts and (I think relatedly) your balance, and you practice being kind to yourself rather than abrupt or forcing.  You also practice concentration.  And all of these things will be directly reflected in your life off the mat.

But in my yoga class, I was finding that what I had done off the mat was affecting the yoga!  I was more mentally, emotionally, and physically balanced.  I may have also been more flexible, less tight.

I had already sensed that I did successfully slow down my thoughts on the Camino, and that I had fewer negative thoughts and emotions, but these things are hard to measure.  The yoga class was, happily, more objective – like stepping on a scale that measures How the Camino Changed Me.  You either fall over where you used to fall over, and struggle where you used to struggle – or you don’t.  And I wasn’t.

And because balance is a reflection of clarity of mind, I think my yoga session confirmed for me that I had somehow reached my goal of slowing down my mind, and with it, the negative thoughts that make for negative feeling.  With the mind racing less, the body can be still; with the mind less mired in anxiety, your body can be calm.  And you can balance yourself in ways you previously couldn’t.

What Caused These Changes?

So the question we need to be asking ourselves is this:  what was it about the last five weeks that put me into such a state of balance? The food?  Certainly not.  The sun?  There are many variables, of course, but here are the ones that I would hypothesize:  the meditativeness of walking; the exercise (and, yes, the sun, a known mood enhancer or anti-depressant); and the sense of purpose.  It’s this last, the sense of purpose, that interests me most.  Because what I want to do now is replicate it in my “real” life.

I want to figure out what I was doing on the Camino that can be brought back with me.  Because if I can’t do that, then a great deal of the value of the experience will be lost to me.

An Unfolding Surprise

While I was on the Camino, I wondered what it would be like to be off it.  Would I be, as Marie Anne always is after the end of a long walk, sad?  I wrote about this from Portugal, after we were done.  At the time, I did not feel sadness about being done.

But then, I wasn’t done.

Simply finishing the Camino did not mean I was done with what I call the Special World.  During our several days in Portugal, I was still away from my Ordinary World.  And so any reaction to the real world would have to wait.

Now that I’m back in the temporary life I was in just before I left for Spain – cooling my heels in and around New York — I’m starting to feel that reaction.

At the post office a few days ago I underwent a petty frustration, and by the time I got back into the car I almost had tears in my eyes.  Back at the apartment, I felt tears come up — frustration, I think, a kind of sadness that I had lost something, or perhaps a fear that I would not be able to find it again.  On the Camino I had felt an occasional annoyance and even anger, but I didn’t feel the kind of existential sadness I recognized early in the week.

I found myself resisting this, and then I found myself saying, Stop resisting.

The next day was different yet again.  I felt no sadness at all.  But I still felt some of what Mom wrapped up well earlier today, on the phone, after I’d said the return to the real world was sometimes a bit disorienting: “Yes, I know!  I don’t know what to do with myself!” she said.  “I walked to the post office, I made a salad and ate fruits again, I did the leaves, I went grocery shopping . . . My body is revved up and ready to go.”

I realize that there is a particular journey that is still going on, one that is not done yet.  I have been telling myself not to develop expectations of what I must be doing now that I am back.  I have been telling myself to stay on the Way – which unfolds only a day at a time.

So this is the challenge I have set myself (a hopeless type-A, I often do better if I call something a challenge):  to come to understand what it was about the Camino experience that made me feel less bad, less often, and made me feel very good, very often, and then to make sure my life after the Camino is designed as similarly as possible.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what I miss from the Camino.  And that may lead me closer to understanding what I had there that I must create here.

Just When You Thought It Was Over: Portugal

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City of Port

If you learn nothing else from this post, you will remember that Porto, also called Oporto (“O” being the Portuguese “the”) in both English and “Portuguese” (explanation of quotes below), is the second-largest city in Portugal and the origin of Port wine.

I knew the latter even before we took a tour of an award-winning port wine maker clustered on the river with dozens of its peers. I learned, from our Botswana-born guide, that the makers prefer French and American oak for their barrels, that port is made by interrupting the fermentation process with a heavy infusion of grape alcohol, and that the ruby and tawny ports I often see are the two middle rungs of port wine, with vintage being the newest and least expensive, and reserves, running from 20 to over 40 years old, being the oldest and most expensive.

We sat down at a sawed-off barrel with a Dutch couple and began tasting. I don’t think I’d ever had white port wine before; they offered a dry one and a sweet one, both very good. I tried a 20-year-old reserve, and bought a sweet medium-red tawny.

Who will give me an excuse to open it? Please complete your application in the Comments section of the blog. Especially interesting applications may be emailed in confidence.

The drive from Galicia took about three-and-a-quarter hours, and was a continuation of the beautiful, green, hilly country we’d seen in Spain, but it looked better maintained. It was hazy all day, for the entire distance we covered.

I’m sure Porto has culture, and in the distance I’m pretty sure I saw churches and palaces and whatnot, but my interest was focused like a laser beam on (1) doing nothing and (2) finding civilian clothes. For a month I have worn two shirts, two socks, two pairs of underwear – I was like the Noah’s Ark of hiking gear. I discovered in Porto that I had an inner metrosexual, and he wanted to come out.

We pretty much accomplished all these goals on the Via Catarina, a long, narrow, pedestrian shopping street, and during a few visits to the Majestic Café, a carved-wood-and-mirror Nouveau Art creation in which I could imagine Hemingway, its contemporary when it opened in 1923, sitting down to write. They are so proud of being able to cook a proper spaghetti Bolognese – which is to say about half as good as Mom’s – that they will take from you about $17 for a bowl the size of an appetizer dish. But they will speak English to you, like many Portuguese seem to do – they even seem to prefer it to Spanish.

Portugal lives in the shadow of Spain, its much larger, more populous, less poor country, and so to carve out their own distinct identity, the Portuguese have sort of agreed they will speak Spanish with a Russian accent. This they call “Portuguese”.

Things get really confusing when you hear a Russian immigrant speak “Portuguese”, or when you ask a Portuguese if he or she would prefer that you speak English or Spanish. “English,” they always say. This is because saying “Spanish” would simply reveal their secret: they are already speaking Spanish, just with a heavy Slavic accent.

The notion of customer service was stronger in Porto than on the Camino. Our first interaction was with the proprietor of a café-bar who (it would not be too much to say) hurdled over the counter to come and translate his menu for us. Everywhere we went, people were very friendly and accommodating.

Kudos especially to the woman who harvested an entire wall of its

No dummies were hurt in this demonstration

sweaters, and even brutally amputated a mannequin, in an attempt to get me to buy a sweater; the friendly young man at Zara who worked his mic like Madonna and who professed not to believe that I had never, as I told him, been as cool as he was, and therefore could not wear some of the items he was suggesting to me; and the salesman at Massimo Dutti, which I have decided is superior to Zara for men over 35, for lightening my wallet more than all the others combined.

I took care to hold on to my receipts, though. Taxes on clothes make up a whopping 23% of the listed price, but the foreigner can get back 19% at the airport. This helps a lot when you’re contemplating a 220-Euro winter coat at Massimo Dutti. Curiously, there is a minimum purchase of about 60 Euros, as if the authorities (in Portugal and elsewhere, actually) don’t want to administrative overhead of dealing with small receipts. But this creates a disincentive to buy single articles from smaller, mom-and-pop merchants, and likely benefits mostly the department stores and expensive retailers.

Many of the churches in Porto look as if they were built from the French Country section of Pottery Barn, being faced with a combination of somewhat grimy stonework that frames large, eye-catching expanses of blue-and-white Delph tiles depicting Biblical stories.

We took a double-decker bus around town. Mom on the bus ride along the ocean reminded me of a little girl, which is another way of saying that she’s able to be open and present to things as if she’s never seen them before. Ohhh! Look at that! It’s crashing! Do you hear it! I’ve got to catch that! It was amazing. I felt so stick-in-the-mud. We got off the tour bus on the avenue of port wine makers. “When will the bus return here?” I asked. “One hour,” the woman said firmly.

Fifty minutes later it paused briefly at the bus stop, a block away from us, and left without us.

For dinner that night I decided to try bacalao, or cod, which I’d had once in Spain, but which is considered a national dish in Portugal. Probably I should have waited until we were in a finer restaurant. Though I ordered it “grilled,” there was so much oil on my plate I could have run my BMW on it. I literally spooned it like soup. The fish itself, as prepared, was nothing to write a blog home about.

Lisbon

In Lisbon yesterday we began with a series of small disasters. The tourist office called about five hotels but all were booked. No problem: I’d look them up on the Internet. Then I discovered that after about 30 straight days of remembering to pack all of my electronics gear every day, I’d left behind my MacBook Air’s power cord. I’d used the battery on the bus, and it was almost dead. My Vodafone USB stick has been done for since Saturday.

We dealt with these setbacks by having lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe. Carrie was in heaven. Mom loved her salad. The mac and cheese was pretty good. Afterward, we marched into a Starbucks that’s surely located in one of the most beautiful buildings for any Starbucks, and I madly tried to book a hotel on any of Priceline, Travelocity, or Venere. My power reached 2% and I booked a place called Caza Latina. We jumped in a cab and drove uptown to the address.

There was no sign. “This is a hotel?” I asked the driver. He shrugged, pointing out that he’d just brought us to the desired address. Obvious locals sat around at some tables at the joint next door. They told me, I thought, that it was a hotel. I then saw the “Latina” plate next to the buzzer marked #1. I buzzed. And buzzed. No one. I buzzed one marked “Porto” and this brought forth an angry charging dog dressed as an old Portuguese woman. By this time I was cursing with her. I established that she was not with the hotel, and though she was not done with her rant, I said goodbye to her and walked up the stairs. No sign. Nothing indicating a hotel or any commercial establishment. No open doors. Nobody.

On the sidewalk we considered our options. Finally we hailed another cab to take us to an Internet café whose address (like an Apple reseller’s) I’d looked up while in Starbucks. A miscommunication delivered us to the Apple reseller instead. He had no more power cords. But he was very generous: he said I could charge up and use the wi-fi. He also pointed out the coffee. Wow.

On Prieline, I found a two-star hotel near the Apolonia metro station. The rooms had single beds of the sort you’d see in the army, if you were in the army in one of Portugal’s former African colonies. A sign warned against “eating or drinking in the room”, but the presence of an unwalled sink and bidet added, “but do feel free, out in the open, to wash your ass”. The manager was extremely helpful in calling the hotel in Porto and having them ship my power cord.

Then we headed out for the ocean, two blocks away, but we were stymied because the ocean, it seemed, had been fenced off. For miles and miles.  Never seen anything like it.  So we went to an Indian restaurant, opened the place up (at 6:30), and had a fantastic meal. We were the only patrons, and it wasn’t just that restaurant: block after block, restaurant tables were empty.

I asked Mom and Carrie what felt different or what they missed now that the Camino was over. “I miss Julio!” Carrie said. Mom said, “I miss Julio’s encouragement, and I miss Marie Anne’s laughter. I also miss walking a little every day.”

I will write more later about our dawning realization that we have left what screenwriters call the Special World.  We bring, I suppose, the precious elixir from our journey back to the Ordinary World.  But we also know that the other reality is now imminent.

The End of This Way

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Pedrouzo to Santiago – 18km

We weren’t in a hurry this morning.  For most of the walk we went at a leisurely pace, putting me in mind of the pilgrims to Canterbury, England, who once rode their horses and donkeys toward their destination at neither a slow trot nor a fast gallop, but somewhere in between, which is why we now have the word canter.

If you think Priceline (above) is confusing, definitely avoid Kemwel.com

I did start late, though, and so spent the first hour or so catching up to Mom and Carrie.  I had stayed behind at the albergue to try to get a car rental from Santiago to Lisbon, and I worked at this until I realized several things:  (1) Priceline’s notions of arithmetic are akin to Camino café-bars’ ideas about spaghetti Bolognese (2) car rental giant Kemwel.com has not yet entered the era of user-friendliness or common sense, to put it mildly, and (3) it is impossible to rent a car one-way in Europe for a price less than that of booking a private jet.

We’re at about the 42nd parallel, which is perhaps near the California-Oregon border in the U.S., but it’s still dark until well after eight a.m. because while the Spanish discovered America for Europe, they haven’t yet discovered Daylight Savings Time.

About forty-five minutes after Mom and Carrie had gone, I left Pedrouzo at a fast pace and found myself in a dark wood.  Two roads diverged in the wood, and I, I . . .

I waited for some pilgrims who hadn’t lost their headlamps.  Instead I got pilgrims who had no lights at all, and one who tried to use his phone.  The wood was so dark that I couldn’t even make out the ubiquitous Pilgrim Litter Navigation System.  Once a group of ten of us had bunched up, murmuring in three or four different languages, we concluded via groupthink to take the wider path, a decision that, unlike the Bay of Pigs, worked out pretty well.  I caught Mom and Carrie about an hour later, and I was pouring sweat.  I don’t remember the song I was singing as I came up from behind, but they were convincingly disappointed that it wasn’t “She’s a Lady”.

A Spaniard on a bike asked us if we’d seen a group of four men, including one with a beard.  No, we hadn’t.  Why?  Well, the bearded man and a woman had fallen in love some stages back, and then they’d gotten separated.  The biker was trying to find the man to deliver a letter from the woman that included information on how to contact her.  Awww, how sweet, right?

No.  I am sorry, but better the letter is never delivered at all.  If two people allegedly in love can’t think to negotiate contact information, what hope is there that they’ll remember to have sex, or to stop at the grocery store on the way home?

Not long afterward, we passed a pilgrim coming back from Santiago.  He was walking back to France – that is, doubling his trip.  We’d already run into an Austrian woman, perhaps late 40s or early 50s, who had begun in Toulose, France — 750 kilometers before the start of our own walk.

For Second Breakfast, I asked for the Espaguetti a la Carbonara.  Based on my bolonaise experience thus far on the Camino, I knew this was risky; my espaguetti could arrive with octopus on top, and in a pesto sauce.  Mom, feeling lucky, said she’d have one too.  But the man at the bar informed us that, sadly, there was only one.  Mom looked at the man, then at me.

“What did they do with the other one?”

A few kilometers later, she left her despised orange shirt on a sign that had been vandalized beyond usefulness anyway.  We had walked twenty yards away from it when she said, “Oh, God, now it’s whining.”  I thought she was joking, but she turned around to go back and get it.  I took out my camera, but she had turned around again.  “There are people coming,” she said sheepishly.

We walked on.  She got shaky again.  “It must be this food,” she said.  “My body is just all messed up lately.  I’ve got to get back on my diet.  I haven’t felt so many problems in my body in two years.”

Reaching Santiago

There’s not much to say about the last stage to Santiago.  After the early forests and some brief bits of farmland in ruin, we walked on backroads bordered by some aggressively ugly houses, through sparsely settled suburbs, near an active firing range where all the suburban warriors were belting out double-taps, Navy-SEAL-style, and through Santiago’s outskirts, which, like a bride’s skirts, seemed to go on forever.  We were in Santiago itself, but instead of the steep final hill that some guidebooks went on about, we were tested only by a tolerance for boredom.  Said Mom, “I won’t feel I’ve arrived until I see the cathedral.”

With a little less than a mile to go, we took a break.  I took off my trail-running shoes and discovered my first blisters, including a 2” x 3” job on my right foot and several on my toes.  The unnecessary river crossing I had done two days ago had gotten my minimalist footwear wet, and they hadn’t dried out by yesterday.  I had worn them anyway, with wool socks, but wearing them at all may have been a mistake.  You never want moisture near your foot when you walk a long way.

I took out a pair of scissors and did the kind of surgery that makes fifteen-year-old girls blanch, and then I put on my FiveFingers.  They had done almost all the work that got me here, and I would not, as Yahweh had done Moses, deny them the Promised Land right on the verge of it.

On our way to the plaza of the cathedral, we met two Seattle tourists who seem to have felt sort of bad because they’d gotten to Santiago by car.  Mom chatted with them a bit before we had to answer the magnetic pull of the finish line just a few blocks away.

When Jesus Meets Me in the Sky

I was thinking of Julio’s words to me.  “When you get to Santiago,” he’d said, “the local townspeople will greet you and offer to take you to their homes.  You’ll have dinner with them and stay the night with them.  It is a tradition there.”

I could just envision it.  People would line the road like in the Tour de France, holding out bunches of wildflowers they’d picked themselves.  Small children would squirm on their father’s shoulders, and teenagers would clamber onto the first-floor ledges of buildings, or hang from fire escapes and drain pipes.  Everyone would cry out huzzahs and hosannas.  Sloe-eyed and slender Spanish women would blow kisses.  Old women would clutch at their rosaries.

I would pick up my poles and jog around the plaza in a victory lap, but the people’s joy would not be so easily contained, oh no.  They would lift us up on their shoulders and sing to us traditional Galician songs, songs so old they were once sung by Pagans, and they would parade us around the square.  When they finally set us down, all of us laughing ourselves to tears, a member of the Knights Templar would step out of the shadows and explain that the brotherhood still existed, after all these centuries, and could I please join – nay, lead — them?

The cathedral was well-hidden on the far side of Santiago.  Also hidden were the townspeople and their homes, the huzzahs and the women, young and old.  There were no tears, there were no kisses, and the Knights Templar remained a figment of Dan Brown’s imagination.  We would stay in a pension, the Santa Cruz, run by an extremely helpful Spaniard who insisted on walking us places rather than simply give directions.

The Cathedral, and a Sort of Finish Line

The cathedral seems situated for maximum impact.  You see only spires as you approach, and then the back and side.  Then you go through a stone archway into the plaza and face the building opposite the cathedral.  And once we entered the plaza of the cathedral, I focused on watching, and filming, Mom walking ahead of me.  I surprised myself by getting a little choked up, but I’m pretty sure it was because I forgot to take my meds.

“Oh, we’re here!” she said.

Mom holds out the credentials stamped by all the albergues on the way

“You made it!” I told her.  “You did it.”

I handed Carrie the camera and hauled my backpack over to Mom.  I set it down and extracted the two battered red carnations I’d stored in it since the night before, and when she saw them she started crying again.  She didn’t even care that the stem of one was now only eight inches long.  When I pulled out the sixteen inches of the rest of the stem, she reached for that too.

Our Seattle friends

The Video 

Our Seattle friends now materialized before us and took pictures. [Read our correspondence from over four years later, in November 2015 – opens in new tab].

“We’ve been here for days,” the man said, “and you’re the first pilgrims we’ve gotten to talk to.  You guys have really accomplished something.”  It was strangely wonderful to have some witnesses, to call them that, who were fully willing to join in something so late in the day and yet still get something from it, and who gave something back.

In the cathedral floor — where you go if you don’t burn enough karma, or whatever, on the Camino

It was almost as an afterthought that we toured the cathedral.  It did not impress as much as the ones in Burgos and Leon.  There are three world-class cathedrals on the Camino:  in Burgos, Leon, and Santiago.  Burgos boasts most of the gold in South America.  Leon, its magnificent stained-glass windows.  My favorite, though, was the one in Los Arcos, because that is where something magical happened, as a father mourned his lost son, and we were witnesses to his love.  What matters, in a cathedral, is simply who’s inside it.

Nearby, we found the Pilgrims’ Office and got our Camino certificates, in Latin, which, as I work it out, means they came straight from the Vatican.

But it ain’t over till the mochilas come home.  We still had to schlep across town and pick up Mom and Carrie’s backpacks.  They were at the seminary, which turned out to be down a steep hill, up a steep hill . . .

“I’m glad we’re not staying there,” Mom said as we got close.  “It looks like a prison!  Look at the bars on the windows.”

“That’s to keep out the nuns,” I said.  Carrie then learned that a

The Seminary

seminary is an all-male facility, which we know because it shares the same root as semen.  She will have so much to share in her school report when she gets back to Colorado!

We ran into Devin, of Canada, who had walked 60km in 24 hours and now had severe tendinitis in both legs.  “I saw the sign for 50 kilometers,” he said, “and I thought, ‘I could be in Santiago by tomorrow morning.'”  We saw the 19-year-old New Zealand woman who had sped across Spain alone, on a deadline to catch a plane to London.  And Mom was overjoyed to find Barbara of Bavaria, whose husband had surprised her for their 26th wedding anniversary by flying out to join her on the last three days of the Camino.  She had walked him for 35km the first day.  “You people have got to be crazy,” he said.

Reunion with Barbara of Bavaria – in Santiago

What Have You Learned?

“When people ask you what you learned on this trip,” Mom said to Carrie, “what are you going to tell them?”

Carrie held an imaginary microphone to her mouth and sang, “She’s got style / She’s got grace . . . ”

I think that’s a job well done.  Go forth and prosper, little cousin!

Me?  I learned that Galicia, especially the countryside, is in a state of disrepair.  My friend Adam, a longtime student of Spanish and Latin American history, and who is right about things that don’t really matter exactly 63% of the time, says that Galicia was depopulated during the 20th century.  The guidebooks don’t often mention that until less than forty years ago, Spain was isolated and in decline under the right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

I learned that if you’re a Pope, you can fly into Santiago in a private jet, slide into your Popemobile, and, having materialized at home base, as it were, receive the designation of “pilgrim”.

I learned that miracles are possible.  For example, in the hurly-burly of travel, I had lost both the little rubber earbuds to my iPod’s headphones.  For weeks, I stuffed the hard metal tips into my ears.  They fell out easily.  It was a hard, hard existence.  But one day, as I was walking along, I saw, draped over a branch on one of the countless trees in Spain, a black wire.  As I drew closer, I saw that there was not one wire but several.  The tip that plugged into a music source had been ripped away, but there, before my eyes, were two rubber earbuds.  I crossed myself and harvested them, leaving the hard metal tips and the rest of the wires on the branch.  They fit my own headphones perfectly.

I learnd that if the collected works of E. Presley have taught us anything, it is that the primary anxiety of a waiter wearing blue suede shoes is that you may do anything you want to do but you should lay offa his blue suede shoes; that you can burn his house, and steal his car; that you can drink his liquor from an old fruit jar.  You can do anything, that you want to do, but you oughtta lay offa his blue suede shoes.

There is no destination.  Only the way.  Recall the book by the German comedian, if you can set aside, for a moment, the oxymoron.  The jacket copy said that since its publication, the number of pilgrims had increased by 20%.  If more people go on the Camino after my book about it, they will have missed the point.  There is no Camino.  There are only caminos.  There is no camino here.  The camino, the way, is wherever you make it.

“Buen Camino!”  We have heard that hundreds of times, from fellow pilgrims afoot, from bikers, and from the Spanish.  But at no time does it seem more appropriate than now, once we’ve reached Santiago.

“Have a good Way!”

Chief Expedition Videographer, Biographer, and Podiatrist

Next to Last Day: Arzúa to Pedrouzo

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Arzúa to Pedrouzo

In Arzúa’s  hostal, I slept well until the early morning.  Instead of being awakened by the rustling of pilgrims, there were other noises.  The sound of scuba gear, for example, with all the oxygen tanks, being dumped into showers upstairs.  A body dragged across the floor.  An entire roomful of furniture being moved across, scraped on, and dropped on the oddly uncarpeted tiled floor on which the hostals here insist.  Then everything was moved back again.  The body propped up in a chair.

Once again we walked a long way in the dark, using Carrie’s wind-up light.  The going was slow.  My thoughts went to the surprising, and large, prepayment penalty I’d just been assessed on my home loan.  I thought it might have been avoidable if I’d given the matter more of my attention, but before the blame could really lock in I reminded myself that I had juggled a superhuman number of things before I’d left for the trip, and I decided to let the money go, which is to say, to forgive myself.  Besides, when we hold on to money, we are trapped in a mindset of scarcity.  You don’t have to believe in something called a law of attraction to grasp that thinking money is scarce and hard to come by will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We were very hungry, and Mom needed to rest.  But there were no places to stop, other than stones on the trail.  We kept walking.  At about 7 kilometers, we saw up ahead another mirage – a site for Second Breakfast?  Yes!  I began to hum, and then to whistle, “Ode to Joy”.

I stayed there a while, and Mom and Carrie went on ahead.  I find that I prefer to start from behind and then catch up.  I may have falsely accused myself of competitiveness the other day.  I just feel better at 5 to 7 kilometers per hour.  I don’t get sore, and my bones, legs, and feet don’t hurt.  So, for the last time on this trip, I turned it on, and it was good.

Think of something funny, my boss said.  For the blog.

I got nothing funny.  Trying to walk here.

Then do profound.

Also not.  (Now my boss had me using German grammar).

Instead, relieved of the pace of 3 kilometers per hour, I was free to sing to myself, and also to the black-and-white Hereford cows I passed:

She’s got style

She’s got grace

And she’ll squirt milk

in your face

cause she’s a caa-ow

You who judge me, or dismissively recommend a karaoke exorcism, simply reveal the depths of your own ignorance.  It so happens that at my stride length, “She’s a Lady” offers the perfect rhythm for walking 7 kilometers per hour.  Go ahead.  Measure a three-foot stride, walk for an hour, and see if you don’t cover seven kilometers.

Pedrouzo

The Albergue Porta de Santiago, in Pedrouzo, was one of the most modern we’ve seen, and one of the most attractive.  It is one of perhaps three albergues on the entire trip that has motivated me to take its picture.  I especially salute the designers for the happy Feng Shui of their glassed-in plants, and for using solid, well-constructed wooden bunks in place of rickety aluminum, and wooden slats in place of springs.  (Noise control, however, would be much better if they used walls that went to the ceiling.  As it is, there is no way for pilgrims to pack or even exit without pilgrims on the other side of the eight-foot partial wall hearing them).

Rene was already there when we arrived, resting his sore bones inside his sleeping bag.  Next to the Feng Shui area, naturally.  He grinned at me every time I passed, which I did a lot in order to get on the free wi-fi.  The proprietor gravely informed me that the password to the wi-fi was “un secreto,” and only he could type it in.  Rene grinned really big when he saw me with my laptop.  He assumes that the only thing that can be done on a computer is work, whereas I live much of my life on it, including 46% of the fun parts.

The next day would be our last on the Camino.

Freud’s Sun

The Demise of the Beautiful

Before Julio and Marie Anne had to leave us, Julio said that Marie Anne would be sad once she got back to France.  “She is always sad when a walk ends,” he said.  And indeed she was, as he reported a few days later.  There’s something interesting here.  She was sick during much of the trip.  Over the summer she had fallen out of her usual walking shape, with the result that she struggled every day and was always falling behind.  And of course she slept with the masses, and ate food designed for them too.

So what did she miss?  The camaraderie?  The slowing-down mindfulness of walking?  Freaking Julio?

Carrie, too, said she was already sad at the prospect of the walk being over.

I don’t have this.  On the other hand, I did at least enjoy myself while it was going on.  In working with clients (not to mention myself, my most intractable client), I often think of Freud and a colleague walking in the evening, or perhaps it was morning.  Freud pointed out the magnificent sunset, but his colleague did not want to look.  He said something like, “It will only go away, and then I’ll be sad.”  A lot of us, a lot of the time, live our lives that way.

Notes from Kilometer 18, Give or Take

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Oy.  I am knackered.  Currently in Arca, or Pedrouzo, or Arca Pedrouzo, or Arca (Pedrouzo) – it all depends on the sign you read.  Just as whether we’ve traveled 40 or 43 kilometers in the last two days depends on whether you believe the piece of paper given us by the French, the somewhat suspicious Galician kilometerstones, or your lyin’ legs.  In any event, we’re at about Kilometer 18 – or about six hours’ walk from Santiago, which we’ll reach tomorrow.

A few days ago I was going to write here that I’ve finally gotten the hang of all this walking business.  By the time we reach Santiago, I thought, I’d be in shape to walk this Camino.  But yesterday the bones (or something; ligaments?) of my legs hurt. And today it was the bottoms of my feet.  We’ve been resting for hours, and they’re still sore.  It’s like a dwarf pounded on them with a wooden mixing spoon.  Why a dwarf?  I don’t know.  Imagery.

Let’s catch up, shall we?

Spanish Pilgrims

The Spanish (all references to “the Spanish” here expressly exclude Julio) keep to themselves, somewhat like the Asians.  Everyone else on the Camino interacts with one another.  In the Asians’ case, I think it is a matter of language and culture.  If they speak English, or want to talk, they don’t let on.  In the case of the Spaniards, it is both the lack of a common language (few speak English, the common language of the non-Spanish pilgrims) and the Spaniards’ lesser need to seek out friendship:  their own friends are just around the corner.  And who else but the Spanish can take just two or four days to walk on the Camino?

“Lejos!” they say, when I answer that I am from the United States.  Anywhere in the U.S. but New York is, in their minds, even farther away.

The Spanish are also not as much in the moment, perhaps because they are in their own country, so they have not, in a sense, left their old lives behind.  They are still on the same cell phone plans, and they, unique among the nationalities here, carry their phones with them around the albergues, or can even be heard talking on the Camino itself.  I’ve seen Spanish Camino bikers ride by wearing earbuds.  “Buen Camino!” one called out to us, and then continued talking into his cell phone’s microphone as he rolled past.  Really, why bother with the Camino?  You can do that on a stationary bike in your local gym.

On Toilets

I think it’s time we had a serious, adult conversation about toilets in Europe, and perhaps especially in less developed Europe.  The traveler to certain parts of Europe, like points on the Camino, cannot help but notice that there must not be a distribution channel for toilet seats in these areas.  There the commode sits, fine white porcelain, yet bereft of any place for you to sit.  Except that you are supposed to sit.  You must sit.  And if you are a man, you will sit where the splashing from other men goes.  On the porcelain itself.

Was there, at some point, a rash of toilet-seat thefts by tourists or pilgrims?  Where would you put one?  My driver’s ed teacher in high school made his bathroom pass a toilet seat precisely because they can’t be hidden.

At least it’s not southern Italy, whose toilets alone (last I was there, in 1989) gave it Third World (or Developing World, as we’re now supposed to say) status.  There, you get a hole in the ground.  If you’re lucky, there’s a chain or rope from the ceiling that you can clasp hold of while squatting.  I remember I was right out of college, this was in Naples, there was a long line for the bathrooms.  I walked to the front of the line just to see WTF.  There sat an unsmiling matron of a certain age, at a large desk, doling out five squares of toilet paper to each of the backpackers.  There they all stood, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, waiting for their squares.

I then went to see the toilets.  Cheesus Crise! as Julio would say.  Hole in the ground and not even a chain to hold onto.  The Romans were better sanitation engineers in 40 BCE than the Napolitanos were in 1989.

Ventas de Narón to Casanova Mato

Web with Dew

Every inhalation in Galicia brings with it a surprise.  It is an earthy, aromatic part of the world.  Woodsmoke and sorghum, fall leaves and grass, cow dung and a smell like oranges (but there are no oranges), hay that smells like camomille, soil.  Eucalyptus!  Brought in from Australia in the mistaken belief it would be useful for building.

In the morning I am inhaling the camomille-like smell in deep breaths, taking it in, imagining the freshness of it nurturing my cells, and then I am caught short by a smell so foul that my cells threaten to mutate, or at least to revolt, until once again I can smell something like tea . . .

We have left so early that we navigate by moonlight.  I have left my new headlamp somewhere, and Mom has spent so many hours reading while others sleep that her battery is dead.

Oh what a plight

Dark as dark night

Thank God for Carrie

With her wind-up light

There is a corona around the moon, like a small rainbow.  “Grandma Powell always said that meant a change in the weather,” Mom said.  “I guess that was the Indian in her.”  Grandma Powell was one-quarter Indian – Cherokee, and perhaps Blackfoot or Blackfeet (these are two distinct tribes).  The rest, as I’ve written elsewhere, was gristle.

From the hills we’re in, we can see fog blanketing the valley below.  When we enter the fog, the air is so thick with water that our packs grow wet, and the trees rain water down on us as we pass.

We pass a cemetery.  My eye catches the word “Peregrino,” Pilgrim, on a sign, and I back up to read it.

Cimetario de Peregrinos

How encouraging.  A cemetery for pilgrims who fell between the 80th and 60th kilometers.

Mom said she read in her book, the one by the German comedian, that only 16% of pilgrims finish the Camino.

We are still navigating by moonlight, and when we enter the trees and the moonlight can’t penetrate, we navigate by litter.  Pilgrim litter is far more reliably ever-present than the Camino’s fabled yellow arrow.

My mind is still working on yesterday’s legal kerfuffle.  It’s also working out solutions to the electronic document signing on Friday.

Secure DocuSign signature starts with the preparer of the document having the email address of the signatories and giving them a password.  Title company inexperienced with DocuSign, won’t think to require a password.  Person clicking on the signature lines needs only the credentials to the email address to be used. 

And this I give to Julio, who is on his way to Madrid, by text message, with instructions for him to pass the same on to Adam, in New Jersey, by email.  Problem solved, I return to the world around me.

Dog and Corncrib (What do these things *do*?)

We will put in around 20 kilometers today.  It is almost too much for Mom.  “I wish we were already there,” she says, with a few kilometers to go.  I have noticed the same thought in myself.  I then put my attention back in the present, including on my sore legs or hips, working to remain in the now.  I suggest that she too follow Eckhart’s advice not to resist, not to want to be in the future.

“I’m not resisting,” Mom says, resisting even talk of resistance.  “It was just kind of a little hope.”

Carrie laughs.  Forget being a prophet who isn’t heard in his own house; try being a mere life coach.

Casanova Mato

We finally reach the albergue in Casanova Mato.  The older woman who runs it is handsome and officious and as helpful as she can be without speaking English.  We three go upstairs and shower, and then Carrie and I take a nap.  It is probably my second nap of the trip.  I’m finding that naptime is an excellent time to get sleep without snorers around.  Daytime has always been for me an illicit time to sleep, a hedonistic indulgence, and so it’s doubly delicious.  In fact, it’s downright —

“Wake up,” Mom says.  “It’s five-thirty.  Time to eat.”

She’s perched on the edge of her bed, shoes tied smartly.

“We just ate a few hours ago,” I say, stifling a sob.

“No, we ate at three,” she says.

Mom’s gusto for food has reached a fever-pitch on this trip.  I point out that I’m not yet hungry, and that nothing in Spain starts cooking before six-thirty, and that in fact the woman downstairs told me that the albergue a kilometer to the east opens at seven-thirty, and the one 1.5 kilometers to the west, which offers a ride, opens at six-thirty or a quarter to seven.

“I’m bored,” she says.

“Why don’t you arrange the mochilas for tomorrow?”  This will get rid of her, I think.

A young Spaniard named Álvaro helps me speak to the service that handles the mochilas, the backpacks that Mom and Carrie send ahead by car every day.  I thought I was clear to tell the mochila man that we need him to carry the mochilas from Casanova Mato to Ribadiso, but he keeps asking the name of whichever woman is downstairs.  Is it Carmen?  How the hell should I know?  We went around like this for some time.  I asked a group of four Spaniards of about my age if any of them spoke English.  They all shook their heads and pointed to Álvaro.  He got on the phone, then off.

“He is very hard to understand,” Álvaro says.  “It’s a strange dialect. I think it’s maybe his first day on the job.”

I asked Álvaro why he was on the Camino.  “Because in January my mother was very ill, and I promised if she got better . . .  She got better.”

We invited him to join us for dinner, but he’d brought his own comida, he said.  So we called the albergue, Casa Bolboreta, that served food 1.5km away, and then we were blown away by the great meal we got for 8 Euros.  Meatballs, great fries, lentil stew, water, wine – Mom said it was the second-best meal she’s had here, after the dreamy two servings of soup she got during the festival in tiny Navarette.

She and Carrie had been reading the blog and got themselves into a laughing fit.  Mom started to reminisce about a trip to Germany in the 1990s, when Oma, my mother’s mother, was still alive.  Mom had gone with her then-husband, known now as whatsizname, and they decided to take a bus tour of the Rhine Valley.  Oma invited herself along.  They’d been riding in the bus for several hours when Oma leaned across the aisle and said to Mom, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said.

“Well, where is it then?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Oma, disgusted, turned to the man next to her.  “Sir,” she said, in her unmistakable (and usually incomprehensible) Bavarian accent, “d’yaknow where this bus ‘s goin?”

“Leiwen,” the man said.  She thanked him and turned back to Mom.

“Where is this Leiwen?”

“How should I know?”

“What,” Oma said, “you get on a bus and don’t even know where it’s going?”

The Albergue at Casanova Mato

The albergue itself looked a lot like the little hospital in which I was born.  Boxy, small, and, by definition, I suppose, sort of clinical.  There must be a manufacturer out there who makes albergue dormitory bunk beds, because I’ve seen them again and again on the Camino.  They’re made of hollow aluminum.  They don’t fit together well, and they squeak.

But their squeaking is nothing compared to the sound their springs make. Imagine ten windshield wipers that have lost their rubber.  I felt bad every time I got up from the bed, or sat down.  It’s not good to hold it in when you’ve got to go in the middle of the night, but some times – and I do mean only some of the time – I’m more thoughtful than is good for me.

Or maybe I still had in mind the ominous sign downstairs.  Its English translation assured us that the albergue had the right to “throw away” any “infractors” of the rules of the albergue.  (The fine print said infractors could be thrown in either a culvert or the trough of a pig (also known as pre-jamon) “at the proprietor’s sole discretion”.)

Casanova Mato to Arzua (~ Km. 60 to ~ Km. 38)

Still no grocery stores. And our albergue didn’t even serve breakfast.  The next spot on the map – there are few towns on the Galician Camino – is over 9 kilometers away.

It is cold when we start.  After thirty or so minutes, I have to take off my windbreaker and cap, leaving my two wool layers and gloves.  Then, without any change in altitude, we all suddenly walk across an invisible line and the temperature drops.

“Did you feel that?”

“Yes!  It got cold again!”

We walk on for a bit, and then it’s like walking into a warm house.  By now I am totally confused.  I am able, finally, to empathize with Tiger Woods, never quite sure whether his clothes are to be be put on or taken off.

Mom says that she no longer feels anything in her back, where the tumor sat.  She says that Barbara the Bavarian told her about a German woman who’d had cancer and walked the Camino.  The woman visualized the cancer as a ball of wool, and every day saw herself pulling a strand of wool off it.  When she went back for her tests, the cancer was gone.

The Ultimate Second Breakfast

However, Mom says she feels a pain like a band across her stomach.  Perhaps it’s the lentils, which begin to do their job and send her into the bushes.

Mentally, I am more of a walker now.  Walking 20 kilometers, or almost 13 miles, is no longer a big deal.  On some days, I could see walking a good bit more.  And of course 13 miles will get you all over Manhattan. But we rely on our food, and our breaks, and we love above all Second Breakfast – which is hard to find in Galicia.  We are all starving, and need a break from walking in the near-darkness.  I am just commenting on the dearth of places to eat when, up ahead, I see it.

It’s like a shining city on a hill.  A castle.  A grail.

“Is it a mirage?”

No.  It is, in fact, a place to eat and rest.

We fall upon it like castaways on a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Menus and signs are everywhere, and they have pictures of pizza on them.  “I wonder if they’re really serving pizza this early,” I say.  “I was thinking the same thing,” Carrie says.  It is 9a.m.  We order, get on the Internet, I click to electronically sell the big, beautiful house I’ve owned for almost two years, and at 9:30 we’re each hoovering up a medium pizza.

Only later does it occur to me that I didn’t even read the closing documents on my house.  I just clicked.

We spent over an hour there, and then we were off.  We were nearly run over by a small herd of cattle, including a feisty little bull whose head had been tied to his right leg, so that he ran with a misleadingly submissive ducking motion.  Then we were into the eucalyptus trees, and then we came upon another hill.  Mom has not yet seen a hill that didn’t elicit a groan from her.

I felt my pack pulled backward.  I looked back and saw that she had grabbed a loop of it with one of her walking sticks.  “Come on,” she said.  “I carried you around everywhere for nine months.”

I am sure we pass a kilometerstone saying 44 kilometers, and then 45, and then, much, much later, 42.5.  I am hoping this system prevails at dinner, when someone will serve us 12.5 Euros of food and charge us for 10.

“Buen Camino!” we say to some bikers.

“Good way!” they cry back, in English, much as the flirtatious waitress (which kind of has a nice ring to it) in El Acebo, when thanked, had translated directly from the Spanish de nada to sing, “Nothing!”

Bone-Tired and Shaky

My legs are bone-tired.  But Mom is worse off.  There are more hills.  “Look,” she says, holding out her hand.  “I’m shaking.”  Indeed she is.  We ponder why it is and she walks some more, stops.  Holds up her shaking hand.  She tries to walk some more, stops, trying to catch her breath.  “I can call a taxi,” I say.  She shakes her head.

“You slept terribly,” I remind her, “and didn’t eat much for Second Breakfast.  And no First Breakfast.  Let’s get you something to eat.  I think Carrie has a banana.”  Carrie did have a banana.

In Arzúa, we opt for another hostel, so we can have our own rooms and get some sleep – and rest even when not sleeping.  I fell asleep on the bed with my laptop on my chest, something about as common, for me, as fainting.

Are we going to make it to Santiago?

Leaving Mercadoiro; Rene the Eagle

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Walking, Thinking

In the morning I got an email from someone with whom I have had a challenging business and personal relationship.  This person, Pat, let us say, had just done something with implications against my financial interests, and it contradicted without comment my earlier guidance, was mathematically incorrect and logically flawed, and was not compliant with federal law.  I felt a brief annoyance, and then I found myself, to my surprise, feeling love and compassion.  I even found that I was letting go of the money involved.

This was all at the conscious level.  The conditioned mind, the reactive mind, is not so easily quieted.  Decades of conditioning to anticipate (and sometimes imagine or create) problems would not be so easily undone.  For many kilometers, as we walked in the dark and into the dawn, I watched my mind working through a resolution to the problem.

I think my gift and my burden are often one and the same.  I can see strategically far down the road, see the implications of each possible course of action and response, creatively work out contingency plans, and even start executing on all those plans – but the cost is a mind full of wires and cables and blinking lights and barbells and ropes, not to mention dusty chalkboards and painstakingly handcrafted chess sets.

So I would note the moon, nearly full overhead, and Venus next to it, and the mist rising off the farmland, and the shadows of the trees around us, and then I would notice that my mind had, without so much as a by-your-leave, gone back to gnawing at its little nut.  But damned if it wasn’t making progress.  Over the next few hours, it had formulated an entire email response – though the mind – choose your metaphor — fueled by the energy of the relationship, or stuck in old neural pathways or addictive dynamics, went through a great deal of unnecessary repetition.  Perversely, it was mindless.

And the solution came at the cost of my being fully present to what was going on around me.  It’s neither possible nor desirable to be always fully present; sometimes we have to think, analyze, plan.  The problem is when we keep planning and thinking long beyond what’s necessary, with increasingly diminishing returns.

I was also thinking of how to ensure I would be able to sign the closing documents on my house, in Bend, Oregon, while walking through increasingly rural Spain.  I mulled over the situation.  The closing was on Friday.  I needed to make an electronic signature on the closing documents.  This required Internet access.  But I knew I had to be running low on Internet.  Vodafone was unable to tell me how much Internet I had left, so I was conserving all I could, and by now had stopped using the Vodafone USB dongle (a vaguely obscene term) entirely.  What if the Vodafone ran out even as I logged on to find out when the documents could come?  What if, as in two towns already, Vodafone got no reception at all?  Could it screw up the entire deal?

Every day we walk almost due west, and mostly before noon.  If the sun is behind us or slightly to the left, we are on the right path.  If it’s more to the left side, then we are either late or we are off-course, going too far to the south.  I have a farmer’s tan with an emphasis on my neck and left side.

I thought of Julio, and how he said his English colleagues in London would take him golfing with them, and how he’d throw his clubs for yards.  A good walk spoiled indeed!  I would pay serious money to see Julio golf, or rather not-golf.

Galicia has few towns and almost no cities so far on the Camino.  There are no churches to duck into.  There are no water fountains that look as if they’d been there for centuries because, so far, there are none at all.  The albergues often have no Internet.  The Galicians along the Camino seem to have concealed their grocery stores from the prying eyes of pilgrims trying to save money or diversify their diet; we still have not seen one.  Galicia is just a different ball game.

When I was a freshman in high school, and still barely over five feet tall, our tallest teacher, Mr. Unzicker, had sidled up to me in the hallway as I walked.  “Geez,” he said, “you take some pretty big steps for such a little guy.”  I’ve always walked quickly.  I suppose I thought I had a lot of ground to cover, and no time to waste.

Now I walk slowly, for the first time in my life, because I have no choice.  I must walk at the pace of my companions.  Surely it’s been good for me not to feel competitive with other walkers.  We are always falling behind or getting passed.  From this uncharacteristic position I walk, and not only that, I walk without checking a cell phone.

On occasion, a very rare occasion, an attractive single woman passes, and, startlingly, she is permitted to walk ahead unmolested.  In the same way that you can discern signals in a dream that tell you that you are dreaming, this is how I know I’m not in real life.

Walking With Passion

I thought of the man who was walking with his daughter’s ashes.  Now there is a purpose.  He is said to cover 75 kilometers a day, which, at the punishing pace Julio and I have set on a few occasions, would take him at least 10.5 hours of pure walking per day, not counting water, food, or equipment breaks.  Thirteen hours a day, minimum, is probably more realistic.

I’m not a father, but I wonder if, when he walks, he imagines, like the phantom memory of an amputated limb, a slight weight on his shoulders, imagines holding in his hands the buckled leather shoes of a four-year-old girl as she squeals with delight and wraps her hands around his head.  And if that is what fuels him.

Rene

We walked for many kilometers with Rene, a German massage therapist who hailed from near Leipzig, Germany.  I asked him why he was on the Camino.  “Because,” he said in German, “I have a goal but I don’t have the way.”  His goal, he said, was to open a therapy center that employed massage, shiatsu, music, crystals, and the like.  It was hard to get a loan, he said.  Germany was not that progressive.

Mom and Rene chatted in German.  I walked ahead to let my reactive mind burble along in its way.  Besides, it was too early in the morning for German.  You have to be very alert to be able to wait until the end of a very long sentence for the verb to arrive, at last, so that you can piece together what has just been said by dropping in the last, critical piece of the puzzle.

Rene had been married for 14 years before divorcing three years ago.  Not long ago, his former wife had died.  He was still very sad about this.  He said he felt very guilty; if he hadn’t left, she might not have died.  Mom was surprised to hear this from a professional healer.  Didn’t he know that you can’t take responsibility for the choices people make, or for everything that happens to them?  Not anymore than you can spend your energy resenting someone, which is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.  He said he’d been helped by talking to Mom.  “You meet everyone for a reason,” he said.

Portomarín

We crossed a very wide river bed to Portomarín.  Two bridges ran side-by-side.  One was perhaps twelve feet above the river bed.  It looked almost Roman in its antiquity, though I’d read bridges over the river had been destroyed and rebuilt many times over the last thousand years.  The other bridge, the one on which we walked, must have been 150 feet above the river.  It was a great, white modern span, with a two-lane road, and from its walkway it was dizzying to look down at the moving water.  We ducked into Portomarín and then found a short-cut that didn’t take us all the way through town, and soon we were climbing on a dirt and rock path for many kilometers.

At times we came upon smells that would have decimated Napoleon’s armies.

After about 9 kilometers we stopped at a stone picnic table for Second Breakfast:  bread, butter, jam, cookies, apple, red pepper, water, chocolate milk.

Mom peppers her speech now with longing for these

“I’m going to miss these red peppers,” Mom said.  “They’re sweet, as juicy as a fruit, and big.  Lots of vitamins.  It’s going to be hard to go back to those pale imitations we get from Mexico or California or wherever.”

I had to admit they were good.  I actually saved my slices for dessert, eating them after the cookies.  They were better than apples.

The Eagle

Ventas de Narón, Wednesday.  Mom finagled me a massage from Rene.  We were sitting on the patio in the albergue (also 10 Euros, but without any amenities).  Rene asked where I hurt.  No place in particular, I said.

He turned and looked at me not unlike an eagle examining a rabbit.  His eyes are dark, and arresting.  I looked back at him a while, waiting to see what he would say or do, or if his expression would change.  For several long moments he looked at me, and then said, in German and to my mother, “I sense some deep-seated problems.  I think I might be able to do something.  I’m just not sure where they are yet.”  He walked away to collect the tools of his trade.

“See?” Mom said.  “He’s already able to see the deep-seated problems.”

“Mom,” I said, “it’s like a horoscope or palm reading.  You can’t go wrong saying someone has deep-seated problems.”

When he came back, I told him all the places I’d had physical problems, going way back.  Shinsplints (high school track).  Hamstrings (college track and rugby, law school flag football).  Ruptured disk in the neck (Department of Justice desk-sitting).  Recently, my left hip flexor.  He said he would have guessed Tourette’s.  Around the time I got engaged, I said, my lower back gave out, painfully.

That, he said, was “existential”.  From the lower back, that was a message:  Be careful!

If he looks long enough, he said, he can also see shadows.

Shadows? I said.  Like in the aura?

No.  The aura folds around the body, but the shadows just lay on the body, and they get darker as he looks.  Examining me again with his direct gaze, he looked suddenly displeased, knitting his dark brows together as if he’d seen a roach on my left shoulder.

He asked my mother, “What is his sun sign?”

“Wasserman,” she said.  Aquarius.  (Literally, as German is, “waterman”).

“Always striving to be the best,” he said.  “That’s normal,” he added.  He asked my rising sign.

“Scorpio.”

“Ohhh!”  He looked up into the air, as if confused or distressed.

He told my mother he was going to say something, a single sentence, and that I should not be offended.  I waited, and then she translated.

“High grandeur,” he said, “comes before a fall.”  He went on.  “Aquarius is good, but through the Scorpio, well, it’s always a little poisonous and toxic, and can lash out.  From a high position, it’s easy to use the barb.  But the Wasserman,” he said to Mom, “will always keep him in a high position.”

“But I have been depressed,” I said.  “It’s not like I’ve lived my whole life in a high position.”

“It can be worse when depressed,” he said.  “Believe me.  I’m a Pisces, carrying a Ram ascending.”

He regarded me typing all this up as we spoke.  “The Aquarius is the highest possible in the working field.  Nothing better.  Because the Aquarius carries all the other signs within itself as far as doing is concerned.”

“I wish that translated to serious money,” I joked.

“Geduld,” he said.  Patience.  “They’re just the best at work.  That’s why,” he said to Mom, “he’s so good on his computer.”

We spread a blanket on one of the stone tables nearby, I lay on my stomach, and he set to work on my back and shoulders and neck.  He was very good.  He had asked me earlier how I liked massages and I’d said I liked them as painful as possible.  So he was firm.

“Oh,” he said.  He was on my right shoulder and upper back.  “This is your work.  But I think the other side will be worse.  That’s the divorce.  Women.  Love.”

He said I worried too much about money.  It took an enormous amount of energy.  I agreed.  Sometimes I think I’d have earned a hell of a lot more money if I’d worried less about doing so.  “You don’t have to worry.  It will come.  It is taken care of.  You are protected.”

I laughed.  Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

He worked on me some more.  “He expects too much from love,” he told my mother, who was standing nearby.  “Love comes, love goes.”

I asked him how he could go about defining the deeper problem.  “I would need to talk to you more,” he said.  He suspected it had to do with childhood.  “But that’s normal,” he added.  For me, he said, it had to do with sicherheit – security.  “You need to live for you.  Not for everyone else first.  You first.  If you don’t do that, you are not good for anyone else.  You need to pause – you understand pause?”

“Yes.”

When we were done, he nodded at me.  “At night,” he said, “it will start to work.”

Later, after he gave Carrie a massage too, he walked over and looked Mom intently in the eyes.  Then he came around and did the same to me.  “You are an old soul,” he said to Mom.  “Him, not so much.  I mean, not very young, but not so old, either.”  Rene said he was an old soul too.

This annoyed me.  If there was such a thing as an old soul, everything I had been given and chosen to believe had said I was one of them.  My soul was one of the best, most advanced, state-of-the-art souls.

Which I suppose just proves how young it is.

Not long after the massage, Rene caught me on my laptop again.  He looked displeased, and repeated that I needed to pause and not work so much.  I felt self-conscious even bringing my notebook to dinner.  After that I had to hide my labors from him as a child hides porn from a parent.

We offered to pay him.  “No,” he said.  “I get something out of it, too.  That’s my payment.”  We tried to buy him dinner and wine, but he only wanted salad and he doesn’t drink.  He frowned and shook his head ostentatiously as the waitress read off the dessert choices to us.  He told us, skinny, close-cropped Rene, that he had once weighed 90 kilograms (198 pounds) and had hair almost to his waist.  This was because he was a biker and a heavy-metal aficionado, and he used to dress like it.  He was still shocked that when he went to New York, in 1998, dressed up in his leather biker gear and hard-core t-shirts, with his long hair, people stared at him.  “In New York!” he kept repeating.  “A world city!”  People had asked what band he was in.

Having been a biker, he said, had also made him a couch potato.  He had never before walked farther than he could throw his helmet, and now he was paying for it:  every day, as I saw, he lay in bed for two to three hours after his walk, letting his sore bones recover.  He particularly liked heavy-metal ballads, especially those of a Texas band called Wasp.  Had we heard of them?

No.

He found a song on his iPod and gave me the earphones.  I smiled through my pain, nodding vigorously at him.  I guessed that his limited English didn’t let him hear the lyrics as they really were.  I couldn’t account for his admiration of the vocals and the guitar.  There’s no accounting for tastes, and all bad art is sincere.

We thanked him profusely and the next morning we were gone before he awoke.  He passed us in the mid-morning but did not tarry.

Sarria to Mercadoiro to Ventas de Naron

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Part 1:  Food on the Camino

Monday.  We’re in Sarria now.  I have before me a bottle of wine that did not cost extra and has no label.  This makes me very nervous.  This time the “espaghetti bolonaise” came in the form of penne pasta tubes.  I think the Camino Spanish have some confusion about what spaghetti is and how spaghetti is made in Bologna, and I propose a fact-finding mission to Italy be scheduled by a team of qualified Spanish culinary and scientific experts.

I wonder how many Spaniards per year name their sons Jamón.  I would not be surprised by any answer but this one:  “fewer than sixty”.  In the United States, I remember reading of two girls who had been named Orangelo and Lemongelo (the “gelo” instead of “Jello”, I assume, to avoid actual trademark infringement).  This is child abuse.

I’ve been to Madrid, Bilbao, Pamplona, and Barcelona, among other Spanish cities.  I know that they do have restaurants.  But the cafe-bar, especially on the Camino, has a distinctive kind of menu.  I wouldn’t claim that a 500-mile walk through the rural United States would yield a greater diversity and creativity in the food, so what I say here applies only to the cafe-bar on the Camino — which is to say, to just about every place you can find to eat for over a month.

The menu del dia along the Camino de Santiago usually comes with a first plate, a second plate, dessert, and your choice of wine or water.  It costs between 8.50 and an occasional high of 12 Euros – usually 9 or 10.  The choice of first plate is invariably one of the following:

The Camino notion of spaghetti Bolognese, which somehow does not involve a tomato, or even, necessarily, spaghetti.

Ensalada mixta, mixed salad, which is lettuce, a few slices of tomato, and a scoop of tuna – even when the menu does not mention tuna, it comes with tuna.  A cucumber, tomato, Caesar, arugula, beet, mushroom, pea, bacon bit, corn, spinach, or any other type of salad is not possible.

Other options are jamón and cheese, jamón and tuna, eggs and bacon, and eggs and jamón.

The second plate offers a choice of fish – cod (bacalao), usually – or grilled chicken.  Sometimes beef, or another type of fish.

Dessert can be flan, yogurt, some kind of cake (tarta), and only occasionally ice cream.

In Sarria, I go to the bar to pay and the proprietress reminds me that dessert was included.  Yogurt or flan.  I shrug and order the flan.  She reaches into a refrigerator and takes out a small white plastic carton of the sort yogurt comes in.  Right in front of me, she peels open the lid and turns the carton upside-down on a coffee saucer, allowing the flan to slide out.  Then she presents me with my dessert.

So far I have seen no to-go coffee in Spain.  Not a single Starbucks, not even in Bilbao, Pamplona, Burgos, or Leon.  The Spanish seem to hold to the charming creed that a person who intends to drink coffee should simply drink coffee, rather than drinking coffee while also doing one to five other things.  A Zenmaster would approve.

At the Bar Morgade, at kilometer 99.5, I had an empanada Gallega, or Galician tuna pie.  It wasn’t bad, but would have been greatly improved by cheese and grilling.  I also ate huevos con bacon, because the Spanish eat fried eggs and omelettes all day long.

Part 2:  Language in Modern Spain

I have collected a half-dozen different Spanish lessons on CD or podcast, and, since my arrival, have faithfully listened to virtually none of it.  (I also imagined that I’d listen to audiobooks on my long, presumably boring walks.  Never once has the urge struck me).  One of the Spanish courses, when I bought it in 1993, had long been used by the Department of State’s Foreign Service officers.  It has quaint phrases like “Deme la pluma,” or “Give me the quill pen”.  But I need something for a modern country, a member of the European Union in the year 2011.  What I could use in modern Spain are phrases like the following:

Do you have Internet?

No, it doesn’t work.

Do you have wi-fi?

This also doesn’t work.

Dear Orange, What do you mean by the slogan “Internet Everywhere”?  Because it doesn’t actually work.  Anywhere.  Ever.  Not for a minute. 

Is there a Thai, Indian, Chinese, German, Mexican, Japanese, or French restaurant in the area?

Dear Vodafone,

Your retail staff in Bilbao doesn’t know how your Internet service works.  Or your cell phones.  Could a shoe salesman have gotten into one of your retail stores?  Your Internet-access interface says I can click to find out my balance.  But it doesn’t work.  It also says I can recharge on the Internet.  But the link doesn’t work.  When I find the right page on my own, the form doesn’t work.  The error messages are alternately incorrect, nonsensical, or unhelpful.  In other words, they don’t work.  No one responds to my help requests.  Does anyone, I wonder, at your company work?

Part 3:  Sarria

The municipal albergue in Sarria was one of the least pleasant we’ve seen.  (The taxi driver had dropped us off there; in the morning we walked past half a dozen visibly nicer albergues).  Each floor’s beds were all bunked around a triangular, all-glass airshaft that enabled anyone trying to sleep to hear the noise and see the light of pilgrims on all the other floors.  There was no Internet.  The kitchen was tiny, and shared space with the washing machines.  There was one outlet, in the hallway by the bathroom.  Competition for it was fierce.

In the albergues, I have seen a number of things I would rather not have seen, usually in the nature of older Europeans without sufficient cladding.  In Sarria, as all the pilgrims on our floor quietly prepared for bed just before lights-out, a fiftyish Spanish couple arrived at their bunks, speaking loudly.  The generously proportioned woman stripped to a shirt and her panties and lay on her stomach, and the man began to vigorously rub a cream of overpowering scent into the backs of her ample legs.

This went on for some time.

Then they hung a towel from the top bunk so as to obscure the bottom bunk, and our uxurious husband climbed in with his creamed-up wife and they yakked late into the night, indifferent to Mom’s attempts to hush them.

Part 4:  Into the Cabbage Groves of Galicia

The Camino ends in the capital of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela (“St. James of the Field of Stars”), and the Camino as a pilgrimage was originally a Galician tradition.  (This was before the kings of Navarra and Castilla and Leon realized how much revenue could be raised from pilgrims, most of them from France.)  The Galicians have placed milestones, so to speak, every half a kilometer on the Way, so that pilgrims can count down the distance to Santiago.  These have been defaced almost beyond legibility by people’s names, messages to one another, and relationship status.  (Almost all are in Spanish).

I had understood Sarria to be a neat 100 kilometers away from Santiago, but the morning found

Camino Kilometerstones -- and more discarded boots

us walking by a restaurant that called itself “Kilometer 111”.  Uh-oh.  Mom’s ailments tell her she can do 16 kilometers a day, but not 19 or 20.  We’ll have to figure out how to make up this difference and still make Santiago in time.

Mom said she’d read that pilgrims walk more slowly in Galicia, perhaps because it’s so beautiful and they don’t want it to end.  The beginning of our walk was not so promising.  The smell of fresh animal dung as we left Sarria was strong enough to be detected in outer space.  We passed a curious Galician custom we would see repeated in every village thereafter:  cemeteries that looked like a blend of mausoleum (tall concrete structures) and morgue (small doors, three high, into which coffins, or ashes, were slid).

Once we got into the country, the day became simply magical.  We were back in the trees,

Galicia

and we wound our way through one small farm after another.  Mist rose from the fields, seemingly without source, for we could see no rivers or ponds nearby.  We crossed quaint stone bridges spanning tiny trickling creeks.  And the smells!  We breathed in not just astringent, bracing cow dung but loam and the leaves of autumn, the sweetly pungent smell of sorghum, woodsmoke, and pig farms capable of being detected from universes parallel to our own.  Cabbage was cultivated in what could only be called cabbage trees – six-foot stalks with the eating end at the very top.

Soon we began to climb, and the landscape became even more storybook.  The small farms

Galician Farmland

spread across gently undulating hills, with ever more hills in the distance, and were bounded by mile upon mile of walls made of carefully stacked stones emptied from the fields themselves.  The houses themselves were made of the same stones, all found in nearby fields.  Mile after mile we could smell the sorghum, and sometimes we could see the plastic tarps that covered it up.  German Shepherds could be seen in most farms, apparently the Galician guard dog of choice.  Roosters crowed nearby.

And then there were the slender, elevated buildings near many of the stone homes in the country, standing on foundations about five feet off the ground, six feet tall, ten feet long, three feet wide.  Were they for hens?  Some were topped by stone crosses and even had

A corncrib that's seen better days

inscriptions:  were they mausoleums?  Or, as a German maintained, for bees?  My guidebook said many houses had next to them something called “corncribs,” which raised more questions than it answered.

“The sky!  The sky!” I could hear Mom saying to herself.  It was yet another perfect day.  “My cells are loving this!” she said.

Mom and Me

Carrie was going to take a picture of Mom and me walking side by side.  I put my hand on her back and began to walk.  “Are you in there?” she said.  “I don’t feel you.”  I understood what she meant, and I visualized light flowing from myself, down my arm, and out my palm into her back.  “Oh!” she said.  “I see a big blue light!  It’s like a . . . what’s the word?  An aureole.”

I don’t know what to make of this.  I can’t say I believe it in the sense that such a belief would matter – belief matters only when and to the extent it affects behavior, as we may see by watching the uninspired conduct of many of the super-religious and god-fearing.  If I really believed what people say about my energy then I suppose I’d spend all my time visualizing myself healing people, starting with Mom.  Which I don’t do, obviously.

At times we walked in a sort of bounded walkway ten feet across, with stone walls three to five feet high on either side of us.  For long stretches the rock walls were covered in ivy,

Path in Galicia, after Sarria

and the stone itself invisible.  The path itself was impassable by car, and we had to pick our way carefully over the uneven stones.  I’ve never seen such byways on any farm, or anywhere.

“Who put all these rocks in our path?” a German woman joked.

“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Mom responded, also in German.

We did, I thought.  God did.  Does it matter?  They’re still there.

Part 5:  Pilgrims Have Increased by 20% Since This Book’s Publication

I have been asking pilgrims a simple question:  “Why are you on the Camino?”  Quite a few Germans say it’s because they read a best-selling book, first published in 2001, by a well-known German comedian.  This is a disappointing answer.  The book itself, at least as translated into English, seems to me incapable of inspiring one even to finish it, much less to walk 500 miles.  Even Mom complains that it’s boring.

I asked one German, “Is it good in German?  Because in English it’s not funny at all.  It doesn’t have any fresh observations, or information about the locations, which you sort of expect from travel writing.”

“We know the author,” the man told me.  “It’s interesting if you know him.  We can hear his voice.”

Over three million copies sold.  Either the English translation was doing the author a great disservice or his readers were doing all the work.

Part 6:  La Bodeguina in Mercadoiro

Mercadoiro Albergue - Our Favorite So Far

Tuesday.  We reach Mercadoiro.  The La Bodeguina albergue costs a princely 10 Euros (about $13.30), but it has a patio with tables, a large yard with picnic tables, and a superb view, as well as a lounge-like room and free wi-fi.  A single laptop is available for surfing, in exchange for a donation that we see no one pay.  The bathrooms and showers are all new.  The showers even have six hydro-massage heads that can be angled to effect stimuli from the thighs to the chest.

The menu has more variety than we’ve seen, and the entire operation is run by two men, one of whom speaks English, and other of whom is simply very helpful.

However.  The menu showed a picture of an assortment of sliced fruit beautifully arrayed in a bowl.

“Son las frutas fresco?” I asked, hoping that meant, Are the fruits fresh?

“Si,” he said.  But the kitchen was not open, he explained.  Then he shrugged and went into the kitchen.  Amazing!  He was going to get me something to eat anyway.  I was feeling very grateful.

He returned with a bowl of canned peaches in sugary syrup.

There are more flies in Spain than in the rest of the world combined.  This is called a hypothesis.  I now ask graduate students from around the world to prove me wrong.

The downsides of the albergue:  for perhaps 50 people, it had two bathrooms, each containing a toilet sans privacy and two showers.

Part 7:  Mom and Food, Part 27

Mom tried to buy bread this morning, in a small shop, and was told it was reserved.  “All of it?” she asked, incredulous, pointing to the array of bread.  Yes.  All.  Reserved.

Wednesday.  In Ventas de Naron, Mom and I were sitting at an outdoor table, reading.  She wanted to know how to ask what time dinner was.  I told her.  She practiced it a few times before she pulled out her notebook and pen.  “This is an important sentence,” she explained.  She got up to go to the café.

“And if she says seven-thirty, I’m going to slap her.”

El Acebo to Ponferrada: More Jamón and What I Miss

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Snore Journal. There was no sawing last night, only a light filing. Mom and I both got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but the water was off. I had a devilish headache and I was cold. My pillow was so hard and so thick that it was like trying to lay my head against a wall. I couldn’t sleep. In the morning I felt sick. Was it the wine I had drunk at dinner? But I had drunk a lot of water, too, and not that much wine. Mom thought it was the prior day’s exposure to sun, and, indeed, the first time I got sick on this trip had followed a day of high exposure. What’s more, though I used to be unaffected by altitude, that began to change about ten years ago, and we were nearly a mile high the day before.

The usual banging, clanging, zipping pilgrims were at it again. Sometimes it’s good that I don’t know which language pilgrims speak, or how to speak it. Because I want to say, you know, “Really?” Which doesn’t translate into anything.

One pilgrim had taken the bunk above me late in the evening. I never saw him, or her. This pilgrim was in fetal position, head and face covered, trying to deny the reality of the noisome day. Remembering how cold I’d been the night before, I covered the person up with my blanket. Then we left.

We made a small circle around El Acebo in the morning. An albergue had trickily painted the same yellow arrow to lead pilgrims to it, and we followed it long enough to realize that it made no sense. When we got in the right trail, we could see the lights of Ponferrada and its neighboring communities far below. Today would be one long descent.

We walked opposite a line of hills to our left that looked like smoothly sloping rocks

Morning, West of El Acebo

bearing green, orange, and yellow lichen. The patches of trees interrupted by open spaces also gave the hills the look of worn suede. In between these hills, many miles away, and us, there were many velvety arroyos, folds in the earth, also ablaze with fall colors.

The signage in the last few stages of the Camino has not been as good as in the Basque Country. There, the yellow arrows, concrete markers, and cairns were frequent and visible. Frequent signs also indicated how far the upcoming towns were. Not so on this side of Castilla.

The bananas here have thick peels, and even when the peels are fully yellow the bananas are much firmer.

Our noses are all running again. Mom takes out a tissue every few minutes, until she runs out of tissues. She recommends them to me, along with what she thinks may be the benefit of their menthol aroma. But my thumb, placed over a nostril, is far more efficient, not to mention satisfying. Without using a single tissue, I clear my nostrils without even slowing down. Of course, the single-nostril blow is not available to women. That would be disgusting.

At around 8:30 we passed through a tiny village where I engaged in a call and response with several very tardy roosters. Judging from the performances they turned in, they were the understudies. We stopped in the town square. I took a picture of a dog on one of the three-foot micro-leashes favored by some Spaniards. (Later, we’d find a dog in its “yard” – perched on a little ledge between the bars on a window opening and the window itself). Mom sat down to work on her toe bandages. “I really don’t like feet,” she said.

At nine o’clock we left the shade cast by the mountains behind us and walked into the sunlight. We stopped to sit on slate near a tree, in the cold, and had Second Breakfast.

As we neared Ponferrada, we came upon a group of Dutch women contemplating their guidebook. “It says there is a shortcut of 1.8 kilometers,” they said, adding a new and exciting dimension to the concept of going Dutch. “Somewhere to the right.”

We came upon two Spaniards who were consulting their map for different reasons. The older one dropped his stick and I bent down to pick it up. “No, no, no!” he said, indicating his younger companion, a man in his fifties.

“He’s your step’n’fetchit?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. Mom explained that the Dutch behind us had said there was a shortcut. We consulted the man’s map without success. Mom suggested we ask a dark-haired woman coming up behind us.

“Not the Italian!” the older man said. “She doesn’t know anything. She’s stopping the cows to ask.”

“Let’s just go,” I said. “We are here to walk.”

The Power of Now

There comes a time during every day’s walk when we are ready to be done with walking. And yet the irrefutable reality is that we are not. So what we want, as Eckhart Tolle would put it, is “more future”. When we want the walk to be over, we want to be in the future, not here and now. And as soon as we want to be somewhere, or somewhen, else, there we are, outside of ourselves, away from the only time there is, which is right now.

So when my feet are sore, I stay with them. I watch the pain with detachment, almost curious, as if the pain and I are separate. I don’t resist. I think of the training in walking meditation I got at a Shambhala Center in Portland. I feel the roll of my foot, the pressure on the heel to mid-sole to the ball. I note the soreness in my hips from carrying the pack. And, strangely, the pain doesn’t hurt as much. It’s just a signal from my body to my mind, but my mind is capable of hearing the signal, as a parent might hear the cry of a child, and decide it’s not bad enough to warrant concern. It’s nothing to indulge in. I don’t need to stop or to sit down.

Ponferrada — on a Sunday

Someone will need to explain to me the Spanish concept of Sunday. My understanding of market economics tells me that if there is demand for, say, food on a Sunday, someone will keep open a restaurant that cooks and sells it, for a profit. But not in Spain. We search for over an hour, walking past hundreds of tables of Spaniards drinking coffee and alcohol, but all we can find are the same bocadillos that have plagued us since the Basque Country. Jamón with queso. Jamón with asparagus. Jamón with octopus. Jamón with comic books. Jamón with tuna. Jamón with jamón. The author of “Forrest Gump” probably relied on a memory of looking at menus in northern Spain when he wrote this dialogue for Pvt. Benjamin Buford ‘Bubba’ Blue:

We finally found a Telepizza®, where Carrie and I ordered oily pizzas and Mom got a previously frozen pasta that had been warmed up for the occasion. “It doesn’t matter,” she shrugged. “I’m starving. As Oma used to say, ‘Der Hunger treibt’s hinein.’” The hunger will chase it in.

We decided to go to a hostel (hostal) rather than the albergue. I had just recently learned that there is a difference beyond translation. An albergueis a dormitory with many beds, like the operating room in “M.A.S.H.” A hostel may have the same, but also offers individual rooms. On the other side of the castle formerly belonging to the Knights

The former castle of the Knights Templar in Ponferrada

Templar, we found the Hostal de San Miguel, and sprang for the 25-Euro single and 39-Euro double.

The private room was just what I needed. It remedied some of what I miss most. I miss a real bed. I carry a heavy pack during the day, and at night I sleep on mattresses that bow beneath me. I miss going to sleep only when I want to, and sleeping as long as I wish. I miss waking up in the morning to silence, and darkness, and not having to get up too, or rush, or listen to fierce zippings and full-throated bellowing in the dark. I didn’t care that the bed was so hard my frame didn’t even dent its surface, or that my feet hung off it, or that there was no trash can or shower curtain. I didn’t even turn on the TV. I don’t miss TV because I haven’t watched it in years. I’m reasonably confident that I won’t say, on my deathbed, “God, I wish I’d caught that fourth episode of ‘Lost and Desperate Housewives of the New Jersey Shore’”.

What I Miss

I miss my car. The M3, that is. I do not miss my Land Rover, the world’s most expensive ski accessory. Let us begin there. In fact, I miss my M3 prospectively, for many months into the future, because it will be parked in Oregon while I live in New Jersey for the foreseeable future.

I miss my zero-gravity chair. It’s a few days from going into storage in Bend, Oregon.

I miss talking to my friends on the phone.

I miss yoga.

I miss my frequent talks with my friend Tedd [sic]. He appeared in a dream I had on Sunday night. In my dream I am explaining to him what he needs to know in order to take over the Camino for me, and to help Mom on my behalf. For some reason that isn’t clear in the dream, or that I have forgotten, in the dream I’m not able to accompany Mom on the rest of the journey. Tedd, committed and devoted friend of mine, has stepped in to take over. I am explaining to him how I attach my camera pack to my waist, and tell him to be sure to take plenty of pictures. Dream-Tedd does not ask me, as Hank the Dutchman did, how the camera pack, which does hang a bit like a codpiece, interacts with my “manhood”, as he put it.

I also miss my friend Adam, even the way he calls from the bathroom for one of his scissors, or a steak knife, because he refuses to buy a proper nose-hair trimmer, or the way he bellows at me from the other room to hurry in and watch him do a push-up.  In another week I will probably even start to miss his near-constant reports on the opening and closing of his pyloric valve.

He instant-messaged me on Skype recently, asking how it was going. Very well, I said. Except for the food.

Cameron: Spaghetti = oil + paprika. Not a hint of tomato sauce.
Cameron: Plates SWIM in oil.
Adam: They do cook a lot of things with olive oil.
Adam: Ponferrada was one of the bases of the ancient Spanish economy, and still an important industry.
Adam: Not many olive trees in northern Spain, but the south is a huge grove of olives.
Cameron: Someone needs to cut them all down.

High Up in El Acebo, We Are Served a Human Heart

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Afternoon in El Acebo

In the end, I did not perform much of a ritual myself at the Cruz de Ferro. It takes time to create a meaningful space, or a meaningful moment in time, and I hadn’t invested that time in the Cruz de Ferro. I spent a few minutes mindfully intending to let go of some of the hurt I’d felt in my marriage and, especially, during the divorce, and the guilt and sadness I felt about my own many mistakes, and the hurt they had caused, especially before and during my marriage. And that was all. I did not want to suck from the mountain all the oxygen that my mother needed to breathe.

At first the terrain leading away from the Cruz de Ferra was easy – a slight downhill slope

El Acebo

on compacted white sand bounded by milled lumber. To our left ran a road whose many patches bespoke a great deal of freezing in the winter. Before long, though, we entered an all-downhill, punishing, rocky single-track trail, some of it straight down. Well before we reached El Acebo, Mom was convinced we’d already gone well beyond 16 kilometers.

But no, tiny El Acebo was a 16.7 kilometer hike. It had been hidden for some time, so when we saw it, earlier than expected, some compensation for the more common false summit, we were happily surprised. It sits high up on a small mountain above the valley below, so small, so isolated, that for the first time on the trip my Vodafone USB got no reception.

The village was a typical Camino village: a single road bounded by a few houses, and a handful of albergues and hotels with restaurants attached. We chose the Meson. Mom was ready to eat.

Carrie ordered the Botilla del Bierzo, which on the menu was translated as “pork with paprika”. According to the menu, it was a specialty of the Bierzo area. I ordered the same.

The very nice waitress set down our plates. On it was boiled cabbage, chickpeas, chorizo, and a beating, pulsating, human heart.

At least that’s exactly what it looked like: a heart covered in paprika. Tentatively I set my

The pulsating human heart in El Acebo

knife upon it and began to saw at it. Grudgingly it parted in two, yielding unrecognizable chunks of white (bone marrow?), shards of pig bone, and something that was like, but not quite, meat.

I turned to Mom, the expert, and said, quietly, so that Carrie would not hear, “Could this be organ meat?”

She peered at it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Try it.”

Ha ha. I haven’t fallen for that since my age was counted in the single digits. My German aunt Elfriede, post-mortem benefactress of Mom’s trip here, had once submerged something utterly revolting in some opaque white soup – it may have been tripe – but my boy-sonar had found it effortlessly, and I had refused to touch even the bowl.

“See what it is,” I said to Carrie. “You’ll probably really love it,” I added.

She shook her head. “I’m not touching it.”

Foiled.

Eventually I caught the waitress’ attention. “Perdon,” I said, politely, holding up a single, graceful finger. “Una pregunta.” A question. “What the hell is this?”

Actually, I said, “Que es eso?” What is this?

She pointed to the casing of the heart-thing. “Thees is the tripe,” she said, “and thees” – now pointing at the stuff in the middle, “is from here.” She put her hand on her back. “It is the goats.”

“The goats?”

“Jes,” she said. Her own face a question mark, she watched my face to see if I was satisfied.

I smiled enormously. My smile was like those stars that could easily swallow the sun a million times. “Thank you so much,” I said. She went away.

“What did she say it was?” Carrie said. I turned back to the table, still smiling.

“Stomach lining and guts,” I said. Carrie’s mouth bulged as if she would puke. Neither one of us touched our human hearts again. Mom tried a tiny bit of mine and made a face. “All the meat I’ve eaten here tastes very strongly of the animal. It’s too strong. Very pig-like.”

The web says:

The “botillo” is a meat product made in the Leonese county of El Bierzo, with different parts from the butchering of the pig (above all ribs and tail), chopped up and marinated in salt, paprika, garlic and other natural spices. It is packed in natural skins and, before being eaten, it must go through the smoking and part-curing processes. Its exterior appearance is defined by the shape of the skin, although it normally takes on a globe shape, reddish grey in colour and weighing between approximately 500g and 1,600g per piece. When cut, it shows deep red tones, a firm consistency and an intense aroma. It is eaten cooked and accompanied by vegetables, above all cabbage, potatoes, chickpeas and chorizo pepper. It is a simple, hearty dish with no great secrets in the preparation, but it is one of the stars of El Bierzo’s cuisine.

The waitress was very apologetic when she realized we’d been surprised. I told her it wasn’t her fault, it was the menu (“pork with paprika” it had said, benignly). When I saw her a little later, on break outside the restaurant, she winked at me. Who winks anymore?

In the afternoon, Carrie lost one of her money purses. Luckily she had taken Mom’s advice not to put all her money in the same place, so she lost only about 15 Euros. But she was still upset. At dinner, I asked Mom if she still wanted wine, as she’d mentioned earlier, to celebrate the Day of the Cruz.

“Yes!” Carrie said, a little too enthusiastically. You want wine? we both asked her. “I need it,” she said.

At dinner, the waitress moved to stand right next to me, brushing my side, while I looked at the wine list, and went so far as to lean on my shoulder as I explained that their being out of my preferred desert was nothing short of a disaster. When she had gone, Mom and Carrie started laughing. “What?” I said. “We think she likes you,” Mom said.

Women in the United States never leaned on me or winked at me, so I left what for Spain was an unusually large tip. “She can have that,” I said, “instead of me.” Carrie made a face.