Author Archives: Cameron

Mom at the Cruz de Fierro

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Camino de Santiago - El Cruz de Ferro

This post is a continuation of Mom Approaches El Cruz de Ferro – the Iron Cross of Letting Go.

By the time Mom had removed her pack and gotten out her rock from home and the rumpled copy of her PET scan, all the other pilgrims had miraculously disappeared from the rock pile, save two who stood a few feet uphill from me.  In a field to our right, a tall, bearded man in his fifties was sobbing.  Mom made her way unsteadily up through the rocks.

One thing Catholics, the original pilgrims of the Camino, really understood is ritual.  Ritual is a mindful creation of a sacred space.  It was clear Mom had thought about how she would create such a space.

From the bottom of the pile of left-behind stones, I turned on the video of my camera and watched her kneel down, a small figure compared to the tall wooden beam in front of her.  I felt Timothy lodge in my own throat.  The two pilgrims

What is left behind

took their time leaving, perhaps magnetized by the sight of a man, weeping, holding a camera on an old woman kneeling at the foot of a cross.  For several minutes she knelt there, offering the copy of her PET scan, with the tumor circled in red, and a rock from Montrose.  These she placed under two rocks.

After a while, I handed the camera to Carrie and walked up the rock pile toward Mom.

Inge and Cameron at El Cruz de Ferro

She had stood up, and I put my hand on her lower back.  She began to cry, and I inclined my head to touch hers and cried with her.

For a lower-bandwidth version (not High Definition), click on The Cruz de Ferro.

Mom after letting go at the Cruz de Ferro

 

The Cross of Chemo

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Chemo and the Cross

A week before I left Newark for Bilbao, I called Mom’s doctor at her request. “I wasn’t able to hear everything he told me about the cancer,” she had said. “Can you call him and talk to him? I don’t want to know what he says right now, though.” A few days after I left a message, he reached me in New Jersey. What follows are my largely unedited, contemporaneous notes of our conversation:

Reminds me she had ovarian cancer ten years ago last January. Treated with surgery and chemotherapy. They have followed her with CAT scans and PET-CT scans. The latter uses a sugar molecule that goes into rapidly dividing cells, such as cancer, and so those cells take up the sugar and create hot spots on the scan. They found three hot spots in May 2010. The pelvic spot went away, he says he has no idea why. [It went away after Mom radically changed her diet.] There were then two others, one higher up in retroperitineum and one in the top of the right lung.

She saw a doctor in Germany who convinced her that she should stop treating them with careful neglect and so we took one out of her lung. It looks like it’s not ovarian cancer, it’s lung cancer. Unfortunately, they save tissue only for five years, and while he wishes they had never thrown out her cancer slides [from when she had ovarian cancer 10 years ago], there is now no way of comparing the two.

Her recent surgery got completely around the one in her lung and it was small enough you wouldn’t do anything else. Now we’re left with the one in the back part of her abdomen, the retroperitineum. It’s in a touchy place to have a radiologist do a biopsy, located between the inferior vena cava and aorta, neither one of which you want to hit with a needle. Any biopsy would have to be done surgically.

If the lung cancer had been ovarian cancer instead, they could have convinced the radiation therapist to use radiation. But it looks like lung cancer, so the radiation oncologist isn’t keen to give radiation to what he doesn’t know. Both cancers will respond to radiation. He recommends she consider surgery, have it removed, then put in meda-clips so radiation therapist knows how far out to radiate, and radiate. Another option would be to cut as much out as possible and then do chemotherapy, because ovarian responds very well to chemo.

In February 2006 the last spot first showed up in a PET, 15mm, size of a dime, and in later scans it was 12, then 20, 19, 18, and in March it was 35mm in Europe (a little bigger than a quarter).

So she’s decided she’s going to do the Camino del Santiago [sic] and come back to get another PET scan, in October or November. See if it’s still the only spot. Options:

1. Surgery and biopsy
a. Consider chemo
b. Consider radiation
2. Radiate without a biopsy. He says it’s a good question to ask (as I did) why it matters defining the cancer, if both respond to radiation. The radiation oncologists say it’s not proven to be cancer and they don’t like to radiate that. Why not? I ask. Because radiation has a lot of side-effects. It would be close to her spine and intestine, could give her chronic problems, adhesions, diarrhea. 5000 rads in traditional radiation. Would CyberKnife (he calls it gamma knife) be a better idea to avoid the radiation? Yes, but it’s very expensive.
3. Do nothing

CA-125 score has gone up and down and so is not reliable as a measure.

I ask about the Stage 4 conclusion. Why is there not more urgency? Because they’ve watched it for five years and it’s not any worse, he says. Some would say when ovarian comes back, you do nothing until it becomes symptomatic. Some think recurrent ovarian is not curable, so one just controls symptoms (he’s not sure he agrees it’s not curable). He has one patient who had ovarian cancer 20, 15, and 12 years ago, each time with surgery and chemo and has not had a fourth recurrence. Everyone else who has had chemo in his practice has not had it go away.

Inge feels normal, and it’s hard to talk people into doing something when they feel okay. More spots, or the existing one in her abdomen, near her spinal column, growing would be ominous signs.

Radiation would be trying to hit a quarter-size spot. Blood vessels tolerate radiation well, but spinal cords don’t. Too much radiation could paralyze a person.

Would he recommend the gamma knife? She hasn’t seen the radiation oncologist in Montrose; doesn’t want to do so if she’s going to try the CyberKnife. He wouldn’t pay $50K to do it if one could do traditional radiation with high likelihood of few side-effects. He says the radiation oncologist in Montrose should give an opinion.

I ask about the nausea that was so bad for Mom the first time she had chemo. There are anti-nausea drugs available that were not on the market ten years ago, and the one she tried at $350 is now generic, and so cheaper. He has also had good results with patients treating nausea with medical marijuana.

He would not give chemo without a tissue analysis or biopsy. The chemo treatment is different for ovarian versus lung.

Is there ever a time when it begins to make sense to do scans more often than every six months? With her history, he says, no. Because things have changed so slowly over many years.

He says all of us, including physicians, in this day and age have to be judicious about how much we spend, else we run into intolerable debt.

When you’re hiking with her, you might suggest, Get that PET scan and then make a decision about doing something.

What are the risks of surgery to remove and biopsy? Inge’s pretty healthy, he says, she could do that pretty safely. Four to six weeks to recover. Risk of adhesions and thus bowel obstructions years later. Any risk of hitting the wrong thing? I ask. Yes, because you’re trying to remove as much of it as you can and doing so between two blood vessels that if nicked could cause bleeding. But surgeons are pretty good at working around it, and even if there is a lot of bleeding, they can clamp it off and close the hole. It’s easy for me to say, he says, I’m not a surgeon, but I’ve heard of that happening and surgeons take care of it. But you could get in there and find that it’s socked in around the blood vessels, get a biopsy, and get out. Put clips on it so that the radiologist knows exactly where it’s located, so you know exactly where you’re directing your radiation beam.

I say thanks as if to get off the phone. But he wants to summarize again. Adds that treatment for lung cancer, once it spreads, is more difficult to deal with than ovarian cancer. So maybe it’s time to do something definitive with this one in her ab-domen (he says it like this – ab-do-men). Any kind of cancer doesn’t typically grow this slowly, as slowly as the one in her lung and in her abdomen. They’re really not changing much, almost unheard-of over five years. Whatever she’s doing, I wouldn’t change it. Of course she’s really gotten religion with her diet and exercise in the last year, but whatever she was doing in the four years before that, that was working too.

Mom Approaches El Cruz de Ferro — the Iron Cross of Letting Go

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Rabanal to El Acebo: Little Switzerland

I love the smell of cowshit, at altitude, in the morning. I’m not being glib here. It’s earthy and real, but most of all it reminds me of many of the happiest times in my life, at my uncle’s hotel-restaurant in Braunwald, Switzerland. The mountains between Rabanal and El Acebo, across a narrow valley, were shorter and below treeline, but somewhat reminiscent of Braunwald, one of my favorite places on earth. For nearly the entire day, we would walk high up on the other side of the valley ourselves, for long stretches on the ridge line.

More modern windmills on the ridges of mountains in the distance. Cold. I have on three layers, Icebreaker wool 200 weight and 320 weight, which I ski in, and a light windbreaker. Light wool gloves and a skullcap. Only my toes are cold, in spite of the five-toed wool socks. When you separate toes, as with fingers, you lose heat.

We stopped near the top of a ridge to watch the sunrise, a brilliant orange orb sending its warm light over the cold landscape. Mom was wearing a white scarf over her head. For most of the rest of the day, I would walk behind her, imagining myself supporting her, willing her upward.

We stopped in Foncebaden for Second Breakfast. It’s one of my favorite times of the day, Second Breakfast. Foncebaden itself is crumbling down. Of the few stone homes, about half are abandoned, their roofs stove in, the rocks in their walls straining to fall out like an old man’s teeth. I found out later that the albergue in Foncebadon offered – wait for it – a yoga class in the mornings.

As we walked, I asked Mom if she wanted me to dial up Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for her on my iPod when we reached the cross.

“No,” she said. “I’m going to be emotional enough. I’ve got all sorts of emotions going on.”

“Such as?”

“Well, first, I’m just grateful I’m here. It still boggles my mind. And I feel hope. I see that tumor just hanging by a thread, and maybe when we reach the cross it’ll just fall off. All the research I’ve done says fresh air is very important in curing cancer. And exercise. We’re getting a lot of that. And no sugar. I should have already starved it by now. But I’m trying not to have expectations. Just drop the analysis and let it be. And then sometimes I get a frog that comes and sits in my throat. He’s there so often that I’ve given him a name.”

Carrie and I waited for the name. Mom was climbing, huffing.

“Well?” I said. “The name?”

“Timothy,” she said. Carrie and I laughed. We kept going up, scanning the horizon for a tall cross, the Cruz de Ferro.

Carrie was now up ahead. Mom went on. “I’m also thinking of all those who’ve passed. I think of Candy, that she has the courage to make a happy life for herself. I pray Brianna will find her way. For Kaleb to continue on his great path, but whatever he does is okay.” She walked some more, still going uphill on the rocky single-track trail. “For you, to have peace and contentment and be able to let go of anything from childhood that may still be with you.”

I sang to her a bit of sing-song that she used to sing to me in the car when I was a boy, when we drove with my grandparents through Germany and Austria on the seemingly endless trip to my uncle’s hotel-restaurant in Switzerland. “We’re almost there, we’re almost there.”

She nodded. “Schiab’st a bissl’, schiab’st a bissl’”. This was my grandmother’s Nieder-Bayerisch for “push a li’l”. “Oma’s here,” she said. “That came right into my head.”

“She’s been here all along.”

“Yes, she has. They’re all lining up now, all of them from the past.”

Scrub oak, yellowing, growing brown. The trees are short as far as the eye can see, a sign of harsh winters. Some pilgrims say they’ve heard it can snow here in summer. An Italian couple walks ahead of us. Heather lines the path, some of it already dying. My toes are still cold. My nose is running, sprinting, hurdling, as I once did not so long ago, and in the far-away past.

The path goes all the way up. It’s all single-track now, and rocky. We are gaining 1000 feet in 5 miles. “I’m going to have a heart-attack before I even get to that stupid cross,” Mom said.

I’m suddenly struck by the thought, What will I leave behind? I hadn’t bothered to think about it. I didn’t even bring a stone, or anything else, from home. I have had some thoughts come into my head. Is there anything remaining from my marriage or divorce? Any regrets, guilt, resentments? Should I let go of the fear of committing myself to writing, and all that implies? I walk on without having decided anything. I had a few more kilometers. Maybe something would come to me.

Suddenly we saw it. About two hundred yards ahead. The cross was made of a 25-foot tall wooden beam with cross-beam and stood atop a 15-foot pile of rocks. I had read that the original pile was created by Pagans. Just as many churches were converted from or built on top of Pagan temples, the Christian symbolism here was built on the rubble of Pagan religion.

More than a dozen brightly-colored pilgrims milled about the rock pile. I could see them

Up ahead, the Cruz de Ferro

posing for pictures. A handful of bikes were parked next to the pile. My heart sank. This was the space we would try to make sacred? But Mom was forging ahead, walking toward the cross as if pulled by a magnet.

“I Want to Go to that Cross and Leave My Cancer Behind”

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The Energy Meridians of Mother Earth

I had heard people say that the Camino runs along on one of earth’s energy meridians, also called ley lines. I’d heard that in pre-Roman times, people of the Pagan religions, and, later, Christian mystics, walked the Camino route from Santiago to Leon, and which in its entirety, as it covers seven sacred sites corresponding to the seven chakras of the human body, is called the Celtic Camino.

The ley lines of the earth are said to correspond to the energy meridians of the human body, as in Chinese medicine. Throughout the world, indigenous peoples have viewed the earth as a holographic representation of the human form. The great travel writer Bruce Chatwin described the connection between the Australian Aboriginal people and the land they walked, and sang out loud — in a wonderful book called The Songlines. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, speaking of the Aborigines, said “The land is a living book in which the myths are inscribed . . . A legend is captured in the very outlines of the landscape.”

The Camino is also said to perfectly parallel the Milky Way, and some people believe that by following a path so powerfully charged with energy, a person is more likely to have intensely spiritual or religious experiences. One etymology of the name “Compostela” argues that it comes from Latin campus stellae, “field of the stars”.

Does this refer to the Milky Way, or to the belief that the bones of St. James made their way to Santiago from Israel (in a boat, in seven days) and were found when a shepherd spotted a star and somehow deduced that the star, billions of light years away, hung in the sky over a specific spot — the spot where the bones were interred and where the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela now stands?  If you are able to replicate this feat at home, please leave a comment in the Comments section.*

I picture a line of druids solemnly walking the same path, oak staffs in hand, white-haired and regal like Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings”, to Finisterre, literally “end of land”, or what was then believed to be the end of the known world.  But the Celtic Camino actually runs from west to east and back again: it stretches from Santiago – its start, in the first chakra – to Leon, Spain and Toulouse, France, and finally to Rosslyn, Scotland. Even today, some people walk this route, which has them walking against the current of the Camino de Santiago pilgrims.

Some people believe that the tomb that allegedly contains St. James’ bones (again, a dubious claim) does not, in fact, house the remains of Saint James, but of a pagan priestess, and that the Catholic Church, as it so often did with Pagan churches, symbolism (e.g., the fish symbol, Christmas in place of the winter solstice, the god-man born of a virgin and a god) and rituals, took advantage of the pre-existing meaning assigned to the Camino to spread Christianity as far and wide as possible. Yet another theory holds that if there are any remains on the spot, they belong to Priscillian, an ascetic from Avila who was beheaded by the Church as a heretic in Treves, France, in 385 CE, but who was venerated as a martyr in Galicia and other parts of northern Spain.

Here’s what I found on a website discussing the matter of energy:

As we walk and travel along this sacred path, we offer a healing to heal the split for Mother Earth, as we simultaneously heal our own split. We walk up Her chakras, and as we do, we offer our healing, our light and love to ourselves, and to the Earth along this powerful meridian of energy.

And this author quotes another, one Peter Dawkins, who says:

A certain pilgrim's footprint

A true pilgrim who pilgrimages in love leaves footprints of light. Many pilgrims leave many such footprints, and a well-walked pilgrims’ way can become a path of light. There are multitudes of pilgrimage routes crossing the earth, with thousands of people pilgrimaging them every year.

On the other hand, “Some of these meridians are polluted with . . . negative vibrational toxins such as battles, massacres, and the like. These vibrations are stored in the records of the land itself” – much as illness may be viewed as the storage of negative emotional energy – “reflecting back to its inhabitants and causing serious illness . . .”

If the history of the Camino tells us anything, it is that war was nearly continuous along it. Christians fought Christians, Moors and Saracens fought Christians, Christians persecuted Jews, and so on, ad nauseam. For most of the history of Spain, these wars were more about land and strategic advantage than religion. The Camino runs through an energetic wasteland of battles and massacres.

“Fortunately,” according to the same source, “these currents respond positively to spiritual impression.” And here we come back to the pilgrims, who walk it with prayers, mantras, and good faith in their hearts and minds. Once again, a practice that was originally Pagan has been superseded by Christian symbolism. Instead of walking along one of the great planet’s lines of energy, pilgrims redefined their seeking in a new narrative, a new storyline: We are seeking the legendary bones of St. James the Apostle.

The Human Scale

Mom said she’s been visualizing the energy blasting through her tumor. I’ve been told by more than a few people that my energy is palpable and can be felt in whatever part of a person’s body I direct it. I don’t know what to think of this, but I make a Cartesian wager when I place my hand on Mom’s lower back and visualize blocked energy getting unblocked, or see light and love flowing into her: there’s no penalty for being wrong, but what if it works?

Like the Catholics who would come later, Pagans often placed altars and other symbolism on the tops of mountains. Thus was the current site of the Cruz de Ferro, the Iron Cross, originally the site of a Pagan monument. It sits on the highest (or second-highest) point on the Camino.

The Cruz de Ferro, by tradition, is the place where pilgrims leave something behind. The place where they agree to let go of something. For months now, Mom has said, “I’m going to leave my cancer behind!” She has duly brought a stone, from home, and a paper copy of her PET scan with the third and last tumor circled in red.

And all of this has me worried.

 

 

* Another etymology is compositum, “the well founded”, or composita tella, meaning “burial ground”.

Astorga to Rabanal

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Astorga to Rabanal del Camino, 22km. 

Friday, October 7, 2011.  I thought I’d have a solid night’s sleep, but I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 11, and between Mom’s snoring, Barbara’s (according to Mom), and apparently my own (per Carrie), the morning hours came far too quickly.  Mom got up far earlier than we did, as is her wont, and went to the kitchen to make some German-style potatoes.  She found the kitchen a disaster from the pilgrim revels of the night before (Mom thought “guitar-playing and drumming” would be too charitable, but there was strumming and banging involved).  The kitchen was the classic tragedy of the commons, but, Mom being Mom, she cleaned it.

We were on the road at about 7:40a.m.  It was cool, cool enough for two layers of Icebreaker wool.  Unlike in days past, when, after 30 or 60 minutes I’d take off the top layer, I wore both layers the whole 22 kilometers.  In fact, after my hands stopped functioning in any way but to hold my poles, I added gloves.  And my five-toed socks.  My nose ran the entire way, ran so hard and fast I feared it might reach Santiago without me.

Mom was pleased with the new Salomon trekking shoes she had bought yesterday.  “Oh,” she

Mom's dancing in the shoe store blurs the shot

said.  “I’m going to sleep in these!”  For the first time since we began the Camino, she walked an entire stage in one pair of footwear, and did not resort to her sandals.

Even before we’d left Astorga, we came upon a wonderful aroma of fennel.  It was like walking through a licorice factory.  The blue of the dawning sky was beyond description.  The power lines sizzled and buzzed overhead – something I’ve heard only in Spain.  In Murias de Rechivaldo, we stopped for Second Breakfast at a small but cozy café run by a woman named Pilar.  She addressed me as “senor,” and the bathrooms, to Mom’s delight, had both towels and soap, a rarity on the Road.  (As long as I’m wearing wicking wool, I find towels unnecessary).  These things would earn her a larger tip.

Pilar was playing Tibetan mantras on the stereo.  “For patience,” she said, pronouncing it “pot-ience”.  “And for compassion.”

Senora Pilar

 

“There isn’t enough of that along the Road,” Mom said.  Pilar agreed.  They discussed Pilar’s liver problems, and her efforts to remain positive, and they shared tips on alternative medicine.  Pilar said that good food had changed her life and her health — notably, she no longer ate jamon.  Meanwhile, I talked with a Galician who has lived in Alberta for many years, his Canadian partner, and an Italian woman from Bologna.

The countryside between Astorga and Rabanal is sparsely populated.  As the earth’s population climbs, I hope that people, especially those in China and India, will keep Spain in mind.  The semi-arid terrain reminded me of the land in and around the Great Basin of the western United States:  yellow grasses, light-green shrubs, heather, broom, wild

Stone corral

thyme, desert flowers, and a few types of dominant trees, none of them very tall, such as scrub oak.  In the distance I saw a few copses of aspens.

It should have been no surprise to see a sign, in El Ganso, advertising a Cowboy Museum.  (I couldn’t do it.  Not after the chocolate museum).  The soil was now red, too, reminding me that Colorado got its name from the Spanish – color red, color rado (red is now rojo in Spanish, but their explorers swept through the Colorado territory centuries ago).

We stopped for First Lunch in El Ganso and I took some notes and checked my email.  Mom fed stray cats bread with butter – “Have you noticed they only eat it if it has butter on it?” – and the cats all ended up standing on my feet because she was throwing the crusts between them.

For the first time since before Burgos – that is, since far on the other side of the plains of Castilla and Leon – we saw walls made of stone.  Some were in the fields, too large to have been a house, too small to enclose an entire property.  I decided they must have been corrals for sheep and cows.  The villages, too, were made of stone.  Roofs were made of mined slate or even thatch.  In the distance, hills, the ridgelines of which were covered with modern windmills too large for Don Quixote to tilt at.

We came upon a tree under which a young man in long curly hair had set up a table.  He had been to Santiago and was now making his way back . . . to somewhere.  For a donation, he was offering coffee, chai, hummus, and cake.  Nearby, and much more alluringly, a slender, raven-haired woman played a haunting flying-saucer-like

Spanish woman plays a hang in the middle of nowhere

instrument called a hang.  Invented by a Swiss, it had small dimples spaced around its perimeter, and by tapping the places in between, she caused it to make different notes.  The sound wasn’t too unlike the music played by the alien ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.  Hank, a young Dutchman, tried his hand at it, too.  I bought one of the woman’s CDs, and we moved on.

Hank and I walked for a while.  He told me about a man who was on the Camino with his daughter’s ashes, and who was walking an astonishing 75 kilometers per day.

He told me he himself was on the Camino to prove, as he put it, “that I can finish something.”  Shin splints had resulted in his early departure from the army, and his confidence had suffered.

“You thought something was wrong with you?” I said.  “You worried that it wasn’t just the injury but that you were weak?”

“Something just like that,” he said.  He was now traveling the world for a year, and filming his exploits.  He said he wanted to learn how to meditate, and for about an hour I talked to him about it.  Hank is probably the first person I’ve ever heard say, of English, “I love the language.”

“Why?”

“It’s just so easy and smooth.  Dutch is like German, they both sound so harsh.”

“To my ear,” I said, “Dutch sounds a little like German, but also a little like English, so in the end it sounds like the kind of language I would make up, if I were going to make up a language that sounded like complete nonsense.”

Rabanal Albergue entrada

Rabanal

The albergue in Rabanal was utterly charming.  Stone walls, wooden beams, an outdoor bar and patio, flowers and flowering bushes scattered about.  There’s even a mistletoe tree, about twelve feet tall.  I thought mistletoe grew only at Christmas, and near doorways.  The proprietress didn’t speak a lick of English, or anything other than Spanish, but she was all smiles, as was her mother, who must have been in her eighties.  The daughter, who was in her late fifties, walked through the dorm and would cry Hola!, and Mom and I answered a few times, until we realized that she was playing peek-a-boo with pilgrims sitting outside the windows.

Once I’d dropped my pack I headed to the restroom.  The light switch was not in the same room as the toilet stall.  That should have been my first warning.  Sure enough, after a few minutes of contemplation, I was cast into darkness.  This saves on electricity, but it necessitates the use of more paper.  I need to research how the Spanish are apparently able to do their business so quickly.  Is it all the oil in their diet?

Mom sat down at a table next to Barbara, the Bavarian woman, and Rainer, from

Okay, girls, this is a whole mistletoe tree. You know what to do.

Cologne.  He’d had a hard day of walking, he said, after having had too much of a local spirit.  Rainer said he was on the Camino because he’d had a rough two to three years, and he wanted to stop thinking about all his problems.

“Is it working?” I asked.  He shrugged.

Barbara had beaten cancer four years earlier.  She initially wanted to walk the Camino in order to spend some time by herself, but now, she said, she was feeling dankbarkeit, thankfulness or gratitude, for her life.  While away from her normal life, she realized how good she had it.  She had been married 26 years and she and her husband still felt about one another as they had when they met.  She had wonderful daughters.  She wanted everything, she said, to stay just the same.  There, I thought, was a dangerous thought to attach oneself to.

Atop the iglesias in Rabanal, the little churches, were more storks’ nests.  One of them, inside, was crumbling and rustic — perfect.  We went there for a Vespers mass, blessedly short, and attempted, in Latin, that odd reading/singing-without-a-clear-melody that Catholics are somehow able to do, perhaps right out of the womb.  We read a Psalm about the Lord crushing our enemies, and then we read from Romans about always doing things to please our neighbors.

“You did that really well,” Mom said to me.  “Like you’ve done it before.  But that priest was not going to let you be lead singer, no way.”

As we exited the church, another group of worshippers was waiting outside.  Two women looked at my footwear aghast, as if I’d just walked across the face of the Lord, stopped, backed up, and wiped my feet.  Soon the whole group had turned to watch me walking away, for all I know clutching their rosaries and crossing themselves.  It’s this sort of thing that could make even a sociopath self-conscious.

Across a narrow road from a hotel that had wi-fi, I sat down with my computer in the cold.  Vodafone charges me by the gigabyte, so when I want to upload pictures to Facebook or the blog, I use free wi-fi.  A cat sat across the road from me, near the door of the restaurant.  We exchanged a knowing glance, we two scavengers.

Morning in Rabanal del Camino:  An Ode to My Fellow Pilgrims

It must have gotten into the 30s last night.  Even with a blanket and two layers of clothes, I was cold.  There was very little snoring, at least that I heard.  I call this a miracle, and credit St. James himself.  Mom said Rainer was sawing away because he’d drunk two bottles of wine the night before.  In the morning he was nursing both a café con leche, from the bar and, in his left hand, a Coke.  He said he felt awful and didn’t know why.

“Alcohol?” I said.

“Could be,” he said.

Although we’re no longer at risk of walking in hot weather, at this altitude and with current weather reports, pilgrims continue to insist on going to bed before 10 and getting up before 7a.m. to begin walking.  And thus begins the second movement of each night’s Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (shout out to Yuka for the 80s reference).  At first, one tentative soul glides around, quiet as can be.  He is soon joined by another pilgrim or two.  There is rustling, but it’s tentative.

But then the broken-window phenomenon sets in.  With each new person, and each new noise, comes more permission for the next person to be louder.  Soon the rustling turns into a manic stuffing, and then a loud zipping, and sotto voce voices turn into whispers fit for artillerymen, and eventually, no matter how many bleary-eyed people are still enclosed in sleeping bags, pilgrims are now calling out to one another, stomping about, slamming

These are externalized costs, in economist-speak.

doors.  It’s truly amazing that these are the same seemingly normal, well-adjusted people we have met the night before.  Then again, once on the trail, some of them will also be unable to bury, or even to lift a rock to cover up, their used toilet paper.

I’m used to a wilderness ethic, at least in America, that says you pack out whatever you bring in.  In true wilderness areas, that even includes your own waste.  That’s what plastic bags are for.  The Camino, by contrast, needs either to educate pilgrims better or to provide trash cans.  Pilgrims disrespect their fellows, the locals, and the environment with their trash.

Tomorrow, we will finally reach the Cruz de Ferro, the highest point on the Camino and, by tradition, the place where pilgrims leave something behind — where they let go of something.  It is probably the most important part of the Camino for Mom.  “I’m going to leave my cancer there,” she said, a few months ago.  But will she?  And isn’t the hope itself dangerous?

 

León to Astorga, City of Chocolate

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León to Astorga

To give Mom’s toe more time to heal, and because walking from León to Santiago would

Gaudí's Palace

have required an aggressive 18 kilometers a day, every day, for 12 days, we took a short bus ride from Burgos to Astorga.  Astorga is a pleasant little town.  Marie Anne had recommended that we be sure to stop here.  There is an embarrassing wealth of cathedrals and churches for such a small town, and a Museum of Chocolate, which Carrie was determined to see.  The old town in which we’re staying sits on a bluff overlooking the surrounding countryside.

Legend has it that both Santiago and St. Paul preached in Astorga.  Both legends seem to me unlikely, but the city did merit a bishopric of its own.  Because it’s at the foot of two very steep climbs, it became a place on the Camino for travelers to rest up before the next ascent.  As a result, there were once more hostels here than anywhere but Burgos.

Astorga was originally a Celtic settlement and in 14 BCE became a Roman stronghold in what was known as Asturica.  Still visible today are the ruins of a sumptuous private home, complete with baths (featuring, as in the baths I’ve seen in Israel, hot, cold, and

Ruins of a Roman Villa

even tepid water), and the town’s walls. Plinius called the city urbs magnifica, “magnificent city”, but most of what the Romans built was destroyed when the Visigoth Teodorico II defeated the Suevi tribe that had settled the area after the fall of Rome. The Moors later destroyed the Visigothic city.  After the campaigns of Alfonso I of Asturias (739-757) against the Moors, the city was abandoned until the 11th century, when it became a major stop on the Camino.  The city was unusually welcoming to its Jewish residents until 1492, when all Jews were either forcibly converted, killed, or expelled from Spain.

Astorga has a fine cathedral, to judge from the outside.  But both times we arrived it was

Astoga Cathedral

closed, so we’ll never know what’s inside.  It might have held the Holy Grail, or a BMW Z8.  We ran into the same problem at the neo-Gothic, fairytale Bishop’s Palace designed by the great and whimsical Antonio Gaudi.

Happily, in Astorga there is a fine little albergue.  The owners or managers are a Spanish couple, and the volunteer hospitalerosare German, this time a couple from a town near Koblenz.  Mom was utterly delighted with the kitchen, which led to a patio with a view for

Mom and a view of and from the Patio at the Astorga Albergue

many miles, and she could not have been happier about immediately going shopping and making lunch – German-style hamburger patties with onions and German potato salad, along with white asparagus, raw red peppers, banana slices, and grapes.

We got a room with a view – and the room holds only four people, the fourth being Barbara, a woman of a certain age from near Munich, whose daughter was once a satisfied exchange student in Iowa.  She has that Bavarian accent that reminds me of my relatives, and childhood, in Bavaria.  Barbara’s crown has broken, so she is off to see a dentist.  Curiously, this happened to another pilgrim just a few days ago.

I’m tired today.  I didn’t get much sleep last night.  At least one man, and maybe two, sounded like nothing so much as a motorcycle starting up.  I am becoming an aficionado of snoring sounds.  It’s like Nabokov, collecting and documenting butterflies, only with more rage.  Truly, hostels need to provide those little anti-snore strips and require that snorers use them.  It should also be made kosher for other pilgrims to wake a snorer without a strip and ask him to get one or to banish himself from the albergue, if not from society entirely.

I am looking forward to a greater probability of a full night’s sleep.  It would depress me beyond measure for Barbara’s crown, say, to get broken again.

Counting another bus trip, we’ll have about 169 kilometers to go, out of the original 800+.  If we budget 11 days (we leave from Lisbon on October 22, but wanted to spend some time in Portugal), then we need to cover 15.4 kilometers per day.  That’s easily doable, if we can avoid injuries and other health issues.  Apparently one must cover the last 100 kilometers to get the special badge of the pilgrim.  Or maybe it’s an embossed certificate from the Pope, along with an accounting of the sins remitted (and how does he know?  But then, Santa Claus knows, so why can’t the Pope know?)  Julio told us that in Santiago, the townsfolk offer to host pilgrims in their own homes, and that there is some kind of ceremony at the cathedral where the pilgrims’ names are called out publicly.

XOCOLATL

One proud native informed us that Astorga was the site of the first manufacture of chocolate in Europe.  (He also said the first shop was in Aachen, Germany).  I wasn’t able to confirm this with Google, and the Museo de Chocolate, for which we had high hopes, was of no help.  The museum appears to have been carved out of the living quarters of someone’s home, and it offers less an education in things chocolate than a collection of old chocolate-making tools.  But its curators’ primary interest seems to have been Spanish-language chocolate advertising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Somewhere in the world, a Ph.D. student with an esoteric thesis will be very happy someday.

The Spanish were the first to bring chocolate to the Old World, and like so much else, they got it from the Aztecs.  Montezuma drank the stuff eight times a day, and believed it was the key to good health.  When Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who destroyed Aztec civilization, broke into Montezuma’s palace, in 1591, to rob his treasury of its gold and silver, he was astonished to find only a truck-load of cocoa beans.  Cortés brought Xocolatl! to Spain, where the bitter stuff was made more palatable to European tastes by mixing the ground roasted beans with sugar and vanilla.  When more and more sugar was added, it became edible to Americans.

León, Our Favorite Hospitalero, and a Brilliant Cathedral

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In Burgos two nights ago, a man shouted out in his sleep, twice. I see him on the podium in Santiago.

The Santa María de Carbajal Albergue

Carrie in León

In León, the Santa María de Carbajal hostel is a donativo, a donation-based hostel, and it’s connected to a convent. (The nuns appeared to have been warned of my coming, for they were not in evidence). Since the original Convento de San Marcos, founded in 1152, separated men’s and women’s dormitories, the men in León have been separated from the women. This is because, according to a presumably ancient document referred to in my guidebook, “it is a dishonest thing to have women and men in a single dormitory”, and the “quality of people who come to the hospice are not of high caliber.”

Among dozens of men in our all-male dorm the first night in León, only one snored. One. In the co-ed dorms we’ve slept in during the last two weeks, we always had at least a half-dozen. Based on last night’s statistically valid scientific sample, I have provisionally concluded

Leon Street Scene

that snoring is evolutionarily adaptive. Snoring must be something men do only to attract the preferred sex. (The snorer in León’s all-male dorm, it must be concluded, was gay). Further study will be required to discover why the preferred sex is actually attracted by the schnarcher. I leave this to future Nobel laureates.

The hostel did not provide pillows, so, having heard that the windows would be left open at night, I slept in my clothes and kept a few more on hand, and packed everything else – including my camera case and FiveFingers – into a makeshift pillow.

The award for best hospitalero on the Camino will be hard to wrest from the gentle hands of Thomas Schlitt-Krebs, of Heidelberg, Germany. Thomas seemed to be everywhere, at all times, speaking at least English and Spanish in addition to German. (For all I know he spoke French, too). I saw him pouring coffee for people, and even mixing in their milk. He led pilgrims to their bunks. He gave out taxi numbers. He gave advice on what to see and do. We talked about the biophysics of running and walking. And always he had that brilliant smile, and an infectious lovingkindness.

And he went an extra mile for Mom. After we decided to stay an extra night at the

Guys Waiting for a Bus in Leon

albergue, he led Mom past a room not yet filled up and put her in the same room as the night before – which she and Carrie had had to themselves. For this he got grief from a French hospitalera, who insisted on the rules: people must fill up space in the proper order, so Mom should be slotted into the dorm room that still had vacancies. But Thomas was firm, and told Mom that he had told the hospitalera he would take the matter up with the sisters if he had to. “I prayed for you last night,” he told Mom the next morning.

He asked her if the Camino was, for her, a religious pilgrimage. She said it was not. She explained that her father, a Lutheran, had been disowned by his family for marrying my Oma, a Catholic, and that she, Mom, had had some unhappy experiences in her Catholic school. “I have a lot of issues with that church,” she said.

He nodded. “I understand completely. You must believe in something, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I felt the Camino wasn’t even my decision, but that it called me.” She doesn’t put what guides her (I deleted the misleading “what she believes”) into words, and she seems to have arrived at the same place I have, which is that the explanation is far less important than the attitudes and behavior that result.

León

It’s tempting to think León is named for a lion, but in fact it comes from the Roman 7th Le/gi/on, which founded a camp on this site in the year 70 CE, just as the first Jewish War was getting underway in Israel. The Romans wanted to protect the Galician gold mines from the grubby hands of the indigenous population. The Romans worked tirelessly from here for 350 years in their attempt to conquer the barbarians of northwest Spain. It was for naught, of course, because the Roman Empire would fall near the end of that time, and León then saw a succession of Visigothic, Muslim, and Christian rulers.

After we had arrived at the albergue, I found Mom holding court with an audience of four

Mom in Leon

of five German men. One of them, their priest, was taking notes. “Good God, man!” I wanted to cry. “She sees you taking notes, none of us will ever eat or sleep again!” He had run for his notebook when Mom told him of her original rules for Carrie: get up as early as five, no time for fussing with hair or make-up, and no complaining or whining. (Carrie is, so far, the youngest person we have seen on the Camino, and by at least four years. She has complained less than any of us).

The priest asked Carrie what was the most beautiful stage on the Camino and what was the hardest. “The Pyrenees, for both,” she said. Did she regret coming? “No!” She would later tell another person, in response to his question, that the trip was “Wonderful!”

The German priest said that, for him, León was more beautiful than Burgos. It is a charming city. Its many pedestrian streets are a riot of color: shops, café-bars, painted two-story buildings and their shutters, pots of flowers in windows. We ran into a Mercado Medieval,

Leon Mercado Medieval

a sort of street fair with a medieval theme, and perhaps a hundred different hawkers of crafts and food dressed in medieval garb. Burros gave children a ride around a park. Eight birds of prey sat on display, and a local Boreal Lynx prowled, or tried to, on its ten-foot leash.

The cathedral in León, copied at 2/3 scale from the Rheims Cathedral in France, is a more pure example of 13th century Gothic than the one in Burgos, whose 15th-century Flemish-Gothic additions complicate matters. León’s is also less elaborate, arguably less gaudy. The interior is more understated. But what distinguishes Leon’s cathedral are the exorbitant number of its stained-glass windows.

Leon Cathedral

We walked in to the transporting sounds of a single man (a monk? on tape or live?) singing Gregorian chants. We sat down and listened while craning our necks to look at the windows far above. My guidebook, The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago, suggests pilgrims savor the cathedral slowly, and to

rest for an hour on the benches in front of the cathedral’s west façade and watch the afternoon sun play on the sculptured portals and the spires of the towers. When the sun strikes full on the rose window, go inside and stand for a few moments in the middle of the nave[,] breathing in the colors of the light. Watch them change intensity as they glide across the floor while the sun drops. Think of how these soaring towers of stone, this vast open internal space, and these dancing colors must have blown the mind of your average medieval pilgrim.

Was it because there was so much less gold in León’s cathedral that I didn’t think about blood as much as I had in the Burgos cathedral? Here was a space that felt more inhabited by the sacred.

A sign said pictures were not allowed, but I risked eternal damnation, or at least a longer

Leon Cathedral Retablo

stint in purgatory, and got some good shots that are now on Facebook.

From the outside, the stained-glass windows looked uniformly daubed in something like soot and dirt: they were entirely an opaque tan color, and not at all representative of what we found within. I wondered how much more brilliant the light inside the cathedral would be if the windows outside were clean. An excerpt from a novel written in 1605 provides a clue:

I went inside, but I was sure that I hadn’t, and that I was still in the plaza, as the cathedral is so glassed and transparent . . . You can drink from this church as from a glass cup.

León also boasts an 11th-century collegiate Church of San Isidoro, which one guidebook says may have the best in situ paintings in Spain, if not all of Europe.  Next door is the Pantheon of the Kings of León, named, I believe, after the rock band from Tennessee.

Thomas took me aside at breakfast this morning. Interestingly, Krebs, the latter part of his hyphenated surname, is German for “cancer”. “When there is a sickness in the family,” he said, “everyone is affected. Everyone has it, in a way. I know this. So there may be times when you need to say, ‘Mom, I must go my own way for a bit, I must be for myself now.’”

We thanked him profusely when we left. “Well,” he said modestly, “special circumstances call for special measures.”

Pilgrims

With Julio and Marie Anne gone, we found ourselves meeting and talking to more people than before. A French student and a wily Basque offered me some wine. (The Basque had earlier played Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” from his cell phone while readying himself for the shower. I started to sing it, he joined in, and we were fast friends thereafter). I gave my map to a departing older Irishman who told us jokes about Ireland’s weather, like its “four winters per year”.

So as to have a meal that involved neither jamón nor queso, we went, with a Danish medical student and an actor from Chicago, to an Indian restaurant. The waiter was also the cook, so we were there for a long time. The actor said he’d heard of an American doctor’s advice to a patient not to take anti-depressants but to go on the Camino instead. He himself took this advice, and said his depression of the last eighteen months has disappeared during his long walks. We talked to a beautiful young Scottish woman, an art student, who was at a loss to explain why she spoke with an English accent or to provide a convincing rationale for not being twenty years older. There were four Seattleites.

And last night, about thirty of us pilgrims followed a nun, sixtyish and diminutive, to the sisters’ modest little chapel, which boasted a brilliant-gold retablo that would have dominated any church in the U.S.  Before we entered, she said something to the effect that we were not tourists, but seekers of God. She led us through a singing of some verse, in Spanish. “Muy bueno,” she said. And then she paused for a beat, and added, “Mas o menos”. More or less. We all burst out laughing. Then we entered the church, and there they were, arrayed in the choir, a baker’s dozen of nuns, and after that I understood nothing. Except her loud claps at an unfortunate young woman whose cell phone rang four or five times.

Julio and Marie Anne Leave Us, So We Can Evolve

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Burgos and the Museum of Evolution

The cathedral in Burgos is just one of the architectural displays on hand. A local bank, the city hall, and many less famous buildings are done in beautiful style. If I had had the benefit of a liberal arts education, I would even tell you what style. The Arlanzón river is framed by wide banks and wetlands and, above them, small, white columnar banisters on both sides. On the old-town side of the river, there is a wide promenade bounded by statues and trees and tall shrubbery cut in all sorts of geometric shapes. National hero El Cid was born here.

There was a time when Burgos was the commercial center of central Spain, ally and favorite of Isabella, who, with Ferdinand el Catolico, would start the Inquisition and later send Columbus to find the Americas for the Spanish. Burgos was the capital of the Castillan kingdom for half a millennium. Napoleon occupied the city for three years, and Franco made it his base of occupations in the Spanish Civil War.

In this country that once burned Jews alive in autos da fe (literally, distressingly, “acts of faith”) that were founded on overly literal readings of the New Testament, it’s a delicious poetry that Burgos now hosts an enormous Museum of Human Evolution. It has been projected to become one of the top 10 visited museums in Spain. It’s in Burgos because Atapuerca, site of the discovery of the most ancient hominids remains in Europe, is close by. Atapuerca has been a major archeological site since the mandible of a predecessor to Homo Sapiens was discovered in 1976. Atapuerca proved the astonishing fact that hominids reached Europe from Africa at least 1.3 million years ago, and the site has been continuously occupied by hominids since then.

Hasta Luego

Julio, Mom, and Marie Anne in Santo Domingo de la Calzado

We parted ways with Julio and Marie Anne today. Julio has business to do in Madrid; something to do with managing certain details of property left to him and his sister by his parents (in a previous post, I related how he was determined to join us on this Camino, in part, because he’d lost both of his own parents to cancer). Mom announced last night that we’d buy them dinner. “Sanksgiving?” Marie Anne had asked. “That’s right,” Mom said. “Thanksgiving.” Next thing I know, she’s telling Carrie we’ll pay for her dinner too.  In this way Mom is just like my Oma, her mother.

We went to a restaurant called Casa Babylon, which promised “Tambores del Mundo”, or “Flavors of the World,” and it didn’t disappoint us. Julio examined the wine list.

“Inge,” he said to Mom, “if I can ask you one favor, please let me pay for the—“

“Okay,” I said.

“—wine.”

Marie Anne laughed until she turned as red as her hair. Referring to her experience in the theater, she had explained through Julio that this was an example of good timing. Of course it was. There was a chance of him changing his mind before the end of the sentence.

I like to toy with Marie Anne, who is both a good sport and as expressive as a child. Her English is only slightly better than my Spanish, which is itself an abomination. For example, in the cathedral, I saw the word “fachada” and guessed it referred to “façade”. Marie Anne, who is aware that I speak as much French as a French poodle, or perhaps the onion soup, showed surprise. “You know zees word?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s English.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, like the language teacher she is. “It’s French.”

“It’s also English. We liked it, so we use it.”

“Wis ze F A and ze C wis ze” – and here she drew with her finger in the air the little hammer and sickle that hangs from the c in façade.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s our word, exactly. Wis ze” and I drew the same thing in the air. “Massage and chauffer are also American. Also French fries and carabiner. Also le weekend.”

“Zey are French,” she said. “Except French fry and weekend.”

“Americain,” I said. “We took zem. Zey are ours now.”

In such exchanges, she would often turn to Julio. “Como se dice?”  What’s he saying?

Consummate gentleman that Julio is (I have seen him drop to a knee to apologize for an infant’s running into him, addressing the boy as “patron”), usually (I have also heard him shout to a pilgrim, who had walked into a darkened dormitory after ten and left the door open so that the light flooded in, “Shut the fucking door!”), he faithfully translates whatever is put to him, even if it’s an unflattering joke I have made at his expense, or, more often, Marie Anne’s side of an argument with him.

“Ju are right!” he often says. “Once again.” Or, to all of the women, at various times, “Ju are a very clever woman!” Or, for little reason at all, “Ju are the best!”

Marie Anne teaches Spanish and French for a living, but her English is rudimentary. We spent a happy few minutes last night trying to get her to hear (forget speaking) the difference between “sheet” and “shit”.

“I don’t heargh zees,” she kept saying.

She acts in local theater, so it’s no surprise that she tries to explain concepts in the manner of someone playing charades. When she was making fun of my French diction in Pamplona, she made a Hitler mustache with her fingers and grunted exorbitantly. She also does this to convey the idea of a turnip, an intersection, and something to do with Don Quixote.

Marie Anne labors to protect me from Julio’s Spanish lessons, both advertent and inadvertent. A few days ago, in what I thought was imitation of his habit of calling male strangers patron, but as a result of a miscommunication, I was happily calling old men on the trail cabrons.

“Hello, cuckolds!” I’d say, in Spanish, waving merrily.

Julio also taught me two invaluable words involving the use of the word cojones. One is descojonado – meaning exhausted, or perhaps knackered, as in after a long walk. The other is cojonudo, which employs the same root word for testicles to mean, basically, really great. Marie Anne was scandalized. “No, no, no!” she said, shaking both head and finger. “You cannot say zese sings.” She shook her head at Julio, and chastized him in Spanish.

“He is deciding to be his own man,” Julio said, shrugging. “Ju say what you like,” he said to me.

We Americans decided to go to the Museo de la Evolucion Humana before we left for Leon, so we said goodbye to Julio and Marie Anne at the bus station. Julio tried to shake my hand, but I wasn’t having any of it. “Cheesus Crise!” I said, imitating one of his favorite expressions. “Come here.” I gave him a big hug. He’s shorter than me, but pretty sturdy.

I turned to see Mom and Marie Anne embraced in a long goodbye. “I’m going to miss you,” Mom said. “Thank you for everything.” When she stepped back, they were both crying, which got Carrie going, and I was going to be next.

“Let’s vamoose,” I said.

“That’s why I don’t do goodbyes,” Mom said. “I always just drop ‘em off at the airport.”

And so, with the heartfelt talk of next times that takes over departures – New York, Colorado, the Dolomites next year – we walked out of the bus station and the tone and color of our journey would never be the same.

From Burgos to the Inquisition and the Aztecs

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A Mulligan in Burgos

We came to Burgos by bus. Mom’s right pinky toe looks like a particularly lurid crime scene, so she’s not able to walk without pain and discomfort. One of the hospitaleros at the albergue, a kindly older man, was actually a doctor, and early this morning he drained Mom’s toe of pus, leaving in the thread so that it would not close up. He wrapped it in what little gauze and tape Mom had, but deemed the tape “for Barbie” and told her to find something better.  He told her not to walk on it.

Given the time we have left, we have decided to follow something like the advice Elmore Leonard gave about the secret to his writing: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Like more than a few pilgrims, we will leave out the walk between Burgos to Leon, giving a miss to the hot, dry, flat, industrial landscape in between. We haven’t been able to sustain the average of 16 miles a day – and no stops in great cities or areas of interest – that traveling 500 miles in 30 days would require, so we’re going to give ourselves a mulligan.

The albergue in Burgos is the best one yet. It’s a new, clean building situated a block from the impressive Gothic cathedral. Beds are bunked in two pairs, along galleys, with storage lockers between the pairs. Each bed has a personal light and an electrical outlet. There’s a computer area (Burgos itself has wi-fi, though it’s not user-friendly), a kitchen, lockers for boots, storage for bikes, and a rooftop patio to dry clothes on.

The Cathedral in Burgos

Burgos is a beautiful little town. The centerpiece is the magnificent, two-tower Gothic cathedral. Once inside, I took a lot of pictures, but my mind was on Spain’s troubled history of religious intolerance. When I think about Spain, I think often of the Inquisition, that engine of forced conversions of Jews and Muslims, and of the destruction of a great civilization, that of the Spanish Moors and Jewry. I think of the destruction of rich civilizations like the Inca and Aztec, including the forcible conversion, or brainwashing, done to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. Spain is a land where religious intolerance has often joined up with state power for deadly consequences.

Spain, the site of holy pilgrimages and so many magnificent cathedrals, has a very troubled relationship with the use of religion as a weapon – not against terror, but as part of it. (This brings to mind Borat’s full-throated cry, at a Virginia rodeo that had given him a microphone, “We support your war of terror!”)

Inquisition and Auto da Fé

The Inquisition, that death-party brought to you by the same people (power couple Ferdinand and Isabella) who brought genocide to the Caribbean and South America, squarely straddles the middle of the Camino de Santiago’s thousand-year history. Indeed, Ferdinand el Catolico and Isabella el Catolico walked part of the Camino themselves. In 1574, Santiago de Compostela itself was granted a permanent inquisitorial tribunal, which was a license to print money.

So I wonder, in the decades around 1500, say, what did pilgrims on the path think of the Jews and Muslims being forcibly converted (conversos), exiled, and even helping to define a new term, auto da fe, which means, roughly, “to burn at the stake”. Guess what “auto da fe” means literally?

Act of faith.

The immolation of a supposed heretic, you see, was as an act of faith. A godly act, as it were.

Meanwhile, cathedrals were being built, in part, with money taken from Jews accused of heresy.  Not surprisingly, those accused skewed heavily toward the wealthy. Without its own budget, the Inquisition depended exclusively on confiscating the wealth of the denounced. This is what we now call a perverse incentive.

Only a few decades later, Martin Luther would protest such abuses of the Catholic Church and help to launch what is now called Protestantism. But his manifesto against the church was more concerned with its sale of indulgences, to the rich, to purchase the remission of punishment for sins. His “Ninety-Five Theses”, legendarily nailed to the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, included a query as to why the Pope would take the money of poor people to build his basilica, but made no mention of the use of Jews as torches.

“Why does the pope,” he asked, “whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?” Luther believed that since the sinners had already been forgiven by God, imposing a fee to allow them to avoid earthly penance was wrong. Luther also objected to a saying attributed to Dominican friar Johann Tetzel, a salesman of indulgences, that “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory [or “into heaven”] springs.” But only fifty years after the lesser Shoah (what Jews call the Holocaust) that was the Inquisition, Luther was still calling the Jews “the devil’s people”.

The Church allowed those who walked the Camino (and other pilgrimage routes) to earn remission of punishment for sins. Sometimes, a pilgrim was ordered by the Church to walk the Camino as penance. Today in Flanders, part of Belgium, juvenile delinquents are still encouraged to walk the Camino as part of their rehabilitation.

Nowadays, there have been innovations of the sort you’d expect of a sophisticated capitalist society. Nowadays, there are churches, usually individual pastors, and almost exclusively located in the United States, who make millions not from sales of forgiveness, but from telling people God wants them to make millions, and he, the pastor, can show them how to earn God’s grace by becoming a millionaire first.

Aztec Gold

Julio noted that some of the cathedral’s artifacts of pure gold listed their origin, simply, as “Mexico”. There was no explanation for how the gold had come into Spanish hands, but history tells us it involved a great deal of blood.

The Indians’ own chronicles tell of appearance of Pedro de Alvarado in the patio of the main temple in Tenochtitlan. The chronicles mention the first rituals of a fiesta that was being celebrated, how “song was linked to song”, and then they describe the Spaniards’ entrance into the sacred patio:

They ran in among the dancers, forcing their way to the place where the drums were played. They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off his arms. Then they cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor.

They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords. They attacked some of them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces.

They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. No matter how they tried to save themselves, they could find no escape.

So this is what I was thinking as I walked through the cathedral and saw portrait after portrait of Mary cradling her dead son, saw the dramatic, bloody wounds to his feet, hands, and side, all carefully painted in by the artists.  Such tenderness, such compassion, side-by-side with the genocide of a people and its culture. The mind boggles at the rationalizations required to reconcile the two, but then man has never lacked the ability to tell himself two simultaneous, contradictory stories.

It’s something I catch myself doing almost every day. The only solution to this habit of mind is simply to keep watching it.

Belorado and Jamón

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Belorado, Snore Journal.  The German word, schnarcher, better captures the enthusiasm of last night’s symphony.  Mom began it.  I wrestled with myself.  I felt badly that others were hearing her snoring, and that I might – might – have an ability to stop it that they did not.  I could go to her and wake her up and . . . what?  Normally you ask someone to turn over (that’s all it takes with me, but I have been aggressively, conscientiously sleeping on my stomach or side here), but Mom has sort of developed the ability to saw logs while lying on her side.  So waking her up might not work.  Besides, I tend to take on more responsibility than is really mine (except when I’m assuming the victim’s role, in which case it’s the opposite).  These people all signed up for the Camino, and paid a mere 5 Euros, knowing what they were getting into.  So why was I responsible for their experience?

I had lost one of my semi-effective earplugs, so I used the iPod again.  It works a little better at keeping out sound, though against the woman who took over from Mom, there was no defense.  I want to be clear that I am not glibly comparing a perfectly nice human being to a farm animal here, but her snore did in fact sound like the lowing of a cow, particularly the almost inquisitive higher note the cow hits at the end of the moo.

I awoke feeling sick again.  I normally don’t get sick even once a year.

But at least it was nearly dark in the dorm.  In the albergue municipal in Santo Domingo, the builders had thoughtfully placed a Salida, or Exit, sign over the door, taking care, so that it would be visible in the event of emergency, to make it as bright as our own sun.  I wore my eye patch, and Julio turned around in bed so that the sun was over his shoulder instead of in his eyes.

Belorado has really done a fine job of communicating its history to pilgrims and tourists.  They have carefully placed Spanish and English placards in front of the various ancient buildings in the village – which like many villages on the Camino goes back about a thousand years and has the churches to prove it – and these placards lead the visitor on a self-guided tour of the village.  On top of one of the village’s two small churches, or iglesias, as prominent as the bushy eyebrows of an old Greek man, there are four enormous birds’ nests.  These belong to storks.  We saw three of the graceful birds flying overhead a few days ago.

“Climb up there with my camera,” I said to Julio.  “Let’s see if storks are the kind of birds that will defend their nests.”

He laughed mirthlessly.  “They want more meat than there is on me.  I am good only for a soup.”

We were waiting for the 9:30 bus to Burgos.  Bus schedules are on a sort of best-efforts basis here, though, and it didn’t arrive until 10:05. At about 10, a little white van labeled Carneceria and Charcuterie pulled up right in front of us.  “Carrie,” said Julio, “turn away.  You don’t want to look at thees.”  She didn’t question him, and turned away, but during the four, or six, trips the driver made with half a pig, cut length-wise, draped over his shoulder, she did inevitably see how the jamon gets to her plate.  After the four, or six, trips, she also caught site of a white plastic bucket of pig’s heads.

She is now a vegetarian.

Two days ago we were walking on the Camino and found ourselves overwhelmed by the most foul stench.  I thought perhaps the fields had been fertilized with animal waste.  Then I thought we might be approaching an open-air sewage treatment plant, or perhaps the National Feces Factory.  “This is where they produce all the shit made in Spain,” I said to Carrie, “up ahead.”  She is required to produce a report when she gets back to school, and I try to be helpful.  I next saw some granaries, so I changed my guess and said the smell was probably fermenting corn or something.  But then I heard the oinking.  More jamón.

Julio says that the Chinese have now developed a taste for Spanish jamón, the best of which is so good because of the dry climate and the oak pellotas the pigs are fed.  “When that happens, jamón may get too expensive for most Spanish,” he said.

Julio and Marie Anne explained that there are about a half-dozen types of jamón, from the jamon de bodega grown in humid climes like his own Bilbao “that’s only good enough for frying or casseroles” to paletilla and jamon iberico (from the pig’s pata negra, or ham hock), which “melts in your mouth”.  In Burgos he would seek out some of the paletilla for us, opting for the 47 Euro per kilo variety rather than the one that cost over 120 Euros per kilo.

It really does melt in the mouth.  Carrie wouldn’t touch it.  Then it was time to check in to the albergue.  There was already a short line.

“Always Koreans at the front,” Julio said, and then addressed the Koreans in one of his signature phrases, one he has constantly applied to Mom and Carrie throughout the trip, “You are the best!”