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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!”

Santo Domingo de la Calzado to Belarado – This Post Sponsored by Ibuprofen

Foot Massage – With or Without “Happy Ending?”

In Santo Domingo I tried out for the first time one of the foot massagers that, along with Internet-ready computer terminals, are staples of the hostels on the Camino de Santiago.  For 2 Euros, I was promised 10 minutes of massage.  I read the instructions, and that’s when I got nervous.

Put the feet within the machine and chooses the Kneading bellboys and vibrating the intensity of the massage and the vibration

I scanned the room to see from where the kneading bellboys could be expected to appear.  Would they arrive wearing costumes?  Would they even speak English?  Would they have hunchbacks and unusually strong hands?  Still, I was game.  I inserted my money, and then my feet.

Immediately a hospitalera rushed over to hand me some prophylactics to slip on my bare feet.  Now I was really nervous.

It was only when the machine began to bang and vibrate that the CAUTION written on it started to make sense:

Not recommended for minors of 12 years, embarrassed or people with Hypertension.

Embarrassed??

When it was over, the older, male English hospitalero asked me how it had gone.

“Where,” I asked, “are the cigarette vending machines?”

 

Leaving Santo Domingo de la Calzano

Mom was running a manufacturing facility in her sleep last night, and she did all the sound effects herself.  When she stopped, or maybe before, one of the Japanese took over, turning in an impressive performance on behalf of his countrymen.  When all this is over, I definitely see him in the medals, certainly on the podium.

We were up at 5:30a.m., also known as oh-God-thirty, and on the road not long after 6, just ahead of the Japanese.  We walked in the dark, beneath starry skies.  It felt good to be underway.  It was chilly, though, and a slight wind made it colder.  I put on my wool cap and gloves.  We passed a herd of sheep, fenced in.  The sheep dog eventually barked at our intrusion, but by then I had given the mutton the detailed escape instructions they would need.

“Did you get your computer?” Carrie asked me.  I hadn’t had an outlet near my bed and had been charging it under hers.  I said I had.

“Are you kidding?” Mom said.  “He’d forget his mother before he’d forget his computer.”

“That’s going in the blog!” I said.

Most of the path ran parallel to the national highway that runs between Logrono and Burgos; in a few places, we stayed on the highway rather than take detours through tiny villages that were all closed up in any event.  “Thees one goes to a village where there is notheeng,” Julio said.  “Three extra kilometers for notheeng.  What you want to do?”

“Let us never go to nothing,” I said.

The beautiful landscapes, though, were behind us, and the vineyards had been replaced by fields of what used to be wheat, now cut down to eight-inch stalks.  The land was growing drier and drier with every step.

Mom was hurting.  I could see it in her face and in her step.  The toes of her right foot were painful to look at.  Her kidneys hurt.  And during a trip into the weeds she cried out, “I’m a bloody mess!”

“You can always take a taxi or bus from the next town,” I told her.  Julio had now come back to check on her too, and we stood there, the three of us.

Her eyes welled up, more from frustration than from the pain.  Mom is, in her own words, “a tough old broad.”

“I don’t want to ride everywhere,” she said.  “I want to walk this.”

I put a hand on her shoulder.  “It’s okay, Mom.  Whatever you decide.  What about your ibuprofen?” I asked.  “Have you had any today?”

“Oh,” she said, now hopeful.  “I could try that.”

Before it could start working, we stopped again in a café-bar in Grañon.  Sitting at a table in the bar, she looked disconsolate.  “You don’t have to walk every bit of it,” I said.  “All you’re supposed to do is your best.  There’s no rule about how much we have to walk, or how fast.  The whole point is that you do what you can, but no one expects you to do more.  You’re probably walking through more pain than anyone here.”

We had our morning desayuno – coffees, teas, drinkable yogurt for me – and I worked on Mom’s back, near her kidneys, drawing out the negative qi, sending forth loving qi.  Mom asked how far it was to the next village.  4.4km, Julio said, consulting the chart they give you at St. Jean Pied de Port.  Mom decided to press on, but not before exchanging her too-small boots for the light sandals she’s worn for most of the trip.  I put the boots in my pack.

“We’re gonna get rid of those sonsabitches soon,” she said.  “You can put that in the blog.  I should have listened to my little voice when I was still in Colorado, but I didn’t want to spend money on another pair.”

As we left the restaurant, she was still in pain — the ibuprofen had not yet kicked in. “It’s just something different every day,” she said. And then: “Oh, look at those roses in that balcony, so pretty!”

Between the jettison of the boots and the ibuprofen, her pain receded, and she kept a respectable and uncomplaining pace for the next 10km.  It was Marie Anne whose Achilles and other pain kept her far in the back.

The Taciturn Waiter at the Cafe Leon

We stopped for another snack at the Café Leon, in Redecilla del Camino.  It was a very beautifully done up place, inside and out.  The passage to the bathrooms smelled of lilacs, and the bathrooms themselves were spotless and aromatic.  The men’s walls were painted with stripes of glistening white and blue.  One thing I like about Spain is that, if you’re a man and you’re going to the bathroom, you get to call yourself a caballero – literally, a horseman, or cowboy.  Excellent.

Unfortunately, we all felt very badly about our visit to Café Leon.  We appeared to have interrupted the proprietor in the middle of attending his mother’s funeral, or perhaps his own.  As we approached, the only customers in the area, he eyed us without welcome, hola, or smile.  “You can’t bring your backpacks inside,” he said, in Spanish.  I don’t think he ever did make eye contact with anyone in our party, nor with the party of Russians (whom he chastised), the Koreans, or the other customers who came in over time.  He served us entirely without pleasantry or comment.  It was odd.

He stood next to us, and asked Julio where we were from.  He complained to Julio, in Spanish, that tourists to Spain didn’t speak enough Spanish; he himself had once been to Turkey, he said, but had had a bad experience when he couldn’t understand anyone and was never going to leave the country again.  “Typical Castillano,” Julio said, of the man’s evident disdain for all that he did.  Either that or he was depressed.

As we were leaving I noticed that he was wearing blue suede shoes.  Which explained a lot.

We continued on.  The sun beat down, and we marched over the graveled road, parallel to the highway, that has characterized the last 40km or so. And then, after 21 to 23km, we were in Belorado, and the Albergue Santiago beckoned.  It would be our first private albergue, but with a price of 5 Euros, flags of 20 nations colorfully flying outside (not including that of the U.S.), and the promise of a swimming pool, a menu peregrino, a bar, a “mini-market”, washing machines, and a kitchen, it was terribly inviting.

Mom had made it.  Over 20km!

Navarette, Azrofa, Santo Domingo de la Calzado

Navarette

The fiesta two nights ago in Navarette was a pleasant surprise. (I note that fiesta and

Marco, Italian, runs a hostel in Brazil

siesta share the same root, iesta, which surely translates to “Let’s Stop Working Again”). I drank 1-Euro Rioja and ate two bowls of migas for 1 Euro each. On top of the merely 5-Euro albergue, it was a good day out.  A live band played Spanish and Latin tunes, and the usual English-language repertoire of Lady Gaga, Tom Jones, and Spongebob Squarepants. Mom and I began singing along to “Delilah” and were joined by Marie Anne. Carrie stayed at a safe distance, for there is nothing so terrifying to a teenager as an adult body animated by music, and it’s a close call whether it’s more horrific for the music to have been produced before the teenager was born or the music is that of the teen and her cohort. Small children chased one another through the crowd.

The Fiesta in Navarette

When we arrived earlier, we were greeted by the piercing sound of an instrument (perhaps a dulcimer) that must have been designed by the court jester of some Navarran king, with the intent of disabling his enemies. It seemed to operate, like a hacksaw, on the region between the ear canal and the spinal column. When we went to investigate the piercing sound, wondering if perhaps there might be old women splayed about in the square, stockinged feet pedaling at the air, desperately trying to cover their ears, we found a stage full of small children, mostly girls and a few boys. The old women were in fact watching, and their ears appeared to be wholly unprotected.  The girls were dressed in what was obviously the local traditional dress, snow-white dresses with flowers of fabric sewn on every eight inches or so, and white tights under shoes with red straps that wound up the calves like those of Roman soldiers’ shoes.

The children kicked uncertainly at the music and toward one another in a Jota Riojana that we could see being done correctly by a few older women and some teenage girls. There were a few little boys on stage as well, one of whom, 6 years old, we later saw (shown in the Facebook photos) at a restaurant with his parents and his eight-year-old brother. I got his mother’s email address and sent her the three photos I’d taken of him and the little girl whose hand he held.

Penance on the Camino

When you think of walking the Camino, the first thing you think about, if you are

The only triple-decker dormitorio so far

thinking clearly, is walking. But what you should really be thinking about is snoring. Get 12 to 50 strangers together in a room, and about 1 in 6 will be accomplished snorers. It’s an oddly intimate thing, to be let in on the unconscious behaviors of strangers. And of course the reactions to snorers are universal, ranging from amusement (if the snorer is going at it in the middle of the day and you have nothing better to do) to uncontained rage (if you are trying to sleep).   Marie Anne related a story of a German pilgrim who, fed up by the raucous snoring of two other pilgrims, exploded in a Germanic volcano.  “And zen,” she said, making a motion with her hands, “silence.”

“Did you laugh?”

“Of course!” she said.  “Eet was very funny.”

Some hostels will put 50 people in the same room. In others, there might be only 8 or 9. In any of them, a few features could benefit from some consulting:

  • Snoring – the solution? White-noise machines in every dormitory room. The quality of sleep would go up greatly for each of the 8 to 50 people. In the albergue at Santo Domingo, they actually had a Special Room for Snorers. It’s a good idea, but what is the incentive for a snorer to sign up to sleep with his fellows? It’s like asking cannibals to share living quarters.
  • Fresh air. Walk into a dorm room after people have been sleeping in it for several hours, and you’ll feel like you’ve entered a warm mist of accumulated exhalations. It’s unpleasant, but it’s also a sure-fire way to get sick. Every one of our five-person party has now gotten sick. Solution? Open windows and blankets.
  • Early-Morning Noise. I’ve written about noise before. Backpacks should be stored outside the rooms. (Valuables may be kept inside or in a locker). At the very least, pilgrims should take their packs out of the rooms in order to stuff and arrange them and turn bright lights on them.  Bathrooms and showers should not be close to the sleeping areas. Signs should stress that talking should be kept to a minimum, and then only in low voices (whispers are actually louder than a low voice). Julio should be barred from all albergues.

A recent discussion on a Camino-related website addresses this very issue:

Why do you stay in albergues? Do you enjoy it??
Is it for the price? Is it because you like the bunks? Snoring? Shared bathrooms?
Is it for the comradeship of other pilgrims? Penitence for past sins?
I am curious why some people actually choose to stay in albergues even when they can easily afford other type accommodations.

I actually do both, but some people seem to believe that not staying in albergues cheapens the experience and is not a “real” Camino. I just can’t figure it out.

I’m thinking the main reason is cost.  There is simply no comparing the 5-9 Euros a night with a hotel. Of course, in many of these villages, there aren’t hotels.

We walked about 20km from Navarette to Azofra.

Marie Anne says my face has gotten thinner. I may have lost a few pounds, though I eat a good deal more than I do at home, including fine chocolate by the half-bar. I have been doing this since I was a boy in Germany, and all my German relatives knew that the price of an audience with me was one or more bars of Milka or Lindt chocolate.  (They knew better than to buy Cadbury or Hershey).

Azofra

They’re harvesting the rioja grapes, but slowly. Not far from here, it rained for about 35 days in July and August, and now it’s been sunny for the full two weeks of our stay, a combination that is expected to produce a good grape vintage.  Julio is convinced Mom made a pact with St. Peter.  We ran across a few vineyard workers who had made a fire out of dead vines and were about to roast an impressive array of sausage and chorizo on it. Mom tried to invite herself over for a bite, but the men didn’t understand her.

The novelty of walking and of small villages was wearing off. My feet still start to hurt after 10 or 15 km, and that makes the walking less than pleasant. I try not to wish it over, I try to stay in the moment, but on some days it’s not what I want to be doing for six hours a day. So my work here is simply not to resist, because walking is what I’m doing. When you resist what is, you suffer, right?

Tired. Maybe a nap. More thoughts than usual today.

Staying in Jersey City for a while – yes. Need winter clothes from Bend. Skis too? Sell some items before movers come – like the sectionals and beds, the big stuff. Get rid of the Land Rover.

Mom soldiered on during the hike to tiny Azofra (“They are so happy the Camino runs through here,” Julio said, “the other towns nearby are so jealous”), in spite of a good deal of pain and discomfort. She has terrible blisters on her toes, and her liver hurts. Once we’d arrived, I went to my room and took a rare siesta, and when I found her again, in the kitchen, she said, “I was in bed and couldn’t even get up.” She went to bed early. I met my roommate, an older Spanish gentleman who assured me that I could keep the lights on and do whatever I wanted and he’d be able to sleep. I read The Girl Who Played with Fire for a while, but the book weighed around a pound and it didn’t make it into my backpack this morning.

As a matter of principle, or something, Julio doesn’t shave while he’s on a walk. But his upper lip got sunburnt, so he shaved it. This made him look Amish, I told him. I think he got self-conscious about looking Amish, so he shaved the sides off, and now he merely looks Chinese again.

Saturday October 1, 2011 Santo Domingo

Mom was still sick this morning, but she was up early, as usual, and cooking German-style crepes (pfannenkuchen, prime ingredient of mine and my sister’s favorite food as children, pfannenkuchen suppe), which she invited Steffi to share. Kiernan, the young Irishman, scored one too.

Mom and Carrie took a taxi (24 Euros) to Santo Domingo. Julio, Marie Anne, and I walked. Marie Anne was also still sick, suffering from an inflamed Achilles tendon, and, according to Julio, not in her usual condition for walking, so we set a slow pace over the 15 kilometers. I left my pack with Mom to take in the taxi; twenty-seven pounds lighter, I moved like Gene Kelly. I used my poles like swords.

The air is noticeably colder. Julio says that as we climb to Burgos, we will need to wear more warm clothing.

The countryside was still rife with vineyards and growing drier by the kilometer. There were more of the elevated cement aqueducts the farmers once used to irrigate their crops; they now use perforated rubber hoses, but the cement is just too heavy to move. One rest area has the following:  a water fountain with potable water; three stone lounge chairs; a bench; and, near a fence leading into what is probably private property, a sign saying:

Prohibido Defecar

That’s close to “Defecation Prohibited”, or even “Elimination Prohibited” — “As if there’s a government involved,” I said to Julio — but the English version on the sign is simply hopeful:  “Don’t Shit”. But in the nearby tissue nearby I saw ample evidence of violation. (Some Germans pointed out that the graphic, which showed a man leaning forward with one arm bent high in front of him, the other bent high behind, if strictly interpreted, really only prohibited defecating while sprinting).

One panorama not far from Azofra will stick with me. The corduroy golds and browns of fallow fields all helter-skelter of angle, various plots of yellow or green with parallel lines sketched by either ploughs or vines, copses of trees, and finally the hills beyond, from the blue nearest us to the charcoal to the light-grey in the distance. I kept worrying that at any moment I would thrust my walking stick in front of me and tear right through the canvas. Naturally I had no camera on me.

We stopped at the club of our first golf course on the Camino, the Rioja Alta Golf Club, and where there are golf clubs there will be other firsts, like yellow Porsche Caymans and unsuccessful plastic surgery.  The bocadillo we at there, though, was delicioso.  Leaving the golf club, we passed through a large suburb of hideous (e.g., American-style) boxy apartment complexes that was almost completely devoid of life.  “Se Vende” (For Sale) signs littered every balcony.  Here was another example of the crash of the speculative real estate boom in Spain. It was like walking through a post-nuclear-holocaust landscape.

Santo Domingo is named for a man (Domingo) who so failed at his monk studies that he was invited to leave. But he then spent the rest of his life building the area into a way station for pilgrims, and often got royal support for his efforts. The place became a village and now boasts numerous very old buildings, from a cathedral with fine examples of art to a Cistercian monastery.  And eventually he was canonized (Santo).

There’s a legend that repeats itself in various places in Europe, “the hanged innocent”. Most of them have the action taking place in Toulouse, but Santo Domingo has its own version.  (Legends are the bread and butter of the tourist and pilgrim business, along with relics like shards of Jesus’ cross, patches of his robe, and so on).  A man, woman, and their son, all from Germany, pass through Santo Domingo (or Toulouse) and stay at an inn. The innkeeper’s daughter propositions the son, who demurs, and she arranges to have his pack filled with silver from the church. The authorities catch him with it, and he is hanged. (This story could also take place in Texas).

After his parents walk all the way to Santiago and back, they return to the body, still hanging from the gibbet a month later, and are shocked to hear their son assuring them he is alive.  “Santo Domingo supported my weight all month,” he tells them (in Toulouse, it’s Santiago himself).  He neglects to explain why no one else has noticed him hanging there alive, or what he ate whilst hanging.  The parents leave the boy and run to tell the mayor, who is roasting chickens. He laughs, saying, “Your son is no more alive than these chickens,” whereupon the chickens spring to life, grow back their feathers, and run away.

The town still cares for two chickens.  Sheerly by coincidence, Julio and Marie Anne bought about two chickens’ worth of chicken breasts for lunch today, and added scrambled eggs just to get in the whole fowl lifecycle.

We were told that Azofra had a hostel like a fine hotel, but the one in Santo Domingo is at least as nice. Azofra had a cozy enclosed courtyard and a fountain in which pilgrims cooled their feet. The exterior was a modern design of stone and wood slats. It had a kitchen and rows of dining tables. It even offered double rooms for everyone – so far unheard of on the Camino. And the washing machine was free. (Curiously, the rooms lacked electrical outlets, so that we were all forced to stretch cords across the dining area to the two outlets available there).

In Santo Domingo, the hostel is several stories high. There is – and I’m not making this up – a lounge with a television. There are a dozen leather, or at least pleather, sofas. A kitchen. Lots of fine pictures of pilgrims walking. The construction is fine. And the showers are peerless. Six hooks on which to hang both old clothes and new, lots of water pressure and hot water, and no timer.

I write this after lunch as Mom saws logs and Marie Anne purrs in a lighter mode.  We’ll go to see the cathedral later. There is nothing I would like more than a yoga class right now.

An Audience with El Notario

El Notario was a very sober man. Small, neat, with a short-sleeved white shirt and a modest tie (so modest it bordered on immodesty), he exuded authority and self-assurance.

Julio made sure to legitimate me right away.

El es un abogado de Princeton,” he said.

“Harvard,” I said.  The Spaniards thought this was funny.

El Notario placed before us the documents that Eva had drawn up. He verified Julio’s identity and made him swear to translate faithfully (Julio would violate this by saying “blah blah blah” over extensive portions of the document). The documents contained so much legalese that even when they were upside-down, an American lawyer could read them: Latin is still the lingua franca of the legalist. They said that Don Cameron Christopher Powell did not understand Spanish, and that Don Julio Angel Redondo Garcia was acting as interpreter and translator. They also appeared to say that they had no real legal effect.

When all the preliminaries had been completed, El Notario reached for a Bic pen and held it up before me as if he were putting Excalibur into my care. He held up my passport before me and pointed at my signature as if to say, “It should look like this”. (Perhaps he did say that). I signed my name in two places.

He appeared to think we were done.

I explained to Julio that a document with only my signature on it would not be useful to the American authorities, who rather expected that the State, County, signature, and commission expiration would be filled out by a notary on the same document, and who would neither look at nor understand the beautifully produced four-page instrument that Eva had so carefully prepared for El Notario’s stylish signature.

To my dismay, El Notario was not reaching for his pen. “Notaries in Spain never expire,” Julio translated. “Their license to print money is forever, perhaps beyond death.”

“Could he write ‘No expiration’?”

Sadly, he could not.

He told us to come back in an hour, so that the separate, Spanish documents could be changed to reflect the fact he would be applying his pen to the English-language document. Like a man sitting in a cab from New York to Washington, D.C., I could see the meter ticking upward.

But there was one good thing to come of it all. “For the rest of Camino,” I told Julio. “You will call me Don Cameron.”