Finisterre
Finisterre
I took 1000-mile walk along the Camino de Santiago from the South of France to the coast of Spain. A midlife journey of love and loss. Here's the story.
Preface
In the spring I will walk the Chemin de Saint Jacques de Compostelle to Santiago, Spain, along one of the four main pilgrimage routes from France. The walk is literally a journey of a thousand miles, the one we’ve all heard about, the one that starts with the single step.
Mine will start at the doorstep of our home in Rognes, France just north of Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. I’ll walk through the early spring grapevines behind our house and then up into the hills overlooking our small town, then over to Arles, on towards Toulouse, through the rising Pyrenees, then Basque country, Jaca, the hot plains of northern Spain and beyond and beyond and beyond, until I run out of continent on the coast of Spain. March, April, May, possibly early June.
I plan to stay in ten euro a night pilgrimage hostels. When it is my turn at the refugio spigot, I’ll clean my clothes beneath the cold tap. I’ll dry them in my bunk on a cord I stretch over my sleeping bag. I’ll tend to my aching pilgrim back and knees and feet and try to keep my spirits up. Officially, the pilgrimage ends with a special service in the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, but many pilgrims continue on for another three days to get to Finisterre, which is further along and out on the coast. I plan to do that final leg as well.
The last of the die-hard pilgrims make this final push out to the ocean, heading slowly and painfully to the finis terre, literally “the end of the world.” Undoubtedly, an unremarkable daily fishing life moves about them there, a steady life taking little or no notice of them, although, I imagine, some of the older folks acknowledge the pilgrims with a respectful nod as they head through their town.
When they get to the top of the lighthouse cliff, pilgrims set small fires on the hard soil and, as is the custom, they burn their boots, poking at them for a bit, an acrid black smoke filling the air. Then they find a quiet rock and stare out at the blank Atlantic.
If I make it to Finisterre, I will take my own final look at the edge of the world, a long, steady look to try to freeze and fix the moment, to will my mind to remember, to beg it to please save this, a prayer to the gods of memory. And then I will turn away, and head off to my bus or train station, knowing that I will never do anything like it again.
Chapter 1: Finisterre
It is early Saturday morning.
My son, Daniel, has been up for hours writing code and sitting on his bedroom floor soldering electronics onto his Arduino. When I passed his door earlier, he was so focused he barely looked up. He is twelve. My seven-year-old, Alannah, is in her pajamas, and I hear her bare feet pad down the stairs somewhere behind me. She comes and stands by me in my study where I am working intensely on a project, rubbing my lips in concentration and figuring something out.
She leans against my swivel chair and it swivels, and I ask her if she could stop that. She looks at my large dual computer monitors and asks me a question about what’s on the screen. I’m animated at the prospect of talking about my interests. I explain to her how my progress is marked out in these elaborate Excel spreadsheets and colored charts, and how I’ve set it up so that a 3D bar turns red if I miss more than two days or if the average weekly rate of progress goes down.
Like no one else in the family, she knows each and every one of my never-ending projects, and she delights, perhaps as much as I do, in my individual progress and achievements. On this early morning, she’s checking up on the number of French idioms I’ve learned. She asks me to make her some French verb cards, and for about the third or fourth time now, she’s asked me to create a daily task sheet for her. She wants me to put it on the table at the top of the stairs, but I need her to give me a minute because I’m in the middle of something, and I’m stuck, and I don’t know why I’m stuck yet. I struggle to turn my head towards her as I explain this.
If she can just give me a minute, I will help her.
She cannot use one of mine.
De quand date votre dernière confession ?
Somewhere along this 1000-mile, midlife crisis I’m about to embark on, smack in the middle of nowhere, I am going to walk into some village church in France and give the confession of a lifetime.
I am not a Catholic, and I have never given an actual confession, but I have seen them on television and in the movies, and I have a pretty good idea what might be expected of me and the order of operations. So, I will go and sit down in the wooden booth and get started. The village priest won’t understand my dreadful French, but he’ll catch enough of the keywords to know not to interrupt.
And I will tell him something like this (allow me to translate):
I am completely self-centered. I am scolding. I am impatient. I lecture my family and my employees. I complain. I don’t listen. I’m pre-occupied most of the time. I carry resentments for hours and sometimes days. I’m foolishly competitive. I need to win every contest. I don’t give up petty arguments. I need to control everything and everybody. I sulk when I don’t get my way.
I have to be held in the highest regard or my feelings are hurt. I’m exhausting. I need attention constantly. I’m over-sensitive. I anger easily. I’m difficult to work with. I’m distracted and busy when I shouldn’t be. My ambitions drain all my energies. I’m rarely present. I don’t help out much. When I do help out it has to be on my own terms. I don’t take instruction well. I don’t take criticism at all. I have childish tantrums.
As you already know, Lord, I am not a Christian.
There is momentary confusion in the adjoining booth as to whom I’m actually addressing and why, but given the rest of it, it’s hardly worth interrupting. I imagine a beat while the priest gently clears his throat and privately raises his eyebrows.
He prompts me to continue like they do in the movies.
Continue, mon enfant...
I am ashamed of the forced, uninspired and mediocre giver I’ve become. I’m not the father and husband I wanted to be, and my children are getting older so quickly. If I had to give myself a grade as a father and husband, then it would be a C+ or maybe a B-. Yes, I can see I could be a whole lot worse, but I take no comfort in the comparison.
And this isn’t some self-pitying play for praise. It’s not like I’m saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t make the team,” and everyone else is better, and “woe is me” and boo-hoo. Honestly, they’re not. Many dads and husbands are far worse, and some dads and husbands are downright awful.
So, I’m not saying everybody else seems so great. I don’t know what grades the other guys are getting, and I don’t care. I want them to do well. I want all the moms and dads to do well. It’s not a competition for me, being a dad and husband. I’m just saying my effort feels like a C+/B- effort. Average. And that’s not who I wanted to be, and I’m already 44.
But I know, or can at least imagine, what an A-/A dad and husband would be like. With all my heart I know that. I can see how supportive I would be, how attentive and helpful, how I’d listen, how I’d make the bed more and do more projects with the kids. They love when I do, and I’d do nice random things for no reason for my wife. But I just don’t. I’m busy. I’m tired. I’m lazy. I’m somewhere else mentally.
But he’s just so possible. I’m so possible. It’s like my good dad is right by a door inside me, but still I can’t make him come out when I call him, and I keep thinking he will, but he doesn’t, and day follows upon day, and he just paces behind the doorway.
I want the people I love to have that me, because that me is out there. I’ve seen him. They know him. I know him. He shows up from time to time for no reason at all, and sometimes surprises everyone in beautiful ways. Even I am surprised when he appears sometimes. Most of all, I’m surprised that the rest of my family still believes in him so completely.
But what if they stop believing in him? And what about when they get old enough that they don’t even need to believe in him so much anymore? Because this is coming, too. It has to, and it should.
And it is going to hurt.
I don’t want my loved ones to have to grow up around me and over and to the sides of me, tending to the thousand small wounds of their disappointment. I don’t want them to make it in spite of me, even though I know they could. I don’t want everyone to give up on the A+ dad and husband, their friend, their employer. But even if all of the people in my life did give up on me, even then I still don’t want to give up on me.
Father, are you still there?
You are so very, very quiet.
Chapter 2: Robert Frost
You can really play the pilgrim out there. It is late summer 2010, and we’ve only lived in France for a month. I’ve seen two pilgrims already just by chance, and oh, my goodness, the first one! I was with the children and we were walking down from the old castle in Les Baux, which is very near Arles, the start of one of the four main French pilgrimage roads. This fellow came up the ancient street with his four-hundred-pound backpack and his eight-foot walking staff, a great wooden, knobbly affair as tall as Moses.
He wore a thick hat with a giant image of a scallop shell probably four-square inches across the front of it. I think it was something he created himself in the fashion of street evangelicals, with their elaborate cardboard signs and their station wagons plastered over in menacing scripture. He walked right up the center of the cobblestone road where we were coming down, making great strides with his staff. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to ask the children to kneel as he passed.
“Kids, that guy was a pilgrim. Just like dad,” I explained.
The books all suggest that there is something to be said for making your pilgrim status clear to the world around you. Displaying the scallop shell, generally from the top of your pilgrim’s staff, is how you’re supposed to do it. The scallop shell symbolizes a whole bunch of things – and I would just be copying out of Wikipedia, so I won’t spend a lot of time paraphrasing – but it’s worth noting that the shell represents the different roads and directions that all lead to Santiago, the Christian endpoint of the journey. To the Christ, within or without, according to the particular cast of your imagination.
There is also the appealing metaphorical idea that every pilgrim washes up on the shore like a scallop shell. The legend of St. James– of Santiago – is that God shipwrecked him on the shores of Galicia where he was later buried in the location of the cathedral. Thus, the pilgrimage. In the same way, pilgrims are tossed by God’s hand. If you are wearing the scallop shell or have it dangling from a leather strap at the top of your hiking stick, the people around you in France and Spain know what you are up to, and the guidebooks assure you that there is a benevolent culture of pilgrim appreciation and hospitality that awaits you.
There remains a spirit of the Knights Templar out there on the trail. You get nods from farmers and free food and solicitous care if anything goes wrong. There are associations that look after you and support you on your way. They even take you into their homes if they have to. Anonymous old women stop you by the roadside, and murmur prayers for you, and bless the top of your head. You don’t have the slightest idea what they are saying or why they care, but you are charmed by the blessing in it, even grateful.
It is said that in the old days, the scallop shell warded off superstitious highway robbers and as a practical matter, pilgrims drank water and ate out of this delicate crockery. The shells were the sign that gave you permission to sleep in churches and monasteries. And after getting to Santiago or even out to Finisterre, the ancient pilgrims coming from all over Europe, and walking both directions, took the scallop shells home again as proof of their accomplishment and hung them over their fireplace or put them in their desk drawer all the way in the back, along with their personal flotsam, like my late father’s initialed “BRN” belt buckle and the four wisdom teeth I had removed twenty years ago that I can’t bring myself to dispose of. Their tortured roots hold a morbid, curio fascination for me.
Nowadays, the scallop shell just symbolizes the trek itself. The roads of the pilgrimage are all marked out with metal UNESCO scallop shells. There are scallop shells on the sides of urban buildings and spray-painted onto the sidewalk. There are faded images of scallop shells on bent wooden sticks in the middle of nowhere. In Spain, they are all over the place, but they can also be found on pilgrimage routes as far away as Poland.
They use the concentric lines of the scallop shell as a kind of arrow indicator. Follow the pointed lines to your heart’s desire. They tell you where to go and what direction to look. Just keep following them relentlessly, and you can’t help but get there. I’ve joked with the kids that one-by-one I am going to remove every single scallop shell I see the entire journey, a thousand miles of way markers, and then I’m going to dump them all out of my backpack in front of the great cathedral and tell everyone the show’s over. You can all go home now. Nobody else is coming. We’re done.
It’s my “Last Pilgrim” joke.
Not the right joke for my friend in the scallop hat.
Pilgrims walk it for a lot of reasons. For the challenge. For the architecture. For the relics. For the beauty of flat plains and rolling countryside. For spiritual experience. For sport. For romance. For friendship. Because, maybe, they’re having a mid-life crisis. Because their grandmother did when she was pregnant in the war. Maybe just to say they did.
Pilgrims who walk out of curiosity are called curiositas. In the old days, you could do it as penance. You might even have found yourself walking the Camino for somebody else’s sins. And to this day, in Flanders, a tradition lives on of selecting one prisoner each year. The prisoner walks the pilgrimage, under guard, to earn his freedom if he makes it.
If you walk the last hundred miles of the Camino, you get an official completion certificate called the Compostela to go along with your pilgrim passport, a foldout paper document that pilgrims are obliged to carry. The following day at noon, during Mass, they announce your nationality and the starting point of your journey. It’s like a Yankees game where you suddenly see your children’s elementary school up on the Diamond Vision scoreboard, except that you find you’re welling up inexplicably, because there is no one to share it with, and there never will be.
And yet, you hear them say it, indifferently perhaps, one city among thousands, one nation among nations, but exactly as promised. Your journey is official now, but as ineffable as the scent from the incense miter that sways precipitously over the crowd of pilgrims.
Un estadounidense que viene de Rognes, Francia.
Most of the time you stay in hostels that run the length of the route. These auberges or refugios are specially dedicated to the pilgrim. They cost six to ten Euros a night, but are donation-based in places. You can’t get into any of them, though, without showing the pilgrim passport.
The first hundred miles in France you’re waking up some old farmer at his refugio in the middle of nowhere, and he has to rummage in a dresser drawer for the stamp, which was there a month ago for the last guy, but by the last hundred miles you use an automated stamping machine to mark your passport, and you wait in line with adolescents from boy scout troops who are out there for a long weekend, pushing each other and stepping on each other’s heels to give each other flats and knock each other off balance.
In Santiago at the Cathedral’s visitor office, you present your well-stamped passport to get your certificate of completion. You stand in that line with quiet, exhausted adolescent boys and the ripple-calved bicyclists who completed the whole thing in five days starting in Amsterdam on Friday night and would have got the record except for something or other somebody or other did and something about broken graphite or composite, and the priest who is on duty barely looks up at them or at you because last year almost two hundred thousand people came through and, as hard as this still is for you to believe, already forty-four years into the mounting evidence, you are indistinguishable from the rest.
Then everyone drifts away from the Pilgrim Office of Santiago, and the hardcore walkers, who tell themselves they really did it, like the pilgrims did it, for one thousand years. These pilgrims hold their official certificate in cardboard tubes and wander around Obradoiro Square trying to find someone they recognize from the road, someone who knows what it truly means to be a pilgrim, not like the people in line, the heretics, the impure, the cheaters, the upstarts, the bicycling “decafeinados” they call them, the come-in-on-the-last-lap people, from 100 kilometers out, who think they understand what it is to be a true pilgrim, but they don’t, because they didn’t do it right, they took the easy way, they slept in hotels with wash machines and fluffy down pillows. These turistas let some hired rental company that advertises on Google AdWords carry their backpacks from town to town in a van splashed out with big scallop shells on the doors.
But maybe these “true” pilgrims are so tired at this point that they don’t even care that they’ve leavened their daily bread with the bitterness of competition and resentment and tears. As you are warned daily, over dinner conversations and on graffitied walls, nothing awaits you in Santiago.
Nothing.
And yet…
I’m not particularly moved by churches and whatever century’s architecture and the whole relics and miracles thing. I’m indifferent to old iron crosses leaning sideways behind a church or dimly lit crypts with coagulated vials of purple blood in yellowing glass. I stand there and wonder if that’s really it, just that, that thing. It’s like the faithful making their way down a thin stone stairwell to stare at my wisdom teeth and my dad’s belt buckle. The giant candle next to the relics is more interesting, really, and far more beautiful. And newer! Hey, European People, new can be beautiful, too, you know. It doesn’t all have to be Gothic saints with broken noses.
Truth be told, I have a striking lack of historical and religious imagination. I see a lot of grey rubble. But I suppose sometimes you meet the kind of person who can tell the right kind of story and bring the whole thing to life and then suddenly the sixteen-year-old peasant girl who was visited in the vineyard by Mary is practically in the room with you. Of course, I’m hoping for some of that, too.
And I’ll admit I’m moved by the idea of a thousand years of pilgrims covering the same ground, coming up over the same mountain outside Santiago de Compostela and seeing the same spires of the cathedral for the first time, every last one of them – of us – chasing their personal miracles. I am moved by an ancient cairn of stones that I know will be found somewhere along a mountain pass in Spain. The massive rock pile and the pilgrimage itself predate Christianity. It has been built up one Celt, Roman and Christian stone-carrying pilgrim at a time, and over a few thousand years, the hunger for miracles has turned into a mountain of expectation.
They say each pilgrim is granted a single prayer with his stone. I look forward to seeing that pile and adding my own rock to its mass. Many pilgrims carry their rock from their homes, and when Melanie and I first came out and visited France a year before, to check it out, to make sure we weren’t totally crazy moving to another country sight-unseen for a wild sabbatical year, I found a small, smooth rock on a beach in Cassis. On a whim, the rock went back to Seattle in my suitcase and then it came back again to France in yet another suitcase when we moved our family here. Then it moved on to Jerusalem during the kids’ winter break where, through a bizarre twist of fate, its story was shared with the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Catholic Church. Now, finally, it is headed to Spain, where it will settle down for eternity. Mine is truly one of the best-traveled rocks in the world, the royalty of the rock pile, blessed from the top, a pilgrim rock if there ever was one.
One stone, one prayer. That’s the deal.
Maybe these prayers get answered out of the force of spiritual bookkeeping to answer prayers generally, or maybe only those tied to rocks are answered. There’s really no way to stay on top of God in these matters. You just have to pray and hope and leave it.
Because if we have a God at all, then I’m quite certain He is a subtle, almost poetic God, a cool, Vermont, Robert Frost of a God, looking up from His desk and watching the wind and snow through His hoary farmhouse window. I see Him sipping His tea carefully and then setting it down again among His writing papers and correspondence, hardly making a sound against the saucer. He is sad, and quiet, and slow-moving, but in nowise defeated. Like all New Englanders, He has simply learned to gear down for the long, long winter and to take things in His stride.
He unfolds and reads my note without expression:
Dear God, I will be alone and on the road to Emmaus from mid-March through early June. I welcome, in fact you could say I deeply long for, Your violent and rapturous correction in these matters…
*
In the cathedral in Santiago there is one special place near the entryway that I’m going to track down as soon as I get there. It’s a stone pillar where all the pilgrims press their open hands and fingertips and pray when they arrive. This is it, the endpoint. Touch this and you’re done. Your race is run. Over. The inscription over this spot reads, in Latin, “The Lord Sent Me.” This pillar of St. James has now been rubbed so deeply, and for so long, that the sweat and the dust of open fingers have worn five distinct radiating grooves into the marble.
It crosses my mind that if you have an inclination for spotting the miraculous, like if you are the kind of person who sees the face of Jesus in the wood grain of the table or the shadowy cliffside and that sort of thing, and if you came at the ancient pillar of St. James from the right angle, probably getting right down and kneeling on the cathedral’s stone floor, you might be able to make out the rays of your outstretched fingers pointing directly back at you, from the Heavens almost, forming something very, very much like the image of a scallop shell.
Your last way marker.
All the roads leading back to you.
A subtle God showing you how to get Home.
Chapter 3: I’m Totally Listening
I cannot have made it any clearer to myself that the ten weeks of the pilgrimage are to be project-free.
The plan is to stop: to stop inventing, to stop creating, to stop planning, to stop becoming somebody new and better, to just take a breath – but every day or so, a subtle project idea slips in on autopilot for how I can use this pilgrimage time. I throw out one set of devils and a legion race in behind.
For example, at first, I decide not to take a camera, because that’s exactly the project nightmare waiting to happen that I’m trying to avoid. I know how I am. I will immediately set a goal to learn every single electronic command on the interface so that I can “master photography” because the opportunity for mastery is hidden in everything. And besides, the little camera instruction book is “small” and “doesn’t weigh much,” and “maybe when I’m being so still and focused, and all I can pay attention to is was in front of me, then I’ll take beautiful pictures of it.”
And at one point, about a week before I notice what I am doing, I decide that I will take a camera because everybody says I have to, and maybe it does make sense. It is kind of crazy to walk a thousand miles and not have a single picture to show for it, right?
Right.
Crazy.
But before you know it, I have a plan to take one picture every day. I’ll show the road as it winds out before me, because that will be so cool to montage together at the end, with the doorway in the first one and the ocean in the last one. I’ll line my office walls with them in a three-month train car of consecutive images. But I catch myself now. I can already see the days coming where I accidentally forget to take a picture - dammit - or I don’t like the picture I took already, or there is a better one after the first one, or I notice something in frame that shouldn’t be there, or I decide that the angle should really have been from shoe level, or four hundred other ways I should have done it differently and better.
Or, and now we’re really getting at the problem, and this is exactly what would happen. I’ll be having a conversation with somebody, and they are telling me something truly personal, something they haven’t talked about for years to anyone, and for a minute they’re sure I am the right person to talk to. They can feel it, and actually they are right, or they almost were right.
But suddenly I’m not there, because I’m thinking this is today’s shot, right there over the stranger’s shoulder, by the fountain, with the sunset in the spray and the two children in silhouette, and I’m fighting a terrible urge to interrupt them so I can get my shot, because I’m going to lose it otherwise. I’ll lose it. I’ll lose it. I’ll lose it. I try to be polite about it, but I’m pulling, pulling, pulling away from them.
“I’m totally listening,” I tell them, running off.
A week earlier, I’m on the Internet trying to find the best hiking trail from Rognes where our home is, to Arles, the nearest city, and a possible junction where I can join the first actual pilgrimage route, the Voie d’Arles. I know there is a marked trail for the Camino leading somewhere into Arles, but I spend a whole evening researching Google maps, and still I can’t figure out where the thing runs, or how I might catch up with it from my house. But this road exists. It has to. Because this is the road that pilgrims walk to get to Santiago from Rome, and some true diehards use it to go back the other direction.
When I’ve exhausted my own efforts, I reach out to a pilgrimage association I’ve come across online.
Their website has ancient HTML and recent event gatherings still posted from two years ago. I call their contact number and get an answering machine for somebody in Avignon. What I don’t realize is that I’ve stumbled onto the secret entrance to a pilgrim’s Batcave. I hear ascending elevator whirring sounds and giant metal structures shifting and compartments opening behind the Times New Roman font and the blinking red and blue whirling police light jpegs.
Within minutes, a woman calls me back with the name of the best person to speak to about the routes. She leaves a second message later that same night giving me a third association member in case I can’t reach the second. She also finds me the number for a priest in a village north of Salon-en-Provence where I might be able to stay. She explains he is the priest for a handful of small towns, and he has to range about between them, but I might be able to stay at the presbytery in one of them. She doesn’t know for sure, but I should try. She will leave him a message momentarily to expect my call. And then, I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but there is one final, remote possibility she is going to look into.
This established, she wants to know how much I am paying for the first night in Vernègues. When I tell her, she says that is reasonable, but she will still see what she can do. A final question: she checks to make sure I have my obligatory pilgrim passport, otherwise I won’t be able to get in anywhere.
I do.
I call everyone dutifully, mentioning the first woman’s name, and then the names of everybody else after, creating a great web of contacts I’ve never met. I have no idea what I am supposed to be asking for with all these numbers, but I just keep writing numbers down and repeating them back chiffre-par-chiffre and leaving answering machine messages in excruciating French.
I have been trying to find route and trail information but after a handful of conversations, not only have I found the trail I’ve been looking for, I’ve also found a place to stay in someone’s home in Arles. And then, because I’ve already sorted out day two’s lodging at a hotel, I turn down an evening at the presbytery and a private home. Completely by accident and backwards, I have stumbled into a vast, secret network of pilgrim support.
I have six different Camino guide books and this network I’ve discovered isn’t mentioned in any of them, but I soon learn that once you get into the network, more private homes reveal themselves as you move along, each of them with warm beds, and smiles, and dinners together, and glasses of local wine. They pop up suddenly like targets in a videogame. The hosts in these networks can’t accommodate hordes of strangers, and this is why the network is kept so hush-hush, but they can keep a steady trickle of pilgrims moving through and on towards Santiago.
I later learn that pilgrim support networks are arrayed throughout Europe. Their general mission is to help pilgrims make it through their particular zone of responsibility, and then on towards Santiago in an unbroken chain of care until the pilgrim arrives safely at the cathedral doors.
No pilgrim should fail under their watch. They offer food, shelter, moral and logistical assistance. They mark and clear the trails. Some of the pilgrim associations from remote countries as far away as Poland run their own summer auberges along the Camino. Small placards of signage indicate the host countries and associations. Most, but not all, of the association members are former pilgrims. The infrastructure of pilgrim support is jaw-dropping.
I’m asked not to reveal the private network contact information, because if the names got published on the Internet or in a guidebook these private good Samaritans will be overwhelmed with pilgrim traffic, and they are not set up to manage that. More problematically, they aren’t the kind of people good at saying no and turning people away. But if you are fortunate enough to find your way into one of these channels, and somebody decides to trust you, you are in, and you eat at the family dinner table. And if all goes well, you get another name for the next leg, and another for the next, each step of way unfolding incrementally. It’s like being on an underground railroad.
*
I leave for this pilgrimage in three weeks, and I’ve been training steadily now for months. I am hiking with my full pack for over twenty hours a week, heading out mid-morning and getting home in the early evenings. I’m working my to-do equipment lists, figuring out my exact route and where I’ll stay in the week it takes me to join the official Arles to Santiago pilgrimage trail.
I’ve created specific instructions for Melanie, with screenshots on how to file my company’s quarterly tax returns. I’ve tackled the problems of two birthdays and a Mother’s Day that arrive while I’m on the road. I’ve made sure the car is okay, the tires are inflated properly, the mailbox keys are taken from my keyring, that money is transferred from the American bank to the French one. I’ve bought some of the remaining gear I don’t have or recently noticed that I need, like a short clothesline and pins to dry my hand-washed hiking clothes. I buy a GPS satellite tracker so my children can see where I am every day. They’ll be able to push pins, colored by the week of my journey, into a large wall map I’ve purchased for them.
I’m also spending a lot of time hiking by myself.
I’m out there for long enough now that when I go out my family doesn’t really want to join me, even on the weekends. I’m over hell-and-gone in our little corner of Provence. I wander by tiny farms, past wild boar hunters in orange jackets who never say anything and only nod suspiciously at the peculiar stranger. I trek past empty rows of olive trees in the middle of nowhere. I eat lunch sitting on my backpack. It is much colder here than I thought it would be this time of year, but when it is sunny and warm, I dry my boots and socks in the sun as I eat my lunch. I rest my bare feet on the toes of my boots. I let my GPS talk to the stars and wait for its long green LED flashes to assure me my message got through to the heavens. The low hum of solo mental time is already settling in.
And there’s a lot of time to think about how difficult this is going to be and about the likelihood that I won’t make it to the end. It sucks to admit this, but even after two or three days in a row of really long hikes, I’m in pain. The bottoms of my feet are hammered and swollen. Something somewhere is putting pressure on my nerves, because my thighs are pins-and-needles dead by the time I get home. Maybe it’s from the backpack, but I don’t know how or where to fix it. I can barely walk around the house in the evenings. I’m trashed and irritable. I still have the luxury of taking a hot bath, but that goes away my first night on the road. I thought this would be easier than mountain climbing, and yet, in some ways, I think it is going to be much, much harder.
I do seem to snap back quickly in the mornings, which is encouraging, but I’m reading disturbing accounts of the body damage that takes place after a month of seven- and eight-hour days. Everybody knows I’m going on this thing now. I joke that if anybody in Provence sees me back home early April or May, do not ask me how it went.
I don’t dwell on it, but I can see how simple it would be to fail and how quickly my plan could fall apart. I imagine scenarios where I’m back home in ten days, and not because I didn’t man up, but because I can’t put any weight on the balls of my feet, a problem I already seem to have even after a couple days in a row. Like everywhere else in my life, I’m sailing into a small storm of worry.
And it isn’t true what I wrote about failure earlier. You don’t learn everything about failure the first time. It’s success where you learn everything the first time.
But if I have to come back in ten days, I’m taking everything I’ve written here and burning it in the fireplace with lighter fluid.
Chapter 4: A Single Step
Melanie and the children accompany me for the first few hours of the pilgrimage. I joke that they remind me of the little harbor boats that buzz around the big ships as they head out to sea. The children are eager to continue further, but when we arrive at a county road, I insist to Melanie that it isn’t safe to have them walking on the narrow verge.
None of them has ever hiked out this far with me, and I’ve pointed out small personal landmarks the entire way, the place where I stopped for lunch and kicked over my water bottle, the place where I sat on my pack during the faintest of snow flurries, the place where I saw a wild boar and wondered if it would attack me. Walnut-sized lumps tighten in my throat during the breeziest of these observations.
I have always assumed my journey of a thousand miles would begin with the single step over the doorway of our home, and that’s where we record a picture of it, but in truth, it starts when we say good-bye on that deserted county road. Maybe all journeys start with good-bye. Maybe that’s how you know you’re even on one.
A hug with each, a hug with all, and I turn away from them.
I have a terrible superstition about dying on this trip. Mortality and middle age have been the backdrop of my entire year abroad. I keep fantasizing that God is going to take me very dramatically. I’m knifed to death by a mugger in some rough-and-tumble Spanish city. I die from the elements crossing the Pyrenees. In the early morning, I’m struck by a car racing across a highway.
In my mind’s eye, friends Google me and find a picture of the overturned vehicle and an ambulance in some unremarkable online newspaper. Maybe there’s a glimpse of a stretcher in the background, and they imagine me lying in it, red and blue lights flashing over the white sheet, police radios cutting in and out in the background.
And then, that’s it! Finito! if that’s even a Spanish word. He’s gone! He was on some walk thing in Spain!
But pilgrims do actually die out there and not all that infrequently. In one pilgrimage guide, the writer was at the big mass in Santiago, and there was a prayer for a pilgrim who had died en route, and he wrote that you can’t walk thirty meters out there without coming across an ancient hospitaleria or a cemetery for dead pilgrims. There are makeshift roadside monuments with favorite poems and wilted flowers and plastic-covered photos someone has secured into the face of a fencepost.
These sites remember the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers who died along the way. The internet buzz around the pilgrimage is a Martin Sheen movie where a father retrieves his son’s dead body and personal effects from the Camino. So, people do die, and some walk it when they’re about to. Dying is a significant part of walking the thing, and clearly, until you’ve fallen along the way, you have not yet had the full pilgrim experience.
*
The morning I leave for Finisterre, I am charmed by three omens.
The previous night the world enjoyed what the papers call a supermoon, and this suggests something celestial. Why not? The second is that it is the first day of spring, the third that the weather is spectacular. There are cotton-white clouds against pale Provençal sky. A gentle breeze is warm. The birds are at it. It is a children’s storybook of See Dick, See Jane.
After months of training, I am on the road at last. This first day I will cover ground I’ve already walked repeatedly, but I’m impatient for fresh paths, and blue and yellow Camino signage, and vistas to unfold from the hilltops and around the bends. Then I’ll truly be off and into the wild. With the sadness of goodbye receding behind me, I feel a morning exhilaration heading out into my adventure.
The game is on.
Until those first few hours alone, I’ve debated internally about whether I would stop at a chapel for St. James that I stumbled upon early on. It is an hour or two off-course, and so far out from the house, that when I hiked there originally, Melanie and the kids had to come pick me up in the Honda. But full of the emotion of good-bye, I opt to take the detour and visit the little chapel dedicated to the patron saint of the Camino.
To not visit the chapel would be the opposite of an omen.
Underneath all of this magical thinking is a plan to leave Reason by the door and allow myself a small “get-started” prayer, no larger in spiritual dimension than the one you might get arm-twisted into at the Thanksgiving table. And, yes, no, I mean, of course, this is not rational. But I tell myself a pilgrimage is a play within a play. It is a miniature life within a life. Do with it what you will.
So, lighten up, already. You’re on a pilgrimage for Heaven’s sake.
Get on your knees.
The chapel’s 13th century bell tower and half of its roof were destroyed in an earthquake a century ago. What remains is succumbing to land, covered in scrub bushes, wild vines and loose chunks of stone. With all the organic debris built up on it, the roof doesn’t look like a roof at all when I approach it from above where my trail comes in. In fact, the entire building is camouflaged by thick tufts of grass and abandoned orchard so that when I look down on it, I’m barely aware I’m looking at a building, let alone a church.
But when I follow signs down a steep iron stairwell, and I’m standing right next to it, the sense of the chapel is different. Its aspect shifts somehow. The little church is not, as it turns out, a total ruin, despite the ominous warning from the mairie that you are forbidden to enter, that the conseil municipal is not responsible if God cracks you over the head with a keystone.
And yet inside, if you can call it an inside, I see that volunteers have braved the danger and cleared the floor of debris. It’s swept. The little chapel is tidy. Someone has arranged displaced chunks of building neatly to one side. From what’s left of the church portal, I can see mosaics on the floor and the remnants of its Gothic arches. And here and there, out of the lazy reach of vandals, I can still make out bits of artistic detail: reddish-brown leafy decorations on a high column, ghostly outlines of saints in the ceiling, a cool expanse of faded blue plaster on the sanctuary’s altar wall.
There’s almost nothing symbolically religious left, but still, when I step over the calf-high ruins of the front wall, the instinct surfaces to remove my hat and leave my backpack by the door. It is still, somehow, a church. I couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it’s because somebody still takes the time to clean up in here. It still has the soul of a church. Sort of, or at least maybe.
I tell you all this because, for a moment anyway, I see myself in it.
I put my knapsack down by the ruins of the front wall and reach in to retrieve the camera my daughter has lent me. I know exactly the picture I want to take. There is a way I tweak my hat and get it to silhouette just right, so that my shadow looks like the stock representation of St. James, invariably depicted with a wide-brimmed hat. Then, if I hold my walking stick in front of me and get that angled into the shadow, without somehow revealing my camera, I’ll come home with my guiding saint setting out on the floor of his old chapel.
But then, as I reach into the top of my backpack for my daughter’s camera, I find a small piece of folded paper my wife has snuck in the top. I have already found three or four other slips of paper throughout the day with penned notes of I love you honey and good luck and be safe. She has stuffed them in the stretch netting by my water bottle, under a shoulder adjustment strap, in a lunch she packed. As I’ve discovered them, I’ve tucked these notes into my wallet, where I might find them later for moral support should I need it. I keep them together with laminated pictures of my son laughing, doing a one-armed pushup and my daughter in Paris twirling a black umbrella behind her.
And then, just as I’m reaching for the camera in that little church, I find one last piece of paper. This one has something actually in it. She’s wrapped something there, and when I open it, I find her favorite silver necklace, a spiky radiating sun on a delicate chain. Alongside it, I find a tiny lock of blonde hair.
I hear myself draw my breath in.
It is the same involuntary gasp that I will make when I first spot the confectioner’s crust of the Pyrenees coming out of Castres and when I come over the final hilltop on the last day and see a harbor full of fishing boats and the Atlantic Ocean sparkling in the morning sun. It is the same gasp as when the three of them come to pick me up at the bus station in Aix and race towards me like action figures, all sharp elbows and balled fists and flying hair, charging towards me like superpower heroes on a movie poster.
I am deeply moved. The necklace and the hair have got me. She’s getting exactly the response she hoped. I move towards the side altar to pray and thank god for my beautiful wife and family. Even if there is Nobody listening, still it is better to thank Nothing out loud than to risk not being grateful for the blessing of My Three. When I first begin to pray, I stand there and kind of pinch my nose with my hand over my face, but I decide this is not acceptable for the scale of my gratitude.
So, I kneel.
I get down on what’s left of a side altar in the transept. I knit my fingers together like I mean it, really mean it, and a river of love is let loose. And at the end of the words in my prayer, I am silent for a long, long moment.
I am not talking. God is not talking. There is just pregnant quiet. You could hear a mustard seed drop. Nobody is asking anybody for anything. Nothing is moving, but it could be that we are, maybemaybemaybe, listening to each other in some way. The one cautiously fathoming the other. Mine is a prayer that moves without manipulation or entreaty, beyond the friction of will. There is a quality in this kind of prayer that’s like staring at a nighttime sky and waiting for the scale of the firmament to sweep down at you.
Because sometimes, no matter what you believe or do not believe, the unfathomable does actually rush down at you, that sweet, wild vertigo of allowing oneself to be touched.
Chapter 5: The One True Cathedral
The couple referred to me through my underground pilgrim railroad meets me in front of the Arles’ office de tourisme. I’m not hard to spot with my red backpack and the pilgrim’s shell on my hat. The elderly couple greet me and clear a space in the back of their modest car. As we drive along, they discuss casual personal matters between themselves. I look out the window as we head over a bridge into a residential neighborhood, only a stone’s throw from Van Gogh’s apartment, the gift shops, and the coliseum tourists.
Even after three days of walking, a ride in a car already feels a touch peculiar, everything at a slight remove, particularly so with complete strangers, an elderly couple no less, a foreign language between us, and a plan to go to their home to eat together and spend the night. By now even the most familiar activities remind me I’m on a curious adventure. Imagine a day where nothing unusual happens, not a single thing, but for some reason you have decided to wear a fake beard or, God help me, women’s underwear.
When we park in front of their home. It is pleasant, garden-tended, suburban. I see a Compostela scallop shell tile on a post in their driveway. Other than that, you’d never find your way here without a referral and a street address. It’s blocks from the trail itself. We step inside, and I see a Livre d’or guest book on a small side table by the entrance. I peek, and it’s crammed with years of thank you notes for their warm welcome and generous hospitality.
On the walls there are scores of pinned up “thank you, I made it” cathedral and lighthouse postcards. They’re from pilgrims who passed through this couple’s home, often months prior, on their way to Santiago or, sometimes, the opposite direction even towards Rome. I’m one foot in the door and I realize the entire house, their entire life is dedicated to helping pilgrims along the Chemin de Saint-Jacques. If the phone number ever gets out for these two, there will be lines around the block.
There’s already lots to think about.
I’ve made it as far as Arles. I’ve trekked fifty miles from the house. In the larger scheme of things, I am really just getting started, but I can already say I’ve walked farther in one direction than I’ve ever walked in my life.
And I have something to show for it, too. On my right heel there is a blister the size of my thumb. I’ve been draining it with tiny needle punctures for two days and re-bandaging and continuing on, but the blister re-inflates within hours, sealing itself up again in a protective cocoon, white starbursts appearing around the pinpricks.
After I walk for a half hour, I don’t feel it so much, but starting out fresh after a break the thing stops me in my tracks. For a few minutes, I have to keep my weight towards the ball of my foot to keep going. The second night on the phone with Alannah I tell her if my blister was a pillow it would be just right for Barbie. A few more days and an American Girl will be able to sleep comfortably on it.
On day three in these strangers’ home, I find myself lying wide awake in the middle of the night. I have given up on sleep. I switch on the bedside lamp so that in the improved lighting I can look directly into my mind. I can understand how the whole mess started the day before. I’d gotten lost not once but twice. I’d ended up on some Aguirre Wrath of God non-path, crawling through the forest, besieged by gnats. I’d scrambled over fallen trees and untangled great thickets of prickly crap catching on my backpack.
There were points where I’d moved along with my forearms held in front of me like a boxer to keep the branches off my face. By the end of that second day, I’d walked non-stop for twelve hours and started to limp. Now, an evening later, I’m hoping that if I keep mentally replaying the disaster in the forest, I’ll be able to see how it all worked out differently.
Anyway, I think that is what I am doing. There is no other reason to have the light on other than to see my anxieties more clearly.
My bedroom is on the second floor of the couple’s home.
The entire upstairs has been converted into a dormitory for pilgrims. Two separate bedrooms that must have once belonged to the owners’ daughters now allow my hosts to board up to four or five pilgrims a night. There’s a dedicated bathroom with a shower, a laundry machine and dryer, a study for relaxation with couches and end tables.
The bookshelves are chock-a-block with pilgrimage picture books in numerous languages for The Way, Le Chemin, El Camino. Small pilgrim souvenirs and knickknacks are clustered about the room. There are bright red Knights Templar crosses, claymation figurines of pilgrims in snow domes, a St. James cuckoo clock, a pilgrim cookbook (in original plastic wrapping), CDs with pilgrim chants from the Middle Ages, somebody’s personal snapshot of the last Pope on a hill overlooking Santiago. There is a signature on the snapshot, which can’t possibly be the Pope’s – I don’t think the Pope signs things – and yet somebody has signed the front of it. Is that even a signature. That can’t be a signature, I think to myself. Can that be a signature?
Whoa.
On a crowded cork bulletin board there are personal letters and photos of joyful pilgrims burning their boots and hiking clothes on the rocks at Cape Finisterre. There are pinned up postcards from Santiago de Compostela and the last-stop pilgrim villages on the “Coast of Death,” which is what they’ve called the Finisterre peninsula for longer than anyone wants to think about.[1]
On the widest spread of wall in the study hangs a mega-scale topological relief map with the different pilgrimage routes feeding colorfully into northwestern Spain. The routes flow in from every direction. Little red pins with tiny French and Spanish flags call out the towns on either side of the border that passes through the Pyrenees. Everywhere, there are pictures and posters of iconic pilgrims making their way along lonesome country roads in the haloed sunlight, the blessed rain, the spiritual fog.
And next to me in my bedroom, right here at 3AM, on a small bedside table is a bible-thick, every-day-of-the-year, book of 365 Pilgrim Meditations. It cautions the pilgrims getting started here in Arles that they will find nothing in Santiago but stone and glass.
The Camino is inside you.
¡El camino no existe!
L'essential, ce n'est pas la destination, c'est le voyage.
Despite my racing thoughts about my alarming blister situation, I am pinned into stillness. When I rotate my body to angle my heel protectively away from the pressure of the sheet, the bed groans uproariously. The same thing happened earlier when I reached for the 365 meditation book. And, when I have no choice but to limp off to the bathroom, the floorboards absolutely erupt beneath me.
I can’t move an inch without waking the entire house. I really don’t want to wake my hosts and, if they happen to toss and turn in the night with absurd worries like I do, I don’t want to concern them that their pilgrim is doing a runner in the night, making off with the molded topological wall map, the snow domes, or the autograph from a beatified Pope. So, I have to just lie and hold still until I can figure out what I’m going to do.
[1] You know those old stories about sailing off the end of the world? Well, that sea ledge is just about fifteen feet past the horizon you can see from the Finisterre lighthouse. You have to be enormously careful, even when you’re just out on a day sail.
That afternoon my pilgrim hosts had offered me a drink when I arrived, and they sat me in their largest sofa chair. There was a brief conversational vacuum for a moment or two. All I could think about was my blister. I was incapable of moving the conversation in any direction without stopping to remove a mental sock and staring at the thing.
But then I couldn’t help myself. I mentioned my blister out loud, and it was like a factory bell rang. The two of them went into action. The woman had me remove my boot so she could take a look. He raised his eyebrows and whistled. She blew out softly through puffed cheeks and said that’s a beauty.
They set to debating what to do and who would do what. She went off and retrieved a sewing kit. He filled a calf-deep plastic tub with hot water and sprinkled it with a marvelous purpling cloud of iodine. She set my foot up on a small stool, holding it gently for a moment. Being cared for like that opened a surrender in me. He sterilized a needle. She pierced. He bandaged.
Voila! They looked up at me together.
The husband told me that the director of the Marseille association, where I’d gotten my pilgrim passport a month earlier, had shown up a few years back just like this with an equally spectacular blister. He’d sat in that very chair, and then he’d made it all the way to Santiago no problem.
“That’s true,” the wife confirmed from the kitchen, and she added what a wonderful man he was. And then I realized I knew the man they were talking about. I told them I’d actually spent an afternoon with him and a group of about thirty other people a few months prior. We’d taken a whole walking tour of Aix together and then had paella at a Spanish restaurant.
They laughed and said they were there that day, too, and that was its own charming discovery. We had already met! We had dined together, broken bread for heaven’s sake! It was like we were already friends, and we didn’t even know it.
Formidable![1]
With all the attention and fuss and food and wine and having met already and the delight of staying in their home, my underlying foot problems were pushed out of my mind during the evening.
But now it’s well after midnight, and the night’s anxiety gremlins are rustling around my bed like Lilliputians. I lie there in their daughter’s bedroom and recall the wife saying my pack looked very heavy when they picked me up, and now her observation starts to nag on me. Maybe my pack is too heavy. No, damn it, it’s not. And then the boots, my damn boots. Crrrreee-aaaaaaa-kkkkk, I turn over as carefully as I can in the bed. This house must have been built from reclaimed haunted house wood.
*
But then, suddenly, I know.
I know what I have to do.
The entire solution presents itself. I sit up in bed, the whole house trembling. Resolve rises up in me like a slow tsunami.
I will not walk on day four. I will stay in Arles. I will dump the hiking boots and move to the last-ditch ultra-light “sneaker” boot strategy, the kind I don’t even need to break in. I will go first thing in the morning to a sporting goods store outside Arles. I’d seen one there a month before when we were checking out the coliseum, the gift shops, and Van Gogh’s apartment.
And if the new shoes don’t last more than four weeks, I will buy another pair down the line. They sell shoes in France. It’s not like I’m hiking through Nepal. If my feet get injured, I will deal with it, if and when that even happens. Four weeks is an eternity away, and frankly I can’t even imagine Santiago from my bed in Arles. St. Gilles, a day away, is my Santiago. I will have to get to the end of the world one Santiago at a time.
I move the third pair of boots to the side. You’re not coming. Bye.
Yeah? Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, Meindl.
“Meindl,” I repeat, like I am picking on some kid on the playground.
I take every last item in my backpack and set it out on the bed, the house and the mattress trembling as I lay it down. I’m getting rid of stuff. Lots of it. I am on a mission, and when I’m on a mission, the sub-trivial things that terrorize me when I’m worrying suddenly leave me unfazed. Now, it is like I’ve turned into a different person. I’m entering the alternate aspect of my preferred self, tapping into my inner Brobdingnagian. If the room is still creaking, I am no longer aware of it.
I turn on the ceiling lights and all the other lamps, too. I’m lit up. I want light. I need to see, baby. I’m going through every last item in the pack and building my everything-must-go pile.
I picture myself failing and imagine looking at each item with deep regret, thinking I shouldn’t have brought you. You are the item that derailed me. I didn’t make it because I wanted to listen to you, an iPod I didn’t need. Every last thing has to come into my office and prove its raison d’être is getting me to Santiago. The sleeping bag liner. Don’t need it. The bivy sack. Same. I’ll freeze to death. Acceptable. Everybody can’t possibly bring a bivy sack. I’d never even heard of one when I bought it, and it’s not like I’m headed to the North Pole.
And why a sweater when I have a jacket? Or Spanish books. They sell books in Spain. A country-scale foldout highway map here showing all of France and Spain that I’ve brought to see the Big Picture as I move along. What the hell? Three razors. Grow a beard. Toenail clippers? You have fingernail clippers. Pinch harder.
And, while I’m at it, if there’s a monitor light on my cell phone, why do I need a six-and-a-half-pound headlamp with a pack of batteries that could start a lawn tractor? Insect repellent when I can scratch? A blue plastic fork and spoon when I can use my fingers like half the planet?
Kilos melt away.
The discard bag grows and grows. I am filled with satisfaction at my pilgrim resolve and the pile of ballast, not to mention a growing intuition that I am going to make it. I take an almost fundamentalist pleasure in the austerity measures. There is something almost superstitious about my triage choices, and above all I am superstitious about getting rid of everything that was coming along to entertain me or to keep my mind engaged.
So, even though they can’t weigh more than the tip of my pinkie I discard the miniature ear buds for my cell phone that would have let me listen to the radio out there. I swear off all things whose function is to help me remember the trip. I might not even have a trip to remember if I carry all this crap.
My spiral-bound journal and my extra pen and my daughter’s lightweight battery powered camera don’t pass muster. I am going to do one thing for ten weeks and one thing only. I’m not listening to music or the news or writing in a journal or taking pictures or sketching crumbling old bridges by the river.
I don’t need to remember anything or save it or show anybody or even prove I’ve been. Not even to myself. I am walking. I am getting there. And that’s it.
I rock from side to side on the creaky floorboards doing a small rhythmic dance, the house trembling around me, starting to sway into it, starting to clap gospel time on every second beat, snapping my fingers, house and porch lights coming on all over Arles. I’m swimming in energy, overflowing with a magnificent confidence, and a thousand years of pilgrim wisdom. At this point I’m practically speaking in tongues.
Unpack everything, pilgrim.
Let it go, let it go, let it go.
*
After breakfast, my hosts drive me into town together and drop me off in front of the sporting goods store. They say they will come back in a bit and get me if I want, but I decline. The wife gives me some fruit she has in a bag. The husband tells me to wait a second. He won’t let me go till he’d retrieves an Arles city map for me from the trunk of the car. Then the two of them sketch out routes and landmarks and bus line numbers so I can find my way to their home again.
When I let them know that I am planning to go to the community auberge that night, they put the kibosh on it. They say no you are not going to the auberge. You are staying with us again. She asks me if I have laundry that she can do that afternoon. When I mention that Melanie is coming in that evening to retrieve my boots and discarded things, they invite my family to dinner.[2]
The following morning when I leave, they both walk with me up to the pilgrimage trailhead to say good-bye and wish me off. The husband gives me instructions on things to look out for to keep me on the path. The wife packs me a brown bag lunch. He takes a picture of me standing on the embankment, then he adjusted my backpack straps because there is something not quite right with the way my pack is sitting.
Then she says I was smart to get rid of all that extra stuff. He says I’ll make it. I say I hope so. He makes a kind of no-problem-at-all face with the Robert de Niro mouth thing and waves his hand dismissively. You make it ten days, he says, you’ll make it the whole way. Then she adds, oh, yes, you’ll definitely make it.
Buen Camino, they both say.
I know this pilgrim’s exhortation from books I’ve read, but this is the first time I’ve heard it in the wild, and I repeat it back to them without thinking about whether it makes sense or not to people who aren’t physically traveling anywhere.
*
At some point during the pain and worry of those forty-eight hours there is a big enough break in the self-absorption clouds that I become aware of how lucky I am to have found the two of them. I realize, like with my entire heart realize, what a godsend they were. And saying good-bye I am so full of gratitude and tenderness towards the two of them that I would have embarrassed all three of us if I’d tried to express it.
But late that afternoon after I get to the next town, I send the two of them a postcard of the church at St. Gilles, and I get it all out. Thank you so much! I’d arrived! In the next town! Twelve miles away! A miracle! I imagine them pinning my postcard to their cork bulletin board next to the autographed picture of the Pope.
For the next nine weeks that I am out there walking along, moving from one Santiago to the next, I think about the two of them. I keep circling back, over and over, to the old couple right at the start, my personal angels. I think about all the pilgrims passing through their home, being welcomed and fed and bandaged, having their backpack straps adjusted, heading off with smiles and packed tinfoil sandwiches, a stream of pilgrims moving in and moving out of their home and lives, coming and going, hello and good-bye, over and over, night and day, month in, month out.
And all of those pilgrims, coming and going and never realizing that they just spent the night in the one true Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
[1] French accent, thank you.
[2] The wife told me at one point, “To be a pilgrim on the road, you need to have a saint at home.” This still makes me laugh and those words came oh-so-close to ending up in the dedication. Now it just reads, “For Melanie,” which frankly won’t need any additional context by the time you get to the end of this. Hang in there.
Chapter 6: Puss ‘n Boots
I’ve been walking for two weeks and covered over 200 miles. I’ve travelled through the hills of the Alpilles, past Arles, past Montpellier, and into Lodève. I am now fifty-some kilometers east of Toulouse.
I’ve continued to purge every item in my backpack that isn’t essential to my warmth, security, cleanliness, or nourishment. I’m not taking pictures of the trip. I’m not keeping a journal. When I move onto a new page in my Camino guidebook of pilgrim lodging and route maps, I tear the used page out to make the book lighter. No matter how subtrivial the item, when I can unload it, I do. This letting go of things is my fanatical religion.
The daily habits of a walking pilgrim have set in. My entire life is built on simplification and repetition. I get up at 5:30 in the morning. If there are other pilgrims in the hostel, I dress quietly in the dark, check my sleep area by the light of my cellphone for forgotten items, throw on my pack, and head out into the quiet of early morning. I wait until it is light enough to make the pilgrim route markers visible. Generally, I need to walk six to eight hours every day. If I start my day early, I can get the bulk of the mileage covered by lunchtime. This leaves me time to finish off the day’s travel before the afternoon heat sets in. I can then get set up in the next hostel, city hall basement, or guest bedroom.
There is an afternoon during the second week when I stop to eat my lunch in the hillsides outside Lodève. There is a large rock by the trail. I am high in the hills. There are white spots of what must be sheep in the distance. There are rolling waves of farmland. I wonder whether a tiny line of road in the distance is the one I followed in. I rummage through my sack and find the baguette I purchased that morning. As I’ve done for the last week now, I’ve torn my daily baguette in half earlier and stuffed it into the top of my pack. I’ve also bought a bar of chocolate, the truest staple of my diet, and an apple.
I pull out my big plastic liter water bottle and refill the smaller water bottles from the larger. I take my shoes off, set my socks to dry in the sun, and rest my bare feet on top of my shoes. The drama around my shoes is far behind me. I’ve found my rhythm. I am healthy and strong. I’m no longer worried about whether I’ll make it to the end. I will. And the actual end of the Camino is so far in the future, I’m not even thinking much about that. I’ve let go of work and professional concerns. I feel strong and steady, and I’m rolling up and down the hills now.
I’m sitting in a mountain landscape of faint sounds and distant plane trails across the blue sky. It has been an hour since I’ve seen another person amid all the isolated farmland.
And maybe because I am barefoot in the middle of nowhere, or maybe because I am looking at my carved walking stick next to my backpack, or maybe for no reason at all, I start to think about the childhood story of Puss ‘n Boots.
I remember how Puss ‘n Boots sat peacefully by a river. My mother would read that story to me. It was a favorite for both of us. Puss ‘n Boots carried a wooden stick with a red handkerchief sack tied to the end. He wrinkled his cat-nail toes and fell asleep in the sun, out of sight of the road. He tipped his large, feather-plumed hat over his eyes for shade.
It occurs to me suddenly that I am happy. A voice inside my head observes, simply and incontrovertibly:
You are happy.
This is happy.
It didn’t mean I was in a good mood. I’m in a good mood reasonably often. It’s more than that. I am at home in my world with my apple and my backpack with nothing to read in it, and nothing to draw on, and no camera to take pictures with. And it occurs to me that if I ever doubt that I can be truly happy again – and this doubt has nagged at me for a decade – I need to remember this moment. I need to realize I can get back here. This peace is available to me, this sense of being at home, of being carefree. I’ll only need to get back on this Camino.
Humans must have been made to walk. The problem must be we don’t walk enough. We don’t keep moving. Because it is like some kind of miracle, this walk. It is like knowing there is a life preserver available to me. I didn’t know that before. A few dollars for a plane ticket and a little stolen time, and I can get here and walk. I can drift both away and towards something.
I pack my things up in my red backpack, look back at the small spot of Earth where I sat, and I head off. I will never sit on that rock again. I will never again be in this moment with those sheep in the distance, and my daily baguette, and the jet vapor in the distant sky.
The greatest of the Camino platitudes is that there is nothing at the end of the walk, that the journey is the destination, that there’s nothing to get to, that the cathedral in Santiago is empty.
And now this beautiful riddle is mine.
Chapter 7: Napoleon on a White Horse
By car it takes four hours to reach Toulouse from our home in Rognes. It’s a distance of almost 250 miles. At the steady rate I am headed west, Toulouse is the last legitimate destination for a rendezvous with the family. After that, it’s too far for Melanie and the children to reach me for a weekend.
I’ve passed on scheduling visits earlier because I want to get some momentum in the pilgrimage before meeting up with them. I want to feel officially on the road without the push and pull and start and stop of family, no family, then family again.
So long ago, we’d pulled out a map and settled on Toulouse. We decided that Melanie would pick up the kids early from school on a Friday afternoon and drive out directly to meet me. I would take my first rest day that Saturday with all of us together and then continue the walk on Sunday morning while they headed back to Rognes.
The stretch of Camino headed into Toulouse from the east runs along the Canal du Midi. The canal winds out from Toulouse all the way to the Mediterranean. Another canal runs from Toulouse to the Atlantic. They are bona fide marvels of Renaissance engineering. Leonardo DaVinci was brought to France to consult on how to build it. After the rolling hills of the first three weeks of the pilgrimage, the level canal path is easy-going.
The path is deserted that morning. Ducks scatter and waddle away from me, fluffing themselves and plopping into the water, surprised by the early morning human. Fog surrounds the canal, and the morning sunlight makes the scenery into an image from a French tourism calendar.
With no camera to catch the moment, I stop and instruct myself to remember what I am seeing, and I do still remember that moment, perhaps not its photographic particulars, but the memory soup of colors and atmosphere, the sense of horizon, and dew, and quiet farmland, the shroud of grey-blue fog, all of it. It’s all still there. Very beautiful, even now.
To the north, the highway snakes in and out of view. The low rumble of tires and diesel engines fades in and out all morning. Later in the day, my family will drive in on that highway. The children are probably still in their classes right now or maybe out on the school playground in a recess. Melanie is at the house or out having coffee with friends. She’s made a lot of friends this year. I don’t even know all of the names she brings up.
I imagine the children being driven along, looking out the car windows for me, excited about who will spot me first and yell out, “Dad! It’s Dad!” Or they’re reading. Or sleeping. Every conjured image of them is a pleasure.
We have a tentative plan that they will pick me up somewhere before Toulouse, depending on how far I’ve walked. We’ll drive into Toulouse together, and then, at the end of the visit, they will redeposit me on the exact spot where they found me, and I will continue from there.
If there’s a Ten Commandments of the Camino de Santiago, the first is that you walk the entire way, no cheating, and you carry your own pack. There must be an unbroken, traceable line of footsteps from launch point to the cathedral doors and then on to the sea at Finisterre. You don’t take rides. You do it on your own. There may not even be any other Camino commandments.[1]
I’m making great time. Most days I cover between 25 and 35 kilometers, which is roughly 15 to 20 miles. Depending on terrain I walk between 2.5 to 3 miles an hour. This morning’s carpenter flat canal pins the needle above that, and at some point, around the 18-mile mark I notice it is still really early in the day. I decide to walk straight into Toulouse. This will knock off a second day of walking in one. Which means the family and rest day in Toulouse won’t set me back because my huge ‘make it up in advance’ day. I am ‘walking it forward.’
This day’s stretch will now be somewhere between thirty-five and forty miles. The very first week a French Camino friend told me that one of Napoleon’s armies was mobilized to walk 50km a day, and they took their enemies by surprise because of it.
To motivate French people, let’s assume Napoleon told his foot soldiers their enemies were English. This would explain the rate they travelled to Paris, or maybe it was from Paris, or somewhere. Doesn’t matter. The enemies might have been German. I’m pretty sure they aren’t crazy about the Germans either.
My point is they won. And from that conversation on, 50km became my benchmark for a Major Camino Day. On the approach to Toulouse I am push towards 60km. I will catch Napoleon himself by surprise!
A confession:
I have a handful of painkillers left over from dental work the year before, and I take (at least) one of them around 30km. Man, it is like I’ve eaten a can(s) of Popeye Spinach. I am flying towards Toulouse. No aches, no pain, no fatigue. Cruise control.
Think Gene Kelly in the rain with a backpack and a walking stick for an umbrella. I have never felt so light. This must be what steroid people feel like, except that I still have normal-sized ears and testicles.
People gradually appear along the canal that morning - nobody in France seems to have a full-time job – and I skirt around them like a peppy Citroen.
Between the 2500mg painkillers and the prospect of seeing my family, I have become a passing machine. As I go around them, up and over embankments, and wherever else they block me, I wave outside my imaginary car window like I’m in an Italian film. Bonjour! Buen Camino! Arrivederci! Barack Obama!
At around forty kilometers, I get to the outskirt suburbs of the city and start to rejoin urban civilization.
I stand out. I’m unshaven and have a homeless guy’s leathery tan. I have a bizarre seashell tied to my sun-bleached army hat. I’m not dirty exactly, but I’m not clean either. Let’s call it “dusty.”
Let’s say I’m Grizzly Adams come down from the mountain. I’m walking into the big city like somebody who has emerged from the Saharan desert. I imagine lone adventurers who paddle across the Pacific in handmade boats and pull up into some resort beach swim area.
Kids are playing in the surf, and their moms are tanning, and nobody even notices this guy who kayaked all the way from Tahiti using coconut leaves. These kinds of thoughts make me laugh to myself. I enjoy the simplicity of my own company. There’s a great deal of that on the Camino.
In a small restaurant by the canal, I run into a heavy-set Swiss pilgrim I’d met a week before. We have lunch together and a beer. My friend speaks French with a singsong German accent and, every now and then, sighs dramatically in falsetto. That sounds off-putting, and I try not to smile. She’s extremely likable, just, well, a tad peculiar. There’s a lot of that on the Camino, too.
She had been struggling when I’d first met her, and when I’d left her behind. That day she was limping at about three-quarters the speed of a group I was walking with. The group slowed for a mile or so, but then wished her well and “dropped her” as we bikers like to say.
She fell back on the road behind us, curve by curve, until she was no more. Now she has shown up again in Toulouse ahead of me, which is, dammit, impossible.
She admits – great falsetto sigh – that she started getting bus rides to keep her on schedule, which explains how she caught up so miraculously.
I tell her with humblebrag pride where I set out that morning and explain I’m going all the way into Toulouse to meet up with my family. They are driving in from north of Marseille. We exchange email addresses and hug goodbye. I fix my backpack on again and head out.
It is now high afternoon, hot and sunny. I walk past the familiar vignettes of city life: bicyclists, roller skaters, soccer games in the park, picnickers, retirement home residents on benches feeding birds. The feeling of being a pilgrim is a sense of general dislocation from regular life, a paddle-free river drift through the familiar that has now been set to the side.
There is a Disneyland Huck Finn quality to it, and it’s not unpleasant this having nothing and nobody knows me feeling. Feeling good is good enough for me. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” My backpack and I are on the edge of an entire generation’s aspirational motto.
At fifty kilometers the painkillers wear off.
I’ve walked steadily for ten hours. In the heart of Toulouse, I realize that the hotel Melanie reserved isn’t in the centre ville, where I’ve kind of assumed, but further out on its western edge, at least an additional 3-4K push.
The kilometer numbers are adding up now, and not in a way I’m in control of. I stop for a moment on a bridge overpass and collect my thoughts and strength.
I am having difficulty understanding pedestrian instructions and which avenues to follow for how long. There’s no straight-line path to getting there and the rapid-fire directions in French are a challenge. I can’t even understand navigations directions in English. I get like one word and then it’s Charlie Brown’s parents. I feel I’m being guided through an ice crystal.
My feet are seriously blistered. I notice every step at this point. I’ve told people during the walk that I’ve ‘felt every step,’ but this is the first time in my life I do feel every step. My legs are numb in a worrying way. There’s some nerve-related pain spreading on my left hip.
Napoleon rode upon a white horse. He didn’t have a clue what it meant to push 60K into Paris, and I do…
[1] I broke the Commandment in Montpellier and I lied about it in the cathedral office in Santiago de Compostela. The man at the cathedral office asked me pointedly if I walked the entire way with no rides or other assistance. I’m assuming he asks everybody this before surrendering the official stamp and the certificate of completion, but he definitely asked me.
He looked me right in the eye and I felt all of time slow down. I felt like a first-time NFL kickoff returner. I affirmed to the man with the stack of certificates on his desk that I had.
‘Si,’ I said with a liar’s vigor.
Okay, so obviously there’s a second commandment around honesty related to the first, but it’s way, way down in the list of importance. On the Camino in Spain people are taking taxis from town to town for Christ’s sake! Rented porters are carrying their crap every day and they’re still weeping on both knees in the Cathedral Square and hugging total strangers and crying out, “I did it. I did it! I can’t believe I did it!”
For the record, since only God and I know the truth here, the guy I was walking with in Montpellier when I broke the Commandment had a swollen knee and was struggling. He wasn’t even a pilgrim. He was a guy from Geneva out for a long walk. He was exhausted and needed to take a bus into the city center and I rode with him. 2-3km tops. This was 2-3km out of 1600km! I walked twice the distance of the Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port people you saw in the Martin Sheen movie. 1000 miles! Those people started on the lower left-hand corner of France! Which is fine, but they’re in France for like 22 minutes. I practically came from Italy! 6 weeks I walked before I even joined them.
And I’m sorry but this tiny cheat that I didn’t even want to commit was between God and me, not the volunteer at the desk with the certificates and the purple stamp. Half the point of the entire New Testament is that this kind of thing is okay, and it’s not all about the rules and the Old Testament God of Rigid Expectations. Why are we even having this conversation?
And just for the record I got incredibly lost the following morning in the pouring rain because the outbound Camino trail led over a small river and the bridge was swept away. I had to completely backtrack through the city to get on course again. That was easily an additional 2-3km and included scrambling up a ridiculously steep hill of brambles with my backpack in the pouring rain first thing in the morning.
So yes, I walked the entire way. God has already punished me for this directly. You’re not in the loop on everything. Please hand me the paper with my name in Latin.
Chapter 8: Jim Croce & My Tropical Fish
The hotel is at the end of a long boulevard. I step into the lobby. It is clean and modern. Surfaces are trim and shiny. There is a revolving door. There are leather couches and empty espresso cups and businesspeople with their legs crossed speaking in lowered voices.
I must be a sight for the clerks at the desk, not to mention the other guests. I haven’t been in a place this nice the entire trip. One night I stayed in the attic of some parish priests. There was animal – let’s politely call it scat – on the top blankets of the bed where I had to sleep. The Camino isn’t all morning fog and waves from children with missing teeth.
The desk clerk tells me that Melanie and the children haven’t arrived yet. I read her face to see if there is any acknowledgement of my appearance or if she is able to maintain her professional demeanor with her clients no matter what their attire. She is. Wow! I’m impressed! If I was her boss in disguise coming to check on her like Odysseus, I’d be very, very pleased.
I must be feeling better because there is a scenario running in my head where the clerk imagines the wife and children of American Backpack Man. They come into the lobby with identical hiking clothing and scallop shells on their hats and scaled-down walking sticks for the children.
My mind is buzzing.
I make my way to the room. Melanie reserved a full suite, and everything is clean and sterile inside. The hotel has wrapped every last object in translucent plastic or thin mobius strips of colored paper with their logo. I don’t want to touch anything or put my sweaty clothes anywhere that might spoil the feel of the place for the others or even disturb it from its silent order.
I stare for a long moment into the refrigerator and it is hotel bare. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, perhaps a small potion and a cursive sign to ‘Drink Me.’
I have an hour before the family arrives, and I’m grateful for the time to rest and clean up. I shower and, then shave for the first time in days. My beard is so thick I have to take multiple razor passes over each section of cheek. I let the water out and marvel at the evenly bearded waterline in the empty sink. I look at myself in the mirror, measuring the weight I’ve lost in my face and stomach. I have truly ‘leaned out’ on this walk. They will be surprised, I tell myself. The kids will say, “Wow, dad! You’re skinny.” Mom will say, “That’s how he was when I met him.”
I wash my clothes in the sink with hand soap because this is done by force of habit now. I’m like the homeless guy who’s spent so much time sleeping on concrete, he can’t fall asleep on a mattress. The road is baked into me. I put away my things in my pack, put on a clean shirt and even decide to touch it up with the hotel iron. The clothes I’m wearing aren’t much, mostly polyester hiking garb already showing wear.
They call.
They’re running late. I’m not sure what the holdup must be. I feel like a prisoner trying to clean up before visitation. I look in the mirror again. Long examination this time. Multiple angles. I’m still middle-aged and much older than I used to be. When I wrinkle my face a certain way, I can create a texture of skin I never used to have. I note this without the distress that should probably be there. It is quiet in the room. I tidy up even more, refolding the towels more squarely, wiping surfaces dry in the bathroom, but I can’t get around the unfortunate need to hang my wet clothes on the shower door glass.
Melanie calls and she’s found the right road for the hotel, but she can’t seem to find the actual hotel. They’ve been up and down several times, and it’s very hard to turn around. I tell them I’ll come downstairs and signal to them from the road. I had the same problem finding the hotel myself, I explain. I am really excited to see them.
Everything in the lobby on my return downstairs is lighter. I am lighter. The lobby couches are lighter. I am floating. The desk clerk smiles at me as if she’s been monitoring my room from a secret camera. Without prompting, I explain I’m a pèlerin. I’m walking all the way to the coast of Spain. 1600km. I’m seeing my family after walking for three weeks. I tell her how far I’ve walked that day. She smiles brightly. Oh, big promotion for you, I think.
There is an overriding sense of re-entry to normalcy, and a welcome back to the world of bland corporate art and empty business centers and membership rewards programs. (No, thank you. Can you show me the way to the parish attic?) I head out the revolving doors into the tail-end of early evening, and I stand by the road waiting for my family.
They are coming down the road in our blue Honda CRV.
My wife’s smiling face is visible through the windshield. She’s making mock frustration grimaces about the road or the directions or something. The children are waving from the back window, and I walk alongside the car as they pull into a parking spot. I pretend to direct them in like an aircraft runway guy with orange light sticks. If this is funny at all, it is only funny because I always do this. If I’ve gotten out of our car first, I always ask them to ‘step out of the vehicle,’ and I ask them “do you know why I pulled you over, ma’am.
There is the familiarity of a dad catchphrase. Dad’s still dad! Yay! He’s doing his highway patrolman joke. Eye rolls all around, but the patrolman doesn’t smile, because patrolmen don’t do that. I signal with my command presence and the tips of my fingers to step out of the vehicle please. It has been three weeks since I’ve seen them. I’ve never been away from them so long in my life. They get out of the car and hug me as a clumped trio like they mean it.
And you see? This is why I pulled them over.
Between smiles and impromptu follow-up hugs, the conversation turns to the cheerful recap of the aggro finding the right road and bad directions and how it’s impossible to turn the car around without driving all the way to Grenoble, and I tell them I walked 58km that day, and they don’t realize how much that is until I explain it in Napoleon anecdotes.
I tease Melanie for loading two different ice chests of food into the CRV and all sorts of food and snacks and goodies so that dad could have anything he wanted while we stayed in our hotel apartment for a single Saturday. We carry all the things in. My legs don’t seem so tired now. I can’t help but think the receptionist finds it odd I arrive with nothing but a backpack and a walking stick and my family shows up with four back-and-forth trips to the Honda in the temporary parking area.
I shouldn’t keep repeating how great it is to see them and stopping to touch them, so I force myself not to. In our hotel room, the children’s attention turns to the television, and the infinite potential of the clicker, and all those hotel movie channels or whatever is on there, and Melanie fusses with things in the kitchen and asks if I want something to drink. She explains all my choices peering into the two ice chests.
Daniel’s working on plans for a programmed robot and shares a draft with me. My daughter is practicing a dance in the foyer space with a yellow scarf trailing behind her. I look over at my wife bustling in the small en suite kitchenette and she appears achingly beautiful, her face, but more than her face, something in her movements and the small frame of her back, her hair, the way the surrounding space immediately belongs to her. In forty-five minutes, she has turned this kitchenette into our home. My family’s movements in the hotel suite are as captivating as snorkeling through a swarm of tropical fish.
I’ve become so tuned to the life of the road and its rhythms that I watch our life together there almost from outside myself. It is like I am witnessing my own life, like I am on some kind of spiritual shore leave. I am not returning to them, but my life is being shown to me for the quotidian miracle that it is. It is like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in that hotel room. If you know the play, then I am Emily revisiting her One Day. My wife and children are probably aware how much time we actually have remaining together – now Friday early, then late evening, now Saturday morning, afternoon, and night, now Sunday – but I am in a curious state of timelessness. I never feel the clock that weekend. I just float.
All Saturday we drift from location to location in Toulouse. There is a visit to the main cathedral to get my daily pilgrim passport stamp from Toulouse. We stop for coffee and then walk through a downtown fair for Airbus aviation technology, then in and out of bookstores, and on to a charming downtown park that I walked through on the way in and made a note to share with my family. Across the street from the park we buy a French version of Chinese food from a mobile food vendor. We seat ourselves at the only folding metal table that doesn’t wobble on its patch of sidewalk. People pass and flow. It is warm on our faces, and someone near us is feeding birds and almost singing to them.
We make our way across the street to the park where Melanie and I nod off directly on the grass, our heads on the ground. The kids play behind us under a large ancient tree. The two of us hear the sound of the children’s laughter and playful squabbling behind us. My wife and I hold hands lying there with our eyes closed. The touch of hands is electric, but we don’t pull in any tighter.
*
This has been an incredible year.
We both know that. The thought is never far from our minds as the months start to wind down. We’ve known that what we’re doing with the children, taking them to Europe, not even working, spending all our savings to take this absurd, wild adventure. We’ve brought them to Greece, to Israel, to ten weeklong destinations in France, to Portugal. In the summer, we’ll head to Italy. Most people either don’t get to do this, or don’t take the time, or don’t dare to if they could. All of our other years will be judged by this one. This is The Year. We know while it is still unfolding that this is our summit. We are planting the family flag on this mountain.
In the back of our minds there are also some major decisions we need to make during The Year. The stress of my work that has made this sabbatical possible has also taken its toll. When we return to the States, will I expand my business or simplify my professional life? Will I make things harder or easier, bigger or smaller? How much should I take? How much can I take? From time to time, Melanie and I joke that we’ll end up deciding the year’s big questions on the plane home.
But we certainly don’t want to think about them that afternoon in Toulouse, lying in eternity on the park grass, side by side, husband and wife, our blue force field crackling, the sound of the children’s play drifting over from just behind us.
Daniel is explaining the made-up rules to something to his sister. Alannah is giggling. They are laughing. Our children are increasingly independent of their parents. They are together. The sibling bond has taken root, a deep hope granted. By design, they now have each other through the course of their lives.
The weather is exceptional that entire day, and we rise from our nap in the park. We stop in a drugstore to buy some foot care items, which are now heavily blistered after the long push the day before. We make our way back to the hotel and then out to dinner. Melanie sits at my side at dinner. The children sit across from us. We return home late. The children sleep on the foldout bed in the small hotel suite living room. The light on the kitchenette oven remains on so the children can make their way to the bathroom in the night. There is just enough light for one last midnight swim to visit my tropical fish. Melanie and I stand there for a long moment.
God, they are beautiful.
The realization strikes me that, for the span of a day, I was present, patient and loving. I was my own North Star for a stretch: I said ‘yes’ to all ideas. I floated with them. I took their hands. I pressed my lips against the shifting grain of their hair. I released them. I didn’t count the hours down. There was no resistance. I didn’t snap at them at the street crossings. I didn’t hurry them.
In the morning we get up early to make the most of our last time together.
I borrow Alannah’s iPod to listen to The Waterboys’ Strange Boat. I want to hear the second verse of a song I tried to remember for an entire afternoon a week earlier. Then Alannah plays Time in a Bottle for me, a song from a playlist of songs from my childhood that I’d given her before I left. We lie on the hotel bed and talk about what the lyrics mean.
She loves these conversations. We discuss the empty box of wishes that never came true, and I call out the song’s final chord, a strange arpeggio that stood out to me in the song even when I was her age. My own hunger for these sorts of contextual parallels from my parents’ childhoods had been insatiable as a child, and now I leave their equivalents for my own children in a generational breadcrumb trail.
So, we cue up the strange Jim Croce chord a second time, sharing the earphones, straining to hear my childhood in the mix, looking at each other without expression across the wires, waiting on the shimmering chord like WWII radio operators.
We have breakfast just down the street from the hotel. Afterwards, I pack my things up, checking, as always, that I have my passport and personal papers, electronics, plug adapters. I make sure that I haven’t forgotten my clothes from the makeshift line in the bathroom. I’m shifting back into the rhythm of pilgrim mode. They are saying something in the other room, but I’m checking my guide for a town I can make by nightfall.
Chapter 9: Lost & Found
Three weeks before, when I headed out with Melanie and the kids, I had this great, unknown adventure ahead of me. I had an Oz.
But now, there’s no Oz. There’s me, and there’s walking. I know exactly what the next seven weeks hold. Everything is flipped. The adventure is all behind me now, and it will be ages before I see them again. I’m swan diving into a quarry pond of Alone.
The four of us walk a half-mile towards the first trail marker. We step over the tracks of a municipal train depot. In the overcast light, Toulouse is morning-after, hook-up-ugly and urban and dirty. Sunday morning trash cans are overflowing. Somebody’s sweater is abandoned in the street. If the depot doesn’t smell of urine, then it should. It’s probably not even safe for the three of them to walk through here to get back to the hotel.
We find the avenue that leads back to the Camino, and then, more quickly than I hoped, I spot the balisage trail markings. There it is again, my Camino, where I left it.
The children’s energy has focused on each other the last few minutes, some small competition or frustration emerging between them. That they are not paying 100% attention to me hurts my feelings. I want them to ask me what’s wrong so that I can say, “Nothing.”
I say good-bye quickly, too quickly, maybe deliberately too quickly. I’m giving 75% hugs. There’s no way to get this right, and it is too painful to drag out. I only need to get going and away. I’ll pick an arbitrary fight with Melanie if I don’t.
A shopkeeper is opening his store up on my right and messing with the awning. There’s overly aggressive morning traffic wrangling on my left. A vast palette of grays opens up in front of me – big, lay it on thick, Van Gogh brush strokes, but with zero color. The three of them are still waving and looking towards me the last few turnarounds. I’m aware some part of me wants to be the last to turnaround. Maybe I’ll keep turning around until I’ve proven they were the first to say goodbye.
Paint stroke, paint stroke, paint stroke.
When I was a child, we used to call this “having a pity party.” I’m having a pity party, and nobody’s going to come.
I follow the red and white trail markers of the French grande randonnée route system along a river. National hiking trails are marked out with colored red-white coordinates, including the Chemin de Saint Jacques. Each stripe of markers is the width of the black paint that athletes wear under their eyes.
They’re parallel if you’re supposed to keep straight on, one angle down if you’re to head right, the opposite for left. There’s one in a big X for “you absolutely don’t want to go this way.” There’s one that takes a museum docent to figure out. They pop up like heartbeats. You barely notice them, until you notice you don’t.
The pilgrimage support communities put shells up here, but they are as much to greet travelers as to navigate them anywhere. Pilgrims rely completely on the GR system in France. My path markers on this gloomy morning are taking me towards the south rather than the west, which is odd, because the route is well-marked, so it isn’t like I’ve lost my way.
Generally, if you’re not circumnavigating something geographical, or right-angling your way around somebody’s farmland, everything directs you reliably west. I’m clearly following the markings, white over red, white over red, but I’m not headed where I feel I should be. I keep looking for a ford over the river that will start moving me towards the west, but it doesn’t come, and with it there’s a slowly rising anxiety.
Did I somehow pick up an intersecting trail and veer off on a new one? At very rare intervals these national paths cross each other, but there’s no red-white signal for “you’re crossing another route, pay super close attention so you don’t take the wrong one.”
I really don’t have the focus to spend a lot of energy on navigation right now. I want the path arrows to line up dutifully. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t out there. Sometimes you have to backtrack and circle every tree in the forest to find the next way marker. In Spain they spray paint arrows on every wall. I know it will be effortless there. But navigation in France is another matter entirely, and, please, God, today I just want things to work themselves out. This is almost cruel. Divine spite.
After a half hour of heading south, I come across a regional map in a municipal park by some tennis courts, and I know for certain that something is really wrong. The map shows the GR trail, and I am not headed the right direction. There’s no way. These are signs for a different route, and it’s definitely not the one for the Camino. I’ve taken the wrong branch at a balisage intersection. For all I know, I’m headed to the Mediterranean.
I’m due at a hostel where I’ve called ahead and booked my next stop. I have to make that destination by nightfall, or I’ll be stuck for a place to stay, and then all the reserved stops past it will domino apart as well. The welcome desks at the hostels are not open indefinitely, and, if you’re too late, you’re not getting in because the volunteers aren’t even there to let you.
I take a clear-my-head break. I’m no less lost, but at least I’ve stopped making it worse for a minute. A light rain starts to fall, and that also isn’t helping my mood. Neither do the tennis courts. For some reason, the suburban setting of parks and football fields and talkative women with tennis rackets walking by reminds me of how lost I am and far from home.
For three weeks I haven’t passed through a lot of suburbia. One time I walked by a golf course, and it felt practically interplanetary. I stopped and stared at it. I didn’t even know French people play golf. But by the tennis courts it’s suburbia in full force. There’s a great saying that the way you know you’re on an adventure is when you want to go home. Yeah? Well, welcome to the Calypso Islands.
I polish off a small plastic Ziplock bag of dried mango Melanie packed for me, depleting the last evidence of her personal touch. I head out again, still stubbornly towards the south, hoping to find somebody who can help orient me. I need directions more than I need to Hail Mary a backtrack to Toulouse and have to redo this entire stretch a second time.
Up ahead, of me I spot an elderly couple walking their dog on the asphalt path. They are probably in their mid-seventies. I approach the couple from behind, excuse myself, and ask them for help. They turn around, and stare at me like a ghost. For a moment, they don’t say anything. They just stare. And then it dawns on me.
Up ahead, of me I spot an elderly couple walking their dog on the asphalt path. They are in their mid-seventies. I approach the couple from behind, excuse myself, and ask them for help. They turn around, and stare at me like a ghost. For a moment, they don’t say anything. They just stare. And then it dawns on me.
They know me.
I know them.
I know their dog.
*
If they had not told me how they knew me, I might not have remembered, but a hundred and fifty miles to the east, a week or so earlier, and a half-lifetime ago, I introduced myself to them on a whim.
I had stopped with three other pilgrims beneath a large oak tree in a small parking across from an ancient church. The four of us were eating lunch and resting in the shade. I was working brick by little brick through a very large bar of chocolate.
An elderly couple across the way pulled in with their dog and a small open top trailer. They started to set out a small picnic lunch. I went over and offered them the remainder of my chocolate bar. I have no idea what strange compulsion made me share my I-come-in-peace chocolate. They accepted, and we got to talking, and the wife insisted I have some of the lunch that she had prepared.
We got to talking about the obvious. My Camino stump speech always starts with the shell or the walking stick, and whether it is the ninety second version or the one that goes on for five minutes, my story always ends on the coast of Spain. I share how far I’d come already.
There’s a funny thing about a long walk that no matter where you are on it, it’s an easy story to tell. When you’re starting, “You have so far to go!” When you’re in the middle, “You’ve come so far!” When you’re at the end, “You’re almost there!”
Well, it turns out that the husband knew all about the Camino. Obviously, I meet a lot of people when I’m walking the Camino, and for the first few minutes, I am interesting to virtually everybody. I’m a stranger from a foreign country. I speak functional French. I am in the middle of nowhere carrying my world on my back, and I’m walking to some destination further away than some people travel in their entire lives. For about five minutes, no matter who, I can’t help but be interesting.
But there are also people I meet where I watch them set out on their own Camino in real time. It’s in their eyes, and their voices, and their questions. They rarely if ever come out and say it directly, but they are trying the dream on for size, borrowing your guitar for a minute and holding in their lap, innocently strumming the open strings.
They ask if it is hard, and how hard, and they want to know how I positioned myself to do it. They ask if I trained, and how long I trained, and if there are particularly difficult stretches or off-path climbing. They ask questions about the time off from work, and the cost, and the approximate pain level.
I lead with my surface motivations: the draw of the proverbial journey of a thousand miles, the sabbatical in France, the chance to work on my French, maybe even learn a tiny bit of Spanish. These are the amuse bouche of a Camino conversation. At first it strikes me as counterintuitive. The people that are not interested in walking it always ask me why I’m doing it.
The people who are interested in doing it always ask me how. In their minds, they are already lashing a seashell to a hiking pole. The afternoon I first stood in the book section at the Seattle REI, and found a guidebook about the Camino, I was no different. By the time I caught up with Melanie and the children in the food court, I had already left.
Now as a pilgrim talking to strangers, I am keenly aware that I am a powerful factor in shaping a dream, and I am careful – to a fault – to nurture their interest, to guess intuitively what it might take to get them out on the road, to gauge the right level of pressure to tip them over. So, I withhold or encourage or implore or calculatingly assert it’s absolutely not for them if I’m working with a contrarian. I say whatever I think will do the trick. “It’s mostly religious.” “It’s not religious at all.”
I want people to walk it because they will not regret it. To be interested is the only criteria. The Camino is self-selecting. It will be what it needs to be for them. I know this already, and, of course, they don’t.
And that day I first met them, the wife fussed with the picnic food, and she tried to find something for me and the others. All four of us have come over now, but the husband standing next to his trailer was intent on talking about my trip and my pack and my feet and my shoes. By the time he stepped back in his car and we said goodbye that day, he was as much a pilgrim as I was. As for me, I was swept up in an evangelical tide.
This time, when I run into them outside of Toulouse, they are visiting their son and daughter-in-law. They, themselves, are far from their own home and hours from where we first met. This curious meeting is difficult for all of us to get our minds around, and the three of us keep coming back to it obliquely.
Nobody outright says, “It’s a miracle.” But we’re all comfortable with “it’s almost impossible,” “a million to one,” “hard to believe that I only came across you because I got lost.” We go through the open-ended permutations of how we could have still not met and been so close. “If we hadn’t found a parking spot so quickly.” If only to sustain everybody’s amazement, they invite me to Sunday lunch with their family. I am the prize from the tennis courts. “Look who we found, everybody.”
The significance of this invitation is not lost on me.
Breaching the Sunday family meal in France is an accomplishment for a foreigner, the equivalent, let’s say, of being invited to someone’s home for Thanksgiving and being asked to bring the turkey. If you haven’t experienced this directly, the French are socially reserved and private, but here I am at a dining room table with new friends. The intimacy is a small honor.
The grandfather’s eyes remain lit up with the serendipity of finding me. I watch him during lunch, and I look across the table and humorously wonder – to myself, mind you – if I implored him to ‘drop your things and come with me’ if he would.
This man can’t get over the chance meeting. It is a sign for him. He is ready to put down his fishing nets and come with me. I’ve always scored very low on self-control, and at the table I joke about my effect on engaging people’s interest – “maybe this is how Jesus got started.”
Mixed crowd.
After lunch the couple and their son-in-law offer to drive me directly to my hostel. Over practical objections, I explain how the Camino Commandment works, and why I need to set back out from the point where I got lost. They are more concerned about the distance and whether I will make my destination before the hostel closes. We negotiate through it, and I agree to be taken a distance that would be the equivalent mileage of what I would have walked if I hadn’t got lost. The commandment accounting now squared up, everyone is happy.
They drop me off by a church in a nearby town. In my pilgrim trail book, we’ve spotted the Camino path as adjacent to the church. Everyone gets out of the car to say goodbye. I thank them for the third time for being such a welcoming family after the sadness of saying goodbye to my own family that morning. They understand me, and that’s probably all I need. Someone came to my pity party after all.
There is a final recognition of the wild serendipity of meeting each other and one last shaking of heads. We say our buen caminos.
Buen Camino.
I’m growing increasingly aware that these two Spanish words have more than a bittersweet hint of adieu. I didn’t get that early on, but now I do. Buen Camino means goodbye, and probably forever. It means your paths connected, and you were never lost in the first place.
*
I tell the old man to be careful. I tell him if he ever makes up his mind to go, even for a single day, the Camino will not be able to hold him. I say, and I’m not exaggerating, that of everybody I’ve talked to about the Camino, he’s the one I’m most convinced should do it. I tell him he’s already walking it right now. I can see it. I tell him he might just fly off the end of the world at Finisterre and out over the Atlantic.
I tell him it is a small miracle we met.
(One of us had to say it.)
Go, I tell him.
Come.
Chapter 10: The Stranger in the Stairwell
I don’t know if it is the mango I’ve eaten on the park bench that morning or the food at the Sunday lunch, but within an hour of setting out, I am sick-sick.
My legs feel like cement. Within two hours of saying goodbye to my friends from the brunch, I’m running a temperature. Things are becoming feverishly surreal. I am as tired after this short late afternoon walk as I was coming into Toulouse the previous Friday. By the time I arrive at the hostel, I can barely get through the chit-chat of the sign-in.
The hostel holds twenty people, but it is early enough in the season that there are only the two of us. The other pilgrim remembers me from a stop in Castres. He wants to talk. We’d had a brief conversation there, he says. I nod. I’ll nod at anything. I am too sick to contribute. Later, he will try to write postcards at a small desk across the dorm area while I race past him to vomit in a toilet down the hall. I spend the night on the tile floor.
In the morning, the worst seems to have passed, and that’s enough to keep moving. If I explained my health situation to the hostel overseer, I could stay another day, but I would have to reschedule everything downstream, a logistic headache to be sure, but it’s more than that.
I have the pilgrim fever to keep going, a zombie anxiety to stay on the river, a disorder that takes root in every pilgrim — and sends many home early. The pilgrim literally can’t stop. Your knee can be the size of a cantaloupe, and you won’t take a day off. Boot problems pale against pilgrim fever.
My progress that morning is a step-by-step slog. It isn’t helped by the elements. It begins to pour five minutes after leaving the hostel. But I’ve stepped over the no turning back threshold and signed myself out, and it forces me to grind on with grim inertia, focused on getting to my next stop for the evening.
Late morning, I pass through a village where I buy bread, cheese, and sliced meat in plastic from a gas station convenience store. I’m not remotely hungry, but it’s one of the only villages on my day’s route, and when food is available on stretches like this, you get it while you can. But when I step out of the rain under a bus shelter to eat, I can only bring myself to stare at it before tucking it away again.
By early afternoon, I’m deep into farmland and countryside, and I find some appetite. At this point, though, the bus shelter starts to look like white tablecloth dining.
A Maslow’s observation: out in the elements, there is nowhere to eat without getting drenched. I have the uncanny, never-noticed-it-before realization of how scarce roof-over-your-head shelter can be. There isn’t that much shelter in nature when I think about it. For the first time in my life, it bothers me that animals limp and trot about in the rain with matted fur, utterly exposed to the elements, never even being able to complain or make a feel-sorry-for-me face so other animals might help them out. As unpleasant as we are as a species, we get to do that. It’s all grim suck-it-up in the Animal Kingdom. I’m starting to understand the appeal of caves. As long as you stay sort of near the door.
All of this should give a general idea of where my head is at.
Eventually, I surrender the hunt for shelter, and I sit on my backpack on a thin path running through the middle of a vast field. I am wearing my full body armor REI mountaineering lunar-ready rain suit. It has a heavy-lidded visor that is effective at keeping the rain out. Hunched over like Gollum, I protect my bread and cheese as best I can and feed myself in a stationary huddle.
Farmland rolls off in every direction. I’m in the middle of nowhere, but I enjoy the absurdity of sitting alone in a mega landscape having lunch in some arbitrary spot like in a painting. Someone might see me and think exactly that! That man is sitting alone in a mega landscape having lunch in an arbitrary spot like in a painting!
Rain is spattering and popping on my rain hood like percussion. While chewing, I bend thick clusters of tall, wet straw under my feet and scrape trenches into the rough mud with my heel. For entertainment, I guide my raincoat runoff into my civil engineering collection pools. I’m abstractedly fascinated by the thick straw I’m crushing under my boots, chew, chew, chew. If it wasn’t for me with my sandwich, crumpled over the straw like an ice fisherman, nobody in the entire life of that stalky, nondescript, white-yellow grass would have ever even noticed it. But me. Spatter, pop, rain gear.
Until I showed up, my straw cluster would have entered and left the entire universe with only a single moment of excitement towards the end when a vast tractor rode over its head like at the beginning of Star Wars. But now, the straw is communing with The Mystery of me as I hover over it, disrupting its entire neighborhood with my heel. I am now The Mystery. That is a lot of responsibility.
So, this is what I think about when I don’t have reading material while I eat. It started as a child with cereal boxes. The reading part, not the Mystery part.
Ok, I must be doing better. You wouldn’t think this kind of stuff if you had a fever. Is that true? Or is it the other way around? Hmmm.
I’m a long way from Toulouse now, and the landscape grows increasingly rolling and pastoral.
By late afternoon there is a silver light in the air and a fresh, country smell that makes me stop on a small rise of hill and take it in, if only out of dutiful respect for nature. There are intermittent lily pad ponds off the path, and I have to stand on the verge to allow cars to pass. When I check my guidebook, it shows me closing on my next hostel destination, the last private home on my French pilgrim network.
I hopscotch rock-to-rock around guttering mud, jump and stretch and Twister precariously over trenches of water. Eventually, I change out of my rain gear and into a light jacket when it gets warmer.
Something has turned in my health, my spirits, and the weather. Half-aloud, I sing all the words that I can remember of And It Stoned Me. Van Morrison’s description of walking outdoors in the summer rain with a fishing pole has always something Bigger in it than the song itself, a glimmer of something peaceful, the turquoise jewel of a chance, joyful moment.
I decide that if there was a heaven, and I was entrusted to pick a mood for how it might feel, like if the General Manager asked me to queue up a background vibe that residents could tolerate for Eternity, it would be the low-key heaven in And It Stoned Me. Particularly if it was a heaven where you walked great distances in the rain and communed with tall grass in a mega landscape.
Half a mile from the county fair and the rain came pouring down...
*
The approach countdown starts for my hostel. 6km, 4km, 2km, 500m...
Occasional handmade wooden signs direct pilgrims, two simple painted sticks nailed together, the horizontal-ish one with an arrow tip for direction, the lettering hand-painted. They remind me of the that-a-way markers you might see on a Disney water park ride, its long tourist queue decorated with whistling, fuzzy stomach bears and buzzing bees and pots of honey, but here, like so much of the craftsmanship in France, the artistry is simple, clever, and charming.
Well, he lived all alone in his own little home with a great big gallon jar…
(Eternity is just getting started.)
One final wooden sign, and I come upon a mowed strip of field, maybe twelve feet across, the width of a single tractor pass, almost arbitrarily cut through the waist-high grass. The strip was very recently mowed, and the smell of cut grass is pleasantly, almost nostalgically intense. This rolling path welcome mat winds like an Ozian ribbon up and over a rise.
A farmhouse appears. Hansel and Gretel’s cottage could not have been more captivating or curious. I will not be surprised if the chimney has been fashioned from peppermint sticks.
My mowed lane winds me another hundred yards, humorously snaking this way and that, which is now patently unnecessary, before finally curving in towards the home. The tractor driver must have split his sides bouncing along with this mischief. I guess that the driver must have been the one that made the that-a-way Disney signs.
I knock quietly at the back door of the farmhouse. The hostess emerges holding a massive cat and greets me warmly.
They have been expecting me she says. I will be their only guest tonight. She tells me — with a twinkle — her husband got out the tractor to clear a way for me.
I love these people already.
My host escorts me through the pilgrim’s section of her home like a friendly realtor.
A set off wing of her Hansel and Gretel cottage holds eight pilgrims, sometimes more, she explains with crisp pride. The pilgrim’s area is composed of a stand-alone shower, a full kitchen, a long wooden table, and a reading area with armchairs to one side. An old upright piano stands near the stairs. I ask for permission to play it, explaining that I haven’t played piano in over a month. She encourages me warmly. It’s an unexpected dividend.
She leads me up a tight, winding stairwell. It is narrow enough that I have to step carefully on the pie-wedge stairs beneath my feet and make sure I don’t lumber my backpack into framed pictures on the walls. At the top of the landing, the stairwell opens onto an attic area converted into a dormitory. The space is pristine, immaculate and quiet. The cots are as taught and trim as military barrack’s.
I notice for the first time that everything within this home is quiet. It is the one outstanding feature that my friendly realtor does not call attention to.
She gives me a moment to take in the dormitory, pick a spot, and set down my bag. Chance, late afternoon sounds drift in from the fields. I select a cot at the rear by a window and set down my backpack carefully, telegraphing a respect for her effort here and her hospitality. I’m making a point to appreciate what she’s built, to let her know that I’ll respect it, that the stranger staying up here alone is safe.
We return downstairs.
I learn through chance serendipity that the hostess’s mother is Russian or speaks Russian. My host returns to her own home and returns with her mother. The mother and I fall into speaking Russian, a language I started in middle school, continued through college and have stuck with in fits and starts over the years. But soon we pass back to French, and our conversation turns to the upright piano.
You play, she says. Embarrassed, I demur and shuffle. But with a burst of enthusiasm and the task of coaxing another musician to play, she excuses herself and offers to bring back a wealth of sheet music. She returns with a pile, but in the end pulls out a single page of sheet music, a one-page fugue, by a composer whose name isn’t even indicated. She opens the fall board by way of inviting me to play and departs. Standing, I play a few, scattered notes, stop, gauge for the volume carrying into their home, and for the second time the quiet rushes back.
The surreal flow of the last few days is amplifying. Everything slightly “off” the whole time, crackling and charged, but in a good way.
I set myself a challenge to see if I can learn the one page fugue before dinner. The fugue’s melody starts on a G in the bass and jumps an octave on the second note. This charms me. There is no second note more fundamental, fitting for this miniature composition. I spend the next hour stumbling around and around the nameless fugue, gradually making traction.
The hostess’s mother returns to check on me, and we discuss the fugue’s construction for a moment, indicating at bars of the sheet music, but each waiting for the other to touch the keys first to sit down and play. Each of us wants to be asked by the other to dance.
Still standing, she picks out the melody to make an observation on the piece, but before long, we find ourselves on the stool together. She takes the left hand, I the right, and we’re off. Between bursts of playing, we are eye-to-eye in discussion, corrections, let me try that part agains, and musical camaraderie. I’ve missed this. The whole time we’ve been living in France I’ve missed the pleasure of musical collaboration. It can be as stimulating as the music itself.
After the miracle of Sunday’s lunch - yesterday’s lunch, already a lifetime ago - I wonder if I will be invited to dinner with her family inside the main house, but I am not, and in truth I don’t need or even want to be. I speculate on whether the social boundary between the main home and the pilgrims’ lodgings is a policy. That would make sense. The French are as measured and precise in social matters as bakers.
Or maybe the mother has an instinct for how connected I’m feeling in the space, communing with something she knows is in here. As she leaves, she tells me the exact time that her daughter will bring my dinner and gives me instructions about the cat and the entrance door in the morning.
I am alone.
Again, it’s quiet.
The stillness is ready for me to allow it to expand at any time, to understand that this moment doesn’t need more volume. It needs less and less sound, and I take in the lid shutting on the piano, then birds at dusk, then a muffled voice through the wall. I move to the window and look out. There are faint, empty field sounds. There’s a pond, a single, gliding duck carving its silent V.
I flip through the spines of a few books on the shelf, pull one down, study it absently, shuffle its pages, feel the paper’s corrugated edge with my thumb. I don’t want or need to read it. I slide the book back snugly into its vacant slot. I’m fully in the room, participating in the quiet. It’s become a meditation. I’m almost doing as I’m told. The room is now playing me.
It’s getting dark.
A knock.
My meal is brought to me on a tray by the hostess. In a soft voice, each part of the meal is explained and inventoried like the delivery of a luxury automobile. She has done this many times. She lights a candle on the table. I follow most of her French, not all. Maybe she’s telling me I don’t have to clean up afterwards. Maybe she’s telling me I do. For the second time, there’s something about the morning, the cat, and the door.
I eat at the long wooden table. I picture the large groups that must crowd in and dine here some nights, laughing loudly, passing large bowls back and forth, guiding them over the candles. Strangers flow through this room season after season after season. Some brave, cheery souls must show up in the heart of winter.
It’s getting dark in the room.
I turn on two table lamps. There is also candle burning on the dining room table and a full pitcher of wine provided with the meal. I drink it all. There is a basket of bread. I eat it all. Afterwards, I quietly wash my dishes in the sink, and return them to the tray that the hostess brought in, exactly refolding my napkin as I found it. The plates and silverware chime and rattle and then fall millpond quiet. I imagine the smooth trail of the duck still spreading across the pond.
I sit down in one of the library area armchairs facing the window.
Muffled voices carry through the walls.
The last purple of the day’s light filters through the living room windows. For a passing moment, I consider playing the piano again, memorizing the last of the nameless fugue before I head to bed, getting busy with it. If I don’t, I’ll never find that fugue again, because I never asked who wrote it. I choose not to play, though. I opt for millpond quiet. It’s very rare that I sit this still without activity, without a hint of anxiety.
There’s a monastery feeling in here. This might be a monastery disguised as a home. What a few days this has been.
A decade ago, I read Zen and the Art of Archery, and all I take away is that if you use the bow of a master, for a brief period your skills will improve from something imparted there by its owner. This room might have that imparted thing. Maybe someone very wise or enlightened stayed here last night, maybe they played the piano with the mother or pulled a leather-bound book down from its slot or washed their dishes and set them back on the tray like I just did. I am diving now, navigating below the surface, listening to breath in blue water.
The last few days have been an Alice in Wonderland dream journey: the walk into Toulouse, the sublime day with my family, the elderly strangers, the brutal night of sickness, the feverish walk, the field and the straw, the charmed arrival at this home, speaking Russian with the host’s mother, playing the old piano together, the single page of an unnamed fugue. This veil of quiet. Something is vaguely out of control, demonstrating, bewitched. I can’t put my finger on it.
It is early, but I decide to retire. My instinct is that the evening is complete, and I take my queue. I turn off the lamps, deliberately feeling the movement of their switches and sliders, putting the room to bed like a sleeping child. I’m now tracing my own late-sunset ripple across the millpond of the downstairs.
Then, as I am circling up to the second floor through the tight stairwell I stop.
Suddenly.
I am on the edge of something. The quiet swells. Listening, listening, listening. I hear the creak of the wood on the stairs as I shift my weight. The small paintings are just to my right.
There’s no one to catch me halted there for no reason, no one to appear noisily coming down and past. It is all me. There is no threat. I hear my breathing and the sense of peace amplifying. I have that sensation where you think you might have heard someone enter your home without knocking, like when you stop and strain to listen, because you’re not sure if you actually heard anything at all. But there is no edge of fear there. I’m on the edge of something.
And then nothing.
Just the hard, flat echo of my tight space.
There’s nobody.
I continue upstairs.
I prepare for bed. The faucet taps squeak as I brush my teeth, spit into the basin, rinse out the sink, wipe it, leaving it as I found it, better than I found it. I ready my things for my early morning exit. My bedside lamp is the only light in the room, barely bright enough to illuminate the far corners of the attic.
I lay out my sleeping bag. I set my toiletries bag at the foot of the bed. I stick my waist-pack of personal papers and money deep into the foot of my sleeping bag for safekeeping. I place my backpack into position for morning access in the dark. I know exactly where I’ll stick my pajama bottoms inside of it when I wake, where my toothbrush will go, my fresh socks and underwear, where I’ll unplug the charger for my phone, wrap the cord around my fingers and then tie off neatly with a rubber band.
On this morning, there won’t be any other pilgrims to disturb my usual early departure, but the daily habits of the Camino provide a ritual comfort, and I observe them as if the cots were crowded with pilgrims from a loud dinner, drinking, not drinking, laughing, silent, writing, reading, getting ready for bed themselves.
I reach to the side of the bed and turn off the light and put my head down. What an unusual stretch of days this has been since Toulouse, a Camino within a Camino.
I no longer hear noises from the adjoining house.
*
And then, suddenly, I know.
It is as if I have been told. The stranger in the house has spoken.
The words are fast, declarative and incontrovertible.
“You will send your son off to school next year. It will be across the country. He will be thirteen.”
I am startled.
One of the year’s major decisions has been made, unilaterally, out of nowhere, unbidden, one that I thought Melanie and I would make on the plane home or subconsciously push off so long the decision would never need to be made at all. The trade-offs of opportunity and loss on sending a child to a boarding school across the country have been agonizing and stirring for a decade.
Now I feel caught, tested - even tricked.
How can I possibly explain this to Melanie? What if she says no?
I turn on my lamp, sit up on the edge of my bed. Thoughts, expanding repercussions, come at me hard. All the years when he still could have been home with us through high school are suddenly stripped away. Taken. Possibly it is right for him to go, to seize an incredible opportunity, but for me it is like losing a son.
The stranger in the stillness has taken my son, and I let him. I invited him in.
I weep loudly enough into the quiet room to hear myself sob.
Chapter 11: Lionel Messi
Spain.
It is the night of the second semi-final Champion League contest between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. I’ve made friends with a group of ten or so Spaniards coming out of an auberge in Jaca. We’re in the northeast, on the far less-traveled Aragon route, also known as the “silent route.” My group is not.
Only a few of us knew each other before the walk, but now we’ve become a rolling caravan of tobacco, blisters, laughter and beer for breakfast. The one woman who doesn’t drink with her tobacco leads the hungover through yoga in the mornings.
We’ve trekked through the hot, flat plains of Enériz, rimmed with mountains to the north, and the intermittently paved Roman road. We’ve spent the night in Arrés, where an old-time hospitalerio banged his fist on the table to tell the room where to accent Arrés and show, by way of white-knuckled percussion, that the “R” was not in any way a French “R,” which he demonstrated with equal verve and another pound. Speaking only for the hospitalerio, I will not make either of those two mistakes again. n fact, I will never repeat the name of that magical hilltop town for fear of getting it wrong.
Besides a couple of us trickling down from the Arles route over the Col de Somport, this stretch of Camino is almost entirely walked by Spaniards. The “Camino” implies a single road if you’ve only seen it in the movies, but there is actually a network of them, each accommodating a logical route: up from southern Portugal, four routes flowing down from France, one that runs along the northern coast, another from Barcelona, another from Madrid. They keep the last two separate for entirely different reasons. There are smaller tributaries to these routes as well, and because many pilgrims walk directly from their homes, like I did, in principle, the whole map of the actual “Camino” route looks like the back of your retina.
As far as I can tell, other than the last 100 kilometers where you can pick up your Compostelana, the pilgrimage’s certificate of completion, few Spaniards want anything to do with the four-week traffic jam of foreigners who come crashing into Spain from southwestern France. Aside from the main route, the Camino remains a source of deep national pride, and walking it for the young is a rite of passage. That’s what my friends tell me over morning beers anyway.
Some of my new friends are headed home the following morning, but tonight there is a face-off between the country’s great sports rivals, two of the best football teams in the world. The bar bristles with an electric impatience to get the game on, and food and drinks ordered, and everybody wants everything all at once. With a room full of background assistance from the patrons, the bar owner stands on a chair and fusses with the large screen television to get the channel for the broadcast. A hassled – I think extremely unpleasant is probably the gracious word here – waiter serves us all the nine-euro pilgrim’s menu. We share the garlic soup they love in Spain and then the ohmygod churrasco ribs that are traditionally eaten for three days straight, in private, without a napkin. My group passes around different brands of cigarettes like we’re on a currency exchange.
The Spanish are doing their best to speak the official language of the Camino, which means communicating in one way or another with your fellow walkers. Everyone is patient with me, and I do my best with my seven verbs and thirty-two nouns. I have. I want. I like. Show me. A restaurant. A bed. A bank. “Please,” but mostly “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” and “can I pick up the last round?” There is a universal language around bar tabs and being the included foreigner that requires no translation.
With the waiter I point to pictures on the menu and make a thumb’s up, and sometimes I think I can’t communicate with somebody across the table, and I have to resort to half-smiley faces only to discover at odd times that we share a second language. God, the relief. It’s like pulling on a lawnmower cord for a half an hour while your neighbors watch from their driveway, but then the mower roars into life, and in the end you win. Very satisfying. Aside from dignity management, these inter-language connections are wonderful in the purest sense of the word. They are exactly why I wanted to learn a foreign language other than Bartab.
Now, I am no great soccer fan, but I know enough to blow through my self-imposed pilgrim curfew to see this one. The auberge has been buzzing with it the entire afternoon. Manchester United have already beaten their semi-final rival and secured a place in the finals. I also know that there are both Madrid fans and Barcelona at the table, which has a car crash, rubberneck sort of appeal.
There are some serious regional tensions in Spain. I learn about them after asking someone why every highway sign in Spain is written in two languages. No, really. Every hundred miles there’s a new second language. At any moment either half of the table could declare independence.
Barcelona scores first, and a huge cheer goes up.
There is, as expected, a generous sampling of pained moans and gasps as well. For the Madrid fans, it’s like watching their dog almost get run over in traffic. Even the yoga instructor’s loyalties are out on the table. I am the only one who has zero skin in the game. Other than taking a moment to express my sentiments about winning a ninety-minute contest by penalty kicks, I’m happy when anyone scores. Yay!
Until.
It happens immediately after the first goal. I have taken the worst chair, the one with its back to the large screen television because, well, I don’t speak Spanish, and I know very little about soccer other than what I remember from playing as a nine-year old, when my coach asked me in front of all the parents and children, and not softly either, to “stop running after the ball like a chicken with its head cut off.” That is the exact quote. Fall of ’73. Nixon is still president. A good coach can make such a long-term difference in your life.
And I am craning my head backwards towards the television in one of those yoga poses where you risk slipping a disk – learned it from my new friend! – and suddenly The Moment unfolds.
At midfield, Lionel Messi nonchalantly passes the ball to his teammate. At first, it’s like they have all evening to work the ball downfield before someone kicks it wide for the thirtieth time, and the whole thing starts again. But this time the ball is sharply flicked back to him as he makes an abrupt start for the goal, and then he is off full tilt. He’s running “downhill” as they say in real football, and he is not focused on his feet learning how to dribble getting there.
As he hits full stride, the defenders watch from their heels, beaten at the start, hypnotized. They are pinned in their tracks the way you freeze when some martial artist spins a full 360º before kicking you in the head. They are so busy watching the little guy’s magic trick – the Atomic Flea, they call him – that they forget it’s their job to stop him. “Your job,” someone in the room from Madrid reminds them.
Messi threads his way through six – count ‘em – six defenders by his lonesome, faces off with the goalie, shoots and scores with that head-down, jerky contraction that short guys have when they kick a ball really, really hard. And in it goes, to the right side of the hapless goaltender, who wonders to this very day what happened to his defense, and how they could have betrayed him so biblically.
Most professional athletes will never have a moment like this no matter how deep into a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's “flow” they get. Honestly, it is as if Messi rode in on a motorized skateboard. To untrained eyes, mine, he could repeat it a hundred times in a row, and still they wouldn’t be able to stop him. I ask anyone who will listen why they don’t just have him do that over and over the rest of the match.
But most of all, and this is the thing, there is the eruption of Messi’s smile afterwards, and jumping onto teammates, and the eternal, locked-elbow arms of exultation. Thanks, but no thanks, Csikszentmihaly. I don’t want “flow.” I want that. I want what Messi’s having.
I imagine all the Camino pilgrims arriving in the great Praza do Obradoiro in front of the Cathedral in Santiago exactly like Messi, charging around each other’s abandoned backpacks, their arms locked-elbow and exultant, young and old sliding on their knees, healthy and lame, foreign and domestic, Madrilenian and Catalan. The divine soccer pitch! A vision of the hereafter!
Exactly half of my Spanish friends decide they’ve witnessed a miracle, and for once I’m not buying the drinks. Then there are even more beer and ribs, and I’m telling you – with all thirty-nine of my Spanish words – that you haven’t been to Spain until you’ve drank yourself under the table with bottomless packs of foreign cigarettes[1] and ten Spanish friends watching their teams kick it out. I don’t even remember who won the match. It hardly matters, and it was very hard to follow the announcers from under the table.
I had no idea how much I loved Spanish people.[2]
[1] Melanie does not know about this by the way and may get wind of it about the same time that you do. That’s why this leg of Camino is called the “silent route.”
[2] That aren’t waiters.
Chapter 12: Solitude and Painkillers
After a week in Spain, my backwater path from Arles and northeastern Spain joins the famed route from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and it’s like coming off a country road onto the interstate. The flow of pilgrims coming down from southwestern France is probably fifty times the number of pilgrims coming from the east. The nightly life in the auberges now settles into a predictable rhythm.
Every night the last, straggler pilgrims check in. Some of the latecomers have covered forty, fifty, sixty kilometers during the day. These are the hardcore who move easily through the stony hills and the afternoon heat because they’ve been at it for weeks, months in some cases. They’ve started from cathedrals and doorsteps near Munich and Paris and Rome. I can see the mileage in their cheekbones and rawhide tans. At dinner I overhear them tell each other over cigarettes they are turning around in Santiago and walking all the way home again.
The hard core arrive after the others because they use the entire span of daylight to move as far as possible. Their lives are focused on movement. They don’t care if they get in last or shower in cold water or sleep by a noisy bathroom. They are oblivious to the drunken cyclists arriving after curfew and getting in fights with their buddies. They don’t care if getting in late means stepping through black footprints in the showers and around the sinks and beneath the urinals. They don’t complain about the demonic snoring. They’re just locked in and doing it. They’re walking, walking, walking, walking. It’s all simple for them and they live for it now. Every day, just going. They’re fast and they’re free.
From time to time, I find I’m on pace with one of them for a day or two. I can sprint to keep up. I get to share a few dinners and some personal stories. They show me their Knights Templar tattoos, but before long they outstrip me. I knew this the moment I met them, that they would move on, and I would fall away behind. I knew they were faster. It’s even in their voices.
But most of the late-arriving pilgrims coming into the hostels are late because they’re in pain. They are moving slowly and tentatively on swollen knees and ankles. They’re stopping a lot and limping to the communal dining room. Sometimes they’ve already hired a local van to carry their pack to the next town. Sometimes I recognize them because I passed them earlier when they were parked beneath a tree in the hundred-degree heat, and their boots were off, and they were staring into space.
They might wave out limply or call out Buen Camino, but I can tell their hearts aren’t in it, and their minds are in pain. And now it’s early evening, and when I pass by their bunk to check on my charging cell phone, I see frightening red blisters on the exposed soles of their feet. I see their swollen ankles and knees and even crutches. There are bloody socks balled up on the floor near their beds, maybe because one of their toenails dug into their flesh or has come off altogether. They joke about their pain, but I can smell the end of pilgrimage on them. They might be the first to sense it’s over and the last to acknowledge it aloud.
The strongest and the weakest on the Camino move among total strangers.
Maybe these wounded got carried away with the romance of the whole thing and didn’t train when they should have, or they overdid it early on, the first day even. They covered forty-two kilometers when they should have walked half that. They were foolish, and they knew it while they were doing it, but didn’t want to be the first to raise their hand and call it a day. And now, injured, they’ve got a serious case of pilgrim fever, and no matter how badly they need to rest, no matter how crazy it would be to press on, they can’t bring themselves to do the simplest thing: they can’t bring themselves to stop.
In the pre-dawn, when the other pilgrims are packing up in the darkness, rustling their Ziplocs and shining headlamps into the mole-eyed sleepers, they can’t stay put and sleep in. They promised, promised, promised yesterday’s house doctor, the volunteer medico, they’d take a break, but now they have to keep going. They have to get up. They don’t know what they would do with themselves today if they didn’t keep walking. They just have to get ten more kilometers in. It is a panic to keep on.
Just ten. Ten is baseline. That’s all. It’s the shortest distance that’s still a legitimate day’s journey. Then they’ll stop.
Once they catch pilgrim fever, and everybody catches it at some point – mine will hit hard in Astoria – no medico can help them. Because they feel that to stop would be to get stranded on the banks, it would be seeing a river of happiness and all their new friends in happy canoes slipping past and away from them, splashing with their paddles, getting ahead in the adventure somehow, laughing cheerfully and teasing each other, and sharing their lunches and ordering afternoon beers in the afternoon sunshine. And when they stop advancing, the whole pilgrimage suddenly looks like a race. There is the illusion of everything swimming away, like watching the titles for too long at the end of a movie and the room rises, except it hasn’t.
Now they can no longer imagine stillness. A day of rest, the one truly sensible choice, is unthinkable, anathema. Santiago is there, and they are here. So, they limp on with their gigantic cameras and their hair dryers and six different books they will never read and whatever else is in their ridiculous backpacks. It is, of course, a lesson I was fortunate enough to learn the hard way early on. And almost always that’s part of their problem: they’ve got too much stuff, and they need it all. They have a defensive reason for every item, and nobody can argue this useless pile of deadweight from their pack. Overburdened, their Camino has become solitude and painkillers and grim compulsion.
The fevered are utterly alone. They text their friends a hundred kilometers ahead, asking how they’re doing and what town they’re in and is it nice there bc heard was gr8? They still try to show the others that they’re a good friend, a real pilgrim with their heart in the right place, still having an “awesome time” even all the way back here where you can’t even remember passing through. They’re still walking along in pain but, look, they’re even thinking about them. Yes, I am a real pilgrim, they tell themselves.
And then, for a second while they text the lost friend, it’s like they’re all still doing the walk together, but as soon as they put the phone down or notice later on that their friends never texted them back, they know that they are gone. They won’t ever see them again. If they’d been able to keep up, they would have been close friends forever, and now they’re becoming people they met once.
Their pilgrimage is over.
Chapter 13: A Marvelous, White-Water Blur
The pilgrims that haven’t been stricken with pilgrim fever, the vast majority, checked into the next auberge hours earlier and twenty-eight kilometers ahead. They sit in the common room chairs and lazily watch the latecomers arrive. They’ve already started drinking their café con leches because it is the only coffee they know how to order in Spanish, or grande glasses of beer that turn out to be so grande there is embarrassment when the obscenity of it is set down on the table.
These pilgrims have already done their chores. They’ve wrapped the anti-bedbug disposable paper sheets over their mattresses and their pillows. They’ve claimed the strategic bottom bunks near the exits. They’ve grabbed up all the electrical outlets. They’ve showered out the last of the hot water. They’ve done their hand laundry with somebody’s forgotten shampoo from the day before or small bits of hand soap they gouged out of the sink porcelain. They’ve checked their email accounts and their Danish Google News. They’ve padded off to town for hazelnut chocolate bars, and fresh fruit, and canned peaches for the morning. The peripatetic business of their day is complete.
Now these pilgrims can rest.
Outside in the fading sunshine in the auberge courtyard, boots are arrayed in long rows and walking poles are jammed, like ski poles, into great barrels by the door. Relaxing pilgrims read or fiddle with their drying laundry from time to time, rotating their cotton socks and their polyester underwear. They keep a close eye on the latecomers who are forced to squeeze out the last space on the laundry lines so they too can hang their things, possibly maneuvering somebody’s t-shirt a tad to the left or to the right to clear a little space. The owner of that t-shirt might watch from across the courtyard, evaluating the level of territorial respect shown to his garments, and, if absolutely necessary, will head over to touch his socks or his clothespins to publicly lay claim to them.
After these territories are won and lost, claimed and adjudicated, they all laze about in their one set of evening clothes and draw-string pajamas. They chat with friends and exchange mileage and town trivia. They give directions to the grocery story as if they’re old hands in the town because they found it first an hour ago. They check tomorrow’s weather, and pick their next town, and measure thumb widths to Santiago on their maps. They close their eyes now in the sun, or busy themselves with hand-rolled cigarettes, or half-written postcards, or books in their native Korean, that they miraculously discovered on a shelf in the lobby.
They get up to talk to friends on the other side of the bar area and read something funny out loud or share pictures of the next day’s Roman bridge, its ancient abbey, its belfry storks. There’s not much else to do in the middle of nowhere.
The retirees stand up after dinner. They notice their legs have tightened considerably while they were eating. Now, abruptly, they feel the day’s walk in their feet and their knees. But it’s always like that in the evening for them, and they’ll be fine in the morning. They are amazed how fast their body heals, what a phenomenal machine the body is, their own body in particular, how far it can take you when you just care for it a little bit, if you only know to rub a little cream into the bottoms of your feet every night exactly like they do.
And every morning they hear themselves sharing that same advice to anyone who will listen, but they can’t help it, because their bodies amaze them on an almost spiritual level. They can’t believe at their age they have made it so far and so easily. I mean, it’s been easy, they think and shake their heads to themselves. There were people – family members! Their own children! – that openly doubted them and hinted they shouldn’t go. But the human body is a marvel, and they’ve got one of the better ones.
After steadying themselves for a few tiny, secret moments on the dinner table they plod past the barrels of hiking poles and the long rows of boots and pungent inner soles to check on their moist clothes drying in last rays of the sun, ignoring the small worry that they won’t have dry clothes in the morning. But they’ve dealt with it before. Hung the clothes from their backpacks as they walked.
They head over to vending machine windows where they look in on an assortment of Camino whatnot: replacement Camino pilgrim shells, plastic clothespins, candy bars, disposable razors, suntan lotion, dental floss, deodorant, gummy bears, Chesterfield cigarettes, pocket containers of bug spray, and cans of San Miguel beer, the pilgrim’s patron saint beverage, which for reasons they cannot fathom, sell for less than the lime soda in this machine. Then on the way back to their chair, they fiddle with their moist clothes one final time on the line, flip their socks and underwear and re-angle the accordion drying rack towards the last dying embers of barbecue sunshine.
They are happier than they’ve been in thirty years. They tell themselves they will walk these pilgrim roads until they drop. It’s like they know who they are again. They remember this person. This light, wonderful, Michael Jackson moonwalk feeling morning to night. It is like being in love but without all the rest of it.
*
And just before lights out, the entire dormitory full of pilgrims, the fast, the slow, the sick, the elderly, the steady-on, they all start scribbling into journals. They are like students in an elementary school classroom. They are heads down, taking notes on the day’s journey, recording their exact mileage in careful columns on the inside covers, with the names of that day’s town. Sixty different heads bent over diaries. “Where are we, again?” someone calls out to the room at large. “Does anybody know what town this is? It’s crazy but they all blur together for me, too,” each them explains to that day’s stranger in the upper bunk.
Then they laugh and nod in amused recognition because it is like that, a marvelous, white-water blur, everything blending together. Then back to their writing and their notes and their thoughts and their shared sighs, and in forty-seven different languages they record the same good day today or really hot, or beautiful old church or really nice person at dinner all the way from Poland. They do this in the vain hope that when they each get back to their different parts of the world, they’ll all be able to remember exactly how it was.
Chapter 14: Trouble Strikes
I’ve been skirting around it and putting it off, but there is something I haven’t told you about this year in France my family is taking, and what this trip is about, and why Melanie and I are here plowing through our savings.
*
It is a year before we move to France.
We have lived through months of a health scare, and we have finally arrived at something tangible. We have waited a harrowing three days for an appointment with a neurologist in Seattle. He will discuss my wife’s scan results.
We have kept everything secret. We’ve agreed that we will not tell the children anything until we know firmly what is going on. We’ve coached each other to be calm. We’ve tried hard to stay cool, to avoid exaggerated emotion, to downplay speculation anywhere it might pop up. There was no luxury in indulging a single grim thought. Don’t dance with the devil. We were on an emotional high wire, focusing on what we needed to do next and only that thing. Both of us.
I still went to work. Melanie still got the children up and off to school in the morning. In the afternoons, she let them play at the neighbors, and when the neighbors offer to make the children dinner, now she said okay. There were brief interludes where everything was normal for ten minutes or so, but then the whole thing resurfaced again. It was like trying to forget there was a shark in the pool.
We thought together and separately about what it meant, or what we thought it would mean, for each of us in our different ways. We both thought about her age and the arithmetic of our children’s ages. Hidden from the other, we both got onto the web and looked at survival rates and treatment protocols for this thing. We read up on what kind of choices we would soon have to make. We were trying to ready and brace ourselves. We kept reminding each other that we don’t know a thing yet. It could be anything. It’s never as bad as you imagine it.
On the ferry ride into Seattle the day of the neurology appointment, we stayed in our car. It was too much to go upstairs and run into anybody we knew in the galley. Then we would have to explain what was going on, or where we were headed that morning, or why. You do not want to have those conversations when you’re trying to keep it together. So, we hid in the mini-van and watched all the other people milling among their cars, going up and coming down the staircase.
These were people who weren’t dying or losing their mothers or their wives. We watched them walk around and take pictures off the bow looking towards Seattle, and heard them squawk and complain, and high-five, and bump their coffees and say shit, and yell at their kids to get out of the car and do all the things people do when they’re healthy. They were living on a different planet. The weather was the same, but everything else about their world was different. It was hard to fathom how things could be so much the same and so different.
I don’t remember how it came up, but I said with a burst of foxhole optimism, that if we got through this, we will have to go to France for a year. We had talked about a year abroad practically from the day we met, and we will have to do it if we can. We would have to stop talking about it. Everybody talks about everything. But clearly there was no open-ended forever winding out before us. There wasn’t for anybody, not for us, not for the people yelling at their children and spilling their coffee. God, if anything was obvious now, it was that. There’s just not a whole lot of tomorrow out there.
“Sweetheart, if we can do it, and you are better or healthy enough to get on a plane, we’ll do it. Even if we have to blow our entire savings, we’ll do it. We’ll do it.”
While I was talking, Melanie was lying back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.
She took my hand.
*
His name is Marcus.
He is Austrian, and right away he tells me that he hates walking. Walking is not his thing. He has never liked walking. He would never choose to walk anywhere he says, serving himself a heaping pile of salad. He tells me good-naturedly that he thinks we are all crazy, you people who do this for fun.
I laugh, but I also wonder if it was one of those things that happens with children where they have trouble doing something, and then they say they hate it in a kind of see-through, self-defense strategy. I think that maybe he’s run into health problems and is now cursing the whole endeavor.
But, no, his health is fine. His feet are good. Knees are good. It wasn’t that at all. He really doesn’t like walking, not even before he set out. In fact, he is on the Camino for a totally different reason, maybe even a little bit because he doesn’t like walking.
Three years earlier, during the delivery of his youngest daughter, his wife had developed a sudden complication. Moments after giving birth, her heart had started to fail. Alarms went off, and he could see something was wrong on the monitor. Everything got crazy in the room, and he was shunted to the side, and after some kind of on-the-scene intervention, his wife was skirted out and carted away somewhere. He was not allowed to follow, and it was too urgent to even tell him where they were going. He didn’t know if she was dying right then and there. The baby and a handful of nurses remained in the room. You can’t imagine the horror of this, he tells me. In a matter of moments his whole life had gone from tingling joy to a flow of grey terror.
Later that evening things stabilized, he says. He was told by the doctors that his wife suffered from a rare cardiac syndrome affecting one in a million pregnancies or something like that. A third of the women who suffer the syndrome recovers. Another third needs a heart transplant. Another third dies. His wife was among the group that needed a heart transplant, and, it would turn out – this was three years ago, he said – that she was able to hang in there long enough to get one.
But fate is as slippery as a fresh deck of cards.
The heart transplant was not the end of their ordeal. There were additional complications immediately afterwards. Her body came down with a viral infection of some kind, and it rejected the new heart. She remained incapacitated fighting the virus. For three years, Marcus had been living with an ailing wife and two young daughters. Often, he took care of them on his own.
And at some point during all of this, somewhere in their darkest hour, Marcus promised God that if He would save his wife, then he would walk the Camino. He would get himself to Santiago.
“Save my wife, Lord.”
*
Marcus tells me that the very first day of his Camino he got hopelessly lost. He had walked for close to fifteen hours. He’d come over from the French side of the Pyrenees and down into Spain. For the pilgrims who walk this major route, this stage is probably the most demanding of the entire journey, and, unfortunately, he missed a key turn on the descent.
He didn’t speak either French or Spanish, and he misunderstood some directions, walking a whole slew of extra kilometers in the wrong direction. Then he had to make his way back up and over, and then, because it was getting really dark and hard to see signage, he missed another turn. The trails all look the same, and he was on some kind of hiking trail, he explains, but it wasn’t for the pilgrimage, and it was leading the wrong way, he tells me. He was sure he would have to spend the night in the mountains, exhausted and hungry. He was out of water and getting cold. It was raining intermittently.
An absolute nightmare of a first day, he tells me with his warm smile, like he’s talking about somebody else.
He doesn’t say this, but I can’t help but think that this is a guy whose entire life is about trying to hold it together. Certainly, it has been for the previous three years. And sure enough, once again, the cheerful guy held it together and got himself back on track. He ran into a helpful stranger and found his way back to the right trail. Sometime well after dark, he arrived at an auberge, mentally and physically exhausted.
Bit by bit after he checked in and sat down, he began to settle. There was an almost surreal surge in normalcy about him, people laughing and buzzing about, proud they’d made it through the first day and the big climb. None of these people knew what he’s been through that day or over the previous three years. There was a Wi-Fi connection in the common room, and he took out his cell phone to check his email.
*
Now, Marcus explains to me that before he left, he had set up two beach buckets. He put them over the family fireplace. One bucket had a picture of the cathedral at Santiago on the outside. The other had a picture of their home. Inside the Santiago bucket were the exact number of shells, one for each day he had set aside to make his pilgrimage. The count was timed from the day of his flight to France to the day he returned home to Austria. The idea of the two buckets was that every evening his daughters would move a single shell out of the Cathedral at Santiago bucket and into the bucket featuring a picture of their home. It would help them visualize the length of the trip and daddy’s remaining time away. When all the shells but one are out of the first bucket, then daddy will be home.
The last shell they would do together as a family.
And that very first night that he was out here on the Camino, when he had finally gotten to safety, he sat down in an armchair in the auberge. He found an email on his cell phone from his wife, who was better now, finally on the mend, and was well enough to hold the fort during his pilgrimage.
Marcus shows me this email on his cell phone at the dinner table.
She wrote in her email that she was proud of him. She told him how grateful she’s been for his support. She wrote that everybody was doing well at the house, and that they were all missing dad. She attached a photo of the girls just before they’d been tucked into bed that night. It was a picture of their two daughters at the fireplace They were transferring the very first shell from one bucket to the other. The children were looking at the camera and holding up one of the scallop shells together. Jointly. They were waving to their father with their free hands.
They were young and beautiful.
They were smiling.
They were six and three.
Marcus tells me that when he saw that photo, he cried for twenty minutes without stopping.
I could not stop, he repeats to himself, taking the phone back.
I do not know what was happening to me that night, he says.
I tell my Austrian friend he is sitting next to the right guy.
I tell Marcus about our visit with the neurologist and how we sat there with the tumor magnified on his computer screen and how the doctor poked at it and flipped it and drilled in. He showed us first this thing and then that thing with his pointer.
“Yes, there may be something wrong with you, but it is not because of this tumor, not the stage it is at now anyway. We will keep an eye on it, of course, but you do not need to worry about the neuroma.”
Melanie mentioned some of the other symptoms, and the neurologist became even more convinced that it wasn’t the tumor. His physician confidence was growing and our relief.
“No, of course, nobody wants one of these, but they are not necessarily the end of the world, he went on. You should absolutely come back in six months to have it scanned again, and these guys usually grow by such and such a percentage every year, so you need to be careful, with x millimeters on average, and sometimes they can really mushroom up on you, but you shouldn’t worry too much.”
And just like that the brain tumor death sentence was lifted. It was like Melanie was pardoned at the gallows. We walked around the hospital corridors in a kind of daze. I’m not even sure if we were heading back to the car or where really. It was like we just wandered the hospital shell-shocked. We were too relieved to feel anything like the joy you might imagine, probably because we still hadn’t solved the real problem.
And it is only this year that we’ve been in France that we really told the children what was going on there during those difficult months and, in particular, during those three harrowing days before the neurology appointment.
I explain to my new Austrian friend that Melanie’s health began to mend inexplicably again a month or so later almost on its own, as it had one prior time. I tell him we have a theory now, but the doctors don’t seem to agree on it, and other than to bat down your theory, they’re really too busy to think about it much when you’re out of the woods. So still nobody knows what is going on. We may never know. The whole episode could be gone forever, or it could start again in the morning. There’s just now a whole lot of tomorrow out there.
But she’s here. I’m here. We live in France like we promised each other we would. I still have my wife. The children still have their mother. Maybe it’s the reason we’re both sitting next to each other, I said to Marcus.
“I liked you right away, he says. That is why I sat next to you. I just had a feeling.”
We toasted our wives, and our children, and our promises kept.
We toasted our beautiful, but delicate, delicate lives.
*
“To promises kept,” my friend repeats when we pass each other on the road the next day.
“Buen Camino!”
And then we never see each other again.
Chapter 15: Su-zanne and Hinry
On this inferno of a late afternoon, I am sitting by a courtyard fountain reading a Spanish phrasebook, and there must be something about another person reading a book when you are bored out of your mind that makes you want to talk to them. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her leave a perfectly good conversational huddle with a fellow Ozzie and a guy from Texas (OK, so I myself have been eavesdropping.) She scrapes a plastic chair across the entire length of the courtyard to sit next to me.
After the first chair I’ve managed to keep my head intently in the book without looking up, but then she starts moving a second plastic chair into the conversational theater. I buckle. I have to see why two chairs, so I look up. I kick myself for exposing myself to eye contact, but at this point the battle is over. I’ve been flanked.
As I look up, the woman, an Australian named Debbie, gives me a big wide, friendly smile that was not going to take no for an answer, and I can’t help but smile back, and just like that I am beaten.
Goodbye phrase book.
Goodbye Type II Spanish verb conjugations.
I should add that I had made a conditional agreement with myself before buying this reverse Learn English for Spaniards phrasebook in a bookstore in Jaca. I was going to let myself break the no-project pilgrimage rule if, and this is a big if I told myself, if I didn’t let it get in the way of just hanging out with people and being present, practically the whole point of my pilgrimage. We’ve been through all of this already, and it didn’t help.
The point wasn’t trying to learn Spanish in a month. Well, here we are a month and a half in. Perfect example. Two white plastic chairs later and a friendly Australian, Debbie, who pronounces her name Dibbie, clearly wants to talk to me, needs to talk to me, is going to talk to me. The mystery of the second plastic chair remains completely unresolved. I have no idea what expanse of conversation opens up behind the door to that question.
Then after no more than a couple minutes, and I mean she doesn’t have three general facts on me, she asks me suddenly, and totally out of the blue:
“Do you know Suzanne?”
Now, by the time you get to the middle of Spain, and all the pilgrimage routes start to run together, there are a lot of people out there on the Camino.
Thousands at any one time are filing in from all over the place. It’s like the Euro Disney parking lot. It’s like the Greater Mecca Ring Road. You only recognize a fraction of them because there are hundreds of new faces every day. So, with no exaggeration I’m telling you there must be fifty Suzannes walking the thing at any point, and I don’t know what to say for a moment, and I can’t think of any Suzannes I’ve met either. And I’ve only just met this woman three minutes ago.
“Su-zanne,” she goes on cheerfully, as if the hard accent on the second syllable clears everything up. I take that inflection to mean – correctly, it turns out – that she wants to narrow it down from do I know Suzanne from the entire Camino to do I know Suzanne from the Entire World.
Well, we’ve all had these conversations.
You knit your brow and go hmmm to show good faith, and then say you guess you don’t know their mother’s college friend. You are as surprised as they are. You apologize for the size of wherever it is you’re from, and you explain that there are actually a lot of people wherever that happens to be, which in my case is New Jersey, a fact that throws people because it looks really small and peanut-sized on the map.
“Noooooooooo, Suzanne and Hinry.”
Well, I’ll be damned.
I do know Suzanne and “Hinry.”
And what is even more curious, so do you. I know this because I introduced you earlier. Remember when I shared the whole long, involved thing about my boots, and how I had this friend who said I needed to buy a new pair like right this minute, stat, and it was just around Christmas, and then I did buy them and all the rest of it?
Well, that was Henry.
His wife is Suzanne.
They are our neighbors across the street on Bainbridge Island.
So, before I forget, I want to say that if you are ever in Australia, please say hello to Dibbie for me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Camino, it’s that you will run into her.
Chapter 16: Hate, Hate, Hate
Even before I see the auberge, I hear loud rock and roll carrying towards me. Old school rock and roll. L.A. Woman is blasting out from behind its closed iron gates. When I walk up to the gate, I see a girl dancing by herself in the courtyard. She’s doing one of those sea amoebae, Grateful Dead dances. This is not Camino normal, by the way. Not the music. Not the astral plane gyrations. But I am so tired I don’t want to walk even thirty more feet to see if there is another choice. I’m done. Cooked.
I try to let myself in, but the gate is locked. Okay, that’s not normal either. Nothing anywhere is locked in Spain. It’s too damn hot to get up and secure anything, and it is too hot to run off with anything you’ve stolen even if you wanted to. A young, bare-chested guy wearing a groovy leather necklace and a jade bracelet comes up to the gate. We have an immediate, eye-contact, reptilian back and forth. Well, what do you know? We don’t like each other one tiny bit.
I move forward to clear room so he can open the gate outwards, but then he doesn’t open it. He just looks at me through the bars, slouching sideways on one hip and stares lazily at me. It is almost a pout. He is taking Jim Morrison very seriously. Or Val Kilmer. He thinks he is on an album cover. Then I wonder for a second if maybe this isn’t an auberge. Maybe this is somebody’s home. He says he wants to know what I want.
What do I want?
¿What do I want?
Okay, this is definitely not normal. I’m wearing a giant backpack. I have an eighteen-inch scallop shell on my forehead. I have a wooden stick with forty-seven notches I’ve carved into it, one for every hot, miserable day I’ve been out here in the middle-of-nowhere. I’ve got empty water bottles you could strap onto the side of a German tank.
¿What do you think I want?
A cama, I say without the Spanish accent that’s deserted me. “A bed,” I add in English for clarification and then esta noche. I get a por favor in there, too, but belatedly and without any expression so that it sounds ruder than if I hadn’t stuck it in there at all.
The hippy hospitalario stares at me. He’s openly studying me now. The door bouncer is deciding what will happen to the party if he lets me in. I say, stupidly, currying favor through the iron bars that I like the music. I heard it coming into town. I volunteer, even more stupidly, that I didn’t bring my iPod on the pilgrimage and music always sounds great now. Just the volume of it. Any music, I say. I mean when you haven’t heard music in so long, I trail off. Jesus, how did I get started on this? I am so tired. Too tired to explain the thing I want to explain, and I don’t know why I’m telling Jim Morrison. I’m dying to sit down and be done with the day.
This guy does not want to hear that I like his music. He will have to go and find new music now.
He starts to teach me in his Antonio Banderas accent that the Camino is music. Music is the most important thing. He rolls the R in important. Despite myself, I find this impressive, but this is no time to be giving him points for anything. “Why wouldn’t you bring music?” he asks. This makes no sense he wonders out loud, as if to himself. I think, to myself, but not out loud, that I have just watched somebody do a theatrical aside in an actual, live conversation.
He returns to me. You have to have music on the Camino, he instructs me. Life is music. By music, he clearly means rock and roll and not the Concierto de Aranjuez. I take exception to all of this, because I can say things, for example, like “break on through to the other side” without the slightest hint of an accent.
“If it is that important, I should probably go back two countries and start all over again,” I tell him. The idea was to say it with a light touch of easy, friendly humor.
He has to ask me a question first to see if he can let me in.
Oh, my God. I am in fourth grade. The bully is blocking my gym locker with his fat arm. He’s going to ask me his favorite color.
Wrong!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
In the background, L.A. Woman is making bendy plane arms and flying in circles. This auberge looks more and more like something out of Natural Born Killers, some fear and loathing shithole, way the fuck out in the mobile home desert, with a dirty kidney pool, and neglected palm trees growing beards like ZZ Top. Somewhere inside, Oliver Stone is standing on the diving board in his underwear. He’s tripping his brains out. He’s pouring a jug of Clorox into the pool. No matter what I tell this hospitalerio, he will never, ever, ever let me in. It is a fool’s errand getting into this place. Great waves of negativity are crashing over me.
Some outlaws lived by the side of the lake
The minister's daughter's in love with the snake...
Oh, God, not another Doors song. I was hoping it was a genre we were listening to and not a band. I hate the Doors. Creepy, evil band. Irritating, stupid lyrics for irritating, stupid people, and that intolerable singsong, light my fire organ. Light my organ on fire. I totally hate them. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
I am so tired, that I am almost to the point of leaning forward with my hands on my knees to support my weight while he finishes up with me.
*
Do I – he asks me this very, very slowly with his Puss-in-Boots Shrek accent – want to cook my own meal OR eat in a restaurant? I focus on him with my twelfth-round face. I cannot believe how much Banderas he squeezes into the “OR.” With one fluffy spiked DreamWorks paw, he tickles his scruffy goatee chin philosophically. With the other he holds my tail down. For a futile second, I try to think of an answer that will outsmart him. God, I am so, so, so, so thirsty. My feet hurt. I want to scurry over the fence and dart behind him. I want to hide like a reptile behind the vending machine with the green lime sodas and the San Miguels.
But it really doesn’t matter what I tell him. This is going to go on and on, and then I’m going to lose, and then he is going to smile at me with his thin lizard lips.
Because he is the lizard king. He can do anything.
He lets me in.
Fuck.
It’s not him. It’s me.
Chapter 17: The Lady in Red
The whole town is Sergio Leone quiet, by which I mean that anybody who’s ever seen a movie can tell you this entire village, at any moment, every last hen house door, is going to erupt in red-pepper gunfire and exploding roof tile. A thousand Mexican bandits and villagers in ponchos will flood out of old wooden doors and slide down roofs on one hip, firing in random directions. Injured men will cartwheel into water barrels. This town is Spain imagined by Quentin Tarentino, the whole place piñata pregnant, ready to blow apart.
But not yet…
Not for a moment…
Because we are still in the opening credits, just coming into town, and everything is rolling in at long, languid intervals. Every time you think the credits must surely be over, there’s a new title fading in again. It is like the director is nodding off in the afternoon heat, or he’s on a very long drive, veering into the breakdown lane, bumping every now and again and struggling to stay awake.
There is just nobody in this town anywhere. The streets are quiet. Dead quiet. I hear the creak of broken wind vanes, the scrape of black crows adjusting their wings. There is a stream of wasps buzzing out of the wall of the church. Suddenly, I hear that little gear thing turning on the back of somebody’s spurs, but when I check if the spur noise came from behind me there’s nobody there. There’s just my boot dust hanging in the air like a trail of underwater footprints. Somewhere off-screen I hear the waltz of a three-legged dog limping to safety.
It is ten degrees hotter in the square than it was outside town.
It is twenty-five degrees hotter on the steps of Our Lady of the Gargoyle.
San Quentin Tarentino.
I think I’ll keep moving.
*
Turns out Spain is hot.
Very, very hot.
I have walked some crazy distance. I left a Brooklyn friend at a café table three, four hours back in San Quentin. “Fuck it, I’m done,” he told me, raising his hands in surrender and ordering a third beer. “Too goddamn hot.” But I have kept plodding on. Something obstinate and crazy has gotten into me.
And, apparently, only me.
This whole long afternoon there hasn’t been another soul out here on the white gravel road. There’s just been blue sky and yellow mustard plants and a handful of exhausted red poppies baking to death in the wheat fields. From time to time, way, way out in the distance, I see an abandoned mid-day tractor, and sometimes a small cluster of buildings. They might be a farmer’s storage sheds. You sure wouldn’t risk heading towards them looking for water, and, believe me, I’ve thought about it.
When I stop for a break, I put my pack in the middle of the road and just sit on it, daring anyone to run me over. Because there are no people, no cars, no bikes, no nothing out here. I am alone. I can take a nap in the road. I can spread my legs as far apart left and right that they can go, like floppy, spread-legged Raggedy Ann or make a dusty snow angel in the boiling hot middle of summer. I can block the whole path off. Zero risk. I am on Planet Nobody.
The road is straight and endless. I don’t even need to pay attention to where I’m going. I just need to move forward. Probably for eternity. I have begun experiments seeing how far I can walk backwards and with my eyes closed. I am amazed at my ability to walk great distances in a straight line backwards and with my eyes closed. I wonder how many other pilgrims over the last thousand years have walked along backwards with their eyes closed and tried to set personal bests. I am sure that there have been others, but nobody talks about it. It isn’t in any of the guide books.
Just for the record, I have walked with my eyes shut as far as two football fields, only occasionally touching the grassy verge with my toe and gently recalibrating towards the center.
I am very thirsty.
I start to think how incredibly, side-splittingly funny it would be if I sang Lady in Red at the top of my lungs. I think how especially funny the escalating over-the-top key modulations towards the end might be. I can’t think of a more absurdly operatic piece of popular music. I imagine outraged lovers popping up from hiding places in the wheat fields and yelling out “shut up” and throwing shoes at me. I imagine a milk cow miles and miles away, raising a single rear hoof and cramping in pain from my singing, running dry on her suck-o-matic milk tether. I don’t know why these images are so funny, but they make me laugh.
Out loud.
Hmmm.
I realize that I am both very, very thirsty and laughing out loud. Some tiny inner voice warns me this is not a great combination. I wonder if I am becoming like somebody whose biplane has crashed in the middle of the Sahara, some 1940’s Hollywood star who curses and throws his empty canteen at the sand dune, Errol Flynn wandering in three-mile circles following another guy’s footprints. No, wait! His biplane was shot down, too! What a coincidence! I must follow his footsteps and find him.
Very thirsty.
Now I actually do start singing Lady in Red out loud, and as loudly as I can, but I am roughly sobered up by my singing voice. Terrible singing was funnier as an idea than when I hear it for real. I can’t believe that in the one place in the world where nobody can hear me, where I should have zero out-loud-singing stage fright that I can’t do better. I always thought if I could get more volume behind my voice, I might turn out to be an incredible singer. I had this little fantasy germ of an ugly duckling idea that deep down I have an incredible voice, but it can only be liberated at side-splitting volumes. My secret voice is that powerful, which explains why it is totally ineffective at room singing volume. This, I now know, is not the case, and almost at once I am again reminded that I am growing very, very tired and very, very thirsty.
Other than a melted, half-kilo chocolate bar dripping into my backpack side pockets, I am out of liquids.
I must try to pick up my spirits!
Stay strong, man!
I start repeating “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” in all sorts of different accents I’ve heard along the way, mostly Spanish because I’m going through a phase where I like pronouncing things with a Castellan lisp, but there are also some Chinese abacus merchants and adolescent Japanese girls. This is very funny until I realize can’t stop doing it. I have been gripped by an accent possession, those-a times-a when-a you-a can’t-a stop-a talkin in-a some-a kind-a ax-a-cent-a.
This is more than a little worrying, especially when the accent involves nationalities you can’t even pretend to claim as your own. Accent possessions are like attacks of the hiccups: you have absolutely no idea how long they will last. I think about the girl who hiccupped for like seventy-three days. Later on, I read somewhere, she got arrested for armed robbery. What does it all mean? My inner voice repeats: Confucius says they ah like heekups. You haf no ay-dee-a how long lasting they aah. Fotty-seben yuan, plu-eese. The pronunciation of yuan slides an octave and a half like a guitar string being slackened.
I hope this wears off before I get to town.
I drink the last of my chocolate bar and take out my Michelin Compostela guide. I have just passed the dry, unmarked drainage ditch symbol at 47 kilometers, so I must be very, very close now. Somewhere around kilometer fifty-four, I will come to a small town marked with two helpful, tiny black icons, the first icon is a little bed, the second, a crisscrossed knife and fork. That’s what I’m looking for: a bed, and a knife, and a fork. Maybe even a tiny water faucet icon. Now-a thats-a gonna be-a my-a kind-a villagio. I’m-now-a-some-a-kind-of-Italiano-paysano-frombolli-spaghettios-sfoli-gotoli-olio.
I hardly kno-o-o-w zis fraulien by my side...
When I sing really out loud mit mein German accent I am zee teenzy, veenzy bit better.
Ja.
Chapter 18: An Open Question (1986)
Some people are true New Yorkers, and they’ve only been in town a month. That’s how it was for her. She never wondered if she belonged there. She just fit in immediately, flicking her cigarettes on the pavement, waving for taxis right out in the middle of the street. She moved around the city like it was her own, elbowing back the other eighteen million people, shoving her way into the subway car. She lugged her DAG bags up the 108° stairwell; cheered the chicks with dicks in the gay parades; flew along in early Sunday morning cabs, her forehead against the window, watching the long row of timed green stoplights bloom along 6th Avenue.
She was, standing tall, 5’3”. If it helps to have a face to imagine, she looked more than a little like the actress Lili Taylor. Her eyes were hazel green. She was tuned in. Always. Aware. Hyperaware. She didn’t miss shit. She was an 8000-megawatt emotional receiver, her crowded dial picking up radiated irritation and bits of interpersonal conflict from ox and cart villages in China. She noticed and felt everything.
She didn’t walk into somebody’s party so much as she exploded into it. She charged in at full volume, arms spread wide, palms open and back, loud, throwing her black coat off onto wherever it landed and greeting friends with her made-up pet names, her kick-your-ass black lace up boots stepping right over the stranger’s glass table and their cocaine mirror and the book open to a delicate Mapplethorpe calla lily, all so that she could hug her Lamb Chop like she hadn’t seen him in a hundred years, but really it was only yesterday, and they’d been on the phone half the afternoon. Her crinkly eyes flashed, and her smile spread out and across her face like a card-deck joker.
She bust in and broke up the slow-motion cigarette tapping and the feedback-loop artistic conversations and the $800 pressed trousers crossed carefully one leg over the other with her riot and her decibels and her dervish. Then she’d race back out and find whoever was in the next room, but not before noting mid-step, in a pause coming back over the coffee table, that that calla lily (she’d just say “that flower”) is pretty (and just “pretty” or something similar, she wasn’t in a vocabulary contest). Then off she’d go, her voice ricocheting back somewhere from the next room. The players would re-cross their legs and take their places again, trying to get back to their performance, but feeling silly about it now.
People either liked her immediately or they could kiss her ass. Or “My ass,” she’d say, gesturing to her own bottom (she was proud of her bottom), and the way she said it made everyone laugh because she could harness her intensity into something entertaining and unthreatening. She could laugh at herself and play the clown to make things light. She could put her hands on her hips, and smile her watermelon slice smile, and thrust her belly out in a funny way for the photographer. She made her height and size and her body something to have fun with. They were part of her show.
She didn’t need to be smarter than you. She didn’t need to be better looking or funnier than you or anything. She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t competitive in that way. She didn’t jump in during the middle of your story to tell hers. She wasn’t ambitious or trying to prove herself to the world. She didn’t need to win all the fucking time. And unless she felt wounded, she did not want to hurt you. There was something childlike in her, and there was something childlike in the strategy of how she chose to relate to the world that made her feel safe and made others safe around her. It was, mostly, a strategy that worked.
She made her living as a bartender which meant she had to handle men twice her size and get serious about people, too. She could, almost miraculously, yell at them from the other end of the bar, making them sit back the fuck down for a goddamn second, and I’ll get you your drink when I get you your drink. She could say this and then break into a smile, and it was a kind of theater sitting there at the end of the bar and watching her work. Her ability to sass and control and win these drunken assholes over amazed even them. Later they’d bring her presents, funny lighters shaped like PEZ dispensers or stupid shit from novelty shops and ten-dollar bills folded into swans to amuse her and make her joker’s smile come out, and the crap would accumulate on her dresser at the apartment. And most of the time anyway, they did sit back the fuck down and then she’d make them laugh later, and even give her one of their cigarettes when she practically demanded it from them, and they’d decided it was just easier to become friends with her than to fight her.
But there were other times, too, when they were deliberately mean or hurtful or cruelly vulgar and she lost control of them, or, worse yet, a barstool ally turned traitor or some worthless employer would join in the laughter about her, and then she’d come home with the hurt and insult and disgust of it, and it would get on her skin and under her skin, and it was like she’d been shit on, and it would make her angry, and then it would make her cry bitterly. It was very hard to convince her to let go once a dark feeling took hold of her.
Her feelings, every single last one, came at her at 180 miles an hour and each one took full control of the wheel while it ran its course. She was its ecstatic or terrified passenger. It didn’t matter what the feeling was: happy, sad, or fuck you, or I’m so sorry or never again I promise, or this time it’s over for real. (I said all of those things.) And then she’d get very hard on herself for things that had nothing to do with what had actually happened, and she’d say she didn’t think she was very smart, and hated that she was bartending, and everything else about herself too, but the smart thing really was crap. She was very, very smart and anybody who ever got in a really good fight with her knew how fast and effortlessly her mind worked once it stopped tearing itself apart in the mirror.
But even just watching her eyes move as she spoke or when somebody else laughed a certain way she liked, or didn’t like, and then you could see it surface, the whole marvelous power of what moved within her. But it did not help to point this kind of thing out or remind her of any of that or argue facts with her. She tunneled in alone, and she tunneled out alone.
She was a champion of the underdog, not because she had a chip on her shoulder and was against the big guy, but simply because she was on the side of the little guy. She naturally defended anyone marginalized. She was in the AIDS Walk very early on, and each year she raised a small fortune, holding her customers hostage, shaking down her employers, demanding her friends contribute until they did, telling them how much exactly was still not enough, and getting away with it, filling long, oversized pledge sheets with scribbled donations.
And woe to the stubborn non-contributors! Or, god help them, anybody who wanted to argue about the disease or tell her, rolling their eyes and muttering that the gays probably deserved it. Later on, back at the apartment she’d go into a total conniption about those fucking fucks! They were only a hair’s-breadth away from saying the fags deserved it, and she could just hear it, and the closed-heartedness of it all upset her and, to tell you the truth, she didn’t actually know how to respond then.
Because it was like they were evil. She didn’t want to see anyone with feelings abandoned, and the fact that there were people out there who would abandon other people right to their face and then give some bullshit, cold-hearted, hateful reason for it was a giant storm cloud of shit hanging over life itself. It sent an electric jolt of confusion and powerlessness through her. She hated that. Just hated it.
Oh, but she loved the Mets (I LOOOOOVE the METS!!!!!! she wrote once), and one time at a game that was rain delayed for hours and had run into extra innings, she stood up in front of the last stragglers in her section, and turned around, and announced suddenly to everybody that they all need to stand up and right this second because Hernandez is going to walk, and then Strawberry is going to hit one. And her voice must have carried all the way down to the field, because everybody did as they were told (the fans and the players both) and then everyone in our section came stepping down over the blue and orange fold-out seats to high five her with both hands in the air like she was the one who’d hit the walk off with that marvelous Strawberry looping swing of his and the front leg thoroughbred kick.
She was practically bumping chests with the other fans, her arms held in victory, radiating her 8000-megawatt intensity the other direction now, the star-crossed lovers in China suddenly seeing the bright side, and deciding to give it another season and somehow work it out.
*
She could kick your ass at this driving game she had at work. Every day she used to play it before her shift, and after a while she could always get all of the way to the end, all five levels or whatever, totally focused on the thing, locked in, swearing and steering, talking to the machine, spinning the wheel aggressively, man-handling the stick shift, telling it what it was about to do before it did it (under her breath whispering blue car coming on the right, blue car on the right, blue car on the right and then laughing and yelling, aware of the audience behind her, there you are, you FUCK!), and then the blue car would appear, and she’d cut it off and drop it behind her without another word, just taking care of business, a Rapid Roy Stock Car Boy menthol cigarette burning at the edge or her mouth or precariously from the side of the machine as she raced past tropical trees, and polar snowfields, and upside-down nighttime highway until the machine had nothing left to throw at her and timidly puttered down and let her into the winner’s circle.
After she’d get to the finish line, she’d enter her initials, spinning the steering wheel, and stomping on the accelerator, and going yeeeeah with as deep a voice as she could fathom and turning back towards the room. She’d scrunch both her fists, and tighten her whole upper body, and bare her teeth in fierce athletic triumph, and for about half a second, it was like she’d won Wimbledon. Then off to work. If they had a sliver of conscience the bar owner, or the chuckling early shift barflies would have returned her quarters.
She had a serious tomboy in her by which I mean that she slept with who she wanted, their gender and color and, maybe it’s better not to think about it in my case, probably the timing were her business. From time to time, she’d wear this pair of men’s jockey underwear she had, and she didn’t really give a shit, and she liked to do it for the shock value, and it did shock and unsettle me, but that kind of thing was just her, and you weren’t going to change it. I’d never really met anybody like her. And, of course, there’s the obvious reason for that.
But you should not be fooled, because sometimes there was a ballerina in there, too, behind the tomboy and the card-deck joker and the clown, past the ass kicker and the drama queen and the race car driver, on a stage right at the center, right at the heart of her, was a ballerina – a child ballerina, beautiful but scared to go out – and everybody close to her knew that tiny dancer, and tried to encourage her from time to time, and speak to her in comforting words when she was frightened. (Because when she was frightened, then we were all frightened.) And we would try to remind her how beautiful she was and letting her know she didn’t need to be afraid to go out there.
To go on.
And for the three years that we were together, happy or sad, drugs or no drugs, whether she might not want to go on was an open question.
Chapter 19: I Will Never, Ever Marry You
When I met her, there was at least part of her that wanted to get married more than anything in the world, that wanted to have a family, that wanted to have a baby. You can’t imagine what that word meant to her and how she said it. She held the idea of that imagined baby so close in her heart you couldn’t see where the mother left off and the baby began.
And when she smiled, and this is what got me right away, right there in the early going, before the first morning walk home even, there was something in her eyes, some persistent and intractable doubt, under the laugh and behind the smile, something that held on for an extra moment when it looked at you, something that always asked if you loved her, I mean really, really loved her.
And with all my heart, especially in those early days, before the ugly, knock-down, drag out early Sunday morning fights, and the I will never, ever, EVER fucking marry you, do you hear me? I’d have to be fucking CRAZY – I was yelling with tears in my eyes and picking up my clothes and college books from her apartment stairwell – before all that, I would look into the eyes of that laugh softening into the one eternal human question, but still holding your eyes with her doubt and, at times, fathomless contrition, and I would race into the vacuum with a yes, yes, yes.
Of course, I love you.
*
We were born a day apart, on November 15th and November 16th, and if you’ve studied astrology for even half an hour you know that Scorpios barely stand a chance with any of the other signs let alone with each other. But even if you haven’t studied astrology then at least you understand that we must have celebrated our birthdays back-to-back. We were both literal about the dates, so there was no “let’s just celebrate both together on the Saturday before or after” like any reasonable astrological sign would do.
No.
Your birthday very literally started and ended at midnight. And she always got depressed the day after her birthday (“because it’s over”), and for the two and a half years and three birthdays that we spent together we’d have an annual argument on the 16th about her ruining my birthday every fucking year. This never did get resolved, but you should also know that my birthday was not actually ruined three times, but this was how two Scorpios communicate with each other once they really get good and going and all warmed up.
Wipe your tears! Wipe your tears! You really don’t need to feel so terrible for me! My birthdays were just fine with cards and candy and little bags of marijuana she’d tied in curly red ribbon and gummy bears and the devil certainly knows what else arriving in makeshift origami pouch pockets with SweeTarts taped to the outside and Bic pen smiley faces. All your typical birthday touches.
For two decades after we hadn’t seen each other or spoken, I almost always stopped and thought of her on the 15th. And, when I did actually forget, and it was a few days before I remembered, then I’d be more likely to stop for a much longer moment, and find myself thinking about our whole time together, and how far apart we were, and then I wondered what the fuck exactly happened back there and went so incredibly wrong, although the birthday presents are both a clue and a dark omen.
We “met cute” in a New York fashion.
I was an actor in those days, and the night we met she had seen me in a movie called Parting Glances, and then there I was, the same guy from the movie, right there at the bar, but not actually gay like in the movie she’d seen, and probably shorter, too. (I was 6’1” in the movies.)
And I remember seeing the “he’s gay to he’s not gay” transition in her face. We were yelling to each other in a loud bar (not a gay one,) and this little firecracker of a short girl with brown hair in a bob dyed all black had been going on and on about wanting to introduce me to somebody, one of her best friends (a gay one), and then it turned out suddenly I wasn’t (gay at all) and then she didn’t want to introduce me to him anymore, and I felt her whole being shift around this new, not unwelcome, surprise fact, and I saw a race car doing a hellacious U-turn in the distance, throwing up a dust cloud, coming straight at me now, getting larger with every second.
She was there that night with her roommate, but she had a little surprise for me too, since my eyes and conversation were roving in that direction (oh, she’s gay) and (so is her girlfriend). And she changed gears faster than I could keep up and ordered more drinks for the both of us even when I’d already said I’d had enough for the night. I told her I was heading out, but she pulled me by the arm somewhere it turned out I had no choice but to go, and made out with me and drove through my tropical trees and polar snowfields and my upside-down nighttime bullshit highway, until she pulled into the winner’s circle at some point later in the evening. And, in this way, you could say I was seduced by a race car driver (who was herself, from time to time, but probably just for kicks.)
We moved in together in an apartment by Lincoln Center just across from ABC News. We lived on the 7th floor, and after her shift we’d stay up late watching Chuck Woolery hosting Scrabble. We’d smoke pot and eat miniature microwave Chinese rolls dipped in squeeze packets of sweet mustard left over from take-outs. One of us would stay productive, rolling little cordwood stacks of joints, proudly building miniature log cabin piles. You could never actually tell how much weed we had or really clean the place out if you hit a sudden patch of sobriety, because every time she bought weed, she would squirrel small amounts of pot all over the apartment in secret locations.
She’d hide them when she was high so that she wouldn’t remember where the hell she’d put them, and then it was impossible to tell when we were actually getting low because a quick treasure hunt would always turn up more. We’d be working on the last few desperate roaches, burning the tips of our fingers to shiny nubs when suddenly she’d yell out “Guess what I-E-I just found?” from the back of the coat closet or standing on the kitchen counter or dismantling the oven hood top or chucking the winter socks out of the bottom dresser drawer.
“Ha-ha-haaah,” she’d cackle, all pirate-smiled and full of mischief, and I would laugh, too. That smile was the best thing about her. Maybe it is the best thing about anybody. I loved that smile, but looking back, and I’ve had plenty of reasons to look back, the excess was frightening.
Early on I had an audition for a Woody Allen film, and it had gone well. I had learned my lines sitting in his projection room beforehand, focused on the pages I’d been given and memorizing everything as fast as I could so I could get off-book. I sat there on a desk looking at pictures of Mia Farrow and the children on the shelf. It was surreal to be in his personal space. In its way, for both my agents and myself, it felt like the tantalizing edge of stardom.
I’d been told by my lead agent like six times not to try to shake his hand or go over to him or be ingratiating in any way, but in the audition, he was friendly and welcoming. He shook my hand pleasantly and was completely normal (except there was the weird sensation I always have with celebrities, thinking this is actually Woody Allen, he’s not somewhere else right now, he’s here with me, and he had those big, sad, basset hound eyes and his thick glasses and button down shirt, and I couldn’t stop thinking he always looks like his owner is away.)
I came home and told the story of how after doing the scene Allen had made an aside to Juliet Taylor, his casting director, and he’d said, “That was great? Wasn’t that great?” He asked the question like the matter was settled, and I’d got the part. My heart leaped. I’d finally done it. Taylor was the one who wanted to get me in there to meet him in the first place, and she’d gotten me into another movie and also the Michael Jackson Bad video, but now we were talking the real deal. Woody Allen. The movie was called September.
Juliet had initially said this audition was more of a look-see, more a chance for him to meet me than anything else, or that’s what she’d told my agent. But I was more than a good fit for the part, and I’d proven it. But I did remember she hadn’t answered Allen’s question either.
The two of us took a bus out to Niagara Falls that weekend and we could feel a shared future shaping up. I’ll bet my bottom dollar it isn’t this way anymore, but, back then, getting cast in a Woody Allen movie was like a ticket for five other movies just because you had him on your resume, even when the movie hadn’t come out yet. It was like making it for an actor, and we were both completely amped up.
And when we got to Niagara Falls, I checked in with my agent on the five-dollar-a-minute hotel phone I couldn’t afford, and he blew my world apart. He said that Woody and Juliet both thought you were great – really great – but the part was to play Harvey Keitel as a young man in a flashback, and you really, really don’t look like Harvey Keitel.
“You were great. He loved you,” my agent did his best to assure me. And you already know Juliet loves you. But he was disappointed, too. The endless near misses were a death by a thousand cuts for both of us.
“That fucking bitch,” she called Taylor, scrunching up her entire frame. “You look like Harvey Keitel.” And about ten minutes later, maybe just to break up the long, depressing silence and maybe to get me to turn face up from the hotel bed:
“I hate his movies. Bore you out of your fucking mind...” She did a sort of trailing-off impression of how everybody talks in a Woody Allen film using sounds more than words. And then, after a long beat, I hear her say from the bathroom, “Just pick up the lobster yourself, you pussy.” She made herself laugh with the Annie Hall joke, and reluctantly I had to stifle mine.
I didn’t lift my face from the pillow, but I did put my arm straight up and backwards in the air so that she could come lie next to me on the bed. She did, but later that day I practically wept through the entire Maid of the Mist boat ride like the ship was named for me, and I made sure the whole rest of the miserable weekend was ruined after that, and to be totally honest, maybe the whole rest of my miserable acting career.
*
One afternoon I came home to our Lincoln Center apartment with a small Casio keyboard I’d bought at Manny’s for a hundred and thirty bucks or something like that. Plastic everything. I carried it home under my arm on the subway. I didn’t have a stand for it, but I found a way to prop it up on cardboard boxes and evenly stacked college books.
The keyboard looked horrible in the living room, but she put up with it. I had also purchased the sheet music for Whiter Shade of Pale at the same time, and for months I played the same eight opening bars on the “rock organ” setting until she was probably ready to tear her hair out, but she’d just come over and listen for a bit and say that part’s a little better. And I’d ask which part, and she’d be able to tell me. She’d know because she was actually listening.
Even after things blew apart, it meant a lot to me, that.
Chapter 20: Malibu (1989)
The LA move is a disaster from the start. I arrived a few weeks before she did to find an apartment and get us set-up. She stayed behind to organize the shipping of our things. I thought she’d like the apartment because it was cheap, split fifty-fifty it was $300 a piece, and I thought that would take some pressure off of us while we were getting going. It had an avocado tree in a small patio out back that I thought she’d like, but she didn’t.
She hated the apartment the moment she walked in. She asked me the first night why I rented it. She couldn’t care less about the avocados and later on learned to make guacamole so she could buy avocados from the store. She said the place was like living in a bird cage, and then I could see that it was. The neighborhood was awful, she said, and then I could see that it was. The carpet was gross, she said, and then I could see that it was. I’d missed that. It was like putting on negativity glasses, and suddenly I had no idea why I rented the place or asked her to come live with me.
The weeks rolled on, and none of our stuff arrived from Pack & Ship, the first outfit she found in the phone book back in Manhattan. They’d showed up with a truck, and she let them take all our stuff the same day without even getting a second quote, and she paid them in cash. So, we ended living on the floor with a borrowed mattress for weeks, and still our things didn’t arrive. The company got so tired of our threats and screaming they stopped taking our calls.
Eventually we got some of it, maybe half. They left our things in a plywood crate outside the front of the apartment building. The Scandinavian bed we bought 50/50 was gone. It was scandalous. I don’t remember all seventy-six itemized reasons I gave her that she shouldn’t have hired them, but we fought about each of them repeatedly.
*
There were fits of happiness.
For my birthday that first year in LA she bought me a songbook of Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and I tried hard to learn this one song, her favorite one, the one she said was about her. I got the “sheets of linen, count the headlights on the highway” part but, not surprisingly, couldn’t get the “blue jean baby, LA lady” part with the hands that had to roll together cooperatively a certain way. I worked on it endlessly, and I know it meant a lot to her because she knew why I was learning it.
And there was more late-night Chuck Woolery television after her shifts, and we still had a few good laughs. But all the weed smoking and the alcohol was getting on my nerves. Her pot smoking, but now also my own. I am a world-class blamer, and I explained I only smoke it because you’re always bringing it in here.
I made it all her fault. For me it is literally out of sight out of mind, I explained like I was saying something clever. What the fuck? she said racing into the living room from the kitchen. No, you smoke it because you smoke it.
But we would get over it, and everybody would cry and apologize and all the rest of it, and the next afternoon before work, we’d have a small truce and get avocado burgers at All American Burger, sort of across from Guitar Center. It was a fun hamburger joint for the first few weeks, but then the place became depressing with weary, trudging prostitutes trafficking right out in front while you ate, and the whole filth of Hollywood, and not even getting any auditions to make the move to LA worth it.
It was a total mistake coming out here and we should never have come together. My agents don’t even like me.
She’d say I was right. At this point we could fight simply by agreeing with each other.
We were cruel.
There were more angry, tearful I’ll NEVER marry you fights, oh that’s a joke like I’d marry YOU, and you must be fucking kidding me, and having to retrieve my keys from the alley and the shame of the neighbors looking away from me when I walked out to my car, which I hated, hated, hated, and she knew that, of course, and that was why she did it.
And then right towards the end we had a climactic fight, our “you, you, you” fight, a bitter-end battle which still rings in my ears.
She was in our cracked, dirty white tile bathroom in her underwear and one of her tank tops with some kind of German emblem, and she was brushing her hair angrily probably getting ready for work, and God only knows what started this one, but she’d said something and, I raced up in a fury from the mattress on the floor, responding to some provocation. I said, “It’s just you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.”
I said you like a hundred times, and I stabbed the air and spit out every last one with the cathartic release of primal scream therapy, and for about a minute I didn’t care if the whole building heard. I got lost in the perfect poetry of the repeated word. And I’d found the word I was looking for, alright. I’d found the word that described the whole three-and-a-half years, the whole relationship. I was cracking the entire universe in half with it, male and female.
I imagined the whole building on my side, nodding along with me, because of the shit I put up with, must have put up with, that poor guy with the crazy bitch down there.
Then she exploded out of the bathroom and said, “No, Adam-the-Actor-Who-Can’t-Get-a-Part,’ it’s just you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.” And I’m sure she thought the whole building was on her side, racing across the upper deck in the opposite direction as we made our deaf arguments, rolling the ship back and forth.
It was over. The magnets were broken.
Neither of us had ever been through anything like it before. And then, at the end, when we had torn all the feathers out of each other’s wings, we stood there staring at each other. Expressionless. Blinking.
Depending on what you have or haven’t been through, you may have difficulty believing how deeply we loved each other, but it was true. Maybe that was the scariest thing.
*
During her last week in LA, as we counted down the days to her flight home, we made peace. We drove up to a beach north of Malibu, way the hell away from Hollywood, and bought some sandwiches and crap from 7-11 on the way up and hung out in the sea breeze.
She loved the beach, any beach. Maybe the beach was the one place she loved more than New York City. She was different by the ocean. Peaceful in a different way than she was anywhere else, and whenever we drove home from a long day at the beach, she would be quiet afterwards, like somebody who’d been to church and, for once, finally felt something.
We must have boxed her stuff up and sent it back to New York. I must have taken her to the airport. We must have said good-bye. I must have driven home from the airport alone. I must have returned to the empty apartment after she was gone and felt something terrible and strong, but I don’t know, and I can’t remember.
Blackout.
*
Twenty-some years passed, and I received a Facebook invite.
From the pictures, it did not look like she was married or had children. If there was a boyfriend, he was hidden. She had dogs named Leon and Paris. There was a picture of her in Las Vegas, another one up in Woodstock out on a lake, a picture at a restaurant where she must have tended bar or hung out. I couldn’t quite make out the knickknacks on her desk table. Among a small handful of “Favorite Movies” in her Facebook profile was Parting Glances.
I knew as I clicked Add Friend that it meant the cruelty and the “it’s all her fault” story that had been cryogenically frozen in time was back in play.
After an initial hello, from time to time, I’d get a quick comment from her or a Facebook thumbs up. One time she sent me a note after I’d posted some Christmas pictures of my children around the tree. In the background of the living room she saw the family grand piano. She wrote she was happy I was still playing, and I must be getting pretty good by now. I wrote that the Elton John Greatest Hits songbook she’d given me is in the pile of music books by the piano.
*
A week before we moved to France, I received a note from her. We hadn’t exchanged messages in months. She signed the note Always, then her name, and finally,
(tiny dancer)
The Always wasn’t like her, and then the close with her Elton John song was too intimate or too nostalgic or too something. I left it alone.
It was odd, though. Something off.
June 14th, 2010.
Chapter 21: A Zen Candle
The night I stop in Atapuerca, I meet a Brazilian woman. She is in the restaurant’s waiting area, and we get to talking and then end up sitting together. As is inevitable, we fall into sharing our stories.
There is a stranger-on-a-train quality to forging relationships on the Camino. You share things about your life that you would never share with someone you had only known for fifteen minutes anywhere else.
So, my new friend learns about my year in France, my “unpack everything,” my “let it go, let it go, let it go,” my day in Toulouse, my moment on the stairwell, my prayer in Vernègues, my children, my wife – everything that I have shared with you here.
And I learn what brought her to the Camino, alone, a woman from another continent, halfway across the world, far from her husband and her two young children. There are many older women on the Camino and many younger women in their early twenties. They travel with friends in the laughter and safety of small groups, but it is rarer to meet a mother on her own, willing to part with her children, to walk and be alone for days on end. I admire the courage of women who travel alone and immediately like and trust her.
She is not doing well physically. Her knee is swollen and wrapped. She’s been to the doctor and given ibuprofen and told to rest, but the pace is catching up with her. I’d seen her on the porch of the hostel that afternoon with her knee elevated, but she carries this setback lightly.
She had her backpack couriered the day we meet. Unlike some people – me – she is not a purist in the sense that she needs to carry her pack every inch of the way on her own or the whole thing doesn’t count. There is something spiritually relaxed in her, at ease. She isn’t someone who catches pilgrim fever. There are times when I meet someone whose disposition is so different than mine that I can’t help but get along with them, almost out of amazement.
She calls the weary pilgrim’s transport service the whiner bus, and that makes me laugh. But, still, quietly I wonder if she was ever going to get there. We are a long way from Santiago to be leaning on a taxi service.
And then it is her turn, and she shares why she is on the Camino. She gives me the initial high-level answer, the need for down time, the opportunity for mid-life reflection, the chance to slow things up. She tells me that she is a successful jewelry artist in São Paulo, a small-business owner. Some of her comments about the lure and trap of entrepreneurial and artistic projects resonate, but there is more to her pilgrimage than that, and she shares the larger reason she is on the Camino.
She tells me that in her backpack she’s carrying a candle, a small Zen candle she calls it, and with it she has brought a slip of paper that reads “the death of young people serves as a reminder to us of life’s impermanence.” The words are from the Dalai Lama, words she discovered by chance on the day of a tragedy that she relates to me. She says the words feel sent to her somehow. And next to the inscription is a small picture of the two of them, her sister, not yet forty.
“She was my little sister, and she was my best friend,” she tells me. “We talked all the time, my sister and I. We did everything together, and when I get to the Cathedral in Santiago, I’m going to light this candle in her memory.”
I listen quietly. I think of my older brother and how much he means to me. I can’t imagine losing him I think to myself, finding a sympathetic reference point.
“She was killed in a car accident six months ago,” she adds.
The hair goes up on my arms.
*
You know, your life floats up at you out there.
When you’re on the Camino, especially when you’ve been on it for a long time, you see how the walk breaks itself up into chapters. There are themes that you work over for a week or two weeks at a time, and then the next thing, and then the next thing.
It is like they find you. The chapters are delivered to you by the people that sit down next to you or walk up beside you on the road or greet you in a restaurant waiting area. They come out of conversations struck up while waiting for the daily stamp on your pilgrim passport.
The thing is that you don’t need to search for them. They introduce themselves. This is why the pilgrim advice I read early on to “forget even the plans you have for the pilgrimage” is so very, very accurate. You may only be getting the way.
Bring nothing. The Camino will be brought to you. You are its audience, not its actor.
When I first read the instruction to bring nothing, I felt I would come away with nothing if I followed that, but now I’m realizing I have the space to hold things I never thought to bring. Somehow, I dared to trust this admonition and benefited from it.
And, now, in a restaurant in Atapuerca, here we are again. When I thought I had nothing left but homestretch, I’m suddenly holding something so delicate it can only rest on an open palm.
I am awake that night for a long time, lying in my bunk. I think how odd it is that I had started to think the meaningful parts of the walk were winding down for me. I had spent weeks working through what felt to me the important things in my life. I had begun to pick up my pace a bit and the daily business of completing the Camino. I had begun to think a lot about getting back home to my wife and children. I was eight weeks in and ready to wrap up a journey of gratitude and love in all of its warmer, happier aspects.
And then here it is suddenly, in a chance conversation, the last chapter, the chapter of loss.
The moment she says “car accident” I know what the chapter is called, and who it is about. It makes perfect sense. Of course her death was going to come up on the walk. Her death and its troubling timing and circumstances have been under the entire year, almost from the week that we arrived in France. She had been floating in a grief-less vacuum, waiting for sustained attention and a proper good-bye.
I know how I couldn’t have seen it coming.
We were in the Dordogne the previous summer in Southwest France. It was only the second week of our trip. We had rented a small apartment in a hilltop town. It looked out over the confluence of two rivers. There was a small beach there at the river’s edge, and all day long a steady stream of rental canoes floated in from somewhere upriver.
There is a word for this type of day. It’s not a word that commands attention. It’s a word we almost mock, but it is the right word for a certain kind of summer day, and a subtle one. The word is pleasant. I believe that if our lives were pleasant for long enough, our hearts would burst. We would know heaven.
And everything was pleasant that day.
We were only getting started on a great, circling tour around France. We had walked home from a terrific dinner that evening, one of the best of the entire summer. It had been hot in the afternoon, but there was a lovely breeze on the patio where we were eating. The presented the food on old-fashioned, cracked wooden cutting boards. Melanie spent half the meal taking pictures of everything they brought to the table. The children and I teased her about it, and we were in great spirits.
The wine was great, and after we looked around the patio for gendarmes and disapproving adults, we gave the children teaspoonfuls of wine so they could taste the same cherries that mom and dad were going on about, and perhaps a hint of adulthood, too.
After dinner, the four of us walked home up our cobbled street. We stopped by a parapet that looked out over a twinkling valley. When we got back to our apartment, I told Mel I was going to check my email quickly, and that I’d be up in a moment to say goodnight to the children.
I saw two Facebook messages from people I hadn’t spoken with in twenty years. The first was from my old girlfriend’s best friend. The second was from her sister. They both said the identical thing.
Please call me when you get this.
*
A vehicle struck her on Broadway and Amsterdam, at an intersection not five blocks from our old apartment. The toxicology report was unequivocal and disturbing. I’ll never know for sure whether her death was intentional that evening - I only have her note – but her drug history made her early loss inevitable to everyone. This was not a surprise. And if she had taken her life that night, it would not have been her first attempt.
The accident was on the night of June 14th, the same day she’d sent me her last Facebook note. And then for the next three weeks – while my family and I were packing our bags and starting off on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure – she had been hanging onto life in a coma before eventually slipping away. She was 46 years old.
I told Melanie what happened. I said goodnight to the children. I sat there and looked at her Facebook photos. I reread her last note and then the small set of back-and-forths over the previous year, the likes, the comments on photos. I read everything she’d posted on her own wall and on the walls of her friends. I systematically saved all of our personal communication to my desktop, so that I could hang onto what I had left of her, in case she disappeared from Facebook as suddenly.
*
You know I probably would have never seen her in person again. We were not in any true sense friends anymore. I didn’t know the details of what was going on in her life. I didn’t want a day-to-day involvement or to become invested in her battles and dramas.
I am a married man with a family. I’m careful and jealously protective of that. I’ve never been a man that keeps women in his life as close, personal friends, not apart from the couples or friends that Melanie and I know mutually. So, if she’d pushed for more connection, I would have shied away from it and hardened up and called out my boundaries in some awkward, possibly hurtful way. It is likely she sensed this or felt a similar way herself. She kept her distance as I kept mine.
When Melanie and I moved back to New York City for a couple of years in the early 90’s, I did not seek her out or stop by her restaurant. It was unlikely, even if I had been back in the city, that I would have ever joined her for coffee or let her know I was in town. Our life together was long since over, and I didn’t want to build anything on the ruins. When she reappeared in my online world a couple of years ago, there was no upswell of nostalgia for our years together. I had no desire to say, oh, remember this thing or that thing about our past life. I didn’t need to feel anything again. Maybe the ability to respond to each other with surgical care on Facebook made this small level of reconnection even possible.
And now the larger thing should be – must be – called out explicitly.
I had no residual romantic feelings for her. I had no leftover longings, no regrets on the outcome, no fleeting sentiments and “if we only had done it differently.” It was over. We were over. Mercifully. We’d known it nineteen years ago. Getting to that point was what made it possible, eventually, at our bitter end, despite the threats and the risk, to part finally and get away from each other.
It was also clear, painfully so, that I’d found the thing I had been holding out for. Between the lines she had acknowledged it in small notes among my posted family pictures. The love in my life was the elephant in the room. Not even naming that would have made it go away.
Maybe six months before her death, though, she had sent me a note. She’d titled it All Those Years Ago and she’d apologized for how she’d been when we were together. She wrote I always wanted to tell you this, so here it is. After I’d cleared it with Melanie, I sent her back an equally heartfelt apology for what I’d done and said, getting at some of the things I was most ashamed of. For each of us there was plenty to be ashamed of.
We had said good-bye long ago.
*
But I will tell you this:
If her life had unfolded differently, if she had lived to be 92, and I’d run into her one day somewhere, her tiny, ancient self sitting on a park bench in Greenwich Village or fussing with her dogs on a midtown curb – I can tell you that I would have looked at her and still known exactly who she was.
We both knew this about each other. I knew who she was in love and in war. I knew the heart of her. I knew the parts of her that would not move and would never change, parts as hard and as fixed as altar stone. I knew what was there from the beginning and may very well be, somehow, somewhere, still.
I knew her because she had let me in.
She had allowed me to know her as I had allowed her to know me. That was our gift to each other. She had let me into her heart in the same innocent and beautiful way a child lets you in. By which, I mean without reservation. I knew the whole terrified, beautiful, tender and self-destructive her. She was each of those four things in full measure, more than I would ever want or feel free to tell you.
And the old woman in the park fussing with her dogs would have known that this old man had once looked directly into her and fought with her and held her and known her, and loved her, really loved her – still loved her after all of her everything, it might have seemed to her.
He had stood at the intimate heart of her. He had been allowed into the place where our beauty has been hidden from our own sight, where we are blind to who we truly are, where the only way to know what is within is to allow another to enter and describe it.
I had been her witness, and I am her witness now.
There are only a small handful of people in any of our lives with whom we are this intimate. She was one of my precious, precious few, and to know someone like this is a gift. It is to know the place where the person that you love has been signed by God.
Chapter 22: Santiago de Compostela
She used to celebrate her adoption day like a birthday, just like she used to celebrate her actual birthday. It was the day she came home to a true family, was loved, and welcomed, and held close and dear.
It was the day she finally had a true mother, a mother who loved and claimed and wanted her. I realized at some point walking along out there, that her adoption birthday would have fallen on Easter. How fitting.
It is probably a special day for many adopted children, the particular day when they are plucked from being some nameless Baby Girl #15 or whoever it is you are when you are living under a temporary name that nobody commits to or believes in. And you can’t really have a temporary name. It is the very symbol of you.
Your name is the trestle of your soul.
And walking across Spain in those last few weeks towards the end, I thought of something she said one afternoon in our New York apartment. She had been talking to a friend, and her adoption had come up, and when she came into our apartment, she put her stuff down, and sat near me on the bed, and asked me, but also asked nobody in particular, asked the apartment, asked herself, asked the world: who the fuck held me the first six months of my life?
She said it softly, with a trace of confusion even, kind of shaking her head, and then she stood up again and was off somewhere to be alone with it. I don’t know if she’d ever really thought about it that way before, but the question had grabbed a hold of her. I remember I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t really a question that can be answered with words. It was a question into the void.
And walking along out there I thought of her smile, too, and how it always kind of asked you that same question. And that question became a part of how I thought about Santiago and what I wanted to do for her once I got there. It got wrapped up in the notion of lighting a candle for her in the cathedral, an idea that I was moved by and borrowed from my Brazilian friend.
In the little rush of borrowed faith that graced me for a few weeks out there on my pilgrimage, I felt that I had a sort-of response for her, for the Catholic girl from Long Island. Maybe I just knew who I wanted to have held her for those first six months, who might have in some way looked after her, leaned over her as an infant and then, at the end as she lay crushed and dying in a hospital at the end of her life. And maybe that’s what I wanted to give her, to summon, to find for her and spiritually complete, in Santiago de Compostela.
I was thinking specifically of the Pieta Mary. The compassion in her features, the exquisite femininity, the resigned gaze into infinity. What radiates out of hard stone is something bigger than the rules and creeds of men, their heavens and hells, who is going where and how and why, and which particular ideas and exact words must be used to navigate and sustain it all. The bitter, self-evident foolishness of all that.
The Pieta Mary doesn’t busy herself with any of it. She doesn’t comfort herself with her fading memory of her son’s Sermon on the Mount. Her expression sweeps all of that away without even raising her eyes. It radiates that none of that is important now.
My oldest is dead.
This idea of Mary is before and beyond all of the masculine doing and measuring and adding up. She simply loves you, the broken, crucified, un-resurrected tragedy of you. I imagine for Catholics there must be a liberation in trusting in her, in counting on her, in inviting the thing that she represents to be one’s deepest ally, in making the case for you with her eyes.
And if there is a Christ who must come, for whatever reason, to judge the quick and the dead, then let us hope and pray that he can be reminded that he is – as he has always been – his mother’s son.
*
This idea of the Pieta Mary practically pulled me across the last few weeks in Spain. I had a very specific notion of how when I got to the Cathedral in Santiago, I would look at every Mary in the great church, every last one. There might be hundreds of Marys in there, but I would spend as long as I needed to discover them all. I would go through every candlelit side chapel until I found the right Mary for her. Her Mary. The most beautiful one in the cathedral. The best one. And I had the same blind confidence that I would find her Mary as I believed walking along that I would meet the people I was supposed to meet, day by day, moment by moment.
And I knew that when I found her Mary, I would light her candle there, and that I would pray for her somehow, too, with whatever small measure of faith I might have recovered. This idea saddened and relieved me. It became exactly what I wanted for her. Because there was a part of me that trusted what was felt or even hidden in this idea of Mary, this Pieta Mary. So, let Mary carry her, intercede for her, defend and deliver her. Let Mary look down on her with the same Pieta expression.
Let her look down on all of us this way.
Towards the end of the walk it was all I thought about.
*
When I found her Mary, I recognized her immediately.
She wasn’t in the cathedral.
I found her in a gift shop. I was only a few blocks from the cathedral picking out a candle, and there she was, engraved on silver, mounted on a small woodblock. She was a Mary with an infant child no older than three or four months. The baby Jesus – but really, he could have been any baby – pressed dreamily to the top of her chest. The child was sleeping, as if on a hot summer afternoon after nursing, mouth slightly ajar, peaceful, pressed against the mother, the child’s head just below her chin. Mary was looking down at the child – but really, she could have been any mother – with that same lovely, Pieta-soft expression.
On the back of the woodblock a small oval sticker read Made in Italy and that felt right, too, for the Italian girl from Long Island. The little plaque was no bigger than the dimensions of a playing card. It had a little triangle hook on the back, but I’m not sure where you’d even hang it.
Originally, I had imagined something bigger and grander, a whole Mary statue extravaganza tucked into her own side chapel with a team of marble cherubim, and twisting Bernini columns, and an enormous rack of candles burning in front of her, but immediately I knew this Mary was the right Mary when I saw her.
And the thing is, when I think back on it now, I’m not even sure the mother in the engraving was even supposed to be Mary. It might have been a generic mother and child, and it was me thinking so much about Mary that I assumed it was her, but it was, nevertheless, the truest symbol of her, the thing a Mary might be, and we all long for, every last one of us, irrespective of our faith, and recognize instinctively.
*
I returned to my hotel room that morning and I carved out her full name, the dates of her birth and her death, and a two-word epitaph in parentheses on the candle. I blew away the wax shavings from the letters and numbers. I placed the candle and the little plaque and a miniature cigarette lighter in the plastic bag from the candle store. I also had a tiny cross that was given to me by an Armenian archbishop I’d met on a plane ride the year before. He’d given it to me after a long conversation when he’d learned I was walking the Camino.
I explained to him that I wasn’t a Christian and that wasn’t why I was walking it, but still he’d turned around as we were getting off the plane, and in one of those last awkward moments when everybody’s filing out, he pulled this miniature cross out of his jacket coat pocket and gave it to me. The awkwardness of it had moved me at the time because I realized it was given from his faith rather than his station. So, I’d saved it and taken it with me on the pilgrimage as a kind of good luck charm. And I decided suddenly to put the tiny cross in the plastic bag, too. Then I packed the rest of my things into my backpack and checked out of the hotel.
Before lighting the candle in the church, I said the Lord’s Prayer. I remembered my father teaching it to my brother and me as children. My father was a Jew who converted to Catholicism in his twenties. At his death, he took his Last Rites, but as far as I know he never went to Mass my entire life. But we learned the words from him.
My mother was in charge of our religious upbringing, but it was my father who taught us to pray, and he made prayer seem like something important. Nothing more than the Lord’s Prayer.
He didn’t believe you should go to God with a whole list of personal wants and needs. But no matter how crazy other things got during the craziest, post-alcoholic, joint custody visits, he would always lie down beside us at bedtime and recite the Lord’s Prayer with us. It was our one reliable oasis of weekend-visit peace. And in the cathedral in Santiago, the Lord’s Prayer felt like the right thing to say, so I said it.
And then I told her as if she stood before me, that I didn’t know what really happened at the end. I would never know. I probably don’t want to know, I said.
But I told her to think of how many people she touched in her life. I told her to imagine how many people would miss her if they knew she were gone. I told her, without the slightest exaggeration, that this vast cathedral wouldn’t be big enough to hold all the people who’d felt her smile at them.
Think of that, because that is your life.
*
There was a flat piece of metal on the ground to catch wax and a half dozen other candles burning there already. I sat her candle down and placed the archbishop’s cross around it like a necklace. I straightened everything up so that it was neat. I leaned the small Mary plaque up against the side of the red plastic tube that held the candle.
There was a priest or a monk or somebody arranging things around a nearby altar, and I thought for a moment of asking him to look after the Mary plaque once everything was burned out the next morning. For a second, I thought of asking him to give it to someone afterwards, a child or someone, or I didn’t know who really. I was not making a lot of sense.
But then I was afraid that if I went up to him, I’d learn that leaving the plaque was prohibited, or something else would get in the way, or they’d make me move her candle, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of anything going wrong or even differently for her, so I said nothing.
I took a moment before lighting the candle, because I had the very real sense that this was it. The two of us were down to goodbye. Saying goodbye to my candle had become saying goodbye to her, and it was getting so that my feelings were so strong I couldn’t tell the difference or what was really what anyway. But none of that was important now.
I thought about how I’ve been telling myself for a thousand miles that I needed to unpack and let myself go where I go, meet who I meet, and let everyone come and let everyone go, the places and the people, the love and the loss. I’d made a personal religion out of this letting go, out of saying goodbye, and here I was again, one last time.
So after a moment I said, “Goodbye, Cathy” and then headed out into the sunlight towards Finisterre.
Epilogue
Monday, 7379273.863740735.056855.5647393644633.5757303.82
To Whom It May Concern:
Oy, vey. This is God. We’re going to have to interrupt. This entire time We’re biting Our Tongue, and, where to start?
So, at the end.
He arrives in Finisterre. It’s a perfect day: warm, cloudless, everything as requested. Three oil tankers swept off the horizon so our poet here can have his “Blank Atlantic” arrival. No mention of this, but that’s a running theme with him.
And this:
He takes a call from that lovely wife of his in the lighthouse parking lot. He isn’t thirty-two yards from “the end of the world,” gets in a huge argument and hangs up on her. This should have been the first chapter. Nine-hundred and eighty-seven miles – not a thousand I point out – and this is how he wraps it up! This is not what you call sticking the landing.
What does she need, you ask? She needs the name of the middle school coordinator at the son’s school. Simple request. Rose Fegelman. You can’t make this up, and believe Us,
We.
Know a Bit.
About Making.
Things.
Up.
Then, a whole sprinkler works after he spots the ocean. We have to tell you, We’re still very much on the fence about men’s tears. And then the way he stands there like he’s waiting for Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse! Trust Us on this:
That.
Will Not Be.
His Last.
Surprise.
Oh, the drama! The entire point of the journey, shown one hundred thirty-seven different ways – We went back and counted – and not a single lesson registered. There’s nothing in Finisterre! Finisterre n’existe pas! Let go! Lighten up! Get rid of what you don’t need! Be present with people! “Buen Camino” six-hundred and eighty-four times! We send him nothing but italics and exclamation points. Not a penny drops!
And to think he’s now instructing others like he paved the road on his elbows and knees, like he’s writing the training manual! Millenniums of dealing with these meshugenes, by the way. This is not new.
You know how many pilgrims got it? Four hundred and twelve. That’s not this year. That’s total. And none of them are alive today, so, trust Us:
You.
Will Not Be.
One of them.
Either.
And his sneaker boots! He doesn’t burn his boots. After all of that! If anyone in the history of the Camino should burn his boots, it’s the poet! You know what he burns? He burns his flip flops! Throwaway sandals he wore in the showers. This! This is too good to be true.
Why, you ask, does he burn them?
Because he “wants to keep the sneaker boots as souvenirs.” Sneakers! This is letting go?! You can’t make it up. The other pilgrims that day – We’ve forgotten their names – but they burn everything: their shoes, their socks, their water bottles, their backpacks, their airline tickets home. You could smell the plastic from Here. They walk back up to the lighthouse in nylon camping underwear.
Not to mention the Messi goal! Oy, gevalt! You can’t make it up. And believe me,
You People.
Know something.
About Making.
Things.
Up.
I won’t even get into the business in Montpellier.
“Thoughts and prayers” as you all say far too often for my taste.
God
I need to tell you this quickly before my sense of it is gone.
I am home again now, and something very special that happened to me out there is, sadly, fading. When I was on the road, the most beautiful realizations were self-evident. Now they are elusive or subtle.
I find that the way it felt for me out there is not the way it feels for me now. I wonder if I can still do it, still find it, this special thing, I wonder if I can still have it happen. I’m finding new and perhaps better explanations for everything that seemed so marvelous and straightforward when I was walking along alone.
I’m only a few late-night conversations from realizing everything I tell you is rubbish. I’m a year out from wishing I hadn’t written anything down. I’m up to wondering if I’m not a blind man who saw, but a blind man who had a dream of seeing.
And so on and so forth.
I confess I’m a faithless and wavering soul, but I still have a pen and a conscience and a memory. And while I still believe the tiniest sliver in a god I might pray to, I will share what felt so obvious to me at the time, this dream of the blind man. Because it would be utterly faithless not to communicate it, a spiritual cowardice not to own it.
It was a grand experiment, this unpacking of everything, and this thing I need to tell you is the one sure thing I could tell you from my time out there in the wilderness. It was the ten-week takeaway. It was the one thing where I said this is true, and I didn’t know this before, and now I do.
*
Maybe God doesn’t speak at all.
Not to me. Not to anyone. Maybe there are only silent introductions. First you and you. Now you and you. Now him. Now her. Just all these different selves meeting each other. Maybe on and on forever into black eternity. Joining and separating. Binding and unbinding the self. This to that. That to this. Rolling and winding out.
Maybe when we let go of everything, when we untether, he, it, life, can float us more easily in the right direction towards the right person and make the next introduction. Maybe God is a Steering of Selves, some surprise ripple in the arcs of our personal trajectories.
Maybe this pilgrim letting go and unpacking makes the miracle possible, makes it possible to steer us, or maybe the letting go and unpacking makes it possible to see what was happening all along. But for a few marvelous weeks out there, I could see it that way every day.
It felt like the secret of life.
Just let go. Don’t do anything else. Watch what happens. If you are ever in trouble, I counseled myself at the time, remember what you learned here. Unpack everything. Simplify. Let go. Let go of things, of ideas, of people, of everything. Look up, look up, look up.
Float.
But no more with my minor miracles.
I will push too hard for you to believe me, and you’ll get quiet on me and think, well now, that’s not much of a miracle, and then you won’t believe me, and then I won’t believe myself either, and then nobody believes in anything.
And that’s not what I want at all, but that’s how it goes in the sharing of miracles. Maybe it’s better to keep them all under wraps while I’m trying to hang onto what’s left of mine for a moment longer.
*
No.
One more.
The simplest facts only.
After I passed the Finisterre lighthouse, I headed down an embankment of rocks and boulders. It was deserted that afternoon. There were three guys off to my left a ways down the hill.
There was a fire burning, and I could hear their voices floating over. They were laughing as they threw their boots and gear into the flames.
Then as I headed further down the hill, I spotted a woman alone, staring out at the sea. Her backpack was at her side. When she turned, I recognized her.
She was my Brazilian friend with the Zen candle from the restaurant all the way back in Atapuerca, the woman whose sister had died in the car crash, the woman whose story shaped the last three weeks of my walk. Her arrival timed up with mine weeks later and then to the hour.
We shared our stories from the cathedral. She took a handful of pictures and promised to send them. The guys who’d been burning their clothes had left by that point, but their fire was still burning.
We went over and threw some things into the flames.
We said Buen Camino.
And then I never saw her again.
Adam - I read this whole thing from start to finish over the course of a couple days. Really powerful and moving writing. I appreciate the depth of introspection that this camino provided for you and thank you for sharing it with us. All the best.
“I’m totally listening,” I tell them, running off…. Omg yes!
I’m loving this so much I’m inhaling it. Thank you 🙏 from the other side of the world.
I’m in the middle of a sabbatical year and suddenly discovered that I have 18 projects mid-flow and mastery is being chased in all of them without achievement of course! 🤣 Your beautiful writing is so what I needed today though I had a big list of projects for the morning. I’m sitting still and reading instead.