Category Archives: Mom

Julio and Marie Anne Leave Us, So We Can Evolve

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Burgos and the Museum of Evolution

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

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

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

Hasta Luego

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said.

“—wine.”

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

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

“Sure,” I said. “It’s English.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s vamoose,” I said.

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

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

Belorado and Jamón

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is now a vegetarian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Foot Massage – With or Without “Happy Ending?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embarrassed??

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

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

 

Leaving Santo Domingo de la Calzano

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

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

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

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

“That’s going in the blog!” I said.

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

“Let us never go to nothing,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Taciturn Waiter at the Cafe Leon

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

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

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

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

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

Mom had made it.  Over 20km!

Navarette, Azrofa, Santo Domingo de la Calzado

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Navarette

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

Marco, Italian, runs a hostel in Brazil

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

The Fiesta in Navarette

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

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

Penance on the Camino

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

The only triple-decker dormitorio so far

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

“Did you laugh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We walked about 20km from Navarette to Azofra.

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

Azofra

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday October 1, 2011 Santo Domingo

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

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

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

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

Prohibido Defecar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Pamplona to “Ave Maria” in Los Arcos

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Pamplona to Cizur Menor

I didn’t walk from Pamplona, as I was feeling very shaky.  I thought perhaps it was due to low

Lunch in Cizur Menor

blood sugar (the H’s hurt with each step) and I just couldn’t face even walking four miles.  Carrie, Marie Anne, and I took a cab with Cameron’s pack too.  In Cizur Menor was a lovely albergue, with a small pool filled with goldfish and turtles, blooming hydrangeas and other lovely foliage.  It was more like a small resort.  Julio cooked again and we sat outside and ate pasta.  I was pretty tired and in bed by 8:30.  I slept well until all the snoring started.  I got up at 2 for the bathroom again, then at 3:10 and once more at 4.  At 5:30 I gave up to handle my dental issues and have a cup of tea.

To Puente La Reina

We started out at 7:30 and walked approximately 8km, had a decent lunch, and walked through beautiful countryside that reminded me of Tuscany.  We had to climb up another hill, and down a rocky path, but the view on both sides and around us was well worth it.  Large fields, now empty and harvested, cypresses and blackberry bushes.  My foot started to hurt and it was getting hot, but I will not complain.

Finally, we came to Puente La Reina.  Beautiful old monastery. Upon arrival we were told that our backpacks hadn’t made it.  Julio took over, helpful as usual, helping us immensely with language.  We had the packs brought by taxi.  Marie Anne and I tried to find a grocery store, but, it being Saturday and a fiesta for running the bulls, everything was closed.  Lots of movement in town, with people sitting all over outside, picturesque houses again, with lots of flowers.

We went to see the old bridge and I took pictures.  Got the rest of our little family and

Puente La Reina

went to see the bulls being run.  A DJ played good loud music and Marie Anne and I danced.  It was so much fun.  Then the two little bulls came running up and down the street as young men tried to touch their horns.  The bulls sure looked tired after a while, but it was all in good fun.

Julio found a store and we invited a young man who has been walking from England since June.  Carrie has made a friend.  An older gentleman and artist.

Estella

Estella.  I call her the elusive, because I was under the impression that the town was only 19km from Puente La Reina, but the walk seemed to go on for a long time.  Problem was we got a late start due to some miscommunication, so we were behind everyone.  The path looked in some places like Douglas Pass, or in any case like the road to the Black Canyon.  We walked up the hill and I was really breathing hard.  When I reached the top, there was the little family giving me a standing ovation.  Then

Julio interrogates an olive tree

we saw lovely vineyards, hills, olive trees, and figs.  Julio picked some of each and offered them to me to make up for the lack of veggies.  Later, Julio cooked a whole pot of pasta, which we shared with others.

My legs are sunburned and red like lobsters.

The Way of the Camino

The way of the Camino is such that everyone, regardless of nationality or religion, is

English lasses with ready medical supplies

immediately helping.  The sharing and caring makes it so worthwhile.  They don’t ask your interpretation of the Bible before they’re willing to help.  No one holds himself above another.  Sometimes the aid is as small as a band-aid.  Other times, people stop and dig through their entire backpack to find what you may need.  People call out a friendly “Hola!” when the pass, and everyone wishes you “Buen Camino”.

When I rest for a minute to catch my breath, the ones who pass always ask if I’m okay.

The Long Road to Los Arcos

Morning came early and we hurried to get started, as I could not face another day with most of the time in 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Our journey today will be 21km to Los Arcos.  Again we made a good start in the cool morning mist.  The stars were shining and we heard the click-clack of the walking poles. (I have two BFFs, Preparation H and ibuprofen).  The many hills that I have to climb don’t elicit any more comments from me.  It is what it is.

The last two-plus kilometers were really, really hot, and it was all I could do to place one foot in front of the other.  Finally, we see Los Arcos, and I was soooo glad.  (It turned out to be 24km).

When we got inside the albergue, Julio was already there, helping us with the credentials.  The front desk was staffed with volunteers.  When it was my turn, one of them barked at me, “Do you speak English?”  I said “Yes”.  Then she said, “Well, how come he” – Julio – “has to do this for you?”  I didn’t understand her attitude or what she was getting at, and I said, “I’m sorry, but I feel really sick, and right now I can’t even manage my name.”

She looked at me and said, in the same tone, “What do you want me to do?”

I was so exhausted and in pain that this was all it took to make me tear up, and I said, “For what I have, there’s nothing you can do.”  Tears flowed freely, and I wondered whether we had walked into a prison camp by mistake.  Then my son took over and told her in no uncertain terms what he thought of her and her sour attitude.  Then Julio, in Spanish, said many words.  I stumbled off to find the dormitory before I collapsed, led by my son.

The Mourning Father

After a shower and a rest, I felt somewhat improved once more, and we decided to go and look at the cathedral.  When we opened the heavy, ornate door, I stood speechless in front of the golden splendor and beauty.  Gold, carvings, painted walls, and stunning decoration.  As we stood to gaze at some statues, Cameron put his hand on my lower back, where the tumor resides, and I felt the energy, and I was choked up and couldn’t speak.

I lit five candles, for four of my loved ones who had passed, and for the son of my friend Pat, her only son, who died last year not long after his marriage.  She misses him so.  After he died, instead of giving her a card, I had given her a small, potted tree for her to plant.

We sat in silence in the pews, when suddenly, there was this grand voice, starting “Ave Maria”.  We looked up in surprise, and I saw a lone man with both hands stretched before him, imploring the statute of Mary, who had her place of honor in the center of the altar.  His voice was brimming with emotion, and I started to cry.  I was remembering how violinists played “Ave Maria” at my brother Gunter’s wedding to Elfriede, and they were so beautiful and young.

Looking over at Marie Anne, I saw her crying too.  Everyone had stopped to sit or stand and listen.  Then the singer paused, and after a moment, he started another “Ave Maria”.  He went on for over ten minutes.  His voice carried, and the acoustics were phenomenal.  By this time, I was no longer thinking that he was singing from religious devotion, but from some other emotion.

He came down, and people approached him to shake his hand and thank him for his beautiful gift.  I also shook his hand and he said something in French, which I didn’t understand.  I just placed my hand over my heart to let him know how he touched me.  We walked to the courtyard and I was still wiping my face when I found out that he sang as a tribute to his son, who had died a short time ago, and that today would have been his birthday.  I looked at him as tears streamed down his face, and there was such deep pain (I cry as I write this).  I folded him into my arms and he sobbed, in English, “My son, my son”.

I could only touch my heart in silent communication.  Everyone – Cameron, Julio, Marie Anne, and a few others – was openly weeping now.  Later, when we returned to the albergue, we told the story, and everyone wanted to hear him sing.  They were affected the same way.

Morning Meditations in Logrono

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It’s a crisp morning in Logrono.  It’s going to be another beautiful day in Spain, if perhaps a bit hot, especially given our late start.  The women have gone ahead, while Julio and I sit in a café-bar called Ibiza and consume bocadillos and café con leche (me) and hot chocolate (Julio).  Julio reads El Pais, one of the national papers, and translates for me the occasional outrage.  Julio often sounds outraged, but you don’t ever detect

Julio sweetly presents Carrie with a stolen flower

real anger, resentment, or bad faith.  It’s more of a stance, like performance art done by someone who’s a comic at heart.

I’m now sitting at a table outside Ibiza, opposite a park.  The streets are largely deserted.  The dearth of thinking I have done on where I shall live, or what I shall write, or what direction to take next in my vocations, is more than a little surprising.  There was a time when I could not get certain topics off my mind.  Now I can walk and have nary a thought enter my head that’s aimed more than a few hours into the future.

But I must credit my instinct with knowing what I need, and apparently what I need is, truly, a break from the thinking and weighing and analysis.  Indeed, yesterday I had an intimation, a sense, that the detachment I feel from the life I led before the trip would prove to be fertile ground for feeling my way into what’s next.  I had the sense that I needed to quiet the chatter of before so as to be receptive to the whisperings of what I might want now.  This is a change from what I expected, which was to have ideas drop into my head via the alchemical process of walking meditatively.

Some of the Spanish cheeses are delicious.  Yesterday I discovered ventero, a soft cheese reminiscent of freshly-made parmesan.

I’m hoping Mom’s ailments do not worsen.  It would be ironic if, on this spiritual-

Mom claps along in Puente La Reina

emotional-health pilgrimage, her health deteriorated simply because she could not get access to the food she needed.  Her diet in the U.S. is so rarefied and esoteric (compared to what now passes for nutrition in our country) that she usually has to shop and cook for herself to stay on it.  It’s even more difficult to be a vegan in Spain than in the U.S., and that’s not even counting the pilgrim’s diet.  To eat as a vegan here would require her to do more investigation in each town, walk farther, and spend considerably more.

But her spirits are indefatigable.  There is so much life in her that it’s unimaginable that it could leave her anytime soon.

Soaking the feet

The Mourning Tenor on the Camino de Santiago

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In Estella, when I first met the Lebanese women, they told me that they’d spent a few

The Retablo

days traveling with a man who had recently lost his son.  “But tomorrow was the son’s birthday,” one of the women told me, “and I think he wanted to be alone.”

In Los Arcos there is a cathedral, the Iglesia Parroquial de Santa María de la Asunción,

The cupola and retablo (Mary at lower left)

that was built over a period of 600 years.  It betrays a mélange of styles, from Mannerist (~ 1530s to 1600) and Baroque (late 1500s to early 1700s) to Churrigueresque (late 1600s to early 1700s) and Rococo (1700s).  We walked through all of it and I took the pictures now on Facebook.  We sat down near the back of the church.  It was quiet.  There were perhaps eight people in it.

Suddenly, from behind and above us, from the choir, we heard a magnificent voice.  We turned to see a small, white-haired man, in a blue shirt and shorts like swim-trunks,

Mary in the central retablo

with his arms spread before him, perhaps toward Mary in the retablo, and he was singing “Ave Maria”.  I immediately turned on the video of my SLR camera.

For ten minutes, he sang three haunting versions of “Ave Maria” – Schubert’s, Gounod’s, and one we didn’t recognize – as the handful of us in the church simply sat motionless, aware that we were in the midst of something rare, powerful, and beautiful.  “My heart was beating so fast,” Julio would later say.  He sat on one side of a pew behind me, and Mom sat at the other end of it, wiping away tears.

The amazing cupola

By the time he was finished, I had walked with my camera up to the choir.  Again and again he reached his hands out over the bannister at which he stood, in supplication.  He reached the end of his last “Ave Maria” and turned around, drained, and made his way to a pew where two of his friends sat.  He sat down briefly, and then they all stood up and walked past me.  “Grazie,” I said.  He nodded at me and walked out the door.

Our group went outside into the quiet and light of the cloister, still emotional, and then

I change the mood by pointing out that Mary´s pose makes her look a lot like the Buddha

he was there too, like a magnet, but also looking frail, spent, and awkward, with tears in his eyes.  Seeing Mom’s own tears, he leaned toward her and said, in Italian, “I sang to remember my son.”  Marie Anne translated this, and Mom reached for him and hugged him.  He seemed to receive this awkwardly.  We were all crying.

Marie Anne and Julio thought he was Italian.  Julio thought he heard the day of his singing was the anniversary of his son’s death, perhaps even the third, rather than his birthday.

He would sing again that night, after mass, from the front of the church.

The next morning, he and his friends passed us on the Camino trail, in the dark.  His two friends walked on either side of him, and one step back.

Viana and the Monastic Life

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To Viana

Last night in Los Arcos Julio and I shared two bottles of Rioja with our young friends Steffi, of Germany, and Jethro, of England.

Julio wanted to get up at five in the morning.

“Julio, that’s not humane.  I still have three hours of REM sleep left at five.  I wouldn’t ask a dog to get up at five.”

I may as well have gotten up at five.  Between the noises in the night, the rioja Julio forced down my throat, and my worsening cold, I slept fitfully.  I woke up feeling at least as sick as yesterday, but I was not going to take the bus again.  And on the evidence of today’s mostly very pleasant walk, I see that it’s more than possible to walk 20K even when you feel sick.  The way I feel at 6a.m. is apparently not predictive of how I’ll feel later on.

The countryside was beautiful today.  At first, we couldn’t see any of it:  we were underway at a quarter to seven, guiding ourselves by looking slightly away from the path so that the rods of our eyes, or perhaps it’s the cones, could discern the slightly lighter path from the surrounding field.  The sky was clear and the stars were popping.  We walked toward Venus, which is as close to romance as the Camino gets.  After an hour or so the sun stretched tentative orange fingers from east to west.  The light before and just after dawn was something to behold, draping soft warm tones over the ploughed brown of the furrowed fields, the yellows of the grasses, the dozens of different greens of the olive trees, the small but numerous vineyards, and, later, the pines and almond trees.  We were walking through 19th-century landscape paintings.  We ate almonds from the trees and blackberries from their bushes.

The physical pains are mostly receding, at least for me. Soon we may all be enjoying ourselves as Julio does. Today I experienced moments of real enjoyment in the rhythm of stick-stick-sticking my way across the landscape, taking in the smells and the light and shadow.

We spent a good part of the day walking with (or near, because no one on the Camino walks at the same pace for more than a little while) two pleasant, lovely lasses from England, one from Leeds (Jenny), the other from London (Katrina).  Their good natures and medical kits came in quite handy, the latter for Mom’s wasp bite and my first burgeoning blister. Katrina just stopped by our dorm room to get this blog’s address, saying they were taking the bus onward in the morning and we’d likely not see them again, so now they’re here, practically famous. Do come walking in the U.S., girls!

Meanwhile, the Koreans still dress like Himalayan mountaineers on expedition.  Their entire heads and faces are covered with hats and bandannas.  They wear glacier glasses, long-sleeved jackets, and gloves – every last bit of skin or hair is covered against the sun.  I was passing one of them, seated, her features only barely apparent beneath all this protection, when she pointed at my feet and chortled merrily to her friends (if non-English speakers could ever be said to “chortle” – Lewis Carroll invented the untranslatably English word by combining “chuckle” and “snort”).

Julio told me more about what he said to the Belgian woman yesterday.  “I tol’ hair, ‘Why are you here?  You don’ speak the language, and in your veins there is no blood, only Coca-Cola.’”

“You said Coca-Cola?”

“Yes, to do this job you have to have some dynamism, not be there with your lists and your forms.”

“Did she understand you?”

“Of course not!” he said.  “I had to repeat myself.”

“They did seem to be unaware of the thousand-year-old tradition of the hospitalero, didn’t they?  Kings were constantly funding hospices for the care of sick and injured pilgrims – even leprosariums.”

“That is correct.”

Outside a café-bar where we stopped, Mom got stung by a wasp, twice, on her big toe.  She cried out and hopped around and we found her a chair and some ice.  “You’re going to have to suck it out,” she said to me, pointing to her leathery big toe.

“You’re thinking of snakes, Mom.  You get bit by a snake, I’ll be there.”

The Monastic Life

I didn’t realize the extent to which we would come to live an almost monastic existence on the Camino.  We wake up when it’s dark.  We then eat bread, perhaps with butter.  We strap on a hunchback (Mom calls her backpack “Quasimodo”) as a Catholic penitent might put on a hairshirt.  We walk, and walk, and walk. At nine or ten we stop for a snack. It’s an indescribable pleasure to simultaneously sit down after walking and eat after nearly fasting. The mid-morning break is one of my favorite times. Julio says that his favorite part of walking — and he told me he walks 250-300 days a year — is the eating.

At around one o’clock we check into the albergue and then Mom, Marie Anne, and Julio go shopping. I stay behind to wrestle with wi-fi or my Vodafone USB connection, upload photos, write blog posts, and check emails. We eat lunch communally around a wooden table, simple meals of real food, not far divorced from nature.

We sleep, often under nothing more than a sheet (in my case, a bedbug-resistant silk enclosure) on mattresses as thin as adult diapers, in bunk beds located in chaste dormitories, with people called pilgrims, or peregrinos.

I don’t have privacy, or no more than a medieval pilgrim might have had during stolen moments in an outhouse.  There is no night-life in the small towns, and even in the larger towns where there is night-life, it’s irrelevant to us:  hostel doors close at 10, or even 9:30.  There is no TV.  Indeed, just having a computer with Internet access and iTunes makes me more plugged-in than most, though all the hostels have computer terminals for hire.

Lights go out at ten.  I wake up in the dark.  And walk again.

And women do not enter anywhere into it.

This must be good for me somehow.

La Bruja en Los Arcos

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The Albergue Municipal in Los Arcos was staffed by volunteers, a Belgian couple.  The man, rotund and pink-cheeked, was pleasant enough.  I checked in and had barely gone upstairs to my dormitory, Bed #6, when I heard Julio downstairs.  The woman was telling Julio that he could not reserve any beds for the rest of the group, though they were only minutes behind and he was holding in his hand both their passports and Camino credentials.

“You are saying,” Julio said, “that if a person comes, first time on the Camino, has cancer, you cannot put her near her son?”

“It is not allowed to make reservations in advance,” she said.  “All Spanish outside,” she said, motioning to him.

Julio made a face to me and then motioned at himself to calm down.  He walked back to Table #1 to fill out his papers.  “Bloody hell,” he said.  “They don’t know what they are doing.”

“Volunteers,” I said, trying to placate him and avoid a scene.

The husband sidled up to us and said, “Yes, we are volunteers.”

Julio digested this for only a moment.  “If you are volunteers,” he said, “then you have no right to complain.”

Soon after, Mom and the others arrived from their 20km hike.  Mom looked exhausted.  “It was so hot!” she said.  “I had to borrow Carrie’s pant legs because my sunburn was so bad.” I jumped up to fill out the forms they needed to sign at Table #1 so that they could then be permitted to approach the table of the Belgian woman, Table #2.

She sat there with her arms crossed and cited to Julio one made-up rule after another, many of which don’t exist in other hostels.  This went on for some time.  My mother stood there clutching her papers next to Julio, who was seated.

“Do you speak English?” she asked my mother.  My mother nodded.  “So what’s the problem?”  On her visage was the implacable calm of the righteous.

Mom was confused.  “I don’t have a problem,” she said quietly.  “I’m just waiting here.”

“He arranges everything for you?” the woman demanded, pointing to Julio.  “Even though you speak English?  Why do you not handle this yourself?”

“I’m sorry,” Mom said.  “I am just feeling sick and he has been helping me out.”

“Then how can I help you?”

“What I have you can’t help,” Mom said.

Mom’s back was turned to me, so I didn’t see when she began to cry.  Now I moved in and spoke to the woman.

“You have a future in bureaucracy,” I told her.  I’m not proud of it.  “But now it’s time to have a little compassion.  As we have told you several times now, we are a group.  Julio told you that she has cancer and wants to be near me.  Now, do not speak to her again.”

Mom was just trying to escape, though, blindly stumbling down the hall, so I helped her upstairs and left Julio to deal with the aggressive Belgian.  We could hear him laying into her for some time, apparently without result, and then he came upstairs, agitated, and in Spanish recounted to Marie Anne his agitation.  He ended with a single word.

“Bruja!”  Witch!

It took him some time to calm down.  I heard him singing in the shower, and it did not sound like the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” so that was good.

And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave

I knew the skillful thing for me to do would be to remain upstairs for a while, so I wrote this post.

So Mom and I will sleep in separate dormitories tonight, that the earth may continue to spin on its axis.

Toward Los Arcos and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

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The End of Childhood is the End of Certainty

I won’t get into how, but I found myself explaining to Carrie what I know of the imago, or our image of what attracts us in a mate, and the operation of transference, rationalization, the unconscious, and denial.

The moment we realize that our parents, teachers, or other mentors are flawed – that they are human – is the end of innocence.  The god-like are seen in all their messy humanity.  To come to see the limitations of those we look up to and depend upon is a necessary, if painful, rite of passage.  But not everyone makes this passage.  Not everyone is ready, in this sense, to grow up.

The fundamentalist, the narcissist, the dependent and the victim for example, will simply double-down, insisting on their belief in certainty, such as in someone’s infallibility (in the case of the narcissist, his own), or the inerrancy and clarity of a text.  The fundamentalist purports to see absolute clarity in texts that are not only not clear, but were never claimed to be clear by anyone at anytime before Darwin.  The entirety of modern-day American-style fundamentalism is not “fundamental” to the Bible at all, but a relatively recent invention of the mid-1800s.  Rapture theology, for example, did not occur to anyone before it occurred to the Englishman John Darby in the 1830s.  How clear could it be?

But in the black-and-white, in easy answers, there is comfort and certainty, and comfort and certainty were never needed so much as when Darwin’s natural selection and geologist George Lyell’s dating of rocks, in the mid-1800s, both showed the earth to be far older than a literal reading of the Biblical myths would suggest.  Indeed, before the advent of science and reason in the Enlightenment, which was terrifying to some of the pious (and which Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann recently, and revealingly, identified as the root of all of America’s problems), no religion ever insisted upon the historicity of their sacred texts.  They did not take it literally.  They saw the tales as mythos, the stuff of finding meaning and of understanding the sacred, and not as logos, the province of fact, rationality, history – or science.

Once you confuse mythos with logos, it becomes difficult to think clearly.  Once you start building museum dioramas, as one can now find in Kentucky, in which humans frolic with dinosaurs, purportedly only a few thousand years ago, you will have so successfully rejected science that you are now at liberty to dispute without either evidence or science-based rebuttal the nearly universal conclusion of scientists worldwide that the earth is warming dangerously.  The same science that sends people into space, powers GPS, runs your cell phone, and heals the sick is dismissed when it runs into conflict with our beliefs, tribal mores, or other indices of identity.

If we are meaning-seeking creatures, then it is great comfort for meaning to come easily, and for answers to be readily at hand.  Humans fear few things so much as uncertainty.  The unknown has always been terrifying to our species.  And so we may seek to remain in, or return to, the comforts, the lack of uncertainty, of childhood.

On the Cushion

Yesterday morning I found myself once again thinking, Now, why am I doing this again….this Camino?  Is it fun?  If it is, will it remain fun?  Is fun even the right question?  I have slowed down a great deal, but apparently not so much that I have stopped craving more stimulation than is available.  Rural trails, small towns largely emptied of the young (or the middle-aged), few cafes, no night life.  I don’t even have books.  I suppose I could download more onto my MacBook’s Kindle app, but lights go out at ten.

Here is what is different.  I am not doing much on online dating sites.  I don’t check my phone for emails or texts – there are none there.  I’m not doing any coaching, and sending and receiving few emails about it.  Some of the Tourette’s tics (but only Type I – I don’t get to shout or curse, damnit) are largely in remission.  Because Tourette’s is exacerbated by stress, I take this as the clearest, most objective evidence of change.  One tic that had become quite prominent over the summer arose from an urge to pop my left knee as you might crack your knuckles.  I haven’t seen it in about a week.

Yes, this is embarrassing.  I’m out now.

And I’m still not giving much thought to where to live.  The house in Bend already seems a memory.  By the time I return, it will be completely out of mind – just as my things will be out of the house and in storage.  I may never see it again, and that’s all right.  The letting go really sped up in the end, surprising my expectations.

Nevertheless, I am reminded of meditation retreats, where people may at times find themselves wanting to run away, screaming.  But that is exactly the point of watching the mind.  You will eventually see things that you aren’t keen to see.  Resentment, cravings, attachments, irritability, annoyance, jealousy, rage, desire, rejection, discomfort.  Meditation doesn’t make the unpleasantness of the outside world go away – it brings our relationship with the outside world into sharp focus.  The path to any kind of enlightenment isn’t filled with peak moments.

You could even say the path doesn’t go anywhere in particular.  The goal may simply be to stay on the path, the middle path, in which we neither cling to, indulge in, or identify with, nor push away, reject, repress, or condemn.  We may choose either erroneous path out of a craving for certainty, whether the need to have an identity or an explanation we can cling to, or the need to reject what is going on in order to hold on to the storylines we have, or to avoid painful feelings.  The middle path is the one where we observe our experience without judgment (pushing away) and without attaching ourselves to it (clinging).  Only then can we see clearly, and make decisions rooted in what we know to be best for us.

To Los Arcos

Monday morning. Woke up many times in the night, and knew I was sick.  I can feel it in my chest.  Further dreams of seeing clearly, and of letting go.  I decided to take the bus to Los Arcos (“The Bows,” named for the decisive role archers played in winning a great battle) rather than suffer through a 20k walk.  Mom and Carrie sent their bags ahead and the group of four left me at the bus station.  At the bus station I ran into three young Israeli women whom I’d seen prior albergues, and two Lebanese women I met last night.  I helped them find the right bus and introduced them all to one another.  The countryside we passed through was gorgeous, all greens and browns and yellows, everywhere rolling hills and citadels and iglesias, and granite cliffs in the distance.

Once in Los Arcos, I walked around for a bit, finding the stores (drinkable yogurt,potato chips, muesli bars), the public hostel (albergue municipal, always the cheapest), and a Café-Bar called Abascal, where I had a green-and-red-pepper omelette bocadillo and tea.  I leafed through a Spanish magazine and got caught up on which American celebrities are sleeping with which other American celebrities.  I still don’t understand who Kim Kardashian is, or why she is.  I especially can’t understand what would justify the Spanish caring.

In the tiny plaza outside Abascal I sit abreast of my new amigos, or the local retired community of hombres.  A seventy-something man walks back and forth over the 35 yards as if counting steps, as if trying to catch the distance in the act of being different on just one of his passes, and thus reveal even una plaza to be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one big cosmic joke.