We´re pilgrims

Yesterday was the hardest day of the trail so far. 35k in a blizzard, the wind so strong the snow was blowing horizontally into my face. I kept wanting to take a picture of it, but what the fuck. Take out a white towel and look at it and that´s what it was. A huge black cloud lingered above, and below it seemed like a strip of promising grey light, but the cloud did not budge. I know weather moves, I kept thinking, I´ve been watching swirling weather forecasts for decades. Time passes, weather moves. This cloud did not move. I laughed for two hours about it. But as I descended on the other side of the pass, the snow turned to rain and I couldn´t laugh anymore. Soaked to the bone, I wanted to get to Ponferrada. The path was interminable. A Spanish air conditioner repairman, 34, also a pilgrim, said a couple days before that he´d meet me there for a Saturday night blast. The first time I saw him in the rain a few days ago, we shared a hotel room because the refuge was closed in that village on Sundays. The refuges charge pilgrims 3 or 4 or 5 Euros, so the hotel blew our budget. He acted holy, spoke of faith, the magic of the trail, his belief. After two days he was talking only of girls. And Ponferrada on a Saturday night. "Bad pilgrim," I called him, a joke he repeated 24 times without provocation or development or any added nuance. When I stumbled out of bed at 7 in a refuge, he would see me in the hallway and yell "Bad pilgrim!"

When I finally made it to Ponferrada, it was 9 p.m., he was nowhere to be found, and all the girls of Ponferrada were dancing in costume on the streets in a Carnaval celebration that my legs were too tired to take me to. "If all the fun is out there, why are we in here," I asked an auto worker pilgrim in the kitchen as I ate my basic noodles and tomato sauce.

"We´re pilgrims," he said, startled by the question. I realized then that in Spain this pilgrimage is a culturally elaborated phenomenon, like running a marathon in our country. It would be like asking someone the night before a marathon, "Why aren´t we out at the bars?" "Um, because we´ve been training for this for six months?"

Today was totally different, a sunny spring-like day in the 40s. Sunday, a day of rest, I took it only 23k. This morning I cooked at 7 a.m. for six pilgrims. On the trail I actually smelled a blossom of an almond tree. Perhaps that´s what opened me up. I had my first genuine emotion in 800 kilometers of walking. I had stopped to read Look Homeward Angel, and at Ben´s death, the mother clipping a lock of her son´s hair. I wished I´d had a lock of my old man´s hair. I took the bone (of dog?) from the strap of my pack where it had been hanging for some reason, some vague representation of death above the branch of life that had slipped out in the blizzard, and it became his tibia, and I held a funeral service for him there in the mountains by the side of the trail.

To not break anything

Risking my life in the past couple hours, nearly passing the night on the freezing meseta. I knew a few months ago when I heeded Rilke, "You must change your life," that it was either Iraq or something else. And the only thing I thought Hemingway had to teach me (before reading For Whom the Bell Tolls) was "Live all the way up." Iraq would have meant not only threat to my physical life (of that I have little concern) but of my spiritual life (the moral vacuity of war). My photographer Johnson and I had our Iraqi translator lined up, ready to go, but we did not. I chose peace, a march across Spain in January, utterly alone in the world, with only my own thoughts to drive me crazy. And here I was with another choice. Stop with the sun two inches off the horizon at the town a K or two to the left, or continue along the Roman road to see what we could find, with no sign of settlement on the h0rizon. My MP3 was playing the same four songs over and over, a Pogues "Ratatattat," followed by a Sugar Hill or something "25 years old, my mother god rest her soul," then a Beth Orton "put a little love in your heart, come on," then a Mozart piano piece, which every time it played I was convinced would be the last thing I would ever hear of music and I didn´t mind.

I would find an embankment to block the wind, would curl up in my sleeping bag, put on all the shirt and my sister´s Haverford sweatshirt and nicked sweater and maybe tie a shirt around my head for warmth and wait for the rains that would kill me. As I walked I took a digital photo of the impending dark and the lunacy of my decision. I made a digital farewell recording to my nephews, telling them my recklessness wasn´t the only choice, just one choice, that they could find the safe route from others. There was nothing but an empty plain I was heading into. Like eastern Montana, I thought, with a very distant snow-covered mountain range. Still, my chances were pretty good in my lame purple sleeping bag, right?

Some lights appeared on the horizon. Were they Leon, 25k away? Impossible to tell, just that I wouldn´t reach them for a few hours at least.

Finally, nearing pitch back, with no flashlight nor map (intentionally, as only Chris McCandless would understand), I came upon a village off to the left a kilometer, paused, crouched to rest the weight on my back, took off the headphones, there was no decision-making capacity left, but something said play it safe. Maybe it was having spilled that manifesto of risk that allowed it. I headed left. Trudging through puddles and mud into an empty village with a cat wailing with diabolical need. Black-toothed woman pointed me to the bar. Bar with two men, pointing me to a refuge. Refuge manager tending her 90-year-old parents. There is a tipping point in the size of a town that will look after you. A few hundred. This one was 100, meaning people shepherded me around, would not leave me to freeze. The last town, Sahagun, they would have without a blink.

At the bar, the well-dressed men were impressively immune to the game show on TV. The man with the cravat pivoted away from the screen. When the man in the middle, in a frayed wool blazer, cracked a joke, it was the man in the cravat who cackled uncontrollably with laughter, the man on the left stone-faced. The theory of proximity didn´t apply, since the cracker was pointed toward stone-face. (See explication of theory, or just go to stand-up show and see if you laugh more than during showtime at the apollo.)

Suddenly, the bartender walked in. It was a spitting image of Mark Davis, cub Valley News reporter. Except in WAS Mark Davis. I stared at him and waited for the typical banter. I was stunned when he started rattling off some Spanish. "A las quatro media..." he said. I knew he was right, coo-cooing with his baby behind the bar, instead of searching the TV screen for impossible dreams of poonani. And yet what was I doing here? Not looking for poonani, of course, but for the spiritual guidance melange of the land and my limits pushed. Why wasn´t I behind a bar with a baby of my own?

I had but one objective for the night. To drink an entire bottle of 12.5% red wine without breaking anything. There was an incredible red sausage on my plate, two eggs, bread tasting sweet, a noodle soup, it was all too much ecstasy to answer the man´s questions across from me. He was wearing a fatigue jacket labeled "Harvard, California," was about 75, made a money sign when I said United States.

"Who´s that?" I barked to the man in the cravat, of the wasting away hospital patient on TV.

"He´s a Basque, protesting with a hunger strike. Why don´t they talk to the family members of the 25 people he killed!"

"He´s going to die," I said.

"Yes, tomorrow," he said.

"Kaput."

"Kaput, yes, good!" he said.

Why the preoccupation with the virgin?

In 1494 a German pilgrim came along the camino. He rode on horse to Burgos, then parked his horse and switched to a mule. He complained that in Spain you have to sleep on the floor, you have to eat barley, and you will find no oats or hay for your horse. "In summary, Spain is a terrible place."

So at least I´m not the only pilgrim to complain about this place. One of the pleasures of being a non-practicing anthropologist is that I can take off my cultural-relativism dress from time to time. Nation of nervous gerbils!

Yesterday the librarian called the police on me. I had walked through the open front door and begun doing research (on the German, among others) in the open conference room, when a policeman came up to me. He was gentle enough, but still. How embarrassing in front of the 90-year-old woman beside me doing her daily reading of the encyclopedia.

"So the door is open but you´re closed?" I asked. Sounds like a Hindu puzzle. Take me to prison for doing research motherfucker!

He explained the rules, asked where I was saying, looked over the books I was reading.

When he left, I went to the librarian, one of millions of nervous gerbils inhabiting this forsaken peninsula, and asked, "Was it really necessary to call the police on me? How can a man concentrate on the Middle Ages when he had just had a policeman touch his arm?"

"But you cannot be in the building before 5 p.m.," she said.

"Why don´t you post the hours outside. Nothing is indicated there. I walked in through an open door."

"Everyone in town knows the hours."

"But for 1,000 years you have had foreigners passing through here, and like me, they might not know the hours." I was feeling like a German and not happy about it.

So, my second run-in with the police on this trek. Back in Roncesvalles, the first stop of the trek after crossing the mountains dividing France and Spain, I was briefly suspected of murder.

That´s because I was the last person to see a Quebecoise before she disappeared near the summit, by the Virgin Mary statue. I had mounted a rescue operation, leading ten men in my rusty Spanish, maps spread out on the table like a general. "This is where I think she fell off the trail!" I barked.

As journalists know, firemen are nicer than cops. The rescue workers dashed off to find her, and the cops stayed behind to interrogate me.

"You were together until the virgin?" one asked.

"Yes."

"What was your motive in separating at that point?"

"I wanted to write in my journal. She wanted to keep going. She´s a very independent woman."

"Where did you separate?"

"By the virgen, virgin, vierge," I was still wrestling with the word virgin, and half my words came out French.

Another cop entered. "Why this preoccupation with the virgin?" he asked.

"That´s where they separated," another cop answered.

Eventually she was found asleep at the refuge where we´d begun the day in France. She´d gotten lost, and a kind man sent by Virgin Mary had driven her back to the inn.

It was the second time I was the last person to see a woman on a trail before she´d gotten lost. Both were found, I swear. The first was in Alaska, a woman from Houston who passed me along a trail north of Fairbanks, then disappeared for a week. I was in California when I read about her recovery.

Attila the Hun

It seems finding the right balance between aloneness and togetherness is a key to contentment. The endless tidal dance of moving apart and coming together, replicated daily.

The happiest pilgrims I´ve met so far are those who have figured out some such arrangement. Attila the Hungarian (that´s right, named after the Hun, a source of pride for Hungarians, he explained) was miserable the first 11 days of his pilgrimage, alone. Then he ran into Tomas, a German, and the two have been walking alone during the days, with Tomas the faster walker, and meeting up every night in refuges to drink wine and chat and feast. There are not many pilgrims in the winter, so it´s good to have someone to talk to.

But I think I may have destroyed their relationship.

Snoring is always an issue in the dormitories of these refuges, so I joked: "Okay, tonight we have a snoring contest--who can snore the loudest." There was puzzled silence, some laughter. Looking at fat Attila, I thought for sure he snores. "Does he snore, Tomas?"

"Yes, he snarks quite loud." (apparently Tomas thinks the word is snark)

"Oh my god," said Attila, who carried a sense of wonder at everything around him. "Oh my god. You never told me." He kept repeating this. He was in utter shock at this betrayal.

"Call you girlfriend and ask her if you snark. You keep me awake every night with your snarking. But it´s ok. That is a real part of the camino. It is no reason
to end the companionship."

"Oh my god. Oh my god. I don´t believe it. Well you are screaming in your sleep every night. And I told you. And it is such a shock to my system to wake every
night to screaming, in German, words I don´t understand. Why so much anger?"

"I´m angry because I can´t sleep because of your snarking. Anyway, it´s okay, let´s change the story. Anyone know a good story? Tell us about your old Perron," he said to a Chileano who is biking the trail (confusing Argentina and Chile).

"I think you mean Pinochet," I said. We talked about dictators for awhile; I endured the familiar feeling of everyone looking at my reaction when the Bush-Hitler analogy is made; and I noticed that Attila wasn´t participating. He was staring vacantly into space.

"What are you thinking about right now, Attila?" I asked. "Snoring?"

"Yes. Oh my god. I can´t believe it. He never said anything."

"Because I can´t change it," Tomas said. "What can I do. You know I even thought of calling his cell phone, letting the voicemail pick up, and recording his snarking, just so he could hear it for a few seconds how he snarks. Yes, it would cost me one euro. But I think it would be worth it."

"Okay, really," Attila said. "I think we should change the story. It´s like we are girlfriends, now. I propose next time we sleep in separate rooms."

"Does anyone know the song from the medieval ages?" I asked. I sang for them a camino song from the medieval ages, which they seemed to enjoy, and Tomas went off to bed with a smile and Attila looked dazed.

Take Napoleon!

After lying on my back around France for a week, nursing the bathtub-related injury to the lumbago region, I set off for the trail. I had already hiked 500 kilometers the summer before in France, and now I wanted to do the Spanish part.

The traditional starting point for the past 1,000 years for the Spanish Camino de Santiago Compostela, a 500-mile walk to the tomb of Saint James in Northwestern Spain, is the French border town of St. Jean Pied du Port. That´s where I hitched a ride, winding up at the pilgrims´ refuge of an old Basque woman named Jeanine.

Jeanine, 72, gave me two backrubs per day to try to get me to the point where I could stand up straight. Three days, no progress. Still bent forward, I managed to walk the cobblestone streets, mount the steps to the old fortress on the hill, take a walk along the canal with a French copy of St. Augustine´s Confessions and spend the day coming up with what I felt to be a new theory of religion. (I´ll have to hit the anthropology literature to see if it´s already been done.)

Everything I did or said while staying in the refuge would result in these words from Jeanine: "That annoys me!"

"Did you buy any bread today?" Jeanine asked on Sunday.

"No."

"That annoys me! What are you thinking? The stores are closed tomorrow. No bread! Really."

On Monday, she said, "When are you going to get better? That annoys me! Pilgrims are supposed to stay here one day only. Here let me give you a back rub. Poor thing. When you finally get better, the hike is straight up into the mountains for eight kilometers. Ha ha ha! You are going to suffer. It´s not easy. Up up up. Finally, you cross the Spanish border and descend into Roncesvalles. Dangerous in the winter, eh? Weather unpredictable. Pilgrims die all the time. On both side of the trail, the cliffs go straight down. Wow!"

"Jeanine, have you ever hiked the trail?"

"No, never."

Not many pilgrims pass through in the winter, so I had a room to myself most of the time. One night with a fierce snorer from Spain. We stayed up late talking about the Iraq War. We compared life under Franco and life under Bush. The chief difference being that Bush was elected and the people believe him, and Franco was not and people did not.

But whenever a pilgrim passed through, Jeanine would dispense her advice on the trail, and no one would think to ask whether she´d seen the trail for herself.

"Take the Route of Napoleon!" she shouted after a group of Italians. "Sunny weather, route of Napoleon. Napoleon!"

Paris Den of Torture

Back in Paris, the German and I shared the floor of Chantille´s small apartment in the 20th arrondissement, near Place Gambetta. He had hurt his back in her bathtub before my arrival, so that he walked at a 60-degree angle. There is no shower curtain, so you have to squat in the tub. The bottom of the tub is uneven as well, with two perches for your feet. He was trying to wash his hair when it happened.

That got him the mattress against one wall. I slept perpendicular to him on my bedroll, my feet around the level of his waist. At my head was Chantille, perpendicular to me. Imagine the capital letter I, with me the cross-beam. I was still jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, but every time I fell asleep I would snore. The German would squeeze my toes as if they were the nose of a clown. I would roll onto my side but invariably roll back onto my back, the snoring position. Another squeeze. I marveled at the efficiency of this torture device, as if German-engineered. At my head a beautiful woman, untouchable. At my feet an enigmatic force that would startle me awake every time I finally fell back to sleep.

In the morning, Chantille gone to work, I tried to ignore the German. He was catching a flight back to Cologne, so I thought the goodbye would be more effortless if I feigned sleep. But there was so much of the plastic-bag sound that my curiosity drove me to sit up. What could possibly take an hour to wrap in plastic bags? My lenses were out, I couldn´t see a thing, except for his mischievous smile: "I tortured you," he said.

Soon he was by the front door, stooped forward in his backpack. I said goodbye but noticed he was still standing there. He was giving me a hand signal. I crawled forward to read it. It was a Star Trek greeting, the words for which he delivered in German. I had no idea what to do.

Watching him hobble around with that pathetic bathtub back injury for two days filled me with one certainty: the same thing would happen to me. Sure enough, I was standing on the uneven tub bottom, reaching down to dry a foot after a shower and PING, there went a muscle in the lower back.

This was just before I was set to recommence my pilgrimage along Le Chemin de Saint-Jacques Compostelle (El Camino de Santiago Compostela), so the timing was poor. I spent the next five days lying on the floor, on the mattress where the German had been. I felt no pain when I was lying still. After awhile, I would think, "What the hell am I doing just lying here like a lazy ass?" I would try to get up, scream, lie back down. This happened too many times to admit.

This is how to eat foie gras

I found myself in a castle north of Paris on New Year´s Eve day. I had spent the previous night on an Air France flight, so I took a nap upstairs in one of the chambers most of the afternoon. When I awoke, I had no clue where I was. The candelabra beside my bed that I would use to navigate the corridors at night, the peeling walls, the high ceilings, the view out the window of trees and lawn in the whipping wind.

I made my way groggily down the stairs and into a room where I had heard some laughter. There was a somewhat familiar face, my friend with the castle, and there was a girl who turned out to be her younger sister peeling potatoes at a table by the fire. The fireplace was huge, with a mostly carbon-covered first-person sentence molded into the ironwork behind the fire. There was a thin German with long blond hair talking in Spanish to a Peruvian woman he had met while living in Lima. My French was rusty (rouille), so I tried talking in English to the two of them, but it was so boring I wanted to go back to sleep. The French sisters insisted on doing all the prep work for the party, so all we had to do was talk and drink.

The aperitifs flowed, first kir then cassis, and soon the German was trying to get me to invest in a tourist compound in a Peruvian jungle where ruins had been discovered. "It´s going to be bigger than Machu Pichu," he said. "Just wait till the airport comes in."

I´m kind of a lightweight with the liquor, and I didn´t want to say anything offensive, as I am often tempted to do, so I tried to hold back, but the drinks were too good. Drinking kir is like downing fruit punch for five cents a cup at a summer stand. You get the water component right in your cassis, and that is irresistible as well. Then there´s the wine, mamma mia.

The German had taken a shine to me, so we were sitting next to each other on a couch so soft I felt engulfed like a small child. I must have mentioned I had made a couple short documentaries, because now he was saying, "What would you say if I told you there was a film about the German ambassador to Peru?"

"I´d say, ´What else is on?´"

He looked at me, a bit stunned. "I mean, this is Germany´s number one person in Peru. I have already filmed him for 120 hours."

"I mean, there would have to be something strange or ironic about this person for me to be interested. Does he hate the Peruvian people?"

"No."
¨
"Does he hate his job or is he uncomfortable with Germany´s past, or is there--"

"I mean, I keep the camera rolling, and sometimes you can really see the stress the job puts on him, I mean he´s constantly shaking hands and having to smile all the time, even when he´s in a bad mood."

In came another French sister and a brother, about 21 and 19 respectively. The boy had brought about four friends, and they huddled together giggling all night, only initially at my expense. The sister had just come back from India, where she is studying business in Calcutta. There was a punk girl on the couch mouthing the words to a song called, "Too Drunk to Fuck."

We moved to the long dining room table for dinner. It was 11:30, just before the new year. I fell in love briefly with the girl on my right until she pointed out that I was twice her age. Actually that did little to change things. I tried not to stare at her when it was the guy on my left doing the talking.

His name was Yves, and I had met him the summer before through the friend with the castle, who by the way was named Chantille and worked in public affairs in Paris. Yves taught guitar. I liked him because he didn´t hold it against me that I understood one out of every six jokes he cracked, all of them in the space of a minute. He always patiently tried to explain them, which never helped. I learned a smile and vacant stare into the middle distance, which seemed miraculously to not spoil the punchline moment.

A plate of foie gras went around. I had heard that they´d banned it in Chicago but I´d never seen it. I had also met people in Toulouse who said they´d grown up watching their grandparents force-feed the geese to bloat their livers.

"This is how you must eat it," said Yves. "You take a pretty big hunk of bread and you put a little bit on it and as you place it in your mouth you breathe, breathe, feel the taste course through your entire system, ahh!" His nostrils swelled, he stared up at the chandelier, the skin on his face trembled.

"It´s not so good," complained Chantille from the other end of the table. She made the same shrug and moue-thrust she always made when tasting a glass of wine, sometimes accompanied by a swiveling hand indicating "so-so," or "comme-ci, comme-ca."

Midnight came, everyone stood up and slowly circled the table, kissing each other on both cheeks. The men kissed each other but shook my hand. The college student to my right ignored my meaningful stare. I snapped myself out of it, gave a quick safe kiss. There are levels to the cheek kiss, ranging from the empty air kiss in the office to the contact cheek kiss to the suggestive one just outside the lips, which is the one Chantille then delivered to me.

We worked our way through the ground floor of the castle, moving to the next room, where another fire was underway. Yves broke out his guitar, played some Django Rinehart to show his skills and some sing-alongs that no one knew the words to in English, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan. His attention span limited him to fifteen-second morsels of each song, so that just as you were getting into it you were snapped out of it.

The kids and I retreated to a corner where we played a game in which you blow a small cork ball with puffs of air from a turkey baster to protect your goal. I wished my friend Rick was there, because it´s the kind of game we laugh wildly during, with all the ways you can blow the ball around.