Traveling with Joe

We have arrived in a small but quaint town called Estella after 5 days of hiking. Tomorrow we have our longest day yet which will take us past the 100km mark. (just under 60 miles). I’m not sure anybody has an exact figure on how long this route is; the signpost right outside of Ronscavales where we started said 790km but that was on the road. You can rest assured that driving from there is a far more direct route than we are taking considering that we are following what was once a Roman road. They might have been good engineers but they did not have the advantage of aerial surveys and satellites.

This group is completely different than the one I walked with in October. To begin with, there are only 6 of us. That makes 5 plus myself. Learning the names was easy as well since we have Margarita, Margaret, and Marjorie, June, and Eileen. I’m travelling with Marjorie, she likes Margaritas and Margaret lives in Australia which is where the Margaret River is. I remember June because she’s from Texas and I think about June bugs when I think of Texas and Eileen was the first person to fall so I think of her as “I Lean” (Too far). She fell on the side of the highway after we abandoned the snow packed trail so, from that point forward I have known my fellow trekkers by name.

Some of you might know that I decided to do my first Camino with absolutely no foreknowledge of what was to come. I heard about it on NPR, decided right then if Tim would let me go I was going to try and do it, found a Company that had a spot open on a trip and booked it. Then I went out of my way to not learn anything about it so I would not have any expectations when I got here. Other than almost dying the first week or some from not being physically prepared, it was an amazing experience. Obviously or I wouldn’t be back here a few months later if it weren’t.

But many of you have heard about the Camino from famous people. I want to talk about them and what you learned from their stories before I write much more about my experiences on the Camino. We have Paulo Coehlo, (1987), Shirley Maclaine (2001) and then the mother of all Camino movies, “The Way” from 2010 starring Martin Sheen and written by his son Emilio Estevez.

Paulo Coehlo came here in 1987. In that year less than 3,000 people registered with the Tourist Office to walk the Camino. By his own admission he spent the first 3 days walking in circles in the Pyrenees while his guide chain smoked lying on a rock. I assure you that anyone that smoked as much as his Guide would have been worthless by the time they hit the 2^nd mountain range. Oh wait, he never got there. After a couple hundred pages of being chased by a spirit-dog he participated in a ritual held in a Knights of Templar castle that was actually not open to the public and, insult of all insults, and again by his own admission (if you know the Camino) he didn’t even finish. What really chaps my ass is that his book sold millions of copies but it’s complete crap. Sorry Paulo but I have to call them as I see them.  If you experienced 1/10 of that it was at home on LSD.

In 2001 Shirley Maclaine came here to gather material for her book. I think by then she had already died two or three times in her previous novels so she had to dust off some nail polish and find something to add to her list of spiritual adventures. In that year just under 61,000 people registered with the Pilgrim Office so the Camino was starting to pick up steam. I have to hand it to her; she was an early adopter, but I doubt she carried anything any heavier than the nail file she used to dust off the nail polish, and I also doubt she walked the entire Camino; the accommodations would have been extremely primitive in some parts and I just don’t see Miss Maclaine sleeping on a bed bug infested cot. Again, I have to call them as I see them.

Then, in 2010, Emilio Estevez got a movie produced called “The Way” and put his father, Charles Sheen as the star of the film and put the Camino on the map.   About the only thing in that movie that isn’t complete crap is the fact that Pilgrims have been caught in snow storms crossing the first stretch of the Pyrenees and died. That’s what happened to Charlie Sheen’s fictional son in the movie.  In fact, a guy from Mexico met that same fate last year only 500 yards from his destination, Ronscavalles, where we start our trip.

It’s not a bad movie but it leaves out a few very salient points. One, and everybody on the real Camino has said it; he forgets to show how fucking hard it is. Not a chance that some late middle-aged bereft father would fly to France, suddenly decide to don his Son’s backpack, and walk 500 miles. During the movie the dumb ass drops his pack into a river (we walked over that bridge yesterday), and then has it stolen only to recover it and have a giant party with a gang of Gypsies. Again, didn’t happen. There aren’t any Gypsies en-masse along the Camino.

But between Paulo, Shirley, and Charlie, an image has been formed about what it means to do the Camino and while there are bits and pieces of truth embedded in all of the “I want to sell millions of books/movie tickets” most of it is so watered down from the truth it needs to just be flushed out of your minds. I mean really Paulo, WTF, an angry spirit dog? The dogs I meet along the Camino are generally friendly. The one pictured on this blog from a few days ago was such a sweetheart and he moaned like a $2 whore when I petted him. He didn’t have an angry bone in his body. I have to confess I have not read Shirley’s account but the people working the Camino just roll their heads when it comes up and the Way is a 500 mile joke along the trail. In one scene, Mr Sheen is filmed walking the wrong direction. You wouldn’t know it unless you had been on that part of the trail, but he did not walk the Camino and the movie does not reflect what it means to do so.

By 2014, the year I walked it the first time, almost 300,000 people had walked part of the Camino. It’s not clear how many of them do the “Full Camino” which is what we did but it’s thousands. Now there are documentaries and more and more books appearing daily about what it means to do this hike. For the people that have been guiding people here for over 20 years they have simply shut down. They can’t read another “I gave up screwing my best friend’s wife after I walked the Camino” (Now I screw my best friend instead”.

But there is definitely something very spiritual about making this journey. I came home in November with an enormous shift in attitude. Through some of the rituals that are part of this journey I was able to shed some very old baggage, the exercise alone turned my overall health around, and even though I don’t have a religious bone in my body, I do believe that there are things out there we can’t explain and they are present in abundance here in Northern Spain.  I’m even getting married which is something I gave up at least 20 years ago.  I guess I won’t be wearing white to the wedding but I am excited.  That all happened on my first Camino.  No angry dogs and no Gypsy parties.

Tim remembers us talking about “Camino Miracles”. Sadly my day to day memory is so overrun from that time that I can’t recall them in any detail. But this trip, so far, I have made a mental list of Camino Miracles; take them for what they are worth.

1. Camino Miracle Number One: I arrived in Spain after some long ass flights not feeling like crap, got upgraded into an enormous Suite, and had a fantastic night on the town with Marji and Tim’s friend, Emmeline.
2. Camino Miracle Number Two: While standing at the Madrid airport staring at an information board waiting for our gate to be posted, Marji asked me if I thought we would meet anyone else from the trip on our flight. Since people come from all over the world to do this trek and since the Madrid airport is only one of the pathways to get here and it is enormous, I said I doubted it but that I did have a “Spanish Steps” tag on my bag. Right as I said that, Margarita from Italy walked up, heard the name “Spanish Steps” (the company we are touring with) and introduced herself. Now Marji, Margarita and myself are walking together because, quite simply, we are the 3 fastest people in the group and we like each other. The 3 of us just got in from dinner and will be doing a hellish day together tomorrow.
3. Camino Miracle Number Three: The night before I met the talking dog (See earlier Blog Entry) I dreamed about him. Excuse me if I get all Shirely-Paulo here, but I had a vivid dream and part of it had an enormous black dog that was very soft. In my dream he helped me climb over a fence; you can try to figure out the symbolism, but when I saw him outside the Bar we were stopping to go inside, I have to admit my heart skipped a beat.
4. Camino Miracle Number Four: Last night I dreamed about my Mother. I actually woke up crying; it was not the most pleasant dream I’ve had of late; it was incredibly sad.   In my dream my Mom was a mother-cat and there were two kittens crawling away from her. She was sick or injured and could not move and the sense of abandonment was palpable. I’m carrying a glass container with a small part of my Mom’s ashes in it that I was planning on leaving at the highest point of the Camino. The ritual is to leave a small rock that you bring from home but I thought I’d bring Mom over here to enjoy the view. So, if Paulo can be chased by Magic Dogs and perform Pagan Rituals in castles that aren’t even open to the public, then I can imagine that my Mom doesn’t want to be separated from her children. Now I have to decide if I want to try and persuade her to go outside her box and experience Spain or honor her fear of travel that both Russ and I had to deal with for decades before she passed. I honestly don’t think my Mom wants to be left alone here so I am seriously reconsidering what to do with her ashes. I may just bring her home, collect the rest of her, and put her under her fruit trees below her old home. The trees are now healthy and produce mountains of excellent fruit and she spent decades in the home above them, some of them quite content.
5. Camino Miracle Number 5: If the woman named Eileen hadn’t fallen on her boob (her words) I probably wouldn’t be able to remember her name. In fact, I have to laugh every time I think of her as “I Lean (too far obviously because she couldn’t stay upright).

 

Seriously though, if Shirley and Paulo can write books with far more ethereal rants in them than what I just put to word then I feel completely within my rights to create my own Camino Miracles. There IS something going on here that I feel. For the very few people that have ever seen me experience something that you can’t quantify (Angelo, you remember what happened when I touched the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and Tim, you recall that night in that bookstore in the Bay Area), you guys can accept this without question. For the rest of you I don’t doubt your skepticism. But try to remember that countless and I mean COUNTLESS people have walked this trail. Many of them died doing it. Enormous battles with unfathomable losses took place all along this trail over centuries of conquest and re-conquest while the Pilgrims tried to peacefully trudge past. Tens of thousands of soldiers are buried in mass graves that they are still continuing to uncover here.  Now, hundreds of thousands of modern day Pilgrims make this trip annually, have totally reenergized the economy of this part of Northern Spain, and every year people continue to die making this trip. I passed two gravestones today.

If nothing else, walking is the elixir of life. Walking for hours each day where the air is so fresh and crisp it hardly resembles the polluted mess we breathe in at home, where the only sounds you hear for hours on end are the bees buzzing in the fruit trees that are starting to blossom, the sparrows and smaller birds chirping quietly from the olive orchards, and the bells that are tied onto everything from Sheep to Horses, is a medicine that can never be put into a tablet. Seeing the same Pilgrims from day to day, sharing smiles and greetings as we all take turns feeling the miles, and experiencing the unadulterated goodness of the people that live out here in this wilderness really is a spiritual adventure in and of itself.

Well, it’s 9:30pm which by Spanish standards is quite early but tomorrow is a very long day and I am battling shin splints. I am determined to walk every inch of this trip unlike the last one where I had to take some days off so I need my rest. I hope I haven’t bored too many people with my “eat shit and die” rant about the perception most people have of what is actually happening over here but no movie, no book, no blog is ever going to do this justice. If you really want to know what the Camino is like then you just need to pack up and come over and at least two a week or two of it. Anybody can do it if you just set your mind to it.

Here are a few pics from today.

The World as outlined in rock.  Somebody had a lot of time on their hands and a lot of rocks.

 Margarita (Left) and Marji (Right) pretending to knock on a very cool old door.  

 

The view when we walk out of our Hotel tonight.  Being in this part of Spain is like going back in time. 

 

March 19, 2015

 

Joe Jeter

 

The Stat’s on Todays’ walk

29,228 Steps