I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (20 page)

The moment I put my foot on the Camino itself all fear left me. The anticipation of the walk I’d been having for months, along with the fear, left. I was now on the path. No turning back. Not yet at least. Only onward. I put the earphones of my iPod in and hit the “play” button and Brandon Flowers began to sing the first few lyrics of “Human.” I sang softly along with him as I took those first few steps on the Camino. “Close your eyes. Clear your heart. Cut the cord,” we sang.

I stopped singing and began to dance up into the Pyrenees. Yet the more I danced, then climbed, then trudged slower and slower and higher and higher up the windswept mountain the more I began to think I should have followed the Frenchwoman’s advice and taken the river route. It was one of the hardest days I’ve ever experienced. When the guidebooks and Web sites about the Camino inform you that you will be crossing the Pyrenees they don’t make it quite clear how steep the climb is. Up, up, up, up you keep going until you reach the snowcaps and the raw wind.

One of the things I told my friends and family before I embarked on this trip was how much I hate walking in the rain and that I hoped I wouldn’t have too many days filled with it.

This first day it rained all day.

It even sleeted at the highest point of the walk. The mud at times through the forested parts of the slope was ankle deep. I was thankful for my boots. I even slipped and fell twice right on my butt, sliding down a bit of one slope in the snow and mud. Scared the shit out of me, but luckily nothing was sprained or broken.

Last night sleeping alone in my room at the quaint “sergeant-run” bed-and-breakfast has given way tonight to a hostel—an ancient monastery—with over one hundred people in its one dorm-sized room. I hope there is no symphony of snores surrounding me. It will be a real test to get some sleep, but since I haven’t slept well in three nights and am thoroughly exhausted from the all-day climb, I hope to sleep through anything.

Two things I forgot to mention about the climb:

At one point the Irish father and son who were staying in my St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port bed-and-breakfast were ahead of me on the beginning of the Camino’s path when, on my iPod Bernadette Peters began to sing “No One Is Alone” from
Into the Woods
. Yeah, I know: How gay is that—Bernadette Peters singing Sondheim in my ears as I walked the Camino from France back into Spain. But when she sang the lyric “Sometimes people leave you / Halfway through the wood” I realized watching the father and son walking up in front of me that one of the issues to deal with on this walk, this trek, this pilgrimage, is my own fatherlessness.

So two things in two days have spoken to me already as I begin the Camino—a minister named Basel’s trying to rediscover his spirituality as a gay man and this father and son’s reminding me so deeply of my own fatherlessness. What will day three bring?

*   *   *

Maybe the only thing more affected than listening to Sondheim on the Camino is reading John Keats along the way. I brought a selection of his letters and poems to dip into from time to time. These lines from a letter he wrote to Benjamin Bailey dated March 13, 1818, spoke to me after this first day: “You know my ideas about Religion,” Keats wrote. “I do not think myself more in the right than other people, and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject merely for one short 10 Minutes and give you a Page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthen to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance. As Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing—Ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things. Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare. Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds and which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to ‘consecrate whate’er they look upon.’ I have written a Sonnet here of a somewhat collateral nature—so don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes.”

I then read, within the body of this letter, his first draft of “The Human Seasons.” The first lines of that first draft spoke to me as well, since the natural beauty of the world about me is even more evident as I start this pilgrimage. At one point when the vast verdant vistas gave way to the snow clouds into which I was walking, I spotted a wild horse grazing in the mist before me. When I turned the corner on the mountain’s ridge there was a whole herd of wild horses gathered there. They all raised their heads and looked at me. I stopped in awe. They were not awed but observed me nonetheless. I went to get my camera in my backpack, but before I could retrieve it they all galloped off into the trees down on the side of the mountain. It was in that moment, which galloped away just as suddenly as the herd of horses, that I realized that even though I was the one carrying the camera it was I who was being closely watched as this pilgrimage began—by nature, the universe, the eye of God.

Although the fog and clouds made seeing increasingly difficult, it also made the white birches towering along the path even more beautiful. As I struggled to walk on once I reached that peak of the Pyrenees, I concentrated on all the beauty before me. It was that beauty of the world that beckoned me onward more than any imminent spiritual marvels and it was then that I thought of these lines of Keats’s first draft:

Four Seasons fill the Measure of the year;

Four Seasons are there in the mind of Man.

He hath his lusty Spring when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He hath his Summer, when luxuriously

He chews the honied cud of fair spring thoughts,

Till, in his Soul dissolv’d they come to be

Part of himself.…

*   *   *

I also concentrated, I have to admit, on the bit of beauty before me in the hostel moments ago when I saw it in the bed right next to me. The hostel is really an Augustine abbey built in 1130. There are about 120 bunks set up in there. And since the bunks are pushed together two by two you find yourself sleeping right next to someone. The someone I have found myself next to is, yes, thank God, a beautiful boy.

I snuck my camera out of my backpack to snap his picture surreptitiously while he too was writing in a journal and listening to his iPod. But since the ancient abbey was rather dark my camera’s flash automatically went off. He hadn’t galloped off like the herd of wild horses before I could snap the picture, but he did throw off his headphones. He then raised his head and glared my way much the way those horses had.

“Are you from America?” he asked, scowling.

“Yes. How did you know?” I answered.

“Americans never ask,” he informed me.

I had to laugh at his perception. “May I take your picture?” I then asked.

He too laughed and posed for me.

“Where are you from?” I then asked him.

“I am from Switzerland,” he told me.

“Basel?” I asked, remembering the first person I’d met on my pilgrimage back at the bus station in Pamplona.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“The Camino told me,” is all I said.

The boy’s name is Lucas and he has just finished serving in the Swiss army and is trying, like me, to figure out his life. We had a sweet half-hour conversation about the Camino and our respective stymied lives.

I am now at a bar next to the hostel having a much-needed Coca-Cola by a much-needed fire. Alternating between writing in this journal and reading my Keats. I made it over the Pyrenees today with just a cup of coffee and a piece of toast made by “the sergeant.” I also had two swigs of water from the bottle in my backpack at one point. In a couple of hours I’ll eat a big dinner and pray that these old legs hold up tomorrow.

One last thing. I said nothing all day on the path. At first I listened to music, but when I took my earphones out I realized that the silence was pleasing. As was my heartbeat in my ears. As was my heavy breathing. My own sounds within the eerie lack of sound on the Camino helped me stay in the moment.

When I heard the church bells of Roncesvalles pealing the hour I knew I was almost there. I looked up and there in a break in the trees I saw a glimpse of steeple looming before me. “Hallelujah,” I softly said. It was a tired and disgruntled one but a “hallelujah” nonetheless. It was—this “Hallelujah”—the first word I was to speak on the Camino.

5/2/09

When I walked out of Roncesvalles this morning at daybreak, this was written on the first sign, on the side of road, before I turned and stepped back onto the Camino: “Santiago de Compostela 780.”

It is a bit less than that distance to Santiago as I sit down now to write after having walked seven hours today.

Last night, after I wrote in this journal, I ran into the Irish father and son I wrote about before. They were sitting by the fire in the bar. The father is sixty-five. His name is Eugene. The son, Owen, is thirty-two. “Owen” is the Irish name for “Eugene.” He is Eugene’s oldest son and it’s their first trip one-on-one without other family members. Eugene told me Owen carried both their backpacks over the Pyrenees when I told him that I had worried about his making it over when I saw them on the mountainside yesterday. Eugene says his hips are already giving him problems.

I told them that when I saw them yesterday walking together I realized one of the issues I was coming to terms with on my walk on the Camino was my fatherlessness. I told them my father had been killed in a car wreck when I was seven. “My father died when I was fifteen,” said Eugene. “I was devastated.”

“I couldn’t imagine growing up without my father around,” said Owen.

“That’s why I didn’t mind you carrying my backpack,” said Eugene. “Because of all those years I pushed you in your pram.”

After I talked to Eugene and Owen, an odd, rather disheveled man starting walking beside me on my way back to the hostel. He had a beard that was beaded with the cold mist. Long hair. He was wearing brown sackcloth clothing. A kind of tunic. Tattered. Frayed. I was, to tell the truth, a bit frightened by his presence. “I overheard your conversation with those two,” he said to me as he fell in step by my side, although I had not noticed him in the bar. “Trust me you are not Fatherless,” he said. “I mean Fatherless with a big
F
in front of it as big as this Camino,” he told me, spreading his arms out wide and almost hitting me in the face. As I ducked I saw the shadow of his sudden motion there on the ground before me, his tunic seeming to untuck beneath his arms and flowing forth as if to lift him into flight. “And neither are you fatherless, that
f
now I say to you, as small as a child, as small as you once were. Are you feeling like a child on this walk you are beginning?” he asked. I was afraid to look at him. I have learned back in New York never to engage a crazy homeless person, never really look one of them in the eye, and this guy seemed a bit homeless and crazy to me. “I am here to tell you that both your Father and your father are here to guide you on your Camino,” he now seemed to be whispering, his voice itself fluttering about me, his presence wafting to and fro like that now-swirling mist swept up in the damp and windy night through which I was making my way back to the hostel. The mist made the tiny pilgrim-centered village—there are only twenty-four year-round inhabitants who live there—even more numinous. The lone church that anchored the town was softly lit up the hill from us and encircled in a shroud of it.

I sped up, trying to lose such an odd and determined interloper who had eavesdropped on my earlier conversation, having decided he really must be Roncesvalles’s lone homeless beggar who listened to and then preyed upon pilgrims. The faster I walked, the more he increased his pace. Was he out to rob me? I turned, chancing to get at a look at him, and realized he wasn’t old and grizzled like I expected him to be but oddly sexy. Like Jim Morrison playing Jesus—or perhaps even the other way around. Was I, I wondered in that moment, becoming the crazy one? There was a monastery there. Was he a monk?

He touched my arm.

“Be safe, my son,” he said, then slowed and seemed to be carefully following in the distance behind me, dropping back in the mist. Dissolving into it? I felt relieved that he had neither robbed me nor asked me for money, since I was on a strict budget during the month I have mapped out on this walk. I thought of the shower I longed to take before dinner back at the hostel, which calmed me. As I approached the door of the hostel I turned to see if the odd stranger was still following me, but thankfully he had vanished.

As I took my quick shower before the warm water could subside I kept going over the cryptic conversation I had with the strange bearded man in his tattered tunic. And then it dawned on me: I had not really felt his touch when he placed his hand on my arm. Had that been because the muscles in my arms and shoulders were already getting numb from carrying my backpack?

Once I dried off and got dressed for dinner, I stopped by the front desk of the hostel and asked the man who appeared to be in charge there if he had ever seen the man who had spoken to me wandering around Roncesvalles. “He kind of looks like Jim Morrison,” I said. “Do you know who Jim Morrison is?” I asked.

“Yes, I know of this Jim Morrison. A man who is dead. He opens the Doors,” he said in his accented English. He smiled. “Jim Morrison. That is the best description to me I have had in my ears.”

“So you know who I’m talking about,” I said. “Is it a local monk or a homeless person or something? He kind of freaked me out.”

The man at the desk placed the cross around his neck in his hand and, looking concerned, clenched it as gently as my father had clenched my own hand along with Chico’s paw and Coco’s paw the night I had fallen asleep that first time I had known a world with snow in it. I haven’t thought of that night in years and years. Odd that I would come up with that image. Was it the stranger and all his talk of fathers who had made me think of such an image for the first time since—well—that night it had happened? Was it the snow itself I walked through across the peaks of the Pyrenees? The man at the desk released the cross and uncreased his brow. “Did Jim Morrison…” He stopped and chuckled at the name, a kind of snort of amusement. “Did he say something important to you tonight that means something to you as you begin your pilgrimage on the Camino?” he asked.