I'm leaking a greasy, panicky sweat. Just arrived, by the hairs on our chinny chin chins, at the estación de autobuses in downtown Madrid. Woke up an hour late after the third night in a row of staying up far too late. Caught a cab instead of public transportation in order to arrive here in time for the 10:30 bus to Pamplona. Whew!
Crusty. More or less exhausted. Unsettlingly uncertain, second guessing myself, my entire world, this trip, my sense even of who I am. All the big ones. Where am I going, what the fuck am I doing? So thankful that Teo(despite his forgetting to turn on the alarm on his phone!) is accompanying me on this journey. I've got a horrible case of cold feet. I flip flop from feeling outstandingly certain that this trip, this pilgrimage-the Camino-is the most bestest and smartest choice I've made in a long, long while, to a stomach dropping, run down the middle of the street shrieking, large ass mistake. It's one or the other that I feel, and the change in my perspective on this topic is blindingly quick. From the one to the other and back again like hot flashes during menopause. No time is spent in the middle, between these two extremes. WHAM! WHAM! Like the sudden drop of a hammer. WHAM!
Had a hard to describe night. "It's okay of we have a barbeque tonight?" Gonzalo, our host, asks us. "Of course." We're thinking hamburgers, you know, hot dogs, maybe some chicken. Nope. The 'barbeque' turned out to be an outrageous assortment of meats, beef, pork, steak, sausages, cured meats, eggplants, potatoes, sauces, wine. Morcillo, a blackish cured meat shaped like salami, made from blood, copies, and rice. A beautiful piece of dark cured steak served sliced thin on a plate with olive oil over top and bread as one appetizer.
Gonzalo invited a good friend, Ignacio ( pronounced 'Ignathio' in Continental Spanish) to join our 'barbeque.' Like Gonzalo, he also rocks the house! Our host's generosity blew me away. His skills in preparing our meal no less so.
Having gone to an out of this world eating out experience with my uncle just the night before, Teo and I both agreed that the meal prepared by Gonzalo easily surpassed the former. We grazed our way through the food that he kept cooking and bringing from the grill, situated next to us on his wonderfully lit patio. The conversation and the energy between us was as spectacular as the food.
The two of them related a particularly hilarious story about being stopped by the Mexican military police whilst driving a rented Jeep with three other friends in Acapulco some five years back. It was a drug searching stop, complete with asshole soldiers and a drug dog. The soldiers were certain that these twenty something turistas were in possession of illegal drugs and spent two hours hassling them and trying to find the drugs. At one point the dog, sniffing away through the rented vehicle, found and ate a muffin-after this point in the story we all began to refer to the dog as 'the muffin dog.' Later a soldier, with what appeared to be an early model walked talkie, explains to them that it is a machine capable of electronically sniffing for drugs and walks around the Jeep with it. Gonzalo explains, no more able to keep a straight face then the rest of is, that the soldier would obviously rotate his wrist, thus spinning the antenna towards the car, at various times to indicate that the 'machine' had indeed busted them and that they might as well give it up.
And so it went, with Ignacio leaving a bit past two. We remaining three, already soggy from a few nights of three and five in the morning, readied immediately for bed. I decided to shove down one more cigarette on the patio and try to FaceTime Karen back in Ellensburg. After seeing no email or attempts on her part to contact me, feeling a growing anxiety, unable to connect on FaceTime, my anxiety, my feelings of loneliness and distance, even at that point from my own true self, I felt myself begin to crack. I finished the smoke, took a totally unnecessary swig of brandy, and made one last stab at Face Time. Very aware that when I awoke I would be catching a bus for the beginning of the trail, and that my options for accessing wifi (pronounced 'wee-fee' here!) we're going to be diminishing, the cold tentacles of self doubt and of pure fear started crawling worm like up the back of my neck.
I made another stab at it and got through! saw her smiling face looking back at me. Heard her voice. Saw and talked also with JV and Chica, two dear friends with whom K was visiting at the time. Reaching through the pipeline of cyberspace I saw, as if I were looking into a magic mirror, a palintir, their front yard, the tall conifers in their front yard. With a pronounced mixture of anxiety and hope I spoke with my wife. What was at first cheery, positive, a palliative for what ails me, soon turned sour, a bowl of milk too long in the sun.
My childish glee at reconnecting, my desire, perhaps my need, for a brief reunion, a dose of water for my parched heart, smashed like ineffective waves against the stone breakwater of her anger. I had expected perhaps a bit of distance, although I longed for something else, but anger I did not see coming. It caused a turmoil in my breast that spilled as salt water from my eyes, my body seizing as this last desperate casting through the air to secure some succor from the only entity capable of granting it failed. The black winged things beating their leathery wings inside the cage of my breast rose and fell as I heard her tell me that it would be best for me not to contact her, that when or if she wanted it, she would let me know. At that collection of syllables, like rocks falling through a glass ceiling, the flocks of fluttering things flew up and out of me, carrying with them the remaining vestiges of hope, of the pride that I have held onto for almost a decade about that which we two had built with one another, a kingdom, a marvelous, shining city up on a sunlit hill.
Thankfully I have a guardian angel accompanying me on this journey. His name is Teo Fiann, he is my eldest son. At twenty a man perhaps more mature than I. His stalwart ability to stride forward, undaunted, seemingly not afraid, his coming to Europe three weeks before me and making it seem easy. Whereas I bring my fears, my worst moments, my shame and my anger. It is his tall and strong shoulders that I now ride until I am able to walk this path by the power of my own will, my own feet, my own joy at discovering the wonders around me, at discovering my own power and my own peace.
As I sit on this bus writing this now, traveling out of Pamplona and on to the starting point of our pilgrimage, Roncesvalles, my mind, roiling and turning inside, returns to words of my Uncle Jose, some scant forty hours ago, telling me that he felt me to be very anxious as a person, that it was obvious that I spent to much energy worrying about what others thought of me. He told my son and I about his understanding of God. What you feel, he said, that is God. It is, in the end, that simple. If you feel good, he said, that is God. If you feel bad, that too is God. Here as we creep upwards into the Pyranees, Los Pereneas in the local tongue, I clutch too tightly at the marks upon my breast, at the water that pools in the corners of my eyes. Through this parting of myself with the she that has been my all for a decade, with perhaps myself as well, I focus on those words of mi Tio, the freaking out, the sense of grief and loss,of losing my best friend and such a huge part of who I have thought myself to be, that perhaps he is correct, that perhaps this set of emotions cascading over and through each other, clawing and scratching for dominance, that this is God.
On this bus full of peregrinos winding up the verdant, wooded sloping hills of the mountains perched at the far Northern end of the Spanish frontier I merge and fall away again and again with myself, with these concepts of loss and of personal transformation, with the kaleidoscopic images of the beaming face, the glinting, emerald eyes of she whom the angels named Karen Heather, spinning in and out of focus in my mind's eye, I coax and lead my heart and my mind, trying to convince them with the rational parts of my brain to embrace this change, this absolute and total fear, this need for growth, this intense and imminent coming into the place of God.
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