Mission Accomplished

Day 43 - Santiago de Compostela - Mission Accomplished - Five hundred miles walked.

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. Muslim adage


Economists are famous for never agreeing with on another. A friend used to say that if you line up one hundred economists in a row, that not a one of them will agree with one another on any given question. That being said, studies which seek to answer the age old question regarding any positive correlation between making more money and increasing happiness are still regularly conducted. A recent study run by University of Warwick's Eugenio Proto and University of Minnesota's Aldo Rustichini, published in the journal PLOS ONE, has not only come up with a conclusion that indicates that there seems to not be a positive correlation between the two, but that, in fact, there is even a hard number for the salary which one should seek if one desires to be happy. The number is $36,000 US dollars (adjusted per country depending on local purchasing power) per year. Their research has discovered that satisfaction does continue to rise to a "bliss point" of $36,000, and then begins to decline, according to data drawn from the World Values Survey.


It is four-forty am. It is a fine time to write. Often it is between two-thirty and five in the morning that I write. Hard to find time during the day anymore. Need the better part of two hours to get a post done; where does that come in the day? Up in the morning usually a half hour before T, get some in before it is time to leave the albergue and start walking, something that is now changed since ending our walk. Then we have Ben walking until a check into an albergue, shower, wash clothes, find a store, ready for dinner. Often I have found some time around this transition. After dinner some time can be found, but we have found many friends along the path and have spent time with them.




Now we are visiting with Rob from breakfast in the dining room of the hotel in the morning to dinner and hanging out at night, talking until we are too tired to do so anymore, it is hard to yank time away, to say, now finally having the ability to interact with him after so many years.


So the night country is where there is quiet, undisturbed time to process, to write, to read. Oft times it is the only time when the rest of my world slows down, melts away enough, for peace to settle over me and thus to make a place where creativity and clarity can take up residence and get anything done. Try at times during the day to get off to the side, go outside, for example, to get time to write. Commonly, before my muse has yet to alight upon my shoulder, I am joined by another soul. I speak here not of ephemera but of true bodies of substance, people. My son knows fairly well to leave me to my traveling office space. Others, however, do not.


This tendency to be interrupted in my attempts to find a bubble of reverie has become greater, more or less proportionally, with each step that we have taken towards the final burial place of Saint James. Teo and I have tended to collect around us a fair sized complement of comrades as we have walked. This phenomenon is, ......, what we desire, has just about no drawbacks to it; one that does present itself, however, is this pattern of people seeing me sitting outside typing on my iPad, come on over to share consciousness, to hang, thus spilling away, unintentionally as it is, my accumulating bowl of creative juices. (As a side note, during my composition of this portion of this post about being interrupted, I wasm in fact, interrupted two times by two different people, for a total of about one hour-not that I did not enjoy their company)




Given that we carry everything that we have with us on our backs, the choices that we have when we decide what to put on in the evening is frightfully limited. Given that I have one set of walking clothes and one set of not walking clothes, I switch from the one, each day after we have finished walking, to the other. Day time wear is an olive green, fast drying, poly-something t-shirt and olive green, fast drying, zip off, cargo pants. Night time wear is a black, cotton, Gap t-shirt, black, stretchy, sweat pants/athletic wear pants. After taking a nap yesterday afternoon I was getting dressed again, joking with T about my choice of clothes. "Hmm, what to wear. What to wear?" We both cracked up as we suited up once more in the same exact top, pants, socks that we have every day for six and a half weeks now. It is practical, to be sure, but so audaciously, rhythmically monotonous as to be bizarre.


Spent some more time hanging with the Martins today. Nice guys. A funny episode. Das Martin says to us, as we are standing in the courtyard inside the interior four walls of the. Monasteries Martin Piniero, the twelfth century building in which we are currently housed (the courtyard concept being a Moorish innovation, keep the women inside and occupied, think TV!?). He says to us, "Sometimes the sun is in your eyes," raises his hand out straight, elbow locked, hand flattened, "and the wind is blowing in your eyes, and then you have an itch under your nose," he uses his free hand, two fingers, to scratch directly beneath his nose, suddenly we get it-heil Hitler! The four of us, Tdog, the Martins, and I, all bust out laughing. A candid moment to be sure.




In short order now I will return to my life in Washington state. Will fly from Madrid to Seattle one week from today. My feelings about returning are mixed. It seems that one of the best parts of going on vacation is coming home. True. But for fourteen years now being in Ellensburg has been not really what I have chosen; I live there because my kids have lived there. Sure it has been my choice, I could have lived elsewhere, could have been apart from them. But to me that was never an option. Today things are different. Today I am soon to be moving overseas.


It is August in my mind and it is hot and it is dusty as I walk the horizontal, undulating system of trails that cut into the side of the irrigation ditch along my father's property in the Kittitas Valley. My arms stretch out from my sides as though I am playing airplane, the soft lobes of the three toothed sagebrush flopping and caressing against my skin. The dust that fills the cow trails is an inch deep, more in places, and it is almost white, and fine as gypsum powder. From high on the side of the bank of the ditch the view across the valley extends for maybe twenty mile to the ridges of the foothills of the Cascade range on the northern rim. The brightness of the late summer sun bleaches the scene, everything I see, into the look of a twenty year old photograph exposed too long to the light, blanched, a bit faded. The colors all shift along the spectrum, turning whites a bit yellow, greens a strange orangish hue.


My job is to walk these trails, along the one until it branches into the one below, the sage in places as tall as my head, find the red brown heifers at the end of the ten acre field, count them and their young, account for them all, report back, the final chore of the day. The smell of the dust, poofing up in small clouds from my feet, mixes an acrid coating onto the pungent, ripe, sharpness of the sage, bruised and opened by the sides and the palms of my hands. In some ways the sensation is like flying underwater, moving as though lucid dreaming through the sea grass and the kelp beds, parting, swaying as I push forward through them.




So as I return to the states now it is with a mindset quite different from any that I have ever experienced before. I return now to tie up loose ends, to make some adjustments to my houses, my rentals, help my two boys to be properly set up for their futures, finalize my divorce, arrange for my job teaching across the ocean, say my goodbyes, head off to watch the sun rise and set from yet another corner of the globe. Much inside of me churns and courses, twists, clenches and releases. It is a bit like going to the dentist to get an aching tooth pulled. Hurts, need to get through it-then in a big whoosh things improve tremendously.


Things are not right, have not been right for a long time. My natural auras, energies have become jammed up some years back. Feel too much maligned by too many people, people I used to respect and admire wildly, people who clearly disapprove of how I prioritize my life, my values, but who, while whispering criticisms to others around me, refuse to speak to me, to honor my requests for connection and for explanation. No man is an island unto himself, and yet if others insulate you from them, what else really can you be? I have held on to my life, to who I feel like I have been supposed to be, for a number of years longer than I have wanted to. For others' sake. For my boys mostly. For my most recent wife. Like holding a too hot mug of tea out of the microwave; didn't know it would be so hard to hold, but having removed it from the oven, half way to the table, past the zero point, hurts too much, but dropping it is not an option, going forward now is the quickest, best option. I believe that now I can see how this plays out.




There is not much longer to go now. Haven't much in the ways of friends left in the states. On the outside of my family. My boys are men now, will be best served now if I set them up with cheap housing in some of my rental units, get out of their way. Can not really stand back, look at my life and say with any honesty or a straight face that I have good advice to give them about how a human progresses with their life in the proper, healthiest manner. No, my time in my hometown is over done. It is my time to attune my inner compass, close my eyes, and migrate. I think that I can keep a hold of the hot mug until I reach the table. Sure it hurts, but what did T.E. Lawrence say about the 'trick' of not making it hurt when he slowly closed his thumb and forefinger about the burning match, extinguishing the flame? "The trick," he said, "is not minding that it hurts."


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Location:Rúa Catalina Poniente,Fisterra,Spain

Trail's End

Wake up the final morning, aiming to hit the trail by eight thirty so that we can get to the plaza in front of the Cathedrál, meet Rob by the middle of the three Christmas trees, by three thirty. Sitting on terrace of the albergue, our LAST albergue, having a smoke, sucking down my instant coffee swill, finishing waking up. Hardly know how to feel as we finish this thing up. Think back to what my Uncle José said to me when we met him for dinner way, way back six weeks hence at the Cervezeria Alemana. Said that God is whatever you feel right now. If you feel hungry, that is God. If you feel angry, horny, sad-that is God. Have thought a lot about that in the intervening days. I mean, if that is true, and frankly it sounds as good an idea as any I've come up with, then what does it mean if I do not know how I feel right now? Or what to feel right now.


Does that mean that God is confused? Does it mean simply that, as Ram Dass says, it is just an 'I don't know moment'? That the 'I don't know mind' is a good place to be? Like the Rumi quote from yesterday's blog, just another visitor to my house, another guest to great cheerily at the door, to usher in, to welcome until he should feel it is time to leave? Is God then an awareness, an opening to and of the universe that I can perceive? Perhaps my highest state is one in which I work on my awareness, allow what transpires around me to come in through my five senses, allow it to just be, to not resist, not resent, but just to recognize, greet, welcome, allow, give a warm hug to it when it leaves, await the next coming phenomenon, event, utterance, emotion.




I joke with Teo, "What the hell are we gonna do every day from nine in the morning until five in the evening?" Told him that we will have to inform my buddy, Rob, whom we are meeting for three days here in Santiago that we have planned a twenty kilometer walk around the city each day! It will be interesting to see just how easily we will return to a much more sedentary and more 'regular' life.


They say that it is hard to see the forest whilst amongst the trees. Right now it feels difficult to extract great feelings, inspired words about what all of this walking, this trek across a country, means. The journey has been, is, and I feel sure that it shall always remain, a perfect metaphor of itself. A passage. The traveling of a long, arduous, beautiful path. So it is that with my son I have passed over a five hundred mile slice of this earth, and with him also we have moved through and across miles of internal spaces, perhaps thousands of them. Both together and certainly each of us individually. While I can not yet say what inside of me has changed or how, I believe that there are now many, many places inside that have transformed into new versions of themselves. What existed before as grey, unmoving chrysalis is now tangerine winged butterfly, gossamer wings still wet, unfolding. Understandings yet rising behind the silhouette of horizon, the shape and kind still as yet undechipherble. More deep knowledge than known fact. More emotional tone than moment defined.




My internal compass has rotated. My true north having on its axis shifted, triangulating, re calibrating onto the new placement of the magnetic points of interest, of intuition, of desire. With these awakenings come the necessity for action in my external world, a mandate from my internal self to fundamentally alter the course and direction of my physical body. I believe most fully that now, having been, to borrow the metaphor of a great man, to the mountain top, that I can not return to the lower regions of the valleys below. And so forward now I must go, onward to a new and different future, the future that has, previously unbeknownst to me, been waiting for me, smiling, at peace, sitting patiently just out of sight around the bend.

Sort of hard to not feel somewhat anticlimactic, like the end of a terrifically good weekend, or a carnival ride. Does one line up again, get in the queue of pilgrims, do the ride again? Does one incorporate the time spent walking, thinking, doing, being, into the manner in which one moves forward? Does one just continue to breathe? In all cases, for all of us who have shared this time together, there are no certainties, no 'must be's, no shared mandates. As surely as we are all now changed, so surely this experience has affected each and every one of us differently. As the lines on the back of the scallop shell all converge into one point, the symbol of the many different pilgrimage routes into Santiago de Compostela, so now we shall all move from this one important moment in our lives outward towards the many different places where our lives and our hearts will take us.




So, we walk today with earnestness and with a soft and certain pleasure, closing the final distance into the Plaza of the Cathedrál in SdC. Rob's plane lands at the airport in SdC at two o'clock. He should deplane, get a cab or bus, get to the plaza around three, perhaps we can even get there about the same time he does, not make him wait. And so we have a good final day of walking, Dwayne, Teo and I. Ankles are hurting again, drop an ibuprofen, take some breaks, the sun actually warmer, brighter than any other day this week; crazy enough, as we have progressed into the 'marine climate' of Galicia and deeper into the wet part of the year, our days have become, inexplicably (to all but Dwayne, his hotline to The Lord firmly in place...and by this point a heretic of my nature begins to have small doubts....), warmer, less windy, brighter, more cloudless.


Our smiles become broader as we take a final ten minute break, some six klicks from city center, SdC still out of sight behind the last hill, then take the final plunge in. Hit the outskirts, joking, I am singing the song "Stumbling In," our spirits high. It is about one forty-five now, Rob's plane does not even touch down for another fifteen minutes and we are about forty minutes, maybe thirty, from our meeting spot. Stop to photograph a statue of a Templar Knight in as all park, keep walking, up the sidewalk along a decently busy street, heading straight for the Cathedrál some two and a half klicks before us.




Suddenly, in one of those strange, disorienting moments in life where your brain sees and hears but doesn't quite know how to make sense of that which it takes on, I hear someone up ahead yell, "Hey, Ellensburg!" Simultaneously I look about a block and a half in front of us, see a figure standing on the sidewalk, arms stretched out crucifix style, walking slowly towards us. My very first thoughts are, it is a caminero, of course, but which one? The Martins? Then my brain tells me, they don't know about Ellensburg, none of them do....klick, klick whir klick...Rob! It must be Rob...whose plane has not yet landed?


And so it is. Mi amigo buenissimo, Robert Lynam, his plane a half hour early, having spotted Dwayne's 'bright orange coat' that he both read about and saw a pic of in my blog, the three of us, our backs turned to the street, taking a pic of the statue, he on a bus to the center of town. Said he saw the coat, something about it seemed familiar, remembered what he saw and read, turned his head and thought he saw me, asked the bus driver to stop at the next stop, and viola!


A grand and magical reunion it became, even in retrospect, even as we embraced and laughed, all of us, at the odd and singular happening that brought us together here in this place that marks the end of the Camino. We walked the rest of the way together, checked into the wonderful hotel adjacent to the Cathedrál from where we shall spend three nights revelling in our friendship and in the warm bath feeling of having completed our overland journey across the Iberian Peninsula.




Not a terrible night, no. Went out on the town with good friends. Rob. Teo. The Martins. Dwayne. Had dinner at a döner kebab joint. With the boys. It was grande. Hummus, fries, beer, salad, a calzone sort of thing. Get this, dear reader, and I s*#t you not, what is served when I ask for pita to accompany the hummus is, drum roll please, tortilla. No, not am omelette of egg and potato, which is what the Spanish call tortilla, but, and this is the only time in two months in Spain that I have seen them at all, Mexican, flour tortillas, warmed, folded into quarters! We had good conversations, much laughter. Dropped some euros and then went out for a few hours of carousing the bars. Dwayne, not a drinking man headed back after dinner. Teo, Rob, the Martins, and I found a small taverna to throw down a couple of rounds of tequila chupitos, chased by a couple botellas de cerveza. Met a nice German fellow of about my age, named Klaus. Having lived in the US a few times as well as Australia, Klaus has impeccable English, and is a warm, sensible, genuine guy.


Standing in the doorway of the place having a smoke, Klaus, some other caminero whose name I never got, and a cute, red headed, Irish caminero by the name of Susan. She was fairly lit, cheeks a bright shade of vermillion, and she sort of locked into me with her eyes, then decided quite quickly that I looked exactly some a famous movie star. It was obvious from the start that the other men with her, especially the rather sycophantic, black troubadour hat wearing guy with the thin mustache, wispy chin beard, were her pack of hounds, having already caught her scent. She was asking them as she laughed, rocked back and forth in her alcohol stupor, 'C'mon, you know, the really famous guy...what's his name?" I believed already that I knew who she was thinking of, but let her do her thing, grinning at her, waiting. "A REALLY famous movie!" She blurted, throwing her long, strawberry colored, rather curly hair back over her head. The guys sort of look back and forth from her to me and back, a tennis match in full volley.


"I know!" Finally. "Iron Man. He's Iron Man!"


"Robert Downey, Jr." I inform her. "Yah, Robert Downey, Jr.," she emits in her darling Irish brogue. She smiles at me, takes two steps to me, kisses me, hugs me, kisses me some more, holds me, my face buried in the wildness of her hair. The solid feel of a woman's body, small, full, warm. And it felt good, both her complimenting me and her physical ministrations. She pulls her head back, smiles big, pecks me on the lips, then releases and moves back to her spot, the two men attending to her like personal aides to the Queen a bit aghast, believing, I suppose, that she had now demonstrated final proof of her drunkenness. Upon waltzing back inside on my cushion of air, each and every one of my compadres, having witnessed it all through the taverna's glass front, cheers me on, the Martins, having tease me earlier about being 'too old' to have any chances as they do, a bit in awe. Score one to nothing for Los Americanos.




Rob and Tdog split and went home after maybe four bars and three hours, while the Martins and I hit a couple more. They left for their place around one o'clock, and I wandered about a bit, finally settling into a bar that had Klaus, Susan, and the sycophantic duo that trailed and surrounded her closely. It is not my way to trail after women, preferring instead the hit and run technique. Come close enough to meet, engage in a brief, hopefully intriguing contact, and then move away. If they come around to follow up, they are usually hooked, if not, not. Drunk as she was, her attendants clinging just about literally to her clothing, I can't say what may have been. I hooked up with klaus, who bought me a probably very much not needed beer, went out front, got into one of the better conversations of my time here.


For an hour probably, we discussed American policies, how Germans, all eighteen million of them, are rooting for us to get our shit together, are very fearful of the damaging ripple effects of our continuing to implode; implored me to not flee my native land, but rather to stay and organize against the small minded, fearful politics of the right; what it means to have walked the Camino; his time spent studying and living in the US; the sad state of every attempt in the US to have what all the other countries have-healthcare-something that puzzles every foreigner, especially those who are not up to speed with the growing power of influence of the corporations in US domestic politics; the 'sixty year alliance' between the US and Germany and how the Germans could not understand Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore declining to send troops; that while most Germans think of Americas as ego centric, arrogant people, I am a 'good guy,' and he really likes me.


Around three I pack it in. Give Klaus a strong handshake, look again to see if Susan is yet free of her hound dogs, see them huddled close around her, fawning. Call it a night, find my way home. In the Cathedrál now, awaiting the pilgrim mass to begin. The final step in our epic journey. They file in now, seat themselves around us. The priest taking his place at the altar. The retablo behind him huge, gilded, ornate beyond imagining. The small shuffles of feet, the muffled hush of voices lowered. My caminero posse around me, the Martins, Teo, Dwayne, Klaus, Rob. In the small now all are fitted inside themselves, digesting the size and the scope of what has been and of what now shall be. It is a moment that certainly no one here will forget.




Pilgrims stream behind the retablo, walking down a flight of stairs to the sepulcher of Santiago, Saint Iago, Saint James. They touch his grave, hug it, pay homage to the man in whose remembrance we have all walked these hundreds of miles. Soon now it will start. Not, as Churchill most famously said, the beginning of the end, but, rather, the end of the beginning.


At about eight-thirty this morning, at the buffet breakfast downstairs that comes with the room, Susan comes in, trailing her two attendants, joins Klaus, who has already joined us all at a long table. She looks at me, grins, says "Good morning, Robert."


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Location:Rúa do Val de Deus,Santiago de Compostela,Spain