I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (23 page)

I then picked up a pebble from the
M
in “MAMA” and the
D
in “DADDY” and switched them one for the other. It was as if my parents were guiding my hands and in some way letting me know that they were still together somewhere, their souls combined in the way their bodies once could be when I, hidden with their smells in the closet, would hear their sighs mingling together atop their bed.

I stood to go and suddenly the wind on the Camino sighed just like them. I began to walk away, brushing tears from my eyes, but turned back toward the two hearts for one more look. I walked back and bent down and took the pebble I had taken from the
M
to put into the
D
and the one I had taken from the
D
to put into the
M
and put them in my pocket to carry with me the rest of the way on the Camino. I did not replace them but left the imperfection there on the path. Perhaps someone else—another orphan, a mother, or a father—will come along and see the slight but quite noticeable space left in “DADDY” and “MAMA” and place a pebble there themselves and, in so doing, think of their own stories. They will stay for a moment themselves. They will hear the wind sigh at them also as if to signal that the past is what passes through us all.

5/9/09

This was the day I let go of the “family” that I’ve formed on the path. Lucas and Toby have gone their own ways. I’ll keep up with them by e-mail along the way in Internet cafés and when a hostel or a hotel has a computer to use. But I fear I am reverting to my loner mode and even isolating here on the Camino in the midst of all these other pilgrims. Does the Camino change you or do you become even more the person you’ve always been? I thought by staying in hostels along the way that I would find a way to cure my solitary life, but maybe I am here to learn to accept it.

I do know I have been walking to prove one important aspect of my life—that I can be drug free for at least a month, no pot, no meth, well, for five weeks in all if I count the days that bookend this pilgrimage. It hasn’t been a problem so far.

5/10/09

I woke up this morning at 4:30 to start walking in the pouring rain up into the mountains. As I’ve written, I like being the only one on the path for an hour or so before the sun comes out. I thought it might rain all day, but it stopped early in the morning. Thank you, God. I do not find walking in the rain romantic in any way.

As I was walking up the path in the early-morning darkness I also became very frightened for the first time on the Camino. Really, truly, honestly scared. I thought I saw movement ahead of me in the darkness, flickering images moving about from the trees across the path in front of me and then hiding behind the trees on the other side of the path. I realized for the first time that the Camino so early in the morning when one is a lone pilgrim trudging along is a great place to get jumped and mugged if anyone wanted to do that to you. I—kind of smiling about this now that I’m safe in a hotel room after a hot bath—raised my walking sticks out in front of me as if they were swords in case I was actually jumped. I began to fantasize about how thieves back in earlier centuries must have hidden along the path if they had the same idea of attacking lonely pilgrims. I know: crazy. Right? It passed—such thoughts—but I did feel real physical visceral fear for a mile or so when I thought I saw movement ahead of me on the path.

By the time I reached the top of the mountain where there was a monument to San Juan de Ortega with the date “1936” along with a dove carved onto it—was this a monument to commemorate the Spanish Civil War?—I spotted an odd eerie light illuminating one spot in the otherwise completely dark sky. It was quite beautiful, but I couldn’t decide what it was exactly. Heaven making itself known to me here utterly alone on the path? A UFO? I thought the theme to
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
was about to blare from the clouds when suddenly the clouds themselves parted and revealed the lowest-hanging and largest full moon I have ever seen in my life. It was as if it were moving toward me, daring me to touch it. I did, in fact, reach out toward it to see if I could feel its presence, then fell to my knees in prayer instead. It was one of those moments of sacredness that the Camino can offer you. I went into a kind of trance that was broken once again by the sound of one lone bird somewhere beckoning me back into its natural realm.

*   *   *

Reality quickly set in as the sun rose and I continued to walk. And walk. And walk. And walk. Nature is not always so sublime. One stretch of several awful miles was through a recently cleared forest, and the mud in places was so deep I had to find ways around it or walk almost calf deep into it. I worried about infections in my feet in the filth that was soaking through my boots.

I made it through the miles of muddy forest and later in the day—when I could barely move another step, the arches in my feet were aching so—I stopped at a dinky bar in a dinky village to down a dinky little bottle of Coca-Cola. Inside, I struck up a conversation with a cute Irish kid I had noticed back in Villafranca del Bierzo the night before. I told him about getting up and walking in the dark at 4:30 this morning and about how scared I’d been for a mile or so when I thought I saw movement and started thinking the ghosts of thieves or something were out to get me. The kid looked as white as a ghost himself when I told him that, for he showed me the passage in his guidebook that he had just been reading that said that in medieval times the part of the Camino we had walked up in those mountains outside Villafranca was where the highway robbers of the time would attack pilgrims. I’m not sure what exactly happened this morning in the darkness when I was seeing those flickering spectral images running back and forth on the path where the highway robbers once preyed on pilgrims and before the full moon convinced me to pray in another way, but I definitely walked through something ghostly to get to the top of the mountain and to witness—to feel—something sacred.

05/11/09

Yesterday I made it to the lovely city of Burgos, which reminded me a bit of Paris, and spent the night in a nice hotel room where I soaked in a deep bathtub. But I am now writing this in a gymnasium in the small village of Hornillos del Camino. The only shower in the place is reserved for the women.

The walk here today was a very long one without shade through miles and miles and miles of wheat fields in the high plains. I met a woman from Toronto along the way named Coral Jewell—love that name, so beautiful—who told me she was trying to catch up with her two friends from Toronto who went on ahead of her, a woman named Marge who owns a used-book store in Toronto named The Great Escape, and another woman named Judy. Marge is also walking with her sister from Melbourne, Australia, who is named Ginny. I met them all once Coral and I got to Hornillos. Judy is the blonde in the group—there’s always one blonde. She even reminds me a bit of the young Joan Blondell. Ginny told me she is a hospital administrator back in her hometown of Melbourne, her keen wit as dry—and slightly dangerous—as the farthest reaches of her country’s Outback. She and Marge were spending their first month together since their Aussie childhoods. Their short, cropped hair was an identical gunmetal gray. Their grins, infectious. I imagined them golf stars in the Presbyterian boarding school they reminisced about. Wash-’n’-wear females, I called them, which made them smile.

Coral and I walked into Hornillos together and she told me of the grief she is trying to walk herself out of. She was married for a while but came out as a lesbian two decades ago and her lover of seventeen years recently died of cancer. She was supposed to walk the Camino with Coral, but didn’t live long enough to make the journey. We talked a lot about loss and I confided in Coral about my sister’s recent breakup with her lesbian lover of seventeen years—it was like another kind of death, that of the relationship itself—and the lesser sort of grief that she was going through.

By the time Coral and I got into the village all the beds in the hostel were taken and there were no rooms in the one
albergue
in town, so we are having to sleep on cots set up in the local school’s gymnasium. Not fun.

I am feeling very alone on this part of the path.

Very alone.

Am I going to make it all the way to Santiago?

Burgos was where “the angel” I met that day in Starbucks blew out his knee. I just remembered that. I just remembered his beauty. His kindness. I just remembered the vision of him in the door that day. I just remembered the vision of my mother in the doorway of my room the night it snowed before she decided to snuggle with my father and Chico and Coco and me.

“Have you fucked the angel?”

What did Hugh Jackman mean by that?

5/12/09

It was the worst day yet on the path. I wanted to give up and go home for the first time. My feet are raw and blistered. I’ve developed a painful rash around my ankles and it’s begun to bleed through my socks. The braces for the first time didn’t seem to help my knees. I felt hobbled. Horrible. But somehow I kept on walking until I got here today. How? I’m not quite sure.

Once I got here I was in a panic because the place where the service was supposed to deliver my backpack was closed and I had no idea where the backpack was—or even if it had arrived. I went all over the little hillside village trying to find an Internet café or a computer to find the number of the service, since I had left its number in the backpack. Plus—this was what was really freaking me out—my HIV meds are in it as well.

I finally found a hostel in town. The priest who ran it had a weathered face out of the fifteenth century. His scraggly beard reached down to his chest. Once someone translated into Spanish for him that I had lost my bag and didn’t know where the service might have dropped it off he hopped on his bike and rode off, trying to find it himself, but came back empty-handed. While he was gone I went on the computer at the hostel and searched and searched until I found a number for the service. I contacted them and told them the name of the hotel where I had made a reservation. They told me to wait in the vestibule of the hotel—the hotel itself wasn’t even open until the evening—so I took off my shoes and socks and stared at my bloody rash and blistered feet and tried to soothe them on the stone floor of the vestibule. I waited two hours sitting there for the bag to arrive.

At one point I decided to get in the lotus position and attempt to meditate. Anything to calm me down from the awful day and to take my mind off the pain in my feet and encircling my ankles. I put my hands on my knees, palms up, and began to think of the early mornings when the sun rises and all I can hear is the birds beginning their songs to one another as I eavesdrop on them. Phantom bird sounds began to fill my head and calm me as I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breath. My mind began to empty of its panic, its pain, and I tried to recall, as if in a trance, the first stanza of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” But I couldn’t. I could only come up with the first two lines, which pretty much summed up my mood:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Not being able to remember that first stanza, my mind flew to the last one and its first two lines that came easily to me, especially its first exclaimed word:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

I then lost the words again until my mind alighted on the last lines of the poem:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

which I kept repeating over and over, more slowly, then more slowly, each slowed-down syllable matched with each of my slowing breaths.

“Are you okay?” I heard a woman’s lovely Irish lilt ask. Do I wake or do I sleep? I thought once more as I was in that very moment imagining nightingales alighting on my outstretched palms. I opened my eyes and there before me stood a little auburn-haired ruddy-faced wisp of a woman as if a freckle had come to life. She looked down at my feet and appeared concerned.

“I’m okay,” I told her. “Though I’ve had a rough day.” I then explained to her about my backpack and how I was waiting for it to be delivered. She told me her name was Ethne and that she and her sister, Mary, had also booked a room at the hotel. I told Ethne it wasn’t yet open, but the man at the restaurant down the street told me it opened in the evening. There was a sign on the lobby door that had been written in Spanish and English that informed whoever showed up to check in with him. She thanked me for the information. “And what’s your name?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s Kevin.”

She smiled. “Mind if I sit down next to you for a moment?” she asked, then sat. “You know, Saint Kevin is the local saint back in county Wicklow where my sister, Mary, and I live in Ireland,” she told me.

“I never knew there was a Saint Kevin,” I said.

“You’re not Catholic, me boy?” she asked.

“No, Methodist,” I told her.

She patted my hand that was still outstretched there palm up on my knee next to her as if I needed to be consoled for my Protestantism. “Are your feet okay? They look rough there, son,” she said.

“I’m coping,” I said.

“Like a saint,” she said, smiling. And for the first time today I smiled too. “You know, ’tis said that Saint Kevin really didn’t like women very much except, that is, for Mother Nature. In fact, he loved Mother Nature so much he’d take his baths in the ice-cold pond outside his monastery in our county back home. He’d stand in the pond and hold his hands out like yours are there on your knees—palms up like that—and all the birds would come land on them and serenade him. Some tell that even the nightingales would stay for his dawns to have the privilege of singing to him.”

I took a deep breath. I tried not to—I took another deep breath—but I began to cry.

This little Irishwoman I had only met moments before reached out and held my hand. She gently rubbed it. “It’s okay, me boy,” she said. “Are you homesick? Are you in pain? None of us are saints these days, Kevin. None of us are anymore. Shshshhh. It’s okay.”