Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow....

Boy, it certainly creeps in its petty pace. I’m a bundle of nerves at the moment. The anticipation is killing me. I’m scared to death and just want to get underway. I keep telling myself that I’ve been thinking about every part of this trip for two months, and my rucksack has been packed for a week now, and I have its contents honed to what is either necessary or worth its weight. I’m as ready as I can be.

I’ve been reading Jack Hitt’s book “Off the Road” about his Camino, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The cover compares his story to The Canterbury Tales. If you haven’t read it, I’m sure your first opinion of that comparison is that this book must be stuffy and boring. However, if you have read it (or were in my ’06 senior English classes), you know that this really means the cast of characters is an irreverent, obnoxious, belligerent, drink-sodden, philandering bunch of anything-but-pilgrims. Hitt’s book is similar. It’s been a little disheartening, as it reveals that human nature on a trek like the Camino can be giving and altruistic, but can just as easily be nasty and petty and full of first-grade-type politics. When resources and scant luxuries are at a premium, alliances are just as capricious as they were in grade school, and when broken, can be just as isolating. I hope that’s not what I find, and if I do, I hope I’m more successful than the author at distancing myself from such people.

But I have high hopes. I think your expectations have something to do with the reality you find. My dad’s version of that sentiment is “You make your own weather.” Since thirty years has taught me how seldom my father is wrong, I’ll go along with it.



People keep asking me something along the lines of, “What possessed you to do this?” “How did you come up with this idea?” “WHAT? WHY???”

I keep trying to come up with an answer.

It found me. And once it found me, it wouldn’t leave me alone. That’s the best I can do.

About a year and a half ago, an audiotape version of Shirley MacLaine’s The Camino caught my eye in the library. I checked it out and spent a week or so listening to it on the way to and from work. Most people know what a nutcase Shirley can be, and this book in no way disappoints that expectation. But a good bit of it seems to track with other information I’ve found on the Camino. Anyway, in any case, that book was my first introduction to the idea. I don’t know why it stuck in my mind...I guess I Googled it at some point or something...who knows. But once I started thinking about doing it, it started to pop up everywhere.

This spring, I got pretty disgruntled with teaching, and decided to leave the profession and spend a couple years living abroad. Cruise ships, tour guide agencies, work-around-the-world schemes...for a month or so, I was convinced I would do it. Rent my house furnished, ditch the car...the whole nine. Mainly because I got tired of all my married, new-mom friends saying things like, “Oh, I’m so jealous that you’re so unattached...you can do whatever you want...you have no kids, no husband...if I had that kind of freedom, I’d....” Fill in the blank. I got tired of being envied...I wasn’t DOING anything envious!!

As you might expect, the long-term-travel idea (“vagabonding,” in some circles) kinda got derailed. And up popped the Camino again.

The next thing I knew, I’d found several websites and a handful of books on the Camino. And the more I read, the more it appealed. It seemed the perfect mix of “out there” and control. For example:

Planning. It’s an established route. People have been doing it for years. The people on the Camino are all heading in the same direction (except for a few salmon), and to the same place. It’s not as haphazard as I-get-off-a-plane-in-Amsterdam-and-three-weeks-later-hope-to-wind-up-in-Venice-on-my-way-home. But it’s not a lockstep tour, either. I can go alone, but never really BE alone unless I want to be. I can go at my own pace. I can stop here and there, I can walk when I feel like it, I can reroute if I choose to...I’m in charge.

Help along the way. A pilgrimage route that’s been alive since the 700s is used to seeing exhausted-looking pedestrians with rucksacks and sleeping rolls. Everything along the route is pilgrim-oriented. Bars have cheap, meat-and-potatoes pilgrim’s fare. Hostel-type establishments are cheap or ask for donations. Fellow travelers share your hardships. Local churches and farmhouses are often willing to help when the hostel is full. Even schools open up fields and gym floors when the numbers swell in the summertime.

Maximum time, minimum cost. This equilibrium was key. I could be gone for over a month (my trip is 35 days), and much of what I’ll encounter will be relatively cheap when compared to major attractions in Europe at the height of the tourist season.

Simplicity. A friend of my father’s who has hiked the App Trail several times said if he doesn’t wear it or eat it, he doesn’t carry it. While the Camino has more civilization along its length than the AT, the premise is the same. I’ve spent two months thinking about what I REALLY NEED. A couple changes of clothes. Good boots and good socks. A quick-dry towel. Something to throw over me in the rain. A journal. Some moleskin and a couple band-aids. No hair dryer, no makeup, no jewelry, no worries about what I look like, NOTHIN’. And the absence of people I know...well...what are you like when no one knows you, and the people you encounter may never see you again? Talk about some serious self-awareness....

The idea of a pilgrimage. I kinda dig it. My religious journey has been an interesting one. I love the church I go to these days, and my pastor is AWESOME...but I’m not an especially religious person, and I never plan to be again. But the idea of stripping down to the barest essentials, placing yourself in the hands of the Almighty and counting on the help of strangers and your own perseverance to face hardship along the way...that’s pretty cool. The endpoint may be the tomb of an apostle of Christ, but I doubt such an experience will be any less transforming for anyone who chooses to undertake it, Christian or not.

I teach Transcendentalism. Whitman. Thoreau and his experience on Walden Pond. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. If this stuff didn’t scream Camino at me all year long.... Well, I would’ve been deaf to miss it.

Then there are the coincidences. Divine interventions, perhaps. When I read The Alchemist last year, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on more Coelho books. A tight budget left me scouring the used bookstores for whatever they had. Only two. They went onto the shelf and I haven’t touched them since. This spring, a fellow teacher who heard of my plans asked, “Didn’t Coelho write a book called The Pilgrimage? Wasn’t it the same walk you’re doing?” After I bought the tickets, it occurred to me that I’d bought two Coelho books and never looked at them. Found them on my bookshelf. One of them was The Pilgrimage. The cover had a picture of a man in a cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, carrying a staff with a gourd (the medieval pilgrim’s typical garb), with a winding road leading into a scallop shell sunset (the shell is the symbol of the Camino), with a menacing-looking dog on the road (also frequent in Camino stories). No doubt. The book is coming with me.

Another one...my brother recently took a trip to Wisconsin. Good sister that I am, I bully into his house and pilfer about 25 CDs to download onto my iPod and return before he got home. He won’t care. I pick through his heavy metal and my sister-in-law’s country music and Fleetwood Mac. Somewhere in the pile is a CD called Pilgrimage. Intriguing. On the CD is a scallop shell. The booklet makes references to “Field of Stars,” translated as Compostela. Santiago de Compostela is the destination of the Camino. When I download it, the music is new-age electronic instrumental, inspired by the Camino. How the hell did a CD like THAT end up in my brother’s house??? He couldn’t answer. I kept it.

And it goes on and on.

So you just got the long version of my answer. Be careful. You’ve heard of the Camino now, if you hadn’t already. It might track you down, too. =)



Final preparations are in stride. It’s midnight. I’m meeting my dad at the house in just over 12 hours. I have a list of things to do tomorrow. I have to compile addresses for postcards. I have to process laundry. I have to hit the bank, the Starbucks, the library tomorrow. I have to forward my email, make sure the thermostat is set right, block the voicemail box on my cell phone. I have to take canned cat food to my folks’ for my cat. I have to figure out what I’m wearing on the plane. I have not YET walked with my new Superfeet insoles in my boots. Too much too much too much....

Simplicity.

If it’s not done, the world will not end. If I didn’t pack it, if it breaks, if it tears, they probably sell it in Spain. Blisters are not deadly. Thirty pounds is not fifty. Members of my family hate to lose, hate to quit, and (as I was told today) have never fallen out on a hump. I’ll make it.

“Ultreya” is the pilgrim’s cry on the Camino. Somehow, it translates to “Westward ho!”

I’m off. Ultreya!