PERIODICALLY WE INTERRUPTED the Buffalo hunt to leave the trail altogether. At one point we flew to Cairo to join a group tour of Egypt, climaxing in a Nile cruise. In some English novel or other a Colonel Blimp type had complained of something he called Gyppo tummy, and by the time I got off that boat I knew what he meant.
Later that same year we combined two invitations, the first to an Italian film festival in Cattolica, the second to a Spanish crime festival in Gijón. We parked our car somewhere out west and flew first to New York and then to Milan. We got off there, and so did one of our three bags. When it became clear the others had plans of their own, we took a train and a bus and got to Cattolica, where we lived out of our remaining suitcase for a week. (Oddly, whichever one of us had done the packing had mixed things up, so our single bag contained something for each of us.)
At the week’s end we flew from Milan to Madrid and carried our bag on and off the plane. In Madrid we and forty or fifty other American and British crime writers boarded the Andalusian Express, a luxurious private train that took a full day to carry us a couple hundred miles north to the industrial port city of Gijón. The ride was quite wonderful, and somewhere in the course of it they served us lunch, and we shared a table with Don and Abby Westlake.
And Don, looking out the window at the Spanish countryside, told us about a friend of his named Jack Hitt, who had some years ago walked across all of this terrain to follow the course of an ancient pilgrimage over the Pyrenees to the city of Santiago de Compostela. There was this route, we learned, and pilgrims had walked it for over a thousand years, and they were still at it, schlepping from village to village in the sacred steps of St. Francis and St. Clare, and there were refuges for pilgrims where you could stay, and—
Lynne and I were sitting next to each other, with Don and Abby seated side by side opposite us. I remember this, because I remember that there was a point in the story where Don paused, for breath or wine or whatever, and just then Lynne and I turned as one, so that we were looking right at each other when we said, in a single breath, “We’ve got to do that.”
15
IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY 1991, LYNNE and I flew from New York to Toulouse, in the south of France. We stayed overnight at a hotel, and in the morning we hoisted our backpacks and started walking south. We were on our way to Santiago de Compostela, and intended to arrive there by the 25th of July, because we knew that pilgrims ideally reached the city by that date to celebrate the Feast of St. James.
We also knew that the traditional pilgrim route led through the French border town of St. Jean Pied-de-Port and its Spanish counterpart, Roncesvalles. But we’d decided to take a different route over the Pyrenees so that we could walk through Andorra. We’d never been to Andorra, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to add it to our list, even if there wasn’t a single Buffalo in it.
And so we walked, out of Toulouse and on toward Andorra. I don’t know how far we went the first day, or indeed on any of the days during that first week. We walked to a café, and got something to eat, and then we walked until we found a hotel, and took a room. And we got up the next morning and did it again.
We must have been out of our minds.
BEFORE OUR BUFFALO HUNT, I’d spent hours in libraries, and more hours with Rand McNally. We’d be in familiar terrain, and within easy reach of friends and family.
Our preparation for the pilgrimage, in contrast, consisted of a single lunch with Jack Hitt, the fellow who’d told Don and Abby about the whole business in the first place. Jack turned out to be a splendid fellow, with a great supply of anecdotes and a fine sense of local color, but all that lunch really did was convince us to go.
And so we’d gone—without reading a single book about the pilgrimage, in modern or contemporary times, without doing a lick of research, and without undertaking any training for the physical ordeal we were about to undergo. We were living in New York now, we had moved back just over a year ago, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, and as New Yorkers we were of course in the habit of walking a couple of miles a day, because that’s how one gets from place to place. And I’d joined a gym upon our return, and got there two or three times a week, working with weights and dutifully slogging away on the StairMaster.
Lynne assumed walking would be no problem; after all, she’d been doing it all her life. I figured it might be slow going at first, but that we’d get stronger as we went along, and would eventually be able to take the physical side of the trip in stride, so to speak.
Some long city walks during the months before our departure probably would have been a good idea. They’d have been good practice, especially if we’d worn our backpacks. But we didn’t even have backpacks until a week or so before we set out.
We bought them in a rush one afternoon, along with a pair of sleeping bags and a tent. We took back the tent the following day, having realized it was just going to be too much to carry, and it’s a good thing, because otherwise we’d have thrown it overboard sometime during the first week in France. Because, even without it, our packs were too heavy.
I don’t know what they weighed. After the first day, mine was the heavier of the two, because we shifted much of the load from Lynne’s backpack to mine. That was essential, because I was stronger and better able to manage the weight, and because she’d brought more with her. We’d both kept clothing to a minimum, but she’d brought along her full complement of Erno Laszlo skin preparations, and those little jars weighed a ton.
So my backpack was the heavier of the two, but both of them were heavier than we’d have liked. The clerk at Paragon had tried to sell us aluminum-frame backpacks, and they’d struck us at the time as cumbersome; if we’d taken his advice, we’d have been better off. Our packs weren’t designed to distribute the weight, and the straps cut into our shoulders.
Before long, Lynne decided her backpack was the problem. It hurt, it tired you out, it slowed you down. There was, she realized, a far better way to transport one’s possessions.
“I want a shopping cart,” she announced.
I had the hardest time trying to explain to her why this wasn’t a good idea. It did no good to point out that people who did this sort of thing all the time always wore backpacks and never pushed shopping carts. All that meant to her was that she’d thought of something that hadn’t occurred to anyone else.
A loaded shopping cart, I told her, would be very difficult to push up a hill. And it would be at least as hard to hold on to on the downhills. And it would probably lose a wheel or fall apart altogether before too long, because those things were designed to move at a leisurely pace up and down supermarket aisles, with no surface under their tires more abrasive than a parking lot. They didn’t roll up a whole lot in the way of mileage, and none of it was apt to be on dirt roads or trails, and—
But I wasn’t getting anywhere. Several times a day she’d resume whining about the shopping cart.
Everything I’d told her was the truth, and what good did it do me? So I switched to fiction. Maybe a shopping cart wasn’t that bad an idea, I told her, but it just didn’t sit right with me. See, I’d be deeply embarrassed to be seen in the company of somebody pushing a shopping cart.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, okay.”
Because once it was a question of style, she could accept it.
NOWADAYS I’LL FREQUENTLY see young parents trotting along while pushing an infant in a three-wheeled Baby Jogger. (Once, in perhaps the eighteenth hour of my first twenty-four-hour race in Wakefield, Massachusetts, I saw a woman jogging along behind a triple stroller, its three compartments filled with triplets. I’m still not entirely certain she wasn’t a hallucination.)
The Baby Jogger, I’ve since learned, is the vehicle of choice for a good number of solitary cross-country runners and walkers, those hardy souls who choose to cross a state or a region or the whole of America on foot, and without benefit of a support crew in a camper. The first time I saw footage of someone so engaged and so equipped, I was struc
k by his resourcefulness and ingenuity; then, when I’d had a chance to think about it, I realized what I’d just seen—Lynne’s shopping cart, God help us, reborn in its ideal form.
Of course the folks with the Baby Joggers didn’t have to deal with much in the way of hills, let alone the Pyrenees or the mountains of Galicia. And those joggers were built for the task at hand, and they weren’t boxy crates last seen in a checkout line at the local Safeway.
Still, credit where it’s due and all that. Maybe my bride was on to something.
THE FIRST DAY OUT of Toulouse it rained some, but after that the weather was pleasant, and the days were not without their satisfactions. Each night found us at a two-or three-star inn, and the rooms were comfortable and the meals more than acceptable. The walking gave us an appetite, and afterward we didn’t have trouble sleeping.
In the morning we’d have breakfast, and then we’d reclaim our passports from the desk and set off again. One morning, after a night in a very nice inn in the town of Foix, we omitted the reclaim-our-passports step. That was my job, and we’d walked the better part of an hour before I realized my error. I left Lynne at the side of the road, shucked my backpack, hurried back to Foix, collected the passports, and hurried back to Lynne.
She sympathized with me, having to do all that extra walking, and I told her it hadn’t been so bad. It was a nuisance having to cover the same ground again, but at least I hadn’t had all that weight on my back. And, before she could put in another word for shopping carts, I sympathized with her, having to stand around all that time.
“It was okay,” she said. “I didn’t have the backpack on, and I didn’t have to walk anywhere. I could just sit in the shade. It was very pleasant, actually.”
THE ROUTE GOT worse as we went along. Because we were getting into the Pyrenees, and while they are not right up there with the Himalayas, they are nevertheless mountains, and that meant that the road we were walking was going forever uphill.
It was on a Sunday, our sixth day on the road, that the elevation became most pronounced. The terrain was steep enough that the road had been built with switchbacks, to make the angle of ascent more manageable. From a physical standpoint the switchbacks were essential—otherwise we really would have felt as though we were climbing a mountain—but this was somewhat offset by the psychological effect; we would walk south for fifteen minutes, then turn and walk north for fifteen minutes, and it felt as though we were working very hard and getting nowhere.
It was also getting colder, because we’d gone far enough into the mountains so that there was still snow on the ground, and from time to time there’d be an avalanche off to the side. It would have been nice to stop somewhere and get something to eat, but that was never an option, because in each of the few villages we passed, everything was closed up tight. Which is why I happen to remember that it was a Sunday.
I don’t know what time it was when we finally came upon an inn, but it was already getting dark. The proprietor had enough English to assure us that she did indeed have a room for us, and could provide an evening meal. And where had we parked our car? Because she hadn’t heard us drive up.
We said we’d walked. She looked at us. “We’ve been walking all the way from Toulouse,” Lynne told her, “and we’re going to walk over the mountains, and then we’ll walk all the way across Spain.”
“Ah,” said the woman, eyebrow arched. “Très sportif.”
Sportif INDEED.
It’s been sixteen years since we walked across Spain, and what strikes me now as most remarkable about the experience is not so much the physical demands of the ordeal, or the sights we saw and the people we met along the way, or even the spiritual results of such a pilgrimage, whatever they may have been. All of that somehow pales beside the astonishing fact that we dropped out of our lives entirely and spent a little over three months in total isolation. Our whole world during that stretch of time was the world of our immediate environment, the world of the Camino.
In today’s world of cell phones and Internet cafés, it’s hard to grasp the extent to which we were cut off from our lives back home. No one had any way of getting in touch with us, and we had made the decision before our departure that we would not even try to contact anyone. We could probably have made phone calls from several points along the way, but to what purpose? To establish that the people we’d left behind were alive and well?
If anything was wrong, there was precious little we’d be able to do about it. Even if some family emergency were to call for an abrupt return, abruptness wouldn’t come easy to a pair of pedestrians in a remote area of rural Spain. Wasn’t it simpler to assume everything was all right back home?
Simpler, but by no means certain. Because the last time we’d been in Spain, we’d received a call from the States that put us on the next plane home.
LET’S RETURN TO the Andalusian Express, where we first heard about the pilgrimage and knew at once that it was something we had to do. In our own minds, we had signed on for it then and there. But it took us almost three years to start walking.
In Gijón, our contingent of international crime writers spent a week as window dressing at Semana Negra, a Spanish festival with dark film and literature as its theme but simple revelry as its clear purpose. We participated in a couple of panel discussions, where we took turns bloviating on literary and political topics, with a couple of harried translators waiting to turn what we said into something the audience might possibly comprehend. This works best when one speaks in sound bites, so the translator can take in and process a couple of sentences at a time rather than have to hold long paragraphs in his mind; few of us were adept at this, however, and it wasn’t hard to guess why the audience looked puzzled most of the time.
At one point Don Westlake quoted some Russian who’d observed that he and his colleagues were all mice in the pocket of Gogol’s overcoat. I thought the poor translator was going to kill herself.
Lynne and I were having a fine time, dining late (though rarely by Spanish standards) at fine restaurants, with Don and Abby Westlake or Ross and Rosalie Thomas or Em and Martin Cruz Smith for company. And the week was drawing to a close, when we got word that my mother had been in a serious auto accident. (My cousin David Nathan managed somehow to track us down, a neat trick given that no one on earth knew where on earth we were.)
We flew home the following morning, with no way of knowing whether we’d find her alive or dead. She was alive, but just barely, and shortly after we got there she slipped into a coma and remained unconscious in Intensive Care for a full month. We moved into her apartment and spent our days at the hospital, until it became clear that her condition had stabilized and there was nothing we could do for her.
We drove west, and picked up a Buffalo in Ohio, and visited friends in Yellow Springs. And came back, and were there when she came out of the coma and was transferred to another ward.
Her return to consciousness was very disconcerting, though no more so for us than for her. At some point, unconscious, she had decided to live, and now, conscious, she was clearly not entirely happy about that decision. She didn’t much want to be here.
All I could think of, spending time at her side, was a novel of Stephen King’s called Pet Sematary. In the book’s titular graveyard, those interred can return to life, but they’re not really the same as they used to be. And it seemed for a while there as though my mother had come back from just such a place, with a different personality than she’d had before—and not a very nice one, either. She snapped at her nurses, and was altogether unpleasant to be around.
Return to consciousness, I came to see, wasn’t just a matter of flicking a light switch. It was a more gradual process, and in fact constituted not only a return to consciousness but a return to oneself. As the days passed, she did in fact become increasingly herself. Her intellect returned, and her personality, and even her humor.
In respect to that last element, I made an awful mistake. I went to a bookstore in search
of something that might amuse her, preferably something that wouldn’t involve a whole lot of reading. I picked up a collection of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons, and after I gave it to her I came to realize what a bad choice that was for someone who’d just spent a month with her brain on lockdown. Cartoons that would have been catnip for the woman were now incomprehensible; they didn’t strike her as amusing, and she couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be funny about them.
Nor could I do much to explain them. Larson’s offbeat humor wasn’t going to work for her, not until she was a good deal better, and I wanted to take the book away from her so that she could stop using it to make herself crazy. But she didn’t want to give it up, because she was afraid her inability to get what the rest of the world regarded as funny was a sign that her deepest fear had come true, and that her mind was not working properly.
Well, it wasn’t, not entirely, but it was getting there. The improvement was evident on a daily basis, even if The Far Side was still murky. And it wasn’t long before she picked up a book of Double-Crostic puzzles and knocked one off in her usual twenty minutes. Once that happened, we all relaxed; it was evident that she was going to be fine.
THREE YEARS LATER, when we were preparing for the pilgrimage, I could hardly avoid recalling what had happened on our last trip to Spain. This time around, not even a chap as resourceful as my cousin David could be expected to find a way to reach us.
I was concerned that something would go wrong, and that Lynne and I would be powerless to do anything about it, that we wouldn’t even know about it until it was far too late for us to take any useful action. My mother’s health was good, although she would never get around as well as she did before the accident. But she was almost eighty years old, and so was Lynne’s mother, and—