ON BEING BACK FROM SPAIN

September 3, 2015

Well I've been back from Spain for about 7 weeks now, and for a considerable amount of that time I've been sorting through the thousands of photos I took along the Camino. I've now uploaded to my photo website a bunch of pics, ranging from abstract to documentary, along with a slightly revised text of my journal. For the time being the entire website will be devoted to the Camino. 

It has been easy to adjust to being home. The delights of comfort and loved ones are immediate and compelling. Being with Terry, seeing the kids, sleeping in my own bed, air conditioning, eating the foods I love, a predictable hot shower, my library and musical instruments, not having to hand-wash my clothes--all pretty seductive. And being in our home in the summer, when New England is at its best, is lovely. It's amazing how quickly it all felt normal. Though I'm already feeling the rumblings of wanderlust again, I'm home for the foreseeable future with lots of stuff to do. More reports as things unfold...

FINISTERRE

July 12, 2015

After arriving in Santiago I spent two and a half days there and felt somewhat ill at ease. For many pilgrims Santiago is a peak experience but I felt aimless. I was done with my Camino. I was perfectly comfortable, and was really happy my hotel had good AC when it got up to 95 degrees. But I guess after 7 weeks of having a destination and purpose and knowing exactly what I wanted and needed to do, I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. I relaxed, wandered, walked the streets, visited some cool buildings (I'll post pics separately), but I felt like I was killing time before heading home.

Then I decided to go to Finisterre for a day. Some people walk the final 4 days to Finisterre, and at this point I'm kind of sorry I didn't. My experience there far exceeded my expectations and it seemed like such a fitting end to the Camino, completing the journey from the French border to the Atlantic. 

Finisterre is located on a narrow peninsula--you can walk across it in less than a half hour--that juts out into the Atlantic. The town itself is charming, a small port with brightly colored buildings, a bunch of small shops and restaurants and dwellings. I was on the peninsula about 24 hours. On Friday afternoon I wandered the town and the countryside around it. On Saturday I walked to the "end of the earth" and found out why it's called that. The town is at sea level and the path leads about 4 km straight uphill along the coast, rising higher and higher above the sea, until you reach the tip of the peninsula, way high above the ocean on all sides. It's spectacular, with vertiginous views. For part of the walk up I actually kept my hand on the guard rail because it was dizzying. At the very end it was overwhelmingly beautiful and I felt way more emotional than I had expected, I guess maybe what a lot of folks feel in Santiago. It did feel like the end of the earth.

ARRIVING IN SANTIAGO ON THE FINAL DAY OF MY CAMINO

July 7, 2015 (Day 43 of my Camino)

Being human, at some points in our lives we all face the abyss of the incomprehensiblity of the universe and our place in it. I've been afflicted with the habit of peeking at it probably way too often for my own good, but it's just who I am. In fact I can pinpoint my first encounter. I was five years old and we had recently moved into our new house on Pilgrim Road in White Plains. I can remember it clearly, lying in the bathtub, the smell of the Ivory Soap floating in the water, the steam on the square blue ceramic tiles, even how white the grout and caulking were. And I started to think about the farthest reaches of the universe. And what came after that? And what came after THAT? And then I switched to time. What came before the universe? And before that? And what comes after the end? But there is no end! And so on and so forth. My first encounter with the ungraspable notion of infinity. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, and I can still feel that palpable sense of vertigo and wonder.

Over time this sense of not being able to understand the most fundamental concepts of existence became a central part of my world view. I tried talking to friends about it but soon realized it was not a topic a lot of kids liked to talk about. As a teenager and in my college days I thought if I could just read the right philosopher, or the right religious text, or really understand the concept of the theory of relativity, or really get high level math, that I'd find the key that would unlock the secrets. I read philosophy, I read Einstein, I read about Zen Buddhism, I looked further into Judaism, I read Nietszche instead of doing my homework, but no answers appeared. I learned meditation, dabbled in yoga, took psychedelics, read all sorts of literature, traveled to exotic countries. It made me who I am, but I got no closer to the answers. Religion seemed directed at people who were capable of believing in things without evidence, physics kept changing its approach every few years, philosophers seemed to be playing with words. For years I felt angst about not being able to find the answers I hoped for, but finally I accepted the fact that maybe we're just not equipped to get there.

I say all this as preface to the inevitable question as to what have I learned on this Camino. Of course I'll have to let it sink in over time before I know for sure. I didn't come looking for answers, I came to have the experience of walking across Spain and to drink in as much as I possibly could. I've done that and it's been wonderful. The one thing I can say I've learned for sure is that my feet can hurt in more ways and more places than I ever thought possible. Other than that, it has just reinforced what I've already thought: Embrace it all. Embrace the not knowing and the not being able to know, embrace the seedy entrances to cities as well as the great cathedrals, embrace life. Make and look at art, make and listen to music, read and write, love and be as good as I can to the people in my life.

I realize I risk sounding way too lofty here, but what the hell, I've just walked 500 miles and I've had way too much sun.

I'm here, I made it, Santiago looks like a beautiful city to explore, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do the next several days. I'm flying to Madrid on the 12th and back to Boston on the 14th. And of course after that my journey continues.

Of course I'll keep posting my musings and photographs, but this brings to an end my Camino journal. I want to thank my friends and family for indulging my thoughts, and I especially want to thank all those who have made so many wonderful comments, given such great feedback, and "liked" so much stuff. It made me feel connected while being on such a solitary journey.

THREE PEOPLE AT THE DINNER TABLE LAST NIGHT

June 24 (Day 31 of my Camino)

Desiree. I first met her in the afternoon on the grounds of our resort-like albergue when she saw me looking for a place to hang my wet clothes and told me where the lines were. She's a Montreal native who's lived in Tucson, AZ for the past 25 years. Willowy with long grey hair, wearing a flowing hippieish skirt and dancing shoes. I took her to be in her late 60s, and she was in bad shape, literally inching herself along with the aid of two walking sticks. Her knees had given out during the descent into El Acebo and her Camino was over, at least the walking part. I said how sorry I was and she said she was actually doing much better; after she arrived she couldn't walk at all, now at least she could move. She'd been in the albergue for three days and was planning to stay several more before taking a bus to Santiago and Finisterre. She was a classic new-agey type, warm, loving, and a bit holier-than-thou. At dinner several of us had been to India and I mentioned of the places I'd been India was the most difficult for me because the sense of personal space is so different and people can be right in your face. She said something about using her body's force field, sending out energy, and people would leave her be. She also said something about going to small villages and interacting with indigenous people. I asked how she communicated, did she have the language, and she said no she communicated with her body and its energy. Despite my  skepticism and her vagueness--when I asked what she had done for a living she said oh lots of things--for some reason I couldn't help but like her. When she saw me leaving this morning she came over and we hugged goodbye.

Dirk. A 40-something guy from Düsseldorf with a sense of humor and a need for rules. He's had a rough time with his feet and it hasn't let up. In fact he was staying for a few days to let himself heal as well. Without my mentioning the attitude I described the other day, he launched into a routine: "I just don't understand these people whose feet don't hurt. They say oh I only did 40 km today so I'll have to do 60 km tomorrow. Don't they realize we don't want to hear that?" We all cracked up. But he had this rigid sense of rules. When I said I'm interested in taking photographs, he said oh that's not the real Camino. And when I said I took the road instead of the path part of the way yesterday he said that's not the real Camino either. Ok, I didn't argue.

Dave. I first saw him in the afternoon as well, and, wearing only a pair of shorts, he made quite a visual impression. He was covered in tattoos, as well as scars. Not the Japanese style total body tattoo that's an overall design with all parts working together. His was more like 50 different tattoos taking up most of the space on his body, sort of like a punk graffiti billboard. At dinner he was wearing a t-shirt about walking the Camino for Nepal. Turned out he had been in Nepal during the earthquake, had seen destruction and death, and was now walking for a charity organization that gets people to pledge money for walkers. He grew up in a rural town outside Edmonton, Alberta, and now is constantly traveling. I figured he was my age, or maybe older, but he turned out to be 52 with three grandchildren, one 16 years old. Different world. He talked about skydiving, about having done the Camino before on crutches, about his mother dying, about his own severe injuries, about wanting to walk across Mongolia and Tibet into Nepal, and about how you have to do extreme things because life is short. I was intrigued and couldn't quite figure it all out. Being the ever ready contrarian I brought up the poem I wrote about a while back, the one that posits that if you look closely enough at a stone fence you'd see the universe. He said if he sat around looking at walls he'd go crazy. Desiree of course said something about, oh yes, some yogis say you should do the same pose for several hours a day.

I saw him again at breakfast, and alone with him I wondered how he can afford all his adventures, did he happen to own some land sitting on an oil deposit or something? The answer was shocking and sad. He gets a small disability pension because he had worked with horses and one day one of his charges reared and kicked him, smashing his pelvis and leg, and now he has pins and screws all through his body. He had lived with his mother in her small apartment subsidized by the province for seniors, but then his mother died and since he had to be 55 to qualify for her apartment himself they kicked him out the day of the funeral. So he's homeless. He visits his daughters for a while, his brother from whom he had been estranged just invited him to stay for a while, but otherwise he just keeps traveling on the cheap. Amazing what stories there are out there.

Today's walk from El Acebo to Ponferrada was superb. The first 7 miles were through the mountains, and despite Dirk's proclamation I walked on the winding narrow two-lane road instead of the path, even though it was longer. The views were again magnificent, with precipitous drops, and I could hear the sound of rushing water hundreds of feet below. Then coming out of the mountains I crossed a medieval stone bridge into the town of Molinaseca, with shops lining the main, narrow cobblestone street running through it. Exiting the town was a bit more mundane, with a long gradual climb through a suburban stretch, through some dusty fields and then through the town of Campo before reaching the outskirts of Ponferrada. At first glance it looks like a prosperous metropolis with huge apartment blocks and some heavy industry. But what a surprise when you arrive in the old city. Beautiful, with a giant castle, imposing churches, and some beautiful plazas. I'm staying in the middle of the old city and once I do some serious relaxing I'm going to try to get up the energy to explore.

CAMINO MEMORY, 2010: HOSTEL MUSIC

This was written just before undertaking a 500 mile walk across northern Spain, regarding a brief stint on the Camino several years earlier.

May 8, 2015

As I get ready to leave for Spain and the Camino de Santiago de Compostela tomorrow, a memory of my first night on the pilgrim road...

In July 2010 my son Josh and I walked for four days on the Camino and stayed in pilgrim hostels, or albergues, along the way. The evening before our first day's walk we arrived in Roncesvalles, a tiny town in the Pyrenees on the Spanish side of the border with France. Many folks doing the Camino Frances--the route from the Pyrenees in the East to Santiago de Compostela in the west near the Atlantic Ocean--start there. 

There are just a handful of buildings in the town (population 24), all hundreds of years old and encrusted in lichen and moss. There's a charming stone chapel, a small rustic bar that served food and drink and had internet, and the albergue, then located in a 12th century Romanesque church, as it had been for the past 800 years. The building was severe and solid and starkly beautiful. More than a million pilgrims had probably stayed the night there over the years.

The showers and toilets, a rudimentary kitchen, and some meeting rooms were downstairs, but the sleeping area was the cavernous nave of the church. There were 60 bunk beds lined up in rows, and the night we were there all 120 spaces were taken. We arrived around 7 o'clock in the evening, signed in and got our pilgrim cards, were each given a pillow and a towel, and were told that the doors closed at 9:45 PM and lights out was at 10 PM.

The huge space, with tall stone walls that dwarfed the bunk beds, was resonant. And as 10 o'clock approached it was loud in there. People were organizing backpacks, arranging and getting into sleeping bags, and talking to companions. At 10 sharp the lights dimmed and a recording of early vocal music played for about three minutes. It was very calming and the collective mood changed. It was time for sleep.

What followed was a John Cage kind of music. I was too wired to sleep so I listened. At first there was the shuffling of bodies in sleeping bags trying to find the right position, scrunching and re-scrunching of pillows, and some scattered whispering among friends. After 15 minutes or so the sounds evolved: deeper breathing, snorts, snores, farts, the sounds of sleep. Multiplied by 120 the combination of sounds was something else, and it struck me as beautifully musical, with changing cadences and rhythms. All the while the volume was going down as if a steady hand were turning the knob. After around 45 minutes or so, even the bodily sounds quieted and the air was peaceful. After that I was able to go to sleep.

Coda to this story: Two years later a new albergue opened, with modern and updated facilities, and the church only houses pilgrims when the new albergue is full.

PREPARING FOR THE CAMINO

April 9, 2015

A month from today I’ll be leaving for Spain to walk the Camino from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Terry will be joining me for the first two weeks of my adventure, which is a nice send-off. We’ll do some sightseeing in Barcelona, a city that I love, take a train to Pamplona and spend some time there, and then bus up to Roncesvalles, a charming small town in the Pyrenees and the site of Charlemagne's defeat in 778, where we’ll start our walk. Terry and I will walk together for a week through mountains, vineyards, farms, medieval villages, small and large towns, and a couple of cities, and then she’ll head back to Massachusetts via Madrid. After that I’ll be on my own for the next 6 weeks.

I’m bursting with excitement about this. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years. I'm reminded of the anticipation I felt before my father took me to Yankee Stadium for the first time in June 1961 when I was seven years old; it was hard to think of anything else. I can't wait to be moving across the planet at 3 miles per hour and to be drinking in not only the beauty but the totality of the experience.

At the same time, frankly, I'm terrified. Can I really walk 500 miles in less than 7 weeks carrying a 25 pound pack? Will my feet hold up? My knees? My back? My psyche and determination? I'm not a stranger to substantial walks. I did a 50 mile hike with Terry in Nepal in 1982, 55 miles in Spain with my son Josh in 2010, 75 miles on my own in Spain in 2011, and a number of shorter adventures, but I've never done anything remotely like this. While it's dead center in my excitement zone, it's entirely out of my comfort zone. Which is exactly what I'm looking for.

I kept up a moderate level of walking this past winter (about 3 miles per day), either on a treadmill or outdoors, but a few weeks ago I started more serious training. At least six miles a day, and lots of flights of stairs. The last several days I've worn my fully loaded backpack while walking, which has made the prospect of the upcoming walk seem that much more real. Covered 45+ miles in the last week and it has felt like a lot, which is daunting because I'll have to average somewhere around 15 miles a day when I'm on the Camino. The training is like a small hors d'oeuvre before the main course.

TOKYO CIRCA 1998: FOUND WORDS

I love the poetry of awkward translations. This sign was in the window of a customer of ours who I visited about 20 times in the 80s and 90s. Matsumura Eiichi--a little older than me, plump, always wearing a black leather jacket--was a fourth generation bookseller whose shop was smack in the middle of the Kanda book district but was tiny and cramped; you practically had to walk sideways to make your way through teetering floor-to-ceiling stacks of valuable art books. Unlike many of my more formal meetings in Japan, we met in his cluttered cubby-hole of an office and I offered him our wares while he chain smoked and punched his calculator. Despite his English being almost as bad as my non-existent Japanese we somehow did business. Sadly he passed away about 15 years ago and though his son tried to keep the shop going, it folded after a couple of years and became yet another restaurant.

IN REACTION TO TRUMP'S ELECTORAL VICTORY

November 9, 2016

Last winter, while going through medical issues, I did a series of disturbing self-portraits exploring illness and mortality. As part of the process I contorted my face and my body and then heavily manipulated the resulting images. I haven't shared any of them because they're a bit extreme, but they echo my response to this week's events. So even though sharing this puts me out of my comfort zone, here's one of them...

MY EARLY READING YEARS, CA. 1956-1964

I started to read early, perhaps too early. My mother claims I was sounding out words in my twos and reading books when I was three. My father even nicknamed me Book Book. From as early as I can remember I've had images of letters floating in my brain and I've always visualized words more than heard them. 

I have strong memories of sitting on a beige and mauve floral rug in our apartment in The Bronx with a book in my lap. My mother didn't believe in fairy tales and they weren't part of my childhood. The books I remember most from those early years were about the physical, material world, not stories. Trucks, boats, trains, rockets, geology, geography, the solar system. 

By kindergarten I was reading at a fifth grade level. My teacher seems not to have considered the social ramifications but she regularly had me sit in front of the class and read to my classmates, the only kid in class to do so. I was simultaneously thrilled and discomfited. Most kids probably gave it no mind but some were jealous, others angry. It began a separation from some of my peers that continued through my school years.

At Christmas during first grade my parents gave me the Golden Book Encyclopedia. It was one of those sets that you'd buy one volume a week at the supermarket, and my mother put together all sixteen volumes. Opening that present, each volume individually wrapped in plain paper, I was almost dizzy with joy and excitement. Over the next weeks and months I read from Aardvark to Z-whatever, and learned about and saw pictures of countries, history, explorers and just about anything I could imagine. It nurtured a love of information and learning was one of the most influential books of my life.

We eventually owned the Book of Knowledge (difficult to use, unintuitive), the World Book (easy to use, illustrated), and my mother's favorite, which became my favorite as well, the Columbia Encyclopedia (in depth but concise, almost every entry a single paragraph no matter how long, no pictures). They were meant for school but I mostly read them for fun. I wondered at previously unknown countries and odd-looking buildings and landscapes and exotic costumes. At the time I was trying to collect a stamp from every country in the world and every time I'd get one from a new country I'd look it up in the encyclopedia and find it on the world map on the wall over my bed. 

I loved The Hardy Boys. The plots were formulaic and repetitive, but at some level I must have liked the predictability. I was taken from first page to last, threatened and reassured at the same time. I could smell the secret caves and feel the groaning floorboards. My closet door had to be closed and I wouldn't go to sleep until I finished the book. I owned several volumes but got most of them from the library. One day in third or fourth grade I went over to Doug Lerea's house and on his shelf sat a perfectly matched set of all 44 volumes that existed at that time. It was as if he owned the Holy Grail. The unexpected lust that was ignited by seeing that set may mark the moment my passion for book collecting was born.

Biographies: I consumed them like comic books. The ones I remember include Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Louis Brandeis, Galileo, Marie Curie, Einstein, Helen Keller, the Wright Brothers, John Glenn, Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Jim Thorpe, and Y. A. Tittle. I'm sure I've forgotten many others. 

Dry Guillotine is probably the single most memorable book from my childhood. My father, who was not a great reader, gave it to me when I was 11 or 12. He had apparently been quite moved by it. He was stationed in French Guiana for a year or so, and Dry Guillotine is a memoir by Rene Belbenois, an escapee from Devil's Island, the French penal colony just off the coast. Many of the men who were eventually liberated from the prison, some of whom my father photographed, ended up in the capital city, Cayenne, the base to which he returned from building airbases in the deep jungle. The story was brutal and terrified me to the core. I had actual nightmares about the coffin-sized underground cages in which prisoners served solitary confinement, unable to move for weeks, routinely going insane. I read it three times in three years and it's indelibly imprinted in my brain. I still have that old copy my father gave me, now tattered and missing part of its cover.

CROSSING THE ARIZONA DESERT AGAIN

January 14, 2018

I had to switch rental cars this weekend and I lucked out. Instead of a compact I was given a virtually brand new SUV that includes Sirius satellite radio. So when I drove AZ state route 93, a route I’ve taken many times before and that goes through incredibly remote and beautiful terrain with various iterations of desert landscapes, and where cell and radio service are nonexistent, I was listening to the sixties channel, from the Beatles to Motown. For a few minutes I was transported back to being a 19 year old again, speeding cross country listening to the same songs on the AM radio in my Dodge Dart.

Between Wickenburg and Bullhead City there’s Nothing. Literally. Former population 4, now population zero. On the boarded up ruins of the one gas station someone had stenciled “Let’s Be Better Humans”.

NEW YORK CITY

There just aren't that many places on the planet where within 10 yards you can be asked to pose with two women wearing only body paint and g-strings and then be asked to repent and follow jesus

EXPERIENCING DAVID AND THE "PRISONERS", FIVE DECADES APART

October 12, 2016

When I visited Florence when I was 15 years old and first saw Michelangelo's David and the unfinished "Prisoners" it was if a jolt of electricity went through me. The Prisoners mesmerized and David overwhelmed. I couldn't believe that a block of marble could turn into flesh and blood and skin. Though my parents had taken me to museums regularly as a kid and I'd loved Monet's Water Lillies and Boccioni's The City Rises among other things at the old MOMA, it was nothing like this. I was changed forever.

Though I've been to Florence quite a few times since, I hadn't had the opportunity to revisit the Accademia until yesterday. What a fabulous treat. No, that youthful jolt didn't reappear, I come at art now with a lifetime of looking and studying behind me and that knowledge goes hand in hand with a sort of lost innocence. I always try to shed expectations before works of art, but I'm at a different stage of life so the experience is different. But these are such powerful and profoundly moving works! David is still towering over the crowds and the unfinished works seem as gut-wrenching as ever. I was particularly moved this time by the unfinished Pieta. The body of Christ seems so unbearably limp and heavy at the same time. 

I'm so glad I had the opportunity to experience these works from different perspectives 48 years apart.

The biggest surprise of the day was the rest of the museum. The second floor has a collection of Florentine painting from 1370 to 1430 that is astounding, one masterpiece after another. A wonderful era, just before the Renaissance ushered in realism and perspective. Some of the images are more surreal than anything created in the 20th century. Walking through those rooms--almost empty because the crowds were all downstairs with Michelangelo--was a grand and emotionally exhausting experience.