98: Comillas

There was another tourist/pilgrim waiting in front of tourist information. I talked to him for a moment and found that he was German. I'll call him Guido.

The office opened and we went inside to get our credential stamped and to find out how to get to the pilgrim shelter. While we were busy with this, the German couple I had met earlier walked in as well. They, too, wanted to get their credentials stamped, but they did not intend on spending the night. Guido told them what a beautiful place this would be to stay, but they said they are not on the road primarily for staying in beautiful places.

This was my introduction to Guido. It turned out that he was unemployed, but that he somehow still managed to spend most of his time vacationing in various places. He had done the Camino de Santiago several times, along several trails, but he seemed very relaxed about it all, taking the bus when he didn't feel like walking, or staying several days in one place if he liked it particularly. The Camino de Santiago is becoming clogged up with people like him.

The shelter here in Comillas did look a little more attractive than many of the previous ones. There were several rooms, and kitchen and laundry facilities, to some extent. The two French sisters were there again. I took a nap and when I woke up, Lone and Anabel and Matthieu had arrived as well. It seemed sort of funny the way we kept finding each other. Anabel and Lone told me they had had to stay at a sort of pension in Santillana del Mar, which ended up costing them significantly more than they had hoped to spend. I was glad to hear that, after having spent the night behind a gas station getting barked at by dogs and yelled at by neighbors and crawled on by slugs.

I went back into town to locate the library. It was right next to the tourist information bureau. There was a sort of patio there and some benches, and a lot of people sitting around and children playing. This was one of the things that surprised me about Spain: how much time people spent outdoors socializing.

In the library I needed to wait for some time before the computer was free. I found a book of Garcia Lorca's poetry which brought back memories of high school Spanish Literature class. I also found some works of St. John of the Cross. The depth of his work always overwhelms me. These intimate encounters with God seem to me so overpowering, so dangerous and frightening, and yet in these poems it is presented as something so sweet, so sought after. It seems bold and somewhat innocent and somewhat unnatural and yet so natural as well, to read his words...

97: Steps towards grace: it's not that bad, is it?

I'm not one of those Christians who frequently says "God spoke to me" or "God told me...". I can't distinguish God's voice from the other voices in my head, so I'm cautious about attributing any of them to God. But there are a handful of occurences in my life in which a thought entered my mind and filled me with such joyful tenderness that I am even more cautious about attributing it to anyone other than God.

It was 2000, and I'd had a very frustrating year and a half since finishing University. I had moved from Canada to Germany and from Germany to Ecuador, for the time being. My friend Bryan came to visit from Canada and we decided to take some time and travel through Patagonia.

I felt a little bit like I was doing something sinful. I expected that God would want me to do something useful, to get involved in missionary work or something like that. I felt like I couldn't even go and enjoy a trip like this without justifying it in some way, such as making a commitment that I would preach to people I met or something like that.

So I felt that I was going under God's radar, as it were. I felt a bit like Jonah running away from God.

How great was my surprise, then, that it was by taking a trip like this that I would have the deepest spiritual experience in my life up to that point.

It doesn't sound like much to describe it: I was sitting on the waterfront at Punta Arenas, looking out over the Strait of Magellan, when I felt as if God was saying, "come on now, Marco. It's not that bad, is it?"

Like I say, I'm cautious about attributing the thoughts I encounter to God. But something very strange happened: for the next few days and weeks I couldn't embrace the cynical, life-negating view I'd usually held up to that point. I was -- almost against my will, almost somewhat grudgingly, if that were possible -- glad to be alive. The whole trip had been a wonderful experience, and for the first time it didn't feel like something with which I tried to counterbalance the bad things in life. It felt like something simply good, simply to be enjoyed, simply to "taste and see that the Lord is good."

Of course, I managed to regain my Weltschmerz soon enough. A few months later I was working in a warehouse in England and hating my life just like in the good old days. But two things had been altered irreversibly in my grooves of thinking:

For one thing, I learned that I was capable of seeing life as something positive. This was sometimes comforting, but sometimes really alarming.

For another, I learned that I can go for decades as a Christian and still not know anything about the voice of God. I had always assumed that the voice of God was the voice that told me to be useful, to do things I don't like, to take on more responsibility and make more sacrifices and try harder. I had assumed that the part of me that wanted to escape, to travel and be a vagabond and an anonymous free spirit unconcerned with the usefulness of any of his actions, was the bad part -- the voice of temptation that I had to resist. But now I had to re-evaluate my life. The experience was too clear to have been an illusion. The result -- going from hating life to loving it -- far too positive to have come from an evil source. Maybe it had been the voice of God all along, calling me to Patagonia, calling me to be useless for once and to taste and see that the Lord is good. Maybe it was the other voice that was the false god, oppressing me with religiosity. Maybe I was finally understanding what grace means. I had been telling myself all my life that I had understood grace (Protestants can tend to flatter themselves with this compliment), while all the time I had been oppressed by the Protestant work ethic of "repayment by works". (We do not call it "Salvation by works" but it amounts to the same thing.)

This possibility grew slowly within me over the course of the next few years.

96: Cobreces and Comillas

The day was slowly breaking behind me. I eventually came on another gas station, and I went in for a wash. I was still walking on the carretera instead of the trail. The kilometer markers on the side of the road gave me the idea that I should count how many steps I take per kilometer. Then I could calculate how many steps I took during the entire pilgrimage. I thought it would be fun to be able to tell someone, "yeah, I took 1.2 million steps on that particular hike."

But I kept losing count. The 15 minutes that it took me to walk a kilometer were a hard length of time to focus on counting steps. Because a number like "seven-hundred-and-seventeen" is hard to say in the space of time that you take one step (especially if you have to say it with every step), I abbreviated -- just kept the "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, twenty... wait. Was I at twenty already, or is this thirty?"

I came to the top of a hill and found two other pilgrims, a man and a woman. When I spoke to them, I found out that they were German. I now found the trail, but because I was hungry I decided to continue along the carretera. I was now entering Cobreces, and had learned from past experience that the trail could go on for a long stretch before there would be any opportunity to buy food.

But it turned out that even walking through Cobreces didn't bring me past any food shops. So by the time I entered Comillas over an hour later, I was feeling a little faint.

There was a beautiful rocky beach with statues of boys posed to jump into the water. Then the road took a bend inland and I began to doubt that it would really lead me into downtown Comillas. I had thought the town would lie right on the beach.

But after a bit of a walk through wooded area I came into Comillas. I found the tourist information. They were closed, but a sign said they'd be open again in five minutes. I decided to take advantage of that time to shop for some food. There was a supermarket just across the street.

My body was crying out for some sustenance. As I stood in the checkout line, I had a brief moment in which I felt that I would faint. I was getting very annoyed with the people in the lineup in front of me. When I had finally made my purchase I immediately opened the carton of orange juice I had just bought and took a good draught. I needed some sugar in my bloodstream.

95: When things start seeming very petty

When I was 13 my older sister moved away from our home in Quito to go to a boarding school in Paraguay. From then on I only saw her when she came to visit every year from December to February (the Southern Hemisphere's summer).

I remember the last day of one of these visits, the day before she would return to Paraguay and I wouldn't see her for another nine months. I might have been fourteen or maybe fifteen. We had had a great couple of months together as a family. One of the things we had been doing was working on some songs. My brother and I had both taken up the guitar in the course of that year. My voice had changed and was suddenly an adequate singing voice, and together with my two more melodious siblings we had learned some trios together.

Now it was the night before her departure, and I wanted to sit down with a tape recorder and make a recording of our recently rehearsed trios. But my sister was busy packing, and the household was generally in a disarray, and I saw that we wouldn't be making any recordings, and she was flying away in the morning.

I remember sitting in the darkened living room fighting my tears that night. I was angry with myself for crying over such a small thing. So we didn't manage to put a song on tape. Was that a good reason to cry? It didn't occur to me at the time that maybe my emotional turmoil was not so much due to not recording a souvenir of our time together as due to, well, the departure of a sister.

But the pettiness of things got a hold on me. Everything that bothered me -- really bothered me to where I could throw a tantrum or shed tears -- seemed so very banal and insignificant. I felt ashamed that the stupid little details of life could get to me like that, and I did not want to acknowledge them enough to let them reduce me to tears.

I did not cry again until I was 28.

94: A dead slug

Should I get into all the gory details about biological and sanitary needs when you are on a pilgrimage? Maybe I should just mention that it is a good idea to bring toilet paper and a small shovel, for two distinct ways of meeting the need. Usually, where you'll need the shovel there will be enough moss and foliage that you won't need toilet paper, and where you'll need toilet paper there won't be a need for a shovel.

And you should bring soap. That part should be obvious.

Your digestion will not always wait for you to find the perfect spot. In some cases, you will wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself sleeping on a patch of grass behind a gas station, and find it necessary to put on your shoes and get your flashlight and find a patch of trees or bushes as makeshift sanitation.

I managed to fall asleep again after this incident, but not for long. I was irreversably awake long before the day was dawning. I decided to keep walking.

The first thing I noticed was that I had crushed a slug in my sleep. When you sleep outside in some places, you may notice that slugs crawl onto your shoes and sleeping bag and backpack during the night. I'm not sure what they're looking for that they can't find in the grass.

This one had come all the way to where it was right next to my head, and I must have turned around in my sleep right around then. Fortunately it got stuck between my hat and the sleeping bag, rather than getting crushed into my actual hair.

Still, it was gross. It had been one of those big brown slugs, a bit like the lower lip of a large African woman. And it was now a gooey paste on my hat and my sleeping bag.

I packed my things and started walking. I had walked at night before, and had walked through fog almost every day, but this was the first time I was walking through a foggy night. Here and there a dog barked, but otherwise the tapping sound of my walking stick and my heavy breathing were the only sounds I could hear. The street was not illuminated, and there were sometimes large stretches in which there was no house or any other source of light. I had to use my flashlight sometimes, or just walk through the misty darkness.

I took a break after half an hour to stretch. I had heard that it is better to stretch after warming up than to stretch cold before exercising.

93: The underachiever, Part 4

Is a desire for success different from a fear of failure? No doubt it is, but I have a hard time seeing the difference. Or seeing how someone can tell whether he is driven by a desire for success or a fear of failure. I bet it feels exactly the same.

We tend to think of an achiever as being driven by 1. a desire for success and 2. high standards. Because if his standards are low, he is considered an underachiever even if he succeeds in reaching them.

But I wonder how many times this combination is exactly what makes an underachiever as well. The high standards mean that success will come with difficulty, or that there is a risk of failure. But the desire for success, if it is coupled with a fear of failure, may immobilize someone rather than drive him forward.

It is an interesting detail that I have noticed: when I speak to underachievers, it seems that they often have higher ambitions than the achievers and overachievers.

92: vagabond as I know it

The rest of the day I walked. Much of the stretch was along a pipeline. I was listening to Johnny Cash on my mp3 player, which I did break out on occasion. I wondered whether I would make the next stop, Santillana del Mar, by night time. I stood on a bridge for a while, considering whether I could sleep under it. I decided against it and kept walking. I abandoned the trail again and went along a carretera. Another 5 Kilometers to Santillana, and it was getting dark.

I found a small gas station and decided to sleep behind it. I brushed my teeth, then went out back and spread out my sleeping bag. This kind of sacking out was more familiar to me than the regular pilgrim hangouts.

A dog was barking at me. I remembered other times when I slept outside -- in Canada or Argentina or other such trips -- and how some dogs would literally bark all night because they knew I was nearby. I always wanted to make a deal with them, that I would not move for the rest of the night if they would agree to be quiet for the rest of the night. They didn't seem to care, even if I just lay motionless all night long, the fact that I was there meant they had a right to bark, and if they had a right to bark, well darned if they aren't going make ample use of that right.

This dog eventually went away. But now a lady in a neighboring house was calling from her balcony. I was comfortably settled in my sleeping bag, had taken off my glasses and was plugging up my ears. I couldn't tell for sure if she was calling to me, so I just ignored her. I became increasingly certain that she was, in fact, trying to get my attention. Some bum going to sleep just outside her backyard.

It wasn't even fully dark yet, but I drifted off to sleep.