60: Portugalete

The rest of the walk was through one city after another. We wanted to find a good place to take a rest and have some lunch, but even when we did find a park there was construction work going on a stone's throw away.

Coming into Portugalete, we saw the famous suspension bridge. Built in 1893, it was the first significant example of a transporter bridge in the world. It is essentially a ferry that doesn't touch the water. I looked at the monumental work and imagined it being built in the 19th century and wondered why they didn't just put a rope ferry across the river.

We asked around for the pilgrim shelter. Many people didn't know, others directed us through town to a hall that was apparently used as a sort of school. There was no one at the reception. We asked some of the people passing through, but no one seemed to know whether Portugalete had a pilgrim shelter. We tried to ask our way to the city's information center, but that had moved recently, so we walked around through the city. Eventually we found it, but, like almost everything in Spain, it was closed for the afternoon. Lone sat down on a park bench. I found another bench, removed my boots, and lay down to rest. An hour later the info center opened.

As we walked in, a petite redhead with a backpack walked in as well. I had already noticed her at the hostel in Bilbao, partly because she walked around with two staves. It looked quite funny, since these were sticks picked up in the woods and not "professional" nordic walking sticks. She was another pilgrim also looking for a shelter. Her name was Anabel.

The receptionist at the info office told us that Portugalete's pilgrim shelter is a seasonal thing; during the summers one can spend the night in that hall where Lone and I had first been led to. But, as it was still April, we would have to spend the night in a hotel. We asked about price, and she said the cheapest was 22 Euros.

Lone decided she would go with that, but I thought I'd rather continue walking and spend the night outside somewhere. Anabel seemed undecided. "You'll sleep outside?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said. "I don't feel like paying for a hotel, and the weather report said that it wouldn't rain." I had made sure to catch the weather at the Bilbao hostel.

"But then where do you sleep?"

I shrugged. "A patch of grass somewhere. Or a beach. I've done it a few times on this trip already."

"I think I'll try that too."

"Great."

I still wanted to see if I could buy a Spanish New Testament, and Anabel wanted to find a photo store where she could dump the pictures from her digital camera onto a CD. Lone had a few things to buy as well, so the three of us went roaming the streets together.

Anabel

Portugalete is the only city I know that has motorized walkways on the sidewalks outside. There were many steep streets, so it was helpful to not have to walk all that way. But it did feel strange.

Anabel and Lone on a conveyor sidewalk in Portugalete

59: Meditations on the resurrection, part 6: Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene, it seems, understood a lot more about Jesus than the disciples did. No wonder the relationship is such a source of fascination and bad romance novels.

But the Bible doesn't tell us much about her at all. Some equate her with the adulterous woman who was almost stoned to death, and some with the one who anointed Jesus' feet. It becomes more confusing because it seems that two-thirds of the women in Jesus' life were named "Mary".

Easter morning finds Mary Magdalene sobbing before an empty tomb. Others had already seen it and gone home scratching their heads, but she couldn't just get over it like that. Two angels ask her why she is crying. In possibly the least astonished reaction to an angelic appearance recorded in the Bible, Mary tells them that her Lord has been taken away.

Jesus appears on the scene and asks her the same question. She does not recognize him at first, but when he says her name, she gives a cry and, apparently, embraces him. He tells her not to touch him (I think his words could even be translated as "stop touching me").

The resurrected Jesus was frequently not recognized immediately by those who knew him. The moment of recognition, when it comes, seems to have some personal significance for each of them.

Mary Magdalene recognizes him when he speaks her name. The Bible tells us that he had driven seven demons out of her. She recognizes the voice that had called her, by name, from out of the darkness of demonic possession. Was that moment a reminder of her first contact with the Light? Did it go back even beyond that -- was it originally maybe not so much a "calling by her name" as a "giving her a name"?

Many people tell us we have a choice as to whether or not we want to follow Jesus, but sometimes I wonder whether all of us really do. I live my day-to-day existence as if I had a choice in the things I do, but when Jesus called me, did I really have the possibility of rejecting the Call? I don't really feel that I did. I found, I think, what the Book of Common Prayer refers to when it says, "Your love compels us to come in." Compels.

The moment of being called. Was this what Mary Magdalene was re-living, or remembering, when she heard her Master call her by her name in front of the empty tomb?

58: Walking out of Bilbao

I had taken a full day's rest to allow my knee to recover. The second night at the hostel had cost me more, since my pilgrim's pass only got me a discount the first night. I called my parents in Germany again, then set out to continue the walk to Portugalete.

It immediately started with a long flight of stairs. A long flight of stairs. Great, I thought. My knee is going to love this.

This picture does not show the whole thing.

From Bilbao to Portugalete there is practically only a series of cities and suburbs lining the coast, but the trail occasionally dipped behind a ridge so that the cityscapes weren't visible and one could walk among greenery. There were many ramshackle huts of the rural poor, and a lot of garbage was lying around. It reminded me of some parts of Ecuador.

As I was puffing up a steep hill I saw the Danish lady I had met at dinner the night before. She was resting on a bench. I stopped and we spoke for a bit, and then continued on together. She had a pair of nordic walking sticks. We talked about why we were taking the pilgrimage and about where we lived and worked. Her name was Lone, and she lived in southern Denmark just north of the German border. She had four children and a few grandchildren. She said she needed some space to air out her mind, so she came on this pilgrimage.

Some sections of the trail have apparently been there since Roman times.

We passed a point where the trails divided. One led to Burgos and the Camino Frances, the other one continued along the coast. A trail marker helpfully indicated that it was still a good 730 Kilometers to Santiago.

We came to a small chapel. Since I was on a pilgrimage and all, I tried to stop at each of the chapels along the road and enter for a bit of prayer and silence, but I hadn't been very successful because most of them were locked. It was the same with this one. We drank some water and walked on.

The trail returned into suburban landscapes. We eventually lost track of the trail markers. Lone read from her guide, and I saw a road that could be the one we were looking for. It started going steep uphill. For some reason I always speed up when I walk uphill, and Lone was having trouble with the incline so she was lagging behind. We hadn't seen trail markers in a long time. Eventually an old car came down the hill. I flagged the driver to stop and asked if one could get to Portugalete by following this trail.

"Dear me, no," he said. "This keeps going up, and up, and when you get to the top of the hill, there's no way to go but down again. You can go down the other side, but Portugalete is that way." And he pointed.

"Well, you'll see we came off the trail a bit here," I said. "If you're heading back down the hill, could you take us with you to where the trail continues?"

He hesitated for the briefest of moments, then opened the passenger door. Lone was just coming into view at that point (it must have seemed strange for me to be talking about "us" when there was no one but me in sight). We were given a lift back down the hill and got off at a traffic light. It ended up taking quite some time until we were all out, with our backpacks and Lone's nordic walking sticks and my pilgrim staff and trench coat, and the driver explaining to us what our options were to continue our walk to Portugalete. The light changed several times and the car just stood there, a line of cars forming behind it. I made an apologetic gesture to the woman in the first car, but she laughed. I guess she enjoyed the sight.

57: Steps towards despair: a burden to humanity

Of course we all know that if you have a roof over your head and three meals a day, you're more fortunate than about three-fourths of the world's population, depending on what sort of statistics you're going by.

We probably all try to be grateful for it, but many of us who try to feel thankful end up feeling guilty and then defiant. Guilty for getting the long end of the stick without having done anything to deserve it, and of course defiant for being made to feel guilty when it's not really our fault either.

In my case this line of thinking also had the effect of putting me under pressure to make my life count -- to compensate somehow for the imbalance that I was causing by being. But this depressed me as well. It seemed like I would, in order to stop burdening the world, have to get used to the idea of having to live in asceticism and service. Mother Teresa was pulling her own weight, and then some. I could become like her, or be like everyone else and burden the rest of humanity.

This is depressing. I preached asceticism and planned it for my own life, but all this self-denial made me wonder what I even exist for. I like nice things as much as the next guy does. Why should I be the one who goes without them for the sake of easing the burden I put on the world? I wondered on the one hand why it was so difficult for me to embrace the joy of the Lord, but on the other hand I did not really allow myself to enjoy a whole lot. During my teens I felt vaguely guilty if I was taking joy in anything other than talking about the Bible or some sanctimonious activity like that. I felt too self-indulgent, and angry at myself for being self-indulgent, and angry at God for forbidding my self-indulgence, and angry at the world for being so imbalanced that my every desire for myself meant a curtailing of someone else's desire.

Asceticism as an end in itself can easily lead to despair. If a man who eats only one bread a day in order to discipline himself and help others is doing more than a man who eats three square meals a day, then it is easy to conclude that the one who eats nothing at all is doing even more. If self-denial is the purpose of being, then it would follow that not existing would make you (if one can speak in such terms) even more purposeful, because the self would be denied to the point of oblivion. It would be my best contribution; it would save me the excruciating toil of constant self-denial, and save the overpopulated world the space and food and air that I was taking up by existing.

56: Second day in Bilbao

I woke up and went down for breakfast. Then I called my parents in Germany from the card phone at the hostel. This was a telephone to which I could receive calls as well, so they called me back and we talked a long time on the lower rates.

I spent the rest of the morning in the nearby hospital waiting to have my knee looked at. My Dutch insurance card had worked its magic again, and I was not charged anything, and didn't even have to fill out any paperwork to speak of.

When the doctor finally had a look at me, he immediately sent me to X-ray. After waiting outside the X-ray room and then having the plates taken, I returned to the doctor. He said he couldn't see anything, but prescribed some pain medication and recommended that I rest for the remainder of the day.

"Pain medication" I thought as I walked out of there. I saw in my mind's eye how some tendon or cartilage in my knee was being torn to shreds over the next few days while I walked along blissfully drugged to feel no pain. I decided I would not take any painkillers.

The procedure had surprised me anyway. I know nothing about medicine, but it seemed to me that X-rays show you what's going on with the bone, and that a knee injury you sustain from walking would be more likely to be related to cartilage or ligaments or whatever. But an X-ray might show that too, for all I know. It seemed unlikely that someone who spent about a decade studying medicine would fail to have a grasp on what the most likely causes of knee pain on a long walk would be, and how to detect these.

I went to an internet cafe to catch up on my eMailing and blogging. I found an Aldi and did some grocery shopping. They even had pumpernickel, which I had not yet seen since coming to Spain.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing in the hostel. I did my laundry. I talked with an Argentine immigrant. I met more pilgrims: a Danish woman in the cafeteria, a French-Canadian guy in the laundry room. In the evening I saw the Austrian couple Helmut and Helga again.

55: Steps towards despair: a burden to other lifeforms

When I try to trace my thoughts back to their origins, I usually find my earliest memories of them to be on my way to or from school. Most of my school years were spent in Quito, and most of the time we lived within walking distance of our school. In the mornings, my father would usually walk us to school, and in the afternoons we would sometimes walk together and sometimes separately. We had great conversations during our times together, and but I also enjoyed walking by myself and pursuing my thoughts.

It seems that it was on these walks that my thoughts on the nature of the world and my role in it began to take shape. Looking back on it now, I find it remarkable how soon I came to see myself as part of the problem.

In a South American capital city you can see the growth from day to day. Hills that were forested last year are now another suburb, or expanse of slums, or combination of the two.

I knew I was a burden on the world because I knew two things: 1. Natural habitats are being destroyed and species are going extinct every day. 2. The human population on earth is increasing.

I did hear that the destruction of habitat was not caused directly by human population growth, but by greedy landowners, ruthless oil companies, and poorly educated farmers on the edge of rain forests. I also heard that the billions of people sharing the planet had not yet reached numbers at which one could talk of "overpopulation". I wasn't qualified to dispute either of these, although the "not yet overpopulated" arguments never sounded very convincing to me, and didn't seem to take into account that overpopulation -- by anyone's definition -- would be reached soon.

But I considered how I lived. We lived in a fourplex with a small garden. It was not luxurious, but I wondered how much of the earth's surface would be taken up if everyone in the world had as many square meters as we did. In some areas of the world there are three families living in a place like ours.

We had a car. We did not use it much, as we were within walking distance of school and work, but still, it needed gasoline. How much gasoline? How much gasoline would be needed if every family in the world had a car like ours? How many toxins and greenhouse gases would they all pump into the atmosphere? How much oil would need to be pumped out of the ground? How much rainforest would need to be destroyed to get this oil?

I ate three meals a day. How much land was being used to grow the wheat and potatoes and to provide pasture for the cows that went into my meals?

The electricity I used for my reading lamp, my computer, my radio -- where did it come from? Where was some reservoir flooding an ecological habitat, or some coal generator pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or some nuclear power plant creating radioactive waste?

I did not know the answer to these questions. I always wished that someone could give us exact figures on what an equilibrium between humans and the rest of nature would look like. How much fuel can we burn before we're taking more than is replenished, and sending more toxins into the air than can be absorbed again? Given the world's population, how much land would each person be entitled to before plant and animal life would suffer irreparable damage? My suspicion was that we were already taking a lot more than our share. This was certainly true for the "wealthy landowners and greedy oil companies" we always liked to blame, but I couldn't help thinking that, to really achieve ecological equilibrium, everyone above the poverty line would have to downsize. But since most people weren't doing so, and certainly not voluntarily, even the more minor contributions of those below the poverty line were upsetting the equilibrium.

"Upsetting the equilibrium" is what I am doing. I am a breathing, eating burden on other lifeforms. No matter what efforts I put into this, I cannot become a positive or even a neutral force. I'll have to settle for being a less destructive force, but still destructive, because I cannot stop contributing my part to a massive force that is creating an imbalance which is disfavorable to most species and fatal to many. They would be better off if I didn't exist.

How can life possibly be lived when you have this knowledge? Apparently, everyone around me was doing just fine. What I could never figure out was whether people weren't seeing it, or saw it but had found a way to live in spite of it. There is amazing power in the optimistic idea of counterbalancing the damage we do by doing some even greater good someday. Fatalism, too, is powerful. So is the willful blindness of greed. I know this because I used these three methods myself in staving off despair.

54: the hostel in Bilbao

The bus reached its last stop and the driver showed me how to walk the rest of the way to the hostel. It was a huge building on higher ground overlooking the city of Bilbao. Several of the major cities along the Camino de Santiago do not have pilgrim shelters, so pilgrims have to stay in normal hostels. This one at least gave me a discount when I showed my pilgrim's pass. It still came to over 13 Euros, but it did, after all, include much more than my accomodations so far had. There was a cafe, several vending machines, laundry facilities, lounges and payphone. My room was shared with only one other person, and there was a great view of the city.

My roommate turned out to be an elderly German man. I took a shower and went to the cafeteria for some dinner. I tried to write while I was eating. Trying to sum up at the end of the day what had been going on in my mind all day long was always a difficult task. I was very tired and my knee was in pain. I decided I should go to a clinic tomorrow and have it looked at before continuing my walk.

Back in my room, I asked my roommate if I could keep the window open. The traffic noise was loud, but I had earplugs and I preferred having a breeze blowing through the room.

"No problem," he said. "I can sleep through anything. I can fall asleep on a bus, in an office chair, anyplace, any time."

This intrigued me. The man had the ability that I most wanted to have.

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"Well, I took some endogenous training, and that helped. You just close your eyes and relax, and listen intently to every sound that's around you. Then you focus on the rhythm of your breathing, but I'm usually already asleep by that time."

This was one of the most counterintuitive things I had heard. I usually plugged up my ears and tried to ignore all the sounds around me. Could it be that I could fall asleep if I tried to focus on them instead?

About an hour later I did put my earplugs in. Listening to the traffic noise in a darkened room had failed to put me to sleep.