Evergreen Editing

September 1, 2017

Travel transforms me. It transforms me from a happy person to a horrible person. I start long travel days with doe-eyed affection for everything (“Oh, Sea-Tac has installed new art in Terminal A!”). My hair looks good and my clothes are clean. When I see my reflection, I see a woman who is going to Spain by herself for two months.

On the flight to Newark, I listen to the start of G. K. Chesterton’s The Invisible Man (“What lovely writing!”), and then I eat a Clif bar (“So yummy! I am sated!”) and I pore over John Brierley’s famous A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago (“What a pleasing tactile experience it is to hold this dense, slender volume in my hands!”).

Brierley tells me that in the mountains, I will see great birds of prey. He tells me that there are 1800 pairs of griffin vultures there, the largest concentration in the world (“I always wondered!”). He tells me I will see hill ponies, which are eaten by locals (“Yum!”). He says I may even encounter a rare Pyrenean chamois izard (“I’m sure I’ll know it when I see it!”).

I begin my layover in Newark, an airport I’ve flown into many times. As usual, everything out the window is poopy beige: the sky, the tarmac, the planes. At the restaurants, iPads are at every seat, cauterizing any possibility of human connection.

I go to Starbucks, and the man in line behind me says, unprovoked: “Oh, great, I’m behind a woman. I know what you’re going to order: a decaf, non-fat, sugar-free, VANILLA, mocha, chai, latte.” I tell him I’m going to suffer through a drip coffee now, just to prove him wrong.

“I’m just kidding,” he says. “I love women. But if they want milkshakes, they should go to McDonald’s and not get FRAPPUCINOS. I can’t stand hearing women order coffee.”

I am going to Spain, and nothing can get me down. Minutes later, he smiles as I dump half and half into my coffee and says, “Have a safe trip home, honey.” 

I smile with my whole body because I am not going home.

I go to the duty free place and treat myself to a makeover and a spritz of the Dior perfume my grandma wore. I am in the international terminal and already, there is less English. I pretend I didn’t just sit on a plane for five hours so I’ll be fresh for the seven that are coming.

I am in the air and watching a movie set in the part of the country I just left, and I have a plastic cup of wine and am feeling calm and epic. The woman across from me is watching Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in New York, and the woman in front of him is watching Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Philadelphia. The man next to that woman is watching Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in space. The Spanish lady next to me didn’t touch her entree because both the chicken and the pasta had cheese, which she does not eat. I give her my roll and wish I knew more Spanish. I look at the map and see that we are not even halfway there, even though I’ve had a meal, some ice cream, given up on a comedy documentary that wasn’t funny, and gone to the bathroom. How many times have I done that: looked at the map and then at the illuminated no smoking light, crestfallen: we are not almost there. 

I had a big to-do list before leaving Seattle: email them, clean that, harvest those, go there, see her, read this. But I did everything on the list, so the absence of an agenda has created a vacuum and the vacuum fills with worries: do I have a tumor on the other side of my neck? Have I scheduled my train to Pamplona too tightly? Do I know enough Spanish to get to St. Jean Pied de Port? Is that a canker sore or a harbinger of chronic gum disease? Will I die alone? 

We eventually land. I’m on some sloped moving walkways in Madrid. I’m confused. I worry that my trekking poles haven’t made it through baggage but they have. I say “Puerta de Atocha” to a cab driver, and all my Euros later, I’m at a station with a clock tower emblazoned with one Latin word: FESTINA (HURRY).

I enter and see a forest of palm trees, and then a group of boys with backpacks and trekking poles.

Then I see, like, a lot more people with backpacks and trekking poles.

I board the train and someone comes up to me, asking in Spanish if I am a pilgrim and if I would like to split a cab from Pamplona to St. Jean Pied de Port with four people. I say I already have a bus ticket, and then I say “Buen Camino!” for the first time.

It has now been 23 hours since I woke up in Puyallup, and I try to nod off, but mostly I tell my body, “Okay, you’re going to be in St. Jean sort of soon, and when you get there tonight, you’re not going to think it’s bedtime, but it will be, so you gotta sleep, okay? You’re really, really tired.”

The line between Madrid and Pamplona is brown and scrubby. In Pamplona I walk to the bus station and make lots of wrong turns. I find it underground with dripping ceilings and sleepy travelers, and my eyes keep shutting.

The bus route to St. Jean Pied de Port is steep and fecund. And on the bus there are only pilgrims: quiet ones, happy ones, chatty ones, flirty ones, silly ones, moody ones. And I cannot keep my eyes open but I also cannot be unhappy, because this bus is winding tenderly up hairpin turns into green mountains at golden hour to a very exciting place. This is the last time I’ll used motorized transport.

I haven’t been social yet. I haven’t introduced myself to anyone yet.

Then it all changes.

We get off the bus and I’m walking next to someone from Michigan and we follow a crowd and the crowd is at the pilgrim office where a woman from New Zealand named Karen tells all the English speakers what to expect for the hike tomorrow and then we’re in the last available hostel and there are ten cats four dogs no shoes allowed and Zehra from Holland leads five of us to a French restaurant and I’m sleepy and all of a sudden best friends with her and Igor the bus driver from Bilbao who shares pizza and pasta with me and Oscar from Uruguay and Johannes from Germany who loves Tony Robbins and never buys beverages at restaurants, preferring to save the money and drink bathroom tap water (Johannes is the sort who reads blogs with titles like “Fifty Things to Do Before 5 O’clock to be Truly Happy and a CEO”), and then two women who join us partway through dinner from Melbourne and I’m already teasing and not caring to impress people and I can’t imagine my life without them and we wait nicely to use the one shower and in the morning Igor is kicked out for waking up too early and then the French host gets angry and we don’t know why and she sends us all out and most of my acquaintances are gone again just like that, walking over the mountains in the rain and fog to Roncesvalles, but I was sort of getting tired of them anyway, and Igor and I are standing bewildered at a shut door. We shrug and go sit in a cafe for four hours.

We sit very still. I’ve decided not to start walking immediately. I’m going to sit and gather my strength. Igor and I sit quietly together, and he smokes, and I drink coffee, and we communicate in faltering English. He’s Basque, so he teaches me a few random words.

And that is the first day.