The Best Women's Travel Writing (29 page)

Back home, Ginny had been my only “political” friend. Her boyfriend's draft number had come up just before we left, so he had conceded and joined the Navy. And suddenly war became very personal. But in long conversations with our young multi-national coworkers, all of whom were outraged by the U.S. war on Vietnam, she couldn't win an argument.

“How do they know more about us than us?” she complained.

“America sends your brothers to kill thousands of people in a place you know nothing about to prevent Communism from spreading?” Ali from Afghanistan would pin us in. With each night spent out in the company of “the servants of the working class,” we grew more distant from the paper-thin perceptions we'd held so close.

“I luv ya, ya big Yanks ya,” the short, red-haired Scottish boy greeted us every morning at 5:30 as we began our first shift. Ginny and I settled into our daily chores and started making plans. We shipped the overstuffed suitcases home at considerable expense and bought train passes to travel during our last few weeks. I was promoted to a maroon uniform, much to Ginny's dismay. We both knew it was only because our blue-coated supervisor was after me, but that bump in class was still a sweet, guilty pleasure.

Late one night halfway through the summer, Ginny and I walked to a community staff room that housed a small black-and-white television set, mostly cabinet with a many-framed small screen in the middle. We sat on the floor with a few dozen coworkers, half-asleep, with sweaters and blankets around us as the evening chill set in. We could barely see the ghostlike figure that stepped off the spaceship and onto the moon, but there was silence among the small group of people from at least ten different countries. A sense of human pride seemed shared, beyond our cultural divide, and I felt all of humanity sitting there with me. And later, when the moon was visible, I could picture someone up there, right then, and imagine millions of people around the world also staring up at this white, round, mystical moon, all seeing a different part of the exact same, wonderful thing.

It was my richest souvenir from Sir Billy's holiday camp: knowing that we all are, in dissimilar conditions, simply seeing a different side of the same place, while striving to relish our small distinct lives.

In the end, Ginny and I did make it to London. We shopped at Carnaby Street for the latest androgynous fashions not far from where Twiggy had made her start, and we toured Buckingham Palace where the Queen was in residence. We even saw Mick Jagger, after spending an evening with a couple of animated young French guys who spoke no English but were comical company, making us goofy pointed hats out of newspapers to protect us from the next day's sun. Sharing blankets, cold tea, and baguettes throughout the long summer night, we staked out a place in the front row for a free concert in Hyde Park the next day. The Rolling Stones performed for 250,000 fans a month before Woodstock, letting three thousand white butterflies loose into the London sky in honor of their dead overdosed guitarist.

We left Butlin's shortly thereafter, bound for the European rails with two small backpacks. We rode up and down the Eurail lines, sleeping nights on the trains, waking up many mornings in a country different from the one in which we'd gone to sleep. I met my first New Yorker in Amsterdam, an attractive, sarcastic young guy as foreign to me as the Italians. We held long conversations in bohemian cafés with fellow backpackers, and Ginny became increasingly able to defend—and adjust—her political positions. We feigned nonchalance as we befriended a striking black man in Paris who spoke impeccable English in addition to his native French. We three walked the Champs Elysées together at midnight, newly minted friends.

Returning home weeks later, I peeled the “America: Love it or Leave It” banner from my bulletin board and replaced it with a group shot of the Butlin's crew. Ginny impulsively married her boyfriend the day before he shipped out to Saigon. We stopped wearing dresses and started wearing jeans, every single day. The revolution had arrived.

Martha Ezell has worked as an educator, social worker, mortgage broker, apple picker, artist's assistant, and short-form documentary maker. Her films include “
Taking Up Space: Socrates Sculpture Park,
” “
Elephant Seals of Ano Nuevo
,” and “
Szechuan Summer
.” She's addicted to the ocean and has recently learned to surf near her home in Sonoma County. This is her first published writing.

JESSICA WILSON

Tongues and Arrows

I
n a courtyard shadowed green where twilight streams through feathering branches, everyone wants to know why everyone else is here.

We are sitting at long tables before steaming bowls of onion soup, dark and salty and pungent. Four hours ago I had no reservation and nowhere to spend the night, which means my literal reason for being here is that I followed a Dutch political science student in orange socks from the bus station to the Pilgrim Office, and then walked across the street and begged a hostelier named Jacques for a spare bed. That my backpack is now sitting upstairs next to a clean bunk, and that I am sitting down to soup and wine and a plate of pasta puddled in melted cheese, seems a small miracle. Which is the only kind of miracle I expect to encounter, now or later, and meanwhile the question is batted back and forth across the table with the speed of thought, or faith: why are you here?

The question is meant to get at motivation, not at method or intention. Our intentions, after all, are the same. We all plan to walk westward in the morning, and to keep walking westward on subsequent mornings, until we have arrived in Santiago, in northwestern Spain, nearly eight hundred kilometers away from this small town on France's southwest border. We aren't the first to do it and we won't be the last. St. Jean has been a pilgrims' town as long as there have been pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, and there have been pilgrims here for over a thousand years.

For the story is this: that in the early years of the ninth century, a shepherd named Pelayo followed a peculiarly bright star to a field in Libredón. There, buried beneath the wild grass, he found the bones of a saint. On that spot an altar was built, and a cathedral around it, and they named the cathedral for
Santiago de Compostela:
Saint James of the Field of the Stars.

And the people came. They walked, or they rode on horses or donkeys. Later, they would ride bicycles, too. There would be hundreds of them, and then thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, streaming across Europe in rivulets converging over the dead saint's bones. In some centuries the streams would be thin, and in others they would flood the countryside in a desperate torrent; but the people would always come. They would be poor or not-so-poor. They would be penitent or convicted or curious. Some would want to suffer. Some would want to see the world. They would come for healing or solace or adventure, for spiritual pardon or legal pardon or epiphany. They came so the dross of their workaday lives would turn to alchemical miracle. They came so that something would change.

And so tonight, here in St. Jean Pied de Port, we are gathered at the beginning of things; and this is dinner but it is also reconnaissance, a preliminary casting session, and we inspect each other keenly, sussing out friends and allies and people to be avoided, trying to identify who will be central to the story we are about to tell ourselves, and who peripheral.

It's a luminous Polish redhead's turn to speak. Dressed in virgin blue, she smiles, hands fluttering to her hair to smooth it. She opens her mouth, but before her words reach the air there is an “Excuse me, everybody,” and then Jacques is standing, proposing a toast to “beautiful journeys.” We raise our glasses. Jacques calls for a round of applause for each of the eight nationalities represented at the tables. We applaud eight times. The Polish redhead starts again: she is walking the Camino as penance for her sins, of which, she says, she has many.

The girl with the orange socks, which she packed specifically to show her support for the Dutch national soccer team, this being a World Cup year, is walking because she “likes trekkings” and doesn't know what else to do.

The Australian computer programmer, who is thirty-eight and looks ten years younger, is walking for the same reason.

Ditto the tall Irish girl.

I don't hear what the Austrian guy in the HARDCORE CHRISTIAN t-shirt says, but I can guess.

When the expectant silence reaches me I am swept with an unfamiliar shyness. I watch my fingers fiddle with the stem of my wineglass.

I came to walk, I say, because I like to walk, and because I am interested in long walks, and why people take them, and what they are looking for, and whether they find it. And because I went on a different long walk once and I got hurt and had to stop.

I say I have an academic interest in failure.

Certainly I am not looking for redemption.

I don't believe in redemption.

There are things I do not explain.

“Do you want more wine?” the Aussie asks. I hesitate.

“When a woman hesitates,” says the redhead, “that means yes
.
”

“Will that hold up in a court of law?” the Aussie asks.

I let him fill my glass.

There are things I do not explain because I cannot even explain them to myself. The facts are tired: how five summers ago I'd planned a different walk on a different continent, two thousand miles, south to north, a walk four times as long as this Camino, through ever-unfolding ranges of green American mountains, running parallel to the sea.

“I would like,” says Jacques, tapping a fork against a wineglass, “to give you each some gifts.” Two tables of fetal pilgrims look up from dinner plates and cast eyes in his direction. He holds up what looks like a length of yellow police tape, emblazoned with arrows, scallop shells, and, in enormous lettering, the hostel logo:
L'Esprit du Chemin.
The spirit of the way.

The ribbon, Jacques tells us, is a symbol of the spirit and shared purpose of all pilgrims on the Camino. “We'd like you to tie it on your packs,” he adds, “and then you will all know you have all been here. If you want an extra one that is O.K. too!”

Because Jacques is the kind of hostelier who answers “Might you have any beds available for this evening?” with a tranquil “Cucumber water?” and because, as he has told me, he is not in fact the hostelier at all, but rather a friend of the owners, taking care of business while they are on vacation, I suspect him of an unimpeachable sincerity even as he waxes poetic about the transformative bliss of providing free advertising.

“Our next gift,” says Jacques, “is energy pearls.”

He holds up a small glass bead, pinched between thumb and forefinger. It's blue, but, he assures us, the energy pearls are available in a variety of colors. Jacques himself always carries one in his left pocket. “We are,” he says, “ninety-seven seventy-nine percent positive energy, and three percent negative, and we spend all our time thinking about the three percent. So the pearl is to remind you of all that is good, all the good energy in the world and yourself.”

I am halfway through the third glass of wine, and I find this kind of beautiful.

With my fork, I poke a pearl onion stained scarlet with marinated beets, and it pops out of its skin, slides across the plate. I do not explain that on that earlier walk, I shredded a footful of ligaments and had to stop walking a thousand miles short of my destination. Or that in the years since leaving those other mountains, I've held onto their memory with a voraciousness that embarrasses me. I don't explain that it took three years before the foot pain began to subside, and that I have a nauseating worry the damage is permanent. I do not say: if I cannot walk across Spain now, if my body fails me again, then I will have lost a dream whose largeness I do not want to think about. All the words sound treacly and precious.
Stop being such a drama queen.
And now I've flown across the sea to walk into a country where even mawkish words will be beyond my reach.

“No, no,
no
,” in peevish tones floats up from the foot of the table, where a middle-aged Dutch woman is roundly castigating two English girls. The girls' university term starts in exactly four weeks, which means that if they want to get to Santiago, they'll need to walk very long days. They are runners and believe their bodies are up to the task. I eyeball them. They're disgustingly fit and they're probably right. But this is the wrong thing to tell Dutch Mary. Apparently it is entirely the wrong way to go about walking the Camino, and represents a desecration of the spirit of the affair. “You must give up the plans and the forcing,” she instructs. “You must let go of this idea that there is a right way to walk. You must walk slowly. You must feel the essence of the Way. You will not have time for the whole thing.” Her voice is rising, her gestures untamed. “You must go home before you reach Santiago,” she says, and she is nearly spitting. “You can finish later.”

“I think we'll be fine, thank you,” says one of the girls, coolly.

I think we'll be fine.
Verbal salt over carnal shoulder, a desperate kind of charm. Something to mutter in the choked roads of St. Jean. This afternoon, walking, we all spilled over throat-narrow sidewalks and into the streets, backpacks bobbing. Each of us, in order to get to the hostel, dodged snub-nosed cars careening over cobblestones, churning through puddled pilgrims. We rippled and receded.
I think we'll be fine.
A pilgrim's first labor: to get out of St. Jean alive. Say it:
be fine
.

This town feels unreal, has since the moment I stepped off the bus, and did all through an afternoon of wandering the streets. I'm trying to pinpoint the source of the alienness now, and I don't think it's Jacques or his energy pearls. There's a different, older and vaguely fabricated quality to this unreality, as though a generic medieval flavor had been poured over the town to support its claims to history: Napoleon, the Romans, centuries of pilgrims. Outside the courtyard where we are sitting, the Rue de la Citadelle threads between whitewashed brick buildings taller than the street is wide. Do places carry layered ghosts of their pasts, auras laid over old streets? I couldn't feel them, but I'd have been willing to blame my imperceptions on some absence located within me.

It's a funny club to be in, this
pilgrim
corps, I'd thought then, as my eyes trailed away from the wooden placard and over the foot-travelers spattering the streets: each of us instantly recognizable to the others (those backpacks! those quick-dri t-shirts and sunhats! the beaming incompetence of outsiders!) before we'd exchanged so much as a
buen Camino,
a
bonne route,
a
safe travels,
nor even enough words to ascertain, if there were one, a common language. There was an unmistakable
we
, and I still didn't know who
we
were. But
we
put euro coins in the donation box at the Pilgrim Office, collected accordioned oaktag booklets—our
credencials
, to entitle us to stay in pilgrim hostels each night—and pocketed them. We tied bleached scallop shells with holes drilled through them to our bags. The shells, symbol of St. James, swung across the fabric as we walked, soft zipping noises preceding syncopated clanks against metal water bottles. When we began to look, we found shells everywhere: cast in bronze, etched in stone, painted in yellow on square blue signs, expectant hieroglyphs implicating us in some silent, coded pact whose terms I didn't understand. The best I could offer was a map in one hand, and I held it like a talisman. And now, here, in the courtyard, Jacques is standing again, tapping that glass again, because a late pilgrim has straggled in, the first Dane of the evening, and we've got to applaud for Denmark.

After dinner I go up to the women's bunkroom and trip on the uneven stairs for the third consecutive time. I pick myself up with a threadbare dignity and glower at the wall above the staircase landing, which is plastered with motivational sayings from the Buddha. “Do not look for happiness; happiness is the Way,” the wall advises me serenely, and then again in French to be sure I've understood:
Le chemin c'est le bonheur
. The wall makes a fitting counterpart to the guidebook I've brought, a slim, orange-spined volume subtitled
A Practical and Mystical Manual for the Modern Day Pilgrim
. The
Mystical Manual
is one of the best-selling English-language books about the Camino, alongside memoirs with titles like
Walk in a Relaxed Manner, The Power of Now,
and
Pilgrim in Aquarius.
It is full of inspirational quotations and blank, lined pages on which to write daily “reflections” about my spiritual progress. It has good maps.

Before I fall asleep I page through the
Mystical Manual
. I want to get a look at the terrain for tomorrow's walk, which will be through the Pyrenees and over the Spanish border. The terrain, as the
Manual
shows me, can be best described as “up.” The
Manual
also advises me, before I begin walking, to fill out a
Self-Assessment Questionnaire: Inner Waymarks
, in which I am to score myself on a scale of 1-10 on my awareness of such personal attributes as
clarity on what inspires you
,
confidence to follow your intuitive sense of direction,
and
ability to recognize your patterns of defence
. A single, giant, misty, purple question mark floats helpfully behind the text, an exercise in thematically appropriate typography. I can download extra copies from the
Mystical Manual
's website if I like, in order to repeat the exercise on my return.