Step by Step Read online

  I talked it over with a friend, who asked what specifically I was afraid of.

  “Well,” I said, reluctant to give voice to my fear, “well, uh, that one of them might die.”

  “It’s a possibility,” he or she said. (And I’m not being coy; I remember the conversation vividly, but not with whom I had it.) “But there’s one thing you should keep in mind.”

  “Oh?”

  “If one of them dies, she’ll still be dead when you get back.”

  I found the logic of that observation unassailable, and was quick to report it to Lynne, who liked it as much as I did. And so we set out for Spain, and bade our everyday lives—well, if not goodbye, then certainly hasta luego.

  BEING OUT OF TOUCH, giving up the need to be in touch, may have been the most important lesson of the walk. I think what we let go of was the illusion of control. We couldn’t control what went on in our absence, and that would have been no less true were we to call home five times a day. There are people who believe contact gives them a measure of control, just as there are those for whom reading the newspaper is a way of playing a role in international politics.

  And, when we reached our destination on July 23rd, the first thing I did was call home from our hotel in Santiago de Compostela. Nothing much was new, I learned. Everybody was fine.

  WE COULD NEVER do it again. The Camino is still there, it’s been going strong for over a thousand years, and I don’t imagine people will quit walking it. Even if the Church should disappear, pilgrims would go on making their way to Compostela. (While some of the walkers we encountered were religious, most were not; many were there for the sheer adventure of the thing, while a substantial number didn’t seem to know why they were on their way to Santiago, but, like us, just felt it was something they wanted to do.)

  So the road’s still there, and there are still pilgrims on it, and refugios to accommodate them. So you’d think we could do it again readily enough, if we felt so inclined. If anything, it ought to be simpler for us. Our mothers are both gone, and our daughters older and more self-sufficient than ever. We’re in better shape financially, and readily able to afford three months without doing any income-producing work. We’re older, and discernibly less energetic, but that’s offset to a degree by the physical training each of us has been doing, I walking and racing, Lynne working out regularly at the gym. We’d treat ourselves to better backpacks, and be more sensibly outfitted overall. If the hills took a toll at first, well, we’d toughen up as we went along, just as we did sixteen years ago.

  Then why couldn’t we do it?

  Because we could never manage the isolation. Oh, we could endure it. But we couldn’t sustain it, because of the way the world has changed.

  It would be easy enough to leave our cell phones home. I rarely bother to carry mine, unless I’m going out of town, and ours wouldn’t work in Spain anyway. Of course there’d be cell phones for sale over there, in every town we walked through, but maybe we could discipline ourselves sufficiently to pass them by.

  But each of those towns would have an Internet café, too, and how long would I be able to go without checking my email? It wasn’t until three or four years after we got back from Spain that I even had email, and now it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when I got along without it.

  If the world has changed, well, so have I. I’m used to being in more or less constant touch with a slew of friends and acquaintances. I’m accustomed to being able to find out almost anything—and locate almost anyone—via Google. I’m not crazy about the idea that I’m so dependent upon the cyber world that I couldn’t stand three months away from it, but I’m afraid it might be true.

  Oh, I suppose we could do it if we had to. But the fact of the matter is that we don’t have to, and that we already did it back in 1991.

  I’m glad we went when we had the chance.

  I’M NOT ENTIRELY sure why, but it’s difficult for me to write about the Spanish walk.

  This is not the first time I’ve tried. I was commissioned to report on the experience for the travel section of the New York Times, and produced an article not long after our return. It was more work than I’d thought it would be, and the editors weren’t crazy about it. They wanted photos, and of course we hadn’t taken any; we’d decided our packs were quite heavy enough without adding on film and a camera. (And we’d actually quit carrying a camera years ago, having decided we got a better look at the world without squinting at it through a viewfinder. The sole exception we made was the Polaroid that served to document our triumphs during the Buffalo hunt.)

  So could I suggest photos they might seek to obtain? And talk about places to stay and sights to see? And, uh, maybe do something to make it more of a travel piece?

  I thought about it and decided I couldn’t do any of that. I felt they were well within their rights to ask for changes of that sort, and had to admit that the piece as they envisioned it might better serve the interests of their readers than what I had provided. But our pilgrimage, I was discovering, was very much a personal matter. I barely wanted to write about it at all, and I certainly didn’t want to write about those aspects of the experience that hadn’t greatly concerned us.

  One nice thing about writing for newspapers is that the money’s so small to begin with that it won’t change your life to give it up. I forget what I was supposed to get, but I took a kill fee of 20 or 25 percent instead, and we let it go at that. No harm, no foul, and no hard feelings.

  Now, of course, I can write about it however I want, and that ought to make it easier. (I could even splice in what I wrote for the Times, and work from that, but it was written a couple of years before I got my first computer, so it’s not hanging out somewhere on my hard drive. There’s almost certainly a hard copy somewhere in the Stygian swamp I call an office, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking, and I’m not sure I really want to find it.)

  Writing about it, I suspect, may be like the walk itself, or like any walk, random or otherwise. If I can just stay pointed in the right direction and keep putting one foot in front of the other, I should get there. I may lose my way from time to time, but that’s nothing new; it happened more than a few times en route to Compostela.

  Where were we? Oh, right. In the French Pyrenees, at an inn run by a woman who was just a shade too well bred to say that we were out of our minds.

  SHE FED US WELL, or at least as well as a Frenchwoman could be expected to feed a pair of sportif vegetarians. I believe she served us cauliflower, and I remember that it was good, but we were hungry enough by then to savor Styrofoam.

  Here’s a thought. A chronological account of our journey seems beyond my abilities, and I’m not sure what purpose it would serve. Since I’m evidently going to digress, let me make digression my structure, and organize my narrative, if that’s what it is, by topics. If that’s what they are.

  FOOD

  In one respect, we’d have an easier time on the walk today than we did back then. Lynne and I both stopped eating meat and fish back in the late 1970’s, and didn’t resume until shortly after the turn of the century. It was occasionally a nuisance, and never more so than on the pilgrimage. If the French regarded vegetarians as pitiable lunatics, the residents of rural northern Spain didn’t even have a frame of reference for us, much less anything to feed us.

  Somewhere along the way we found out that bocadillos de queso were cheese sandwiches, and it’s hard to imagine the relief we felt when they were available. It’s not as though there was anything particularly good about them—the cheese was pretty ordinary, the rolls plain white bread, and stale as often as not. But they were, thanks be to God, something we could eat. Add a salad—iceberg lettuce, inevitably—and we called it a balanced meal.

  We learned to pick up provisions at stores along the way. Nuts and olives were both tasty and portable, and delivered a good nutritional payload. Bakery-fresh bread ranged from pretty good to excellent, and we learned to point at the whole wheat loaves
until we learned what they were called. Lynne remembered that Hemingway had somewhere observed that you could always tell a poor country, that the whores were young and the bread was still good. Permutations of that line became a part of our argot; a street scene might prompt one of us to remark that the bread in this particular village was sure to be wonderful, while the occasional loaf of compressed sawdust would call up a vision of geriatric working girls.

  There were times when good food was available. Some cafés had soup, and it didn’t much matter to us if the base was a meat stock. Our vegetarianism was never religious in nature. (In fact it’s impossible to say what the basis of it might have been. It wasn’t PETA-style ethical vegetarianism, as neither of us stopped wearing leather, and, while we both thought it was probably good for us physically, I can’t say it stemmed primarily from health concerns. It just intuitively seemed right for us at the time—and, some years later, it seemed to be time to give it up.)

  In the city of Burgos I remember eating a rich stew, after carefully picking out and setting aside the larger pieces of meat. More recently I spent some time on the Atkins diet, and if I’d then been presented with that very same bowl of stew, I’d have limited my consumption to the very portions I rejected the first time around.

  Pizza was always a good choice, when we could find it. It was abundant in France, but we only encountered one pizzeria on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, and that was in Catalonia. The fellow who owned it was fluent in English, and we got to talking with him; he’d learned the language in England, where he’d also learned to make pizza. He met an English girl there, married her, and brought her back to Catalonia, where they’d opened a pizzeria.

  In Huesca, we had a hell of a time finding a place to eat. There were a couple of restaurants that were priced beyond our budget, and if there was anything cheaper, it was well hidden. Then we found this large restaurant housed in what seemed to be some sort of inn, and we had a decent lunch there at a reasonable price. Something was odd about the place, and somewhere in the course of our meal we noticed that Lynne was the only woman in the place, and not because we’d somehow wandered into a monastery.

  It was, we realized, some sort of gay house of assignation. It was also the best place to eat in Huesca, and we took all our meals there for the rest of our stay. Now and then we’d see a youth we recognized, leaning on a fence and looking flagrantly available. Lynne called out a cheerful greeting to one such lad, and the poor son of a bitch turned scarlet, as embarrassed as if his mother had caught him in a men’s room with a senator from Idaho.

  In Galicia, the province where Santiago de Compostela is located, we encountered a local pub specialty called Pimientos de Padrón. These were little green peppers, perhaps an inch long, roasted with garlic and salt, and I ate plate after plate of them.

  THE ROUTE

  Early on, the route was very much our own creation. After we left Mme. Très Sportif, we continued on toward the Andorran border as far as the town of Aix-les-Thermes, where we had to wait for three days because the road ahead was closed by an avalanche. When they opened it, we walked on to and through Andorra, and there’s something special about walking in one end of a country and out the other end a day or two later.

  The little country has long been jointly administered by France and Spain, and this had the effect of turning much of it into a shopping mall for tax-free cameras and electronic gear. While the shopping held no attraction for us, the views were pretty spectacular.

  It was during our transit of Andorra that Lynne first began to believe that she’d actually be able to go the distance. Up until then she figured that what she was going through was only going to get worse, and that eventually she’d have to quit and go home; the only thing that was keeping her going was that she couldn’t figure out how to break the news to me.

  I knew she was having a tough time, but I’d anticipated as much. I was having a difficult time myself, contending with the weight of the backpack and the steepness of the terrain and the sheer burden of mile after mile after mile. What kept me going was the certainty that it would become easier once my body had conditioned itself to meet the challenge. I could recall those laborious circuits of Washington Square Park, by means of which I had gradually turned myself into a runner. In much the same fashion I was now transforming myself into a hiker, and so was Lynne.

  Except she didn’t know it. And, when I told her, she didn’t believe me.

  As far as she was concerned, I was just shining her on, dangling the notion of improved physical conditioning like a carrot while I kept in reserve the stick of disapproval. She didn’t believe me for a moment. It was just a nice story I was telling her, something to lure her into continuing this impossible journey, and if I could make up such a story she could pretend to believe it. But she wasn’t buying it, not for a minute.

  So she soldiered on, knowing it was hopeless, and sustaining herself by holding imaginary conversations with her girlfriends, in which she pointed out my obduracy while lamenting the fact that she couldn’t go on and didn’t know how to tell me.

  I wish she’d had some of those conversations with me, because as it was I really had no idea what she was going through. Then again, what if she had? All I could do was offer the same assurance I’d been extending all along, and all she could do in turn was nod and smile and know in her heart that I was full of crap. So on we walked, and I wondered why this game and good-hearted companion had morphed into a whiner, while she wondered why she’d ever been persuaded that marrying me was a good idea.

  And then, somewhere in Andorra, things changed.

  I don’t suppose it hurt that we had crested the Pyrenees, and that we were now going down instead of up. But more important was the fact that the walking we’d been doing had made us discernibly stronger. I think, too, that this strengthening process was mental as well as physical, that we were both getting used to the idea of spending our days walking substantial distances.

  When Lynne told me that she was indeed stronger, that shouldering her pack and walking for an hour or two, while still challenging, was no longer the horror it had been, I was relieved but not surprised. “That’s great,” I said. “I told you that would happen.”

  “I know,” she replied. “I didn’t believe you.”

  And, after we’d batted that one back and forth, I frowned, puzzled. “If you honestly didn’t believe me,” I said, “and if you were convinced it was never going to get better, what kept you going?”

  She gave me a look. And, a mile or so down the road, she found us a shortcut.

  We were approaching Andorra La Vella, the principality’s capital and largest city, and the road into town consisted of an elaborate series of descending switchbacks. From where we stood, we could see the town way down below, and the way the road resembled a meandering river, or perhaps a snake. Lynne pointed to our right, where a steep and little-used footpath plunged straight down toward the center of town.

  “Come on,” she urged. “We can go straight down and save all that walking.”

  And so we did. Staying upright was no mean task, given the declivity of the path and the heft of our packs, and it was almost as hard to keep from running as it was to keep from falling, but we managed somehow. And it was exhilarating, dashing down that mountainside, crossing and recrossing that winding ribbon of road, and finishing up, flushed and breathless, in the very center of town, surrounded by no end of establishments eager to sell us cigarettes and stereo components.

  “See?” she said. “It was a shortcut. Wasn’t that great?”

  “The best part,” I said, “is that we’re still alive.”

  “That was fun! And look at all the walking we saved. It was a shortcut.”

  “A rabbit shortcut,” I agreed.

  It was not our last rabbit shortcut, though it was certainly the most dramatic. Lynne, who as you might gather is not a slave to convention, would often choose a direct if untried route rather than walk in the footsteps of other
s. Sometimes we saved a few steps. Sometimes we had to turn around and walk back, persuaded of the wisdom of those who had gone before us. But whenever my companion fixed her sights on a rabbit shortcut, we always gave it a shot.

  THE ACCOMMODATIONS

  Early on, we stayed in hotels. The refuges for pilgrims—refugios—were only to be found along the traditional route. Each little village had a few hotels, the more reasonable labeled hostal. A room was generally ten to twelve dollars, and while I don’t suppose you’d mistake any of them for the Sherry-Netherland, they were generally clean enough and comfortable enough for a pair of Americans who’d spent the whole day walking dusty roads.

  The villages were rarely more than ten miles apart, and my map was reliable when it came to letting us know where the next village was likely to be, so it wasn’t hard to walk far enough to find lodging for the night. The whole system worked fine, until the day it didn’t.

  That must have been a day, or maybe two, after we left Huesca and its charming gay restaurant. We were walking in Aragon, heading west, and for the first time we were unable to find a place to stay. The one hostal we managed to locate was fully occupied; a construction crew, temporarily employed in the area, had booked all its rooms for the next two weeks.

  The proprietor couldn’t offer a suggestion; as far as she knew, there were no rooms to be found for twenty miles or more. It was far too late in the day for us to cover another twenty miles, and we’d be doing so with no guarantee of a room at the end of the day.

  We could sleep in a field, we did have sleeping bags, and I might have given that a shot if I’d been on my own, but I didn’t want to put Lynne through a night under the stars. The sky was clear, so rain wasn’t likely, but it would be uncomfortably cold, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it was safe.

  So we hitched a ride. If we’d passed a hostal I might have asked the driver to drop us off, but we didn’t, and he took us clear into Zaragoza. We hadn’t planned to swing this far south, but it was supposed to be a pretty interesting city, with a famous pillar where the Blessed Virgin had made a miraculous appearance on one of her whirlwind retirement tours, so we figured it was worth a look. And it sure beat wandering around all night with no place to stay.