Chapter 52: Along the Camino

 Chapter 52: Along the Camino

              To call the Camino a hike would be dishonest to hikers. We started in the town of Sarria to walk the last 100km. Perhaps it could be considered a hike if flat ground and frequent bars and food were considered standard hiking conditions. We made it roughly 8km our first half-day all together. The sun was becoming sweltering at midday due to our late start. We had pints of Estella Galicia—a favorite of the Camino with a characteristic woman wearing a blue dress as the tap handles. Water was expensive, so we hydrated on beer. The nebulous path of the Camino is marked by yellow shell symbols painted along the path. We continue to follow these towards the next town.

              We arrive relatively late to the first town hostel; it is nearly full. We check in and get three of the few remaining beds in a gymnasium-sized room with wall-to-wall bunkbeds. A large man on the bottom bunk of my bed snores the entire night. It’s a kind of seismic snoring that rattles the frame of the bed. I try to focus on the rhythm of his snoring to fall asleep, but eventually take an unrecommended amount of Benadryl and melatonin to finally pass out. Kyle and Micah must have had trouble sleeping. We all awake a little after 11am to find nearly everyone else gone. Most pilgrims of the Camino get started in the early morning to avoid the afternoon sun. We were not good pilgrims.

              We got going around noon at the height of the blistering sun. Thankfully there was much shade on today’s 15km or so stretch. Kyle and Micah share that they want to pursue teaching after college, and both have become incredible teachers. They want to help inspire direction, passion and care for one another and the world. For them it’s not about teaching a subject but helping to develop good and caring personhoods. Kyle shares that his biggest concern is being relatively unfamiliar with the sciences related to climate change. He decides to use some of his last year in college to do classes on the science of the environment. I love that quality in Micah and Kyle—they find a cause to care about and simply take that path. They’ve taught me that it is sometimes better to follow a feeling or an idea and then to only reflect afterwards on its importance or relevance.

              Sometime in the mid-afternoon we stop at another bar to “hydrate.” My favorite part of the Camino was how it made life “quiet.” Each morning we gathered our stuff, hiked several kilometers, checked into a new place, then got dinner before repeating the next morning. We had no other commitments or tasks or extra motives. Every day the goal was the same: walk. The routine became so standard and automatic, we were freed to discuss and talk about anything and everything we wanted. Somehow in adopting a narrow set of rules and goals for each day, we had become freer despite objectively increased physical bounds.

              Sometimes we walked in silence; other times we made up songs—something Kyle and I would do in our senior apartment quite often. We talked about who we would be in Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter; we shared how we saw ourselves through example rather than description. And through resolving the occasional disagreement developed a truer sense of who we were in the eyes of ourselves and others. While explicitly the Camino was a physical task to complete to be worthy for Heaven, but the true hike was internal and introspective. I can confidently say that all three of us emerged from that trip with a better understanding of who we were, who we are, and who we wanted to be. It was amazing what simple goals and constancy of companionship was able to unveil.

              Kyle, Micah, and I lay scattered on the religious spectrum. I was decidedly nonreligious for several ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological reason. Especially now with this curse of cancer, I don’t want to live in a mechanistic or deterministic universe, controlled by a single entity. Kyle was caught between religiousness and atheism at the time of the Camino, leaning to the side of atheism for many of the same reasons as me. Micah grew up Baptist and remained religious. This didn’t cause any arguments but brightened our discussions with additional viewpoints and complexity. I never asked Micah why he was religious, and now I wish I had.

              We all seem to occupy some sort of ground state of belief or ideology that we view as “normal” or “baseline.” To answer such a question about your core personhood comes off as strange, as though you are trying to answer the question, “why are you?” We have been trying to answer the question, “Why are We?” for hundreds of years, and the answers are endless based on the epistemological framework you choose. What’s important is that we can choose the structural way in which we answer the question.

              As a child the major focus of this question related to “what happens after death?” There are a couple of reasons why I feel this question is meaningless. First, it’s answer is only comprehendible if one achieves a consciousness after death. Second, if there is some sort of heaven or afterlife, the bounds of existence and self we would embody there would be so disparate from this life that a continued consciousness would be meaningless; you would essentially awake a new person. Regardless of method, the you that you are now, would no longer exist after life and you would nonetheless experience a metaphysical death. Maybe this is when I realized I wanted to be in medicine to explore death, and when I came to believe that how we die helps us understand how and why we live.

…

Our last night we decide to stay in a private room, initially so that we can sleep better. But we go to the store and pick up 1L bottles of wine for a cent, except Kyle who gets sangria. We set up my laptop and start watching Avatar the Last Airbender—which Kyle will later say was the most spiritual part of the journey. I agreed. Over the course a few episodes we all finish our drinks and then pass out. The next day we would learn more about ourselves again by discussing which characters we would be in the show. We’re woken by a knock at the door. A housekeeper peaks the door open and asks if we are going to stay another night—it’s already 1 pm. We say no, then Micah and I take turns vomiting into the toilet before packing up and getting ready to go. We stop by the pharmacy on the way to Santiago and Micah picks up some “hangover medicine.” The pharmacist knows exactly what he’s talking about. It’s mostly for me. We walk slowly for this final leg of the journey. Eventually we spot the large cathedral in Santiago that marks the end of our journey. We go to set our walking sticks and a rock we had each carried to “represent our sins,” on the side of the cathedral. No one else doing this and there are no other walking sticks or rocks on the wall here. We review the little guide in the passport book and realize that it was at a different cathedral several kilometers back where we were supposed to lay our rocks and walking sticks. We decide that we’ve already made enough mistakes this pilgrimage and leave them there. We go to the afternoon mass inside the cathedral. Our senses are attacked by an aromatic pillow of hundreds of odiferous persons. A large chandelier lit with incense swings around the ceiling. Afterwards we go to the office to pick up our heaven certificates. When it gets to me, I initially tell them I walked it for fun with my friends. They present a generic “congratulations” certificate and I rapidly backtrack with the help of Micah to explain the religious nature of our pilgrimage. The lady rolls her eyes and then presents me with the certificate into heaven. Who knows, I could be the first one to sneak into heaven.

The next day Micah and I will fly back to Oxford, while Kyle will stay in Santiago to meet up with his dad. We get a nice room at a hostel that evening and watch several more episodes of Avatar to conclude our experience.

At the airport it becomes problematic that my (new) passport doesn’t have an entry stamp. As security starts to accumulate Micah quickly attempts to explain that my passport was stolen and that this was an emergency passport. They eventually let me board the plane back to Oxford. Without Micah I think I could still be stuck in Spain today. I love my friends.