It's strange to be home again, and so suddenly. By airplane in a few short hours all the ground covered over weeks and weeks is regained and boom, there I am waking up in my own bed. I went for a row today for the first time in months. It was nice weather and I was a bit uncertain if I had lost enough weight from my pilgrimage to fit in the boat. By some magical coincidence, my rowing buddy Mariek was there too, rowing for the first time in months also after a knee injury. We just fell into each other's arms, because she knew what I had been through. Who knows, the fact that we both came in at that same moment after months of not rowing is maybe no coincidence at all.
Afterwards we discussed the idea of a pilgrimage, and the Santiago pilgrimage in particular. She hates crowds and large groups of people, so the Santiago trip is probably not a great choice for her. She has been on lots of self-supported walking trips though, and Pipo, one of her walking partners was there. What is the attraction of being a pilgrim? You have reduced your life to very basic things: sleeping, eating, moving, and taking care of your body. If your only goal of the day is moving from A to B, you can find so much freedom in your head that you see, hear, touch, taste and smell things you would never notice otherwise.
On the road I would often shout out 'Hey Pilgrim!' as we passed one. I liked to think of myself as a pilgrim, but I was never alone. I also thought of myself as a templar knight, accompanied by fellow knights, all wearing some talisman as a symbol of home. I had my blue stretchy thing on my head that Joris gave me during chemo, Dave had his red jacket that Rosa gave him in Scotland, Ad had his Rabobank shirt from his days working there, and Rien had his stone that he laid on the Cruz. Every pilgrim out there has a story, and I wish I could hear them all. We all had a job to do, some fuzzy thing about getting to Santiago in one piece. The last night that we spent in an albergue (was that Sarria?) I looked down from my upper bunk at all the morning rituals of the hikers. Some of them looked like their feet had been reduced to raw pulp. Seeing those people tape up their feet and putting boots on made me think of them as heroic. I would be on the next bus home with toes like that! I didn't have any physical problems or even any bicycle problems. I remember Ted with his toothache in Tours. I wonder if he made it to Santiago?
We talked about the whole religious aspect of the Santiago journey. You can get heavily into the Codex Calixtinus and probably spend months just visiting all the church museums and famous libraries and exhibitions. It is interesting stuff, but detracts from the pilgrim experience of using your legs to move you through the landscape. Once you have felt the poetry in that simple routine of becoming a road warrior, you spend the rest of your life missing that feeling of being on the road, or en route, wherever and however it goes. People talk about good and bad pilgrims, as though there is a right and wrong way to follow the camino. It reminds me of the discussions we had in France about 'the route'. What I found to be most obvious was that the genuine concern and helpfulness of all the people who live along the route shows that most pilgrims are good people who are worth helping out. People reaching out to me only did that because a lot of good pilgrims came before me. Of course it's also true that most pilgrims are in possession of a healthy bank balance and credit card, one reason that the pilgrim churches are filled with beggars asking for money from modern pilgrims. That's a twist from a century ago, I'm sure. Who are those people anyway? Pilgrims who stopped along the way?
While on my pilgrimage I obsessed about stamp collecting and getting my compostela. Why? What the heck am I going to do with this piece of paper that I haven't even translated yet and that lists my name as Joannam. That's not my name! It reminds me of the way I obsess about my yearly mammograms. I obsess about them and then the results come back and I'm fine. Why do I depend on the mammo machine to give me permission to live another year? I always used to trust the way I feel.
I know that I couldn't have managed the trip as well on my own, and I know that I helped my companions as much as they helped me. After all that intensity we are back on our own individual caminos. I should be setting down for reentry, but right now I just want to take off again, even though I have to save up vacation days first.
Rowing helps.
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