June: Oh Man, That’s a lot of miles…

Dear EN502, 

I write to you, now, from an abandoned motor-cross trail in South Western France. I set up my tent on the landing side of the dirt-mound that used to be a jump. A fellow pilgrim is fiddling with the camp stove in a dell created by tires that, no doubt, once drifted here. It's around 6 in the evening and wind is blowing, softly, through the ferns. Though we've stopped hiking for the day, there's still a long ways until dark.

It's pretty funny. Since the middle ages, people have been walking across Europe to a placed called Santiago de Compostela. What's funnier is that, in the past 1,000 years, they haven't stopped! Every country has different routes associated with different Saints, Legends or local rituals, but they all wind their way to Santiago. You know, some people start their pilgrimages just a few hundred kilometers from Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. Others start a few thousand kilometers away in Oslo, Budapest or Prague.

To that end, the other day, my fellow pilgrims and I were arguing about which route to take when a french woman came up to us and asked, in perfect English, "Can I be of any help?"

I whirled around, paper-map in hand and said, "Yes! We're pilgrims and we're walking to Spain!" 

"...Oh! That's-- cool?" 

My point is that even ancient customs have their limits on social bandwidth and, to many, we are still a phalanx of strange, lost Americans. 

Still, I dig the pilgirm life style. While it’s consistently dominated by walking, I think it breaks down into two main ~moods~

Firstly, If one sleeps in town, your average pilgrim wakes up and hangs out, for a while, in the main square and drinks coffee. This is the Camino at it’s best. Sure, in French villages, like the one I slept in yesterday and the one which I can currently see rising on the hill beyond the cornfield in the distance, you get some funny looks because you're a random stranger with a huge backpack casually sipping espresso in the middle of a remote village with a population of 1,000, but most of the time people are kind and they ask where you've been and if you plan to make it all the way to Compostel(a). In this scenario, after resupplying (which usally takes less than an hour at the local grocer's), you're off to the next town. Rinse in a coin-operated laundry mat and repeat. If you slept in the woods, however, things play out a little differently…

Instead of finding a calm, collected, well-rested stranger polightly taking their breakfast in the town square, the pilgrim becomes, well… Ok. Let’s do this: imagine you live an idyllic lifestyle in a French village. You know your neighbors. You only have to work 28 hours a week. It’s paradise. Got it? Good. Now imagine you leave your apartment after the day’s first cigarette and half bottle of wine and you’re ready to start your half hour shift when you see, emerging from the gloom of a humid, gray, July dawn, three starving, dehydrated, stinky Americans with muddy clothes and bags under their eyes as they stumble their way out of the forest. That's us. That's me. It'll be me tomorrow morning: frankenstien ready to terrorize some villagers with my REI brand hiking socks and empty Nalgene.

Truthfully EN502, jokes aside, this trip feels like a big thing. Yesterday, around mile 12 of the winding path which lead through pastures and church-yards and sunflower fields, I thought *oh man, that's a lot of miles...* And, to tell you the truth, it IS a lot of miles! In fact, there are some 650 miles between me and Santiago. That's 650 miles of dehydration and stink and blisters and the fatigue of each and every mile that came before it... so why do it? Why don't I pack up my tent and turn around and take the train back to Bordeaux, back to bars and hotel rooms and an ubelievably expensive flight home? 

I won't turn around, EN502, because, at least for now, I'm a pilgrim and this is what pilgrims do. We hang in there. We keep on going. We walk. The truth is that so much of our lives are spent *looking*. We look across vistas and we look through faces and we look at screens but to be a pilgrim is to look differently. I can look at the next town on its hill that rises from the aforementioned cornfield, but, when you’re a pilgrim, looking is not enough. Space ceases to exist as an observable distance between to points and, instead, becomes something physical that must be traversed. When your a pilgrim, you see with your heart and with your feet. I can see the next town, but my eyes simply won’t get me there… Or, on second thought, who knows!? It’s kind of spooky in the woods at night and walking is hard. Maybe I will quit after all… I guess we'll see in August!

I hope you’re all doing splendidly. Truthfully, I miss Boston far more than I ever thought I would… I do a daily Camino De Santiago photo blast via email— let me know if you would like some throughly mediocre amateur photography beamed into your inbox from Western Europe around 4 AM (eastern). An owl just hooted. The church bell from the town just rang. I hope It doesn’t rain!! 

Your weary pal across the sea,

Nicholas