So I read in today’s The State that JayBo is walking across South Carolina, with his sights set on San Francisco. He expects it will take him a year to walk the 2,800 miles and that he will emerge on the Left Coast a new, slimmer Bo. “I get to see wonderful things, meet new interesting people, and yes I will lose weight,” he wrote in his blog on his third day.
I love this story, and I am rooting for JayBo. I know how transformative a long walk can be. In the fall of 2002, I trekked solo across northern Spain. It took me a month to do the 500-mile pilgrims’ trail, known to seekers around the world as the Camino de Santiago. And while the trail was physically demanding – crossing two mountain ranges and the meseta, a vast moonscape that takes days to traverse – I found the biggest challenge was mental. The scariest part was not traveling alone or packs of wild dogs (which I’d read about in Paulo Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage), it was navigating the landscape in my head. With no distractions, no phone, no radio, nothing but the sound of my feet meeting the earth, there I was with myself. Hours upon end, just me and my thoughts.
Terrifying.
Until it wasn’t. Somewhere along the road I grew comfortable in my own skin, at home in my own head. And God was, as I wrote in my journal, “near as my own breath.” In the end, my Camino turned out to be a profound journey inward. And a supreme gift.
May JayBo find himself on the road.
— Becci Robbins
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This column, in part about lessons learned on the Camino, ran in The State in March 2004. It wasn’t posted online at the time, so it is not in their archives.
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BACKLASH AGAINST SPAIN UNFAIR, UNBECOMING
My shock at last month’s bombings in Madrid has turned to shame at the way Americans responded to the tragedy. U.S. sympathy lasted exactly three days — until Spanish voters went to the polls and elected a prime minister who promised to withdraw troops from Iraq. The solidarity we shared in the wake of “Spain’s 9/11” suddenly vanished.
Apparently, we only support democratic elections when the vote goes our way. How arrogant. And ironic. While most Americans don’t even bother to vote, they dared criticize the way people in another country cast theirs. They called Spanish voters cowardly and disloyal, said they let terrorists determine the election.
Baloney. George W. Bush and his scary foreign policy determined the election. Ninety percent of Spaniards opposed the war in Iraq even before it went so horribly wrong, and they have a right to leadership that speaks for them. After being lied to by the Bush administration and their own government, they said, “Enough.”
Spanish people are not naive, nor are they stupid. I know that from having lived in Spain 15 years. In my experience, Spaniards are more fluent than Americans in talking about the world. In fact, about the time the U.S. invaded Baghdad, a National Geographic Society study found that 87 percent of Americans between 18 and 24 — the prime age for military service — could not find Iraq on a map. Eleven percent couldn’t even find the United States.
When I was born in Zaragoza, Generalissimo Francisco Franco ruled the country with an iron fist. After his death in 1975, I watched a liberated people transform their country into a progressive state. It is one of many things I admire about Spain.
I miss it. It is home — is where I went in the fall of 2002, on the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The timing was no accident. I did not want to be in the United States on Sept. 11, could not bear to suffer the media spectacle that was sure to mark the occasion.
So I escaped to Spain. I went there to walk the Camino, the ancient pilgrims’ trail that runs 500 miles from the Pyrenees on the French border to Santiago de Compostela, where St. James is buried. For ages, people from around the world have walked the same trail, for reasons as varied as the pilgrims themselves.
My own reasons were complex but driven by what I can only describe as a cultural identity crisis. I wanted to get away, to find the time and space to think seriously about what it means to be an American. To be a Spaniard. To be a citizen of any country. Or no country.
After 9/11, while my neighbors dutifully went shopping for American flags to sport on their lawns, their lapels, and their SUVs, I could not share their sense of pride. Instead, I was disturbed by the blind nationalism distorting their world view. And I was dismayed to watch President Bush exploit the horror for political gain.
I started walking on Sept. 11. Although I set off by myself, by the time I reached Santiago four weeks later I was no longer alone. Along the way, I fell in with a group of pilgrims that had formed quite by accident. We were from five countries, and spoke a mix of English, Spanish and French. By day we walked on our own, then gathered together in the evenings to share meals, attend mass, explore whatever village we’d landed in, and sit in the local bar talking late into the night.
Sometimes the topic was politics. As an American, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain my country’s foreign policy to people directly affected by it. Months before war was declared in Iraq, anger toward the United States was palpable. Even the most remote stretches of trail were dotted with graffiti as hostile as the one I remember best: a drawing of an American flag, an equal sign and a swastika.
To the credit of the people I met along the way, not one of them held my nationality against me. Older people were especially kind, offering me more figs, sweets and tomatoes than I could carry. They remembered how Americans had helped Europe rebuild after World War II, and they wanted to return the kindness. Sadly, younger people held a radically different view.
For the record, I still don’t know what it means to be an American. Or a Spaniard. But the Camino taught me a lot about being neither, about simply being a human being among other human beings. When stripped of country, titles and possessions, I found we are remarkably alike.
Becci Robbins
Outside the cathedral after a mass for pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela Oct. 9, 2002. A walking UN, we are (from left): a South Carolinian, two Londoners, a Spaniard, a Canadian, two New Yorkers and a Brazilian.