Category: Food – Mind

Bill’s Eval

Oh Captain, My Captain!

Bill teaches like John Keating (Robin Williams character in the brilliant Dead Poets Society) on sedatives. Bill correctly senses that the lively engagement with scholarship and the embrace of new ways of thinking that once animated the youth in college settings has been replaced with a stale desire to partake in a quid pro quo, in which students pay money to get credit and expect professors to entertain them in the four year lay over. Instead of standing on his desk and reading Shakespeare in a John Wayne accent, Bill crosses his arms and strokes a haughty goatee in a singular motion and declares, “Students aren’t alive anymore. They don’t even know how to read.” Unlike some of my peers, I find great pleasure in these interactions, although I do think that opening a seminar by declaring students to be dead and illiterate is tragically counterproductive to the resuscitation effort.

Bill’s wry sense of humor blends seamlessly into his frank and pointed criticism, which I often found surprising and hilarious. He never gives feed back in seminar. It feels bewildering after sixteen years in school that I often spent seeking the positive feedback that would signal that I was thinking the same as the teacher. Bill did not do that, ever. As a result, I was forced to assess my own engagement with the material and decide for myself whether my role as a student was leading to me living a better life.

Bill’s commitment to scholarship and his attestation that studying history and sociology frees people is infectious. I walk out of this Bill’s classroom with a willingness to take responsible for how I think and the freedom that comes with the ability to think differently.

Self Evaluation

The Camino felt like rereading a wonderful book. I had not walked the 880 kilometer path across the north of Spain before this program, but the experience brought to mind old lessons that I learned in kitchens with my friends, on runs by myself and on the silent lakes of Canada. On the Camino, walking every day demanded that I feel impact of gravity in the soles of my increasingly sore feet. On the Camino, walking every day made me aware of the weight of every article of clothing, electronic device and wine bottle in my pack. On the Camino, walking every day forced me to focus shift my focus from the perceived and abstract needs of my daily life back home, to more simple and immediate needs.

In my life outside the Camino I can escape the importance of gravity on buses and elevators, but here gravity permeated my subconsiousness and sunk into my consciousness every time rain fell on my face and my sore soles flexed around sharp rocks and every time I loaded a bottle of wine into my pack. I knew how important gravity is before the Camino–I scraped enough knees as a kid and shed weight before half marathons to spare my legs the extra load–but on the unrelenting, in-my-head-silence, lugging a pack for a million-step pilgrimage, I relearned that every possession and bottle of wine that I carried was a burden. I know this now, not in the way of knowing that comes from reading or being told. I know it in my feet and back and calves and shoulders.

When I was in high school I went on four ten-day canoe trips in the backcountry lakes of Canada. I still remember the man who led the trips pulling me aside the night before we went into the wilderness and telling me that I was not allowed to get hurt. The idea of a sprained ankle being a serious problem had not occurred to me because access to wheels and motors had always meant that transportation on my feet was one of several options. Every time the Camino rolled down rocky trails or I felt the twinges of tendon pain in my feet I remembered that I need my body to work.

I stack responsibilties in my daily life: I work for money, spend money on school, go to school for the opportunity to have better work, better work for more money, more money for a more pleasurable life. On the Camino, gravity toppled this constructed tower of needs and brought pleasure back down to earth. After fifty kilometers of walking, who in their right mind would desire money or status over food and rest?

David Hlavsa said that humans are “meaning making machines,” and that it usually takes him at least a year before the meaning that he makes solidifies. I finished my Camino de Santiago two weeks ago. The meaning that I am making from it is still amorphous and the shape of it changes from day to day. But forced to declare prematurely what it is I have learned in these last two months, I would say that the Camino brought me down to earth.

Academic Statement

A year ago I was a fixture in a gently sloped, narrowing room central to the newly-built Purse Hall. The windowless walls and tilted floor funneled the attention of seventy-five sun-deprived students towards a PowerPoint on hormone signaling. Perhaps it was the hypnotic narration of our professor that cued the collective drowsiness that is so often associated with serious learning, although, some of my classmates hypothesized that the fresh paint on the walls was off-gassing and subtly choking our oxygen supply—a conspiracy theory that only gained validity coming from the mouths of these soon-to-be biochemists and Med students. Regardless, we were sufficiently corralled and lulled into the docile state which allowed for the information to be optimally imparted upon us. I glazed over between slide 11—in which the protein Per 1 dephosphorylates a supposedly vital receptor—and slide 15—in which Per 2, after four slides of tantalizing build up, finally binds to said receptor and induces the start of a metabolic day. A wistful thought wafted through the stagnant room: I need to stop huffing dry paint fumes and memorizing signalling pathways; I need to get credit some other way. So I walked across Spain.

According to school, every question in science has a correct answer. And after two years of crunching numbers and circling letters on exams, I began to always expect a right answer. But not just in science, my craving for a precise, provable, and correct answer seeped into my thoughts outside of school. I began looking for the correct answer for how to live a good life. Nobody every graded my answers, I was very disappointed.

Then I walked from Southern France to Finisterre in Spain. I spent forty days walking across farmlands and through cities, in cold rain and hot sun, with people from all over the world. I slept in bunk beds in crowded dorms that got hot from all the bodies. I felt discomfort in my feet and back from the long days of walking, and the discomfort that comes from being stripped of privacy. I began thinking differently; I stopped looking for correct answers to everyday problems and quit clinging to expectations. Thinking is freedom, and freedom is funny.

Walking 50k Alone is Boring

I walked with people for the first three weeks. At first with Sara, over the Pyrenees and through rain and the rolling vineyards in Navarra and Rioja. We talked about languages and customs at first, and then everything else two people can talk about. We walked together for eight days. Then with Jacquelyn, her father and Bill; we walked through red mud past a monument that marked a mass grave, and on goat trails and cow pastures, and alongside rust-red barbed wire that marked a military zone, and through the park that stretches into Burgos.

I left Burgos alone. And met a group of vagrants that stopped for a spliff break every 5k and who drank in parks and brought bottles of wine to bars.

I walked with Spencer through the Meseta. He’s a goddamn weirdo. And I love it. He’s got the dork glasses, trekking poles, a bandana around his neck tucked into his sun hat, pants in the midday heat and knee braces on the outside of his pants that cultivate sweat stains. He doesn’t drink and he goes to bed at ten. Somewhere in his parent’s house there is a whole chest full of his Boy Scout Merit Badges. He eats plain yogurt. Then he talked to me about his past life as a rockstar. He toured across the U.S., did coke in New York til the sun rise, loitered in parks like we do now to make sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. He went on tour with EL VY and Matt Berringer from the National knew his name. We always walked straight, always the wheat fields on one side and the highway on the other, always with the sun on our left. Always through ghost towns whose names mean nothing to me or anyone who does not live in them. He saved me from boredom in the dulldrums of the Meseta. We split up outside of Astorga.
I walked with an Italian and some germans up the windy skree to Foncedabon.
Then I walked on my own.

I slip out the door of the old church I slept in before the other pilgrims and just as the sun is rising. Outside the mist clings to the mountain and sun smoulders red as if through smoke and the stone walls on steep the slopes look bombed out and the ruins and red clouds paint a picture of brimstone and the end of times. My joints creak as I trek the two kilometers up to Cruz de Fierro and I stop once to look as the sun passes through a cobble arch and the clouds swirl in the valley.

The tiny iron cross perched on the telephone pole log, stuck in the pile of rocks that marked a pagan site of rituals is the reason I stayed on the Frances route. People bring small rocks from home and leave them at this high point to symbolize letting go of their burdens. I squat on the pile of stones and look at the pictures and letters from and to loved ones that thousands of people have set down on this pile. I cry for the desperation that drove people up this hill, for the small pictures that symbolize the loss of life and the repercussive destruction the vacuum of death creates. I did not bring a stone. But I pull out a letter from a woman who I love and no longer talk to and place it under an oblong stone. The words of an annoying yoga guru I met along the way come back to me, “Our subconscious needs rituals in order to be convinced.” I stayed on the Frances mainly to come to this place, and I have walked 400 miles and up this mountain 1500 meters above the sea, to leave a letter under a rock.

I walked 50 kilometers that day, bouncing down rocky trails and on the roads in and out of Ponferrado, past estates with Ferraris and private tennis courts. I did not see many people on the Camino, pilgrims or locals, past two in the afternoon. That day was no different. The last five hours of my walk took me through vineyards devoid of shade and I only saw two men on tractors.

Boredom is like darkness. In the first hours of walking alone I feel claustrophobic as the world shrinks into my head and there are no screens or people to pull me out. I think about goals and logistics in my life: where I want to live, who I want to date, what kind of job I will settle on. Then I sing for a bit. Then I imagine that I am having conversations with people in my life, usually women that I have been romantic with. I hash and rehash arguments until I end up talking to myself out loud. Then I sing again. Or twirl a stick as if it were a sword or a baseball bat. Then, as with darkness, I adjust to boredom. I just stop paying attention to my thoughts. And when something or someone finally pulls me from my head it feels like getting rudely awakened by fluorescent lights.

That day, in the vineyards, I sang the same song for twenty minutes. It’s called the “Work Song” by Dan Reeder, and it only has two lines of lyrics: “I got all, all the fucking work I need//Oh I got all, all the fucking work I need.” By the time I got to an albergue Villafranca I briefly forgot how to speak to other humans. The hospitalera was from the States, but it took me a minute to remember how to ask for a bed. I imagined my skull as a crock pot and my brain as chili that had simmered in the sun for an entire day.

I walked late into the afternoon several times after that day.

Cordyceps and Crosses

The small towns near the France-Spain border do not look like the small towns in the USA. I am used to driving passed the sparse houses in rural America that loosely gather around one or two stores and a dilapidated gas station with boarded windows that could easily be open, closed or abandoned for decades and you would not know the difference. Houses and people in those towns are only connected by highways and sagging power lines. In that north-east portion of Spain, towns look like someone cut out a half kilometer circle of city with the church in the center, lifted it and dropped it in the countryside. Cobblestone streets wriggle past tiendas and mercados and the apartments squeeze together, too dense for their facades and the town contains itself modestly, as if to not impede on the view of wheat fields and groomed vineyards.

I thought about cordycep mushrooms for those first few days. Cordyceps drop spores that infect insects, and the infection compels the critters crawl to the highest place they can find and then they die and a new cordycep grows out of their head and drops new spores into the wind from the advantageous height.

There is a cross or monestary on every tall hill in this countryside. Thousands of prople across the millinea were compelled to climb these massive hills with masonry stones and crosses in the name Christianity.

I wonder what ants think as they crawl up blades of grass, carrying the spores of cordyceps in their bodies?

A Lot of Effort for a Walk

I left London on some shitty British Airways plane from the Gatwick airport that reeks of cologne and salted pretzels at 6:40 a.m. Bordeaux was warm and sunny and a great relief to the Washington-like weather that I found in London. I hopped a bus from the airport to the train station and fumbled through a few apologies and phrases I had looked up on the bus ride until I found a very kind women who spoke english. My train was cancelled. Ugh. Problem solving without a night of sleep under my belt is not my strong suit. I resisted the urge to take a terrible nap on a bench in the station and went to the nearby Albergue Juessen, checked in and took a terrible nap on the couch in the common room there instead.

Treating myself to cafe au lait and a decadent croissant seemed like the right move. On the walk to a cafe, I noticed something and I don`t know if this is true of France in general, but Bordeaux is a sexy place. I mean the people, they are really sexy. There are several universities there, so it makes sense that there would be a large popular of young attractive folks who dress to impress. But the people in Bordeaux apparently think differently about aging. Every single person looked more fashionable and confident than I would on a date. I felt woefully underdressed and exhausted by the time I got back to the hostel from falling in love every stranger I walked passed.

I took the previous day’s ticket to the train station and hoped the nation-wide rail workers strike would speak for itself and I would not have to explain why I had the wrong ticket. I don’t speak French. And that’s about all I can explain in French. I asked the only train conductor I could find who spoke some english where I was supposed to sit and he responded sternly, “No seat. You can get on the train. No seat.” I waited for everyone else to board and snuck into and empty seat and kept my head down. I was relieved in Bayonne to see a bunch of other people with trekking packs with shells dangling from the back. I followed the herd of them onto the bus for Saint Jean Pied de Port and again boarded a bus with the wrong ticket and was again relieved to not explain myself.

Saint Jean Pied de Port was what I imagined southern France would look like. Nestled in a lush valley, the features seemed too perfect. The small river that bisects the town under the old missionary building seemed too quaint. The streets too narrow and the cobblestones too askew. The air intuitively felt warmer than it should have been and the fields looked to green to be grass.

At six a.m. I realized the difference between a pilgrimage and a vacation. I could easily lounge in a town like Saint Jean Pied de Port for weeks; running the hilly country roads, drinking wine and walking through the picturesque mountains. My alarm went off at six though and gravity felt stronger than normal having slept only three of the last five nights, this was the moment on vacation where I would void whatever brilliant plans I had made for the day and throw my phone across the room and sleep until it was too warm to stay in bed. I washed my face and repacked my bag in the half dark and set off south by myself up a steep narrow road towards Orisson and eventually Roncevalles. I felt no ceremony in my first steps towards Santiago.

The air was sweet with spring bloom and manure and the occasional diesel from cars that abruptly passed by, sucking up the dark world in a wedge of high beams and spitting it back out in accentuated blackness. The mountains cloaked the sun and the immense backdrop of the crisp moon brightened long before the orange sphere of the sun crested the rounded ridges jutting up in the east. Up the steep hill the from the town the night mixed with the yellow sliver that was the temptation of day and from the vantage I could see how the slopes warped the fields and the sparse rows of trees and slanted fence posts outlined the crooked pastures with horses stooped head over barbed wire and sheep asleep against feed posts or under old carts used to haul hay now left for the weather.

I reached Orisson, 8 km up the road and about 800 m of elevation, by eight thirty. All the bus rides and flight itineraries and train schedules of the past few days stressed me out, compounded with the fact that I speak hardly any Spainish and even less French left me feeling entirely inadecquet. But here, walking uphill by myself in the morning darkness, passing other pilgrims with overloaded packs who had never walked 27 km in a day and certainly not 27 km up and over a mountain range with a pack on, I could feel confidence in my body. The cumulative disorientation of the previous six days of ocean and time zone hopping, sleepless nights, rapid changes in climate and language and culture, and the beginning of a Pilgrimage relaxed as the hills rapidly rose, my heart rate steadied and my feet and breath shortened to match the tilt of the mountain.

I walked by myself for the first 15 km. The narrow country road wound past farms near Saint Jean, and then ventured out into sage brush hills and crested the foothills of the Pyrenees and snaked atop the ridges headlong into the wind towards the peaks themselves. I ran into a German woman named Julia who I had sat next to on the bus into Saint Jean the night before and we ended up walking with two Italians, Simone and Sara. By the time we reached the highest point of the Camino in the Pyrenees the four of us had formed a makeshift group and my hands were too cold to zip my wind breaker and there was snow melting in the north facing ditches.

For many people, the walk from Saint Jean to Roncevalles is their first major trek over mountains and tests their spirit and dedication to pilgrimage. I was very tired by the time we descended into the valley, but I was relieved to finally rely on my body to travel and in an unexpected way, I felt at home in the massive albergue that evening.

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The Puddles here are bloody nice.

I am writing this from Gare St. Jean in Bordeaux and on the train to Bayonne.

This probably isn’t fair, and people can certainly say worse things about any city in the USA, but I didn’t love London. My snap judgement sense is that half of Londoners would perish within the month if you cut off the city’s supply of fish breading, fryer oil and shitty toast. Inversely, the same half would probably live to see their late sixties if you took away their cigarettes. I wonder if it is just the result of collective vitamin D defficiency as it is in Seattle, but the inhabitants of these two cities have a very similar ‘fuck off and mind your own business’ attitude (although here I suppose it would be ‘piss off`)
Plastic bags of bland vegetables aside, the city is beautiful: all old churches and quaint winding streets, comically exhuberant palaces for royalty and (this is coming from a Washingtonian) an absolutely striking amount of puddles on the sidewalk. Seriously, do London city planners engineer the sidewalks to hold water? It’s amazing. The parks here are splendid and I could really get used to the centuries old churches and garden squares that nestle in the middle of quiet, rich neighborhoods.
The second day I was there I wandered over to Hyde park and was impressed by the restraint and taste that went into the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. This is the country that (from the outside at least) appears to go into mass hysteria everytime new royalty is concieved and that still puts silent guards in ridiculous hats outside the Queen’s house (the extravagant Buckingham Palace), yet in honour of the death of a beloved member of royalty, they constructed an incredibly reserved fountain. It is a circular ring of cement canal that is not more than a dozen and a half meters in diameter and is perched on a slight hill. Water bubbles up from the top of the hill and swirls down both sides, meets in a quiet surf at the bottom, and drians into the lake near by. I ate my lunch of bread, cheese, tomatoes and basil next to the sound of the ripples in a light English drizzle.
I met up with a local running club on Tuesday (4/3/18) at the Marquis of Wellington, a pub near the Tower Bridge. They had an exceptional turn out of 40 or more people and split into groups based on pace. I went with the first group (the slow one) but darted off ahead with a group of guys who run a 10k instead of a 5k. We ran the whole way along the Thames, crossing over the Tower Bridge and winding southwest on the foot path that follows the water until we reached Westminster Abbey and the scaffolding that Brits currently call Big Ben then crossed back over and ran the way back on the South side of the river, all the while weaving through an endless stream of distracted tourists with selfy sticks and ice cream licking children.
A chap called Milo went out really fast and I gave him a hundred meter gap in the first kilometer but kept him in sight so I would get the details of the route. I pulled up beside him in front of the Tower of London and we chatted the rest of the way, interrupted only by quick jukes around tourists, wonky cobblestones and puddles (good god, so many puddles, it hadn’t even rained all day for Christsake). I was nervous about how my body would feel given that I had missed so much sleep and had only eaten one meal with vegetables in it in the last three days. Sure enough the first 5k felt pretty rough, which I did not tell Milo, but by the Westminster Bridge I felt great and ended up pushing the pace on Milo towards the end. I was not wearing a watch but we ran about a 45 minute 10k if what Milo said was accurate.
Brits apparently do not mind running in backpacks. I saw countless runners in full running garb–men and women in tights and bright shoes and DriFit race shirts–with backpacks on. I don’t get it, but I did find it amusing to follow behind them and watch the hipnotic sway of their packs.
Back at the pub a friendly couple (Lisa and Jason) offered me a seat and Lisa bought me two beers. We chatted about running, life in London, the Camino and their own travels in the States. Lisa had been all over the U.S. and wants to go back to New York and wants to see Chicago.
I caught a train back to the Astor Victoria Hostel where I showered in the tiny closet with lukewarm water and ate dinner in the basement kitchen while the folks who worked in the Hostel played beer pong. Two Aussie guys were getting pretty rowdy singing American Pop songs from the 90s and dancing. A girl from the States came in and sat next to me. Katie was from Vermont and was cute but not such a pleasure to talk to. She’s a student studying creative writing with a minor in international partying. She seemed like she was nineteen and could not fathom why I would want to walk (and not at least take a donkey if not a car) across Spain. I went up the six flights of stairs and backed my bag and took a really shitty nap from 1:30 a.m. to 2:30 on a couch downstairs with Shrek playing on a projector in the background, and then took a very groggy walk to the Victoria Station.
As with most cities, people do not care about you. If there was ever a time when you could go out to a bar and meet people, it was not during my adult life. I was glad I brought my running shoes and I was glad that I met Lisa and Jason and Milo.