Today I finished what turned out to be a thousand kilometer pilgrimage, across the Iberian peninsula, over a period of two months, and felt almost nothing.

I have had a lot of time, walking over mountains, through forests of oak and eucalyptus, and ancient cities, to picture the completion of my pilgrimage. This morning I wrote a blog post about the anticipation of my arrival, and reading it again, I sound delusional.

The walk to the End of the World was saturated with people, a few of them pilgrims. The parking lot was at its capacity of tour busses, and Danish teenagers flowed out and toward the cliffside like a river. I dreampt of a cool ocean spray in the air, but instead the thick musk of intercontinental shit wafted out of the public bathhouse. There was no beach in which to plunge myself to the ocean, but there were several bustling kiosks selling the same blue-and-yellow knick-knacks that infested every city like leprosy.

I clambered down the cliffside, seeking solitude from the clicking of cameras and the giggling of teenagers. I found a flat-ish boulder hanging over the ocean, sat down, and thought. I waited for tears to come, to be overehelmed by my journey’s end. There were no tears. I felt no different than I had the weeks before. An hour passed, and I scrambled back up to join the other tourists. I joined them in exhaling an enthusiastic “Wooooooowww”, and then turned my back to the End of the World, and descended back to Finisterra.

I thought of Forrest Gump and his three years of running across the North American continent. “When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on goin’.”

When I got to the ocean, I realized, or remembered, that it was never about getting to Santiago de Compostela, or Finisterra. It was about going somewhere. When I tell my family and eventually my children about el Camino, the stories won’t be about the day I finished. They will be about the people that I fell in love with along the way, the things that I saw and touched and felt.

Its easy to arrive somewhere, but it is a whole hell of a lot harder to go somewhere.

When the sun purges through a heavy veil of clouds, the light catches water vapor, creating a golden stream of light training from the heavens. When I was just a nugget, I used to thunk that these were the slides that angels slid down to recieve passing souls. There are many angels on their way to Finisterre this morning.

The salty musk of the ocean fills my every breath. The water is still, rippling ever so softly like cyan stained glass. Little pastel colored boats sit moored in the cape, still, sleeping.

A few hours away is Finisterre, the End of the World. I woke this morning with a stomach too unsettled to handke breakfast. I always feel like this in the morning before I fly or travel, or go to a job interview, or start a new class.

My face burns if I dwell too much on my journey, and the closeness of its end. I dont feel ready to give up those tears, so I straighten my posture, sinch my pack to my back, and walk faster.

In Santiago, Aiden Taylor invited me to attend mass with him. Indid my best to kindly decline. I did not feel god in that cathedral. It was cold, and echoed the sounds of pilgrims jabbering and struggling with camera-phones.
The crashing of the waves are my mass. The shock of icy ocean water is my baptism. The spires of seawashed rock are the spires of my cathedral. When I arrive, I will pray, and throw my bare form into the ocean.

Today, I am going to church.

According to my ‘Wise Pilgrim Guide to the Northern Camino’, many Galician farmers “enjoy telling you, without the slightest tone of irony or sarcasm, that ‘no hay vacas en Galicia'”. While there may not be any cows in Galicia, there are wolves.

“Ive never seen a gray German Shepherd…” Ida said in mystic tone, leaning out of her chair to peer into the hillside.
“I saw something, but not a dog…”

Ida pointed across the valley of pasture, to the edge of the forest, where she had seen a beast. Two of our hosts four tiny dogs came running up the driveway, breaking silence with their yipping. The other two sat nervously at our feet, ears at attention, eyes on the trees.

Evening had crept into A Roxica; a soft mist continued to drip from the albergue awning and dull the colors of the countryside.

“El bosque tiene lobos?” I ask the presumable husband of our hostess.

“Siiiiiii…” grumbled the cattle farmer, raising his brow and turning his chin down at us. He proceeded to tell us many things, about his cows and his dogs, and los lobos. I understood very little of his mysterious tale, but I clearly understood one bit: Pilgrims, he said, should not be out walking in the evening, and not too early in the morning either. There ARE wolves in Galicia.

Ida and I slept in the next morning, not setting off into another drizzly morning until well after nine. A half hour into our way, we stopped in our tracks.

“Listen…”

A comotion had errupted across the valley, not far away. Many canines of unknown variety howled and barked and snarled in a frenzy that silenced the other creatures of the hillside.

“I dont think anyone here has that many dogs.” My eyebrows raised at Ida, who shuddered slightly, and resumed quickly down the lane.

“I do NOT like this way.” She said as I did my best to keep up with her frantic march.

Ask anyone who lives here and they will tell you, there ARE wolves in Galicia.

My grandfather recently paid me a visit, which was unexpected seeing as how he has been dead for almost four years.

Bill Stevenson’s company was an acquired taste, like an old, dry whisky. He had been quoted many times shouting things like “NO! Not twelve inches, more like a foot!” His front door was to be left perfectly adjar as to allow the correct amount of airflow (which was never much) but not to obstruct his view of the driveway from HIS chair. Tucked beside him in that chair was his chrome plated, locked, loaded, ready to go Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum. Every once in a while he would remind one of his usual guests that should any rapscallious punks or ambitious lawmen walk through that door, he would be sufficiently prepared.

From that chair, HIS chair, he had everything he needed. To his right was his coffee (a running brew of unknown age), all manner of pens, notepads, a flashlight, one of these and one of those. Sitting perfectly arranged on the base of his lamp were each of his teeth that had fallen out, root and all, in the past several years. Periodically, a lucky grandchild would be shown the four, yellow momentos, followed by a flash of a gummy grin and the one tooth that still held on. He would laugh from his belly as the youngest of us scattered, later to be reeled in by promises of Reeses Cups or maybe a Milky Way.

When a younger me wanted money for a new video game, I went to Poppop. He would put me to work, the amount of which we would both stiffly negotiate, mowing the lawn, stacking wood, or using an old badminton racket to dispatch resident bumblebees.

The first time I wanted to take a girl on a date, he gave me a hundred dollar bill and told told me to bring back the change.
Any time I called him for a ride from school or here or there, he would be on his way, provided I listened quietly to NPR or Rush Limbaugh.

A good dirty joke (honestly they weren’t particularly good, but they WERE dirty) could send him into a coughing fit. The fiasco was more often than not punctuated by hocking a large, green mass unapologetically into his perfectly positioned waste bin. As the years passed, green became brown, and brown became red.

Bill had put down the bottle, cold turkey, several years ago, and he was proud to tell you. In this case, his family was always proud to listen. He did, however, smoke at least a pack of special miniature cigars a day. He ate less and less, and rarely left his chair, leaving him ever more skinny. He would not set foot in a doctor’s office, and didn’t agree to let a family friend examine him until there was no denying his fate. When his days shortened and visitors became more frequent, no one was surprised.

One morning around Easter I woke to a missed call and text from my uncle. “Dad’s gone. Tell your mother.”
So I slid out of bed, walked softly to the other end of the house, and went to stand beside my mother’s bed. I passed on the message, and watched as she rolled over, curling around her pillow and burying her face in the linen. I didn’t stay to mourn with her, I just went to bed. I did not mourn him at his funeral either, which was a blur of the same sad Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams songs on repeat.

Four years later, we met one last time.

I was watching cyan water undulate in and out of small tidepools of rock and sand. The tide was almost glowing in the noon day sun, which warmed the sand below my feet. He was sitting above the reaches of the tranquil, ever-lapsing waves, with his small bookshelf perfectly organized to his right, where it belonged.

“August…”

I had been mindlessly doodling with chalk on a tabletop, and hadn’t noticed him.

“August. Do you think… Could you give me a hug?” His tone was patient, less abrasive than I remembered. This was a Bill who had surely been humbled upon meeting his maker.

I stood to grant his simple request, meeting him within reach of the tide. His embrace was boney and warm. His tattered flannel still smelled of stale tobacco.

I heard myself battling a sob, having seen this man for an intangible farewell. My whimpering, the beach, and my grandfather were engulfed in incandescent light.

Waking in a train station albergue, my eyes were already swimming. I laid amongst the combating snores of frenchman and thanked the Camino for making me miss my grandfather.

Whether I realize it or not, I pass empty judgments of just about everyone I meet.

On my way to a cafe this morning, I fancied my deduction that the posse of uniformed schoolboys strutting ahead of me were a certain variety of angsty, up-to-no-good punks. One of them blasted repetitive trap music, the kind that rang sour in my ears, from a speaker in his hand. They all had the same haircut; clean on the sides, long and saturated with gel on the top, combed to the side. This would surely be enough to convict them of their punkery in a court of law.

Every time a slightly-past-middle-aged man in a cafe approaches the little digital slot machines that are apparently everywhere, I figure the man has a habit, and is quite familiar with this particular machine.

Detective work well done.

At the beginning of this school year, my best friend Garrett and I befriended a character. We met Joe in Evergreen’s bouldering gym. We were both very new there, but as months passed we learned that Joe was a regular. The first day we met him, Joe sported a pair of amusingly tight climbing pants, with giant brown patches on the thighs and knees and a bright red patch across the ass. Thus we dubbed him Joe the Pants. Never just Joe, always Joe the Pants, sometimes even just The Pants.

He climbed far better than Garrett or I.
“Try this!” he would mutter, punctuated by his signature giggle, before hanging impossibly from two fingers on one hand, and launching his heavy frame into the air to the next nearly-nonexistent hold, and hanging on effortlessly. Routes set and signed by Joe the Pants were seldom worth trying.

Sometimes Joe the Pants would fall off the face of the earth for weeks at a time. Folks who had been closer with him would tell us that Joe the Pants had been “dealing with some stuff”.

Figures. Who isn’t?

He would eventually reemerge in the gym, and tell some far fetched tale of how he had lost his phone learning to surf on the coast in the dead of November. For a stretch of about a month, he suffered from four cracked ribs. We saw him in the gym climbing more often that month than any time before or after.

Garrett and I had deduced that Joe the Pants was an A-Grade badass, worthy of our admiration.

The man was an enigma.

Ask someone if they knew Joe, and their reaction was more or less the same.

“Joe!? I love Joe”.

Sometimes they would tell some crazy story about how they had watched him eat a whole pack of cold hotdogs when they were climbing in Leavenworth or maybe how he had fallen twenty feet from a tree and risen unscathed.

Garrett and I fantasized about climbing the clock tower on campus, but would always laugh and remind ourselves that it was a task better left for Joe the Pants. Once he called Garrett at 2am to invite him to do just that, but Garrett had been asleep.

The last time Joe the Pants disappeared, he left promising to return with all his climbing gear, easily a grand worth, to give to Garrett for us to use. He never explained why. Garrett and I manufactured an explanation: Joe the Pants was getting rid of extra weight so that he could move into a van and travel the country, or escape to a distant beach to bum on cyan waves for the next two decades. We admired his supposed spirit of adventure, and spoke frequently of living the same way. Garrett recently sent me an email saying that when he “grew up”, he wanted to be just like Joe the Pants. No one else understood but he knew I would.

I learned via a photo of ropes, quickdraws, webbing and cams laid for display on the dormitory floor that Joe the Pants-a-Clause had paid Garrett a visit after I had come to Spain.

This morning my phone buzzed me into consciousness. Joe the Pants was dead. He had had an infection in his blood, and had probably known for a while.

It is very likely that he wasn’t the reckless, wild, walking adventure that Garrett and I had determined to be the foundation of his character. He was running out of time, that was all.

Those “punk” kids were on their way to school in their uniforms, pants pressed and ties straight. Who gives a shit what kind of music they listen to.

The bald guy at the slot machine had just bought a cup of coffee, and probably just dropped his disposable change in, taking a silly chance.

Turns out I’m the punk kid with a bad habit.

My eight hour train through the Spanish north country passed by mostly in flashes, brief clips captured on an old film camera. Unfamiliar country roared past as I fell in and out of consciousness.

A small, simple cabin, built by hand from clay and stone, the sand on which it sat. A single wooden door and wooden windows, hanging askew in their warped frames, enduring the vast expanse of frozen hilltops.

 Distant mountain peaks, sloping ever so softly into the hills, and eventually valleys below. Gently they marry with the earth, as if painted by the stroke of a very lazy painter.
Flat, green pastures, iron colored soil, diligently tilled and squared off for seasons more wet than this one.

Many cities made only of ten-ish story apartment buildings, a sore capitalist thumb poking from the masetta. No doubt, erected around factories that had quickly gone under durring the last decade of financal turbulence. They all seemed like ghost towns. No padestrians, one or two parked cars for every hundred dwellings.

The series illustrated a country’s desperate scramble to consume and expand. From huts to agriculture, cities and collapse.

And then there was the Basque country. Sensible homes, and clean streets clashed with abandoned warehouses and graffiti “Independence!” or “Basque Country” scrawled in technicolor handwriting in a language that has no anscestor in Europe, Asia, or Elsewhere.

Nestled away in this confusion of identity is Albuergue de Peregrinos de Irún. A converted appartment building boasting over fifty beds, and two incredibly friendly hospitaleros.

This evening, I made my way into their office and presented my stiff, unsoiled credencial. The one who spoke very broken English flashed a smile up at me as he opened the blank folds, and proceded to stamp the first page with a blue scallop shell. I had a very hard time hiding the fact that something had gotten into my eyes, glassing them over and threatening to spill over my cheeks.

My stench was washed away by their hospitality, and their incredibly hot shower. My belly was filled by a pair of French pilgrims, who had made too much dinner and shared my dispair of finding food on Good Friday. From the back of my pack now dangles a virgin white concha, a scallop shell. It hangs as a reminder that a pilgrim gives thanks, as I intend to, and to pass forth the spirit of this pilgrimage, as others already have to me with food, kindness, and welcome.