The Camino de Santiago,captured from a video. *
This morning, I sat on my bed with my head feeling as
I used to tease my curly-haired daughter, “We had to let all those curls screw
themselves through your scalp, if not the inside of your head would be filled
with—imagine this, a curled-up wad of hair.”
That’s how my head felt—full, but not of hair, of
inspiration, of thoughts, of memories. I was in a ratified zone. I wanted to
stay there, all warm and toasty, after I read that a friend pulled a needle and
thread through a hiker’s feet blisters, tied off the thread, left it as a wick,
and plastered Band-Aids over the blisters. The hiker put on her shoes and
continued hobbling on down the trail.
I thought of the author—I was jealous of her
abilities, although I know we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, but when
my head is ringing from their words, it’s hard not to wish I could sing like
she does.
Laguna Beach, an old stomping ground. The author I’m
speaking of, lives there, is an architect, has two restaurants, and writes best
sellers, AUGH! And that’s where we used to go on Sunday afternoons driving from
San Diego, to take in the art galleries, and where they had the best pottery
shack, and a beach where my daughter took her first step, standing in the sand
with a little body 100 times larger than the tiny feet she balanced on,
weaving, swaying back and forth, concentrating with wrinkled brow, until
finally she did it—took a step. And we caught it on film, with a movie
camera—that’s what we had in those days.
But it wasn’t Laguna Beach that changed me, well maybe
a little, during those years, they had a greeter, an old man, who had greeted
motorists for so many years, they made him the official greeter, and at the
beach there was an alcove eroded from the sea into the cliff abutting the beach
that had so many shells my mother-in-law spent an afternoon sitting among those
shells, sorting, and we could hardly pry her away.
No, it wasn’t Laguna Beach or the memories that
changed me today, it was Suzanne Redfearn’s novel, Call of the Camino.
I let others do the walking. I did the reading. After
Redfearn’s two women protagonists completed the Camino, a 775 km, approximately
482-mile walk through Portugal, Spain, and France, I was left sprawled on the
bed with thoughts curled inside my brain.
Walking the Camino de Santiago began as a pilgrimage
in the 9th century for medieval Christians to follow the Way of St James. It
has become is a spiritual journey, a finding of oneself, of finding direction
in life. For the pilgrims, it means their sins are forgiven, and any punishment
related to them in this life or in the next is pardoned. For others, it’s a
place to grieve, to spread ashes, and for some young guys to find girls. For
all, it is an arduous walk, grueling and enlightening.
You walk, you think, you put one foot in front of the
other. You work through the pain, through the blisters, through the painful
feet and aching joints. You endure the heat and the sun and the rain. You make
friends, you lose some, you celebrate with coffee or a drink at a pub when a
city presents itself. You challenge yourself, face your fears, and
demolish your demons. You become separated from the world, you attend to
minimal daily tasks like washing your one of two outfits. You feed yourself,
water yourself, and take a shower. You fall in love.
The Camino provides. There are hostels along the way
and showers, dormitories, ‘The albergue,” with bunks that can house 150
stinking, smelly, snoring people. You pay if you can. it’s free if you cannot.
“Buen Camino!” shouts a fellow traveler. In earlier times it was “Ultreia!!”
“Onward.” And they never let a fellow pilgrim go hungry.
I wanted to run back to my office and let some
thoughts leak from my brain before they evaporated. Already, the feeling is
drifting away; it is not the tender Ahhhhh.
I was impacted by the fictional characters who walked
the Camino. And there, snug in my bed, I thought of dreams I had had of
following in the footsteps of writers who traveled and wrote folky
slice-of-life stories, such as Charles Kuralt did with his books, On the
Road with Charles Kuralt, and his Sunday morning TV program of the same
name. He traveled the backroads of America and wrote about what he found
there—a time when people were proud of America, and country fairs spouted such
signs as, “See the Swimming Pig,” like he was the only one on earth, yet all
pigs can swim.
And in San Diego, another writer, John Sinor, wrote a
column for the local newspaper. I remember his story about the white doe, which
occasionally gave a local an otherworldly experience. Sinor himself had come
upon her one misty Sunday morning as the first light of the day illuminated the
sky and the deer. Some society, for what reason I do not know, tried to capture
her with a non-lethal tranquilizing dart, and it was too much for her. I
still grieve her, although she would be long gone by now, and her mate, a white
buck, had passed before that story.
And I dream of renting a camper and taking a road trip
with my dog, and seeing what I would find and who I would meet. It could be
like John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie,” who said a truck is more reliable
than a car, and his trip was at a time when camper shells were a rare sight.
When he met a fellow to whom offering vodka was appropriate, the fellow was
awed by his gift of iced vodka from his camper refrigerator.
I wonder if I could pay for my trip by writing about
it, but my quibbling mind tells me people don’t want to pay for writing when
they can get so much for free.
Yesterday, I declared, “I no longer want to live in
doom and gloom.” My grandson wanted me to read a Steven King book, I told him I
had “Steven King on Writing.” That didn’t wash. He meant a novel. How
many pages did I read before I said, “F* that, I’m not going to read about a
demented old bastard tormenting a little boy,” and stopped reading.
Why throw in bad thoughts!
It was enough after I read a real-life Substack
writer, JoJoFromJerz…” (April
17, 2026)
“Just yesterday, Donald Trump referred to Jeffrey
Epstein’s victims as 'victims… or whatever.”—JoJoFromJerz
“Or whatever.”
And if I’m being honest, that triggered the shit out of
me.
…
“There’s a man who raped me, and he’s out there living
his life without consequence, like what he did to me never mattered.
“He took my virginity when I was seventeen years
old—violently, painfully, in a way that carved itself in and stayed—and when I
tried, in that immediate aftermath, to tell the truth about what had happened,
the people I trusted most didn’t believe me.”
Now I wonder, should I change the memoir I wrote three
years ago, with inclusions and exclusions over the years? For now, I am a
different person. We have all changed over the years. It’s hard to find joy.
It’s hard to believe in truth, goodness, those sorts of things. But then I
guess a memoir, I prefer to call it a Prairie Report, is the telling of what
came before.
However, our responses to what happened have changed.
I was so anxious to get to my computer and pour out
something. My computer, however, decided it needed an upgrade, and it was so
slow I resorted to the old, tried-and-true method—writing by hand.
Last night, after discarding King’s book, I suggested
to my grandson that he read some Ray Bradbury. I read Bradbury about 50 years
ago, loved him, and now wonder how I would feel about his books. Bradbury never
used a computer. All his works were typed on an Olympia typewriter, and he
refused to have his books published in digital form. He was a futurist who held
books sacred—to hold them, to smell them, he felt something was lost reading
onscreen. In 2011, he reneged and allowed Fahrenheit 451 to be published
as an ebook.
I went to the computer (see, now you can read an
excerpt of Bradbury’s books online) and read the introduction to Dandelion Wine, and was moved to an
ethereal realm, where he gloried in being alive; basked in it, celebrated it,
tussling with his brother and getting a fat lip didn’t faze him, blood
trickling told him he was alive.
The couple of times I heard Bradbury speak (when he
was in his prime), once on a college campus where he sat, like Socrates, on the
lawn under a tree, and taught his students. I walked away from his talks on air
two feet from the ground.
There were advantages to living in San Diego.
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