Camino Journal Day 7
Pilgrim statue on the trail leaving Guernica
April 8
I had been making good pace the last couple days. My legs felt good, and I still had no real blisters on my feet. Just a couple little nicks and scrapes. Two magnesium tablets in my 1.5-liter bottle of water in the mornings seem to be helping with any aches and pains in my muscles. I figured I’d walk the 20 or so miles to Bilbao and committed by booking the hostel in the old quarter before getting out of my bunk. It was 6am. The first train heading back to Guernica wouldn’t arrive until 7a. There wasn’t going to be a cafe for a while, and I was very groggy due to the alcohol and so many late night spliffs. I took about 6 mg of Addaroll and washed it down with a Coca-Cola I’d harbored away in my bag the night before; this time it was a coke with real sugar. I’d been burning upwards of three to five thousand active calories a day. One pilgrim told me you should add on the 2000 or so calories it takes to stay alive when just sitting around.
Physical health was a big part of this walk for me. I did my first Camino in 2019 as a gift to myself for my 35th year around the sun. If I didn’t start taking care of myself, I’d end up dying a slow and painful death. So, I still had the same goals this time around, and losing a few pounds was definitely achievable even with consuming sugar here and there.
Leaving Mundaka - 6am
That’s my rationalization monster. And really, thinking about it, maybe they are not all monsters, but they definitely all sound like used car salesmen. Anytime I need a reason to do something or a justification to go ahead on something questionable, there my mind is, with all its creations, offering up as many explanations as needed. The mind has a tendency to get what it wants. I wish it weren’t so flexible sometimes. The mind doesn’t even really know what it wants. It just knows it needs. It would be great if this body came with a manual and on page 18 it would tell you: What The Brain Wants And Needs. There. It would be so helpful.
Everything in moderation, I reminded myself. That sounded like a heart thought. Scientists say that our other organs can sometimes function like brains, and the heart and even the stomach are formed of an intricate network of complex ganglia, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells, the same as those of the brain in the head. I prefer the way the heart thinks. It’s even in our language. “Listen to your heart,” or “Go with your gut.” This ‘ol brain is good at somethings, language acquisition being one of them, counting money being another, but I don’t know if I can trust it anymore.
I start feeling the caffeine immediately and by the time I’m off the train and back in Guernica where I had left off the day before, I’m feeling kind of high from the Addaroll. Forgotten are the pains in my legs and shoulders and in their place a feeling I could go farther than Bilbao, if I wanted. I could walk to Santiago without stopping. There is an old man of 60+ years old that can do the Camino Frances, beginning in the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, in only 10 days. That’s over 75km a day. my most so far had been my day before from Markina to Guernica with 37.6km completed. I was getting carried away with myself. Was it the drugs? Yes, it was probably the drugs, but I was sensing another monster within. Another nagging behavior, another survival trait, that although brought me this far was becoming a real annoyance. The over-achiever.
Either way, I’d made my Bilbao reservations and would need to get at least there. I knew I’d be tired soon and question my motives and ask, yet again, what am I doing out here on this trail? To accompany my solo walking, I put on a masterful reading of the Psalms by Alexander Scourby, and since I was walking alone, didn’t need to use ear buds. I walked and listened in an attempt to glean some of David’s wisdom. The Old Testament has been around for thousands of years. It doubles as the Jewish Torah. In the Jewish calendar the year is currently 5782. How’s that for some perspective? It’s only the year 2022 for the Christians and most of the Western world. Do other countries or cultures have a different year?
An old Guernica Oak Tree
I love listening to the Psalms. The video with Mr. Scourby lasts around 4 hours. I never get through it all at once, and there’s no need to, really. But on the trail, I had all the time in the world. I had reached a relative flow-state, with the aid of hashish, coffee, alcohol, Addaroll, Ibuprofen, and Magnesium tablets, not to mention the sugar, but overall flow state had been achieved. I knew my purpose: Arrive to Santiago by foot. I knew what to expect: pain, frustration, fatigue, joy, elation, exuberance, beauty, tranquility, tragedy, paradox. And I knew what it took to make the goal a reality: gratitude, dedication, consistency, patience, empathy of my fellow Earth beings, and self-care. This is flow state.
This is how goals are carried out. This is how things are manifested. This is how I am able to get things from the mind to the world. It’s how I accomplished my first Camino. I thought of him back then. Walking ever so slowly and painfully, but with a good Camino group. We all having a tough time getting through the walking. Lena, a young college girl from Freiburg was the only fit one among us. I couldn’t figure why she stayed around with Alo, myself and Alo’s fiancé. Alo was older than me and walked with me slowly most days, and we stopped every hour or so to smoke a spliff. The girls didn’t seem to mind at first, but then I felt Alo started to use me to keep the focus off him and his relationship. I guess the couple had some things to work out while walking. I wouldn’t separate from this group for nearly three weeks. That’s part of the reason I was so adamant of getting off on my own, to get into the flow state faster, to get back to knowing myself and putting this time and walk to good use.
There will be bumps in the road, people you don’t like, things that go wrong. There is just no way around this, but the severity of the situation really depends on mindset, and joy, as well as its opposite, are compounded infinitely. I wondered what I would be like if I didn’t use any substances. If I even went so far as to only take food in liquid form via smoothies, or juices or hell, how bout an i.v. drip? What is the super human, perfect image I have of myself? Why would I even want to be like that? A machine, going in for my daily oil change? “Another monster?” I thought.
Jesus, how many daemons are there? How much time it has taken to even recognize these behaviors, these traumas and their origins, to even know they exist. This ‘ol brain definitely cannot be trusted. I’ve been doing this life thing for almost 40 years, and I’m just now catching on to what my shiftily little mind has been up to. It’s turned me into a situational chameleon. If I need to be a machine, he’s a machine, an animal, he’s an animal, a superstar, a friendly person, an honest man? He can do it! There’s no one and nothing this chameleon mind can’t be and do.
The machine mind aspect of my personality could be akin to the monster described in Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Hitler goes so far as to have multiple injections per day of high doses of vitamins and experimental cocktails sometimes containing animal bloods and even drugs. The machine mind does anything to eradicate the body, to destroy the organic and soft malleable qualities of being human. A concoction bred of half animal/half spirit, and the mind decides to create a machine out of it. A goal so unattainable people work themselves to death, overdose on drugs, and injure themselves during extreme physical feats. I am not a machine. I must eat. I must shit and piss. I must die.
On the trail to Bilbao. A picture looking back East of the sunrise.
I imagine a future world kin to the apocalyptic movies like A.I. or Wall-E and see a planet populated by electric-self charging robot lawn mowers. Going out in the morning, bumping into things all day, backing up, correcting course, cutting the lawn in no pattern at all, no sense or rhyme to the pathway, just going until it hits something and then turning around, and retiring to its solar powered charging station that looks much like a doghouse. As the houses and roads deteriorate and the forests begin to take back the land, from the sky one sees a peculiar landscape with patches of perfectly manicured lawns. Not a human in sight.
I finished this little meandering thought of being a machine. Did I have the money to do it? Go in for an I.V. drip every day and push myself to the maximum of what I can be. But then what’s the standard? How will it be measured? Our systems are a little different than a car motor, after all. It was fun to imagine anyway. Maybe I could be an X-man. Someone with superpowers. Maybe I could eat as much sugar as I wanted and never gain weight or risk diabetes. Man, there’s a superpower the average American could use right about now.
So, there I was walking the trail, huffing and puffing with Alexander Scourby’s voice reading me texts supposedly written by a king who existed 1000 years before my American calendar even began. What was life like back then? Who is David? Did he slay Goliath by divine right, or as Malcom Gladwell suggests in his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, because the odds were in David’s favor? David had killed bears, wolves and other large predators while defending his father’s sheep. Goliath, although large, was likely full of unnatural deformities caused by generations of possible inbreeding to create these massive giants of war. When offered armor, David refused, and with just his sling shot, knocked the giant to the ground with one blow to the forehead before using Goliath’s own sword to cut his head off.
What am I to believe? How is it this story is now over 3000 years old, and I know it through and through? Is there any truth to it? What is the truth to it? Was David smarter than everyone else? And anyway, the lineage connecting David to Jesus, is skewed as well. What is Mother Mary’s lineage? If the divine birth is true, then Jesus had no blood of Joseph, his father, but that of his mother, still his heritage is accounted through the bloodline of Joseph. Seems there is so much to sift through. So much bullshit to weed out. So many years of history and so many attempts to make us forget, or rather remember everything in a certain way. This collective narrative that informs us is written by the winners. But what about when the losers know they will lose and hide the information? The Dead Sea Scrolls were only uncovered in the 1950s. These are the loser’s texts.
From the trail.
So many thoughts. The Camino is great for thinking. For real thinking. Maybe when walking, the heart, gut and head brains all think together. There is so much clarity, like fresh pine air filling the lungs after years of city dust and smog. Undisturbed thinking that can really provide some growth and certainty to a situation. There’s no one there to influence you, yet the voices of the people in my life still ring in my ears. What did they think about me? Did they think like me? What’s everyone else up to? Is my journey here less or more important than someone living back home and working at Home Depot? I can’t tell anymore.
I come over a hill and smell the strong smoke of marijuana, hear reggae music blasting up ahead. There is a house right on the trail, with the garden on one side and the house on the other. One must pass through the yard to go along the trail. What a cool spot to live, I think approaching it. Off in the garden to the right, with the sea in the background sit two guys Hugo and Jesus. It’s Jesus’s place. He’s from Senegal. We make eyes as I’m passing by. Neither of them invite me over, but spotting the joint in Hugo’s hands, I stop and say, “I’ll trade you guys a couple songs for a couple tokes.” I’m starting to run low on my supply and see this as a possibly easy opportunity to get some weed or more hash.
“Ah yeah man. Peace and love! Peace and love brother. Come. Here. Sit,” Jesus pulls a chair up around the table for me. There is a grill cooking fish filets with lemons and vegetables going to the side. One of the men is drinking a sangria and the other rum with coke. They offer me a beer and I decline but accept the joint they are passing around.
“Yea man! You like my place here?” Jesus asks me, “Me, my baby and my girl are living here. We love it. It’s beautiful, no?”
I agree that it is. Incredibly beautiful, I think. “You see, I call myself Jesus because he is the only one who knows about love. He’s the first one to every love me true. I will not tell you my real name. And in Bilbao they know me as Black Jesus.”
He bursts out laughing and passing the joint back to me. For a moment I thought about Covid and if it were smart to be hanging here with these two, trading spit from the end of a joint, and I decided it was.
“It’s not what goes into the mouth that will kill you, but what comes out,” I hear replaying in my head from my morning devotional listening of The Gospel of Thomas. There he is again. The damn chameleon ego, forever getting what the brain wants. What the brain wants in this situation is to score a hefty supply and not worry about it the rest of the Camino. Here I was not even a week into it, and I was almost out of the 100-euros-worth I’d bought when first arriving to Spain. So, I’d socialize, and take a few puffs with these guys, plus, I was vaccinated.
Whatever it takes, scientific, religious, or pseudo intellectual, my mind will come up with it and use it. It’s crazy. Of course, I’m thinking all this sitting there. It can make being in the moment a bit difficult. Maybe the weed was too strong. Maybe it was laced. Maybe they were laughing at me and about to kill me.
”You know anyone in Bilbao that can get me some weed?” I finally ask.
”Nah man. But you can try this bar out.” and he writes down a couple recommendations. I fold the paper and put it in my pocket. Hugo gets up to check the fish and Jesus disappears inside. I get my things ready to head back on the trail, it’s getting into the early afternoon, and I still have a ways to go.
”Hey man! Where you going?” Jesus asks me, “You’re not going to stay for dinner? We got this so good fish here and it’s ready to eat! Is it ready, Hugo?”
Hugo, who looks extremely high and hasn’t said a word up to now, turns to us both with an ear-to-ear grin and nods his head slowly. It was like watching a sloth climb a tree; painful.
”No, Jesus, I’ve got to get moving. I made reservations at a hostel in Bilbao. Gotta keep at it.”
”Ah my brother! Why you do that? You can stay here and eat with us and meet my family!”
”I can’t. I already booked the room last night. Thank you so much though. Your place is very beautiful. I would love to come visit you again.”
I give him my card and a sticker and tell him to text me in WhatsApp if he knows anyone who can sell me some weed. He says he doesn’t but gives me a couple grams as a gift. I hug him and we shake hands and I’m off back down the trail. I was glad to have some weed being given to me. I thought it a good sign. “Just relax,” I tell myself, “Relax and don’t look for it so hard. Everything will come to you. If it doesn’t, it’s not meant to be.”
I can’t always accept this notion. There has got to be some sort of action to get the manifestation going, right? “Faith without works is dead,” but then in the Tao Te Ching it says that no-action is the right action. I think they both have a point. Believing or faith is a sort of non-action, or rather a mind action, not using any energy or matter, but seeing, creating and believing in the mind in things unseen in this reality. There is no stress or worry, just belief. Good or bad, whatever I think has come to me. This Camino being one of the things I’ve manifested. I’ve found a more focused and controlled approach to overall thinking has slowed the choppy and dangerous waters of my mind. I find that no-action is beneficial as well as action. Part of my goals with this second Camino is to learn about right action. To be of better and truer service to this world and myself. To be more focused and specific.
The trail opens to a beautiful landscape.
Errigoiti, Basque Country.
I head on and am happy to find two other pilgrims at a cafe table in Zamudio about to head up the last mountain leading into Bilbao. The climb would take us up 1,200 ft and then back down over a 5-mile distance. Another knee breaker. I’d resorted to walking backwards down some of the first declines to ease the pain in my knees, but after a few days of not over doing it by using this tactic, I could almost run down the hills again. The inclines killed me though. I was glad I ran into these two younger guys to help aid in momentum to the top of the mountain. The three of us shared some conversation for the first mile or so, but when we left flat trail and started to climb, we all went quiet. Noel, a guy from Hamburg, set the pace and led us all up to the top for a nice and well-deserved break in about an hour or so.
On the way down I took some of the steeper parts with a falling like trot that allowed my weight to carry me down a little. When we reached the city, it was around 6pm and the three of us said goodbye and departed to our respective lodgings for the night. It was great to greet each other, walk together for a bit and then depart from company with the ease of two ships passing in the night.
Approaching Zamudio - Aranoltza (San Antolin)
The city swallowed the trail and I got out google maps and typed in the address to my hostel. I took the zigzagged path through the heart of the city, a forever descent down a network of steps and sidewalks until reaching the Hostel Quartier. I thought maybe I’d do some busking, but after 25 miles (the guide wasn’t exactly correct!) I didn’t really have it in me, and with a pocket full of money, I checked in, showered, and chatted a bit with the others in the hostel. This was a city hostel with travelers from all types of reasons and doing all types of things. I’d stayed an extra day here in 2019 but the entire city was booked up due to not only the Holy Week, but a concert by a famous Spanish rock singer. The hostel only had the one night available. I was glad I was out in front of the group, now a day behind. I texted with them, and we played with the idea of getting a house together for the next night, but I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
I went out for something to eat and was craving a juicy Spanish hamburger. They do them right over there, adding on to the basic meat-cheese-bun-combination, ham, egg, calamari and anything else they can fit. It’s called the Hamburguesa Extra. I ate and then wondered around the city for a couple hours stopping in at cool little dive bars and having a Shandy beer out on the patio with a spliff. After a few beers and spliffs and no word from Black Jesus, I headed back to the hostel to get some sleep. Maybe I’d just leave out early and keep going, I thought. After all the walking around the city I’d added another 7 miles by pacing the Bilbao streets making my total for the day 30 miles. After looking through booking.com and finding nothing I was leaning toward getting out of Bilbao in the morning. I had no desire to party, meet anyone, or take advantage of some of a big city’s offerings. I was just tired and a little numb from the long day of walking.
Putting my earbuds in, I listened to Como Tu by Paco Ibañez before popping a couple Ibuprofen and falling asleep.
Hamburguesa Extra - This one even has a chopped-up hotdog on the bottom.
Olives while waiting on the hamburger.
While walking around I caught a rehearsal for the upcoming processions during Semana Santa
The Old Quarter, Bilbao