Wayne Chimenti - El Camino De Santiago: Rites of Passage

OTHER BOOKS BY WAYNE CHIMENTI

Wandering in an Ancient Land

by

Wayne Chimenti

Thanks to Jenell who first made me aware of the Camino. Thanks to George who encouraged and advised when I was ready to trash the book. Thanks to Sarah who, out of true friendship, tirelessly edited and did all the hard work I could never do. Of course, thanks to Nicole the ultimate traveler and to Nahja the wonder child.

During the time I wrote this tale and fiddled with its nature, the story had a name. I called it Walking Across the Milky Way and it started like this...

The year was 777 A.D. It was a quiet, cold night in the Pyrenees. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, the Holy Roman Emperor, was sleeping fitfully. He felt he should be sleeping better. His camp was peaceful. There was no battle impending, no enemy near. But something was in the back of his mind. Was it the Moors? He dozed off again. And in that languor he dreamt. In the dream a powerful voice told him to travel across the Milky Way. A bit bewildered he awoke, rose and went outside into the crisp, clear night. His eyes lifted up and he saw the stars of the Milky Way spread across the sky toward the West. In that instant he knew what he must do. He must follow them. He would walk across the Milky Way to Santiago.

This appealed to my mystical side. This tied me to history, to myth and legend. This was the way I saw our pilgrimage. But now that several years have gone by, the aura that surrounded those glorious days has faded somewhat, as it must with all wonderful things. I now see it this work as a simple traveler's tale, a tale better told from the armchair than the soapbox. Without trumpets and banners, let's just go back to the beginning and start the story a little more simply.

It was still dark when the driver stopped the bus and threw the door open. Not a word was spoken. All the cramped, sleep-deprived passengers just got up and filed out into the moonlight. It was 5:40 a.m. Pamplona, we guessed. The chill outside told me we weren't anywhere "southern" anymore.

Here we were, a family of three in a foreign land. The bus depot was locked down, so there was no entry and no shelter from the cold. We walked across the street in the darkness to where a streetlight illuminated a signboard with a map. Score! There was "El Camino" marked only a couple of blocks away. We had the address of the refugio, which was as good a hope for shelter as any. Along we went through the streets in the pre-dawn morning. "There!" shouted Nahja, my eagle-eyed daughter. Our first scallop shell - the sign of El Camino de Santiago. We followed the symbols into the old part of town.

Here we found, to our surprise, bunches of hooligans, drunks and partying young folks all weaving about. The late night bars had just closed down. The steel gates were rolling down with a crash. I heard a bottle break as it was tossed against a wall. The music burst out the bar doors as they opened and died to a murmur as they closed. Trash and broken glass were everywhere. A young man dressed in black was urinating on a wall and still carrying on an animated conversation with his mates who were strolling away. Wave after wave, they appeared and disappeared in the streetlights. Drunkards noticed us and began shouting out to us in Spanish.

"Hey, peregrino, we got a place for you to stay."

"Look, pilgrims who need some direction."

"No God here, companero!"

I hadn't pictured this on El Camino, the Way of the Pilgrim.

Off a narrow alley, we finally found the refugio, which was locked up. A gated portal gave us some niche to avoid the mobs, or at least a shadow to withdraw into for escape. Now what? It was only 6:30 and still two hours until the bus depot opened. Our twelve-year old daughter was with us. We were cold, confused, tired and a little spooked. Suddenly across the street a man rolled up the gate of a cafe. An open cafe means shelter and a warm drink. Nicole, who is fluent in Spanish, gave him a few minutes and then checked it out. "No, I'm not opening. Just the baker going to work," he said.

Nicole explained our situation.

"Hmm, I'm not the owner, but come on in! It's the least I can do for a family of peregrinos. You can sit with the lights out, so no one will think that we are open. "

We followed him in. It was wonderfully warm inside! It was bigger than expected, a split-level. We went up to the top section and took off our packs. Then we lined up four chairs apiece, laid down and passed out. We had stayed up to catch an 11 p.m. bus out of Barcelona. It had been a weird six-hour trip, with little to no sleep. For weeks we had been excited about starting our pilgrimage, only to have this strange entry into town. Emotionally and physically, we were spent.

Little more than an hour later, I was woken by the hiss of an espresso machine. "You want coffee?" asked a kindly face.

"Si Senor, I have never wanted a coffee so badly in my whole life," I replied. Our friendly baker served up two delicious coffees and hot milk for Nahja, then handed us hot croissants straight from the oven. If this wasn't an act of God then nothing was.

Revived, we had a family conference and formed a plan. First, we would check for buses to Roncesvalles where the Camino de Santiago starts, as soon as the bus station opened at 8:30. Secondly, gather information about the Camino in the refugio whenever it opened. We were seasoned travelers and this was just part of a game at which Nicole was a master player.

My wife Nicole is Belgian. She fled the bourgeois attitude of Antwerp at the age of twenty, backpacking alone through South America in the early seventies. She continued to travel and live in different countries until I met her in Tahiti in the mid-eighties. That's another story for another time. My being a tall ship sailor didn't change the traveling for either of us. It just made it a team. But whereas I planktonically drift around the world, she has refined it to a science. She speaks seven languages and makes herself understood even where she doesn't speak the lingo. Somehow she deciphers the bus, train and plane systems of any country we enter. We can walk into a town with no information and she will have us the cheapest, safest room within an hour.

If I was a lazy traveler before, having her as my personal tour guide only accentuates my tendencies. My brain just doesn't take to languages. It must be in my DNA and the "A" stands for American. Luckily I'm fairly big and strong and have a good sense of awareness, which gives Nicole a sense of security when we enter strange situations. She is the tour guide. I am the bodyguard. Nahja is the traveler's apprentice.