Fiction: Excerpts from Nate’s New Age

By Michael Hanson

Nate is a 28-year-old skydiving instructor at Psycho Sky Sports. Having recently quit a bartending job in an effort to rein in his own drug/alcohol dependency, he decides to travel to Europe for a solo hiking adventure.
    These excerpts were selected from that particular story line of the many that make up Nate’s tale.

For over a thousand years people have made the journey across Spain’s northernmost margin, on El Camino de Santiago. Though started by Christians (who made the march to the burial place of St. James in Santiago de Compostela as a kind of penance for their sins), the hike has become a popular pilgrimage for people from all walks of life, making the trek for their own personal reasons.
    I read an article on what’s called ‘The Way’ in a travel magazine at Psycho, one of a half-dozen periodicals littering our little waiting room. I hardly ever look at these things, but one afternoon when Mike needs a lift home I hang out waiting for him to finish up and find myself thumbing through one, whose cover of Spanish mountains lured me to take a look.
    And by page three I’m knee deep into those mountains, to say nothing of the notion they're espousing: that the ancient pilgrimage has a powerful pull on people trying to sort out certain difficulties in their life, spiritual and otherwise. The idea of me making such a trek seems every bit as insane as anything else I’ve been doing, but there’s something weirdly enticing about the prospect, some attraction I can’t quite convey when I call my pal Max to talk about it.
    No matter, to Max—he thinks it’s the best idea I’ve had in a coon’s age. He helps me do the research, outfits me with an old backpack of his, goes with me to get the all-important boots and nails down an approximation of what the whole shebang should cost. After all, he’s helping me pay for it.
    ‘It’s as important an investment as I’ve ever made,’ says My Lovely Accountant.
    And two months later he drives me to the airport on the day of my departure.
    ‘You lucky bastard,’ says he.
    I miss my parachute. As we shoot across the Atlantic Ocean in a steel tube that means to drop me in Europe all by myself (Xanax keeping my heart from pounding a hole in my chest), I work hard to hear Max’s voice the whole way. I repeat his words over and over again, a mantra, trying hard to hear them, believe them.
    I’m a lucky bastard . . . I’m a lucky bastard . . .

Map from a Michelin Guide, used in “El Camino de Santiago, Part I,”
by Valeria Idakieva, November 24, 2015

My European odyssey first lands me in the City of Love, but only long enough to take the metro from the airport to the train station, then with beaucoup help hop a TGV to the French town of St. Jean Pied de Port—white cottages red-shingled and red-roofed—where I’ll spend one night before walking into the Pyrenees mountains at eleven a.m. tomorrow.
    The world traveler? I can’t even believe it.
    With Max’s backpack providing vicarious company, the first day on the trail has me ascending from 300 meters to nearly 1,400, through verdant hills patched with pastures for cow, sheep, horses, every now and then a thickly-wooded stretch like something out of the Southern Appalachians. I won’t lie to you: there’s something scary about being so far away from ‘civilization.’ At least back home—where crime rates are through the roof, every city rife with thievery and murder—being a bit suspicious makes some kind of sense. But damn: even out here in the middle of nowhere I imagine predators surrounding me. I think about where I am . . . crazy . . . alone in the mountains of the Basque country, paranoid about being kidnapped by ETA terrorists and held captive as a political prisoner. It’s unfortunate that I read a bit about this stuff in the travel guide tucked in my pack: the ignorance-is-bliss notion might’ve served me better.
    The flip-side, however, is being treated to one breathtaking vista after another. Summiting the high hill, I literally straddle the border between two countries—France and Spain—the boundary marked by an old wooden fence with three strands of barbed wire, like something supposed to contain a farmer’s flock. I mark the moment. I say out loud, ‘Bonjour,’ then walk through the old gateway and say, ‘Buenos dias,’ heading down off the ridge into Spain.
    The remainder of the hike is essentially an easy walk downhill, and seven-and-a-half hours later I arrive in the Spanish town of Roncevalles, where I go straight to the patio of a café, heave the heavy pack off my sore shoulders and order uno cerveza, happy to have survived my first day in the wilds.
    Nervous? Scared shitless is more like it. I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language (save to say hello or order una cerveza), armed only with a travel guide, a phrasebook, and a confused heart regarding my real reasons for being here.
    From an adjacent table, two butchy German women who speak impeccable English strike up a conversation, having pegged me as el peregrino and saying they too are hiking el Camino. They tell me there’s a hotel, expensive, which is where they’re staying. Or I can go to the old abbey where ‘pilgrims’ are allowed to stay for free. Already I’m relaxing, this whole pilgrim business clearly putting me in special company: less than ten minutes in town and already strangers have helped me. Like the pilot of a crippled plane I coach myself: You can do this. Just keep calm. It’ll all work out.
    The decision is a no-brainer: the expensive hotel might be where my heart wants to hang, but my wallet knows better.
    The abbey is a large multi-floored fortress, imposing to approach for being buttressed by the mountains behind it, but when I check in a kind senora who speaks ‘un poco Ingles’ sets me up with an official booklet for hiking el Camino: a Credencial Del Peregrino, a sort of passport that I can get stamped at each stop as proof of my pilgrim status (as if the clothes, the smelly boots and backpack aren’t a dead giveaway). She leads me up three flights of stairs to a large open room filled with wooden bunks, points the way to the bathroom where three showers and two toilets are shared by all. Tells me that Mass will be held in the Chapel in about an hour.
    Mass? I slogged all this way to share toilets and go to church? Guess I should’ve splurged on the hotel after all.

‘You ever used those Turkish toilets?’ says a good-looking young guy as I stretch my sleeping bag on a bunk.
    ‘Can’t say that I have.’
    ‘It’s an experience in and of itself.’
    Carl is Scottish, from Edinburgh, and becomes the first in a series of kind souls I’ll meet on el Camino who are plenty willing to help me however they can. Share their own story, say why it is they’re in a foreign country recreating the pilgrimage of ancient Christians.
    We go to Mass together, and bizarrely I end up kind of digging it, despite my inner skeptic. Something about the small eleventh-century church—with its belfry and steeply slanted roof, its stone sides still pocked by French cannon-fire, courtesy of Napoleon—or the fact that they say Mass in a foreign tongue, ratchets up a sense of mystery about the whole ritual. If only Mass back home was as strange and otherworldly I might actually go every now and then.
    Afterwards, a whole group of us gather near the bunkroom around a long rectangular table cluttered with bottles of red Rioja wine, crusty baguettes, and Basque cheese bought off a street vendor.
    Carl speaks Spanish, periodically translates for the embarrassed (me), but eventually we fall into our own conversation in English while the others chatter on around us. He’s recently graduated college, but doesn’t know what to do with himself, can’t find his calling. Hence he’s here, plans to do the whole hike, which should take about three months, he says. His parents are footing the bill.
    Sure we’re both in Roncevalles, this tiny village in Navarre, northern Spain, same point on the path. But by my reckoning Carl’s already way ahead of me. He’s focused on figuring himself out, getting it together, whereas I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I’m only a few years older, but meeting him makes me feel ancient, clueless.
    When I tell him I’m only doing a part of the hike—three weeks, tops—because I’ve just gotten my skydiving license and have been hired on as a tandem instructor at Psycho, he nearly pisses himself with excitement, can’t believe it. Says it’s the coolest thing he’s ever heard.
    The playing field levels.
    He asks a million questions, and talking about it makes it more real to me. Despite the hundreds of jumps and the two tests I had to take to get licensed, part of me still doubts what I’m doing. Like I’m not really accomplishing anything, am just dicking around. His interest helps.
    Since he’s so curious, I tell him about my inauspicious first jump with Instructor John, when our chute didn’t deploy and we were saved only by the backup, watch his amazement with new satisfaction.
    ‘That is in-sane,’ he says, clearly astonished. ‘And you actually kept jumping after that, even made it your career? You don’t have a death-wish, do you?’
    I raise my eyebrows, shake my head. But I’ll confess his question causes me to wonder.

In my mind, all the stuff I’d read in the travel magazine at Psycho had taken root—the pilgrimage as lonely spiritual quest, an opportunity for relentless self-reflection—and, longshot though it may have seemed, I wanted to make the most of it, give it a sincere go. I’d made some good moves toward getting my shit together, so I went to Spain determined to learn something, anything, that might improve my life in the long run.
    This is what the trip was supposed to be, and it was. But it was also more than that, not at all what I had in mind. And in this way taught me one of its important lessons—
    Things rarely happen the way we want or expect them to.
    Maddening to some, I’ve come to see this as a good thing. Great, even. Life’s nothing if not a series of surprises. Not all of them nice surprises, but still . . .
    Nearly a year after el Camino tried to teach me this lesson, I continue to forget. I set my heart on a fantasy, carry it around as a dream and wait for Life to deliver it, leave it on my doorstep like something ordered up from Room Service.
    Or I’ll actively pursue the dream: map out the route in my mind, the one guaranteed to get me where I want to go. Then stand scratching my head when it turns out the landscape looks nothing like I’d imagined.
    The trick is not getting attached to The Way—just walk it. Shoulder that heavy pack and take one step after another, grateful for what’s there in front of you rather than regretting how different it is from that picture in your head.
    So all that lonely walking I imagined doing? There was some of that, sure, but the surprise is that I met more interesting people on el Camino than I’d meet making drinks by the dozens on a busy night bartending at The Cellar. Kind people, fascinating people. People who all seemed to be on a mission of some kind—any kind. Like maybe we’re all on a mission, and it’s not necessarily supposed to be this private thing.
    Maybe—more so than we realize—we’re all, all of us, in it together.

Carl the Scot becomes fortunate detour numero uno. That morning in Roncevalles, we wake to the otherworldly sound of Gregorian chants, echoing throughout the high-ceilinged abbey all the way to our third floor bunkroom from a single stereo speaker sitting in the lobby downstairs. Carl and I breakfast at a local restaurant, café con leché with toasted bread and butter. Then—unplanned—we spend the next two days hiking together. We walk through Burguette, and Zubiri, but by the time we make it to the walled city of Pamplona on the third day I’m hobbling along like a near-cripple, both feet seared by blisters from my boots.
    Guess I won’t be running with the bulls.
    I spend three days there, healing up in the plush comfort of sneakers Max wisely insisted I carry, seeing some sights, relaxing. Spain is old. You hear this, right? How old everything is in Europe compared to back home? But you’ve got to come here to know it. There’s this sense of history I’ve never experienced before—not just the old cobbled streets and structures, it’s like history’s floating around in the air. You breathe it in and it gets into your body, your bones, so you start to understand it on a visceral level. Carl’s curious about this notion, never having been to the States, so I tell him that everything in America seems new, we’re so young—a child. And like a child the country I’m from is sometimes clueless, careless, and can act in shockingly selfish ways, as if its own needs matter more than anyone else’s.
    But hey—it’s cool, too, I tell him. ‘I’d love to do a hiking trip like this back home.’
    ‘I’ll come visit!’
    Carl knows a lot about hiking. Along with showing me better ways to load the backpack (putting my socks in plastic bags so they won’t stink-up everything else, for instance), Carl also teaches me a blister trick: he takes a needle and a two-inch length of thread, sews it through my blistered skin and leaves the thread there, dangling from my feet. Sleep this way, he says, and the thread will draw out all the gunk, dry out the blister so it can heal faster. By the time he finishes with me that first night both feet are hairy with all the thread hanging off.
    On the second day, after breakfast, Carl hits the trail. He’s got months of walking, so can’t afford to linger too long in one place. I’m sorry to see him go—he gave me confidence somehow. In the sentimental moment of goodbye, I say as much, make a self-deprecating remark so he’ll know how much I’ve appreciated his help.
    That’s how much I like the guy—I want him to know.
    ‘You’ll be fine,’ says the Scot. ‘Anyone who makes his living skydiving has a few things to teach the rest of us.’
    See what I mean?
    ‘Buena suerta,’ I say, having learned a tad of the native tongue, and he walks out of my life.
    Sure, we exchange addresses, just in case. But that’s not what it’s about, not really. Chances are I’ll never hear from him again, never know if the three months of hiking helped him find the calling he’d come to seek.
    No matter. He was in my life, I enjoyed his company, and now he’s gone.

    The Way.

One night at a refugio in a town called Logroño, I fall into a brief conversation with a man in his mid-sixties: Alvaro. There aren’t all that many pilgrims bunking down this particular night, but some cat is snoring up a storm and it’s keeping me awake. So I get up to go to the bathroom, hoping by the time I come back he’ll have stopped, or some braver (pissed-off) soul would’ve wakened him, gotten him to turn over or whatever.
    Alvaro is sitting alone at a little round table near the eating area just outside the bunkroom, smoking a cigarette and drinking wine from a small straight tumbler. Even out here you can hear the snoring, and when I walk out he says, in English, ‘Surprise he no wake himself up.’ He motions for me to join him, points toward the kitchen with his glass, offers me a cigarette.
    I turn down both, heroically. Or stupidly. Wish I knew for sure.
    ‘Why you to walk Camino?’
    He’s got this great voice, rusty but resonant. I don’t sit, just stand in the doorway, say I don’t really know why I’m here. ‘I read an article about it in a magazine back home, los Estados Unidos’ (as if he didn’t know), ‘and it got me curious. I’ve never been a big hiker, but something about the article really struck a chord. So here I am. Y tu?’ (I also love throwing in a dash of Spanish I’ve learned: Un poco!)
    ‘My wife, her heart go.’ He says this like that explains it, and when he mentions her heart he brushes at his chest with these big fingers. Alvaro has this intense, weathered face, all these deep lines, and speaks a broken English that makes me want to hug him.
    I say I’m sorry about his wife. ‘Lo siento.’
    ‘Camino keeps us busy living,’ he says.
    I’m mesmerized by his hands, which are enormous, fingernails like nickels. Hands I always wanted. The kind of hands that could pry nails from an old board, palms you could strike matches on. With hands like that a guy could do damn near anything.
    He says he’d hoped el Camino would help with his grieving, plus he could mark her passing with something other than a funeral. Something substantial, he says.
    I ask how it’s going. Does he think it’s helping.
    He nods. ‛Every step I feel. Every step . . . it has meaning.’
    It’s quiet and I’m not sure if I should probe, or back off. After a moment more I observe that the snoring from the bunkroom seems to have stopped.
    ‘You sleep now,’ Alvaro says, which I take as a hint.
    ‘Tu tambien?’
    He shakes his head, drags one of those big fingers down a thick crease in his face. ‘Es dificil.’
    So I say goodnight, but throw caution to the wind and thank him for sharing his story with me. Then damn the torpedoes and say how amazing it is that everyone I meet on el Camino is so honest about the motive behind their pilgrimage—the real reason for their being here—even when those reasons are intensely personal. ‘Like your story,’ I say.
    And he looks at me sternly with that weathered face: ‘Why does this surprise? What is worth talking about, if not Life?’

Copyright © 2021 by Michael Hanson