I set out to find wild elephants. That was my big idea. I pitched the story that way. I left on the plane with only that in mind.

I got much more.

In a couple months, the article about my trip to the Yunnan Province in southern China will run in EnRoute Magazine. I don’t want to give anything away. But let me quickly hit a few of the highlights.

We started in Lijiang, in the long cool shadow of Jade Dragon Snowy Mountain, holy peak of the Naxi people. Yulong, as it’s locally known, has never been climbed to its summit, though legend has it that many star-crossed young lovers have lept together to their deaths from its cliffs, diving into the third kingdom to gain acceptance for the love forbidden them in this world.

In Lijiang there are roof cats, who draw wealth and fortune into their mouths.

There’s gorgeous food:

And then there are these, which are marble and expensive, or I might have taken some home.

From Lijiang we moved on to Shangrila, where a Tibetan woman named Sanam showed us around. She brought us to the Songzanlin Lamastery.

To the market.

She took us to the house of friends of hers, who sat us down around the blackened stove and gave us fresh yak’s milk cheese, yak butter tea and tsampa.

We sat in their living room under amazing carvings.

We said goodbye to Sanam and travelled down into Xishuangbanna. We went to the Mekong, where a woman with a pink umbrella sang by the shoreline.

We went up the river, past a large pagoda on the far shore.

We went into the jungle.

We saw gibbons and hiked past tea terraces.

Later, in town, we ate 1,000 year old eggs and roast chicken at a restaurant where they played MahJong for what appeared to be large amounts of money.

And the elephants. Did I see any?

The whole story runs in EnRoute early next year. Let’s just say for now that it ended up being bigger than the animal, that story.

Bigger, and weirdly better, than I could have expected.

Gone for a few weeks to China on a gig for EnRoute Magazine. Spotty to nonexistent internet while I’m gone.

Taking: 2 blank notebooks, 5 pens, a knapsack, and zero preparation.

Returning with: 2 full notebooks, a crucially necessary new attitude, and photos of elephants.

Enlightenment is an outside possibility.

We’ve been motoring seaward for about an hour when Roberto finally cuts the diesel. Brazil is a bare pencil line on the horizon, Monte Pascoal a tiny bump, as it must have been when Portuguese explorers first came across these cobalt blue waters 500 years ago, and I’m feeling more here than I have since arriving. Roberto yells at his mate, Uruca, to drop the anchor. Then we wait as the hook sets in the rock far below. With a flash of a smile, Roberto indicates that it’s time to fish.

We use strictly traditional techniques as those are the rules in this part of Bahia, even for visitors: thrown nets, single lines or spears with no scuba. We choose lines, and down they go: high-test fishing wire unwound off Styrofoam spools, hooks baited with bits of white fish that Uruca produces from a cooler. And up come, in what seems like mere seconds, the struggling ariocó, big red-flanked fish with yellow stripes. No Portuguese required for this moment; fishing is its own common language. “Olá! Look at this!” I shout. Roberto ribs Uruca, pointing at me, and says something like “He’s catching more than you! Maybe I’ll hire him!”

The idea isn’t so far-fetched: Trancoso is famous for swallowing foreigners alive. Since the local population – Pataxó aboriginals, Portuguese settlers and African slaves – first mingled in this seaside town in northeastern Brazil, a steady stream of outsiders like me have come to visit, and many never left, becoming immersed in the landscape almost instantly.

Back on land, Roberto and Uruca sell their catch on the beach in minutes. I bring mine to the Uxua Casa Hotel, where chef Bernardo shows me how to cook the fish in two classic Bahian styles: first steamed in banana leaves with olives and black rice, simple and clean flavours; then in a fabulous moqueca, which Bernardo insists I help him make. He guides me through the various steps, sautéing the onions and garlic and peppers, then bringing the fish to a boil in coconut milk in a clay pot, to be served bubbling at the table. Bahian perfection as the sound of a weekend-long soccer match drifts in and the pink-tinged clouds float seaward overhead.

On the grassy central Quadrado in front of Uxua, a cluster of old-timers sits with instruments in circled chairs under the shifting leaves of the amendoeira tree. Red and blue lights wink, and people clap and sing along while the stars swirl overhead. To hear samba in its birthplace is so perfect, I wonder briefly if the Uxua concierges, who seem to know everyone in the region as personal friends, arranged for it. (They didn’t.) The scene is just Trancoso doing what Trancoso does, in this case celebrating the life of a beloved local, a midwife they called Dona da Glória, who passed away a month before. And so we stand, swaying with the sweetly wistful music, sipping glasses of potent batida handed to us by a smiling woman in colourful beads and flowing skirt. And the distance between this moment and regular city life spools out into the night with song and drink and laughter.

The next morning, Romualdo, a baiano who runs canoe trips down the Rio Trancoso, shows us Bahia from the water. He drives us up craggy clay roads into the singing jungle so we can float downstream. It’s a voyage from the town’s private to its public face as we make our way past residences toward the beach. The dark green waters swirl under hanging vines; low-flying birds race overhead through clouds of mutuca mosquitos as big as your thumb. No dengue or yellow fever, Romualdo assures us. But the mutuca can bite through the hide of a donkey, so we slap on bug spray all the same.

Down the snaking, close passage of water, we glimpse into Trancoso’s backyard. Kids paddle in the elbows of the river next to leaning docks and brightly painted fishing boats. A man snorkels with a spear in search of the robalo fish among the mangrove roots. This is Bahian life in its natural rhythms. As we near the ocean, Romualdo describes how in decades past, it wasn’t unheard of for a lingering foreigner to receive land from locals through trade, although usually it was along the beach, which wasn’t as highly prized as land on the riverfront, with its access to fish and transportation. He says this as we glide past a magnificent gameleira tree, soaring to the forest canopy, braided around by seedling offspring that will eventually consume and replace the original trunk.

Then we’re out of the bush and into the final stretch of river before the beach, separated from the ocean by only a single orange sand dune. The river water is turquoise here, where the locals swim. Two boys do cartwheels across the grass, vaulting into the water in a tangle, a foaming eight-limbed river monster with two mouths laughing.

Someone across the Quadrado is holding a communal Saturday meal, and we’re invited. That’s how we learn about feijoada: a 24-hour stew of black beans, pork shin and salt beef, served over rice with farofa and couve and yet more batida to sip. We sit on the concrete floor of the casa festiva with families savouring a delicious moment. And when a pregnant dog wanders in and finds herself a half-finished plate on a low table and digs in, nobody looks twice. We were welcomed; so is she.

Chatting with locals comes naturally in Bahia, whether it be with men burning leaves in the square, a schoolteacher or an 86-year-old woman named Gida, who leans out her front window to offer us cajú fruit. We find shade at a café and sip foamy white cacao juice, watching a huddle of people drinking beer under a sign that reads “Ponto dos Mentirosos” (liars’ place). Gilberto Gil trickles from overhead speakers – his famous song “Toda Menina Baiana” about how all baiana girls have charm and spirit. There’s a certain way he sings, with a smile you can hear. Meanwhile, the men throw their nets in the river, and the wind applauds.

Samba closes our visit, as it surely should, this being its home. I’ll always remember the dark knot of people under the tree, the sway of bodies and the mingling of conversation and song. One song about taking the last train from São Paulo. And another where the haunting refrain is “Não Deixe O Samba Morrer.” Don’t let the samba die. The people were made of samba, the famous song says. Don’t let it die. And listening in the Trancoso Quadrado, that moon still very much on its rise, I’m embraced by the scents and rhythms of the essential Bahia, feeling glad to have been shown it so intimately, and quite confident that it will survive.

In May I had to get back to work. That means magazine work. And that means travel. I still very much enjoy this aspect of my freelance life. This time around in particular, I had an unusual schedule that took me to Igloolik, in Nunuvut, which is in Canada’s arctic…

…and then to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, 9000 kilometers away in one of the hottest desert areas known to man.

The experience generated plenty of stark contrasts, as you might imagine. -40 C versus +40 C is perhaps the most obvious. Ditto the landscapes of frozen snow and hot sand. But there’s also the area of wealth and development, where Dubai’s skyline seems to grow while you watch it and Igloolik is a clutch of low buildings along a remote stretch of beach in the Canadian high arctic. An international hub in the middle east versus an isolated hamlet in the frozen north. What two places could be more different?

And yet a couple of things struck me powerfully as being shared by these places. Both the Emiratis and the Inuit are ancient people, whose entrance into post-modernity has been relatively sudden. And in both places I was there to interview people whose lives are crucially connected to the project of staying in touch with ancient ways.

In the north, that person was Zacharius Kunuk, the legendary Inuit filmmaker who brought us the films The Fast Runner and The Journals of Knud Rassmussen.

Kunuk is a fascinating individual, whose committment to Inuit tradition comes paired with a fully post-modern engagement with technology and global thinking. I look forward to writing a profile of him and his work for an upcoming issue of Canadian Art.

In the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, I was there to write several pieces that will run in Spafax Canada publications. But one of those assignments allowed me to meet Peter Bergh, one of the best known falconers in the world.

Falconry is a 2500 year old tradition in the middle east, and in a culture that isn’t easy to penetrate for western outsiders, it offers a fascinating window into the history of the region. I’ll be writing about Peter and the experience of working with his birds in an upcoming issue of Fairmont Magazine.

On a gig for Western Living Magazine, I toured the Willamette Valley recently. Lots of gems to discover there, like Whole Hog Wednesdays at the Dundee Bistro. And of course several hundred small, high-craft wineries that produce the amazing fruity, farmy pinot noirs of the region.

But I particularly enjoyed “meeting” the mascot of the Scott Paul Winery. He’s a rabbit. And the painting of him, which Scott Paul used to inspire the rabbit on their label, is by Oregon artist Cody Bustamante. The painting is called “Rabbit Receiving his own Information”, and it shows the animal with his head cocked to the sky, as if listening to a timely bit of advice.

The story behind the painting is a good one.

Scott Paul is the brainchild of former big-time disc jockey Shadow Stevens, whose real name is Scott Paul Wright. After a career in radio, Wright went to work for Epic Records. The work situation there was reportedly very stressful (maybe in part because Wright was involved in such culturally dubious projects as launching the career of Brittney Spears). In any case, Wright became sick. And around this time, a friend sold him the painting “Rabbit Receiving his own Information”.

The friend also told Wright the story behind the painting. The Rabbit is illustrating a life lesson: that people are occasionally stopped short by illness only to find that the resulting inactivity allows them to really listen for the first time and here their “own information”. From that information, then, can come about great change.

In Wright’s case, the change was a decision to turn away from the corporate music world and start Scott Paul Winery. He and his wife moved to Oregon. On arrival they made a final discovery, closing the loop on this story. They learned that the artist who painted this important work lived in the area.

Rabbit had come home. And so, in effect, had Wright.

Some people might find this whole idea of one’s “own information” as a bit flakey,or new aged. But I find it very appealing and hopeful. And the story of Wright had within it a strange parallel for me. That’s because – having never heard this story previously – I had named the main character of my new novel The Blue Light Project “Rabbit”. And my Rabbit too is touched all at once – while he was suffering from stress related illness, no less – by his “own information”. And in his case, it was also life changing.

Here’s to having the time to here our “own information”.

Would You Walk 500 Miles?

This month in EnRoute Magazine.

The place has a gravitational pull all its own. Just passing Amenal, 10 kilometers east, walking through a light rain, before I even glimpse the tips of its famous cathedral spires, I feel Santiago de Compostella like a spinning vortex just over the green rim of the Galician horizon. It moves people.

The Spanish town has had this effect for a long time. Consider that it was way back in the ninth century when the Apostle James’ tomb was reportedly found on a hill nearby. Word spread; people began to arrive. On foot, on horseback. Alone and in caravans. So many people that by the 12th century, an ambassador for Emir Ali ben Yusuf wrote back to his master, “So great is the multitude that comes and goes, that there is barely enough space on the pavement.”

That contemporary-sounding sniff of impatience puts the long-ago diplomat well ahead of the curve for tetchiness with tourism. But his comment also suggests how Santiago, well into its second millennium as a place to which people are drawn from all over the world, can be seen as a living case study of the relationship between all tourists and the places to which they travel.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

If you plot the different routes of the Way of St. James (as the walk has come to be known), it now looks like a web of vines spreading from Santiago across the face of Europe, with branches stretching south of Rome and east of Prague, north across the sea to Sweden and Norway. I walked from Irun, in Basque Country, all the way west along the famous medieval Camino del Norte and Camino Primitivo routes. I did this at the behest of a friend of mine, who – after a long dinner together and well into our post-prandial Calvados – mounted a surprising and persuasive case that we make this more-than-800-kilometre trip.

I’m glad I did it for a number of reasons, several of which I couldn’t have predicted, including the opportunity to encounter one of the world’s most enduring travel destinations. Santiago as ur-destination, as ancestor to all those secular Meccas that have followed in the Western travel tradition, highbrow or otherwise: Paris, Las Vegas, Venice, Puerto Vallarta. Name a destination and you’ll find people visit it in a patterned way – which is perhaps only made plain in Santiago because of the pilgrim-yearning that is sharpened in even the lay visitor after hundreds of kilometres and however many blisters have been invested in getting here. In the massive central Praza do Obradoiro, over which the gothic cathedral looms, thousands of individual journeys are completed in the same moment. To find yourself in Santiago is to feel part of an ageless act of arrival. You feel a collective rush.

In Santiago, this means that thousands of people who’ve been walking for weeks all decide at once that it’s time to go for dinner. They spread out at the city’s patio tables. They sit in gossipy groups around its fountains. They pack into the narrow bars. They eat roasted pork shoulder at Casa Manolo and fish stew at Don Gaiferos. They sample the tuna empanadas at O Dezaseis and the filloas (crepes) at San Clemente. Or they simply follow the river of people down into Rúa do Franco, where virtually every door opens onto a cool dark room in which Galician deliciousness may be found. And if they’re very lucky, that means a bar stool at Taberna do Bispo, where they can eat morcilla sausage or garlicky prawns or patatas bravas. They bask in the difference between all previous moments, when they were merely heading toward this place, and the brilliant moment now, when they find themselves truly in it.

In Santiago, where most people have devoted many more days to the journey than they have to the destination, it doesn’t take long before you see the reflection of this, first in others and then in yourself. At some point, you start to notice people away from their groups, perched on a bench in Praza da Quintana, or staring off into space in the nave of the cathedral. Or perhaps you find yourself sitting on the green hillside of the Carballeira de Santa Susana one afternoon, tucked under one of the ancient oaks, wordlessly taking in a view of the cathedral across the red roofs and tight streets of the old town, no cars to be heard. It could be the 12th century. It could be the ninth. It could be the 24th. The wink of a timeless moment, as your own experience is linked into the human ages, is entirely worth the trip. It’s either the moment you realize you’re going home, or the moment you realize you aren’t, ever.

For most of us, most of the time, it’s the former. But either way, one trip draws to a close just as another one begins.

When I was writing my architecture novel, Story House, I had a small library of images that I used to shape my sense of Packer Gordon, the senior architect in the story. It’s no secret that Arthur Erikson was one inspiration, particularly his wooden houses. And especially the beautiful Filberg House.

But Vladimir Ossipoff, the Hawaii based modernist, was another inspiration.

And now, after all these years, I’m finally going to see his work in real life. I’ll be in Hawaii for 10 days, mid March, working on a number of stories. But a piece for Western Living (guided so creatively by Charlene Rooke over the past few years) will be about Ossipoff. I’ll be touring various buildings of his, including the famous Liljestrand House and the Goodsill House.

Amazing. Thanks Western Living. This is going to seriously rock.

In travel, while you don’t want to rush, moments of real speed can be exhilarating. I mean those times during a trip when you can feel the globe rotating under your feet, the landscape transforming before your eyes. Liftoff out of Vancouver, on a trans-Pacific flight, is particularly evocative of this sen­sation for me. The ground melts away behind, the scenery blurring and morphing. The sea opens up under the wheels, and there is a sudden sense of transference, of life moving from the known to the possible. And when the landing gear folds home, with that light but comforting thud, a point is sealed: We’re all in transit, in physical suspension, mid-teleportation. When the flight is over – I feel this every time, with a sudden and intense certainty – a new world of unpredictable possibilities will begin to make itself known.

In Tokyo for the past week, that peculiar sense of transference I associate with liftoff has seemed to follow me moment by moment through each day. I’ve been in the city without any agenda, living the moment, testing out an idea I’d had about “experientialist” travel. As a direct result, events and encounters have hit me with surprising energy. Each person I’ve met, each scene I’ve stumbled upon – by being unplanned, by seeming fated – has offered that glimpse of the possible. And so, Tokyo seems to have absorbed me into its rhythms more surely than would have been possible if I’d tried to impose any rhythm of my own.

I’m taking a fast train to Kamakura as I have this thought, enjoying that familiar liftoff feeling, the sense of what might be possible in this ancient town with its famous 11-metre, 120-tonne statue of Amida Buddha. The landscape is blurring, the globe seeming to spin under my seat. I’m on my way to meet a man named Lipton, who I met by accident a few days ago and who offered to show me around his seaside town, less than an hour outside Tokyo. Getting on board the train in Shinagawa, flowing with the vortex of bodies into the station, it occurred to me how Tokyo’s transit system itself contributes to the feeling of being absorbed into rhythms beyond your control. With its ongoing rush of millions of bodies, the trains here often feel less like a linear mechanical system and more like a quantum one, a series of black holes sucking people out of one reality and releasing them some distance away in the midst of another.

A word of caution, however. If you release yourself into this system, it can have unpredictable results.

Lipton is a Japanese studies professor, so I get some history as we cross the market streets and boulevards. Kamakura was the seat of Japanese government for almost 150 years, starting in the late 12th century. When rival warlords took fortress Kamakura in 1333, the ruling family committed suicide en masse, as did a large number of the residents.

But the Great Buddha at the Kotoku-in shrine remains, having survived the sack of Kamakura, having withstood the tsunami that swept away the shrine itself in the 15th century, having endured even being portrayed in the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days as resident in Yokohama. The Buddha sits, resonating a sacred suspension of time. And people still gather in the hundreds in his mystical ambit, their hopes and cameras raised.

Still, Lipton does not want to linger here, clearly having some other site in mind to show me. So off we go again, up the Daibutsu Pass and into the hills this time, into a forest and along a trail that winds up the flanks of Genjiyama. Thirty minutes to the summit and over, as the town and the seaside sink and disappear behind us. Over the brow of the hill and down a steep roadway on the far side. I begin to assume that the trip is over, but halfway down, Lipton waves me to stop and indicates a doorway I would have missed entirely if I’d been on my own. A tunnel opening in the rock face, a long passageway greened over with moss and shining with the mountain’s interior waters.

It takes us into a hidden valley, open to the sky above but surrounded entirely by high cliffs topped with trees. Water spouts over ferns and roots and splashes into pools. There are various buildings here, long racks of prayers written on snips of paper and wooden paddles, hanging and spinning and wind-chiming in the low breeze. And off to one side, the Zeniarai Benten Shrine, which disappears into the cliff under a rock overhang.

I enter to the sound of water and low voices, ladles dipping and clinking. People gathered in groups, money shifting from hand to hand. Bills and coins. There is something sacred here too, suggested in the low light, the gestures and routines. But a sharp difference to the Great Buddha at Kotoku-in. No suspension of time here, but, instead, a pressing in. Currency giving emblem to an urgent present.

Then the nickel drops. Finally, I think I get it. Water and money. People come here to wash their money, to anoint it with sacred water. So that it will grow, and prosper, and multiply.

I head back into the city. I have dinner planned with a friend I met the other night in Meguro, watching the Chelsea-Arsenal FA cup tie in the wee hours at Seamus O’hara’s on Meguro-dori. I know, I know. But I wasn’t sleeping anyway. She lived in Okinawa when she was a girl. She was raised in Kyoto, now works in fashion in Tokyo and is a Chelsea supporter. Go figure. When Didier Drogba scored the winning goal, getting on toward 3 a.m. Tokyo time, we both stood and yelled and high-fived, and the crowd still gathered there at that hour: airline pilots, students, an Italian guy who’d just returned from circumnavigating the world in a 26-foot sailboat. They all looked at us like we were nuts. Then the signal flickered and the TV went out. And everybody who wasn’t watching the game yelled, “Godzilla! Godzilla!” until the television eventually came back on.

Mika was her name. She told me it meant beautiful grass.

We go for Okinawan food at an izakaya called Komahachi, in Meguro. Goya chample, a bitter vegetable served with egg and bacon. Umi budoh, strands of seaweed with tiny bulbs that pop in your mouth, a saline hint of the sea. Mimigar, chewy pig’s ears sliced thin and served with a sweet hot mustard. And cold sake from Kochi, overpoured into short glasses and allowed to spill into a small saucer. Mika, who’d long ago gone to school in my hometown of Vancouver and loved it there, talks about memories. “Life is busy,” she says. “Your memories of something that changed you get smaller and smaller as time passes. But then you meet someone and you’re transported back, and the memories become full again.”

She was right, I realized, even though I was only just then making my memories of Tokyo. But when I told her about my day in Kamakura, about the Great Buddha and the Zeniarai Benten Shrine where people wash their money, she laughed at my telling of it because I was missing a crucial detail. People wash their money, sure. They dry it and carry it away in their pockets. But if they want it to multiply, if they want it to come back to them and change their lives, they have to spend it. We took a moment to think about that together, sipping Kochi sake. You have to let the money go into the quantum machinery of fate and the economy, let it lift off into its own moment of transference, without plan or expectation.

I walk back to my hotel in the dark. Past the storefront of Dream Japan, whose business I’ve been unable to determine, not by asking at my hotel, not by asking Mika or anyone else. Not even by going inside and asking at the front desk. Dream Japan. What is Dream Japan? The whole time thinking the dream was a particular Japanese thing.

Now I’m standing outside the store on Meguro-dori. I’m reading the same name a different way, like an imperative statement: Dream Japan. And that leads me to consider a different but fast-approaching moment of transference. The sea giving way. The landscape blurring, the world seeming to roll under my seat. The landing gear unfolding with that comforting shudder. And then, an instant in which we go from flying to not flying. Contact. Touchdown.

Dream Japan. Well, exactly. When I get home, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.

For Walrus Magazine

1.

I can’t explain the feeling I’m having here, standing on the beach in Comillas, a little seaside resort on the Cantabrian coast of Spain. I’m actually wading in the water, because my feet are aching, and as I stare out to sea, my mind drifting, it suddenly occurs to me—ten days and 250 kilometers into a planned twenty-two-day walk across Spain, west from Irun along the centuries old Catholic pilgrimage route to the famous cathedral town of Santiago de Compostela—that my journey has really, finally begun.

Which doesn’t make sense, given that my body is telling me that this pilgrimage (or whatever it is that I’m doing here; the question remains open)  began long ago. Call it another “long walk paradox.” I’ve been making a list. I scrawled the first one into the margin of my Los Caminos del Norte guidebook back on day two. My trailmate Dave and I were climbing around the lighthouse south of Pasajes San Pedro, having just parted company with Heidi from Michigan, who’d pressed a Spanish-English dictionary into my hands after our lunch of calamari boccadillo on the quays. (“I’m just like really worried about you guys walking all the way across Spain not speaking any Spanish.”) Then she disappeared up the trail, walking at a speed neither of us could have quite matched jogging. We climbed on up the hill, past the graveyard and around to the lighthouse, gasping in the heat. Somewhere out there, we stopped, and I wrote “Long-walk Paradox #1: pain/beauty” in an unsteady hand,standing on that wild shoulder of Basque greenery above the heaving, Windex-coloured sea.

I’m not even sure what I meant by that now. Pain/Beauty. Perhaps I was imagining a third value, for which the first two might be solved. But now the day is collapsing around me. Spanish families are packing their coolers and rolling up their beach towels, heading for their cars, heading home. The sun is dipping toward the western ridge. The sky growing long, deepening from blue to grey. Dave is back in the pension, reading Beevor’s Spanish Civil War. Our conversation has been getting thin at the edges, with hundreds of kilometres still to go. I’m out here soaking my feet, thinking I was in Bilbao a couple days ago and didn’t see the Guggenheim because I was so tired that lying in my hotel watching Gran Torino seemed like a better idea. Eastwood riddled with bullets at the end, stretched out on the lawn like a crucifix. Eastwood rebranded as Christ—shoulda seen that coming.

And here one of the beach kids boots a soccer ball past his friend, and it rolls all the way down to the waves where I pick it up and throw it back, and he stares at me, curiosity edged with suspicion. Me standing there in the waves with my iPhone, pecking in notes. I guess I don’t look like I’m from around here, even if I am just doing what people have been doing along this coast since the remains of the Apostle James, the brother of Jesus, were first discovered in Galicia in the eighth century. That is: walking west, wondering why.

I thumb-type the words. “Long walk paradox #2: the walk really starts when you feel like you’ve already been walking forever.”

2.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere
At ant time or at any season
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.

(T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding)

People tell you all kinds of stories about why they’re doing it, taking weeks to come this way. Down the Basque hills and across the sands of the Playa de l’Arena, up to El Haya, down the blaring Cantabrian motorways, the misty back lanes, through the shaking pines and fragrant eucalyptus, the red dirt, the gossiping donkeys, the halting breeze. They tell you they’re heading to the festival at Santiago, or they’re meeting friends in Finnesterre. They tell you they’re travelling on the cheap before finishing school. But most commonly they talk of freedom, which is a jarring answer if you associate the word with autonomy, self-definition, and individual routes through the maze of life. On the north coast, there is only one way to Santiago de Compostela, and you are reminded of your surrender to that path every kilometer or so by a yellow sign or a scallop shell indicating the way forward. This way. Up that hill. Turn left past the churchyard. The markers make rudimentary the human day, collapsing all options, all routes, all avenues to one. Freedom. Really?

But that’s what they say. To be free. To feel free. A political science student from Germany. A nursing instructor from Norway. A bookie from the UK, same story. He says: “I just like the freedom. Just walking. No hassles, right?”

I’m more in sympathy with a theatrical agent from Germany who stops to watch me photographing flowers outside a café. I’m killing time while Dave works his BlackBerry inside, handling emails from a job that never stops. She says, “That should be a nice shot.” And when we get to the point in the conversation where we talk about why, she says, “Well, I guess to change my mind about a few things.”

Nobody talks about religion, faith, metaphysics. None of that. Nobody says: because my mother died three years ago and I haven’t been the same since. Nobody says: because not long ago at a party I got into a drunken argument about the validity of philosophical materialism and found myself yelling at a woman: “Then why are we here? Why are you here?”

Nobody would admit to that. To losing it. To getting belligerent over the possibility of transcendence. Nobody would admit that because it would suggest that maybe you needed to walk 800 kilometers across Spain.

I cop the plea. Guilty. I maybe needed it.

3.

We walk and walk and walk. We talk at first, but then much less. On the first day, Dave said: “A friend warned me that you and I would probably be doing top-ten-movies-of-all-time by the end of this thing. Because by day twenty, dude, we’re going to have talked about everything else.”

Dave’s friend was wrong. Make no mistake. I’m here because my friendship with Dave is an old one. We’ve been pals since in college, and stayed in touch ever since, even after Dave began an international life that has taken him from Geneva to South Africato London and beyond. We’ve stayed in touch for a reason. So when he suggested this trip over dinner in London, where I last saw him, I didn’t hesitate. For me, Dave may be the only person on earth from whom the suggestion to walk 800 kilometers together would not be insane. So there’s talking to be done. We have plenty of conversational ground to cover. And in the morning, sure, with a coffee con leche and a wedge of tortilla inside us, with fresh legs, breathing light cool air and smelling the farms around us, the soil, the botanical plenitude, words are free and our discussion is as wide as the horizon, as curious as the world. Politics, money, books, kids, and family. What’s up with mutual friends. Religion once, nothing too personal.

But on tired legs, with the sun high as we climb a long slope toward a final ridge line, our destination a smudge of buildings some stubborn distance ahead of us, our progress imperceptible—during those stretches we’re imprisoned in what we’re doing. Marooned in the flow. Paradox #3.You take somewhere around 45,000 steps a day. Each one of these depends on all the others. Each is mission critical. So each one—each single footfall, crunch of broken stone, scuff of dust, kicked pebble skipping ahead—grows from a tiny non-event to occupy a space as large as the universe. Each footstep, in the moment you take it, is all you have. And there comes some point each day, sometimes as early as mid-morning, when words simply fail. If there’s a conversation after noon, it’s generally about food.

We eat like teenagers. The trek might be worth it for this alone, the metabolism roaring like a blast furnace. We eat slow-roasted lamb shoulders, platters of octopus and smoked ham, anchovies and green olives, patatas con chorizo, oxtails, bocadillos with thick slices of cheese or rings of fried calamari. Once, escalope jamon, which turned out to be ham cold cuts breaded and deep fried, perhaps our only culinary disappointment. But then, in Castro-Urdiales, we found ourselves looking out over the boats in the harbour, eating a whole monk fish cooked in oil with slivers of garlic, and served with bread. And in El Haya, a slab of beef churleton between us, grilled an inch and a half thick and served with crisp fries and tangy salad. The owner kept pouring us more brandy, pleased to see us devouring the local specialty, reminding us all the while that he normally ate a whole churleton himself. Sometimes two. After dinner we talked with Horst, a German economist who worked on contract for BMW and spent long months walking in between.

Then we slept. We crashed, we went deep. And we woke huge spirited, talkative, filled with the energy of our plan.

“Get to the Primitivo,” Horst had told us, speaking of the mountain route from Oviedo over the remote inner hills of Asturias and Galicia and down to the walled city of Lugo. “Hurry through Cantabria if you have to, but take your time in the mountains.” Horst had covered 4,000 kilometers by the time we met him, and would cover 4,000 more by the time he returned home late in the year. Lost fifteen kilos already. He showed us the notches on his belt.

So that’s where we’re going. That’s where the whole trip is now heading. To the Primitivo. To the “Original Way” of the medieval pilgrims.

I say to Dave: Gonna party like it’s 1399.

He says: Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.

4.

If you came at night like a broken king
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave thr rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone

My mother died of cancer in March 2006, a few days after her seventy-sixth birthday. She’d been diagnosed three years before and given six months to live, but was obviously tougher than the doctors first guessed. Lots of people say this about their parents, I realize. Mothers in particular. Man, but she was tough. And perhaps we say this because we need them to be strong, even knowing that they live with fear and doubt like anybody else. Knowing there is heartache for our toughest moms.

You could say she was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ursula Kuppenheim, in Munster, in 1930; gentile mother, father’s side all Jews. These weren’t great coordinates to land on just a few months before 6.4 million Germans voted Hitler into the Reichstag. So my mother became a “mischling of the first degree,” as the taxonomically minded Nazis referred to people with exactly two Jewish grandparents. There was no comfort in the designation. The Nazis were regressivetaxonomists, even before 1942 when Eichmann determined that “Mischlinge of the first degree will, as regards the final solution of the Jewish question, be treated as Jews.” Already by 1940, my mother’s paternal grandparents had died as the SS cleared Jews out of the town of Pforzheim. Two months later her father fled Germany using the single visa he was able to get for passage to Ecuador. My mother, my aunt, and my grandmother rode out the war in Munster and later, in hiding. The family wasn’t reunited until 1948, when the International Refugee Organization arranged transit for the three women: from Germany, through Paris and Genoa, then by boat across the Atlantic to a reunion with my grandfather in Ecuador.

Where life began again, in what my mother once described to me as a drifting, dream-like state: out of place and distant from all the futures she might have once considered likely. Certainly she couldn’t have imagined meeting my father. In the late ’40s, my mother was managing a bookstore, the Libraria Centifica, in Guayaquil. My father was working in the Philippine jungle, rebuilding an electrical generating plant. As a kid I once plotted these locations on a globe and determined them to be almost precisely on opposite sides of the planet. Here was a vector-intersect you’d call a long shot, in the geo-statistical sense of it.

But it happened. All that way across the world to end up at the same house party. In she walked. There he was. How do these things happen? We know the rational answer. It’s called a random event, albeit a happy one in this case. All human story after all, in the eyes of science, is the product of quanto-chaotic-material unfolding. There is a new canon of rationalist literature devoted to debunking other interpretations, other ways of imagining the fabric of your own life. Fate, destiny, divine will, even luck. All these are romantic or worse: intellectual dummy-sucking as Richard Dawkins memorably put it.

Nonsense, my mother would have said. Stories care nothing for statistics, in either our telling or our living of them. As for materialism, well, one man’s rationalism is another man’s eugenics program. The Nazis had a material view of my mother: she was a bio-genetic phenomenon. She didn’t accept their definition of her any more than she accepted their Final Solution to the problem she represented to them. It’s to that brutal, early schooling that I trace her later tendencies, all of which coalesced around a single governing principle: that you could not allow yourself to be defined by material human sources. The literal survival of your self  depended on deeper resolution. And while she found that resolution in Christianity, the more practical way I experienced her world view as a child was through her committed suspicion of the mainstream, the chief expression of which was an ingrained anti-consumerism. Brand promises were always broken. I don’t remember ever not knowing that she felt this way, even if she rarely said so explicitly. She lived the message. No television in the house. No junk food or soda in the diet. Home made clothes. Holidays on the West Coast Trail. I recall that once a year, following a successful piano recital, we were allowed to choose a brand-name breakfast cereal. (For me: always Captain Crunch.) Otherwise it was home made granola and tiger’s milk. In the Brady Bunch Seventies, in shag-carpeted then-groovy West Vancouver, these practices made us nonconformist freaks. Not as a matter of self-denial. I understand this now, if I couldn’t possibly then. On my mother’s part, it was self-affirmation. Specifically, a removal of the self from the governing ambit of commerce and fashion, a willful conviction that necessarily connected her to the beyond.

And here is where I believe she sourced that conviction: she didn’t believe that her birth happened in the wrong place at the wrong time. She believed it happened as intended. Of course life’s material phenomena were real, notably Hitler’s existence and much later the fact of her metastasized colon cancer. But the cause and effect at play in the world and in her body were not the essential story. The essential story was that, as a thing intended, her life and all lives had intrinsic, ineffable value not derived or defined by organic materials but by their meanings. In other words: derived and defined in a way inaccessible to either markets or science. Derived and defined spiritually.

Religious was never quite the right word for her, though. Her faith had no overarching ritual. She was antipodal to Catholicism, it now seems to me, with its various codified enactments, including this very pilgrimage. She was a product of personal belief and reformation instead. Charles Taylor’s “disembedded” individual, unplugged from the hierarchies that would define and destroy her. Yet choosing to live her life as if the spiritual were bound up in the physical, the musical soundtrack playing endlessly behind the toy-strewn family room scenes of her mother-of-five life.

Mischling of the first degree. If my mother had a coat of arms, the motto might have read: Says you.

5.

We cross Cantabria into its forested western reaches, past the sprawling estuaries of the Tina Meno and Tina Mayor, the flat expanse of inland water reflecting the sky, the blue-green hills, the clouds shooting in to gather at the foot of the Cantabrian Mountain range paralleling our path from the Basque country behind us all the way to the Galician border. Climbing the long slope into Asturias, we get lost in a hillside eucalyptus forest short of Unquera. We end up following a narrow track kilometres past a marked turnoff, swatting bugs in the heat, running gauntlets of thorns, while below us through the fragrant trees we can see the road we’re supposed to meet dropping further and further away. We stop and retrace our steps, trying different trails that each fringe out to nothing in the brush. It takes several hours before we make our way down and across the valley—overheated, scratched, sweating, irritable—and climb the final steep stone path to Colombres, where we’re planning to stay.

It’s approaching that summit that I get my first taste of pilgrim euphoria. Endorphin flows, runners’ high—it belongs in that group of phenomenon. The sudden head-rush sense of your own movement and power, like the thrill of lift-off in an airplane only writ down to human scale and speed. As I climb the hill, I feel that chain of thousands of steps, hundreds of thousands now, carrying me upward and upward. I feel the earth roll under my feet as if propelled by my very motion.

I take my own picture at the crest of the hill, camera held out at arm’s length. There’s a capilla de animas here, a little chapel set up for recitation of the Angelus. I don’t know the prayer. But I’m gripped by a feeling, an exhilarating sense of lessening, the world briefly rendered inconsequential. A summit feeling. The picture later reveals me to be grinning a bit madly, seized by the moment and out of breath.

I have no pictures of the moment just following, however, maybe fifteen minutes later, when we discover that both hotels in Colombres are closed. That we must carry on to El Peral, a series of gas stations and truck stops on the highway to Villaviciosa, where tankers and big rigs howl by and none of the restaurants are open and the bartender who handles room keys at the motel ignores our presence, clearly willing us to carry on out of his jurisdiction. Dave and I with our packs at the bar, ready to crumple from fatigue. Twenty minutes spent wondering if we’re sleeping under a hedge or hailing a taxi to the next town or what.

So that summit feeling of immunity does not last. The world returns. But with the world also comes a young woman, who intervenes and talks to the man in Spanish. I can tell from hand gestures, facial expressions, what this is all about. She’s saying: Come on, they’d like a room. One room with two beds. Peregrinos. Yes, they’re Peregrinos. Just give them a room.

6.

Up and down. This is the inner and outer topography when you walk for weeks on end. Once locked into it, the trek becomes an endless cycle of arrivals and departures. Always entering or leaving some fold in the land, climbing or dropping off a ridge line, a valley behind or in front, the roll of a hill stretching upward or downward ahead of you. After 300 or 400 kilometers of walking, it seems I’ve been coming forever on some new set of views and possibilities. That’s the real constant of the trail: its Nietzschean eternal recurrence, the ever-changing sameness of the land. That and the sheep and cow bells, the hovering cry of birds.

On the train to Oviedo, where we will begin the Primitivo, we retreat to our respective playlists and books. We turn inland, the hills rushing past, burnt orange in the morning sun. The ocean slips behind. Last glimpse of it is a mirrored flash, the entire coastline obscured in a fizz of light shards, prisming and refracting. I brought two books with me on this trip. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Don Quixote. Spanish pilgrims chuckle to see me lugging around the Cervantes, a book they remember not-quite-finishing in high school. I’m dragging it through Spain nevertheless, reading passages in hotel rooms and bars across the country. I spill wine on it. Fortuna ashes. Bits of bocadillo and tortilla. It gets burnt, then rained on. Some of the pages fall out.

But I want this book with me. The great Spanish masterpiece. Also, the first modern novel. The ancestor document that branches out to all my literary heroes. This book is, in a sense, the mother of all reasons why I decided that being a writer was worth a life’s effort. And when you’ve just finished a novel yourself and it’s out to your publisher… when the atmosphere in the book business is as dark as it’s been since the fall of 2008… when you’re on the road walking miles in silence and thinking about the future and your own place in it… well then it makes a certain amount of pilgrim-sense to clutch the lodestone, hold tight the talisman, hang the juju from a cord around your neck.

Miguel de Cervantes, all two kilos and 950 pages of you, I pray to you now in the hour of my…

Although, really: what is my hour exactly? I can’t say need. Food and shelter are needs, the things we seek spontaneously requiring no encouragement or guidance. Even vagabonding across Spain, I have plenty of both of those. My “hour” instead, relates to the world I left behind. I’m not alone feeling a little exposed by the events of 2008, not the only person who wondered late last year what the future might hold. We never know the answer to this question precisely, of course, but some circumstances make it distinctly more pressing. A history-making market crash contributes to the urgency. But so too does our contemporary vulnerability to that market. I mean beyond the financial or, at least, beyond the numbers to the point where they intersect with our very sense of self. In the wake of older definitions which are no longer standard – notably those definitions of self once provided by family, church or civil hierarchies – who among us now doesn’t self-identify significantly in terms of what we do for a living? And who among those who answered “yes” didn’t feel a tremor as markets around the globe wiped out billions of dollars of value? Who didn’t entertain the question: what am I going to be when this is all over? Or even: who am I going to be?

I read The Tale of Foolish Curiosity that night, lying in our pension with its view across the valley to the tracts of new housing being built south of town. In the story, I find a strange and surprising reverberation of just that sense of vulnerability. Anselmo marries Camilla, then convinces his best friend Lothario to try to seduce her in order to test her faithfulness. Anselmo’s plan works too well. Lothario and Camilla become lovers. So: “From that time on Anselmo was the most deliciously deluded man in the whole world. He himself led home by the hand the man who had completely destroyed his good name, in the firm belief that he had brought him nothing but glory.”

Not everyone likes this story, I should note. J.M. Cohen, the esteemed translator of the Penguin Classics edition I’m reading goes so far as to say in his introduction: “…neither its morality nor its psychology bears a moment’s examination, and except perhaps for a mild interest in the turn of events, it is difficult to see what amusement the average reader can find in it. My advice to anyone who has found his patience wearing thin… is to skip it.”

But with respect to the late Mr. Cohen—translator of Pasternak, Rousseau, Christopher Columbus, and many others—I disagree in the strongest terms. The Tale of Foolish Curiosity might well be the very root of Don Quixote because here we discover what Cervantes sees when he looks to the heart of human aspiration. Just as Don Quixote himself is inspired by Amadis of Gaul, and suffers mightily for the desires he inherits from this fictional model, so too are Anselmo and Lothario unfailingly inspired by what the other desires. What Anselmo has, he needs Lothario to crave in order for it to have value. What Lothario did not previously desire at all, he discovers—through the modeling example of his friend Anselmo—is the one possession without which he cannot live.

I’m influenced by Rene Girard in my reading of this passage, specifically his theory of “mimetic desire”. According to Girard, our desires (as opposed to our spontaneous needs) are neither a subjective or objective phenomenon. We don’t desire anything we wish to possess on its (or their) own merits. Nor do we choose such targets of our desire based on innate preference. In the matter of the desire of possession, in the matter of acquiring that whole repertoire of objects and experiences and relationships that we consider to illustrate our “taste”, we are wholly lacking in spontaneity, and rely instead on the inspiration of a model. These models, which Girard refers to as “mediators”, may be either internal (that is, people close to us with whom we consider ourselves equal), or external (people distant from us, whose relative seniority we acknowledge). Amadis of Gaul is safely external to Don Quixote in this analysis, a model whose example the hero might be ill advised in following, but to whom no grudge is borne despite Quixote’s dents and bruises. Lothario and Anselmo, on the other hand, act as internal mediators one to the other. And seeing themselves as equal, their relationship is necessarily rivalrous and unstable. Indeed, it continues only through Anselmo’s delusion.

People have never liked hearing this version of events, and it’s easy enough to see why. Our highest admiration is reserved for those whom we imagine to have emotional autonomy, those of whom it might be said that they consult no external source in the formation of their desires. The signal of the modern hero is his immunity from the opinion of the Other, his indifference to any voice but the unwavering, spontaneous one speaking from within. This is our working definition of integrity: personal, artistic, professional. And if I am truthful, I’ll admit to holding that exact view of my mother. She betrayed no worldly influence. When I was eight years old and wanted North Star runners, her failure to see what they represented was a source of great irritation. As an adult, however, what I remember of her independence now fills me with real awe. And it is telling then, that one of the very last things I remember her saying, she didn’t say to me at all, but to my brother. Still, it lives in my memory as if I heard the words because it is so true to my sense of who she was.

She said, with real urgency, real intensity: “You must believe in your Self!”

So, to recognize that our Self is beholden to external models, then, is to admit a real weakness. Hence our resistance. We don’t like to be told we’re checking our cell phone for messages because we subconsciously register the guy sitting opposite us on the bus check his. We don’t like to contemplate that our satisfaction with the apartment we own rises and falls depending on which guest is visiting, our pal who still rents or the friends with a big house. We resist even the thought that the cars we drive, or the cuisine we fancy, or the style of dress we adopt is anything less than a personal aesthetic, spontaneously and definitively our own choice. And we certainly don’t like to think that our reputation in the eyes of others really does fluctuate with our Facebook friend count or the number of people following us on Twitter.

We don’t like to think these things because they make us feel contingent, provisional, caught in the gulf between being and appearing. These considerations – sadly alienating us from our heroes – make us feel vulnerable.

“Oh hell,” Hermia says to Lysander, “To choose love by another’s eyes.”

Which is interesting to consider in the light of the great mimetic hurricane that was the financial collapse of 2008. Interesting particularly that economists are now referring to this collapse as a “Minsky Moment”, after Hyman Minksy (1919-1996). Minksy who theorized that human nature lead to market instability, as people were fundamentally momentum not value investors. That is, people enact their desires in the market mimetically, based entirely on the enacted desires of others.

And as I follow a centuries old path across a centuries old country, as I lay my feet into the faded prints of a million million million feet that have fallen before mine, as I contemplate my own future – immediate and longer term – these all seem like points well worth pondering.

7.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living

The trail winnows to a point. It narrows and turns, like a nautilus shell, it directs you toward some inner part of itself. After passing through Oviedo and hiking three days to Tineo, we turn into the heart of the Primitivo. Four long mountainous days lie ahead. About 120 kilometers total. Tineo to Polla Allende, then to Grandas de Salime. From there to Fonsagrada, and finally to Cadavo. And as we leave Tineo in the pre-dawn blue, rose light coloring the clouds to the east, I sense us arrive at the heart of matters. Turning with the inner spiral.

We cross the hillside, traveling west into the valley south of the Sierra de Obona. The trail is full of pilgrims this morning, Spanish kids and older couples. People nod and greet. They say: bon camino. Past the glowing green summit over Piedratecha, we descend down a long straight forest path through a stand of red pines and walk for a few kilometres with Mary, a schoolteacher from Galway. This isn’t her first pilgrimage. She does them, she says, for the freedom of it.

Onward and onward. The days compress and stretch simultaneously. In Burducedo, where there are no other pilgrims around we ask the old woman running the corner store if she can make us a bocadillo, and she  nods and shrugs and retreats into her own kitchen through a doorway past the shelf of plumbing supplies, returning in a few minutes with sandwiches cut roughly from a loaf of brown bread, thick wedges of cheese, and folded layers of jamon Serrano. In a  roadside café just past the Alto de Lavadoire, where the washroom has a wasps’ nest in it and a crew of red chickens run riot out front between the legs of the table,  the lady who owns the place has laid out a bowl of hazelnuts for pilgrims, with a small hammer provided for their cracking. On the ridge line near Buspol, wind turbines churn the sky emitting a steady low roar and “wielding more arms than the giant Briareus” as Cervantes would have it. And just past the turbines, right where the path leads behind a farm house and onto the open hillside above the lake, we come across a guy and his girlfiend. He’s  sitting in front of a small grotto with a statue of the Virgin, sitting with his head in his hands. His girlfriend hovering nervously nearby.

What’s wrong? I ask her.

And she tells me that the gate at the end of the lane is closed and that there is a bull in the paddock beyond. And since there’s no other way around, they’re considering the fact that they’ll have to go back down that long steep hill we all just climbed, all the way back to La Mesa, where she thinks the refugio is already full.

I say: we’ll go look. And Dave and I go to the end of the lane and find the gate, which is closed. And we see the bull beyond. But at kilometre twenty-five of our longest day, the thirty-six-kilometre leg to Grandas de Salime, neither of us see the bull as I see him now in my memory—this magnificent and terrifying creature with his curling horns and rippling flanks. We see a cow. So we push open the gate and stump wearily through the paddock to the far end while the bull gazes up into the darkening clouds and never stops chewing his cud for even a moment to consider us.

Spiraling and spiraling. An inchoate sense of something building. Some shape or sensation from which I might judge my own reasons for being here. My own answer to the question why? It comes close, descending into Polla Allende along a rocky path, my knees in agony. I’m as tired as I’ve been on the entire hike, and I think suddenly of my mother. A sharp and penetrating thought. Not a presence, I stress. There is no sense of proximity, no breath of a ghostly nearness. The dust is rising and I can see the spire of the church in the town below. And something shifts in me. I’m seeing myself in motion, doing something that would have pleased her enormously. Not the pilgrimage per se, not the ritual in which I join many others. What would have pleased her about me humping across Spain with an old friend and Don Quixote in my knapsack is the steady continuation that it demands. She would have been pleased to see me take each of these steps, not knowing entirely what I was doing, knowing only enough to take that step. Continuing, continuing.  She did that, I thought. She did continue. And I was inspired by the memory.

The following morning, we climb the pass at Puerto Palo to the roof line of Spain, where the bare hills roll away in all directions. West of the pass we come to Montefurado, a seemingly abandoned hamlet of six or eight stone buildings and a chapel, daisy-chained along the narrow ridge. On the hillside beyond the town, past the Saint Bernard keeping silent watch over our progress, the path narrows and twists down towards Lastra through the spiny gorse and flowering broom, the ferns and low thorns. We’re walking far apart now, as much as half a kilometre. And here it comes again, like Googlemaps set to satellite view. I see my movement across the world. And again I find myself thinking about my mother, but with something important added too. Something  singing in on the hot, high winds of the Sierra del Palo. It takes me a moment to register what it is. And then I get it. By following her example of continuation, by taking that one step after the other, by doing only what I know I have to do and thinking no farther ahead, I suddenly appreciate my arrival somewhere entirely fresh. A place of complete sufficiency, having everything I need for the moment, in the moment. Wind and the smell of cows. Bells in the distance. I’m stopped in my tracks, standing alone on a Spanish hill where I will never stand again. I’m light as air. I desire nothing.

The moment is fleeting, of course. Our days continue. Life continues. Feet get sore and hamstrings act up. Moods worsen. Words are exchanged. In Fonsagrada I write in my notebook: we’re grinding it out now. Which is true for me, certainly. All thoughts of continuation and sufficiency gone from my head. I catch myself finally, a full day and a half after the high of Montefurado, standing outside a café just through the pass at Acebo where we’ve stopped for a quick rest and a coffee. Dave’s answering emails inside. It’s been fifteen minutes, twenty. I’m impatient. I’m irritable. Standing, waiting, waiting while a black bank of clouds is vaulting up out of the west towards us. Twenty-four hours from euphoric to miserable.

I resolve to get it back. Dave comes out of the café. We walk on. We arrive in Fonsagrado. Eat, sleep. Walk on again. And late on that last day of the Primitivo, heading into Cadavao, we drop down off the green flanks of the Sierra do Hospital and past the town of Paradavella. Here the trail dips down below the road, winding behind the small stone church at Degolada and past the hamlet of Couto, stacked stone buildings with leaning, lichen-covered walls, slate roofs, wild cats, wind in the high pines. We trudge into the forest along a steep embankment to the bottom of another trail that seems to cut almost vertically up through the forest toward the road, now far above us.

This is brutal. We’re exhausted. It’s hot. It’s late. If we’d stayed on the road and forgone the scenery, we’d be 400 meters up the hillside now, not facing down this bank of loose stone and broken rocks, leaning stumps and tortured switch backs.

You just keep going. So we take that first step, and so it begins again. Although this time, with one thing added again. I sing myself to the top. (Silently.) I sing to myself. Keep going. Keep going. Tuneless, chanty. Like a work song, that’s what it is. I’m a prisoner of this damn trail and here is my work song. Keep going. Keep going. Fifty metres up and we’re pouring with sweat which shakes loose from my forehead and darkens the stones at my feet. Up and up. And I’m thinking of her, of course I am. I’m thinking of her continuation and immunity from possessive desire. Another fifty metres. Another hundred. No end in sight. The wind dies. Keep going. Keep going. Another hundred. And then, here it comes: the moment. I realize the chant is working. I’m either driving myself productively insane or this damn song is working. Some kind of reverse energy loop. About halfway up I realize I’m not expending energy any more. I’m somehow gaining it. I’ve turned contra-entropic. I’m actually recharging. Of course it’s nuts, but that’s what I’m feeling. I’m not tiring, I’m getting stronger. I’m going faster. I’m floating up this hill. I’m not even breathing hard anymore. It’s a miracle! Call the Vatican! And when I arrive at the pavement at the top, I let out a huge whoop and throw my hat in the air, and it spirals up and up and for a second until it blocks the sun. My hat winks out the entire sun. And then it falls back down, onto the road, just in time for Dave to emerge from the woods and stare at me with all due alarm and personal concern.

Which is understandable, if not strictly necessary. I’m grinning like a fool, but something else too. I feel the feeling. And now I know its name too. She lived with this feeling. And its name is freedom.

9.

After twenty-two days, the destination can hardly live up to the route. Santiago is rain soaked and clogged with pilgrims. They walk singing down the flagstones next to the cathedral. They gossip in the square. We watch. We eat brilliant tapas at Taverno do Bispo. It’s my birthday. We have a few, get a little drunk. I say: I’m old. Dave says: yeah, but you look great. We’re old friends and now, I suppose, for all the silence we have invested in one another, we are somehow better friends than before.

We go to bed in the nicest hotel room we’ve had. Top floor room looking out across the wet city toward the cathedral. I can’t sleep. I surf the news and check email. No word about my novel. Dave is snoring.

I get up and go to the window. Across the blackness, they’ve turned on the cathedral lights, the whole gothic structure now glowing silver, mercury, gold, blue. The clouds wreathing around it, under-lit and vaulting, as if to extend the structure high into the swirling sky. And I know then that I’ve walked all this way just to see this sight. This garish, amazing, crazy sight. To see it with my mother’s eyes. Touching the beyond.

I text my wife, thumbing in the words. I write: Santiago is shining.

It seemed like a good idea when I woke up: a day spent hunting the perfect Tokyo cherry blossoms. Here was the plan, drawn up in the first seconds after waking, still in my bed at the Claska Hotel: I’d walk the Meguro-gawa upstream to its source, following the many kilometres of cherry trees that line the banks of the old canal, which links the ocean to Shinagawa and Meguro and which only disappears underground – according to my Tokyo street atlas – north of the Ikejiri-Ohashi train station.

Of course, timing is critical with cherry blossoms. So while I set out feeling confident, I know immediately after turning up onto the pedestrian boulevard that flanks the deep concrete channel where the river flows that something isn’t right. Most of the pink petals are on the ground already. And while the flurries tossed up by the breeze are pretty, they’re also sad. As if the trees, past their manic flowering, were now losing a brief extroversion they’d enjoyed, sobering and darkening, returning to the sedate and orderly shade trees they’d be throughout the summer.

“Great idea to look,” an English speaker tells me when I stop to ask where the city’s peak blossoms might be. “Only sorry, but you’re a week late.”

I’m annoyed with myself. I should have known. I’m mid-way through my experiment with an ultrasimplified mode of travel: no guidebooks, none of my normally obsessive planning. Call it experientialism, what I’m trying. It shares with existentialism a suspicion that reason does not always lead to understanding. But rejecting the isolating bad mood of existentialism, this approach is about blowing life open to opportunities and connections. Believing that we can glimpse understanding in exactly those unplanned moments when we’re just letting life happen.

I’ll acknowledge that the trip has had its moments so far. I’ve been lost more than usual, but the experiences that have floated my way – finding a geocached archive of Tokyoite dreams at the top of a Midtown bank tower or a hidden classical music café in the middle of the Shibuya love hotel district – have carried with them the sense of fate. As if, for being unplanned by either me or by a sales strategy aimed at me, they were more authentically my own. Meant to happen; meant to happen to me.

Now I’m standing opposite the pristine white smokestack spire of the Meguro Incineration Plant and wondering. Clearly, only those who planned ahead this year got to see the damn blossoms.

I carry on toward the source. It’s only two kilometres before the blue line marking the river on my map goes capillary thin, then vanishes in Ikejiri. I cut up through Meguro, past the tennis courts and designer boutiques. Up through Nakameguru, past the modelling shoots, a woman holding blue Cellophane in front of her face as the flash strobes. Just before the booming overhead crossing at Ikejiri-Ohashi station, I pass graffiti that reads “King Wylo Was Here.” And I press on, certain the source is near. But when I reach the road, the river disappears under a tangle of construction equipment and scaffolding. On the far side, only an ornamental trickle remains, idling up between the Ikejiri condos for another few blocks before expiring with an apologetic rustle under a purple hedge.

Now here’s something wholly unplanned: I head back to the hotel. To the soothing vibe of the Claska lobby, where I sit and read a magazine for awhile. The DJ is spinning “Music for a Found Harmonium.”

I regroup. I phone a friend’s Tokyo cousin whose number I’ve been carrying around. He suggests I ride the Chuo Line. Simple as that. “From the centre out into the wilds,” he says.

Here’s all I learned from the web before leaving (not planning, just checking): The Chuo Line runs west from Shinjuku station, one of the oldest JR lines in the system, out through Nakano, Koenji, then on to Kichijoji, where Inokashira Park may be found, with its lake and paddleboats and its shrine to the bitch-goddess Benzaiten, who’s apparently so jealous, it’s bad luck to enter her shrine (and the park as a whole) with a new girlfriend.

So I bump and roll westward, leaving the Shinjuku neon behind. I notice the kids getting on between Nakano and Koenji. Plaid shirts and wallets on chains, a guy with dreadlocks tied up in a tam. All heading somewhere. So I pick one of them and follow – a new waver in Converse high-tops and white-framed sunglasses lugging a guitar and an amp. He disembarks with the crowd in Kichijoji, where I lose him in the station throng.

No matter. Once in Inokashira, down past the flea market stands and the fragrant smoke of outdoor grills ready for the lunch trade, it’s hard to miss what’s going on. Japan might be the refined minimalism of teak lobbies and clean lines, but on a hot Saturday in a Tokyo park, it’s like 1,000 inner performance artists have been born at once. And then, it’s maximalism all the way.

Here’s a dude doing clog dancing and another man dancing in a skeleton suit. Artists sell pastel scribbles and sculptures made of wire and beer bottles melted into vases. There are magicians and balloon tiers and a roster of amateur musicians who cycle in and out of the performance spaces in the dusty square, just north of the lake, as lovers ply the water and ignore Benzaiten. Two bands compete during the time I hang out. There’s the leathery old-timer called Broom Duster playing country on a National guitar. Blue jeans, no shirt, cowboy hat, a mini-amp hanging around his neck blasting out his rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” while some monster yakuza tattoo billboard squats nearby with his five Irish terriers all barking at once.

Then there’s the scrub band of nice-looking kids in black shirts with white painter pants who, I swear, all work at Starbucks when they’re not here playing banjo, washboard, bucket bass and kazoo. Playing the most annoying version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” ever recorded, and, yes, they have a CD. Lots of made-up English filler words along the lines of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Papapaaaa-yah!” But then I have to say, coming in loud from over my shoulder in the process of mangling an Elvis tune into unrecognizability, I swear I hear Broom Duster growling the words “findin’ me a pizza.”

Huge applause, both ways. And lots of laughter. This is what I notice sitting on a crowded bench halfway between the two acts with my late-afternoon snack of pork skewers and grill-charred corn, the smoke of an ancient grill in a side street making me squint and smile. Lots of people enjoying themselves and laughing.

Which makes no sense to me, at first. The scrub band is terrible. Broom Duster minus the hat and shades is somebody’s grandfather, old enough to know better. But then, my new wave kid shows up again, accompanied by a grungy-looking friend. And I suddenly get it, precisely because they don’t do what I’m hoping they’ll do. They don’t pull out the guitars and start thrashing out Talking Heads or Pearl Jam, complete with made-up words. Instead, they sit quietly in front of the scrub band, two coolsters from Koenji, cracking their Asahi tall boys and sparking up their Winstons, bobbing away to the music like they were beats in the Village Vanguard in 1952.

They’re loving it. And there’s no irony in their applause and laughter when the last song is over. Because it isn’t about being cooler than anyone else. It’s about a shared moment of peak extroversion. A manic flowering, yes, indeed. Broom Duster and the scrub band, all the artists and dancers and all the people watching too. Everyone at peak season. And sure, it won’t last. Sure, it’s disappearing, even now as the picnickers pack up, as shadows stretch and the light subdues, everything and everybody heading down toward the sedate and orderly purple tones of evening. But it’s a cycle.

I might have missed that point, even if I had seen the cherry trees at their peak. But stumbling into Inokashira by accident, I see it. The blossoms come back.

I get home late. I’m not planning it. I’m not planning anything. I just ride the train to Meguro and climb down into the street. Head for the hotel. But half a block up Meguro-dori, I recognize something. I have to stop on the sidewalk to think through exactly what it is I’m recognizing. Then it comes back. In my sketchy preparations for this trip, I’d wandered the Meguro neighbourhood in Google Maps Street View, and so, I’d crossed this intersection before and noticed a narrow alley turning downhill here. With just the suggestion of a restaurant or a bar down there, tucked in under an anonymous residential tower.

I go down and find it: the Black Lion. A little sock of a pub with tables made out of barrels and movies on in the back room. And a rare thing in Tokyo: a pub that actually is a local too, drawing the residents, Japanese and expat alike. Do I feel strangely at home? I do, indeed. And I would have, even if the owner didn’t turn out to be from Deep Cove, B.C.

So I settle into the bar for a pint and get to talking. And when I tell people what I’m doing, everyone has a suggestion. Someone suggests Namja Town. Someone else suggests the Meiji Shrine. Then someone pipes up, “Have you been out to Kichijoji?” And everybody chimes in: “Oh, yeah. You gotta check out Kichijoji.”

I don’t even have a chance to say that I’ve been there already, that I saw Tokyo blooming at its weekly peak. Because just then, another local comes in and announces, “It’s a boy!” and everybody cheers and toasts a healthy mother and baby, calling out the newborn’s name: “Kyle Kane!” So recently flowered into this world himself, with so much ahead to see and nothing planned.

I walk back to the hotel as the newspaper guys are loading up their scooters, folded papers stacked high in their baskets. And around the corner from my hotel, not 100 metres from where I woke up with my idea that morning, a single cherry tree riots with blossoms in the blue morning chill, full and white, illuminated from the inside by a lamppost around which the tree has grown. An ethereal and promising glow.