The Backpack Press

I am always packed for the Camino.

It’s been only a week since I came back home from my tour of duty as an Amigo – an English speaking greeter in the office of pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela – and I am already looking at airfares and deciding what I still need to buy. How is it that a kid from the Midwest could become so taken with the medieval pilgrimage to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela?

The pilgrimage goes back over a thousand years, but I only learned about it in college, in my Romanesque Sculpture class at the University of Michigan. I studied with a woman who was, at the time, emerging as one of the brightest lights in art history scholarship. She spent her career exploring the intricacies of one Romanesque cloister in southern France along with several other key topics, not the least of which is the identification of the “Seat of Wisdom” depiction of Mary with a seated Christ on her lap. She was inspirational and she taught us that there was this road that had been traveled since the time of Charlemagne, pulling artists and poets and musicians to walk across France and Spain with the sole object of paying their respects at the church in northwestern Spain which holds the remains of the apostle James.

It took me a while to get there, decades actually. First, I didn’t have the money. Transatlantic travel is still not cheap. Then, I didn’t have the time, what with a job and then children, family responsibilities and all. And I kept saying to myself that I didn’t really want to go walking in Spain by myself either. So months went by, years went by, and I never got there. It was there. I wasn’t.

In 2010, I read about the celebrations of the Holy Year. That is the calendar year when June 25, the Feast of Saint James, falls on a Sunday. James is also the patron saint of Spain, so this is a really big event. The year begins by opening the Holy Door of the Cathedral, La Puerta Santa. It’s a special door that opens only during that year and is closed again on New Year’s Eve. Anyone who wishes to use this special entrance to the Cathedral can do so by simply waiting in line outside, and I knew if I missed it, I would have to wait until the next Holy Year – 2021.

I decided this was my moment. I made the leap by buying a plane ticket and putting in for my vacation. I had little real walking preparation and I decided I could in fact walk by myself so I booked my trip over Christmas and I walked. I even managed to squeak through the door about an hour and a half before it closed. I watched the fireworks through the skylight in my hotel room, just up the block from the Cathedral. It was extraordinary.

Two years later, I walked again with my daughters. We spent Christmas Eve up in the mountains, eating paella and listening to American Christmas carols on a laptop plugged in near the kitchen of the hostel where we stayed. When we got up the next morning, the man who ran the hostel took me outside to show me we had a white Christmas, just like in the song, and we walked all day surrounded by snow.

Everyone talks about how walking the Camino changed their life, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of how it has affected me. Rather, it is the amplification of my life, the display of my life. I have been able to speak with dozens of pilgrims and people who want to become pilgrims and I tell them stories and give them tips about what to bring, what to leave at home, but in the end, this road is best traveled alone. Even when you go with other people, as I have, it’s best to do it for yourself.

I met a wonderful man while I was working in the pilgrims office who told me he had made the journey several times, once walking to Santiago de Compostela – in northwest Spain, remember – from Jerusalem, stopping first in Rome. When I told him that was incredible, he shook his head and said, “No, it’s just walking,” as if that were the simplest thing in the world to do.

In the end, he was right. One foot in front of the other, over and over again. It’s less about training and all about motivation.

Parking is at a real serious premium in this stretch of Queens where I am working now.  It’s only two stops out of Manhattan, but the neighborhood relies on real life commerce, not pedestrian traffic and strollers.  You see one loading dock after another, with vans, trucks, piles of pallets, boxes, skids. You cannot park here because when you do, nobody can take deliveries or load up trucks and vans.  Commerce stalls, the economy suffers, the loading dock guys all take cigarette breaks, and time is money – get it?

This is particularly wonderful.  Just sound it out, take a stab at it.  Don’t stop to look it up or see what everyone else has on their door.  And it works nearly every day.  It says, “Drywey,” and most days, nobody parks there.

Or this:

And no, you just can’t make this up.  It really says, “ANITIME.”  And it’s new.  That’s fresh paint.  It went up yesterday.  I wondered if maybe it was addressing a French chanteuse named Anitime and she alone was admonished not to park here.  Hey, it could happen!

Except it doesn’t work.

That first shot was a close up.  The sign – as clearly spelled out as it is – doesn’t work.  What a colossal bummer.

They must have used a whole spray can to get this much verbiage on two doors.  And yes – they spell it wrong twice.  The photo would lead you to believe the “active driveway” addition to Sign Number Two actually had some effect, but cars park here too.

Here’s the thing: nothing gets past these guys.  They really get how to do this.  They get that everyone has signs posted so nobody parks in their spot.  But once these guys open for business, and open is the operative here, you can’t read the signs no matter what they say.  When this business is in business, both doors are open and then cars park there.  They did write “No Parking” on the sidwalk too, just in case you are walking by and wonder if this is a good place to park your car.

So where is the one spot with the best luck NOT having cars park in their loading zone?  This guy got graffitied a while back and decided to give it up and nobody parks here.

Go figure.

Photos by me, of course!

When Spring arrives – finally – I mark the event by collecting and cataloging a random assortment of my own personal harbingers.  I scour the parks for crocus and daffodils, I take my coats to the cleaners and venture out wearing a sweater or a fleece, I listen for birds to wake me up in the morning, and I look for wild chives.  For me, it’s the wild chives that spell Spring.

I grew up in a lovely little town.  When I was in the eighth grade, my family built a very nice house in a new sub-division called Seven Pines because the street that lined the open space that was about to be filled with homes had seven tall pine trees.  The field had been farmed during WWII.  They grew onions there that would have been shipped overseas to help feed the American troops.  This was before my time and to me, this area was just the vacant field at the end of the street where our first house stood.

I remember my mother talking with the designers about widening a doorway or the height of the counters.  She loved really vibrant colors and the house would be painted gold, rose pink, lavender, celery, mint, and yellow.  After we had moved into the house, my dad planted chives.  They grew right out the back door, next to the stoop and even though he always had a full garden with beautiful tomatoes, the chives grew all alone, close to the house.

On Saturday mornings in the spring, my dad would take my mother’s kitchen shears out back and snip off the chives into long strands, releasing the onion scent into the kitchen.  He chopped the chives into tiny bits and beat them into eggs, scrambling them together in the pan.  In these few instances my mother relinquished her regular role as breakfast chef to my dad and he would set aside his regular fried eggs and bacon for this masterful concoction of scrambled eggs and chives.

I know now why he planted them there.  Chives masquerade as grass, so if you plant them anywhere else, once grass has been mown, the chives will disappear and become barely distinguishable from the rest of the lawn.  That’s why I think of them in the Spring – it’s because nobody has had the chance to mow the grass yet.  It’s barely warm enough for sweaters and the last thing you think about is mowing the grass so the chives grow tall and fragrant and to enjoy the wonderful scent, you just snap off a blade to release the fresh onion fragrance.

My mother had her own plants growing just out the back door – Lily of the Valley – growing right next to the chives.  Tiny white bells on Crayola green stalks, sending out their own wonderful scent every Spring and my mother would collect a small handful of them and put them in a colorful glass vase.  Lily of the Valley is not a common scent to me now, but when I was growing up, I could catch that scent every time I went outdoors.  The chives were not really fragrant unless I picked them, but the lilies released their scent unaided.

It strikes me now how these plants characterized my parents and it’s probably why I find myself looking for them now that it’s getting warmer out.  My dad is practical, a builder, the guy you’d want to call if anything went wrong because he would know how to fix things, what to do next.  And my mother was always more of an indoors girl who loved books and music.  They were the perfect balance of indoors and outdoors, practice and theory, the world around us and the eternal.  And now, it’s the smell of chives growing in parks and fields in New York City that reminds me of home, breakfast, and spring.

All photos by me!