On The Road: The Hero’s Journey
Further misadventures among the field of stars, May 2014
‘Myth is the foundation of life: it is the timeless pattern, the religious formula to which life shapes itself…Whereas in the life of mankind, the mythical represents an early and primitive stage of life, in the life of an individual it represents a late and mature one.’ Thomas Mann
Back in Somerset, I had scrawled four loose goals in the front of one of four cheap notebooks: find strength, lose weight, bond with Lula belle — one of several pet names I had for my daughter — and heal the father wound. As we passed the church at the bottom of the cobbled road and through the Notre Dame arch and over the river, I turned and saw BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) and child looking down on me.
It was time to ask for her blessing. I wasn’t a catholic but no matter.
Standing astride the catholic-protestant schism of my parentage as she did, it seemed clear she was looking out for me, and it reminded me of another, unwritten, goal I had in mind: to cement the sacred marriage of masculine and feminine within and to one day help men and women set aside their differences and find peace.
It seemed like a plan and as Meg and I left the ancient town through the Porte D’Espagne, we forked up the often dangerous red route or route de Napoleon, foolishly forsaking the gentler Valcarlos, or green route.
Normally, I understood that red meant stop and green meant go, but in crossing into continental Europe I decided to eschew common sense and put my faith in the unseen. Though not quite.
About six weeks before my departure, I attended a talk by a Glastonbury astrologer-now-friend, John Wadsworth, who had walked The Way a year or two earlier and was an ardent proselytiser. His advice was to stop after the first eight kilometres at Auberge Orisson and spend the night, rather than tracking the full 27 kilometres straight up more than 4,500 feet and down the other side to Roncesvalles, the valley of thorns, in Spain.
His advice, together with a godsend in the form of 25-year-old Texan Jeannie, may have just saved my life.
For it was not long before the full horror of what I had taken on dawned, not like the yellow sun that would so often cake me in sweat but, depressingly, like the blackest of nights. With the pack on my back, I was carrying 270lbs, which seemed intent on pulling me backwards deeper into France not forwards into Spain.
They call this first few days of the trail before Pamplona the physical part. Whoever said it wasn’t kidding and it was soon apparent that I couldn’t make it. Every 30 yards I would stop and lean on my walking poles, fighting for breath.
Fat people, old people and French people strode past me. My daughter, who was carrying 100lbs or so less danced around me. She circled back and forth, caught between leaving the old man and steaming ahead, and daughterly duty.
It would soon become apparent the resentments she held toward me since my departure when she was just two put daughterly duty way down her list of priorities.
How the fuck did these old people walk so fast? And how the hell had I gotten myself into such a parlous state?
The night before we had dinner in another auberge, three trestle tables of tourists ready for the off. The owner gave his speech, much of which is lost to me, but this I do remember: don’t stop on a hill, he had said, you may never get going again.
But I had to stop. There was no way I couldn’t stop. Meg on the other hand, stepped up the mountain like a billy goat on steroids and was clearly struggling to hold herself back.
After just a few kilometres and facing another sharp incline, I was almost done. With surprising ease, the adventurer in me fixed his vision on a sofa and a movie. The thought of giving up was wonderful, but I knew I couldn’t. My whole future depended on this one thing, this next step.
My friend Sue’s parting words were ringing in my ears: ‘Don’t you dare come back unless you finish it.’
But how? I couldn’t go on and I could not go back. I was at what is amusingly called the jumping off place. The only thing I could do was pray. I was utterly powerless.
It occurred to me with a bleak and sagging ferocity that I was done — after about 3 kilometres.
Almost immediately, Jeannie came into view. We had met briefly when I went to sit, exhausted, with her and her father Max by the side of the road. They had gone on ahead, but I knew she was struggling with an injured knee and, like me, too much weight.
If I’d had any breath left, I would have laughed out loud. I knew from experience the divine moves in mysterious ways and it was typical that I would be rescued not by strength but through weakness. Here was someone worse off than me that I could help.
Then a second godsend: the first of many bars. We all but crawled in and I sidled past a sleeping dog, parked myself on a chair and took the Coke provided by Max who had descended to his daughter together with her mother. It wasn’t long before I figured the Camino was part of some long-term rehabilitation for Jeannie.
Max had earned himself a minor rebuke for reaching into a fridge for my Coke. It wouldn’t be the last time this American found himself at odds with what was to him the inscrutable European mind.
Whenever he started a sentence with ‘In America, we…’, and grinned, I knew we were in for some Maxisms on Spain, and the failures of the particular Spaniard — often a waiter — who happened to be in front of us at the time.
What made him, and other Americans, particularly enraged and/or confused was the siesta — or what one indignant local smartly snapped was ‘lunch’ — that lasted from 2pm to around 5pm.
Didn’t these people know their economy was down the toilet? Didn’t they get there was more money to be earned, more busy-ness to be had, that the engine of individualism needed constant stoking? Wasn’t their some ersatz enthusiasm they could muster?
No, was the clear and unabashed answer, and it always, always created a huge grin as deep as it was wide somewhere within me to see the vast U.S ego slammed into a corner and looking for a way out it simply couldn’t find. I could have thrown Max and his compatriots a bone but I knew it was pointless.
It was amazing how sheepish I could feel when met by such fixity of view. Some days later over dinner, I would tell him that I had thrown myself on God’s mercy and had spent 51 years accumulating nothing but a small debt.
He was peeling an orange but looked up bemused. I had, it seemed, sunk in his estimation, hovering somewhere on the same level as a lazy, sleepy Spaniard, content with a beingness utterly anathema to the American psyche.
In fact, I had some sympathy with his position, apart from one thing. Deep inside, I knew that despite appearances all was well, that everything I had gone through in my life was purposeful, perhaps even planned, and that this pauper was really a prince in disguise.
Apart from the Chironic myth (let’s save that for another time), another Greek story held the bones of my own particular family tragedy. It was the story of Orestes whose father, King Agamemnon, was murdered in his bath by his wife and her lover after years of war, which began with his sacrifice of one of the couple’s children.
Her vengeance was understandable yet it placed Orestes in a dilemma. Duty bound to avenge his father’s killer, matricide was the worst of crimes. In the end he slays his mother, and is cursed by flying harpies who torment him until he finally takes full responsibility for the whole sorry saga. At which point he gets a lifetime of whispering sweet nothings to soothe his final days.
When my father went off with another woman when I was a toddler, he savagely wounded my mother. Years later, she would ensure upon the insistence of her new husband, that he never saw his sons again, and I was instructed to call the new man ‘dad’ and lie about my provenance at school.
It was just one of the elements that eventually gave birth to a despair that I had fought nearly half a century to conquer, but had carved out a kind of homespun wisdom only borne of deep suffering.
Here, now, on a foreign hillside, I had to decide whether to push on and live or fall back into France and failure. I pushed on towards Spain, coaxing Jeannie up the mountain a few, short yards at a time.
I had known it was only by reducing my life to the rough rudiments of survival and physical challenge that I could escape defeat and early death.
What I had under my belt, apart from a well-nurtured belly, was some years of spiritual practise and an absolute faith in the unity behind all things.
I had three mantras at my disposal: Om Namaha Shivaya (roughly ‘thy will be done’); another secret one following my initiation on the ancient path of light and sound (curiously on 11.11.11); and something rather more Anglo-Saxon.
‘Fuck’ and ‘fuck it’ seemed to win out, and I was sure I could feel legions of angels chortling in the wings.
Jeannie and I started to find a rhythm and a method. (Okay, okay let’s not go there, pretend you are a grown up.)
One of us would fix our gaze on the next object. ‘Okay, to the next post,’ I would say and off we went, wheezing and puffing, as her parents moved on ahead. You learn quickly here how we all need one another, as if we are all in our own private war, which of course we are.
‘Once you set out, there is no going back, no one to save you bar yourself, and only a relentless forward motion come what may,’ I wrote at the time, but it was not strictly true. Jeannie and I saved one another and although the next day I would succumb to the pressure to move on, trusting her progress to others, she would forever hold a special place in my heart.
As we passed wild ponies and cattle, I spied a ring of vultures circling above, and realised we had to follow The Way and its famous yellow markers that appeared on anything not nailed down, and on some things that were.
I had wondered who painted the yellow arrows that directed the trail, on rocks, boulders, pavements, walls and so on. I pictured a small government office in some neglected out-of-the-way building. In it are three men and a donkey playing cards. The donkey suggests drawing straws.
A skinny guy — let´s call him Ferdinand — pulls the short one.´Right,’ says the donkey, ´On your Way Ferdinand, and don´t forget the yellow paint.´
In truth, eight kilometres is a short distance. I had been walking it for weeks, but not up a sharp and seemingly never-ending incline and not with a pack on my back. As we hit the road, a French couple drove past shaking their heads.
Suddenly, the hostel was in sight. We were going to make it. I checked in and headed to the dorm where an exhausted Meg was spark out but had been persuaded to surrender her bottom bunk to her father.
If I’d had to face a ladder, albeit a small one, that might have finished me. I downed a coffee and a cheese sandwich, while Max and a small group of fellow survivors ploughed into the wine.
That night, some 40 or 50 pilgrims from all over the world, sat and ate a meal of soup followed by pork and beans, before being asked to introduce themselves.
I stood up and told the gathered throng at least some of the truth: “I am having a midlife crisis, and thought I would subject my daughter to it,” I said.
Everyone laughed, and although I knew the archetypal nature of my life meant as Mann said, my soul was experiencing a late and mature lifetime, I still doubted the world was ready to hear such things.
That would be for another day.
© Simon Heathcote
