There and Back Again: the unplugged album
This is how I know I’m back from the Camino de Santiago: I burned my tongue on gas station coffee, driving the interstate north from New Mexico to Colorado. The hot, sharp sting from that plastic cup felt like a snake bite, the risk you take when you walk too close to the sheltering shade of sagebrush or cool clefts in the rock under the relentless desert sun.
I started to realize I was back when I noticed airports and train stations felt more comfortable than familiar cities and towns. The tickertape of news from Washington is everywhere, and so unnerving now, I can’t even look at it, though it does its best to suck me in. Relentless. The manic pace of this place is so intense, so constant, for me it’s relieved by driving 80 miles an hour down a gray highway, looking at pronghorn antelope, an eagle slowly circling overhead. In my mind, I’m driving at the level of those clouds building on the horizon. This actually feels slower. The highway feels slower than the mindset of this country I’ve returned to. I don’t know how to be here, but I don’t know how to not be here – my whole family is here, and I love them, and I couldn’t wait to see them; but I’m not sure how workable this is going to be in the long run.
It’s sort of like this: I left with a crewcut, and a backpack, and all the time I would need. And I returned with a backpack that’s far too big, doesn’t fit me any more, and a mop of hair that is neither attractive nor controlled. This is probably my attitude toward this society right now: so uncomfortable. I have no interest in being attractive, or controlled, or fitting here. And now I wonder how much time I’m going to need.
Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees; Time can break your heart, have you begging please…begging please…
— Eric Clapton, “Tears in Heaven,” Unplugged
In a strange way, the quietness of the Camino was matched by the busy pace of New York, where I arrived from Spain. Floating equally anonymous and unimportant along my way, I was able to observe small moments on the streets, stop to hear music in a jazz club, search for a book on sidewalk tables. I stayed in a hostel, slept in a bunk, lived out of my backpack, just as before. Yet once I got to the quiet of New Mexico, I realized I was overwhelmed by the roaring pace of ordinary American life.
But even that’s not as accurate as I’d like to be. That’s just one piece. If I don’t want to hear the noise, I can just turn it off. It would be easy in my own space. But I don’t have my own space, just this jeep, and walking. Everywhere else is through the kindness of people who love me – a grand generosity, but subject to their relationship with the world, with information, with speed, with technology, … with noise.
So I’m also trying to figure out how to not leap back into the rat race as if I was an alternate on a relay team and now they need me – hurry, lace up your shoes, start running. I’m not interested in that any more, either, and I think the options that will come my way first will be more of the same. Instead of taking those baton hand-offs for the endless racing around in circles, I have to deflect them. I’m not sure even if I get a job and tell them, “Look, every year I go on pilgrimage, it’s what I do, it’s the reason I work, so if that’s not gonna work for you, this isn’t gonna work for me” – even if I tell them that, will I still maintain what I brought back? Or will I slowly melt into the madness again, slowly put back on my racing shoes, slowly just go back to the way it was before? I can’t lose this, and I’m not sure how to keep it.
Woke up this mornin’, feel ’round for my shoes, you know ’bout that babe, had them old walkin’ blues….
— Robert Johnson, “Walkin’ Blues,” Eric Clapton Unplugged
What is “it,” anyway, this invisible Hero’s Journey elixir. I feel like I’ve brought back a pocket of mountain mist…the sound of the sea…the texture of Roman stone roads imprinted on the soles of my feet…arms of comrades still draped lovingly across my shoulders. I keep searching as I drive past New Mexico arroyos hinting they’ve recently held rain.
I’ve been gone three months. A season in the Spanish sun. Which is how I measured my days – by the sun. My phone was reduced to a humble camera – no international phone service, no text messaging, no email, no GPS. No internet. Nada.
It forced me to quit forcing life. Our iPhones actually use two standard “commands” to keep our messages and appointments and frantic anxiety and relentless noise up-to-the-obscene-minute: PUSH and FETCH. Good god. Push it through, push it through, like forcing new prisoners into cattle cars before the horrified eyes of those already captured. Or fetch it for me, a lordly order using the intonation of a dog command, as if we ourselves are not the slaves ordered to fetch more news, more appointments, more crazy news, more assignments, more insane news, more useless meetings, more possible world war news, more messages we dread to open because it’s just one more impossible thing we are expected to manage or accomplish with a sickly smile.
As if we ourselves, the prisoners and slaves, haven’t created this culture of force. We have, by participating in it, by accepting it. We are many. We could be mighty. But we’re afraid to lose what we believe we have: security. So we push and fetch.
The highway passes out of one reservation boundary and into the next. So many reservations in the American West. I am sadly familiar with these road signs of despair: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ohkay Owingeh, Acoma, Cochiti, Laguna. Over 20 exist just in New Mexico, sometimes lumped together to make it seem like the individual tribes have more space and more power than they actually do. Many that could be mighty. I realize they have the security that so distresses me: maximum security. The terrible security of imprisonment and slavery. Oh, they are free to walk off the reservation any time they want – but where can they go if they are still wearing spiritual and emotional chains of fear and defeat?
Must be invisible; no one knows me. I have crawled down dead-end streets on my hands and knees. I was born with a ragin’ thirst, a hunger to be free, but I’ve learned through the years, don’t encourage me.
— Eric Clapton, “Lonely Stranger,” Unplugged
I’m feeling like I’ve returned to the rez. Seeing the people I love searching for the water of hope in a desert of anxiety. Handcuffed by earbuds and remote controls forcefeeding them despair disguised as news. Trying to find electronic comraderie and escape from the battle fatigue of the day in games of more battle, like bailing a brother out of detox and then coming home to drink cheap vodka on the porch together. Everyone’s strung out on screens, fingers twitching keyboards like they’ve got the shakes.
And now as I’m driving north, I just want to put on my shoes and walk. Hike. Run. I’m looking for the Camino on every walking path and running trail. At 80 mph on this interstate highway.
I watch cloud shadow cross the silent red mesas. I feel similar shadows crossing my brow. Looking south, out across limitless miles of sage and yucca and rabbitbrush, my mind is eased. It quiets. Opens again. Calms my heart, as I feel myself once again standing on the shore of the endless sea, watching the waves crash forever against the rocks, watching the day drift into night.
This is the magic elixir. I understand what I’ve brought back in my pack: freedom. Anti-venom for the snake bite. My pack isn’t too big; it’s big enough to hold freedom for myself and for anyone else who wants some. How I found it and brought it back is another story.
I am free. Sounds pretentious, or idealistic. Actually it’s somewhat disorienting, after all these years. You’ll feel a little lightheaded as the poison leaves your system. Take it slow.
Then we’d go running on faith, all of our dreams would come true, and our world will be right, when love comes over me and you….
— Eric Clapton, “Running on Faith,” Unplugged