eight centuries later, in the year 813 or 814, a shepherd named Pelayo or Pelagius had a vision of a bright star, which led him to the place where James had apparently been buried. This is the spot where the cathedral was later built and the little town of Santiago de Compostela established. The name of the town tells the story: Santo Iago (Saint James), Compos (field), Stella (stars). James is also the patron saint of Spain.
The first written record of a pilgrim walking the Camino dates from the year 940. In the subsequent centuries tens of thousands of people walked from every corner of Europe each year to pay homage at James’ grave, and in the process be granted forgiveness for their sins. The Camino starts at your front door, the moment you put a foot over the threshold.
There were apparently also forced pilgrimages: instead of serving jail time, some of those convicted were made to walk the Camino. You could even “delegate” someone else to walk your Camino and to receive forgiveness on your behalf at Santiago de Compostela.
The Camino became so huge that it began to overshadow the other two famous and ancient Christian pilgrimages – those to Jerusalem and to Rome – in popularity.
Brierley mentions that this early growth must be seen against the background of the Catholic Church’s attempts to consolidate its presence in Spain in the early Middle Ages, especially once the Moors had been expelled during the Crusades.
Here too the apostle James played a mythical – and controversial – role: He is known in Spain as Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer). According to the legend, the apostle appeared on a white horse during the Battle of Clavijo and crushed a numerically vastly superior army of Moors with his sword.
From the Milky Way to the Moors … it remains a magical story that stirs the imagination of millions to this day.
* * *
9 March 1816: 5 rebels hanged … only Stephanus Cornelis Bothma’s rope did not snap … prosecutor Jacob Glen Cuyler … . “It will perhaps be a satisfaction to His Excellency to hear the prisoners one and all died fully resigned to their fate …”
10 October 1815 … “ruffian” … Frederik Cornelis (Freek) Bezuidenhout (55) from the farm Baviaansrivier … now Silverbrook (Johan Troskie) refuses to be arrested, farm in Baviaansrivier … shot at Pandoers … shot and killed, tried to hide in rock crevasse.
My rough notes on the Slagtersnek Rebellion are becoming unmanageable on my irritatingly small Samsung Netbook.
I can’t stop thinking of the satisfaction I’ll feel when I chuck the laptop and phone away at Charles de Gaulle. It’s absurd: sitting up here in the sky on the way to the longest holiday of my life, after all the flaming hoops I’ve jumped through over the past few months, with an article that’s still not finished. It’s enough to make you certifiably insane.
Bun Booyens, my first editor at Go, gave a talk at the KKNK once in which he described how his journalists’ writing styles differ. Toast Coetzer’s words flow like a waterfall, and Bun imagines him writing with one hand, while steering with his knees, holding a KFC Rounder in his other hand. Dana Snyman has a different approach. He is like a cat having kittens. Approach him cautiously, keep your distance, and when you look again, there’s a precious new arrival.
And me? Erns sits in front of the laptop like a dog that’s swallowed poison …
* * *
I yield to the temptation of the in-flight entertainment despite (or maybe because of) the pressure of work. The laptop’s batteries are not going to last until Doha anyway; I’ll have to come up with another Slagtersnek plan at the airport during the eight-hour stopover.
I scroll through the movies. My eye catches Wild (2014), with Reese Witherspoon in the leading role, based on the bestseller with the same title by Cheryl Strayed.
Wild tells the story of Cheryl’s epic solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA. She covered almost 1 800 kilometres on her own in 94 days, with hardly any hiking experience and infinitely more baggage than she had in her rucksack.
Her hike began in the Mojave Desert in southern California. During the hike she has constant flashbacks to her childhood, the death of her mother, rough sex with strangers, and a heroin phase for good measure. Oh, and the collapse of her marriage, and an abortion. One is tempted to ask her, in the vein of a New Yorker cartoon: “Other than that, Mrs Kennedy, how was your trip to Dallas?”
The film is incredibly inspiring. I can’t help making certain connections between Strayed’s story and my own imminent hike.
Look, I don’t foresee having to lick the dew off my tent when I run out of water, or covering the distances she covered without seeing a single soul. The Camino is far too popular for that. My guidebook tells me that in 2014 exactly 237 886 pilgrims arrived at Santiago de Compostela. Of these, 161 994 walked the Camino Francés, the route that I’m going to take.
But like Strayed, I also have a lot of baggage I’d like to get rid of. Physical and emotional. Baggage that has kept me very busy for a very long time, that I don’t necessarily want to think about, but that is always lurking just below the surface. The cracks in the “room beneath the floor”, as the psychoanalyst James Hollis refers to the unconscious. Let’s face it, I don’t think people decide, without reason(s), to take six weeks’ leave to go and backpack around Spain alone without a cell phone, watch or camera.
I scribble a few quotes from the film in among my Slagtersnek notes, especially from the part where she reaches her destination at the Bridge of the Gods on the Oregon–Washington border after so many challenges, crises and adventures:
•“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish, or die, or take another course? What if I forgive myself? What if I was sorry?”
•“We are never prepared for what we expect.”
•“After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods. Thank you … for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know.”
•“It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”
* * *
What thoughts and sensations will I arrive at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela with in about forty days’ time? Or, firstly: will I make it there?
The obvious psychological challenges – in themselves a morass – aside, four physical aspects worry me constantly:
1. At 92 kilograms I am seriously overweight.
My body mass index (BMI) is a staggering 31,1 – so technically I am obese. A bit like the title of the Valiant Swart song: “Diknek en klein tandjies”. So, getting over the Pyrenees on Day One won’t be fun. I was full of good intentions and little schemes to take on the Camino considerably lighter and leaner, but alas. It’s a vicious cycle – I am an emotional eater, constantly stuffing my face to ward off the anxiety.
2. I am unfit.
The story I keep trying to tell myself is one that travel author Dana Snyman once told in a Go article on club rugby in small towns. The one about the farmer who lives a little way out of town and won’t travel back and forth into town on weekdays to train with the local
