This post is adapted from my loosely scrawled outline for a rehearsal dinner speech I gave at my friend Danny’s wedding in New Orleans this May.
On a February night in 2015, I was minding my own business at a Duluth East-Blaine game at Fogerty Arena, locked in on a back-and-forth affair that saw 13 goals and an overtime. Some guy, having successfully Twitter-stalked me, tracked me down afterward and introduced himself. I promptly forgot him, though I managed to pretend otherwise when he re-introduced himself to me at that year’s State Tournament, and before long I’d been invited to attempt a podcast on high school hockey. The rest is history.
The podcast was the perfect launching point for both of us, and it gave us both the perfect outlet to share our thoughts on the sport we love in our ways. But before long, it became clear that Danny and I shared more than an unhealthy high school hockey obsession. We were born nine days apart, and our moms grew up a few miles from each other in suburban Chicago; years later, we realized we’d competed against each other in high school Knowledge Bowl meets. But our tie was more than mere coincidence: we were also going through a similar phase of life when we met, as we settled down on to roads far from our pre-college plans.
At the same time, though, there was a hunger. Danny was not going to be content just going to a few hockey games. He had to make the best podcast, attend the most games, find those outlets in which a natural homebody became a social butterfly and shared the fun with everyone around him: random connections invited to dinner, jersey-chasing games with high school kids, drinking in the full scene. It applies beyond hockey, too, where he seeks out the best food there is, sucks up all the random trivia, goes deep into his passion projects. To hang out with Danny is to learn the minutiae of every Ken Burns documentary, of the Donner Party or Hemingway, to dive in deep into topics of intrigue.
I made an easy slide in with his family, off on adventures that might involve Karl Pours at the Ryan family cabin or that ridiculous party during the Minneapolis NCAA Final Four at The Butcher and the Boar or us just puttering around Minneapolis when we both lived there. Before long I was passing up much cozier guest lodging in the city for his comfy couch a block off Loring Park: here I would get good food from one of the best chefs I know, good company for both adventurous and quiet nights, and a window into the ever-expanding hockey jersey collection.
Living this way Danny does, with a such strong sense of self, can make it hard to settle down with someone. (I speak here with firsthand knowledge.) And so, when Miranda came along, I managed my expectations about how well she’d handle someone who attended 92 hockey games the year they met. The beginning was inauspicious: we will not speak of Miranda’s first State Tournament, and the time she had to go headfirst through a window at the Ryan family cabin to save the day for Danny’s mom and her friend likewise did not portend a seamless blending of two worlds.
But there was clearly work being done here, a shared journey undertaken. Danny and Miranda were going to make this work. I finally saw it in full a few years ago when they came up for peak fall colors with their bernedoodle Beary—who, unlike his housemate Muffin, is a chill, sweet, kind dog. (I’m convinced Muffin is a member of a Hamas sleeper cell.) There was an ease to their interactions, the rhythm of good-natured humor of two people finding their way to a life they could share. Miranda and Danny can come off as low-key but are astute observers of their world, drive hard for what they want, and have become great company to keep.
And so their wedding in New Orleans this May was the culmination of that shared journey. They power through obstacles and exercise their agency. They brought us together, a party in their favorite city with their favorite people, the rest of us along for the ride to share in it. Here we were, able to spend a week downing delicious food, celebrating at a grand Southern estate, dancing down the streets of the French Quarter for a second line. Who could ask for more? So here’s to the good memories we have made, the good ones we will make, and that shared journey we’re all on with them here. To Danny and Miranda.
I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
Give my Aunt Trisha this: she knew what she wanted. She was always the rebel of the family, the one prone to a sudden life-changing decision that would leave everyone else scratching their heads. In a family of twelve she lived the hardest of anyone, and her body paid the price. But she remained unapologetic, herself to the end, committed to the paths she chose, and she had plenty of fun along the way.
When I first came into consciousness, Trisha was living with her son Brian at my grandparents’ house in Lombard, Illinois. Not long after, she made one of her sharp turns and picked up and moved to Wisconsin to tend bar, temporarily joining my family in the Badger State. Thanks to that proximity I remember more of Trisha in my earliest years than any other aunt or uncle. I was too young to have many distinct memories; she was just a presence, always there with her big, rolling laugh, free from any pretense.
Aunt Trisha led a different sort of life from most of the family, but her unique path did not stem from any shortage of intelligence or capacity for insight. In those early childhood memories she was very attentive to me, in no way babying, imparting knowledge and logic, the straightforward real talk of someone who knew her course. She had a deep memory and could recall tales from her past with startling specificity, and when she found a willing listener, storytime could last for hours.
As stubborn as she was, the wheels were always churning beneath, maybe questioning, maybe justifying, always moving. I recall sitting with her at my grandmother’s wake some three years ago, not long after Brian had passed, and her poignant statement, offered as a simple fact, that the true loss of her only child had happened years earlier. I do not know how well she coped, deep inside; I’m not sure anyone can, as the mental and physical tolls mounted. In those later years she came back into the family fold after a time of relative absence, a return to those old rhythms she remembered well, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of the support she needed, that we all need.
In another family Aunt Trisha might have been written off as the black sheep, or her forays met with a resigned shrug. Instead, the most prodigal Maloney always had a safe harbor. When she came home with Brian, her staid and very Catholic parents welcomed her in; whatever judgment there may have been did not leak out into the open. Later, other family members took on thankless work to help a lovable but stubborn soul enjoy some measure of freedom as life caught up with her: the Joneses in her South Bend days, the Downeys when she ventured back into Chicagoland, and everyone else in ways large and small. Keeping the family whole came first.
In the late stages, her deteriorating body did not stop her from continuing the push. Aunt Trisha gutted out last summer’s family trip to Europe despite increasing immobility, somehow surviving an incredibly inaccessible Venice and then mostly parking on the cruise ship deck with margaritas while the rest of us went ashore. (Like her late older sister Kathleen, she simply had to go on that last cruise.) When she came home from that trip she then made one last hard-to-fathom move, this time to Florida. She seemed to know her days were short and wanted to make what she could of them, a fate accepted with typical resolve. The party would continue to the end.
Aunt Trisha’s passing is a blow to our giant family unit, but even though it comes too soon, it comes with peace: she certainly went on her own terms. Somewhere she lingers, parked in a chair, cheap beer and a cigarette at hand, her laugher booming through a crowded room as she spins another yarn for anyone who will listen. She did it her way. The rest of us were along for the ride, doing what we could when we could and hopefully, in the end, finding peace too.
A courtesan, not old enough and yet no longer young, who shuns the sunlight that the illusion of her former glory preserved. The mirrors in her house are dim and the frames are tarnished; all her house is dim and beautiful with age. She reclines gracefully upon a dull brocaded chaise-lounge, there is the scent of incense about her, and her draperies are arranged in formal folds. She lives in an atmosphere of a bygone and more gracious age.
-William Faulker, “The Tourist,” New Orleans Sketches
Riding in from the airport to downtown New Orleans I observe two things: it is flat and it is wet. Water pools in canals and stray lowlands, portends more water, water seeping in and slowly rising, a whiff of doom amid the building heat and low grey clouds. Ridiculous feats of engineering make this city possible, from the levees holding back the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain to the spillways and the Old River Control System redirecting waters from the north. These days the most fearsome assault comes from the south, where the Gulf slowly eats up more and more of the protective swamps and bayous. The Nola response to these tenuous tides is a redoubled commitment to its cause: party even harder, live even more in the moment.
New Orleans is the love child of American excess and Spanish urban form, as if Las Vegas had been dropped atop a pleasing grid and then had some French affectations sprinkled over it like powdered sugar on a beignet. On the first of two visits for weddings this spring I am in the district of hotel towers just west of the French Quarter, high rises that disgorge revelers to lassiez les bons temps rouler. The second time around, I decamp to the Monteleone, a grand old thing in the heart of the beast. This city’s founders put the Quarter on the highest, driest ground available and gave it an artistry no American city can match, probably because the Americanness all came so much later. Here tight little streets are lined with beautiful balconies to drink in the revelry below, to catch a breeze off the Gulf to cool down after a long, hot day. In this sense it is European, but the only places the activities below might invoke are Ibiza or Benidorm.
Today, the French Quarter is both beautiful and utterly debauched. Every night the partying hordes emerge from wherever it is they come from and parade down Bourbon Street, slugging down hand grenades and hurricanes, concoctions that are one-way streets to oblivion. It is chaotic, it is loud, and it never stops, only reaches higher and higher apexes on weekends and around certain holidays. The street crews emerge the next morning to wash it all down, rinse and repeat.
One morning, a man wanders through the lobby of the Monteleone yelling that he has been drugged and robbed. As I await a pickup, a group of men literally roll about in a gutter along Canal Street, pouring beers over their heads to cleanse themselves. New Orleans is an olfactory smorgasbord, sometimes good (the food!), but usually not (vomit, secondhand weed, overdone perfume or cologne, garbage). Faulkner’s memories of a more graceful age are overrun.
I seek out other sides of New Orleans, search for that old mystique. To stroll through the Garden District is to drift past colorful columned old grandees amid lush landscaping, past the house where Archie Manning raised his brood; as in many great American cities, million-dollar real estate can still get one a taste of the character that made the place. Towering, gnarled oaks draped in Spanish moss command the parks near the art museum, further evoking that complicated Southern sensibility, stateliness concealing old secrets. On the second visit I do dinner at a Trinidadian eatery in Mid City with the groom from the first, and with a move to DC looming, he is wistful for everything he is about to leave behind, the easy demeanors and the jazz and music scene that is so authentically from this place. Embed oneself at safe remove from the chaos and the spell this city casts starts to make sense.
New Orleans is a place of deep history, plaques and homages to people who in other towns would have drifted out of consciousness. Cemeteries are attractions unto themselves. On a grander scale, the World War Two Museum tells a good American story, a throwback to a time when there wasn’t much contestation about sweeping national narratives. This city, of course, is part of the death of that dream: on a run north and east of the Quarter, out toward the neighborhoods whose names are numbered wards, I pass some of the shotgun homes that survived Katrina, the ravaged, Blackest parts of New Orleans, home to the stewards of the old cultures crowded out by blasting pop on Bourbon Street. The struggle seems real in more sense than one.
The city strains, the infrastructure crumbles, dollars pour in to fix it. The potholes in a flat city with no snow are somehow worse than Duluth’s. The famed St. Charles Streetcar may be the world’s dorkiest, no maintenance performed in decades to the point that its creakiness has become part of the charm. If you don’t keep it up you might as well let it go, call it historic, and endure it at the speed of an ambling brass band. No one would name this thing desire today, but it is still great fun.
The heart of New Orleans is Jackson Square, a blurring of Spanish and French and American: a cathedral here, a cabildo there, street artists along the edges, a placid garden in the center. At its heart sits the victorious general turned populist president astride his steed. New Orleans’ Confederates have come down, but Andrew Jackson remains, a fitting figure for this city: democratic in spirit with all the joy and flattening that word entails, racially troubled and yet still a child of a blended nation, a mixed drink enjoyed as a corrective to staid impulses but deadly in excess.
Excess? The food scene here is that and more, and my friend Danny is a connoisseur of this world. The white tablecloth French Quarter stalwarts consume many hours of my second trip there, coursed meals and bananas Foster and oysters Rockefeller at their origins. For the true culinary cutting edge there is the new New Orleans: Cajun delicacies at Cochon, radical sandwiches at Turkey and the Wolf, comfort food with an uplifting story at Café Reconcile. And then there is Friday lunch at Galatoire’s, Kentucky Derby caliber attire on display, with guest appearances by a brass band and Marie Antoinette and her court. It is pure spectacle, and I can play this game, bust out that Italian linen suit from Ravenna or a few pastels and slip into this murky gumbo, at least for the three hours of a good Nola meal.
I slowly succumb to the New Orleans torpor. Bloated by food and drink and oppressed by the heat, I lapse into naps and late mornings, planned explorations reduced to halfhearted strolls. Late night pool parties at the Monteleone pickle my skin. Exhaustion creeps in; tempers flare. But I keep up appearances, escape to find second winds and then jump back in. We ride this slow, clattering trolley past beauty and rot, on toward the end of the line, wherever that may be.
Thankfully, that end is in sight, at least for now. I have been traveling nonstop for seven straight weeks. I have become a packing automaton, my bags organized with military precision, a perpetual motion machine. My hair has achieved pandemic shutdown stage length. Half of my pants have olive oil stains. All this fun takes a toll on the body to the point that I crave salads and some sobriety, and my appetite for meeting new people has run its course. My patience fades. There is not much left to say. It is time to go home.
Mood shift, for the third time this trip: I head to Mendoza, a two-hour flight to the west of Buenos Aires, a city tucked in the shadow of the Andes. Mendoza gave the gift of malbec to the world, and it remains a great wine-growing region, so roughly a dozen wedding guests have made their way out here to continue the afterparty. We are strewn about between downtown Mendoza and the placid towns heading south toward the Valle de Uco, and I crash at a small bed and breakfast a block off the main square in Chacras de Coria.
Chacras is a quiet town of low-slung, walled-off houses and unassuming quality restaurants. The smell of grilling meat drifts through the air and settles over my patio seat outside my room at the B&B. Thick sycamores and elms in fall color line a network of drainage channels called acequias, a legacy of the Huarpe and Inca that break up an otherwise dusty landscape. A wine country dry heat hangs over the foothills of the Andes, and the mountains above us shiver with a strong wind pouring down, a sign snow is falling on the slopes of Aconcagua, the highest point in the Americas, some 200 kilometers to the west. By the third day the winds stop and the temperature plummets over twenty degrees, a sign of deep autumn here in Mendoza.
My B&B is the pet project of an American named Bruce, a Vietnam era fighter pilot who later flew commercial planes. Bruce has electric blue eyes, a long and scraggly mane, and is one of the more astonishing humans I have ever met. His global travels have taken him to every continent and just about every ski hill on offer, flitting from place to place, adventures in motorcycle racing, a home in Giza, a German ex-wife, and even some time in Minnesota. After decades of an itinerant life he landed in Mendoza, the house choosing him, or so he says. He is now the pilot of this little B&B, a labor of love going on 20 years.
We spend my first night in Mendoza in conversation over meat and drink, though most of it flows in one direction. He diagnoses extreme stress in me, which is both right and wrong; yes, I can be a bundle of nervous energy, these surges often a fuel and sometimes a crutch, a tension no doubt heightened in a place far from home. The lone wolf struggles to understand the chameleon, forever calibrating himself to his surroundings, but the chameleon can come to understand the wolf.
If Bruce’s goal is to give me an escape, his scattershot volleys certainly don’t help the cause. He speaks so softly that I strain to hear, and while he peppers me with questions, only rarely do I sense he is really processing my answers. He grills me on my work and its value and shares his idiosyncratic takes, sometimes insightful and sometimes leaning toward cringe, a jumbo jet on a set path that I cannot alter, and I am intrigued to just watch him fly as far as he can. Here is a man who chose the radical freedom, gave up a family and everything he knew, and now here he is on a Monday night in Chacras de Coria, Argentina, guzzling down wines and holding court for an American kid who thought he was going to have a quiet evening in to recharge his battery before exploring the vineyards. I am fascinated by him, and he has clearly done some good for quite a few locals. But I would not choose to be him.
In spite of everything, Bruce is bullish on Argentina’s future. If Uruguay is a country that just works, Argentina is one that should work but too often does not. It has a world-class capital city of 16 million people, rich agricultural and mineral resources, beautiful countryside from Patagonia all the way up the Andes. Like the United States it is a European settler society, its indigenous peoples generally wiped out or pushed to obscure corners, a tragedy that has left it on a trajectory apart from some of its Andean neighbors. Waves of immigration from Spain and Italy crashed up on its shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a land rush to rival the opening of the American West.
Its modern history, however, is an absolute jumble. The country has managed to escape its long run of military coups over the past 40 years, ever since the hapless Falklands War discredited the last junta, and this is a real achievement. The economy, however, is a different matter, thanks to runaway inflation and the populist patronage machine that is the Justicialist Party, Argentina’s dominant political institution since Juan and Eva Perón showed up on the scene. Putting up the Economy Minister in a nation with rampant inflation did not work out well for the Peronists in the 2023 elections, and Argentina is now running an experiment with Javier Milei, a Trumpy figure with no legislative support and five cloned dogs named after University of Chicago economists. The drama goes on, though the early returns suggest one of his ideas, the dollarization of the economy, is doing some good to stabilize prices and rein in that inflationary scourge that Argentina needs to solve before it can make good on any other promise. That promise, as these next few days show, is considerable.
Dollarization also makes Argentina an even easier country for American visitors, and for us revelers, Mendoza is a land of bountiful excess. Given the difficulty of winery logistics—here is an industry that is just begging to be disrupted—we go off on our own or in small groups, and we share an entertaining group chat. Five or six courses into my seven-course paired meal at Alta Vista (a visit arranged by Bruce and his staff; he is nothing if not a connoisseur of good taste from the whole world over), I report a state of general bliss. One wedding guest who is on a guided tour of the Valle de Uco shares he has just been served his fifth filet mignon of the day; another makes the mistake of counting how many glasses she has consumed. “We need the anti-Ozempic,” our bride writes as she ponders her dinner reservation with dread. Indeed, after a siesta and plenty of time to digest, I can only stomach a small salad for dinner in downtown Mendoza, while a tablemate pokes feebly at her eggplant. Three of us end up at a rooftop bar overlooking Mendoza’s gentle grid that night, shivering a little at the coming cold and marveling at what we are a part of here.
The next day we do manage to get a healthy group together for a tour and tasting at Kaiken, where the aging barrels are serenaded by Gregorian chant to create vibrations. (As with Dante in the Palacio Barolo, here is that credulous Latin American melodrama, a feature of a society less beset by the all-knowing cynicism that can plague educated Americans.) Guided by a sommelier, we try an array of malbecs to test the differences between them, and we eventually close the place down. I join Jess and Phil back at Entre Cielos, their sleek spa resort for their mini-moon, and we bask in the hot tub beneath the Southern Cross and hold a scattershot bilingual chat with a man from Chile and a woman from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who have settled here together. Later, we peck at a dinner with two more friends at the resort restaurant. We order as much tea as we do wine. The body can only endure so much here.
I return to Buenos Aires for one final night in Argentina, though the energy for greater exploration has diminished now toward the end of near-constant moves from place to place. I content myself with another night at the Miravida Palermo Soho and stroll around the neighborhood, with visits to the charming Japanese Garden and the rather moribund Ecoparque zoo. One unattached fellow Hoya remains, and we sample a bumping craft brewery named Strange. The beer is superb, and the blasphemous raccoon logos are, well, something.
Once it is time to head back to the airport, I am ready to leave Argentina. I am ready to speak fluent English again, ready to sleep in my own bed; at least for two nights, that is, before the last adventure of my mini sabbatical. In the days that follow I reflect on the juxtaposition between my hunger for that freedom to wander and my natural homing instinct; my embrace of Uruguayan anonymity and my rejection of Bruce’s retreat from all prior commitment.
Is it truly a tension? I’m not so sure. They are both parts of a well-lived life, paces adjusted and waves seized. Here is yet another way to be free: to find the ease of knowing one has found one’s home in a certain place, among certain people, desire and roots aligned. This trip is all a good dream, yes, but I have work to do when I get back home. I couldn’t ask for much more.
This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II
My first impressions of Buenos Aires are mixed. The drive in from the airport is a slog down an apartment-lined highway. Next, I am greeted by a massive protest on the Avenida 9 de Julio, the greatest of the many great porteño avenues, and my cab driver meanders the neighborhood of San Telmo in dismay. The universities of Buenos Aires have risen in rebellion, marching in blocs of matching shirts for their schools, decrying proposed funding cuts by the country’s radical new president. By this evening hour many are disassembling, but some are still pushing forward, chanting and singing, and others have settled under the Obelisco in the city center with beverages. Signage here and there advertises this and future protests, and the next morning, the cleaning crews are rolling through. Argentine protests spawn their own little economy.
When my taxi finally reaches my last second lodging choice for the night, I find my “Presidential Suite” truly unremarkable, a bare bones all-white room with a light that shines through a frosted glass door all night long. (Hey, it was 30-some bucks.) The walk to the ferry dock in the dark the next morning, mostly through an unremarkable office district, does not help. While the Casa Rosada and the Plaza de Mayo are interesting, against a threatening sky and a tight timeline two friends and I are not compelled to linger, and I find myself perhaps suffering from square fatigue after a month of Spanish urban form. (Now, writing from a land far from them, I crave another evening on one of those plazas.)
The grand avenues and plazas are deceiving. Buenos Aires is a gritty city, a metropolis that encompasses all walks of Argentine life. In this country the immigrants never had the chance to move to tract housing in Jersey. They came to places like the Palermo neighborhood, a rough-and-tumble borderland where city met pampa and where streetfighters paved the way for the tango. While in the US the cowboys were always somewhere off in the great western netherland, a legend now filled by projections, in Buenos Aires the gauchos drifted right in. There was no Midwestern buffer between the frontier and the cosmopolitan center of power, and that collision starkly defined the first century-plus of Argentine existence through near endless civil strife between federalists and nationalists. Pampa life was no distant myth here, and even as some of those dusty immigrant suburbs now gentrify, there is still a raw edge to this city.
Predictably, neither copying European high culture nor wallowing in gaucho hagiography has served Buenos Aires well. Certain political figures such as Juan Perón have, arguably, adopted the worst of both. “I want neither progressivism nor criollismo, in the way those words are commonly used,” writes Jorge Luis Borges in “The Full Extent of My Hope,” an essay that holds up a century later. “The first means subjecting ourselves to being almost-North-Americans or almost-Europeans, a tenacious being almost-others. The second, once a word of action…is today a word of nostalgia.” Buenos Aires is a stark collision between two very different worlds, and the nation it rules is still sorting out the twisting strands of those two great stories.
And yet, Buenos Aires is full of gifts from both inheritances, once one learns how to see it. Borges again: “Never have I given myself over to its streets without receiving some unexpected consolation, whether from feeling unreality, from guitars at the back of some patio, or from contact with other lives,” he writes on his city in Evaristo Carriego. In time, I come to understand his sentiment.
The city starts to open up to me when I turn over tour guide duties to my friend Andrew, who studied abroad here. We visit the San Telmo market, an endless string of vendors on a narrow street through a bustling neighborhood of the same name, a delight of maté paraphernalia, art, cookware, Messi and Mafalda swag, CBD brownies, and any other effect one may find necessary. Instead of musicians, tango dancers do the busking; the garb of choice appears to be tracksuits for Boca Juniors, the working-class soccer superpower. Here is a city teeming with life, crowded and edgy, filled with inheritors of the gaucho tradition, even in a metropolis those forerunners would never know.
And then there is the dream of what can be. We tour the Palacio Barolo, a grand office building near the Argentine Congress whose 1920s builders created an homage to Dante: hell in its ornate main hall gilded with gargoyles and dragons, purgatory in the office spaces, and an ascent to paradise in the narrow tower at the top, which culminates in a cupola with a series of balconies and, two floors above that, a glass lighthouse turret that can hold ten vertiginous people for 360-degree views of Buenos Aires at sunset. The city rolls out in every direction, denser than in Borges’ day but aglow in the night, bustling with beauty. As we go about our tour up and down narrow stairs and 1920s elevators, a man dressed as Dante pops up here and there to read cantos from the Divine Comedy, a very Latin American melodramatic flourish that nonetheless sheds light on the vision behind this building.
The day after the wedding, Andrew, his wife Kara, and I spend the night in Palermo Soho, a trendy neighborhood of tree-lined narrow streets and hipster shops. Borges was born here, and many of the low-slung turn of the century buildings remain, enlivened with brilliant color and elaborate mural art, along with some jarring modern additions. Dinner for the three of us plus old roommate Tim is at Don Julio, rated by some critics as the greatest steakhouse on earth. I am in no position to measure it against the competition, but by 1:30 in the morning when our night there is done, I am in no mood to doubt the claim. The butterflied sirloin melts in my mouth, a malbec and a cabernet franc wash it down, the pumpkin and cheese plates just add life, and despite being overstuffed I will indeed have the dulce de leche ice cream for dessert, thank you very much. Food is an art form here, tradition and inventiveness brought together with utmost care. We drift the few blocks back to the Miravida Palermo Soho, a boutique hotel where I have somehow wound up with the lofted penthouse room with a terrace wrapping around two sides of the building. I end my night blissed out on meat and wine, and I say goodnight to my friends and catch the last snippets of revelry in Palermo on the streets below. I rose to a paradise twice in one night.
A confession: I have spent too much of my life in a state of status anxiety. I’ve long run in circles adjacent to considerable wealth and power and enjoyed some of their benefits while never really holding them myself, a position that provides both great fortune through the access it allows and a nonstop sense that I am somehow falling short, have somehow chosen poorly and consigned myself to being a passenger on the grand plans of others. This feeling is exacerbated by certain habits of the current American upper middle class, which include an eternal instinct to downplay any advantages one does enjoy, a sustained myth of equal footing that does not always play out in reality. Too often have I measured myself against opaque but daunting measures of success, queasily collecting Pell grants or opting out of some activities because I cannot afford them, struggling to find the right balance between a knee-jerk frugality and a desire to experience everything my peers are, if not more. It fosters a lingering sense that, no matter how meticulous I have been, I am not quite ready to launch.
Lately, however, I have been able to allow myself a few more flourishes like this terrace at the Miravida Palermo Soho, and I can at least put up the appearance without feeling false. A small achievement, perhaps, but one freighted with some meaning. The ability to move between worlds is a lesson from Georgetown, a recognition that we can contain multitudes, can aspire to snippets of the best of all the worlds we brush through instead of feeling chained to one. I catch myself over dinner in some grumble over my ability to live in certain ways from my perch in Duluth, but on this balcony, I can write that strain away.
Belonging is not a matter of money or title. It is a matter of taste, a matter of belief, of seizing opportunities when they arise. In the grand scheme those things may be small. It is also dependent on finding the right people, and that is by no means small. But here, on a balcony in Buenos Aires, I rest assured that there is nothing false in certain dreams, that a certain life is within my grasp. It is up to me to seize it.
My adventure to the Southern Cone begins, as half my trips anywhere these days seem to do, with travel issues. Ten minutes before I leave my door, Delta informs me the flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires will depart nine hours later than planned. While they feed me, put me up in a decent Atlanta hotel, gift me some miles, and are night and day better than United was to me through comparable past incidents, I am still left lamenting lost time that I can never make up.
I confess that I am spoiled. Any regular flyer knows the absurdity of travel scheduling, the absurdity of our expectations, and the ability to schedule things out so meticulously can crimp the traveler’s mind. On our recent Camino, my dad reflected on his post-college backpack tour of South America in 1981, when there was no way to plan much of anything and he went with just one heaping guidebook to carry him through the whole continent. He would just take a bus to some city, wander until he found adequate lodging, and then stay there, and he came away from all of it just fine. As a millennial I got the slightest snippet of this unplanned life, most notably during my college semester in Mexico, which was just before functional smartphones for trips abroad were a thing. Now, such spontaneity feels like a borderline irresponsible relic, or at best a quaint dream of a different era.
This line of thinking trips an old hunger. On the plane, I break my usual rule about not connecting to the internet (the irony does not escape me) to wistfully reread Roger Cohen’s “Ways to Be Free,” the op ed column that has stuck with me more than any I’ve ever read.
It resonates so fully because the desire it expresses is deep in my bones. I can see my dad in Cohen’s van trip. William Finnegan’s writing on surfing triggered an artistic flourish from me, a fictional project that set re-oriented my trajectory some. I too asked the question Cohen’s son did, without ever quite settling on an answer. The appetite for freedom is inescapable.
I was not in a position to take some grand adventure right after college (or at least I didn’t think I was), but I am now in a position to make up for some lost time. Any annoyance at the delay is forgotten as I drink in the rare experience of a full international flight in the daytime. I love this: over the ten-hour flight I can gaze out my tiny window at the Florida Keys, Cuba, the Panama Canal, the Andes over Ecuador and then Peru and then Chile before sweeping over the pampas and into the sprawl of Buenos Aires. This god’s eye view opens up the possibility of the world, shows how many more places there are to explore.
The contours of the earth always have fascinated me. From the youngest age I was enraptured by atlases and globes, tracing routes across nations I did not know and may never know. I recall some kid on the school bus early on—this must have been first grade, the only year of elementary school I took a bus—asking why I always stared out the window. Because I want to explore every inch of it, I probably would have said if I had the maturity to do so. Now, blessed with some modicum of disposable income, I dispose of it by visiting some of those places. Even with the travel delay, this feels right, some sort of trip I am meant to take.
An odd feature of my mini sabbatical: between my dad’s retirement trip and three weddings, all this travel is because of someone else. Of course I am pleased to go to all these places with all these people, and I had some input in crafting some of the itineraries. But I have just one snippet that is truly my own, for more than a few stray hours: my two-night detour to Uruguay.
The journey from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, takes just over two and half hours by a ferry named Francisco, which bills itself as the world’s fastest catamaran. It cruises smoothly across the Rio de la Plata, the views rather unfortunately blinded by bright string lights all around the windows. The travel delay has cost me my night in Montevideo, and from cab and bus windows it feels a bit tired, the changing fall leaves adding to the general sense of a drift into lost time. From Montevideo it is a two-hour bus ride on to Punta del Este, where I have decided to hole up before I return to Buenos Aires for the wedding.
Uruguay is a remarkable little country wedged between Argentina and Brazil. On the surface it resembles Argentina immensely, with its loves for beef and maté and wine and soccer; like its neighbor, its population is dominated by Spanish and Italian immigrants from around the turn of the 20th century. Its early history was tied up in wars involving its larger neighbors, whose residents still descend on its beaches en masse in peak seasons. But here is little Uruguay, tame as its neighbors overflow in excess, as boring in its politics as its neighbors are bombastic, comparatively affluent and low in crime. It is, perhaps, the most chill country on earth.
Uruguay earns this status not by exuding the painfully orchestrated cool of California or that “what, me worry” style of, say, a Caribbean island where people just expect things not to work. Uruguayans just seem to ease their way through life, living out small dramas, refilling their matés from the thermoses they carry around all day, and channeling any aggression on to the soccer pitch, where they might just bite you to get what they need. Uruguay is not rich, but it does not pretend to be. It works with what it has, and its infrastructure and institutions are the class of Latin America.
Riding out from Montevideo, the suburbs bustle with healthy life and don’t feel too far off from the parts of Portugal or Galicia I toured a few weeks earlier. In the countryside there is some poverty, but it feels stable, like these tiny cobbled-together homes have some staying power the shacks of a slum or dusty Mexican outpost do not, rooted into this pampa sand instead of living each day on the edge. The landscape starts out as plain grassland; cows and horses graze about. A few humpback mounts rise in the distance and grow thicker as I head east, and occasional forests offer pleasant mixes of pines and palms and the great ombú trees of the region. And then, finally, my bus rolls over a hill and reveals South America’s foremost beach resort.
Punta del Este juts out on a snippet of sand where Uruguay’s southern and eastern coasts meet. Its center is more Miami Beach than modest Latin American resort, with clusters of towers and other prime real estate, while further out it drifts into graceful modernist homes settled beneath the pines. As this is fall in South America, it is now the offseason; the towers are mostly quiet, and the trendier clubs are closed up until the next major vacation. I putter around the peninsula and take a minute to appraise the iconic mano of Punta del Este, the hand that rises from the sand. Punta’s style is modern but tasteful, built to drink in the full surroundings, to provoke a few creative thoughts without disrupting the beachfront cool.
Some stray raindrops convince me it’s time to cab up to La Barra, a small beach town across an undulating bridge from Punta’s towers. It is still built up, still very much a destination, but has more of a town feel than Punta itself. I settle into a private room in an otherwise fairly dead, quirky hostel a block off an inlet, an easy walk from everything I will need for my stay in Uruguay. It all feels very assured.
I stroll along the beach at sunset. It is quiet, just a few stray couples and dog-walkers, and a lone surfer who puts in the brutal work out through fierce waves for one long, brilliant ride in. The sun disappears into glowing clouds and a full moon rises up through the marine layer, a resplendent yellow orb shrouded from time to time in a drifting oceanic haze. Everyone on the beach stops to watch. Later, I eat a chivito dinner at a casual restaurant named Chill Out and chat up the kid at the bar, an easygoing townie with a dream of an escape to Miami.
On day two, I fall deeper into Punta’s trance. It is grey, on the chilly side, but the surfers are out in force. Sixty or seventy of them ride off Playa los Cangrejos, and scattered others take on additional stray points along the unending beach. I amble my way to Manantiales a few miles up the shore just to drink it in. Sitting and watching the crashing waves appears a perfectly acceptable pastime in these parts. My guidebook calls Playa Bikini a “flesh cauldron” in the high season, but for now it is placid in response beneath a colorful row of those large-widowed modernist homes, all nestled beneath shapely pines and ombús. It is hard to square the Punta I see with the ubiquitous cranes putting up more towers, and hard to remember over lunch in a swanky beachfront joint that this is not in fact a rich country. I eat the seafood of the day, drink fernet, and the waiter provides a heavy blanket so I can get cozy in my seat. Rain arrives while I dine, and while I wait out the worst of it, the walk back is damp. Time for a siesta.
I dine at El Papu, a bohemian chic spot up the road, stone floors and the ubiquitous floor-to-ceiling glass, all lit by candle. They serve local craft beer; the eggplant parmesan is the best I’ve ever eaten, tender as can be, drizzled in a green salsa with nuts. A bassist and a keyboarder settle in to serenade us with jazzy tunes, all improvised, the bassist working wonders in the higher registers. The other patrons are local hipsters and surfers, at ease among one another, an easy night taking shape. The vibe has met the moment.
In Uruguay I am free to pursue a radical freedom, to re-create myself in a country where not a soul knows me as I am. It is an opportunity at once both tantalizing and impossible. I could expand on certain tales from my stay here, perhaps, but some things are best left unwritten. And sometimes fiction, in the words of Walker Percy, tells us what we know that we do not know that we know. After Uruguay, I know what possibilities exist, but I also know the extent of my reach. I can head home a wiser man.
There are ways to celebrate and then there are ways to celebrate. Take, for example, the idea to hold a wedding 5,000 miles from home, to bring over 70 people from your life to a sprawling country estate in Argentina. The clouds lift just in time for the outdoor ceremony beneath an arch shrouded in flowers, emotions flowing at self-written vows. After that all your guests are strewn across a lawn for a garden party. Drinks appear, along with some particularly vigorous fiddlers; off in a corner, an asado grill churns out the meat, which wafts over and sticks to the guests. By nightfall the wedding party settles beneath a tent laced with golden lights, where each guest’s name plate includes a personalized appreciation. First dances draw tears, speeches turn to roasts, fog machines erupt and the DJ carted in from Boston churns out the best hits of 2012 for over four hours. We dance, we sweat, we wave around glow sticks and don ridiculous Argentine soccer swag. The estancia is aglow as the backdrop, reflected in a small pond, and when the feet are sore and the livers protest, it invites everyone in to sit in the drawing room’s enveloping couches and drift toward sleep. Dreams and reality blur.
I am in Argentina to celebrate Phil, one of my college roommates, and Jess, a friend from that era who went on to become more than a friend. He grew up in Schaumburg, Illinois, not far from my Chicago area relatives, and his easy Midwestern style remains contagious. On R Street, Phil occupied the basement lair, emerging for video games on the couch or nights out in DC or to tutor local students and occasionally for class too. The Tuesday trivia host at The Tombs most certainly knew who he was, and if Georgetown’s honor were challenged by invaders from Syracuse, he would rise to the challenge. He brought a good party with him everywhere.
Phil possesses an endless spontaneity and willingness to try just about any new thing. This does not always go well, but it brings collective fun when his schemes work and collective humor when they don’t. His college era shenanigans matured into a hunger for travel and United Airlines status. (Perhaps someday he will share his secrets over how he has gotten that company to not treat him like a heap of dung.) The old Phil is still very much around, though, as anyone who was taken on his wild goose chase for the utterly remarkable biscuits from a generic New Orleans chain named Willie’s can attest. His loose humor is a gift from his mother, as I learned from her savage send-up over dinner, a blend of pride and good-natured ribbing that summed up Phil perfectly.
From the outside Phil could make it look easy, shrugging off any nerves and from there quickly learning what he liked and disliked professionally. But there is a design here. He meets challenges with honest examinations, seeks the counsel of good friends, and possesses an uncommon tenderness that manifests as a strength. It is not hard to see how Jess, a star of the business school at Georgetown, could fall for him, and how they could come together as a well-complemented power couple. Jess can live as large as Phil but insists upon reasonable bedtimes and good life decisions, a diligence evident in the wedding planning, where her remarkable skill in pulling things and people together in a land far, far away shined through every time I took a moment to consider another aspect of what went into it.
Phil and Jess’s wedding is indeed on point: big, loud, no detail missed. It begins with a welcome lunch, which I miss because I am inbound on a ferry from Uruguay, and it proceeds from there to a welcome dinner at the Four Seasons in Recoleta, the swanky core of Buenos Aires. Guests stride up the streets in their finery, old college friends appear here and there, and the energy swells. After we mill about with drinks for a spell, a pair of tango dancers emerge, and they leave us in awe: feinting and swinging, pulsing with sexual energy, physiques perfectly tuned. From there we are seated for what becomes the first of five straight days of steak dinners for me. The buses then carry the wedding party out to the estancia, and we proceed from there.
At Estancia Villa Maria the wedding guests are split between the main villa, the neighboring Casa Francesa, and a series of more modern houses developed a short distance away. The older buildings are endearing in their old-world opulence; over the course of the weekend I hear allusions to Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and Clue. I join the groomsmen in the Casa Francesa, where I shack up with my old roommate Trent and his wife Kelly in a suite that includes a balcony off the shower. Brunch is communal on both our days at the estancia, a gentle blurring of friend groups as we sip maté and nibble on pastries, gaze out at the polo ground beyond. At times it is hard to believe this is real.
This wedding is a spectacle without sacrificing intimacy, aided by an Argentine culture that enjoys going for it without any reservations. Phil bawls through a substantial portion of the ceremony, which is both predictable and endearing, and he and Jess can laugh through it and bring us along for the ride. Not once did this adventure feel gratuitous or attention-seeking; it was two people doing a wedding exactly as they wanted, with the people wanted, in a way that made it a party for everyone. Twice over the course of the wedding night, when I need a bathroom, I take the long stroll across the lawn to the house instead of using the convenient port-a-potty so I can savor the night and approach the tent in reverence, drink it in before a new tune inspires me to bolt back to the dance floor. Those two late nights, with nightcaps on the couches as the crowd dwindles, show how deep ties can be over space and time.
I will need to return to Phil and Jess’s Bed-Stuy brownstone before long, and someday we will make our planned pilgrimage to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. But for now, I will make sure this wedding to end all weddings is seared into my memory like a good Argentine steak on a grill, a rare meat indeed. What a delicacy, to have been brought along for this ride.
Finally, we can sleep in. Santiago wakes slowly, and after breakfast at the Café Las Vegas—finally, true protein instead of a halfhearted menú peregrino—we start a circuit, around the compact downtown but always back to the plaza before the cathedral. Here the ritual repeats itself all day: exhausted pilgrims stride in and collapse, grinning. Some dance and jump and sing, some sit in quiet contemplation. Some embrace fellow travelers, others ask total strangers to take their pictures. Some, proud of their conquest, march off to collect their compostela or take a shower or find the nearest bar. Others linger, perhaps to lean up against the arcade on the university building opposite the cathedral, little live gargoyles lining the wall, there to watch the rite repeat itself.
The crowd who broke up the final day rolls through first. The Czech guy, now beaming and triumphant, takes his sweet time in the square. Ron and Marnie roll in a bit later, and I get a hug from their friend when she hunts them down at the bar, only two beers ahead of her. Of course there are more chance encounters with Alan and the Spaniards, too.
We attend the Pilgrim’s Mass. Alas, the botafumeiro is not on display today, but we do get a service befitting of the Camino. Priests from Korea, Ireland, and the US join the Spaniards who lead it, most words in Spanish but with nods to other languages. The students from Sevilla get a special shoutout, and one comes forward to read some words on what their trek has meant. Maybe half the congregation takes communion, the rest merely there to absorb it. Catholicism in the literal sense of the word.
Lunch comes with mediocre service on a pleasant patio. I then bid my dad Buen Camino as he rolls north to A Coruña, off on the final leg of his six-week journey across Iberia. I broaden my circuit around the city as I kill time before my own bus back south. I chat with Alan and Maria on a placid park bench, and I catch them yet again as I head for the bus station. I flag down Julie and Susan from Saskatchewan on the plaza, and later share a beer with them; they’ve befriended Marcia and Michelle from the States on the Spiritual Variant, though my bus leaves before their scheduled rendezvous, and I do not see them in the flesh.
Instead, I turn a reluctant back on Santiago and begin the return journey. It is a three-and-a-half-hour bus ride back to Porto, much of it lining the very route I just walked, past the factory in Pontecesures, the suspension bridge on the Rías Baixas, past a familiar little market outside Valença. We stop in Vigo, a clump of ugly apartment blocks on a stunning strait, as the sun slips toward the Illas Atlánticas, the last dots of land before the great expanse of ocean beyond. The sparsely filled bus is mostly populated by southbound pilgrims, including two women from Washington State who have just been to Muxia and Fisterra on the coast, and my seatmate, a shy, thoughtful Italian army kid on leave, who heads to Porto to start his own Camino. The cycle starts anew.
The Italian kid and I wander through the station together before we part ways in bewilderment at the signage in Campanhã station. After wandering in a circle I befriend a local who is equally confused, and she and I eventually find our way to the Metro together. The navigation challenges continue when I come up out of the Metro into a pile of construction barriers, as parts of downtown Porto are torn up for the construction of a new Metro line. Nevertheless, I find the Torre dos Clérigos, lit up in purple at night, and pick my way up a hill toward my hostel on the Jardim de Cordoaria, a pleasant leafy square bisected by a cable car. I’ve taken a private room in the hostel, though I spend some time at its bar sipping port and meeting the fellow guests, including a Brit who has just wrapped up several years working on his uncle’s butterfly farm in Kenya. As one does, of course. The room is lovely, with a grand view from a tiny balcony out on the square, though the party at the bars down below rages until past two AM, the revelers singing and shouting ceaselessly. It is a Wednesday.
Porto is to Lisbon what Barcelona is to Madrid: the smaller, cooler second city of an Iberian nation. Of course the port wine caves in Vila Nova de Gaia and the vineyards up the Douro may be its foremost claim to fame, but this is a flashy city, draped over hills rising up from the river, great church towers and pastel buildings with gilded balconies. Foremost, however, are the azulejos, the stunning blue tile that brings life to facades and back alleys and the São Bento train station. I don’t have nearly enough time, and it is a hot day to plug up and down its hills on still-battered feet. Still, I catch as much as I can, up and down hills and across the river, relaxing in the shade and dispensing some advice to Denise, the solo Canadian tentatively setting out on her Camino later that day.
Before long I am on the slow train back to Lisbon, which leaves on time but somehow gets two hours behind schedule. I befriend some Argentines, with whom I presage my next adventure. After some initial exasperation I find Zen as we roll through Portuguese villages in the late afternoon sun, and finally the train roles back into Santa Apolónia station in time for a stroll down the waterfront and into a sunset behind the Ponte 25 de Abril, the great red suspension bridge over the mouth of the Tagus. I am hungry, but I am compelled to join the watching crowd beside the Praça do Comércio, cuddling lovers and boisterous families, crews of friends laughing in unison. I am one with the sea.
I stroll back up and down Baixa, enjoy one last leisurely late-night meal, people-watch and admire the skilled buskers. I turn aside the double-digit number of guys who ask if I want marijuana or hash. As the crowds begin to thin and I tire of these circuits, I know it is time. I shuttle to the airport for an all-nighter ahead of a five AM takeoff for Amsterdam. I am headed home, but my Camino, I think, is still in one of its earlier stages.
I say this because it will take time to know what this Camino means. I knew this going in, and I will need to sit with it, even as other adventures build. There was occasional frustration, tired feet and a narrowed scope of life; bad weather days and language barriers drained the mood at times. (While I am fully functional in Spanish and possess more rudimentary Portuguese than most visitors from abroad, I appear to have traded my dad’s faculty for delighting in play with different languages for an obsession with precision in one.) But the Camino brought out long times of intense life in the moment, in striding up sun-splashed country lanes or strolling through teeming plazas, savoring a victory beverage and creating temporary travel friends.
There were also some moments of intense emotion, those flashes captured by Andrew McCarthy in an account of his Camino with his 19-year-old son, Walking with Sam: those moments when “the awful truth of the sweetness of life throbs in an unguarded mix of emotions.” I stood in front of the Cruz dos Mortos in the pouring rain and thought of another backpacking drip in a downpour with a cousin, now departed from this earth. Images of Mary cradling Jesus took me back to age eight; carefree Spanish kids on a plaza tugged at some glimpse of a childhood long since gone. Sunglasses hid swimming eyes as I gazed up at the spires of the cathedral at the end of our trek. I watched my dad disappear up a street in Santiago as he continued on to his next adventure at his ever-steady pace. I have always felt life vividly, but with every other external worry stripped away, the fierce intensity of the moment took a control it can never muster on a random Tuesday at the office.
It is alright to hold these throbs of emotion in contradiction. In Returning from Camino, Alexander John Shaia describes the internal chaos many pilgrims face after their returns from Santiago. “This type of energy is far more powerful than we can imagine, and it is almost impossible for our human intellect to contain it,” he writes. “It is largely beyond our rational control,” and we must “simply be with the energy,” knowing these oscillations will occur.
Perhaps something seismic is afoot and some insight will come, either in a burst of reflection or in accumulated thoughts over time. Perhaps nothing will, and I will simply look back on this trip as a once-in-a-lifetime venture through fun cities with my dad. That alone would be a sweet enough gift. But I have opened myself to every possibility, and that is why we walk these Caminos.
This is Part Three in a four-part series. Part 1 | Part 2
Day 5: Rías Baixas
Tired of halfhearted breakfasts, we have scoped out a spot where we had a drink the night before, a bar named Fredyy’s, which delivers a tortilla Española before a plod out of Redondela under moody skies. We climb through its outskirts, snippets of the sea visible here and there, and at the start of a big climb are joined by Roland, a veteran Irish pilgrim shepherding 11 charges along the Camino. He sets a powerful pace up the pavement and talks of the spiritual power of the Camino while lacing in some of the joys of escorting 19-year-olds through bouts of stomach illness. Toward the top we stumble on a collection of North Americans: Ron from Phoenix, who flies a Duluth-made Cirrus plane, and his wife Marnie and a friend; a couple from Houston taking an easy pace; and Julie and Susan from the night before. The trail has grown more crowded, swelled by those who have taken the coastal version of the Camino Portugués and some who have started in Vigo.
Up on this alto we have views down the Ría, one in a series of inlets cut deep into the Galician coast. It is not quite a fjord—those require glaciers—but evocative of those jagged northern European coasts. The grey skies meet the mood, but the density of the greenery and the clusters of red-roofed homes tell us we’re in a place that is entirely its own. We pause in clearings in the eucalyptus groves to drink in the view.
We plunge down from the Alto de Lomba and into the town of Arcade, though, sadly, we are too early for its annual oyster festival, which will not start until the afternoon. German Knee Girl moves a bit better today, but we still leave her behind as we wander in search of food with Julie and Susan, and in time stumble upon a gem of a little shop with sandwiches and fresh fruit and kombucha and the biggest sello on the Camino, designed by the owner’s grandfather. We eat on a bench next to the Pontesampaio down where the Rio Verdugo meets the tip of the Ría, and here we property meet Alan and his Spaniards for a more in-depth conversation. Here on day five our Camino crew has taken shape, familiar faces now acquiring names as we leapfrog our way over the long bridge and up a second big climb of the day. This one takes us deeper into the wood, past some opportunistic entrepreneurs and then turning us loose on a long, slow descent before a road walk into Pontevedra.
At 80,000 residents, Pontevedra is the largest place we’ll visit between Porto and Santiago. That means for a large, sprawling suburban zone, and a long stretch down a bland pedestrian walk between apartment blocks. We run into Marcia and Michelle for the final time a few blocks before our hotel, as they’re turning off to do the Spiritual Variant along the coast that will bring them to Santiago a day behind us. The Hotel Madrid is a functional but nondescript tower, its back view on a bland, overgrown court between yet larger apartments.
A few blocks away, however, the old city of Pontevedra shows out, and it punches well above its weight. There is a scallop-shell chapel to pilgrims, a prominent convent, a musty old basilica with plants growing all over its façade. On the Camino we see a Spain far removed from the large restoration budgets in Barcelona and Madrid, still grand but worn down by time, the darkness and the odor adding the mystery of a deeper world. The old city’s streets are a maze of small plazas and arcades, ornate charms tucked away on stray corners, clusters of tables waiting to fill.
Slowly, Pontevedra comes to life. An intricate dance unfolds, residents and pilgrims alike, circling the narrow stone streets, seeking out bars and restaurants here on this Saturday night. Twice we cycle past a pilgrim couple we decide are Belgians, chatting the first time and laughing as we wave the second. A French-Canadian couple circulates past the mediocre brewery where we camp out to await an restaurant openings around eight; the first time around the wife appears peeved with the husband, the second time downright irate. Of course they are seated next to us when a taberna finally opens for dinner, and they too try the pulpo a feira, the simple but delectable Galician octopus specialty. Back out after dinner we go from square to square, every one of them filled with diners, boisterous with life and chatter, parents at one table, kids of all ages scattered at others, everyone here and finding their people, milling their way through the dance of Spanish urban life that runs late into the night. I could live this way for a very long time.
Day 6: Idyll
Sleep comes poorly in Pontevedra. Someone on the courtyard throws a birthday party complete with a botellón, the ritual smashing of every glass bottle consumed over the course of the night, leaving me groggy in the morning. That ends quickly: while there is a threat of rain on the initial walk out of Pontevedra, day six blossoms into the prettiest of the trip so far. The sun pokes forth, but it is never brutally hot; there is one moderate climb toward the beginning, but this is mostly a stroll down bucolic country lanes, the only disruption the Sunday bicycle riders. Early on we walk with an older Czech guy who takes it easy, our conversation all in halting English.
We do lunch at a restaurant with a sprawling terrace and a menagerie of goats, sheep, and geese parading by. Two more Galician delicacies await us here: eel casserole and then a stew with pig’s feet and tripe. Ron and Marnie from Phoenix plop down at the next table and we walk on with them for a spell, questions peppered steadily, and in time we lose them and pick up a British family, parents with two teenage sons. Mum chatters away about her oldest heading off to uni soon and the joys of the Camino, seemingly oblivious to her younger boy, who labors in misery on a gimpy leg. We leave the parents to wait for their straggling kids at a café a couple kilometers outside of Caldas de Reis, where we of course also find Alan and the Spaniards, stopped for food as usual.
Our lodging for tonight is a splurge: the Hotel Balneario Acuña, a grand old thing atop Caldas’ claim to fame, its hot springs. The French Canadians from dinner the night before roll into the room next to ours, and we share the warmer of the two outdoor pools with them and a Danish mother and son, and later Eduardo from Tenerife. The French Canadians are full of snobbish opinions (“It is essential to hike with poles!” “But of course we have the right shoes, we have no issues with blisters!”) but worth a laugh or two, the Danes are chill, and Eduardo spins a good yarn. We enjoy a shift in the indoor spa, a giant glowing tub with jets everywhere. Back outside the pool has become an amusing collection of aching pilgrims and retiree Spaniards. The place has vague Grand Budapest Hotel vibes, faded grandeur and a nod to a bygone era when a trip here was the vacation of a lifetime.
Outside its charming riverfront, where we have dinner at a tippy outdoor table down the row from the Poles and our Czech friend and the quieter-than-usual loud British girls, Caldas is a bit tired; we enjoy a good fish dinner and make a brief circuit, but my dad is ready to crash. I settle in at the dead hotel bar to catch up on notes.
This is very much my dad’s trip. A retired Spanish professor with a side love for Portuguese who enjoys long hikes and seeking out good beer: how could we design a much better venture? As the less interesting member of our twosome in these environs, I am along for the ride, content to make this trip his. In April, at least, the Camino crowd tends toward retirement age, though there are other scattered parent-kid combinations and a few youthful backpackers. While I would probably slide into this latter circle if I were alone, both our pace and our commitment to lodging with private rooms push against that, and on this trip, that is fine. It is more than enough to share this trip with my dad, a chance few sons have with their fathers, and when many fellow pilgrims observe this, I can only nod in affirmation.
The Spanish language offers a brilliant little glimmer that sums up this trip: the word for retirement is jubilación. Here in his first year out of the workforce, my dad is finding jubilation, the freedom to wander without the student charges he’s had on every previous visit to Spain, comparing notes to a Brazilian beer judge, sampling exactly what he wants to try in every town he visits. This is, indeed, how to do it right.
Day 7: Anticipation
The penultimate day on the Camino dawns damp, and we brush past our Czech friend and the British family before we trudge out of town. The rain increases in intensity. On a day like yesterday, today’s stroll through the woods would have been charming, but today it is a slog, our heads focused forward by the hoods on our jackets. The rain lifts for a bit when we get back on to country roads, and here Alan and his girlfriend Maria catch us for some extended chat on their life in Valencia; eventually they peel off to collect their crew, a necessity in a group of this size that I know all too well from extended family gatherings.
It rains again, and we take refuge in a Spanish trucker bar, where one man opines loudly over coffee where the rest stare vacantly at a nature documentary on TV. It only pours harder when we start moving again down a riverside valley path, any socializing with our fellow venturers left to a minimum. Many pull off at another café, and we wave at the Danes lounging on the covered patio. We soldier on, settling only for a brief stop at a self-service station with 50 Euro-cent bathrooms and a passable instant hot chocolate. The rain continues its off and on flips as we skirt views of industrial Pontecesures and drop across the Ulla River into Padrón.
Padrón is a small but dense town on the River Sar, a stagnant tributary of the Ulla. It was here that St. James is said to have first come to Spain; there is a monastery up on the hill where he first ministered, and the church in town has extensive art in his honor, first as a peaceful converter of the pagans and later in propaganda as Santiago Matamoros, slayer of the Moors. Our hotel is a charming, if rather cramped, time capsule from the mid-20th century, the elevator dumping us out on a landing between floors.
With a week-long festival having ended the day before, the town is dead outside of gimpy meandering pilgrims; we deduce the Irish boys using their phones to ask after a McDonalds from the locals must be Roland’s food-poisoned charges. (There is no McDonalds here, and we later see them bearing plastic bags from some convenience store.) The one place we find open for dinner is a wine bar that fills steadily with the Poles and some grumpy Germans and the loud British girls plus two less loud British girls and some French and eventually two of Alan’s Spaniards, all in a very narrow space. No one is too social, but at least the wine is good. Today there is a sense of general tiredness, the party on pause before the final push. Tomorrow in Santiago.
Day 8: Jubilation
Our last day is our longest on the Camino: while some pilgrims break up the 16 miles between Padrón and Santiago, we have decided to do it in one push. We are up early, free to groggily frown at the hotel’s breakfast of two slices of toast, though Alan and the Spaniards appear shortly after us and have somehow procured heartier fare. We head out before them, through the mists of a Galician morning, chilled through a maze of homes on the rural edge of Padrón. The route largely follows the N-550 highway but hides it from us in fog and back alleys, busting out by aged Jesuit church in Escravitude. The young guns of the Camino fly past us early, and a few more trickle by as we stop for a real breakfast in A Picaraña. In time we are back on rural lanes, the sun finally burning through the grey shrouds.
In the concello of Teo everything is impeccable, flawless lawns and fruit trees and what passes for Spanish suburban tract housing, retirees on walks to wish Buen Camino and see us on our way. With 8.5 kilometers left we stop for lunch at an oversold roadside café, where we stand in line for a while as the British girls laugh like hyenas at the next table. We let them get ahead of us, but we catch and pass them in time. After an apartment block in the suburbs we catch our first glimpse of Santiago, the cathedral spires looming in the distance seven kilometers out. Eventually it is a long, steady tromp through urbanity with nothing to recommend it, just us and some Germans powering through toward the center.
The march into Santiago feels somewhat discordant. Suddenly there are throngs of people on all sides, a small Spanish city humming at its own pace. Pilgrims, so often the objects of attention in small Portuguese and Spanish towns, melt into the backdrop. No one offers up a Buen Camino, and amid the crowds and narrow streets, the fellow pilgrims ahead and behind us blend in. It is a reminder that the world goes on, that this inward drama has little bearing on the people just down the street. We all walk our own Caminos.
In time it looms up above us: the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the goal of this walk. Pilgrims collapse on its square, exhausted and freed, gaze about in a daze and lift their eyes toward its towering spires. A crew of kids from a Jesuit high school in Sevilla march into the plaza in full song, waving flags after a triumphant march here from southern Spain, and toss their teacher in the air in celebration. A Galician bagpipe trills in the background. All of the Brits we know trundle in, and a few other vaguely familiar faces, too. On our way to obtain our compostelas, the official proof of pilgrimage, we see the Possible Belgians from the plaza in Pontevedra, who have made a beeline for the beer. Two Canadian volunteers confirm our status and give us our certificates, and back in the square an Italian couple we’ve seen a few times arrives. Sure enough, Alan and the Spaniards are not far behind, victorious and ready for dinner.
We enter the cathedral and gaze up at its overwhelming altar of silver and gold; the horizontal organ, the crossbeams for the famed botafumeiro, the giant swinging incense burner; the side chapels to Santiago and his friends in ministry. We descend into the crypt, see the saint’s tomb, skirt the couple having a rapturous moment in its presence. From here we rise through a passage into the bowels of the altar where we are to hug the bust of the saint. I am more moved here than I was at St. Peter’s or in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, more caught up in the ritual: this is deep, ancient, freighted with whatever power the Catholic church can still move on earth.
A few more familiar faces trickle through: some French in the square, the Poles in the restaurant where we dine, and of course my dad has found the best craft beer bar on offer. We have completed the pilgrimage, arrived in Santiago, ready to rest our feet, sins forgiven and life renewed. The nightcap comes on our hotel balcony, the cathedral rising up just beyond us, and while the beer is mediocre, the accomplishment is complete. I sit on the cool balcony, clean up my notes, and head to bed when the bells strike midnight on Santiago. Somos peregrinos.
A Patient Cycle 