Tag Archives: earthquakes

Camino 2024, Part I: Tremors

Lisbon, 1755: the world shakes. An earthquake and subsequent fire destroy the great Portuguese capital, thousands killed, palaces and churches thrown into ruin. For a Europe at the dawn of the Enlightenment, it is a jarring reminder of powerlessness; Voltaire, surveying the wreckage, decides he needs a better way to make sense of a senseless world. Rousseau and Kant follow suit, questioning both modes of living and the mysteries of nature. The earth has shaken, and nothing is quite the same ever again.

It is with no such pretention that I arrive in Lisbon on Easter Sunday, 2024. I do not expect, nor do I necessarily need, seismic changes in thinking. But I am open to the possibility, perhaps never more so than on this venture that begins in a small European capital with a great heritage, from the Age of Discovery to the catastrophe that weighed on the West’s foremost minds of the time. I have the privilege of a mini sabbatical to traverse different continents, to open my mind to whatever may come. It may be nothing, and that would be fine. But it may be more.

Lisbon undulates over a series of low hills north of the estuary of the Tagus River. In a nook between two of them is Baixa, the core of the city grid laid out by the Marqués de Pombal, the post-earthquake Robert Moses and Oliver Cromwell figure who rebuilt the capital in a style that now bears his name. For my one night in Lisbon at the start of a great Iberian adventure, I settle into a quaint hotel on a pedestrian street in the heart of Baixa. The rains that have swamped Portugal for the past two weeks have temporarily lifted, and both tourists and locals tentatively venture out to restaurants on terraces, to sample tapas and what passes for good craft beer in Portugal.

At the end of my street, beneath a triumphant arch, sits the Praça do Comércio, a waterfront square dominated by a statue of King José I atop a horse. A short way down the Tagus from here was the launch point for some of Europe’s greatest voyages of discovery, as this tucked-away kingdom on the edge of the continent unleashed the first tremors in a movement that would eventually upend world history. I content myself with my own morning of discoveries, a hurried push up to the Castelo de São Jorge and then along Avenida da Libertade, the great artery appended to Pombaline Baixa in the late 19th century European tradition of grand, monument-strewn avenues. This little taste will have to do. I have a train to catch and a path to walk.

The Camino de Santiago, literally translated as the Way of St. James, is the collective name given to a network of Catholic pilgrimage routes that lead to Santiago de Compostela, a city in the northwest corner of Spain. It emerged in medieval times as a route to visit the tomb and relics of St. James, who, according to tradition, moved here to preach the gospel after Christ’s crucifixion. The Camino receded in later centuries but has steadily grown in popularity over the past 40 years, including a burst of interest since the 2010 Martin Sheen film The Way. By far the best-known route is the Camino Francés, which begins just across the French border in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and winds 769 kilometers across northern Spain. But there are myriad other routes, some wandering in from very far afield. One emerging path that now accounts for one quarter of all pilgrims is the Camino Portugués, which begins in Lisbon and works its way north to Santiago. It is this route that my dad, on a six-week post-retirement tour of the Iberian Peninsula, has chosen to walk. I go with him.

For official certification, a Camino requires that the pilgrim walk 100 kilometers (or bike or ride a horse 200 kilometers) to Santiago and collect at least two stamps (sellos) per day from businesses, churches, or other points of interest along the way. Given my timeframe, we choose to start in Ponte de Lima, some 160 kilometers south of Santiago and a two-day walk through Portugal before six more through Spain. We will follow a series of yellow arrows and scallop shell images that mark the way up into Galicia, the lush, green autonomous Spanish region noted for its distinct language and fine seafood.

Traditionally, pilgrims stayed in albergues, which offer basic dormitory lodging, and many restaurants along the route offer a menú peregrino for basic, filling fare at a discount. Of course one can also stay in cozy hotel rooms and eat fine meals if one wants, and the Camino draws a wide spectrum of walkers, from purists to people cabbing from place to place, from devout Catholics to leisurely folk who treat it as the world’s most deliberate pub crawl. A Camino is a physical feat for many who achieve it, and even those of us for whom these distances are in no way intimidating contend with new challenges, such as the change in surfaces from paved roads to rough lanes to dirt paths to mountainside trails to those evil, evil cobblestones. I am almost never sore, but the blisters blossom daily.

The Camino’s explosion in popularity suggests a people in search of their own tremors, their own meaning in the face of senselessness. Pilgrims are often searching for something, sometimes within the faith that founded this path but also often not, spiritual seekers with less patience for liturgy or tradition but who cannot shed its trappings, the power of enduring monuments of medieval faith and a shared human ritual, a path both literal and metaphorical. Students of the Camino will tell you everyone has two reasons to walk it: the reason they share with everyone at the start and the real reason hidden beneath, one that may not even be obvious to the pilgrim until some point mid-path or even some months after the return from Santiago.

Pilgrimage is an invitation to strip out all the noise in a life and do one thing: walk. Yes, there are now perks like swanky hotels and luggage transport, but a good Camino invites non-judgment: we are all finding ways to do the thing. The Camino lacks the survival skills of a backpacking trip, and it is inherently social with its albergues and everyone’s steady progress in the same direction. People from all over the world come together on a collective journey, form temporary bonds on a walk, and forever share a path, one whose history and trappings just mean more than, say, a shared trek on the Appalachian Trail. It is a human celebration in a way a wilderness venture is not. We walk together with chosen or random fellow travelers, sharing only the title of pilgrim as we go.

I take a train north to Porto meet my dad, and I swiftly learn the breadth of the gap between Spanish high-speed AVEs and this rickety Portuguese thing, which sits on a lovely bridge outside Coimbra for a spell and gets me to Porto with nearly no time to spare before a bus connection onward. This is part of the package, though: Portugal sits somewhere on the middle of a spectrum between Latin American fun and European comfort. It throws its share of parties, its culture is rich, and it is dirt cheap compared to the rest of the western half of the continent. And yet it has nice things, no serious safety concerns, and the Portuguese try to run things on time, even if they don’t always exactly get there. It is no wonder there is a surge of Americans exploring it and even retiring here.

From Porto we promptly continue by bus to Ponte de Lima, an ancient town now home to about 20,000 residents. This town is named for a bridge, built by the Romans and restored by the medievals, over the Lima River, and that old span is still the center of attention. The town center is a charming little knot of narrow streets around a couple of classic castle turrets, though we have chosen to spend the night in an absolute marvel of peak brutalism just down the river from the center. For any extended time I would die in this youth hostel with a not-particularly-youthful clientele, but for one night I will giggle at this mass of concrete and right angles and slowly shed layers as the heater clanks away all night.

We spend our pre-pilgrimage night wandering Ponte de Lima’s streets, eating at a bustling gem of the Portuguese microbrew scene named Letraria, and appraising the weather forecast with worry. After a few weeks of near-constant rain the Lima has hopped its normal banks, and a mock Roman army marching northward now stands knee-deep in the drink. This, we hope, is not an omen for our hike. But whatever the weather brings, we are set to walk.

Part 2 is here.

In the Shadow of Disaster

The two places I have spent the most time outside of the mainland United States are the U.S. Virgin Islands and Mexico City. Between Hurricane Irma and the earthquake that struck Mexico, it has been a dark past few weeks for two places with a special fondness in my heart. No one I know was hurt or has suffered damages they don’t have the means to repair, but it is jarring nonetheless, especially from a powerless distance.

I first went to the Virgin Islands as a nine-year-old, and as that was my first venture out of the Midwest, the islands always loomed large in the mind of a kid plagued with wanderlust. Most of my return journeys date to my college and grad school years, when I could enjoy a lot of sun and rum and enjoy some rare moments to completely unwind. The natural beauty was stunning, the colonial architecture of Charlotte Amalie had its charms, and thanks to the generosity of others, I could live like a king for a short while.

As the trips went on, I became more aware of the islands’ social reality. Aside from the beaches, the Virgin Islands are one of those forgotten relics of America’s colonial phase, perpetually broke and flailing about. When I went back there shortly after I finished my semester-long stint in Mexico as an undergrad, large parts of it struck me as more like Mexico than anything American. These people will live without power for several months as they struggle to clear brush from the precarious roads clinging to hillsides, and have heaps of junk to clear and little place to put it. My experiences in trail maintenance in the Virgin Islands National Park on St. John assure me that the hillsides, stripped bare by Irma, will return to their past verdant selves in little time. Less safe are the towering flamboyant trees, the roadside barbecue stand in Cruz Bay, Duffy’s Love Shack, and the homes so many of the island’s poverty-stricken permanent residents, who won’t even have many tourists to sell to in the coming months. There will be much work to do.

Thanks to a cleaner flow of information from Mexico City’s diverse media environment, I’ve had a more intimate portrait of the damage in the city I called home for a semester during my junior year of college, and had visited twice before. Over the past week, I’ve spent some time every day reading up on accounts of the recovery efforts in Mexico City, or CDMX, as we seem to abbreviate it these days. Some of the pictures are especially striking: signs demanding silence as rescuers listen for signs of life beneath the rubble, Paseo de la Reforma converted into a pedestrian highway as the city comes to a halt, people of all classes consoling each other in the streets.

Earthquakes loom over CDMX, and a catastrophic 1985 quake still haunts those old enough to remember it. The university I attended had its previous campus demolished by an earlier tremor; while the new one was well-built and up in the mountains on solid ground, it was hard not to take stock of the evacuation directions posted next to the door of every classroom. (If you’re stuck in a building, I learned, the safest place to be is standing in the door frame.) Nothing major hit during my time there, but I did feel a slight tremor one day, a low-scale quake accentuated by the fact that I was walking across a less-than-stable pedestrian bridge at the time. The unstable soil just adds to that sense that CDMX is a city on the edge of every churning force in that nation, all of life and the risk of death all wrapped up in one manic burst of semi-ordered chaos.

Earthquakes are a particular risk in Mexico City since much of the center of the metropolis sits on the unstable bed of Lake Texcoco, which the Spaniards drained after their conquest of the Valley of Mexico. The building I lived in would have been a beachfront condo in Aztec days, barely on solid ground. Polanco, the ritzy district I’d wander over to on lazy weekend afternoons, was on the lakebed, but on somewhat more stable ground than the city center and built to a high enough code that it suffered little damage. Less fortunate was La Condesa, the hip district of nightlife and young people where a number of my fellow students from abroad made their temporary homes. Here, numerous apartments toppled, as they did in neighboring Roma Norte. The Parque España, once home to late-night dalliances amid the bushes, was reborn as a temporary aid station. And no collapse gripped national attention quite like the damage to the Enrique Rébsamen school, where at least 20 bodies have been pulled from the rubble.

We are still learning the scope of the damage further south, where towns tucked away in the mountains of Morelos, Puebla, the State of Mexico, Oaxaca, and Guerrerro live in a different world from the well-connected capital. Some of these towns to the south suffered damage in a separate quake just a week and a half earlier, and the long, slow process of digging them out may take much longer. A family friend in Cuernavaca, over a mountain range to the south of Mexico City, sent a message detailing his family’s nonstop efforts to help those they can, bringing meals to the newly homeless and collecting goods for an eventual journey using his larger vehicle out to the outlying villages in need of help.

cuernavaca

Youthful heroism, as captured by a family friend in Cuernavaca. Photo credit: Gerardo Debbink.

The rescue and recovery efforts bring our some of the most heartening displays of human solidarity. Brigades of people (many of them young) poured out all their energy as volunteers, swiftly organizing into rescue operations and digging into collapsed buildings, even amid the terror of potential aftershocks. This quake had the eerie coincidence of hitting on the 32nd anniversary of the disastrous 1985 quake, and while the young people have no memory of that disaster, they seemed to know what to do. Even social media, which deserves so much of the negative press it’s received recently, has emerged as an essential method for coordinating a rapid response to the crisis. The unity and upsurge in Mexican national pride has been a sight to behold, even from afar.

The 85 quake was a seminal moment in Mexican history, not only for the disaster it brought but also as the catalyst for the formation of a genuine civil society. People recognized the rottenness of their government, responded immediately to create some good, and the energy that emerged from that outburst of civic activity played no small part in spurring along Mexico’s democratization in the 1990s. Now, 32 years later, that dream has soured: the opposition parties have lost their sheen, and the longtime ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is nearing the end of a return turn to power that was just as corrupt and sad as in its late authoritarian days. In an Economista column today, Rubén Aguilar Valenzuela, the ex-Jesuit/leftist revolutionary/spokesman for a conservative president from whom I took a class in Mexico, looked at the upsurge with hope: perhaps a new generation will now find the power to take control of its own destiny.

“Why does this only happen in these circumstances, and not in others?” Aguilar asks of the outpouring of civic unity and genuine heroism. “What needs to happen for us to express this capacity in everyday life?” Questions worth asking anywhere, whether in Mexico or in the hurricane-ravaged southern United States, or even in a corner of Minnesota where we have little capacity to comprehend the destructive power that both nature and humanity have the power to inflict. In a better world, it wouldn’t take a crisis to spur people to recognize the immediacy of community, but we live in the world we have. With terror and sadness or just plain anomie looming in so many lives, the least we can do is take these moments and use them to remind ourselves of the goodness that can also exist within the human spirit. Hope can yet spring from the ruins.