Still the radio came to our out-of-the-way villages and houses, and told us things about ourselves almost none of us needed to hear. It was at that time, with 30 percent unemployment in my hometown, that I got a call from a friend in Montreal asking me if I had finally sensitized myself to Quebec and their quest for freedom. He was thrilled at the idea that he could now lecture me—and prevalent modern opinion would allow him to.
What was pertinent here was my answer; that is, he wanted me to beg him not to succeed. To show the proper amount of English shame.
But I did not play the game—from that moment on I simply said Quebec could go or stay; it made no difference to me because it was not up to me—it was up to them.
That is, after eleven years of asking him to give us a chance—of reiterating what the radio told me I must feel—I no longer had the inclination to care. They—that is, CBC—on the issue of what Canada was and what it needed no longer represented me. In some respects I didn’t even know where that Canada was.
“If you do not watch it, we will go.”
I was looking out the window at a numbing snow—my wife and I were literally down to our last twenty dollars.
“Goodbye,” I said.
* * *
—
But that was in 1981—by then I was writing my fourth novel, which seemed so far removed from the world I was supposed to celebrate, his world in Montreal and most of any other world our TV told us about. I had caught on to the trick—and after I had I could never pretend I did not, even for my own well-being—and the trick was this: Canadians like me must agree with what others in urban media outlets promoted as Canada—and if we did not, we would never be as Canadian as they were. But the real secret was: even if we did agree, we would still have to apologize for who we were most of our lives. And I would not apologize or feel less than those who told me to, again.
In Canada by that time most of the trains had been replaced by jet travel, and the CBC promoted us not by speaking of us as a nation—but by telling us continually how we must be one. But even that stopped after a time. Though my feeling is they want me to understand that people like me have made some mistake; and sooner or later they will tell me it has to be corrected, for my own good.
Over the years, many of my friends left my province to go out West to work. They had to, to keep their families alive. And now Alberta is feeling pressure from those from the centre of our country who tell it continually they have done something wrong. The world changed, and Canada grew further and further away from who I was and am.
I still love it desperately, but I doubt, except in our glorious hockey, if we ever got it right. Many men and women have died for it, showing grace and courage under fire, knowing this tragic truth themselves.
Still, in the end, getting it right might be asking far too much. Though with all we’ve been through, and all we know, for the sake of our land, for the dreams we have, we all must, for those who come after us, continue to try.
1998
WE WALKED THE CAMINO
MY WIFE CAME WITH ME. AS ALWAYS. THE YEAR BEFORE, WHEN I had my first heart attack, she was waiting for me, and then the second, again she was there. Over my life she was there when my books were attacked or went out of print. She was there, too, when friends turned their back and I was alone.
Then I fell, off the back of my porch and hit my head—yes, I am a walking disaster. I always was. So for almost a month I tried to walk normally—or as normally as I could manage at the best of times. But I wobbled all over the place, had to hold on to things whenever I stood.
Finally I went to a doctor and then a neurologist.
Four vertebrae discs had pinched my spinal cord up at my neck, and it was bent like a curve ball. They needed to operate. The doctor, a very kind and good man, said there was a chance, slim though it was, that I would be paralyzed from the neck down. So it was my decision. Not a great one to have to make no matter how small that chance was.
She stayed with me, and when I woke after the three-hour operation, she was in the elevator:
Can he move his right arm, my sister had texted her. For my left arm was never much good.
I reached up and took her hand.
Yes, she texted back, he can.
* * *
—
Anyway, before that—after my second heart attack—we walked the Camino. The way of Saint James. The Apostle of Christ. Bringing his message to the world of Iberia. Thousands of people followed the way over the years—over the millennium. Thousands upon thousands of people have crossed the Pyrenees to walk the way of Saint James. One almost says, who am I not to do so. And so in 2014 the two of us went. You see, I have written about religion as it differs from spirituality—but she, my wife, was the one more spiritual, kinder, far more gentle than I. Far more gentle—in an ungentle world.
* * *
—
I had a dream when I was nine years old. In the dream I was walking up the old pathway that led from town to the Rocks—the section of town where I lived—and I stepped over a white stone. Afterward I searched everywhere for that white stone—never found it, really—but I began after I was married to pick my wife white stones off the beaches I visited and bring them home.
STARTING OUT
There are as many reasons for doing this as there are people doing it. For some it is simply the idea of making it across the Pyrenees from France to Spain and travelling all the way to Santiago de Compostela. Which is over five hundred miles. Others bicycle it, wearing Spandex shorts. Others do it as if it is a marathon. Some might do it as a lark. I might have done it only to see how far along it I could get. But all of us see things on the journey that are bound to astound—to make us realize—well, perhaps make us realize that there is a God that does exist after all. No it is not an unusual observation. I’m not trying to make it one. It is just that so many things have happened in my life, or to my life that I can no longer deny.
Walking up the mountain the first day, the sheets of flowers and crops in the fields miles apart from one another, the houses and villages resting below us, the sun in the wide grand sky, the French Mirage fighter jets swooping across the valley almost at eye level. It was hard walking, almost straight up to the heavens. But we made it to the albergue just before supper.
The second day we befriended three open-hearted, wonderful Australian women. So we walked over the top of the mountain with them, high in the world, with the scent of fresh snow and nearing the Spanish side in midday.
Coming down late in the afternoon—having been taken partway across the mountain by a tiny but rugged French-Vietnamese guide who had adopted us—to the Spanish monastery. To the sunlight diminishing in the sky against monastery windows six or seven centuries old, to the Australian women ecstatic that they had seen snow in the mountains, to the rows of hedges and flowers of northern Spain. To dinner and a late mass—where so many people, Catholic and Protestant, attended—suddenly people, affluent or not, from Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia, the States, England, Canada and many places besides, simply—simply is the best word—crowded in to hear the gospel—because for some reason, no matter how far one has strayed or how slight the belief, the truth of the gospel is still immediate and ever present.
I thought of the cross put up in honour of the two Swiss men who had fallen from the mountain and had died the year before.
THE DARLING OF JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY TV
My wife asked me to go on this pilgrimage. Without her I would not have gone. She became the darling of Japanese documentary television for a while. A petite woman with a knapsack and a cap, with compassionate blue eyes and greying black hair, trudging along beside me. As she had done most of her life.
We were followed by a Japanese television crew wondering why we did this. But you see, they pray, too, just as I said in my book God Is.; everyone in the world does, even those who cal
l those who pray “hypocrites.” I have been called that enough, by people who know my rather outlandish life—nor do I blame them one bit.
* * *
—
When the film crew saw us, walking up toward a copse of trees on the third day, suddenly we, the oldest people on the journey at that time, two people in their sixties, were surrounded by cameras and microphones—the kind of things journalists do.
“Are you tired—can you keep up—why are you doing this?”
And then the most personal of questions, almost as personal as a question about sexual preference: “Are you religious.”
“No. Yes. I am not sure. Sometimes.”
The interviewer was young enough to be our granddaughter.
So she and her interpreter and her cameraman followed us, along the copse, through to a roadway and up a long white stairway. Every time we turned around to see her, she would smile timidly and bow. We liked her a good deal. They stayed at the same albergue.
Then they followed us into the dormitory that night, where they watched my wife wrap her sore feet. Then they filmed me looking concerned at her toes. We did not see the documentary, but I am sure she made a splash.
PEGGY
Without her I would not be alive. I would simply have drunk myself to death in my thirties. There is no question that is what I would have done.
My wife was born in 1950 in the kitchen of her house. Her mother was left a widow with nine children. One Christmas Peggy got a tiny jar of fingernail polish, for the doll she got the Christmas before.
I never heard her complain about poverty, call herself a victim, demand more—demand an apology from anyone—even from one who betrayed and hurt her.
She never partook in feminist angst. But she learned to fly a plane at twenty-six. She never marched for freedom, but she rides a Harley. She never spoke about being equal, but she could handle a horse, and paint a house, and fix a stove, and she didn’t get a master’s or a doctorate to get a job that would reinforce her bias.
She doesn’t always remember the characters in my books, or why I write the way I do; can’t get through Henry James—not sure of when certain wars happened or why; but she can remember conversations and incidents that happened twenty-five years before, who ordered what at what restaurant on trips long past; took care of children—not only her own—with deep love. And I remembered all of this as she sat down on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and cut some bread and cheese for us, and handed me a drink of water, telling me to take my pills. Here we were six thousand miles from home, and the tender way she smiled she might have easily been sitting along the banks of the Bartibog when we fished it as kids. I suppose in that way, the way she accepts who it is she is, I am in awe.
THOUGHTS ALONG THE ROAD
We crossed over northern Spain, saw where Hemingway might have fished. I stopped and listened to the rapids. A tributary of the Ebro, and I realized I, too, might like to cast a fly across a certain part of that water. There would be trout there I decided—in the pocket just below the rip, where the rock just broke water.
I have fly-fished a lot in my life and realize why Hemingway loved it. I fished with many who would have put Hemingway to shame fishing, but so what. I think there is something noble about the rural life if handled right—and I thought, too, of the Spanish Civil War—one of the great battles was fought along the Ebro, I think.
Hemingway, a Catholic, like Fitzgerald was as tormented about his Catholicism as I was and am at times. At its moral stringency and priestly pretense, its Vatican opulence. And the terrible cover-ups of crime. But still he could not put it behind him. Ever. For there is something else Catholicism carries in its genes, beyond all of that, beyond all of that—a grasp, a grasp of infinite truth.
I remembered, too, that this is where Orwell began to have second thoughts about communist thuggery, when he came here to fight Franco. What amazes me about a man so clever is that he had to come this far to find out. Still, I doubt he walked the Camino. He hated Catholicism in a very traditional British way. You could almost see him sitting about in a common room, in tweeds, mocking it all.
Hemingway might have wanted to walk the Camino. Of course he was in Pamplona with the bulls, drinking in a bar Peg and I got to after a week.
As we sat in the huge bar, Hemingway’s favourite, I thought Ernest in many respects got a bad rap by people who would never in their lives be able to write “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”
I wondered if they met ever, Hemingway and Orwell—and what they would have said to each other. Perhaps that they had the same naïve misconception about Stalin and the sanctity of the left.
I also thought of something else. Villon was exiled from Paris in 1463. Seeing the thickness of the ancient medieval walls of Pamplona, I realized that for Monsieur Villon, exile was a death sentence.
MEETING PEOPLE
For the most part I’m against it. I was making a singular journey—not for any reason except in hope. I was free from booze for over ten years when an accident and a short prescription with painkillers put me on the road to addiction again. An addiction to opioids that almost destroyed my life. I was able to stop cold turkey. By 2014 I was off them for over ten years. But it had been hell for my family and me. That is why Peg asked me to do this. I was making this journey in atonement. I know a lot about that, and as much about addiction as anyone. There is not an addict that I don’t feel some affinity with, in some way, on this or any other journey into the dark.
I met at least a dozen others doing the exact same thing. One gentleman carrying a heavy backpack in penance said to me, “I am trying to make up for a life of mistakes and terrible decisions.”
“Yes—” I said. “Join the club. Many of us here are here for a similar reason.”
Another was in tears because he had left his snakes behind and missed them.
“Ah, your snakes,” I said. “How many snakes?”
“Twenty-seven,” he said.
“Ah,” I said, “twenty-seven—well, when you get home, they’ll be waiting.”
We met a British woman who was lost. We shared our last bottle of water with her, and she followed us down the right path to the small village. She had been wandering along the road, unable to speak the language, crying. Like the Australians before her, there was an almost instant bond. But there was a bond with the Dutch girls, too, and the German lady—and the Australian man we had supper with. Most of the people were very kind.
We met other Canadians, as well. Most of them were thirty years younger than us, but not all—a good number were men and women in their fifties.
We walked by forts built a thousand years ago by the Knights Templar guarding pilgrims who were walking the Camino, and who were in danger of being robbed and murdered. Tiny little stone-and-mortar structures in vast fields, left to history and the weather. State of the art back then, with their turrets and crow’s nest.
We had mass at a monastery with a heavy bronze cross on the altar that was carried over the mountains by German pilgrims in AD 900. Drank from water fountains that have supplied pilgrims since 1033. Maybe this journey was in someway coming home.
SO THEN THIS HAPPENED
We were in a small albergue after a long day. My feet had had it. They were torn up very badly. I had lost most of my toenails, and the blisters were such it was agony to walk. Peggy’s feet had healed, and for the first time on the journey she was walking ahead of me, waiting for me to catch up. The Australian women had tried to help my toes earlier. Big Sue, who was five feet eleven inches, and Little Sue, who was five feet one inch, friends since kindergarten, and their friend, a woman whose name I regrettably forget, who was a nurse. But it was not to be. I had made a fundamental mistake. I had bought a brand-new pair of sneakers the day before I left for Spain. I knew I was taking a chance doing so, and now I was paying for that.
* * *
—
We were at an albergue by four in the afternoon, put into a room with six other pilgrims. The room was small, with eight bunk beds. When Peg and I entered, a young Spaniard standing in his under-shorts, and seeing Peg—not prepared to see a woman walk in—started to shake and bark. He continued to bark and two other young Spanish men came in to speak with him. It was not that other women were not in this room—an Australian woman and a Japanese woman were there, as well. But they had put their packs down and gone out. So the man thought he was alone at that moment and had taken that chance to have a shower. Seeing Peg startled him.
“Look,” I said to Peg, “I have not slept in forty-eight hours, my feet are driving me crazy—if he continues to bark, I will have another sleepless night—we might have to change albergues—”
“Well—just wait and see,” she said.
So that night we went down to supper and sat at the large table with those men. It was Holy Week. They were from Barcelona. I noticed the men he was with for the first time. All my life I have been around tough men—grown up with them. So I knew these fellows were the real deal. We spoke about the Camino, and Canada, and how cold it was (that is the starting point for many conversations), and that someone had a relative who worked in Thunder Bay and did I know him. They noticed my tattoo and asked what it was. Then they showed theirs. But that is not the point—the point is, it was Holy Week. And these men, tough as nails, had brought their good friend who had Tourette syndrome along to walk with them—hoping for a miracle—not for them—no, they did not want anything for themselves, but for him. Naïve, well—no more than anyone. Compassionate—yes. Very compassionate. Innocent, too. So I no longer considered changing anything. They would head off to the next town early the next morning, the three of them, two earnestly hoping for the one, and I never saw them again.
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