Walking Home: A Pilgrimage from Humbled to Healed

by Choquette, Sonia

  11

  Chicago to Paris

  I was relieved to get on the flight from Chicago to Paris, to finally be on my way. I had spent so much energy vacillating between anticipating and fearing the experience that it felt good to be getting on with it.

  “Okay!” I breathed out a big sigh, probably the first in days and days, as we turned onto the runway. “Here I go,” I told myself. “I hope I know what I’m doing.”

  Once on the ground in Paris, I grabbed both backpacks and headed to a Hilton at the airport to rest for one day and get over my jet lag before I set out.

  I woke up early and got ready to leave for Biarritz. Wow. I couldn’t believe I was so close to starting. My flight left at one, so I had time for a leisurely breakfast before I set off for the airport. I took out my little purse with all the information I had gathered on the Camino to look over my plan one more time. For walking across an entire country, it didn’t seem like there was very much to go on. I had the names of the hostels where I was to stay at the end of each day, and that was it. Not even an address or phone number. Just the name of the town and the hostel.

  I guess that’s what a pilgrimage is all about, I thought, as I stuffed my little purse back into my backpack. I was to simply follow the signs—which I’d been told were yellow arrows and occasionally the famous scallop shells like the ones found on St. James’s body—marking the Camino, and to go on faith. I looked out the window of my hotel room. The skies were nearly black with clouds while thunder and rain crashed down. I laughed as I looked away. Of course the skies are troubled. They feel the way I do.

  I checked the outside temperature on my iPhone app and saw it was only 45 degrees, which was really cold for the middle of May. I was so glad I had thrown on a heavier windbreaker at the very last minute before I left my house. Looking at the forecast for the days ahead and seeing it was more of the same or worse, I would clearly need it.

  I repacked my big backpack, which I had completely emptied the night before, just to make sure one last time that I had had everything I needed, and then went down to breakfast. My head was a bit heavy. I was hungry, jet-lagged, excited, and a little scared, wondering if I was ready to begin tomorrow.

  I know when I put my mind to things I always accomplish what I set out to do, so it wasn’t a genuine concern. I just wondered what the journey ahead would actually be like and if I was physically up to it. I was healthy and strong but not exactly what I would call athletic. I walked. I danced. I did yoga. I occasionally hit the gym and lifted weights, but not in the past year due to my knee surgery. I took all of this into account when considering I was about to walk across an entire country.

  “Well, we’ll see,” I muttered to myself as I sipped my café au lait.

  Perhaps more than anything I was nervous. I am an adventurous spirit and love to leap into the unknown, but I hadn’t done it alone, or on as grand a scale as this since I was 20 years old.

  The last time had brought me to France, as well.

  My parents had been going through many tumultuous collisions at the time and just like now, my family was falling part. In my attempt to help both my mom and dad with their suffering, I found myself in the middle of their emotional struggles, and it took a tremendous emotional toll on me. I couldn’t take it anymore. In my mind, they were crazy, and I needed to get away from them.

  In addition, I had just abruptly ended a relationship with my first important boyfriend, with whom I had lived for almost 18 months, due to his increasing drug and alcohol use. I wanted the world. He wanted a joint. Even though I knew it was right for me to get away, he was caught completely off guard and was devastated, which left me guilt-ridden and confused. At the same time, I quit college, which also left me feeling ashamed. I was there on a scholarship and was a good student. I wasn’t supposed to quit college. No one was supposed to quit college, and yet I was doing just that and without telling anyone or asking anyone’s opinion. I was running away from home.

  I attempted to find a new life as a flight attendant, but I soon discovered that I was not cut out for that job at all. I felt lonely and completely out of integrity with my spirit, a grand impostor every time I put on my uniform to go to work. Working for the airline felt like working for the army. I was told I was on probation for the first six months and any false move I made would result in termination. Being a good Catholic girl, I was scared to death.

  Needless to say, I was not the typical carefree, wild person, who loved to party, was sexually promiscuous, and stayed up all night drinking and doing cocaine, as were most of my fellow flight attendants at the time. I wasn’t “cool” like that. I was shy and serious, extremely sensitive, deeply spiritual, and highly intuitive, so this ungrounded craziness, all happening in strange hotels in strange cities while on layovers, left me feeling anxious and stressed and more traumatized than ever.

  I felt like such an ugly duckling, a fish out of water, a wallflower in that world that I had to keep running. I was upside down, ungrounded, homeless, and distraught with nowhere to turn for respite and comfort. I often thought of moving to France. Ever since I was a child, I felt drawn there. Although my father was French and was raised in a French-speaking home in the States, he himself never spoke French or talked about France at all while we were growing up. So my attraction to France, and the south of France in particular, did not come from him. It came from a deeper place in me, and I didn’t know why.

  One day while sitting in a flight-attendant lounge in Cleveland, I mentioned, in a causal conversation with a fellow flight attendant, my dream of going to the south of France. He said if I ever did, he recommended Aix-en-Provence. He then wrote down the address of a place I might check on for a place to stay. And just like this pilgrimage, the minute he handed me that paper with an address in Aix, I decided then and there to go. The next month, without any real planning or information, I took a year’s leave of absence from my job and was out the door.

  Once I arrived in Aix, things fell into place, and soon I was settled into a rented room on the third floor of an old country house, complete with army cot, small sink, table with a single naked bulb lamp, and a shared bathroom in the hall. It was simple to say the least, but as a person who grew up with six brothers and sisters and had a bedroom that didn’t even have its own door, followed by living with my boyfriend, and then with a house full of flight attendants, being alone for the first time in my life, even in such basic quarters, was a relief.

  Once settled in, I needed something to do. I found a language school in town where I could learn to speak French for several hours a day, so I quickly enrolled. Other than that I mostly spent my time just wandering through the countryside or the town trying to feel better, mostly to no avail.

  While I succeeded in getting physically away from my family, the emotional pain I was in followed me all the way there. I had no idea at the time how to be completely on my own, or process my emotions in a healthy way, so I ended up feeling stressed and afraid and lonely. On top of that I had very little money, so I lived off day-old baguettes and very small amounts of cheese. After three months of that, I suddenly got very sick.

  Two days before Christmas the woman who rented the room to me came up to invite me to join the family downstairs for a Christmas aperitif, only to find me on the floor, consumed by fever, and delirious with both severe back and stomach pain.

  I vaguely remember her looking at me, panicked, as she put a cool rag over my face. The next thing I knew I was at the local hospital and headed in to surgery for a ruptured appendix accompanied by a severe kidney infection.

  I’m convinced my angels sent that woman up to my room to help me at that very moment, as she had never once, in the three months I had lived there, come up before. In fact, I rarely saw her, and when I did I avoided speaking to her because she was, in typical French manner, elegant, aloof, and intimidating to no end. I was so grateful she did.

  After surgery, I spent the next 19 days in the hospital recovering, s
o my holidays were as sad and miserable as the rest of me. And yet, I can now see how perfect it was that this had happened to me. I ended up being nurtured day and night, which on so many levels I needed. The nurses, feeling sorry for me, were very kind and often stayed a few moments longer than necessary in order to reassure me that all would be okay as I recovered. I was so grateful to them for that.

  The teachers from the language school where I was a student also came to visit me, some several times during my stay, which both surprised and touched me. They even brought me Christmas and New Year’s offerings of candy and figs, assuring me they would still be good to eat after I recovered.

  Even the woman who rented the room to me came to visit almost every day. She had softened and treated me with such gentle concern I couldn’t believe she was the same person I had been avoiding. These strangers offered me so much love and kindness as I lay there, day after day, that the quiet panic inside me began to settle down.

  As I convalesced, I shared a room with a 90-year-old woman who had fallen and broken her leg. She had some form of dementia, which caused her to talk almost nonstop for hours and hours at a time. She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to heaven.

  As I listened to her endless chatter, I actually began to understand French. She was talking to angels, departed loved ones, guides, people from her past (some of whom she missed and some of whom she didn’t like), and a whole cast of transient invisible characters. I actually found a great deal of it entertaining. She ended up being the best French teacher I’d ever had. By the time I checked out of the hospital, I had learned enough French to test into the University of Paris, where I would later finish school.

  Sitting at breakfast I thought it interesting that this entire phase of my earlier life came rushing back into my consciousness as though it were only yesterday, when I hadn’t thought of it for years. Apparently I had been called to the Camino to clear more than just the recent past. I was dredging up the debris of all my ancient emotional wounds, even the ones I had long since forgotten. While swallowing a small morsel of cheese, I wondered if some of those wounds might not even be lifetimes old.

  I looked at my watch. It was time to go. Downing the last sip of my coffee and shoving the last bit of chocolate croissant into my mouth, I headed to the checkout desk before I caught the shuttle to the airport. Thirty minutes later I was checked in for my flight and had my boarding pass for Biarritz in hand.

  A deluge of mixed emotions flooded through me. One part of me felt like a kid setting off to summer camp. Another part felt as though I were an inmate who had just been released from the prison of my own life. And yet another part of me felt as though I were walking toward something I had long ago known in my soul, a sort of homecoming, or at least a return to something that had begun in another time and now needed to be completed.

  My mind was dancing all over the map, but my spirit was excited. I could feel the support of my angels and guides and the spirits of my ancestors cheering me on.

  I knew in my heart that no matter what called me to undertake this pilgrimage, something good would come out of it, for me, for my children, for my family, and for generations of my family back and forward.

  Settling into my seat for the 45-minute flight, I announced out loud, under my breath, “Let the adventure begin.”

  12

  Get Ready, Get Set …

  The airport in Biarritz was small, and in no time my two backpacks came sliding onto the baggage claim carousel. I put them both in a trolley and went outside, where I hired a taxi driver to take me to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, 45 minutes away, where I would begin the Camino.

  I was immediately taken by how cold it was.

  “C’est froid,” I said, shivering, to the taxi driver as he placed my bags in the trunk of his car. He immediately agreed and then slid into a tirade on how nasty the weather was that lasted until we arrived at our destination. Turning around the bend of the curved highway, we descended into a charming medieval-looking town backed up against a mountain range. He pulled over.

  “C’est Saint-Jean,” he said, turning around to show me. “In which hotel are you staying?”

  I took out my itinerary and said the Central Hotel. He looked left and right, and then left again in search of it. I searched right alongside him. Neither of us had any luck.

  The town wasn’t that big, so we strained once more, looking both ways to see where it might be. Finally he suggested that I get out with my bags and simply ask around, as it would be easy enough to find, and he had to get going.

  I wasn’t exactly happy that he couldn’t help me find the hotel, but I knew this was the end of the line for me, and I had to get walking anyway, so I agreed. He jumped out and ran to the back of the car to open the trunk and then soundly plopped my two bags on the ground and asked for 50 euros. The minute he did, I immediately regretted bringing this much stuff and wondered if I could simply walk away from one of the bags and pretend it wasn’t mine, as opposed to having to drag both along in search of the hotel.

  As he drove off I felt a wave of anxiety. Now what?

  Slowly I picked up one bag and thrust it on my back, not having a clue as to how I would ever be able to drag a second one along at the same time. When I turned around to arrange the backpack straps, I found myself looking directly at a sign no more than 20 feet away that said “Hotel Central.”

  I nearly squealed with delight. I immediately ran to the front door of the hotel with the heavier backpack first, now known as my “cheater bag” or simply “Cheater,” and dropped it on the front step. Then I dashed back to retrieve the second backpack, now known as the “real pilgrim” or simply “Pilgrim.” I left them both outside on the step as I walked into the lobby of the hotel. I thought it would be easier to scope the place out without all that encumbering me. The old hotel was dark, and nobody was at the front desk.

  To the left of the reception area was a small dining area, also completely dark. There was a very steep, narrow staircase in front of me.

  I saw a small bell on the desk and rang it, hoping it would draw someone from out of the dark. After only two rings a friendly older woman, wearing a dark red sweater, her hair pulled into a tight bun on the top of her head, popped her head out of the kitchen and said, “Bonjour. J’arrive.” She emerged seconds later, asking me if I had a reservation.

  I said, “Yes, Camino Ways,” praying to God that it would be there.

  She frowned for a few moments, which was long enough to stir a small panic in me, and then finally said, “Oui.”

  When I breathed a huge “whew” to her “oui,” she started laughing. She then asked for my passport and handed me a key for a room on the fourth floor.

  “Do you have any bags?” she asked, as she handed my passport back to me.

  “I do,” I said, and quickly stepped out to retrieve them. As I dragged in the first, then the second, her brow furrowed.

  “I only have you registered for one person,” she said, looking at my two huge bags.

  “No worries,” I replied. “I’m the only one.”

  Her eyebrow raised in obvious disapproval as I tried to be as nonchalant as possible while pushing Cheater across the floor and throwing Pilgrim over my shoulder.

  Looking ahead at the disastrous staircase in front of me, knowing my room was four flights up, I asked if there might be a bellboy or someone around to help me with my bags, ignoring the obvious dearth of humanity.

  “Ah, non!” she said as if I had asked for her for the moon. “Pas d’ici!”

  Oh, how I love the French. They have such a way of making you feel like an idiot for asking the least little thing of them.

  “Okay, pas de problème,” I said, smiling, trying to act as pilgrim-like as possible, as if it were no big deal for me to carry the equivalent of a dead body and second backpack up four flights of stairs.

  “Bien,” she responded, and sat back on her heels to watch me, clearly ready for the entertainment to come.

>   I decided I would start with Cheater and drag him up first. I took a deep breath, bent my knees, tossed the backpack over my shoulder as if it were a handbag, and like Quasimodo, hunched over and started up the stairs.

  I managed to get to the landing and turn to mount the second flight when I heard her snort and walk away.

  “AAARRGGH,” I silently cried out, dropping my bag on the floor. “I hate you, you stupid Cheater. We are breaking up tonight!”

  We struggled for another ten minutes before I had successfully landed him on the extremely dark fourth floor and fumbled around for a light, grateful that no one was around to hear me cursing like a sailor.

  I finally found the light switch and opened the door to a dreary, simple room with a single bed and a small connecting bathroom with a minuscule shower in it.

  The room was freezing, and there was no heat coming out of the heater. Suddenly I felt very jet-lagged and cold. But I still had to retrieve Pilgrim and drag her upstairs, as well. Fortunately, round two was far easier than round one, and all I could think of was that there was no way I was going to struggle with Cheater like this the entire way across Spain.

  Looking at the beast on the floor, I said out loud, “Better get ready to be dumped, Cheater. Unless you prove yourself truly useful to me, and fast, we will soon be parting ways for good.”

  Cheater was silent.

  I looked around the room, which was easy, as it was only eight feet wide. I tested the bed. It squeaked. The pillow was thin.

  “Hee hee!” I laughed to myself. “No problem, thin pillow. I have my own!”

  I whipped open Cheater and there she was—my fluffy, comforting, inviting, personal pillow beckoning me to lie down.

  “Not now,” I said, talking to my pillow.

  “I have to go into town and find where the Camino starts. I hope it’s not too difficult to figure out.”

  I locked the door and made my way downstairs and across the street. The quaint town was filled with tourist and pilgrim-like shops. The first thing I noticed were countless scallop shells hanging in the windows and at the entrance of nearly every shop.