Dispatches from El Camino

3:03 a.m.—I’m awake before my wife. Actually, I’m awake before the rest of France. Jet lag has me screwed up. It’s 3 in the morning here but 8 p.m. in Alabama.

Thus, I am locked away in our inn’s bathroom, door closed, sitting on a latrine, playing my fiddle, with a brass mute affixed to the instrument’s bridge.

4:10 a.m.—Jamie is still sleeping. I’m still fiddling.

5:37 a.m.—I am now sitting in the inn’s garden, fiddling. Sleeping Beauty still hasn’t budged.

There is an older woman in the cottage next door, listening to me play through an open window as she works in her kitchen. She pauses to lean out the window and give light applause when I finish playing “Over the Waves.” I’m not sure whether she is applauding because she liked the song or because I am no longer playing.

6:24 a.m.—I am watching a calico cat creep along terracotta rooftops in the dark distance. He carefully leaps from one roofline to the next. I think he hears my fiddle and is looking for his wounded sibling.

7:28 a.m.—The sun rises in San-Jean-Pie-de-Port, slowly ascending behind the small French hamlet, nestled in the Pyrenees. Silver mist clings to the mountainsides like a damp dishrag. Distant sheep graze on swatches of green farmland quilting the rocky hillsides. It is my great hope that my wife wakes up someday soon.

8:32 a.m.—Jamie is awake. We eat a breakfast of muesli, which is cereal. Our innkeeper tells us muesli will help us go to the bathroom. The French woman doesn’t speak English, so instead of saying “bathroom,” she uses hand gestures to pantomime “severe gastrointestinal distress.” Then she laughs. The French are wonderful.

10:00 am—We are at the supermarket, buying food for our upcoming walk. There is evidently no peanut butter in this store, or in all of France.

They sell items I've never heard of. Tiny octopuses in a jar. There are two aisles wholly dedicated to cheese.

In the meat department I see a butcher handling an animal tongue the size of a small toddler. He presents the tongue to an elderly woman who cheers for the slab of muscular organ meat like you’d cheer for a birthday cake.

10:13 a.m.—A supermarket employee informs me that peanut butter is something only Americans eat. The employee cannot even utter “peanut butter” without gagging.

He says the French would never eat peanut butter unless they were in a survival situation and cannibalism was no longer a viable option. I tell him that is all well and good, but beef tongues the size of Fiats don’t exactly blow my American skirt up, either.

12:11 a.m.—The whole town shuts down for two hours. All shops close. Even big, franchise-looking stores and gas stations.

“You no have 2-hour lunch in America?” one shopkeeper asks me amusedly. “Don’t you ever take a rest?”

I tell him no, in America we only have 65-hour work weeks and angina. He seems genuinely saddened by this news. But I tell him to look on the bright side, at least we have peanut butter.

2:05 p.m.—We are standing in a LONG line outside the Pilgrim’s Office to get our “credenciales,” which are passports used for the Camino. You need these passport booklets otherwise you cannot stay at the hostels and we do not plan on sleeping in a pasture where they harvest cow tongue.

There are hundreds of pilgrims. Very few speak English. We are all from different countries, age groups, and walks of life. And yet, somehow, although we are foreigners sojourning in a strange land, we all manage to—this is beautiful—gripe about how slow the line moves.

Our collective grumbling leads to new friendships. I make friends with an older French man named Lauren, which he pronounces “Law.”

Also a German man named Heinrich who only knows one English word, which is “Brilliant,” which he uses after everything I say. You could say the sky is fuschia and the ocean is made of manure and Captain Crunch and Heinrich would smile and gaily reply, “Brilliant.”

A 25-year-old Dutch woman, walking the Camino after a breakup. A 46-year-old Vietnamese man who says God told him to walk this path in a dream after his mother died. A 22-year-old guy named Roger, from Michigan, who is fervently praying to meet hot girls.

7:08 p.m.— After supper, we attend a pilgrim’s mass at Notre-Dame du Bout du Pont. The ancient church is mostly empty, except for a few dozen pilgrims.

Everyone is reverent. A lot of people are bowing heads. Some light candles. There is a strong sense of joy in the air.

An official looking elderly woman is walking from pew to pew to inform people there will be no mass tonight for some reason. Even so, this does not stop the horde of pilgrims from genuflecting. We have come a long way to do this. To be here. To feel what we’re feeling in this sanctuary. So we continue praying. Some are weeping. I feel a lot of peace.

I unfold the prayer bench and kneel.

I don’t know what I’m praying for, exactly, but I begin to weep too. Big tears. I don’t know why. Maybe because it all feels real now. This room. This atmosphere, so heavy with the feeling that we are all looking for something, and we are about to find it.

8:04 p.m.— I finally find peanut butter.