Into the West

 We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.

We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on something big.

To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood. A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining country, power plant country, cowboy country.

Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.

At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your chest.  Inside the café, the tables were nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table – the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people leaned across tables to talk.

“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”

“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”

“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”

“What do you hear from your mom these days?”

“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”

After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting cards. 

An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its back, drying in the sun.

The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style, maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the hospital parking lots are now.

Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland, trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset. As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow and red scoria.

Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.

Badlands, and Medora – dusty. Dust on the car, dust on your legs, dust in your nose. Oh, and there are the cowboys, strolling down the street. Oh, and there’s a rattlesnake, crushed dead on the road by a passing car. We’re in the west.

A surprise in the laundry room...

I found a dead bat in the washing machine the other day.

That’s right, a dead bat. A bit mummified, really, and quite, quite dead.

Earlier in the day, I had been looking around the storage room in the basement in our hundred-year-old house, digging through boxes that had once belonged to my husband’s old roommates, who have all moved on to their own adventures in homeownership. I was looking to see if anything was worth keeping. Something caught my eye that I thought would be good for our pup.

We only recently got a dog – just three weeks ago, actually. She’s a good dog: seems very smart, mostly obedient, though she likes to jump up on unsuspecting people, worryingly, often the elderly. Anyhow, she sleeps in a kennel – if she didn’t, she’d be in bed with my husband and myself, which, as you know, would have us end up squashed together on the far end of the bed while the brazen hound takes up the middle. So, to keep her comfortable in the kennel, we’ve put in an old pillow, a comfy old blanket, a few of her toys in an attempt to make a nice doggy comfort space.

Righteo now, don’t forget about the bat. While digging around in the storage room, I came across a box with old books, childhood knickknacks, and a frayed blue towel, presumably all from ancient roommate times. Looking at the towel I thought to myself, gee, this would be great for the dog to slobber on instead of the couch corner. So I pulled it out, popped it into the washing machine with a few blankets that needed a freshening up, and went on my merry way.

Guess where the bat was?

My suspicion is that it was on the old, raggedy blue towel. Somehow, I didn’t notice it when I pulled it out of the box, or when I put it into the washing machine.

When the wash cycle was finished, I went back down into the basement, folded the dry clothes and started lifting the wet blankets and towels from the washer into the dryer. Something strange was at the bottom of the wash tub – something dark and rumpled, with a few sticky-out bits, like the top of an eggplant looks a few hours after being cut off.

I poked it with my finger.

Squish.

Oh no, I thought: that’s not an eggplant top. Realising that it might be something that once had a pulse, and praying that it hadn't survived the spin cycle, I pulled a clean dusting cloth out of the pile on the dryer and slowly, gingerly even, picked up the rumpled dark thing.

I turned it over, and ah! It had a face! A fuzzy, tiny face with slightly chubby cheeks! Slightly chubby, mummified cheeks.

The dog was standing right behind me, as she always does, little shadow that she is, and was looking up at the thing in my hand, head cocked to one side, ears perked up with interest. I assumed, of course, that she wanted to eat it, being a dog that will eagerly eat horse poo.

I took a slightly closer look at the thing without actually bringing my face closer to it – was it a mouse? No, those arm bones were much too long and papery looking – that was a bat, and it was (eek):

        a) in the house

                      

        b) in the flipping washing machine

Pinching it between my thumb and forefinger as far away from my face as possible, I dropped it into the trash bin along with the used dryer sheets, lint, and the remnants of the ‘I’m single, not desperate’ mug I’d accidently knocked off the counter with a broomstick a few weeks ago. And out with it to the trash can in the alleyway. In went the bleach to the washing tub, along with the now definitely unclean but clean-smelling laundry.

I’ve never found a tiny, creepy animal in my home before – and I’ve had a lot of homes. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. There was the time when a squirrel came in through the skylight of my yurt in Idaho, ran a panicked circle around my roommate’s legs, and beat a path out the door. That was really only for a minute or so. It hadn’t set up residence, and it certainly wasn’t there long enough to become mummified.

Mummified! That brings us back to thought of how it squished a little when I poked it. I think it might’ve become rehydrated in the wash.

Ew.

My sister in law once had a family of skunks set up home beneath her porch in college. That was probably worse than this. Skunks carry rabies, too, and with them comes the danger of them spraying the whole place with their foul odor... and if they’re living under the porch, there’s probably a good chance that they’ll scurry into the house while you’ve got the screen door propped open on moving day. Just imagine that for a second. 

I suppose my dad has caused a few creature-in-the-house near-misses himself. My father has what you might call an affinity for squirrels, a desire to bond with them and develop lasting human-rodent friendships. He loves to feed the neighborhood squirrels, and has even attempted to train them to eat from his hand as he crouches down on the ground nearby. Yes, he's retired. About four years ago, he started laying a trail of unsalted in-the-shell peanuts along the top of the garden fence, with the last peanut set just outside the front door. The result was this: arriving to visit my parents and coming face-to-face with a squirrel, perched on the fence mere inches from my nose, a squirrel now totally unafraid of human contact. One day, while home from his faraway job, my older brother opened the door to find a squirrel, upside down, suspended by its claws from the screen. That was not something that my mother had ever hoped to experience. By the end of that winter, all of the trained squirrels had since died without teaching their offspring to trust the white-haired man on the corner.

Well, no more bats have shown up since the fuzzy cheeked, mummified squashy thing emerged from the washing machine three days ago. By now it can be filed under ‘just another horrible story to tell in the pub.' 

Hopefully.

Buen Camino

Right, we were going to talk about the Camino de Santiago, since we already talked about the cake. It's a gorgeous autumn morning, the sun is shining, and now is our chance, so let's take it.

The Camino, as people who've walked it call it, is an ancient hiking trail that runs about 720 miles or 900 kilometers across Spain, if you go all the way to Finnesterre, or the End of the Earth. Yes, that's what the Romans called it, the End of the Earth.

 If you don't do the extra bit at the end, it works out to be around 560 miles. Now, whichever you choose, that's a pretty long way if you've never walked further than the safe, paved distance between your car and the front door of work. The long version, of 720 miles, is in North Dakota terms, like going from Bismarck to Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is, as our friends and neighbors would say, a ways. And you're walking, unless of course you're one of the minority group who choose to ride horseback or bicycle. Let's be honest, though: unless you're willing to wear an all-spandex outfit in 90 degree weather (oh dear, oh dear, the chafing), or to get Mr Ed his own plane ticket, you're most likely going to walk it.

Imagine that for a moment: stepping out of your front door in B-town, NoDak, with a light pack on your back, shoes on your feet (preferably ones that won't ever cause blisters) and walking out across the prairie, past the bustling, booming oil country, turning left somewhere south of Billings, and making your way, all day every day, to Cheyenne. Walking for ten hours a day, napping in parks after lunch, eating six or seven meals to keep the energy going, and falling into bed every night. When you think of it that way, the distance becomes clear. Mind-boggling, almost. Or maybe you'd rather not think about it at all.

But thousands upon thousands of people think about it, and then do it every year. It's a pilgrimage trail that has existed since Roman times, which means that millions of people have done it. You may well ask: in God's name, why?

Well, that's exactly the point. Most have done it in God's name. The city of Santiago de Compostela is named after St James, aka Sant Iago, one of the twelve apostles of Christ.  As the story goes, St James the apostle was martyred in the middle east. His followers placed his body in a stone boat and set it off to sea. The stone boat eventually washed up on the shores of Galicia, where it was found by shepherds, and brought to the site where the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela now stands. It is widely assumed to be his burial place, and so, starting in medieval times (and indeed, in Roman times) people often times made the journey as a pilgrimage in penance for crimes or sins. Actually, if you're doing the hike with blisters on your feet, you very well may think that you're doing penance for some past wrong yourself. But don't let that idea dissuade you just yet.

Now, why the name Compostela? Pilgrims often escaped the brutal Spanish heat by walking at night, and according to camino lore, they made their way to Santiago by following the milky way, or the field of stars. In fact, while walking the camino at night, if you look up, the milky way seems to stretch straight out from where you've been, to where you're going. Santiago de Compostela = St James of the Field of Stars. Beautiful.

Spain is dry, hot and dusty in the summertime, remarkably so, when you compare it to the lush, humid French side of the Pyrenees; but it is made of spectacular stuff. From the start of the Camino, way up in the Pyrenees mountains, which divide France and Spain, peregrinos (as the pilgrims are called) cross through the vineyards of Rioja, the wooded mountains of Cantabrica, winding through thousand-year-old cities like Leon and Burgos, through tiny towns with names like Villaviciosa and Carrion de los Condes, crossing mile after mile of trail before finally ending in Galicia, on the northern Atlantic edge of the Iberian peninsula.

It takes roughly a month to traverse the whole of Spain on the most popular route, the Camino Frances. Modern pilgrims have their own reasons for checking out of their day-to-day life and following the trail: some for sport, some for religious or spiritual reasons, some to get over a heartbreak or to grieve. And some, of course, just because they've always wanted to.  For many, it is a life-changing month: a time of daily reflection, of meditation, and of the purest simplicity.

Some of the more memorable points include a wine fountain, where pilgrims can drink wine for free (!) from a tap coming out of a vineyard's wine cellar wall. People often carry a small stone in their pack to leave at the Cruz de Ferro, covered in mementos, ribbons, photographs, and yes, stones. Worth an overnight stop is the pilgrim hostel at Manjarin, run by Tomas and the modern Knights Templar (or so they claim to be), who will feed you, put you up in a barn, and perform a blessing ceremony after dinner in tunics... with swords! You won't forget that anytime soon, nor will you forget picking up a scallop shell on the beach at Finesterre, proof that you made the journey in its entirety.

Of course, the most memorable things are the feeling of comradarie amongst pilgrims: of sleeping in giant rooms stacked with bunkbeds; of shared meals along the side of the road; of greeting familiar faces at different points along your journey; of making new and sometimes lifelong friends from the other side of the world. It's like a big, migrating United Nations summer camp for grown-ups and the occasional donkey.

Does this even begin to encapsulate the camino? It doesn't. As LaVar Burton would say, you don't have to take my word for it. Sure, have a look yourself. You should probably give it a shot sometime.

Buen Camino.

The flop of shame

Yesterday, I went to the grocery store in sweatpants. Not just any sweatpants, but the stretchy, black workout leggings that everyone is wearing these days. 

This wasn't the first time I've worn them out in public, but I don't make a habit of it. Every time I do, however, there always seems to be a reminder waiting. Some invisible mirror being held up, perhaps by a complete stranger, showing me that I used to be different from how I am now, no matter how subtly.

I found my reminder easily enough, rounding the corner of the cereal aisle: two young women, standing in beautiful linen summer dresses, reading aloud the sign hanging overhead labelled 'jam, peanut butter, pickles.' They had Scandinavian accents. Foreign women, looking like real grownups in public.

A mother in jogging shorts flip flopped by with a young child, also in jogging shorts and flip flops. Flop flop flop flop flop flop.

Standing there in my stretchy black leggings, my Irish self inwardly frowned at my American self, remembering Fiona, the Boston girl from my undergraduate English tutorial group in Dublin. Fiona, who would appear for small group discussions in sweatpants with words printed across the backside, a hoodie, flip flops, and a huge bun leaning over the side of her head. Pajamas, essentially. She'd fold herself up, legs under her in her hard backed chair, like she was watching a movie in her living room, instead of discussing literature at the same university that James freaking Joyce had attended. She would drawl out her words in a half sing-song as she offered her analysis on the week's novel.

"I don't knoooow, you guuuuuuys, IIIIIIII just thought this book was kind of boring?"

Oh for feck's sake, Fiona.

That was not how things were done, and her extravagantly casual way embarrassed the bejaysus out of my American self. To be honest, I worried that my classmates would equate me with this groggy creature swathed in comfy fabrics and shod in plastic.

And then, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, there I was, standing in a prairie grocery store aisle in flip flops, stretchy sweats and a tee shirt, with a big messy bun perched on my head.

sigh.

Oh well. I pulled up my elastic waistband, casually flip flopped past the Scandinavian girls, and made my way to the checkout counter.