Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Inevitably, the rest of us called them the Holy Family.

The Welsh turned up in Santiago de Compostela a few days after we arrived there, and it didn’t take us long to run into them, or any time at all to dope out who they were, as they still had the donkey. We told them we’d heard a lot about them, and they confided that they’d read our entries in the refugio ledgers; if their fame had preceded them, ours had evidently trailed along behind us.

Like everyone else, we asked if they’d be able to bring the little donkey home with them, and they said it was probably going to be impossible. The UK had rather draconian regulations regarding the importation of livestock, and pet dogs and cats were subject to something like a six-month quarantine to prevent the introduction of rabies, so what chance did a donkey have?

So they’d probably have to sell it, the man said, or find a home for it. And it would be a wrench for the kids, the woman added, but she didn’t see how it could be helped.

“You can always buy another donkey once you get home,” Lynne suggested. And the two of them stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

Life became a good deal more collegial from Puente la Reina on. We ran into other peregrinos on the trail, at roadside cafés, and in the villages where we’d end the day’s walking. We spent even more time with them at the refugios, where sleeping accommodations were often dormitory-style, and a shared wait for the shower gave people a chance to talk — and, if the wait was long enough, something to talk about.

But most of the time Lynne and I had each other for company. We didn’t walk side by side every step of the way; my natural pace was faster, and sometimes I’d wander off ahead while she trailed along behind me, until I’d drop my pack and sit down and wait for her to catch up with me. For the most part, though, we walked together, and it was generally just the two of us on the trail. When a larger group chanced to form, it didn’t stay together very long.

As a result, the trip became a remarkable bonding experience for the two of us. We’d already evidenced a curious ability to tolerate each other’s company in close quarters, all those months driving around in search of Buffalo made that abundantly clear, but this was an exponentially more intense phenomenon. There we were, cut off from everything, with yesterday ten or fifteen miles to our rear and tomorrow as many miles in front of us, and both of them well out of sight. We weren’t always chattering away, and the shared silences were as intimate as the continuing dialog.

I can’t remember what we talked about, but neither can I point to anything we didn’t talk about. From its beginnings, our relationship had been characterized by a degree of candor far removed from our prior experience, so we’d been talking intimately for years. Still, this was different, because there was so much of it, and so little of anything else.

And we didn’t just have conversations. Every once in a while we had a meeting.

In 1977, as I mentioned earlier, I stopped drinking. Lynne underwent the same life change four years later, and in fact we first became acquainted at a meeting of a group of people who had all stopped drinking and using drugs, and who convened regularly to share a dark little room in the West Village, along with their experience, strength, and hope.

Attending such meetings had become a regular part of our lives. We went to them separately or together, and we went often — on average, several times a week. Meetings of this sort are held all the time throughout the world, and we’d gone to them during our sojourn in Florida, and during our years of driving back and forth across America. We’d even sought out meetings during trips abroad.

They wouldn’t be available to us in Spain. There are meetings held in Spain, and I’d even been to English-speaking meetings in Madrid and Barcelona when I’d come over for the Madrid Marathon. But we weren’t going to be in either of those cities, we were going to be in hamlets and villages strung across rural Northern Spain, where no one spoke English, and where it would be virtually impossible (and profoundly inconvenient) to find a meeting. And even if we did find one, we wouldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. (And what could we say? “ Me llamo Lorenzo, y soy un puerco borracho. ” “ Hola, Lorenzo! ” Terrific.)

It’s not that we were worried we wouldn’t remain sober. We felt reasonably confident of our ability to stay away from a drink at that stage in our lives. But while the primary purpose of the meetings is to help members maintain their sobriety, that’s not their only function. In a way I don’t entirely understand, they make it easier to maintain one’s emotional equilibrium, to be comfortable in one’s sobriety.

But all it takes to have a meeting is two members gathered together for that purpose. And so we established what we wound up calling the Peregrino Group, and either of us could call a meeting simply by declaring one to be in session, reading the designated preamble, and calling on the other to give a talk.

Meetings back home typically consisted of a speaker who talked for twenty minutes or so, telling what his life used to be like, what had happened, and what it was like now. We’d heard each other many times over the years, but at our Peregrino Group meetings we wound up exploring parts of our past we’d never gotten around to recounting before, in a meeting or in our private conversation. Aspects of childhood, of family history. Incidents from our drinking years that might have seemed inappropriate in a larger assemblage. Anything, really.

These sessions were not just intimate conversations, because we maintained the formality that prevailed at a meeting. The speaker talked, and there was no back and forth; the other person listened without interrupting. When the speaker was done, the other would talk for a while — about what the speaker had said, or about anything else that came to mind. And then we’d recite the Serenity Prayer and conclude the meeting.

The cumulative effect of these two-person meetings was quite extraordinary. They helped remind us of our commitment to sobriety, not a bad idea given the amount of time we were spending in bars and cafés. (In one refugio, the chap in charge was buzzing around the place the night we were there, brandishing a bottle of colorless liquid which he identified as aguardiente and offering it to all comers. All the efforts of the Peregrino Group notwithstanding, that bottle was not entirely unappealing.)

Beyond that, the meetings did what meetings at home did. They made us more comfortable, and improved our dispositions. Calmed us. Settled us down.

And this was particularly useful the day we got seriously lost.

Everybody got lost now and then. I don’t know that it’s an inevitable part of any pilgrimage, although I can see where it might be. I do know it was part of ours.

We’d picked up a guidebook in Puente la Reina, with a pretty decent map of the route. But here’s the thing about the Camino — much of it is an off-road event, with marked paths inaccessible to wheeled vehicles.

This enhanced the whole experience beyond measure. Walking on a two-lane highway isn’t unpleasant, in the ordinary course of things, but there were stretches in Catalonia where we had to share narrow roads with large trucks. Sometimes the roads had no shoulders, and sometimes there was a sheer drop-off at the side of the road, and that wasn’t much fun.

When you were on a path through the fields, you didn’t have to dodge trucks or inhale carbon monoxide. And it was a lot easier to forget you were still in the twentieth century. The hills and the trees and the sky were, after all, not that different from what peregrinos might have seen ages ago.