I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir by Kevin Sessums

Author:Kevin Sessums [Sessums, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Journalist, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Retail
ISBN: 9781250023179
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

4/30/09

There were nice friendly people on the train, but I was late getting to Pamplona and missed the bus to Roncesvalles. Shit. The next one is at 6:00 P.M. It is now 2:45 P.M. I have to sit in the bus station until then—my idea of hell as I set out on this trek that will supposedly get me closer to heaven. This is my first lesson of letting go. I am worried, though, about getting across the Spanish border into France to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, an unofficial starting point for pilgrims, too late to get my “passport,” which gets stamped along the way to prove one has walked the Camino. I am also just worried about finding an empty bed at a hostel. I said my first prayer—not to get there in time but to stay calm and let God get me there when I am supposed to get there. The danger is competing with myself, to make this journey as quickly as I can.

One lesson: Slow down.

Another more earthly lesson: Bus stations are the same all over the world. I am looking around the station right now and seeing some scruffy young people. They look like they might be runaways. I just looked into their dirty faces and realized my face might look just that dirty and emaciated in a month after walking the Camino. One more prayer, one more lesson: God, don’t let me be running away but toward.

* * *

I am now writing in my bed in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

Back at the bus station in Pamplona, a black man from Toronto sat down next to me. His name was Basel and he told me his lovely accent was a Barbadian one. He too had come to Pamplona on the 9:20 A.M. train and was about to walk the Camino as well. He too had gotten lost.

“Why are you walking the Camino?” I asked him.

“My path in life seems to be changing, so I thought I’d walk this path to see if it could point me in the right direction,” he said, reflecting my own reasons.

I asked, “Are you Catholic?”

He chuckled dismissively. “Far from it,” he said. “Very far, in fact. I am an ordained Methodist minister.”

“I was raised a Methodist as well,” I told him, remembering that first day I had gone to the Methodist church with my mother back in Mississippi.

“But this is not a religious trek we are about to undertake,” he told me. “It is a spiritual one. I came to terms with being a gay man two years ago and that has made me less religious yet more spiritual.” He also told me he had a seventeen-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old son. I didn’t ask if they knew he was gay.

We rode together on the bus to Roncesvalles and then in the taxi/van that was waiting for us pilgrims to take us across the border into France. That’s the first time I’ve referred to myself as that—a pilgrim.

We were in the last taxi to arrive tonight and there were no more rooms for us at any of the hostels.

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