My last note was on May 6th last year. It’s title was The Old Man from Japan.
I included a photo in that blog of this man of teak hiking over the hill of Cruz de Matagrande between San Juan de Ortega and Burgos with a backpack strapped to his back and his chest.. There were rumours in the clots of pilgrims moving along the Camino that the little old man from Japan had been up Everest.
I had never been so cold in trying to sleep in the big dungeon-dormitory of the albergue there in little main square of this tiny hamlet of San Juan de Ortega. Ortega translates to nettle in English.
Now almost a year on I am flying now with my son Zac to Santander and then by Alsa bus across the Cantabrian mountains to rhe valley of the Rio Arlanzón and Burgos the Real City through which it flows. There we I will take up my Pilgrim staff again and we will begin the mid-section of the Camino Francés across the Meseta. Near the start of my Camino and entry into Spain back in April last year I came though Burguete after there was no room at the Inn in Roncevalles. It was in Burguete that my writer-hero fished and wrote The Sun Also Rises in 1923. In Pamplona I visited his favourite bar Café Iruña in the main square in Pamplona. This is not a writer- pilgrimage but a spiritual pilgrimage to honour San Tiago. But I am thinking of Hemingway and not The Old Man of the Sea. and not The Old Man from Japan and what he said about writing:
“..…I went to Spain….where I’m trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a he’ll of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit….”
and in his Nick Adams Stories: “He wanted to write like Cezanne painted. Cezannne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was he’ll to do. He was the greatest. The greatest for always
It wasn’t a cult. He Nick wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick.”
