Chapter 2
There Is No Day Zero
“That is when the journey begins for real,” I wrote.
It was Thursday morning, 18 June 2009. I was standing at Sandefjord Airport Torp with my rucksack and plane ticket. First I was flying to Gatwick, then on to Biarritz. From the airport in France I had to make my way to the railway station in Bayonne and find the train to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Once I arrived there, I would register as a pilgrim, find somewhere to sleep, and get ready.
The next morning the walk would begin.
This was how I had arranged the days: the journey to the starting point was day zero. It belonged, but it did not count. It was transport, waiting, and preparation, a parenthesis between home and the way. Only when I walked out of Saint-Jean with the Pyrenees ahead of me would the real story begin.
A calendar can draw such a boundary. Life cares less about it.
When I read my notes today, I can see that the story begins at Torp. The sentence places me there with my pack, ready to leave. What happened before the airport was not written down. Home, the final morning, and the drive out to the airport have already fallen outside the frame.
That does not mean those hours were without significance. Only that I did not yet regard them as part of the story. I had chosen an opening image: the man with the rucksack at the airport. There the break was clear. Before this I was at home. Afterwards I was travelling.
Every story needs such a choice. We cannot include everything. But the choice also says something about what we think a beginning is. I imagined it as a bounded moment, one door closing behind you and another opening. Only later did I understand that the most important transitions often happen without a clear dividing line. You have begun to leave long before you depart, and some of what you leave follows you.
The stone from the garden was already in my pack. So were the shame, the expectations, and all the questions I had put to the journey. The airport was a starting point on the map, but not the source of the movement.
I had left home carrying everything I would need for the next month. The pack had not been checked in as luggage but came onto the plane with me. That was practical, and it meant I could move quickly when we landed in Biarritz. While the other passengers waited at the baggage carousel, I went straight to the taxi queue. I was first.
I was in a hurry.
I could have taken the bus to Bayonne and saved money, but I wanted to get going. The taxi cost thirty euros. At the railway station I bought a ticket to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and learned that the train would not leave for another six hours.
Six hours.
I had spent months preparing for a walk that was to last thirty-five days, yet these six hours were difficult to accept. They had no place in the plan as content. They were merely an empty stretch I had to get through before the journey could begin.
I went out into Bayonne and wandered about, constantly looking at my watch.
The town turned out to be beautiful. The rivers Nive and Adour meet there, and the old town had streets and buildings that could have deserved an entire day. I learned that the bayonet had taken its name from the town. I bought nail scissors, a nail file, and plasters—small things I had forgotten, but things that might become important to someone about to entrust his feet to an eight-hundred-kilometre road.
And yet my attention was elsewhere.
I saw the town, but I was waiting for the train. I walked its streets, but was already on my way away from them. The clock moved far too slowly. The journey really had to get started soon, I wrote later.
I had travelled there to find the moment, yet the first moment I was given I tried to make pass more quickly.
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It is easy to recognise this impatience. We divide time into what counts and what merely leads up to what will count. The journey begins when the plane takes off. The holiday begins when we arrive. Life begins after our education, after the dissertation defence, after the work is finished, after the children have grown up, after retirement. Until then we find ourselves in a kind of waiting room.
But the waiting room, too, is a place in life.
In Bayonne I had not yet learned this. I wanted to reach Saint-Jean, because Saint-Jean had been designated as the starting point. From there the kilometres could be counted. There was a first stage and a destination for the day. Bayonne was not marked as part of the walk. And so I was not quite able to receive the town as it was.
The map had given me direction, but also a hierarchy. Some places mattered because the route passed through them. Others were merely connections. Some hours were walking. Others were delay.
The body did not make the same distinction. It carried the pack through the airports, into the taxi, and around the streets of Bayonne. My feet had already begun their work. I simply had not begun counting the steps.
Perhaps stillness had already appeared there, in those six hours for which I had no use. Not as a peace I could feel, but as a space I tried to fill with movement and clock time. I had wanted to leave the routines of everyday life behind, but carried the timetable with me as an inner sound.
Silence did not begin when the surroundings grew quiet. It began when I discovered how much noise I myself could make out of waiting.
I did not understand that then. I crossed one of the rivers, looked around, bought what I was missing, and checked the time again.
At last the train came.
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It was a small, slow train that wound along the river Nive through the French Basque valley. Its top speed was around fifty kilometres an hour. After the flights and the taxi, the pace was different. The landscape did not come towards me as a view from a great height, but moved along the window. The river and the railway followed one another deeper into the valley.
On the train I noticed people who looked like me. They had rucksacks and hiking boots, and they were restless in the same recognisable way. Some had trekking poles. One had a beautiful walking staff.
What were those supposed to be good for, I thought. Only wimps walk with trekking poles. I would manage without such aids.
There is something revealing in the thoughts we manage to have about strangers before we have spoken a single word to them. I knew nothing about their bodies, how far they were going, or what they had experienced. Yet for a moment I divided us into those who needed support and me, who did not.
The way would later teach me how quickly such a division can collapse. An ankle, a blister, or a steep descent is enough. The body does not negotiate with pride. But for now I was still sitting on the train with sound feet and a month that had not begun.
We looked alternately at one another and out of the window. None of us yet knew what stories the others were carrying in their packs. Schoolchildren got on and off along the way. They sang and played and made the journey lighter. For them, the train was probably not a solemn prelude to anything. It was simply the train home, or on to the next station.
For me, it was carrying the whole weight of my expectation towards one particular point.
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port means roughly the town at the foot of the pass. The name says something about its position: here one movement ends and another begins. The town lies at the foot of the Pyrenees, as though it were itself a threshold. Behind me were the airports, the taxi, the waiting, and the train. Ahead were the mountains and Spain.
When the train finally stopped in the evening, I put the pack on my back and walked into town.
At last, I wrote.
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I liked Saint-Jean immediately. The old town, the narrow streets, and the people with rucksacks made it clear that I had arrived at a place where many had begun before me. I was alone, but I was not alone in being about to walk.
The first thing I did was find the pilgrim office. There I would register and receive my pilgrim passport, the document that would accompany me all the way to Santiago. At each approved place of lodging it would be stamped. When I arrived, the stamps would show where I had been and confirm that I had walked.
The passport made me a pilgrim on paper before I had walked the first kilometre of the Camino.
I had arrived in Saint-Jean as a traveller and left the office with a new identity. It was neither grand nor solemn. It consisted of a small document that would be filled with dates and stamps. Yet it meant something to hold it in my hand. I had been entered into an old order of walkers, pilgrim hostels, churches, and places that received strangers.
At the same time, there are things a pilgrim passport cannot document. It can show where you slept, but not what kept you awake. It can confirm a distance travelled, but not which experience changed direction along the way. It can receive a final stamp in Santiago, but it cannot decide whether the walk is over.
I knew nothing of this that evening. I was pleased to have found the office, the passport, and a pilgrim hostel. The practical things were in place.
At the hostel I met a man from Canada and a mother and daughter from Sweden. The Canadian man was looking for French relatives in the area and wanted to walk part of the pilgrimage route while he was there. The Swedish women were heading the same way as I was, but had only three weeks. If time became short, they would take a bus for part of the route so they could reach Santiago.
Already in that first room there were several kinds of pilgrimage. I was going to walk the whole distance. The Swedish women were willing to use a bus. The Canadian man had really come for another reason. No one had yet asked which of us was the real pilgrim.
I notice how easily the old urge to measure can creep in here. I had eight hundred kilometres ahead of me. The Swedish women had fewer days. The Canadian man would walk only part of the way. It would have been easy to rank us by distance and endurance, as though the longest journey must also be the truest.
But a way cannot be judged only by the number of steps. For one person, a hundred kilometres may be a greater threshold than eight hundred is for another. Some come with faith, some with grief, some with curiosity, and some do not yet know why they are there. The bus the Swedish women might take did not make their questions any less real.
I understood this better later. That first evening I mostly registered the differences: how far we were going, how many days we had, and what the plan was. I was still the man with the calendar. Yet it was precisely someone who was not going to walk the whole way who opened my journey with a few words.
The man from Canada asked where we came from.
I said Norway. The two women said Sweden.
“Then you have already travelled a long way too,” he said.
The word already stopped me.
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I had travelled a long way. I had left Sandefjord, flown to England and then to France, driven to Bayonne, waited six hours, and taken the train through the Basque valley. The pack had been on my back. My feet had walked through airports, across bridges, and up the streets of Saint-Jean.
And yet I had called the day zero.
For me, the journey had not yet begun because I had not set foot on the part of the map I had decided would count. The Canadian man was not making some grand philosophical remark. He merely stated the obvious: we had come a long way from home.
But the obvious can be difficult to see when the plan gets in the way.
If the journey began when I left home, then I had missed the first day while waiting for it to begin. Bayonne had not been a pause before life, but part of it. The taxi, the six hours, the nail scissors, the train, and the schoolchildren already belonged to the story.
I had wanted to be in the moment. Yet I had treated an entire day as though it did not exist.
Day zero is a useful expression in a calendar. It allows us to separate preparation from execution. But in a lived life there is no day without value, no day that is merely a parenthesis. The day before what we call the beginning is also a day we have lived. Something has already been set in motion.
So where did my pilgrimage begin?
Did it begin when I left home with the pack? When the plane took off from Torp? When I received the pilgrim passport? Or months earlier, when I decided to go? Did it perhaps begin while I was working on the dissertation, before Santiago had even presented itself as a possibility?
A starting point may be necessary without being true in every sense. We draw a line because the story needs somewhere to begin. But the line does not create the movement. It only makes it visible.
That evening in Saint-Jean I had discovered only that I was already on my way. Not until Santiago would I understand that the finishing line, too, was less final than I thought.
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After the conversation I went out to find food. Outside a tavern, a sign said that they served dinner at a reduced price for pilgrims. I had barely had time to become a pilgrim before someone offered me a pilgrim’s meal.
For eight euros I was given a large serving of Bayonne ham, chips, salad, and bread, together with a bottle of wine and a carafe of water. It was not a symbolic meal. I was hungry, and the food was concrete. But around that simple table I encountered for the first time an arrangement that had existed along the way for hundreds of years: the stranger was to be given food and a place to sleep.
I had not earned the hospitality through the number of kilometres I had walked. No one asked me to show sore feet. The pilgrim passport and the pack were enough. I had been received before I myself had fully understood that I had arrived.
I leaned back in the chair. The wine, the food, and the day did their work. The restlessness that had driven me through the airport and around Bayonne began to loosen its grip.
The journey had begun before I was aware of it.
I wrote the sentence that very first evening without understanding its reach: a walk can begin before its starting point and continue beyond its destination.
The next morning the Pyrenees awaited me. I had read that walking there was like touching the sky. I imagined the magnificent view and the first real stage. The pack was ready. The pilgrim passport lay prepared. The calendar told me that day one was about to begin.
But day zero was already gone.
Not because the day was over.
Because it had never existed.
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