Walk It Off. Erns Grundling
hide in rock crevasse.
My rough notes on the Slagtersnek Rebellion are becoming unmanageable on my irritatingly small Samsung Netbook.
I can’t stop thinking of the satisfaction I’ll feel when I chuck the laptop and phone away at Charles de Gaulle. It’s absurd: sitting up here in the sky on the way to the longest holiday of my life, after all the flaming hoops I’ve jumped through over the past few months, with an article that’s still not finished. It’s enough to make you certifiably insane.
Bun Booyens, my first editor at Go, gave a talk at the KKNK once in which he described how his journalists’ writing styles differ. Toast Coetzer’s words flow like a waterfall, and Bun imagines him writing with one hand, while steering with his knees, holding a KFC Rounder in his other hand. Dana Snyman has a different approach. He is like a cat having kittens. Approach him cautiously, keep your distance, and when you look again, there’s a precious new arrival.
And me? Erns sits in front of the laptop like a dog that’s swallowed poison …
* * *
I yield to the temptation of the in-flight entertainment despite (or maybe because of) the pressure of work. The laptop’s batteries are not going to last until Doha anyway; I’ll have to come up with another Slagtersnek plan at the airport during the eight-hour stopover.
I scroll through the movies. My eye catches Wild (2014), with Reese Witherspoon in the leading role, based on the bestseller with the same title by Cheryl Strayed.
Wild tells the story of Cheryl’s epic solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA. She covered almost 1 800 kilometres on her own in 94 days, with hardly any hiking experience and infinitely more baggage than she had in her rucksack.
Her hike began in the Mojave Desert in southern California. During the hike she has constant flashbacks to her childhood, the death of her mother, rough sex with strangers, and a heroin phase for good measure. Oh, and the collapse of her marriage, and an abortion. One is tempted to ask her, in the vein of a New Yorker cartoon: “Other than that, Mrs Kennedy, how was your trip to Dallas?”
The film is incredibly inspiring. I can’t help making certain connections between Strayed’s story and my own imminent hike.
Look, I don’t foresee having to lick the dew off my tent when I run out of water, or covering the distances she covered without seeing a single soul. The Camino is far too popular for that. My guidebook tells me that in 2014 exactly 237 886 pilgrims arrived at Santiago de Compostela. Of these, 161 994 walked the Camino Francés, the route that I’m going to take.
But like Strayed, I also have a lot of baggage I’d like to get rid of. Physical and emotional. Baggage that has kept me very busy for a very long time, that I don’t necessarily want to think about, but that is always lurking just below the surface. The cracks in the “room beneath the floor”, as the psychoanalyst James Hollis refers to the unconscious. Let’s face it, I don’t think people decide, without reason(s), to take six weeks’ leave to go and backpack around Spain alone without a cell phone, watch or camera.
I scribble a few quotes from the film in among my Slagtersnek notes, especially from the part where she reaches her destination at the Bridge of the Gods on the Oregon–Washington border after so many challenges, crises and adventures:
•“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish, or die, or take another course? What if I forgive myself? What if I was sorry?”
•“We are never prepared for what we expect.”
•“After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods. Thank you … for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know.”
•“It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”
* * *
What thoughts and sensations will I arrive at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela with in about forty days’ time? Or, firstly: will I make it there?
The obvious psychological challenges – in themselves a morass – aside, four physical aspects worry me constantly:
1. At 92 kilograms I am seriously overweight.
My body mass index (BMI) is a staggering 31,1 – so technically I am obese. A bit like the title of the Valiant Swart song: “Diknek en klein tandjies”. So, getting over the Pyrenees on Day One won’t be fun. I was full of good intentions and little schemes to take on the Camino considerably lighter and leaner, but alas. It’s a vicious cycle – I am an emotional eater, constantly stuffing my face to ward off the anxiety.
2. I am unfit.
The story I keep trying to tell myself is one that travel author Dana Snyman once told in a Go article on club rugby in small towns. The one about the farmer who lives a little way out of town and won’t travel back and forth into town on weekdays to train with the local team, because he “farms” himself fit. I hope I can “walk” myself fit on the Camino.
3. I am injured.
I don’t tackle anything with a measure of balance. It’s always full-on or fuck-all – I’ve often thought this would be a good epitaph on my tombstone. On 2 January I hiked up Skeleton Gorge above Kirstenbosch, hung around for a bit at the reservoirs at the top, then bounded back down like a nimble mountain goat – only, I’m shaped more like a juvenile rhino. The next morning my right knee started hassling me, so much so that I couldn’t bend it without a shooting pain. Several physiotherapy sessions and Pilates classes followed, as well as acupuncture needles from knee to hip. I even ended up at an orthopaedic surgeon, who took X-rays and diagnosed tendinopathy. That was ten days ago. The orthopaedic surgeon had good news and bad news. The bad news: I will definitely have ongoing knee pain, especially up steps or steep inclines. The good news: I’m not likely to mess it up more than it already is, especially if I start slowly and stretch regularly. He even claimed that my knee could start to heal with all this exercise.
This unsettles me deeply. In September 2006, I left for Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro. I was also pretty unfit, and had the final stages of an upper respiratory tract infection. I boarded the plane with an irritating little cough, which only got worse. I don’t know if the dreaded altitude sickness played a role, but it couldn’t have helped. After four days I was so ill that I had to admit defeat, barely ninety minutes’ walk from base camp, the start of the final climb. Being denied the sunrise from the roof of Africa was a huge disappointment.
4. I have serious sleep apnoea.
In February I went for a sleep study at a clinic in Cape Town. My father had recently been diagnosed with sleep apnoea and now uses a CPAP device at night – an expensive affair at R20 000 with a mask that makes him look and sound a bit like Darth Vader from Star Wars.
My results were not good. Apparently I don’t sleep deeply enough because of obstructive sleep apnoea – my throat muscles and tongue become so slack that I stop breathing, but I don’t wake up. This may explain why I so often wake up dead tired. But sleep apnoea has all kinds of other scary and dangerous consequences: a higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, obesity and accidents, because you could fall asleep while driving, for example.
My results showed an apnoea episode up to thirty times an hour; I sometimes did not breathe for as long as half a minute, during which time the organs need to work twice as hard. Sometimes you do wake up, gasping for breath, or choking, or from snoring loudly and irregularly, and with pounding heart palpitations – all symptoms I know well. Especially the snoring.
It’s not really something I’m proud of, but I am a seasoned snorer. At university, a friend and I once went on a road trip from PE to Cape Town. One evening we pulled into a backpacker lodge in Knysna to overnight in its dormitory. Sometime in the middle of the night my own snoring woke me and I looked around. Only backpacks remained – everyone else had sneaked off to escape my thunderous snoring