In Camille’s Lugano happy place, complete with a splendid lake view, she and Jacqueline sprawled on their shared queen bed with Swiss picnic things arrayed around them like one of Cleopatra’s feasts. Unfamiliar salamis and foreign cheeses were the least of it, with curious Euro breads and exotic-looking nibbles of Lugano’s most tempting treats lying there…just lying there on the sheets emanating scents to make a young, naive kitten mad, crazy, insane with curiosity.
“Camino, look. For you!” Camille beckoned with a morsel of an inscrutable something on her outstretched finger, but kitty was rolling rapturously among the many papers and containers holding this cornucopia of potential tastes so very removed from what he knew – kitten mush – and so ignored her.
“Sister,” I said, “please don’t feed Camino any mässmogge.” Camille was eager to try – and share – the Swiss mystery with a big brown hazelnut emblazoned on its wrapper.
“Do you even know what it is?”
Well, no, but I was sure it wasn’t Dr. Pappacoda approved, especially for a baby cat only recently introduced to kitten kibble.
“What about some Älplermagronen?”
“What?”
“Or, I know, here: he might love a taste of Zibelechueche.” She kept sticking her fingers out holding weird smears of things not precisely paté.
“Am I supposed to tell the vet when I take kitty in for his first vaccinations that he has acquired a taste for Tirggel, and now stalks off upset if presented his usual Meow Mix?”
“Okay, can he have a Bugle, then?” In addition to Alps delicacies, Camille and Jacqueline enjoyed their sacks of homestyle snacks – their Pringles and Cheetos and so forth. Who doesn’t? And so, I relented, why? I let Camille give Camino a Bugle because besides arousing my anxiety about possibly having to try base-jumping or bungee-bouncing once we arrived in Chamonix, my sister shook me with an obvious truth I hadn’t yet seen: the two of them had an understanding. Already.
“See? He knows I’m the fun one.” After one Bugle, kitty like the rest of us wanted the whole bag and begged for another and another. Camille complied with his desire.
“Oh, and I, as Mother, am the strict and predictable one?” The one decidedly not fun? If I said no to Camino’s fifth or sixth salty Bugle, which he now crunched with the focus and ferver of an addict in the making, was I just Mommie Dearest mean for not allowing him his kitty crack when clearly, he loved it so much and come on! Camille said, and offered him his seventh, isn’t he ever allowed treats?
At that moment, there I was, on the Camino with everyone else – suddenly assaulted by an existential question, the sort of earth-shaking, soul-stirring, life-transforming query that walkers on the Way all say arrives at some point on the trail. There’s Carolyn Gillespie, for instance, weeping before a statute of the Virgin Mary in the town of Burgos, who suddenly feels “a surge of grief.” As she remembers in her memoir, Pilgrim:
Motherhood has been the most important aspect of my life. That visceral, gut-wrenching love that I had for my children, that would make me run into the flames or stand between them and the lion…this love that seemed so vital a force in me, where would it go now that my children were grown? And why, at 47, did I still crave that love so badly, and feel its loss so deep?
There’s Angela Leslee at an alber-goo dinner in the village of Azofra, where a tantalizing trekker she calls Mr. Dark and Broody fills her wine glass for the third time, “while giving me the look.” In The Way of Love on the Camino de Santiago, she returns to the scene:
What is going on here? First the Marlboro Man and now this! I haven’t had this kind of attention from men in 13 years. I am so out of practice…I am also acutely aware that my unwashed hair is pulled back tightly in a ponytail and I’m not sure of the last time I plucked the hairs on my chin – did I even pack my tweezers?
She then settles on the better question: “Do I want another relationship? Am I up for the fun but exhausting process of flirting and dating again?” There’s John Pearson, walking his way to Boadilla del Camino when a headwind tosses him off his feet like a mere wisp of bug into the roadside grass. In The Way of the Wind he relives his meet-up with the real John Pearson:
I got back up and cursed that damn wind, that relentless and uncompromising wind. If there was a time when I regretted being on the Camino, it was then. I was ready to give up. I wanted to be inside, at home, dry, and with a refrigerator of food. I wanted the howling to stop. The Camino had beaten me and I had failed. The howling had to stop!
“Fuck it,” he continues. “I pulled a napkin from my belt pack and wiped tears of surrender from my cheeks and eyes. Then, I started walking again, forward.” Down but not out, he too, then arrives at his essential life question: “Where does it come from, this desire to go forward with no obvious reward and while suffering?”
Camino so happy crunching his junk-food Bugles. Camille so loving his eating out of her hand. And I, stricken with the thought, as a person, am I no fun? I mean, beyond appalled at the prospect of kitty getting sick from the distilled monoglycerides, BHT, and sugar now toxifying his baby-cat body (at least Camille was not giving him Nacho Cheese Bugles with their added maltodextrin, too), am I a joy-suck? In general. I mean, let’s say, Camille goes, look: here we are in Chamonix – it’s Mont Blanc! – and this could be your only chance to do something you’ll remember forever. Like, perhaps, hike the infamous Goûter Couloir to have lunch at the Goûter Hut, elevation 12,582 feet. If I say, Sister, no way, no way will I climb through a couloir known for hazardous and deadly rockfalls, does this cement the idea that I, unlike Camille, am gutless and unwilling to really live? To refuse her invitation to a bold and daring adventure, thereby forcing her to go alone or not at all, am I the selfish sister, aka, not fun? I shuddered to see the me this implied. So, I resolved then to lighten-up.
“Here, my kitten. Do you want to try some fancy Swiss Appenzeller?” I held out a mini morsel of cheese to lure Camino away from the bag of Bugles. But it was too late. Delirious from his first taste of life on the road with Camille, he curled into her lap and purred the roaring purr of a cat who had found his happy place. Snug and safe with the one who could guarantee that all the rules he knew with Mami or Maman or whatever other name he associated with moi, his rescue mom, were off. And on his contented kitten face was the slightest smile – if I looked at it crooked it appeared oh-so cat from hell – a smile that clearly said, just know, Mommie Dearest, from now on? I’m going for the thrills.
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