The Banality of War in America

“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn [from the trial] in Jerusalem.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil

*

Many things have puzzled me since returning to the United States of America. It started with small, usually neutral observations, like 64 ounce cups in gas stations and stores the size of apartment blocks. Even the size of quarters caught my eye. “They’re just so….small,” I remember muttering to a confused cashier. On my third morning back I suddenly found the volume at which most Americans speak jarring.

I am, in some ways anyway, a stranger in my own land. And I have to be honest, this has become a scary place to be a stranger.

To be clear, I found relief in many parts of American life. After living under a kleptocratic dictatorship for more than a year, my understanding of and appreciation for freedom has gathered depth and breadth that I would never have imagined. I don’t mean civil religion’s version of the word, screamed into meaninglessness by warmongering, xenophobic pundits. I’m talking about tangible freedoms that were glaringly absent from life in Damascus. A free press, free speech, free practice of religion, and free elections (though I’m afraid that last one seems to have faded in America after the Citizens United decision) are things I no longer take for granted. In fact, I’m proud of these aspects of my country. I’m not always proud of how they are used, but I’m proud and grateful to enjoy these rights.

With these freedoms, however, comes the tendency toward complacency and thoughtlessness. Very few normal, every day Americans care about politics. Why would they? There’s very little they can do to change it, and, in the words of a friend, it’s all too complicated anyway. I can understand this sentiment; I feel it in my bones sometimes, too. But for many around the world, American policies are not just a matter of extended unemployment benefits or increased consumer protections (important though such things are); they are the difference between life and death.

Few know about the US and UK militaries’ use of depleted uranium rounds. They are titanium shell casings fortified with nuclear waste. Due to the radioactive metal’s extraordinary strength, it allows a shell or bullet to pierce bunker walls or tank armor. But while exceptionally effective, its effects on the health of both soldiers and people who are left to live in these contaminated areas have been intentionally obfuscated by the Pentagon and the UK’s Ministry of Defense. After the US-UK joint operation ‘Phantom Fury’ in 2004, according to a study by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, residents of Fallujah have been suffering from cancer “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout.” According to a harrowing article by Maggie O’Kane in the Guardian, after heavy use of DU throughout the first Iraq War “health authorities say that at least three times more children are being born with congenital deformities than before the Gulf war.” In that same article, an Iraqi doctor has chilling words regarding the continuing legacy of US and UK ‘interventions’ using DU rounds. “If it is not a child without a brain, then maybe it’s one with a giant head, stumpy arms like those of a thalidomide victim, two fingers instead of five, a heart with missing valves, missing ears.” The US military rightly takes great pains to dispose of its own DU-contaminated vehicles and equipment – effectively admitting that the substance, when fired, is highly toxic. Yet despite international outcry, proposed legislation, and numerous independent studies, the Pentagon has not made even the most basic admission of DU’s danger like the one stated succinctly by veterans’ advocate Dan Fahey, that “science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water.”

Consider cluster bombs, which blindly disperse an average of 2,000 separate explosives over a wide area. There are many types, all with different functions; anti-personnel, anti-tank, anti-runway, and those that scatter chemical weapons are just a few. Cluster bombs are morally repugnant in the same way as any other weapon of indiscriminate destruction, but made all the worse by the high rate of unexploded bomblets, which resemble small toy balls, left on the ground. Since the end of the Vietnam war 36 years ago, 500 Vietnamese children have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured in one province alone from contact with unexploded ordinance, a term which encompasses unexploded cluster bomblets, mines, and other live explosives left by American and Vietnamese forces. Laos has it even worse. The most bombed country in human history, Laos today is the resting place for an estimated 80 million unexploded cluster bomblets – all dropped by the military of the United States of America. The US, Russia, and Israel are some of the only countries in the developed world which have yet to sign an international treaty outlawing their use. It’s not difficult to guess in which countries the main manufacturers of cluster munitions are based.

I often read reports of the pilotless drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which, sadly, have more than tripled under President Obama’s administration. A few weeks ago, a traditional jirga was hit. It was a meeting of tribal elders of which, upon further investigation by journalists, had little to no connection to militant groups. 34 people were killed. There was hardly a peep of protest from even the ‘liberal’ American newspapers – save for an editorial in the New York Times that mentioned the strike as an instigator of anti-Americanism but failed to question its basic legitimacy.

The United States sold, has sold, and currently sells arms to nearly every Western-friendly dictatorship under the sun. I understand that realpolitik, the idea that politics needs to be based on power and practicalities rather than ideology, often ensures stability. But if that status quo makes systemic injustices permanent, as it did in Egypt for 35 years under Mubarak, there must be room for a higher ideal. Obama has made an honest, though inadequate, effort to change this sort of relationship with post-Mubarak Egypt and post-Ben Ali Tunisia, but Bahrain’s dictatorship still enjoys US State Department and Pentagon support – despite a brutal, torturous crackdown on dissidents and the doctors who treat them.

There is no shortage of similar examples of an American foreign policy led not by the high ideals of freedom, justice, and equality but instead by the interests of weapons manufacturers, multinational corporations, and a fast-imploding imperial philosophy.

I know that to many I will sound like a bleeding-heart, mindless simpleton for saying these things, but the depressing truth is that my country has been at war for almost half my 24 years. And as war drags on, reports of the killing of people with brown skin becomes a shriller, more ignorable background noise. To the American public, what are 34 innocent people in Pakistan anymore but nameless, faceless, Muslims? Talk of cutting defense spending in favor of broader social programs like universal health care is couched in economic, rather than humanitarian, language. Why cut weapons spending when the defense industry supports so many hundreds of thousands of American jobs? No matter the fact that the United States spends more on ‘defense’ than the next 17 countries combined. This is what Americans know. This is what we are comfortable with. This is what has become normal.

These attitudes make up the basis of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Adolf Eichmann, of one the most important cogs in the Nazi death machine, was put on trial in Jerusalem after being kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad in Argentina. Arendt caused huge controversy with her observations of the proceedings. She wrote, “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” While the world wanted to see a monster, Arendt, in her reports for the New Yorker, saw a normal, even banal man who worked extremely hard to complete the tasks that were given to him. She concludes that Eichmann lived his life without critically analyzing the monstrous system surrounding him. This willful thoughtlessness, she says, allowed him to complete tasks like the transfer of more than 430,000 Hungarians – Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and political dissidents – to the gas chambers.

I know that to use a Nazi as my point of comparison is problematic. In no way am I equating the crimes of the Nazis to those of the American empire. I recognize that American imperialism, war profiteering, and human rights abuses are all part of a hopelessly complex, intertwined, and relatively unstable global system that could well collapse upon a massive US shift in foreign policy. But I don’t see any other option. People are dying in my name – Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, Libyans, Israelis, Palestinians, the list goes on – under weapons made, used, and sold by my country.

My aim here hasn’t necessarily been to make each reader go out and campaign on behalf of the 34 innocent Pakistanis killed by America’s pilotless drone on March 17th, though I think a wider campaign against drone attacks, cluster and DU munitions, and the wider ‘defense’ industry is certainly needed. I write this to challenge myself, and perhaps others as well, to think, criticize, and, most importantly, act. In a country where our votes count, where our voices can be heard, we are responsible for the actions of our government. And yes, this applies to important domestic issues just as much as international ones. But when it comes to bombs, labeled ‘Made in USA,’ dropping on innocent people, we cannot sit back and accept it as our reality – as just the way things are. There is a better way forward. There has to be.

On Being Home

“And at the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back–but that you can’t go home again.”
-Thomas Wolfe, emphasis added

As we both were mulling over making our separate ways home, a friend of mine mentioned this quote. We were both in the midst of spending significant periods of time abroad just after college. Most of our friends, hers in Indiana and mine in Minneapolis, had begun their post-undergraduate life already – which in today’s America usually means taking on monotonous, poorly paid jobs having nothing to do with one’s field of study in order to pay off crippling student loans.  We were both incredibly fortunate. A combination of scholarships and family assistance made it feasible to graduate without any debt, freeing us to take to the globe.

We talked over how we knew that things had changed in our absence. The college social life for which we were nostalgic had ceased to exist. Friends were working (usually more than) full-time, getting married, even having babies! After together roundly bashing the absurdity of a 22 year-old couple getting married, let alone having a child, she sighed and made mention of Mr. Wolfe’s famous words.

Now, after being home for five months of Minnesota’s wintry tundra, dashed expectations of a job floating ever so daintily onto my lap, re-acquainting myself with friends who seem to have changed in every possible way and yet not at all, and many, many plans made, doubted, changed, scrapped, and remade, I’ve learned it is quite true that I cannot go ‘home’ as I remember it. Nor can I go back to Damascus as I remember it. I may, however, go back to a place I once knew and, by throwing off nostalgic expectations, accepting things and people as they are, and working with what I have to make my world a better place, make it home again.

Hebron

Walking through the streets of Hebron’s old city, I was struck first by its similarities to other ancient cities in the region. Damascus, Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth – all share narrow, labyrinthine alleyways, groups of women window shopping at a snail’s pace, and stubbly shopkeepers drinking enough coffee and tea for all of us. The atmosphere of these places of commerce – except Jerusalem, as throngs of tourists throw it off a little – always gives me the faint impression that I’ve traveled back in time.

Hebron is said to be one of the world’s oldest cities, although I’ve become skeptical of such claims after seeing the slogan ‘The World’s Oldest City’ in about six urban centers throughout the Middle East – as well as one dusty Turkish village on the Syrian border (though some would say it’s a Syrian village on the Turkish side of the border).

Suffice it to say, Hebron is old. Very, very old. Over the millennia, dozens of people groups have lived in, ruled over, and fought about it.

As we entered deeper into the maze of narrow streets, I started to see things that brought me abruptly back to the present. After a certain point near the edge of the bustling market, shops were closed. Their doors had been welded shut. A few meters down, there was no longer just sky above us. An ugly, rusted chain link fence rested above the market path, keeping piles of trash and sun-bleached buckets from falling onto the cobblestones below. Sellers, some of whom had set out their wares on tables in front of their closed shops, looked on bemusedly as we realized where we were – that this was what we’d read about.

Israeli settlers took the buildings above this market in the years following 1979, when the first house in the bustling old city, Beit Hadassah, was occupied by an extreme right-wing group of Israelis. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF – the Israeli army) assisted the settlers in taking the buildings and has protected them at all costs since.

The IDF has forced more than 550 shops in the bustling central marketplace to shut for good. With only 24 hours’ warning and no chance of appeal, the proprietors are often left with nothing as the heavy iron doors to their shops are welded shut, their merchandise still inside. This video from Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, shows three shops being closed in this manner just days before I visited.

The fence above the market was placed there in order to protect Palestinian shoppers from items like trash, dirty water, urine, eggs, and even bleach that, appallingly, are often thrown down by the settlers. We saw streaks of eggs across pashmina scarves hanging in a shop that had been thrown from a window above – a window ironically decorated with a menorah, a symbol usually associated with the pursuit of peace, justice, and enlightenment. The shop’s proprietor, a grizzly old man in a jelebiyah robe named Ali, told us that the eggs had been thrown by a settler woman just that morning.

 

A rusting fence bends under the weight of trash tossed down by Israeli settlers living in the compounds above the market. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

One former market street in Hebron's old city that's been completely closed by the IDF in order to protect Israeli settlers. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

Next door to a settler compound, a Palestinian girl sits on her rooftop in front of an IDF watchpost. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

An Israeli checkpoint in a square at the center of the old city. Photo: J. Fischer.

We walked further along, following our tour guides from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a group organized and funded by the World Council of Churches. In 2003, Palestinian Christians asked the WCC to send international observers into occupied Palestine to observe and document incidents of injustice and accompany Palestinians through areas where they may be harassed by settlers or IDF soldiers. Our guides, Dan and Muhanad, were both Swedish. They brought us through the Ibrahimi Mosque in the center of the old city, where it’s believed that Abraham is buried, along with Rachel, Sarah, Adam, and Eve. Worshippers there, delighted that internationals wanted to know about their plight, showed us the bullet holes from the 1994 massacre that occurred there during the regular Friday prayer.  Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Israeli settler, with the worshippers’ backs to him, sprayed automatic fire through the mosque, killing 25 and wounding more than 120.

The vast majority of the Israeli public immediately condemned the killings, but until today there stands a monument to Goldstein in the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Following the massacre and riots that followed it, control of the Ibrahimi mosque was divided between the Muslim waqf and the Jewish settler community. There now stands a synagogue in about a quarter of what was entirely a mosque. There are two entrances, one for Jews and one for Muslims; we entered through both. On the Muslim side, we walked to what both Muslims and Jews recognize as Abraham’s cenotaph (the term for an empty, symbolic tomb). The cenotaph is set in an octagonal room and a green, dusty shroud embroidered with Arabic calligraphy is draped over it. The dividing line of the mosque/synagogue runs through the center of the octagon, so looking from the Muslim side we could see Jewish worshippers paying their respects and from the Jewish side, Muslims. I could only imagine what one thinks of the other as they glance over the prophet they share.

 

An Israeli soldier stands guard near the Ibrahimi Mosque and cave of Machpela. Photo: J. Fischer.

 

Inside the Ibrahimi Mosque, the site of Baruch Goldstein's 1994 massacre. Photo: C. Babcock.

 

Abraham's cenotaph from the Muslim side. Notice the bulletproof glass and the elbow of a young Jewish girl through the window behind it. Photo: C. Babcock.

After walking through an area completely closed to Palestinians (another part of what was once a bustling marketplace), we soon came to the front door of Beit Hadassah, the first building taken in1979. We saw young orthodox Jewish children playing happily inside, safe under the watchful eyes of IDF soldiers on the roof. Muhanad told us that EAPPI observers have to walk with Palestinian schoolchildren as they pass that house because the settlers that live there, both children and adults, often harass them, throwing rocks and eggs and shouting obscenities. The nearly 1,000 IDF soldiers stationed in Hebron to protect 20-25 settler families rarely intervene. This disturbing video is one of many pieces of evidence corroborating Muhanad’s story. In it, Palestinian children and their mothers are walking home from school when they are harassed and physically attacked by settlers. It’s telling that even the Anti-Defamation League condemned the settlers’ actions in 2008.

I couldn’t help but wonder how growing up amidst such insanity will affect both groups of kids: the protected, secure ones playing inside and those walking quickly and fearfully by outside.

Many settlers are lured to the West Bank for economic reasons like subsidized housing and industrial jobs, but Hebron’s settlers are ideological. They believe that Hebron’s Jewish community should be restored, no matter the cost to the surrounding Arab residents. Forgoing discussion of ancient Jewish claims to the city, we know there was a Jewish community in Hebron for hundreds of years until 1929, when, amidst ongoing conflict between Zionist Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and British mandate officials, rioting Arabs massacred 67 and injured 60 of Hebron’s Jewish community. 435 other Jews escaped the pogrom by hiding with their Arab neighbors, a fact that affirms the two communities’ history of largely peaceful coexistence prior to Zionist colonization of Palestine.

But, as Amnon Birman, an Israeli whose mother was one of the original, pre-1929 Jewish residents of Hebron, pointed out in 1997, “claiming Jewish property inside the West Bank could set an awkward precedent, encouraging Arabs to reclaim their ancestral property inside what is now Israel.” He is quoted in a 1997 Philadelphia Enquirer article about the sons, daughters and grandchildren of Hebron’s original Jewish community who now stand in opposition to the settlers, charging that they are an obstacle to peace. It should be noted that none of the current Jewish settlers of Hebron are actual descendants like Mr. Birman.

The precedent set by the settlers’ claims is certainly ‘awkward.’ In fact, the entire Zionist colonization and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine is ‘awkward’ in the same way. But that’s a matter for another post, likely one the length of a book.

Robert Fisk, a journalist who has been based in the Middle East for over 30 years, often says that war is ‘a total failure of the human spirit.’ The situation in Hebron especially, but also in all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, is just that: a total failure of our ability to work for justice, propagate equality, and live together in tolerance and peace. I say ‘our’ because we are all culpable, especially those of us living in democratic, open societies. Without mentioning the more obvious blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can look from the United States’ support for despots like Mubarak and Ben Ali to its willful ignoring of both Israel’s and the Palestinian Authority’s human rights abuses as only a few of the innumerable examples of the West putting its self-interest before what’s right. Even Hebron’s community of extremists is funded largely by an American charity, which retains tax-deductible status with the Internal Revenue Service.

Equality and justice are not just catch phrases. They are the keys to a peaceful world. If I learned anything from those two horrible days in Hebron – and believe me, for a very long time it was difficult to take some sort of grand lesson out of the experience – it’s that. The only way to build a more peaceful world is to fight for those ideals whenever we see them violated. I take comfort from knowing that most Israelis that I spoke with about Hebron expressed disgust for the settlers there. One friend who lives in West Jerusalem nearly spat on the ground as he said, ‘Don’t talk to me about those motherf&*$ers. I hate them. They themselves are an existential threat to Israel. If they are allowed to continue their bullshit, Israel will not survive.’ I have to agree with him. Admittedly, it is one of the most extreme places in Palestine as far as how the occupation is realized on the ground. However, the same unjust, racist principles that are used to justify the actions of Hebron’s settlers are used to justify the occupiers’ actions all over the West Bank, Gaza, and even in Israel itself. One group of people have more rights, more protection, more impunity than another simply because of their race and the military might that backs it. Sooner or later, despite billions in American aid and unlimited American political support, such systemic injustice will become unsustainable. Just like the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Just like Mubarak, Ben Ali, and now, God willing, Qaddafi.

It’s simply a matter of time. Let us hope beyond hope that the downfall of the system that sustains Hebron’s extremists will come about peacefully, cooperatively between Palestinians and Israelis, and in a way that ensures some significant measure of justice for all. The only other option is an endless cycle of violence, retribution, and hatred, no matter how much money and might are tossed into the fray.

 

 

Links:

An Introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Jewish academic Norman G. Finkelstein (slightly thick, but a fantastic primer if you’re not familiar with the cores issues of the conflict)

B’Tselem

B’Tselem’s archive of incidents in Hebron

Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel

Breaking the Silence – An organization founded by former IDF soldiers who were stationed in Hebron that ‘have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the routine situations of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. We endeavor to stimulate public debate about the price paid for a reality in which young soldiers face a civilian population on a daily basis, and are engaged in the control of that population’s everyday life.’

An article from ynet about the descendants of Hebron’s Jewish community visiting Hebron to show solidarity with Hebroni Palestinians

Collection of articles about the descendants of Hebron’s pre-1929 Jewish community opposing the current settlers

Journalist Chris Hayes’ October 2010 report from Hebron

Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron

Contextless Quotes

I recently came across my old travel journal from my nine-month backpacking trip through Japan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, India, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. Reading through it left me very, very amused. From it, here are some quotes for your enjoyment, taken completely out of their original context:

‘I’ve got the shits and I’m tired of traveling: Why I’m not cut out for this’

‘That was a terrible, terrible idea.’

‘My hotel (read: rooftop littered with rubbish costing a whopping $10 to lay a mattress on) is a dump but it’s all I could find.’

‘She was driving me crazy. Hopefully that thought will be a comfort once the solitude starts getting to me.’

‘The highlight of the night was probably me trying to say in Arabic, “My dear, you are so beautiful!” Instead, I managed to say, “My dear, you are so beautiful and big!” Ktiir vs. Kbiir. God…’

‘Loon was our raft captain who seemed either perplexed or offended when I tried to explain that he shares his name with our state bird.’

‘I’ll write more later about the moral conundrum going through my head at that moment.’

‘I met an 82 year old woman today who has been a Peace Corps volunteer three times – all after retirement. At one point she was the oldest current volunteer on the planet.’

“I just had a psychosomatic stress reaction to the Lao music coming from the bungalow next to mine.’

“Phnom Penh’s been great – almost too much fun, seeing as how a large part of our time was spent at a genocide museum.’

‘The hammock: I believe I’ve found my soulmate.’

‘I asked the weird Chinese girl in our hostel if she still had the tarantulas in the plastic bag up in her room. “Uh, I think so!” was her response.’

‘Suddenly serious, she told me, “Walking this path made me believe in God for the first time. It’s too beautiful, too incredible.”‘

‘I woke up at 4:30am to the sound of an explosion muffled by earplugs and a quick shake of the building.’

‘We danced to horrible techno music and took a “hard man” shot (snort salt, take tequila shot, squeeze lime into your eye).’

‘There’s something profoundly tragic about a people fighting justly to get back what was stolen from them even as there is little to no hope of success…It saddened me immensely, that rally. I walked away with a heavy heart and a bruised faith.’

‘”Are those nunchucks you got there?” I said absentmindedly toward, but not to, a rather pudgy but bulldoggish man on a sidewalk near Beirut’s waterfront. His posture snapped up immediately, as if he had been strolling along, just daring some ignorant fool to comment on his ‘chuks. “Yes,” he said. “Because I am master.”‘

‘I’m so lucky to be doing what I’m doing. It’s amazing, really.’

El Camino del Norte de Santiago

For 28 days this September, I walked from Bilbao to Finisterre, Spain. The route I took is one of the Caminos de Santiago, ancient pilgrimage routes from all over Europe to the city of Santiago, where the apostle James is said to be buried. In total, it was 773 kilometers (about 480 miles). The Camino del Norte, the northern route of the Caminos de Santiago, took me along the Iberian coast for about three weeks, leading me through Pais Vasco, Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia, before turning southwest through miles of rolling farmland and forests toward Santiago. Like many pilgrims, I continued three days past Santiago to Fisterre, a small village once thought to be the end of the earth.

The first week I planned to walk with my German buddy Jakob, who, after we met in Syria a year and a half ago, remains the travel friend I’ve seen the most over the last two years, but I was looking forward to the rest of my journey as a solitary, meditative mental and physical exercise.  As all travel adventures tend to do, the camino confounded my expectations. I ended up walking alone for only two of the 28 days. I met dozens of kooky, inspiring, at times annoying, and always interesting folks along the way. By far the two I bonded with the most were two Norwegian medical students. The three of us walked together for more than two weeks.

There are dozens of tales from the walk that I could fill pages with, but for once I’ll let my photos tell most of the story. Ask me about it sometime (and really listen, as I’m finding many people back home have a hard time doing) and I’ll tell you about the grunting Danish woman and her ‘sexy underlegs’ (it sounds far worse than it was), Ian the always-drinking Englishman, sunrise just outside of Arzua, Maggie the sweetest Canadian nurse/CEO you’ll ever meet, the dog pissing on my only pair of pants at 6:45 in the morning, and a young American woman who, upon being asked her name, replied, ‘oh, they call me Gypsy.’

All in all, in many the same ways as my trek in Nepal, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I ended the camino feeling more confident, clear-headed, and more at peace than I’ve ever been before. It’s difficult to describe exactly what made the walk so profound. It was the opportunity for reflection that walking six to nine hours a day provided, the stunningly beautiful vistas, the immediate sense of community and comradery with other pilgrims, and, strangely, the simple daily routine that I came to expect and in which I found great satisfaction: waking early in the morning, walking almost immediately, the mid-morning snack and rest – usually on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic or in a small town cafe with a small cup of espresso in front of me, lunchtime on the beach, afternoon naps under scraggly trees, chance encounters, fun chats, and deep conversations with locals and fellow pilgrims, the glorious arrival in the albergue, taking off my shoes after a 20-plus mile day, and evenings spent at the hostel washing clothes, grabbing a simple dinner, exploring the surroundings for a short time and perhaps the most fulfilling part, falling into a deep sleep at the ripe hour of 8:30.

For many years it’s been a tradition for pilgrims to either leave or burn their clothes at the precipice of Fisterre’s peninsula, just past the lighthouse. Along with a couple fellow pilgrims, I made my way down the rocky peninsula through what was quickly becoming an ominously dark night. As dusk crept overhead, we arrived at the final distance marker. These cement signs, all sporting a concha shell pointing left, straight, or right, had shown us the way and told us how much farther there was yet to go for nearly a month, so to see the last one was a relief and a shock. Its finality –  that I wasn’t going to be walking for eight hours the next day, that I would actually be taking a bus, of all things – was suprisingly gripping. After taking photos with the marker and singing a few celebratory songs, we walked further, past the lighthouse to the end of the end. There, next to a radio tower with hundreds of pieces of pilgrims’ clothing tied to it, looking out over the vast Atlantic, we had our last peregrino dinner of bread, cheese, and fruit with a dessert of Milka chocolate and a bottle of wine. The sun fell nearly to the horizon and, confounding all of our expectations, pierced through dense layers of cloud to present, what seemed to be just for us, a whisper of a sunset. After a period of stunned silence, we decided to complete the final task of our journey. We sat for a while as the shirts we had used for nearly thirty days and, in my case, a torn and ratty pair of pants burned. We waited for the embers to burn out completely, the wine keeping us warm, before heading back to our hostel and back to our separate lives.