Stacy and I came out of the Pyrenees, wind blown and exhausted. So exhausted that the walls of the Roncevalles Orreaga albergue which loomed over us like a 1960’s Hammer Vampire film didn’t impress us. They should have, and on any other day that ancient Eleventh century building’s brutalist demeanor would have sent our American sensibilities oohing and aahing like crazy. But today, we just wanted a bed.

Everything about the Orreaga was huge, Cavernous and Corporate.

Capitalization Note: I over capitalize. I know this. Stacy makes fun of me for it, as she should. But I need help to convey tone, as I am mainly a vocal person. I have cut back, but I’m gonna keep adding an Extra Big Letter now and then because it’s right for me, and that’s the only way I can keep my faith with you, the reader.

Orreaga was Corporate clean, Corporate arranged, Corporate staffed….with an odd difference: the company that runs the place decided to have all the people who checked you into the rooms be senior citizens. And Dutch. Because we were at only one part of the huge line to check in, we didn’t realize the homogeneity of the staff until we were climbing upstairs, with Stacy bemused and me pissed off. All of them, Old Dutch folk: some of whom could not speak English and others just enough Spanish to push pilgrims on to the next part of the check in process. And that process must be followed!!

THE CHECK-IN PROCESS—All Pilgrims soon learn to quickly and efficiently remove their hiking shoes and poles and place them in the room provided, which is separate from the rest of the albergue. No exceptions! Over there! Now! Please! Por Favor! There! Go! The corralling is very important as shoes and hiking poles are the biggest source of dirt, and keeping all that trail dust out of the rooms is essential for a clean communal experience, especially when there are 336 people arriving and leaving every day. Orreaga is an early stop on the Camino, so a lot of us had no idea what we were doing, or even if we did, it was still confusing to navigate the same process in an entirely different space. The longer you do the Camino the quicker you find The Room, wherever it may be, to put your shoes and poles away. Learning to see the same systems in different environments is one of the gifts the Camino provides.

Here at Orreaga, the Process is a cross between a security line for an American rock concert and Ellis Island. The Dutch Grey Panthers were having a great time, herding us along and barely bothering to understand us. They all seemed to know each other, and shared little laughs and jokes among themselves in a relaxed, jovial atmosphere…which made my Spidey-Sense tingle. Relaxed? Jovial? The old folks can’t be working. . .they must be . . . volunteers. Oh no! my inner customer sobbed. They don’t have to give a shit. But then the awake part of me relaxed completely as my expectations plummeted to a comfortable nothing. Ahhhhh, now there was nothing to get tense about. This was going to suck, there’s nothing we can do about it, and we’ll all get through it. There’s a line from a Matthew Broderick movie I think about a lot at moments like these.

But things did not go as terribly for us as they did for Matthew and his lizard. The Wal-Mart Door greeters of the Camino got us to the the desk, and we were given our bunk assignments. We were staying on a co-ed floor with about a hundred other people. Our alcove held two bunk beds and four smallish storage units. Across from us were two young men who worked for the Spanish National Police Force; which is not their National Guard, or their FBI or their ATF as we discerned after some cautious conversation. They’re a damn national Police force. Like city police, but National. I suddenly recalled I was walking in a formerly Fascist country, got nervous and stopped asking questions.

Our football field-sized room was open-aired, with cubicle like separations between each four bed space ending about five feet from the ceiling. We got cleaned up in the gender separated communal showers and hustled ourselves to get to our assigned table for our dinner. We had been given tickets for our Pilgrim Meal, with the time and the location of one of the three available rooms printed on them. Upon receivership of the Golden Tickets, we were told to not be late, as there were no other options for food in the area …Spider Sense tingle! 300 people a night and NO competition for that dinner dollar? Not even a couple small super pricy Snails-n-crepes bistros to leech off the One Percenters on the trail? That’s deliberate. Someone is paying someone else for the privilege of this monopoly. And I would wager the kickback/charity donation to the local magistrate was more than the money spent on a year’s supply of the dinners that was flung at us that night.

This would be our fourth Pilgrim Meal, which is a Camino food tradition offered by a thousand different bars, cantinas, restaurants and albergues all along the route. The Pilgrim Meal is obtained only by the presentation of a current Camino passbook. It’s always prix fixe menu with maybe a few basic options. Vegetarian options seemed to be consistently available. The most common menu item I saw in 2023 was the ‘1/4 chicken or pasta with red sauce’. Wine was always available for free or near free prices, and happily the wine generally tasted better than free wine usually does. However, our subjectivity was skewed when the Camino gave us the gift of starting out Pilgrim Meal journey with a low bar of quality. Very Low. Limbo low.

The meal we were served was the worst I have ever had. And let me be clear, I do not mean the food was not prepared to my liking, I mean the food we were served was not to ANYONE’s liking. Hunger was the only sauce in that room that night, and it ran out quick. The fish had the head, tail and some scales still poking out of the crust it was ‘fried’ in. The papas fritas were frozen french fries that tasted more like freezer than potato. The chicken seemed to have come from a flock raised and trained to cosplay Charles Dickens characters. The wine made us understand the ole’ Texan Hondo Crouch’s aphorism “the cheapest thing is the cheapest for a reason: know that reason.” The dessert was that plastic cup of ice cream you got in the second grade, and it was served still hard-frozen plucked from from a cardboard box that’s pushed on a battered plastic cart through the over-crowded room and then dropped on the plates in front of us with a sad clatter of hopelessness, a hopelessness the guests soon shared with the servers.

And that was the part that made me mad. The folks working that room, serving that sad excuse for a meal knew how bad the food was, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Every damn night those poor people have to disappoint every single customer they get. Nobody wants to go there, nobody is happy when they leave. No sane individual would make this choice to do this job in this manner for themselves or others, but somehow a Corporation can.

Stacy and I were going to experience a lot of cheap pilgrim food down the trail, and some of it was great, some was just basic, and some was crappy. But never were we served such a plate of Hopelessness, Carelessness and Least Possible Effort as we were at that dining room in the Orreaga. And I want to stress that the workers there bear no blame for what they are forced to do. There is incompetence in the world…oh my yes, there is abundant incompetence . . . but these folks working the dinner room had no options. The area we were in was remote, with few employment opportunities, and there was a pungent level of suck to the food that makes it clear it sucked before it even arrived at Orreaga. And from my own experience, when you have to serve crap you better serve it fast, don’t make eye contact and close every possible window of complaint: that isn’t bad service, that is the only way to work when you cannot do a damn thing to better the product you are providing.

How large does a Corporation have to get before it can achieve this level of incompetence? How many people agreed to the decisions that created the meal in front of us–with each person knowing they were manufacturing a dinner they themselves would never stoop to touch? How many people need to be in a group before the actual needs of the people become less important than profit? How big a group do we need to be in before people not in our group can be safely considered less than ‘Us’, and therefore less than human?

Comparing the grim visaged Spanish ice cream flingers to the jovial Dutch seniors gave one something to think about, another insight into processes and environments, perhaps. Is this a form of European carpetbagging? Same system, different environment? Thank you Camino.

But I would like all of you to think about people who have to do crappy things to make a living, from a fast food fry cook to an Eviction-serving lawyer. Now, it is possible to be a genius fry cook serving kick ass healthy and delicious food and it is possible to be a humanitarian lawyer who trots the globe freeing the unjustly jailed….but we’re not talking about them. When you have to do something you know is wrong, pointless or just poor quality every day it whittles down your humanity. It makes it hard to make good decisions for yourself, it makes it hard to trust other people and it makes it hard to trust the world. I had a job like that for a while. The horror of it is hard to explain. It’s both so small and so large at the same time, like a scream from the bottom of a coal mine. A man with nothing to lose is dangerous enough, but a man who makes the world a worse place 40 hours a week— and knows it— becomes worse than dangerous, they become numb.

Buen Camino.