Bulls on parade.

"To keep alive a moment at a time/ But still inside a whisper to a riot/ To sacrifice but knowing to survive/ The first to find another state of mind/ I'm on my knees, I'm praying for a sign/ Forever, whenever/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I'm on my knees/ I Never wanna die/ I'm Dancing on my grave/ I'm Running through the fire/ Forever, whenever/ I Never wanna die/ I Never wanna leave/ I Never say goodbye/ Forever, whenever, Forever, whenever." - Foo Fighters, "Walk"

"There's blood beneath every layer of skin." - Alexander McQueen


I grabbed my passport from my locker and set my backpack by the door. I crouched back down to the bed and softly moved some tousled blonde hair away from her cheek. She stirred, her (blue? green?) eyes still shut as she craned up for our last kiss, one forever framed by intrusions of the Madrid morning light. Our lips parted to form the melancholy smiles of goodbyes and she opened her eyes. (Blue. They were blue).

"Run fast."

She sunk back down to the pillow and her whisper walked with me outside, toward my train to Pamplona.



Two mornings later I stood on La Estafeta, much longer than most streets in Pamplona but equally narrow. I was surrounded by strangers, drunks, the fearful. And I was surrounded by friends. Derek, Nicole, Damian, Mark, Sandev, Nick and I looking at one other with massive eyes, our adrenaline consuming our exhaustion. Seven friends had flown from California to meet me in Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, and five of them (six now, with Corey's cousin who met up with us) huddled with me in the minutes before the reason for the entire journey. Our encierro. Our initiation into a select set of humanity that together is just the right type of romantic, and just the right type of crazy. Thousands of mornings like this one throughout centuries, but still entirely unique to us. This morning was our turn to run with the bulls.

We broke our circle and stretched out unevenly along the left side of the street, about seventy yards from Dead Man's Corner, the sharp 90 degree turn on the course where bulls skid out and most often become separated, and thus most dangerous. As we took our places and waited for the rocket sound that signaled the release of the bulls, my mind was blank, as it was for most of the run. In the absence of thought, I instead noticed the relative quiet of the streets, of the other runners, but didn't process until later why it seemed, for all its surrealism, familiar.

It's something I know of from writings on Hiroshima, but most major bombs create the same phenomenon. After the initial shock of the blast that spreads outward from the epicenter, an even more violent vacuum sucks all of the air in the surrounding environment back to that one initial point, bringing buildings, cars, skin, everything imaginable, along with it. A wave of energy creating an area of momentary nothingness as the shock bubble collapses. The streets of Pamplona the morning of our encierro were a bomb in reverse. When we left the packed town square and jogged to our starting place on Estafeta, I left behind my thoughts, my sense of humor and personality, all complications in my life. All of that energy fed back into the six cauldron black bulls in the corral, the six brown and white steers with them. The wait and the run itself existed in an aura inhabited solely by the instinctual. The visceral. A world with minimal thought and sound as we waited. The twelve animals that were loosed from their pen became the first part of the bomb; the shockwave that chased us upon Spanish cobblestones.

We seven looked back toward the corner, Derek the closest with his large fist raised some eight feet in the air, I about ten feet behind him, hand raised as I bobbed like a prizefighter, the rest of the group strung behind me, a rosary decade with gapped beads. With the pop of the rocket a wave of thousands poured toward us as we remained in place, chanting our mantra borrowed from the final battle scene of 300: "HOOOOOLLLLD!!!" We were determined to stand in place until we could see the bulls make the turn at Dead Man's Corner, and we caught dozens of wayward elbows and shoulders in what felt an interminable wait. Seconds dripping like honey. My mouth completely evaporated the instant the runners came our way, the moisture gone with everything else not absolutely vital inside me. Over a minute past the first rocket, my wait didn't end from catching sight of the bulls, but the words of a faceless Aussie running by me. "You're gonna want to start running now, mate." There was enough panic in his wheezing voice to convince me, to realize the bulls had already turned that corner unseen and were almost upon us, and my raised hand became a beckoning wave to Derek. "Go, go, go, go!!!" I turned away from Dead Man's Corner and sprinted along with my fellow correadors toward the Plaza de Toros.

My concept of time was a casualty of the vacuum, but for a few seconds my inhaling breaths screamed in my head before I heard the clanging of the bells and the thundering of the bulls' gallop. I turned my head to the right, my eyes inflating with the vision they'd been trained for but still absolutely denied and my deserted brain could produce only one thought. "There are giant.... fucking.... bulls... right there. In the middle of the street?" The shock of it all. That no amount of preparation can insulate you from the abandonment of reason. Your intrinsic determination to deny your senses when confronted with the unnatural. I continued to flee until the moment I most dreaded happened right beside me. One of the bulls slipped and became isolated as the rest of the pack continued ahead without him. I paused along with him, along with time. He turned his head to the left, to where I stood motionless but ready along the wall, remembering in that moment that bulls are drawn to movement above all else. A second and a half that will last until the end of my life. To watch a bull's eye as he thinks. He jerked his head back forward and ran toward the motion ahead, and I followed, rejoining the wave consuming Estafeta.

We didn't pause til we reached the ramp leading down to enter the ring. The bulls all past us now, we bunched up waiting to get through the narrower opening to the arena. We turned to each other in elation, arms around strangers turned allies, chanting "O-le! Ole, ole, ole! O-le! O-le!" with breath we didn't think we had left. The runners moved down the ramp and into the arena and we emerged to stand on the dirt of Pamplona's Plaza de Toros with the audience of thousands applauding us. The closest I will ever come to gladiator. Drinking in the ovation earned for being chased by twenty-thousand pounds of meat and fury and bone. The vibrant banners of red and green, the stark white of most of the correador uniforms around me and the nothingness-brown of dirt kicked-up from the bull ring floor were the only colors around us, and I saw them brighter, deeper, and clearer than anything I have ever seen before. New eyes for a new world, post-experienced-dream. Life as altered by lesson learned well, with a mindset dominated by the confidence that turns clichė fact. What does not kill you, makes you stronger.

A few of us managed to find each other in the madness of the ring, and all of us were together again at our meeting spot, the bust of the American author outside the Plaza de Toros. We huddled up again, our eyes still sprung wide, our smiles wider. We walked back along La Estafeta together, past old cobblestones stained with new blood.

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters." - Ernest Hemingway

Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.

I walk outside my hostel, past the Convento de San Esteban where people take pictures and look up as a stork perched up along the naves flaps its wings in a jerking rhythm, just as I watched him do yesterday, and I walk outside the walls of the city, crossing the river Tormes upon which two girls reverse their paddle boat away from the dock, and several benches that overlook the rio are taken by a series of old men in infinite conversation gazing at each other and the water below, as still further down in the grass along the water a couple in matching black bathing suits sunbathes, and I keep walking south of the river and come to a four-lane running track upon which a woman jogs one lap, takes a brief sip from a water bottle she leaves on a bench, and begins to run again, and I continue along a green bike lane as in the opposite direction a father pedals a bicycle with his son in a car seat mounted on the back and he points out features of the landscape to the boy who looks out from under an oversized bicycle helmet and trailing the two at full gallop is a massive grey and white dog who bounds along joyfully with his tongue like a baby's arm streaming out of his mouth, and I turn my head and watch the three continue on their stroll, unable to contain my smile, and after recrossing the river I walk back toward the town, passing two middle-aged men who sit shirtless, wearing trucker hats and tattoos, their sagging bodies the sign of lives lived fully, and past them is a small skate park where a group of teenage boys sits looking at their friend who skateboards along, effortlessly kicks away another board that has rolled up to him without losing momentum, and performs an ollie, and past the skate park people stroll across a centuries-old bridge with a stone statue of an animal worn away by time and with now only the generic stump of a faceless head, and by a small church a couple sets a digital camera on a pedestal, the girl setting the timer before joining her boyfriend for the picture, and then I enter the walls of the city and walk up a small street I've already walked up several times in just over a day, and for the first time notice a stenciled sticker of a Japanese girl on the back of a street sign, while a car slowly rolls past me and the older woman in its passenger seat is about to finish her cone of helado and as I approach the Plaza Mayor a bachelor party is dressed as lifeguards, with the groom-to-be wearing an inflatable Spongebob Squarepants attached to his lap, and his groomsmen wear Dora the Explorer waterwings, and inside the massive Plaza a group of American college students walk by with grocery bags hanging from their arms and a large party of people sit at a series of tables on a restaurant's terrace and a waiter counts their raised hands to know how many glasses of sangria to bring, and in the middle of the Plaza two women in fascinator hats and pastel evening dresses stand reading a text message, and another woman pretends to be a matador with a children's sword and cape and as she swings her arm in an artistic flourish the sword's sheath goes flying and slides along the stones of the square into the feet of the Japanese girls seated beside me on a cement bench, and the woman utters an embarrassed apology as a second bachelor party tries to get the attention of a passing bachelorette party but they strut past unimpressed and their walk takes them past a vendor holding fortysome mylar balloons, more Doras, more Spongebobs and some Patricks for good measure, and I duck into a carneceria for a jamon bocadillo and while the woman prepares it I look around at the large hanging shanks of pig's flesh with the hooves still attached, and as I am finishing my sandwich a wedding party is gathered outside of a church where two of their friends have just become husband and wife and more than anything everyone seems happy in the city of Salamanca. Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.