Before the Bulls

My laptop is open in front of me, and I’m working on my third cocktail of the evening. The low hum of jet engines fills the cabin. Flight attendants move quietly through the aisle, collecting glasses and lowering window shades. Somewhere over the Atlantic, the lights have faded, and the world below has disappeared into darkness.

Yesterday I was sitting in my office in Southern California. Tonight I’m on my way to Spain.

This trip has been on my mind for a decade, maybe longer. It’s not a vacation. It’s more like the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself a long time ago.

When I turned sixty, I made a commitment to keep those promises. Not just the easy ones or the sensible ones, but the ones that had been quietly waiting in the back of my mind, asking if I still had the balls to do them.

In another hour, I’ll swallow a sleeping pill, flatten my seat into a bed, and try to sleep my way across the Atlantic. Tomorrow I’ll wake up in Madrid, catch a train north to Pamplona, and begin preparing for something that cannot be prepared for.

In a few days, I’ll step into one of the world’s most dangerous traditions: the encierro, or the running of the bulls, as it’s known in English.

Buy me a coffee (or a beer!)

I’m not going to lie. I’m a little nervous. In moments like this, I sometimes wonder if life would have been simpler had I chosen a different path. Maybe I should have spent the last thirty years chasing a little white ball across perfectly manicured fairways. Instead, I’m crossing an ocean with a camera in one bag and a laptop in the other.

This is where I feel most alive—chasing stories and photographs down dusty back roads and foreign alleyways.

Anaïs Nin wrote that we write to taste life twice, once in the moment and again in retrospect. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. Maybe every photograph, every journal entry, and every passport stamp is just another attempt to catch lightning in a bottle—to hold on to a moment that would otherwise disappear forever.

In a few days, I’ll pull on a white shirt and white pants, tie a red bandanna around my neck, and step into the streets of Pamplona. Maybe I’ll come home with nothing more than a few photographs and another passport stamp.

Or maybe I’ll come home with a story worth telling twice.