This is What Happens When You Run with Angry Bulls
“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.”
— Gustave Le Bon
“Pack your bags!” your touchscreen reads. “You’re going to Pamplona.” There’s an angst threatening your poise, an uneasiness over what you’ve just done. You’ve left a betrayed conscience in your wake.
“What are you thinking?!” it wants to scream. “What happened to restraint?”
Yet, here you are.
After punching in a few numbers, agreeing to vague but binding terms, and a few taps of an obsolete mouse you’ve officially signed on for lunacy.
You’re going to run with the bulls.
You book your ticket to idiocy eight months in advance, trimming your history of obsessiveness by weeks. Seven years and another life ago, an overly earnest young actor ready to take the world by storm phoned the renowned Guthrie Theater a year before auditions for its summer conservatory were even scheduled.
“You’re calling WAY too early,” you heard a voice on the other end say, just making out the faint dins of muffled laughter.
Still, absurdity must sometimes be scheduled, especially if it’s annual absurdity drawing thousands of equally absentminded souls.
The months pass by. July inches closer. You begin to picture yourself running down cobble-stoned streets as onlookers take in the mayhem perched on balconies and boarded up storefronts between sips of wine. Your mind begins to field questions, silly ones, that start to take precedent over important ones.
Should I practice sprinting? Rolling? How fast can bulls run? How fast can I run?
You keep your secret to yourself, believing such an act falls in the domain of spelunking, skydiving, lion-taming, or deciding to ride a motorcycle — no matter how old you are you can’t tell your parents you’re doing it.
But just as the Pamplona battle plan takes shape your plans are foiled. You’re needed back home in July. The pattern will go on for another four summers until you start to say the hell with it, wondering how old is too old for stupid to be squared.
Then your flawed bucket list is swapped for a dream. After toiling away for years as a no-name actor, you and a band of scrappy producers, actors, and directors decide to make a feature you’ve spent three years of your life writing. Eight years after being dropped by your first agent, you’re telling your story on your terms.
What could be better?!
Your hometown will be the backdrop for an eighteen-day shoot, a story more fact than fiction. Your formatted prose have brought together a collage of African American, Asian, Arab, and Latino storytellers in front of and behind a colorblind camera. Never has the time felt more right, the demand for inclusivity more dire.
But your indie film is not immune to the false starts and setbacks of any other scrappy start-up, no matter how earnest.
The film is postponed.
You give yourself a day to hang your head before the seat of your soul must be returned to its upright position. Those twenty-four hours are hard as you shake your fists at the gods, curse the universe for not doing its part. By day two, the residue of heartbreak is faint, most of the broken pieces swept under a blood-stained rug.
Then it hits you!
For the first time in a presidential term the month of July stares back at you blankly. You. Are. Free.
What do you do?
You scroll your touchscreen looking for a friend to offer a word, whether sobering or comforting is not your concern. You just want to know if you’re being impulsive, your actions early onset of a mid-life crisis.
Then a smile breaks the fault line of your lips as you read the text:
Go! You only live once.
Her words offer solace not about the trip but about your understanding of yourself. It dawns on you that you would have gone no matter what. This is who I am, you think.
Whatever that means.
One week later, you’re pacing the crowded terminal of Orly Airport in Paris awaiting your flight to Madrid. You discover Pamplona is many things but easy to get to it is not. It’s okay, you think. It’s all part of the adventure.
It’s nearly midnight when you touch down in Spain. You can practically hear the clic-cloc against stone. You lay your wearied head on some other worldly bench Gaudi himself may have drunkenly sketched. Your eyes grow heavy as you watch the departure screen like a Netflix binge.
Marrakech, London, and Rome it reads. Images of medinas, Westminster Abbey, and gladiators dance in your head as you fall in and out of some sloppy slumber.
At 6:30 am your gate finally appears as you march one step closer to Pamplona, or backing out. The plane is small, the flight is short, its occupants are young. Droves of fellow countrymen mingled with a few from down under sit anxiously in cramped rows.
“Are you going to run with the bulls?” you hear a young man ask another.
“Yeah! You?!”
“Oh, yeah.” I”m pumped!” he says.
You admit what you knew all along — your idea is not only possibly a bad one, but a popular one. For a moment your adventure reeks of Cancun, Times Square, and the Fisherman Wharf’s of the world. Your little adventure feels like it was cc’d to all the twenty-five year old men in the Western Hemisphere.
Still, you bury such thoughts and doze off during the twenty-four minute flight. Soon you’re standing before a tired carousel showcasing bags with one thing in common: none of them are yours. A customs agent grabs your arm and shoves you toward the sliding doors.
Tired, hungry, and luggageless you set-up shop in a room you found on AirBnb. Your host turns out to be just short of a saint. He is one of the kindest souls you’ve crossed paths with in all the time zones you’ve traversed. For two days he screams Spanish into his cracked touchscreen demanding your luggage be delivered. He’s so convincing you forget it’s not his bag.
The language barrier between the two of you is immense, like the Great Wall stacked on crates. Fortunately, it’s breached through words punched into Google Chat. You both apologize for not knowing the other’s native tongue when you realize the burden is yours — a Californian / pseudo New Yorker.
So much Spanish.
Just before laying down your sleep-deprived bones your phone dies along with hopes of waking up at a time of your choosing. “Don’t line up any later than 6:30 am,” the websites tell you. “You risk being turned away.”
Four years of bullless summers and you stand on the brink of a fifth in el toro’s backyard. How do you get up early when you haven’t had a full night’s rest in three days?
Throughout the night you stumble down a dark corridor in a strange house in a strange city. Again and again, you top off a plastic bottle with Pamplona tap water, unsure, but mostly ambivalent to whether that’s a good thing. If the blaring alarm of a smartphone won’t make you rise perhaps a cranky bladder will.
The plan works swimmingly until it doesn’t. A faint light breaks beyond your windowsill as you leap from bed. You grab your iPod Nano with the urgency of an asthmatic reaching for his inhaler.
It reads, 6:55 am.
It’s too late, you think. I came all this way just to come all this way!
You pace the cramped quarters of your rented room, cursing in muffled bursts so as not to wake your gracious host. What am I doing here? you wonder. This is ridiculous.
I’m ridiculous.
But a quitter you are not. You toss on a borrowed crimson shirt and bolt through door frames like turnstiles to catch the night’s last train. You turn the twenty-minute walk into a ten-minute tear reaching the starting point just past 7:15 am.
You climb over wooden planks to wade in a sea of red and white idlers, soon-to-be runners. People stretch sleepy limbs, practice sprinting in bursts, and more than one or two make the sign of the cross. You’re tempted to remind them they don’t have to do this.
Policemen check your sobriety, padding you down for GoPro’s and smartphones but otherwise their approach is surprisingly hands-off — liberating even. They seem to say, Your irrationality is your concern, not mine.
Then the current moves around a bend as the world opens up. Hundreds lean from balconies that seem to touch the sky, cheering you on like Neil Armstrong perched on a convertible down 42nd.
Even you forget for a moment that none of this is about you.
You’re surprisingly poised as you lean against the metal draped over a storefront. Just as an unexpected peace begins to set in you hear battle cries from the tide of crashing bodies about to envelope you. Whether someone somewhere really sees something is unclear, but the ripple of fear is strong enough to move the masses.
It is literally herd mentality.
You run not because you bear witness to encroaching horns but because the alternative could be costly.
It’s a free for all as people push and shove with abandon. Ironically, the greatest threat to your safety is not a pack of confused steers but other people. It seems strangely poetic, that it somehow serves you right.
You begin to make your way to the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, when finally, out of the corner of your eye, you see three one ton bulls plow right past you. Any doubt they could have their way with you disappears along with the careful footing of a young man who goes crashing to the cobble-stoned streets. Onlookers hold their breath as the bulls brush past the low hanging fruit.
He is safe.
The run comes to an end in mere minutes, but the real insanity is about to begin. Hundreds are corralled into the bullring as 20,000 people anxiously await your arrival.
YOU are the entertainment.
Bulls of various size, age, and temperament are sprung loose. You time your movements on loose gravel by the shifting mobs. Wannabe matadors antagonize and tease the agitated animal as many stumble, a few fall, and one even lands a seamless flying side kick directly over the bewildered bull.
The crowd erupts, hungry for more.
Each released bull feels slightly bigger, progressively angrier. You realize with each passing minute your odds of returning home in a mostly non-fractured state slip out of your favor. After twenty-five minutes you’ve had enough. You hop the fence and make your way through the steel doors of the coliseum.
You walk in a daze down damp streets, the scent of beer and urine permeating the sticky air. Ten years sooner and you would have veered left towards the row of bars that in a mere hour will be filled testosterone laced war stories over pints of sloshed ale.
But not today.
You go right and make the long walk back to your apartment. You’re exhausted but still full of life. However absurd the events of the morning and four years leading up to today were, you take a strange solace in finally doing what you said you would.
That’s got to count for something, you think.
You collapse onto your bed and are out in seconds. The sound of hooves against stone and belligerent cries of thousands play over a collage of red and white until you wake up a few hours later. You stare blankly at the ceiling wondering if it was all just a dream.
This is what happens when you run with angry bulls.
