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The fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, held for a week each July since 1591, honors St. Fermin, the city’s first bishop. A curious mixture of religious fervor, around the clock drinking and carousing, and expert bullfighting, each day’s festivities start at 8:00 a. m. with the encierro, the running of the bulls through the narrow barricaded streets of the city. Here locals and tourists prove their courage by running ahead of the 1,400-lb. bulls. Serious injuries, even fatalities, are common, yet the party rages on unabated. Ernest Hemingway popularized the festival--and the notion of "grace under pressure"--in his 1926 novel, “The Sun Also Rises.”
It had not exactly been a restful vacation to this point. "Surfer" John Hearin, an old rugby friend, and I had been traveling across Europe and North Africa for two months. In June we took the midnight train to Prague and were rousted from our sleeping car by the Czech police. Then there was white water rafting and a climb to 10,000 feet in the Swiss Alps. Hustlers plaguing us along the coast in Morocco, and now Pamplona and the bulls. All eyes were on the clock above City Hall. Three minutes.
Albert was talking in my ear as we waited on the cobblestones. "Stay relaxed. Don’t panic. Don’t run at the first rocket. The bulls will pass you. Let them pass you on the uphill part of the alley, not on the turns, and donít get caught in the bottleneck at the end. Donít sprint. Run, and look back. Keep your feet. If they're running together, that's good. If they get spread out, it's trouble. If a bull gets turned around on the course and runs the wrong way, that's when people get killed. Never assume the last bull has gone by. Keep looking back. And follow me. When I say go, you go."
The crowd had thinned out a little, and some runners were walking or jogging in the direction of the bullring eight hundred yards away. Most were dressed in the traditional costume: white shirt, red bandana, red sash, and carrying a rolled up newspaper. There were several other rugby players, a collection of stone-faced serious cases in shorts and good running shoes. I had butterflies like I had never experienced before any rugby game and I remembered Surfer John’s observation the night before when we walked the course. "There are no atheists in foxholes," he said, "and no friends on the encierro." I kissed my St. Christopher’s medal and sent up a quick prayer.
The first rocket went off precisely at eight o’clock--thudding in my chest--and people were panicking everywhere, tangled in little groups and yelling. Albert was squeezing my elbow. "Wait. Not yet," he said. "Let them go." Dozens of wild-eyed runners streamed past. The second rocket indicated the last bull was now out of the corral and thundering toward us.
We started jogging and I was right on Albert’s heels. Into the second of two turns and up the grade four hundred yards to the bottleneck. The cobblestones were slick with wine that was like blood, and the total width of the street was no more than ten yards. A roar came from behind the barricades and from the onlookers in the windows and balconies above us.
A big Samoan fell down hard and was having trouble gaining his feet. "Get up, man," I yelled, grabbing for his collar. Then there was the unreal sound of hooves on stone, loud screams, and someone yelled, "Here they come!" I was probably two hundred yards from the bullring. The faces around me, elongated and stricken, were like the faces of men emerging from a fire. I glanced back, and in double file, charging uphill with their horns spread wide, chests more than an ax handle across, came a pack of six bulls--strange, prehistoric beasts. As I veered onto the sidewalk, still running, my mouth open but without speech, they swept past, close enough to smell their dense, musky odor.
All in a tight pack--that was good. I ran after them, and a second later, the huge steers came along. A new wave of panic spread and then pure terror: people in front, just at the start of the bottleneck, were tripping and backing up, coming toward me, and the steers were just behind. A bull was charging up the course the wrong way, scattering two hundred-pound men like candlepins. I dashed for the rail fence, scrambling up next to Brian Murphy, this cop from the South Bronx we were running with, and then the bull got turned around and the steers ran past us into the bullring.
I sprinted past the closing gates and through the last narrow stretch beneath the stadium, fists clenched, leaping for joy. Ten thousand spectators bellowed "Ole!" I was almost crying, it felt so utterly beautiful just to be alive. "Methuen, Mass.," I shouted my hometown at the crowd. "Methuen, Massachusetts."
Then Albert crashed into me with a bearhug and we fell on the soft sand of the bullring. "You did it!" he said. "You were right behind me. You waited."
About a minute later they began releasing the bulls back into the ring, the crowd began yelling and whistling, and men darted out from the sides, whacking the bulls with their rolled up newspapers. Brian Murphy, the New York cop, got distracted by one bull and blindsided at high speed by another and was knocked down. After a vicious stomping, Murphy was pulled from beneath the animal and carried off by six other runners to the Red Cross. He suffered a severe concussion and didn't remember a thing.
The same bull came rampaging along the retaining wall straight for me, so I dived into the first row of seats. A couple of spectators broke my fall and I jumped back up to watch the bedlam in the ring. My adventure was over. Total elapsed time: just over four minutes. It seemed like ten seconds. Another way, it seemed like an hour, days, an eternity. Adrenaline has a funny way of playing with time.
By 8:45 we were back on the main plaza drinking beer, and the festival was in full swing. A snaking, drunken horde of Spaniards and tourists, dressed in white shirts and pants trimmed with red, danced madly on the flagstones, drenched in sangria, sweating and turning like dervishes. "Tonight the matadors will kill the bulls who tried to kill us," said Albert. "So they celebrate."
I stood back and watched the party with Surfer John. "Any idiot can get drunk," I said. "But only certain idiots can run with the bulls."
An American Special Forces captain who ran with us said, "Sure, there’s Mardi Gras and Oktoberfest in Munich is a big party, bigger than this. But it doesn't have the intensity. It doesn't have that element of danger."
That night we learned that there had been 23 injuries on the run--seven that required hospitalization. (The same day a New Zealand girl was killed diving from a statue in front of the Mussel Bar. This activity seemed crazy even to us, since you had to rely on drunken strangers to catch you, and it led to many serious mishaps during the week.) The locals said that the festival’s first run had been particularly dangerous because of the errant bull and had lasted nearly twice as long as the average. It was a miracle that no one was killed.
I’m not sure why I did it. I didn’t do it for Hemingway or for glory or improved testosterone levels. Moments before the run a local girl, filthy, hair matted with wine, approached me and said, "You Americans. You are stupid. The bulls will have you." She was looking for a reply and I just stood there, keeping silent, while her girlfriends laughed and made snorting sounds, and horns with their fingers.(return)