WE SET OUT bright and early the next morning, my new best friend—Brigitte—and I. We were headed for the bus station, which did not bode well for someone who had recommitted herself to the walking life, but Brigitte was insistent.
“I hate cities,” she declared, “and the walk out of Ponferrada will be boring. We will take the bus to Villafranca—it is only twenty kilometers anyway—and we will walk from there.”
I followed her through the maze of narrow residential laneways wending through Ponferrada’s citadel toward the Rio Sil.
“I cannot see wasting our time on a city highway, risking our lives with all that traffic,” said Brigitte as we stood in line at the bus station and purchased tickets for Villafranca. “Besides, we are pilgrims, not martyrs, right?”
She had a point. A pilgrimage is not about punishment but about making an intentional decision to look at the world with fresh awareness and to consider your place in it. A pilgrim defines her own pilgrimage; maps are guidelines, not prison sentences. If I walked every single step of the Camino’s route, it would not make me a better pilgrim or a better person. It could make me a superhero, but I had already traveled that road and found it to be highly overrated.
The bus let us off on the outskirts of Villafranca. I felt mildly put out that we had to actually use our limbs to reach the town.
So this was Villafranca, I thought, as we followed the Camino’s arrows and stylized shells through the town. It was a charming, prosperous little place of white stucco buildings, well-tended gardens, and a large central square bordered by residences, shops, and a theater, the sort of place that gives the impression of quiet sophistication and a comfortable lifestyle. Everyone we met greeted us with a smile.
We passed the Parador, and I was immediately glad I had stayed at the one in León. It was hard to know where to place Villafranca’s Parador in the pantheon of Spain’s grand architectural gems because it was so shockingly bland. Was it Spain’s first example of unremarkable architecture? A failed attempt to introduce low-slung California styling to the Spanish masses? There wasn’t a hint of grandeur to the place, and let’s face it, nothing says pampering better than a level of opulence you can’t afford.
Villafranca was over in a matter of minutes. We strode out of town, crossing the Rio Burbia along a bending road that ascended gently through leafy scenery. An older man who was walking toward us from the opposite direction removed his hat as he passed and nodded respectfully, “Buenos días.”
“Now that was a Spanish gentleman,” smiled Brigitte with great satisfaction. “Did you notice? He carried himself like a true caballero.”
Brigitte had no caballero in her life. She was divorced—her daughter had just completed university—and she lived simply, eking out a living as a translator in French, English, and Spanish. Tall and slender with chestnut hair that fell neatly past her shoulders, she had a wide smile that showed lots of teeth. She carried herself with an ethereal calm; she had made peace with the uncomfortable decisions thrown her way and was living life on her own terms. She was more Earth Mother than soccer mom, at home around nature and horses. She had come on the Camino with some friends, but she had no idea where they were at that moment, and it did not concern her.
“They are adults. They will find their way,” she said matter-of-factly. She was only walking for two weeks, the amount of time she could spare to be away from her clients.
Her clothing set her apart from other pilgrims: not for her the polyester cargo pants or the quick-dry shells, shirts, and jackets. She wore a pair of black denim jeans and a cotton T-shirt, which in most hiking circles is grounds for excommunication.
Slung diagonally across her chest was the smallest backpack I had seen on the Camino. It was like a postman’s bag with a clear plastic compartment in the front where Brigitte kept her guidebook opened to the page du jour, which meant she had only to flip her bag over to read the map she needed for that day.
“Your pack is so tiny,” I remarked. “What are you carrying in it?”
Such issues consume pilgrims, who are always on the lookout for something to ditch to lighten their load.
“Well,” she began, “in the main central compartment, I have a pair of light cotton pants—African batik, which I bought at an ecological fair—plus two light cotton T-shirts—one that I wear only for a few hours after my shower and before going to bed, the other, quite old, that I alternate with another T-shirt when I’m walking. I also have a spare pair of sport socks, briefs and bra, as well as my hairbrush and a little plastic bag containing my toothbrush and toothpaste, nail scissors, tweezers. I also have a pair of leather sandals—they are the heaviest thing in my bag. Next time I’m going to pack something lighter. In the two small compartments on the side, I have four tiny samples of foot cream that a chiropodist friend gave me. I don’t know if it has helped, but at least my feet smell nice. I have a small pot of white grease [Vaseline] to put on my feet every morning, plus vitamins, a tiny bottle of shampoo, some cotton to use in case of blisters, and a small piece of natural soap for my body and my clothes. My sleeping bag—it weighs six hundred grams—is tied to my pack on the side. I also have a light rain jacket and rain pants and a bath towel. Around my waist, I have tied an old sweatshirt, which I can wear when it is cool, and a lighter cotton shirt, in case I need that. I have my usual waist bag—see?—that holds my papers, money, a knife, a pen, and some paper.”
Granted, she was only walking for two weeks, but a pilgrim could make do with all that for a month and just replenish the shampoo and soap.
“What about face creams, moisturizers, cleansers, toners, sunscreen?” I asked. I mean, didn’t every woman carry these?
“Oh, why would I use a face cream?” she asked as if she had never heard of such an idea and that my question had inadvertently hurt her feelings.
“Doesn’t your face get dry or flaky?”
“No, not really. If it does I put a little nut oil on it in the winter.”
I made a mental note to add nut oil to my dermatological arsenal.
We hiked on and on. Brigitte was a steady though leisurely hiker. Often she would stop and point out a shrub, a flower, or something else we saw along the way, and explain its origin.
“This is broom,” she said, stroking a hardy unattractive bush. “It’s called this because people can cut the branches off, tie them together, and make a broom! Now this flower—hmmm, I’m not sure what it is, but isn’t it pretty? Look at how the tiny drops of dew stick to its petals.”
At this rate, it would take three months to get to Santiago. Still, I was grateful for Brigitte. She reminded me that pilgrimages weren’t races; if anything, they were meant to teach you to stop, observe, and reflect.
At a small park along the riverside we came upon a sign in Spanish. Brigitte paused and parsed it while I stood by faithfully and attentively as the teacher conducted her lesson.
“Tramo libre sin muerte,” she read slowly. “Now libre means free; sin muerte means without death. Hmm. What does that mean?” She considered the sign in silence.
“Aha! This is a warning to fly-fishers that they can fish, but they must only use one hook, and then must throw the fish back. See? ‘Freedom without murder.’ ”
The lesson over, we moved on to the next.
“See those cows over there,” Brigitte said. “Those are La Rubia de Galicia.” She stopped and made me repeat the term slowly. “La Rubia de Galicia.”
“They are blonde, as you can see, and they are a special breed. Do you see that they still have their horns? That is a sign that they are raised naturally.”
She smiled at the thought. She liked life in its natural state.
“Now this church bell,” she said, pausing farther along in front of a small stone church and pointing to the tower. “That is called a clocher mur, as opposed to just a clocher. With a clocher, the bell is actually in the tower, whereas with a clocher mur the bell is located in a hole that has been cut into the wall specifically to accommodate it. I guess they did it that way for economical reasons; it’s less expensive to build a wall than a whole tower just for a bell.”
Occasionally our conversation veered toward a subject we were not keen to discuss: O Cebreiro, our destination that day.
O Cebreiro is a remote mountaintop village, and it has been a significant stop on the Camino since the ninth century. Reaching it involves a hideously steep climb, more than 1,200 meters above sea level. It is a mini-Pyrenees. Brigitte had started her Camino in Burgos and had therefore missed the Pyrenees.
“You’re in for a treat,” I said.
Faced with a daunting challenge, we did what most people do under such circumstances: we delayed it. We stopped for lunch, for cafés con leche, for beer and chocolate. We sought out places that sold real ice cream.
“I detest soft ice cream,” Brigitte said. “It’s plastic food.”
We sauntered through villages festooned with RE/MAX signs, places where you would not expect to see a realtor’s sign—Pereje, Trabadelo, La Portela, Ambasmestas, Ambascasas, Vega de Valcarce, Ruitelán. I pondered a dozen renovation possibilities.
The villages of northern Spain are an endangered species, and there was ample evidence of this all along the Camino, where homes were shuttered and there appeared to be no signs of life. When I first set out on the Camino with my group, we remarked at the absence of people in the villages and put it down to the fact that Spaniards left for work earlier than we pilgrims hit the road. Then we decided that perhaps pilgrims were the early birds. The shuttered windows we passed in the afternoons indicated it was siesta time, we surmised. Or the inhabitants were at church. Or away on holidays. As we progressed across Spain, it became apparent that we were witnessing the decline and fall of Spanish rural life. We were walking through ghost towns.
A recent census found that many of Spain’s five thousand villages are sparser in population than the Sahara. Once-busy little burgs were reduced to a handful of inhabitants—some as few as twelve. Young people had fled these towns, seduced by better jobs and bigger money offered in the cities, leaving behind the elderly to fend for themselves without bus service, cafés, or stores. Nowadays village folk purchase groceries from the back of a van that rolls into town a few times a week, tooting its horn upon arrival. The isolation, especially in winter, was the worst form of deprivation. One woman told a newspaper reporter, “We can cope with the cold, [but] the hardest part is the loneliness.”
It was just after noon, and probably not the best time to be walking on open asphalt roads under the Spanish sun, when the path around Herrerías took a steep downward turn toward the Rio Valcarce and brought Brigitte and me into some of the prettiest scenery I have ever seen—fresh spring foliage, moss-covered rocks, a small stone bridge—all the ingredients needed to recreate Eden or to illustrate a storybook.
Although this portion of the river was little more than a creek, the noise from the water spilling over rocks dominated everything around us. We had never seen water so clean. The riverside was sprinkled with small stucco and wood homes; an occasional car drove by. I considered what it must be like to wake up to this sort of life every day. As much as I wanted to go home, I was constantly looking for a new place to set down roots, or maybe I had been on the road so long that I just needed a place, any place, to call home.
Eden only lasts so long on the Camino before another punishing climb is handed to you.
The climbing began sharply and didn’t let up for the next two hours. On the upside, the trail was largely in the shade. I remembered José’s advice to take baby steps while going uphill and kept my head down so as not to be daunted by what lay ahead.
An hour and two hard kilometers later we arrived in La Faba, our faces flushed with exertion and dripping with sweat. O Cebreiro, we were told, was another two kilometers away—all of it uphill.
There was a sign for a café, so we plodded on. Ten minutes later on a very narrow path, we came across the “café”—a vending machine lashed to barbed-wire fencing that circled a barnyard on the right. A few steps to the left of the vending machine was a six-hundred-foot drop. We were so out of breath that we barely registered the absurdity of the sight.
We staggered into O Cebreiro to find the place jammed with tour buses. Worse, the Saturday crowd of boisterous day-trippers had snagged all the seats in the bars.
O Cebreiro is famous for a couple of things. One is its pallozas, circular rough-stone buildings with thatched roofs that date from the eleventh century. A respectful job has been done to integrate them into the fabric of modern life without debasing them; there were no gaudy Ye Olde Fudge Shoppe signs around. Still, given that this was the twenty-first century, I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised to find the village’s sanctity tainted by crass tourism, pricey B&Bs, and a proliferation of the religious equivalent of head shops with batik skirts and dresses hanging from outdoor racks, clay statues of dragons, faux silver jewelry—the sort of bric-a-brac favored by old hippies and weekend Christians.
Brigitte would not sanction so much as a browse.
We abandoned the crowds and moved toward the little pre-Romanesque church, where you could count the number of visitors on one hand. It was here that O Cebreiro’s claim to fame—a miracle—occurred in the early fourteenth century. It goes something like this:
One winter evening while a snowstorm raged outside this church, a grumpy, disillusioned Benedictine monk who had lost his faith prepared to celebrate yet another communion to an empty house. Midway through the service a peasant entered the church, having struggled up the storm-ravaged hill (and trust me, it’s a struggle in good weather). The monk continued to say Mass, barely masking his contempt for the peasant’s audacious interruption. As he held up the Sacraments, the bread and wine turned literally into the flesh and blood of Christ. The monk’s faith was instantly restored—and no doubt the peasant’s spirits as well. Today the chalice and paten from this miraculous event are on display in the church in a glass safe.
Ancient artifacts could not distract me from the fact that I was desperately thirsty. Brigitte was, too, but she refused to enter any bar that held the slightest hint of trendiness, which pretty much meant all the bars in O Cebreiro.
“Let’s get to the refugio first,” she stubbornly suggested.
When we arrived, we were met by a tough, unsmiling young woman who crossed her legs and folded her arms the moment she saw us. No mistaking that body language!
There was no room, Hitler’s Sister snapped at us.
Brigitte, who spoke Spanish, employed her best diplomatic skills, but Hitler’s Sister would have none of it. She let loose a rapid-fire explanation that tested even Brigitte’s natural civility and dignity.
“We are leaving,” Brigitte said to me, turning on her heel.
“May we just get a drink of water?” I asked Hitler’s Sister politely. She gestured wildly and snarled at me.
I matched her snarl with a bark: “Agua!”
I shoved past her into the adjoining kitchen, adding loudly, “You fat, lazy cow!” Truthfully, the Camino would have strained the patience of Job.
We failed to secure lodgings anywhere in O Cebreiro and were forced to walk to the next town.
Two kilometers later we arrived at a roadside diner that advertised rooms to let.
“The thing with the Spanish,” Brigitte instructed me as we paused at the door of the diner, “is that you have to ease your way into your request. You don’t just come in and ask for a room. You have to talk about the weather, ask them how they are. It is like flirting.”
We entered a gloomy room that was part grocery store and part diner. The ceiling fan made a limp wop-wop-wop sound, and I knew in an instant that this setting would not yield a successful outcome.
Brigitte smiled at the woman behind the counter and launched into a laboriously long and ultimately fruitless dance to get us rooms. I stifled my urge to slug the two old geezers on the bar stools beside me who suggested we sleep with them. As I removed my backpack, one of them ogled my breasts and licked his lips.
“In your dreams, Grandpa,” I smiled, as I slid onto the stool and ordered a beer.
A further three kilometers away, in Hospital da Condesa, we snagged the last two bunks.
Showered and grateful for a bed, I went outside to catch the last few rays of sun while I wrote in my journal. It was a warm, tranquil evening, and once again I felt optimistic about Santiago de Compostela. Earlier that day we had passed a marker saying that it was a mere 142 kilometers away. But most of all, I felt blessed to have the company of Brigitte and to be able to feed off her momentum. Sometimes it takes the energy of others to spur us on.
My good mood was jarred by a man circling me and caressing his chest while he stared at me. Only on the Camino could I win the lusty affections of two geezers and a nutcase in the space of a few hours. This guy was more my age, so I suppose things were looking up. I stayed resolutely focused on my journal and avoided eye contact.
When I returned to my room, the man followed me and stood at the foot of my upper bunk looking at me as he removed his shirt. Slowly. I slid into my sleeping bag and continued to ignore him. He then lay on the lower bunk kitty corner to mine so that if I looked down on him, I could see him stretched out caressing his chest.
Exasperated by my indifference he reached into his pants and pulled out the only attention-getting tool he had—his cell phone. He proceeded to dial a friend. “Hola. Que pasa?” he roared into the phone.
The audio volume on his cell phone was turned up so high that anyone within earshot could hear a male voice on the other end yammering back.
After a few minutes, the Lout with the Cell Phone made another call. I glanced across the room at a young couple who had also taken to their bunks. It was after 8 PM, and most pilgrims hit the hay early because, well, walking thirty-five kilometers uphill in the searing sun has a tendency to make you tired. The couple returned my look and rolled their eyes.
The Lout made another call. And another. And another.
Brigitte climbed into her bunk. The Lout had been vying for her affections that evening as well, she told me. Two-timing bastard. He continued looking up at us, making loud noises to attract our attention. We did not return his leers but shook our heads and laughed mockingly.
Someone turned off the lights, and we all prepared for blissful sleep.
The Lout’s cell phone suddenly rang.
“Hola?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” someone in the room yelled.
THE NEXT MORNING I set off without Brigitte. She seemed uncharacteristically pokey, and I assumed it was her polite way of letting me know she wanted to walk alone.
“You go on ahead,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
But she never did, and it was the last time I saw her.
It made me a little sad, but I was sanguine about it; Brigitte was as much a free spirit as I was, and I had to let her go.
The morning dew spread a gauzy veil over the surroundings. Everything was lush and moist, the sky was cloudless, and the sun was edging its way toward the horizon. It was a peaceful morning, and the view was breathtaking.
I made my way along a narrow footpath that clung to a ridge. The sun snapped open like the eye of God, causing the shadows that cloaked the mountains to beat a hasty retreat. There is nothing more wondrous and operatic than a sunrise over a mountain range. The sun pulsated above the horizon—the heartbeat of a new day—and I spread my arms in welcome and let its heat energize me.
My goal that day was Sarria, a little more than thirty kilometers away. Once there, I would be about a hundred kilometers from Santiago. I fished out the maps from my backpack to double-check my route.
If nothing else, being on my own was making me more adept at reading a map.
While training for the Camino, Beth and I would get together on occasion to peruse the maps. One day, I casually mentioned to her that I was planning to pack my swimsuit for the Camino.
Beth looked puzzled.
“Do you really think we’re going to have time to swim?” she asked patiently.
“Well, why not,” I replied, pointing to the many red-ringed circular markings on the maps in front of us. “Look at all the pools of water.”
She gave a worried smile but was polite enough not to question my ability to lead a herd of sheep, never mind a group of smart women.
“Oh, Jane,” she said softly—and I think it’s fair to say that probably many thoughts ran through her mind at that moment, chief among them whether she had cancellation insurance—“Those markings aren’t pools; they indicate mountains.”
The swimsuit stayed home.
As crowded as the Camino had been at the beginning of the journey, the pilgrim horde had noticeably thinned out. The solitude spooked me. The yellow arrows and stylized shells were the only indications that I was on the right path.
I did not encounter another soul on the twenty-kilometer footpath through a swath of forest that led to Triacastela. Not one. Desperate for companionship, and to erase the fear of walking alone, I had no choice but to create my own.
A man had momentarily appeared on the path a short distance ahead of me. From the back he looked exactly like the actor Steve Martin.
Wow, I thought, what would be the odds of finding Steve Martin on the Camino? The man evaporated and suddenly Steve Martin was right beside me.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
“Why yes, I do,” he replied. “Where are you from?”
“Canada,” I answered. “You?”
“The States.”
“Ahh, there are a lot of you on the Camino,” I smiled.
“Really? I haven’t met anyone from the U.S. They all seem to be Belgians.”
After a few moments of awkward silence he spoke again:
“My name’s Steve.” He smiled in his aw-shucks way and extended his hand.
“Jane,” I replied. “Nice to meet you, Steve.”
I decided not to let on that I recognized him. I mean, why make us both uncomfortable?
My feigned ignorance appeared to irritate Steve, however. He dropped clues so that I would say, “Oh my God! You’re Steve Martin!” But I refused to play the game. I’m not the star-struck type.
Besides, it wasn’t important that it was Steve Martin; it was only important that he was another human being who spoke English. I was craving conversation, craving it more than café con leche. I was desperate to connect in a meaningful way with someone, even if it was fleeting, even if I had to make up the person.
Steve was a pleasant walking companion. We discussed Bush’s foreign policy and debated whether weapons of mass destruction were merely a ruse for an attack on Iraq meant to divert attention away from a covert parallel operation to flush out Osama bin Laden.
“The whole thing seems so farfetched,” said Steve. “I mean, c’mon, how does a guy in a cave manage to elude the world’s superpower? Then again, maybe America isn’t the superpower it says it is. So it goes after small fish like Iraq. I mean, Iraq. Give me a break. I’ll bet Jamaica could take out Iraq.”
We discussed the theological aspects of the Camino. Steve admitted he was wrestling with whether the spiritual component of the pilgrimage measured up to the physical task.
Our conversation was brief because the dirt path came to an end at the edge of a parking lot in Triacastela.
I gave a jaunty wave and a “buen camino” to Steve. He waved back and headed in another direction. What a nice man, I smiled to myself, and then worried whether it had been petty of me not to let on that I recognized him or to tell him how much I had enjoyed him in The Lonely Guy.
I walked into a café where a fat, greasy-looking lascivious old man asked my breasts what I wanted. I glanced down at my breasts because for a split second it occurred to me that if I was capable of having an imaginary conversation with Steve Martin, I was capable of leaving the refugio without my clothes on.
To my immense relief, I was fully clothed.
Behind the bar, on the wall facing me, was a pinup of a totally nude woman spread-eagled on a studio floor. If not for the red rose in her talonlike fingers—and I’ll let your imagination determine what she was doing with the rose—the poster could have been a gynecological diagram for medical students.
The gruff bartender slammed down a café con leche in front of me, causing its contents to slop onto the saucer and the counter. He made no effort to clean it up.
Just then a little girl skipped into the café, resplendent in a pale pink dress tied at the waist with a huge pink bow. Her dark hair was divided into two pigtails that were festooned with pink ribbons. She wore dainty white leather Mary Janes, and her white-gloved hands carried a small white Bible. She ran up to the man, and gave him a kiss. This pig was her grandfather? Oy!
The girl’s mother teetered in looking like a drunk slattern, a cigarette drooping from her red lips as she rummaged through her purse for a lighter.
I grabbed my gear and left. Sometimes the only way to take the high road is to walk it. And sometimes the metaphorical high road becomes a literal one.
Try as I might, I could not find my way out of Triacastela. I would walk a few hundred meters, then double back because the way did not feel right. I consulted my maps. I stood in the middle of the road trying to get my bearings, turning my maps every which way to glean a hint of direction. Without another pilgrim around—where the hell was Steve Martin when I needed him?—I was left to figure it out myself.
I chose one route and hiked along a paved road that led up and up. For four kilometers I climbed, and at the top of the road I arrived at—a garbage dump. A dead end.
“What a perfect metaphor for my life,” I screamed. “I always take the long, hard way; always stick with difficult people, climb steadily toward what I think is a goal of resolution, and the pay-off? Garbage dumps!”
I stomped all the way down the hill.
I tried the other route and walked and walked. And walked some more. I recognized place names from my map, and realized with resignation that I would be taking the scenic route to Sarria.
I walked along footpaths and through villages that were so tiny they didn’t even merit a sign displaying a place name. I passed farmyards and pastures. I paused to watch a lamb suckling its mom. There were cows everywhere. And dogs. Everyone seemed to own a German shepherd. The upside to walking in the noonday sun was that the dogs were too hot and tired to bother strangers. In her account of the Camino, Shirley MacLaine wrote about masses of wild, ferocious dogs prowling for pilgrims, yet every dog I came across could barely muster a bark or a growl.
On and on I walked. Up steep hills and down through leafy glades. I did not see another human being.
I often like being in a place where there is absolute silence, where I feel like matter, where I feel as though I do matter.
Then there is the creepy type of silence, the type that puts me on the cusp of a panic attack. The internal dialogue goes from “Wow, how wonderful to have the place to myself” to “Gee, where is everyone?” to “Oh my God! Am I the last person on the planet?”
That last question was the one I was asking on the desolate but very charming stretch of road between Triacastela and Samos. Low stone enclosures bordered a narrow asphalt road that wound higgledy-piggledy through the verdant rural landscape. The air was fresh, the grass was tall, and the sky was blue and sunny. But there were no people and no sounds of activity. A few homes were scattered here and there, and I considered knocking on one of the doors just to check for signs of life.
I strained for a glimpse of someone—a farmer plowing a field, someone hanging laundry on the clothesline, a car whizzing by—but there was no one. Even the birds were silent.
I was both afraid and elated. Absolutely no one knew where I was. I could have simply walked off the face of the Earth—disappeared—right there, and no one would have had a clue where to begin looking for me. The idea was momentarily tantalizing.
Then again, what if I had a heart attack, a stroke, or an aneurysm? What if I twisted my ankle or dislocated my knee? Who would help me or even find me? No one. I willed myself not to get sick or hurt. If by an act of fate something did happen, I still had a few spare tabs of morphine in my pack.
I remained in this state for a very long time, perhaps five or six hours. It was thoroughly unsettling. Eventually I saw a café, and I made a slight detour toward it just to confirm the existence of human life. If no one was there, I decided I would steal a beer.
The café was a run-down joint under the proprietorship of equally run-down people, the type who wouldn’t care if they were the last people on Earth. I inquired about the distance to Samos and was dismayed to learn I had four kilometers to go. Four kilometers feels like fourteen kilometers when you’re hiking alone through high, dense vegetation along an infuriatingly winding path. Had the route been straightened, it would have shaved two kilometers off this particular stretch.
At the same time, it was an exciting route because you never knew what lay around the corner. The scenery inspired a deep and abiding reverence, but it could spook you, too.
Something rustled in the grassy border of the path, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a snake slither into the bushes. I hate snakes. It was the first time I had considered their existence in Spain. Suddenly I was panicked about what other wildlife was lurking about. Wolves? Poisonous vipers?
This is the sort of research more practical and intelligent people conduct when they embark on a hiking journey. I tend to take the blunder-in-with-staggering-ignorance approach.
With my faculties on high alert, I glanced back to allay my fears that the snake had not morphed into a massive, venom-drooling, red-eyed beast with a long, quick tongue. I pretty much ran down the path.
Under a blazing Spanish sun, I staggered into Samos to find that the refugio, which was attached to a monastery, did not open for another hour and a half. I sat down on a cold stone step and quietly wept—wept for the tiny blister that threatened to erupt on one of my toes, wept for my sore, aching legs, wept for my separation from all that was familiar, wept for my loneliness and fear.
By 5:30 the next morning, I was on the road once again. It was dark and frightening, but I no longer cared. I was fueled by the sort of anger and brazen courage that comes from sleep deprivation.
All night long, I had been kept awake by the woman in the next bunk. She snored. All. Friggin’. Night.
I had been forewarned. One of the woman’s companions had thoughtfully told me that I might want to choose another bunk because his friend’s snoring was bad—so bad that all her companions routinely slept at the opposite end of the refugio.
I thanked him but stubbornly stayed put, certain that I would be fast asleep before anyone else got to bed.
But I miscalculated the decibel level of the Incredible Snoring Woman. Not only did she snore, but she also farted constantly—big, noisy farts. She was still issuing loud bodily emissions from both ends when, in the too-early hours of the morning, I swung my pack into position and groped in the darkness for my walking stick. I considered whacking her with it, but had I started I would not have been able to stop.
I slipped through the refugio’s wooden doors onto the dark, ghostly street. I moved quietly, barely holding my resentment in check. Was it possible to return home from a pilgrimage more grumpy and sleep deprived than I was before I left? How can spiritual enlightenment be achieved amid farts and snorts and groans? Was this another one of God’s test? C’mon God, throw me a bone here.
My grumbling stomach reminded me that it had been a few days since I had eaten a real meal. The night before I had seen a couple eating a steak dinner and almost dove on them. According to the waitress, I was five minutes too late to order the steak. I had to content myself with a beer and a bag of potato chips, which I munched on while trying to decipher my horoscope in a Spanish women’s magazine. At the table next to mine, a couple of pilgrims were complaining about the erratic dinner schedule.
“If you speak Spanish,” one grumbled, “you can somehow get a meal any time of the day; if you don’t speak Spanish, you’re out of luck.”
With darkness blanketing the world, it would be hours before I found a café. I strained to make out the yellow arrows painted on the pavement leading out of Samos. The main road curved around the side of the monastery, whose spotlights illuminated an expanse of lawn and manicured gardens.
There had been a Mass the night before, but I had been too exhausted and too depressed to attend; now I regretted not making the effort, especially since the day before I had encountered one of its priests, who actually smiled at me—the first cleric to do so on the Camino—and who had gently warned me, in Spanish, not to sit too long in the sun.
The early-morning air was a chilly contrast to the late-afternoon heat. In the morning, everything was closed up tightly, including the flowers. By the time I reached Sarria, twelve kilometers away, the buttercups, forget-me-nots, and miniature daisies were wide awake.
I stopped at the first open café I found, threw back a café con leche, and carried on. Alone. I wondered how long a person could go without speaking before the ability to communicate ceased entirely.
I considered my feet and how the action of putting one foot in front of the other over and over and over again could induce a Zenlike hypnosis and an out-of-body experience simultaneously. I was mesmerized by the movement of my feet. I asked myself lunatic questions such as, “How does locomotion work? How do feet instinctively know how to walk? How do they know where to go?” This last question wasn’t so insane; I often felt my feet were leading me on the Camino, not my head.
On the far side of Sarria, the trail descended steeply through a field and led into a forest.
Two men were on the path ahead of me. One was tying his shoelaces very slowly, and as they glanced at me they seemed to be purposely hanging back. They were Spanish; one was older than the other—a father and son, perhaps? It was obvious that they were day-hikers, because they carried no packs. Both of them smiled at me as I walked past, and I nonchalantly smiled back. But something about them spooked me.
Suddenly the rape dream I had had before setting off on my pilgrimage resurfaced. I felt a growing terror. I picked up my pace, but I could hear the two men close behind me. I moved as fast as I could without making it appear that I was running from them.
Farther along, a bunch of elderly Germans were negotiating their way across a stream. I offered to assist them but was rebuffed. The Germans, however, intercepted the two Spanish men and asked them to snap photos of the group, which the men graciously did. I sprinted quickly ahead.
The trail was a winding, pebbly one, edged with low stone walls covered in age and moss. In some places the vegetation was so dense that it formed an arbor over the path. Huge, ancient tree trunks protruded from the stone walls like enormous carbuncles. The numerous turns and unexpected shifts in the terrain kept me engaged and enchanted. I half expected Gandalf at the next bend.
I passed small, shantylike settlements, and then several minutes later passed grand homes. The contrasts were startling.
My initial plan had been to walk as far as Barbadelo and check in to the refugio, but a quick check of my maps showed that I had somehow missed Barbadelo and was well past it. Ferreiros was the next stop with a refugio, and I resolved to stop there for the night. I was hot, sweaty, parched, exhausted, dirty, and starved.
There were a number of places along the route where refreshment was available, but my legs inexplicably refused to stop. Something kept pushing me forward, and it was so strong at times that I stumbled under the pressure to move faster and faster. At a gorgeous café that seemed carved out of the forested surroundings, I looked longingly at a display of cold drinks, but my feet refused to pause, whisking me past a trough where I just managed to scoop up a handful of water and splash it on my overheated face.
The trail left the leafy, shaded sanctuary of the woods and delivered me to a dusty, dry, thoroughly unappealing road. The sun was intensely hot, there wasn’t a stick of shade anywhere, and, adding insult to injury, the road led uphill.
“That’s it,” I screamed silently to my stubborn body. “I don’t care what your hurry is, but I am stopping at the next place. I will die of heat if I don’t get a drink.”
At the crest of the hill, I found the refugio. Not surprisingly, it was closed. I rattled the door knob and tapped on the curtained windows, hoping to rouse someone, but there were no signs of life.
I looked up the road. A cluster of backpacks rested against a barbed wire fence. There had to be a café nearby.
As I approached the backpacks, my own felt suddenly lighter. The buckles mysteriously unlatched themselves, and the pack slid from my shoulders to the ground. I turned my head and noticed a café, its forecourt arranged with white plastic tables and colorful umbrellas.
Then I saw him: the fair-haired man.