I had been thinking or dreaming of her before I awoke, I can not often tell the one from the other. The she appeared over me, my eyes apparently open. Julia, who, being German, gets up early, readies herself, and gets on the trail early, asking me for my email address, which I, of course, gave her Asked her where she was headed for the day. 'Tosantos.' 'Well, I hope to either see you on the road,' says I, 'or to catch up with you in Tosantos. It was frustrating to not be able to spend more time talking with you here.' After getting up and having a shared breakfast, I hugged her goodbye and she left. Today we walk out of La Rioja and into Castille Y León, Spain's largest Communidad Autonimo, and at 95,000 square kilometers, eleven times that of the Communidad of Madrid, Spain's capital, but a population, at 2.5 million, or less than half. This historically rich province contains the incomparable high inland plateau called the Meseta, through which slightly over fifty percent of the Camino is run. La Meseta sits between 1,000 and 3,000 meters above sea level and follows the line of the Douro River basin, the Douro being, alonf with the Tagus, one of Spain's largest two rivers. The mountain range forming the northern border of both the province and of La Meseta is the Cordillera de Cantábrica, which we see daily now on our right as we stride onwards towards the Atlantic Ocean and each day's setting sun. One of the small things along the Camino that cracks T and I up is that, occasionally as we pass through some town, usually towns larger than, say one thousand people, perhaps a third of the towns that we pass through then, an older man, say older than seventy, shuffling along with a European style cap, a cane, a buttoned sweater over his large lapel sticking out button shirt, slacks, returns our, 'Ola,' with a look straight ahead, no smile, and one word, 'Adios.' It has happened maybe five times, and it is always a gentleman like this. We giggle, notice, and keep moving on. This happened again today as we neared and then crossed the Rio Tirón in the city of Belorado.
We arrived, limping on sore feet, in Tosantos at about two in the afternoon, once again coaxed into donning our rain gear with less than one hour to go in the day-third day in a row! We found the only albergue in town, the Albergue St. Francis, which, given that the town has only sixty inhabitants, was remarkably easy to do. Entering, a woman of about forty seven, with short, blondfish hair greeted us, seated us in the first room on our right, asked if we could wait five minutes, and left. Shortly, she came in to explain that this is a Christian albergue, a donativo. We nodded, assented.Then she told us the basic rules of the establishment: we all make dinner together at six-thirty, eat at eight, then there is a voluntary oración, a prayer, upstairs at nine. We can get up no earlier that seven and must be in bed by ten. 'Sí, bueno, comprendemos.' She stamped our Credenciales, signed us in, jotting down our names, country of origin, staring point on the Camino, and our destination, a practice followed by most all albergues. Her name, I would learn, is Mapi. She showed us around the three story building, where, on the top floor we would sleep, as the previous night, by grabbing what we would probably call a wrestling mat in the US, and dragging it to a spot of our choice on a wooden floor about twelve by twenty-five feet in dimension. The bathrooms, male and female, with showers, the common eating room, the extra blankets. Teo and I put five Euros apiece into the locked, small wooden box with white, painted letters that read 'Donativo.' And hauled our packs and blankets up the flights of old, wooden and terra cotta tiled stairs to the sleeping area.
We said hello to the only other perigrino in attendance, a sixty-five year old woman from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, who lay under blankets in the corner opposite where we laid our mats, two thick for extra comfort. I introduced myself, Teo did the same, and when I told her that he was my son, she exclaimed, eyes widening somewhat, 'I think I've heard of you guys'! T and I looked at each other in astonishment. I asked how this could be. She told us that a man named Kevin told her about us a few days back. I said, 'The Swiss guy?' She said, 'Yes. He told me about a father and son pair, Americans, that we're walking the Camino together.' 'I guess,' said Teo, 'Our reputation precedes us!" Apparently he had out walked us a fair amount, having already been walking, as he had explained to us in Estella, from Switzerland some two and a half months ago. 'The race,' said I, 'doesn't always go to the Swiss!' A bit of an odd woman, Rachel pushes a baby carriage with her belongings in it as she walks the Camino, going each day only as far as the next albergue, as little as two kilometers per day. She has no intention of finishing the walk, just in doing part of it and in seeing Spain. A prematurely white haired woman with a pronounced limp in one leg, she mainly stayed in her bed, by the only window in the sleeping room, reading. I assumed, upon meeting the hombre of the albergue, a very gentle man of about sixty-five, speaking only Spanish, a bit of a lisp, even for a speaker of Castellano, meaning Spanish from Spain, that he and Mapi were husband and wife, a mistake which would turn out to embarrass me, and her, later in our stay. Took a shower, washed my socks, underwear, and walking t-shirt in the shower with me, using my all purpose cleaner, Dr.Bronners. Then T and I were going to go walk about a bit when Mapi and Jose Luis, his name, asked if we could watch the front door, let in any perigrinos looking for shelter, and tell them that the hospitileros would be right back to check them in. I read and wrote while Teo went looking for wifi so that he could FaceTime with his girl, Veronica. Tired, almost two weeks of walking underfoot, I nodded on and off on the couch in the front room, daydreaming, feeling somehow fulfilled and not fulfilled at all. Lonely. Happy to be with T. Satisfied anyhow with this adventure, with feeling empowered after such a long time of losing, step by step, power in my marriage, in my feelings of physical disorder and disintegration, in my alienation from who I had come to see myself as, in my feelings of sloth, of falling away from grace. More than satisfied, I suppose. Maybe even content. Maybe even pleased. The weather is turning colder now. The air a tad more crisp, sharp. One's breath is visible now in the earlier hours of the day, in the evenings, after the sun drops below the curtain of the hills. We getting days that register no higher than a brisk fifty two degrees as a high, drop to about freezing at night. I chose to sleep the night in the front room on a couch that folds down into a single bed. Teo and Rachel upstairs in the third floor dorm. They were, I found the next morning, freezing their asses off all night, waking to ice crystals on the inside of the window. Teo, with clothes and three blankets, said he kept telling himself all night, 'I know morning will come. I know morning will come.' There has not been one single heater in one single room in any pensione, albergue, or hostel that has yet to be able to be turned on during this trip. This albergue, it turns out,closes it's doors for the season every year on November 15th, reopening each year on the Ides, the 15th, of March. As I rested and read, awaiting the return of Mapi and Jose Luis from getting groceries for la cena, I can say that, yes, I did have a desire to see Julia walk in the door, where. I was hoping to surprise her by being deputized to receive her as the substitute host. That being said, it's not like I'm looking for a gal, you know? Sex, physical intimacy, jeez, my entire psyche is more or less wrecked in that department right about now. The last decade has eroded me incrementally into a shell of who I used to be. Ever see the painting called The Shriek, by Edward Munch? Yeah, that is me, except hold that picture in your head and then think of me with that expression flash frozen on my countenance, running for the hills. No, what I guess I had hoped for was more of a connection that feels safe, where I feel okay in being soft, vulnerable, without any inkling, suspicion, paranoia that things are not what they seem. Something plain, call it, or call her, vanilla ice cream. Yeah. I think I've had enough of the exotic for a time. Someone's hand to hold. The sensation of placing the back of my hand along the small hairs on the sides of a woman's cheek. The smell of the back of a woman's neck as she sleeps. The whispered, night breathing of sleep. We all prepared a good salad, lettuce, tomatoes, apple pieces, and walnuts, which Teo and Rachel smashed on a cutting board with a small hammer and collected into a small bowl. The hosts had prepared a typical regional meal of cooked potato pieces in an orange sauce, the color coming from the chorizo cooked along with onions, laurel leaf, pepper, salt, and garlic. It was right tasty, and we had fun talking during the pre-meal prep and during the meal. Being that Rachel speaks only 'seven words of Spanish,' it became my job to translate to Rachel, and Mapi's to translate to me when I was unclear.
On the subject of who walks the Camino and who they most enjoy hosting, it turns out that they love Americans, whom they find to be polite, warm, interactive. Australians and the British as well are much enjoyed. The French, excepting those from Brittany, Normandy, Paris, not so much. The problem with the French, it turns out, is that they are so used to thinking that the world revolves around them, that they feel no sense of any need to learn any other language or to travel much and don't seem either much suited or interested in meeting them half way. The Spanish have mostly all done the Camino, those that will do it at any rate, and with the Crisis going on, there is not much reason to do it again, so there exists a dearth of them on the trail. Italians are fun, warm, Mapi likes them, but Jose Luis finds that they will come in groups and turn the place into party zone central! And Los Alemanes, the Germans, they really enjoy the Germans, who, it seems from their comments, are culturally oriented to learning other languages and to travel. 'What about the 'Chinos,' I asked. 'Como estan Los Chinos?' At this Jose Luis, a former Catholic priest and all around mild mannered perhaps to a fault, put his hands over his mouth and sort of looked down while Mapi, an assertive, yet reasonable and friendly person, said, 'We don't like the Chinese very much. They are not polite. They don't speak any language other than Chinese. They laugh at us.' An interesting note. Martin. Sheen and the film crew making the movie, The Way, stopped here, met. Jose Luis, filmed a scene here. Both he and Mapi said that after watching the film that they did not recognize the albergue in it. IN all probability their scene was cut and left, in the anachronistic parlance of Hollywood, on the cutting room floor.
After la cena we cleaned the kitchen and then we went upstairs to do an oración, a prayer, in a darling, secret sort of meditation room where we read a few prayers aloud, listened to Jose Luis speak, and then each of us read one written down reason, left by peregrinos who have stayed here before us, for why someone has chosen to walk the Way of St. James. It was a fine way to spend twenty minutes. Jose Luis spoke thoughtfully and with great sincerity and truth about his spiritual views of the pilgrimage; he remarked that sometime walking the Camino will show you the wrong way, as life does, and that through this process, one can go on to find the right way. That we have to not just look at the future, or only at the positive parts of our past and current lives, that we can learn to see the parts of our lives and of our selves that we do not feel good about in a more beautiful, accepting, unified manner.
As we begin to arrive at the end of today's sermon, my friends, I can not but share with you the lyrics to a charming, surprisingly poignant, bittersweet song from my youth. Sometimes when we walk, I place my everything tablet up through the top of my back pack and play music. Today the album from which these lyrics come, The Harder They Come, was one of the selections. As this song played, I could not but help to connect its words, the strong power that it's words had, do have, on me. It is being understood now that the same part of the human brain that processes spirituality is the same part that processes music. Sitting in Limbo Sitting here in limbo, But I know it won't be long, Sitting here in limbo Like a bird without a song. Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the dice to roll, Sitting here in limbo, got some time to search my soul. Well they're putting up resistance, But I know that my faith will me on. I don't know where life will lead me, But I know where I've been, I can't say what life will show me But I know what I've seen. Tried my hand at love and friendship, But all that is past and gone. This little boy is moving on. Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the tide to flow, Sitting here in limbo, knowing that I have to go. Well they're putting up resistance, But I know that my faith will lead me on. I can't say what life will show me, But I know what I've seen. I can't say where life will lead me, But I know where I've been. Tried my hand at love and friendship, But all of that is past and gone. This little boy is moving on. This walk, for me, is so akin to being placed in limbo. There is a grand sense that time has been removed from my personal equation. In searching for some adventure, some release from the building pressures of my world, emotional, familial, financial, electronic, physical, mental-the whole thing-I knew that somewhere I would find and then settle on a journey that would, in its nature, in the definition of itself, show itself to me as a passage that would act as much a metaphor in my life as it would act as a physical, real world, literal action. Something perhaps ephemeral in definition, semi-amorphous, a mission more than a trip, a passage, a rite, a way to both do something new and to also become something new. A hard to see, unformed shape, all mist and smoke, that I could latch onto, pull through the doorway between dimensions in all it's parts and pieces, puzzle over, re-sort and arrange, and that it would then, with difficulty, with tears, with nights spent under the cold, clear autumn stars, manifest into a reality more real and more meaningful than that which in many years I have known. The final evening that Teo and I spent in Pozuelo, partaking in that legendary feast of cooked and cured meats, we consumed not only wine and food, but large amounts of friendship, and the Spanish night air. We discussed many things that night: past adventures; newly found relationships with others, within ourselves; we spoke, of course about the imminent Camino de Santiago and about how precisely we would get from Madrid to the municipal albergue in Roncesvalles the next day. I spoke of my excitement about the bus ride to Pamplona, as it would give me my first taste of the landscape of the Peninsula Iberica, begin to inform me visually about this huge, historically saturated collection of former kingdoms, this land fought over by Muslims and Christians for lo some seven centuries, this place where the language of my mother came into being. 'It is not so beautiful as you might imagine,' Ignacio related, sorry to pop my balloon. 'It is mostly cereal fields.' To which Teo and I got a chuckle, visions of Captain Crunch and Honeycombs planted in the chunky brown turned earth of the farm lands. 'That is correct,' Gonzalo chimed in. 'Spain is mostly farm land in the middle, in La Meseta, but that is not how it has always been. That legend has it that Spain once was covered in trees. One large forest,' he said, the entire country. 'It is said that one thousand years ago a little squirrel, you know this word, squirrel?' he continued, 'the squirrel could cross the all of Spain from one side to the other, jumping from tree branch to tree branch, without ever once having to touch the ground. Ermita de Nuestra Señora de Pena, 12th century
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment