nancyelnorte

Oct 13.  

We spent last night in Arzua about twenty five miles from Santiago. Tomorrow we will walk as far as Labacolla, about nineteen miles away.

We have two reasons for stoppping such a short distance from Santiago. 

First this is the only place we have been able to find a hotel. The camino is getting crowded. 

Second. We want to be close enough to Santiago so we can make it to the Cathedtal in time for the noon Pilgrim’s Mass.

Arzua is the town where the popular Camino Francais and the Camino del Norte converge.

  All of the walkers from both routes will walk together for last two or three days into Santiago. Instead of ten people a day we will now see hundreds.

 In addition, since it is a weekend, there are even more pilgrims .

 To qualify for a Compostela ( the official recognition of a Camino walk) one has only to walk 100km. Thus, it can be done over a long weekend.

All of this means that our quiet days of solitude are over.  

We had a foretaste of this last night in our hotel. It was like party central. 

I am dreading the rest of the walk and fear it will be like a circus. 

Funny thing about life. It never goes the way you expect it to go. 

I worry it will be like walking along a horizontal “tower of babel”.  Instead it turns out to be Pentecost on the path. 

Let me explain. 

We start out as usual in the dark but this morning there is a difference. 

 In front and behind us there are dozens of tiny lights. Like fire flies flying in formation. These are the early risers.

As the fireflies pass us,the air is filled with one language after another. They come up behind us, they chatter and they fade back into the dark.

 

Gradually morning turns these little fireflies into people.

As I begin to see these fireflies as people I begin to see their faces and to listen to their stories.

The crowds and noise I have been dreading become a beautiful tapestry of humanity and sweet music to my ears.

I think of Santiago who was sent to Spain to spread the good news of Christ.

 Here I am two thousand years later and people are streaming through the darkness to get to his shrine. 

Each person walking has heard something or felt something to end up beside me on this path.

I think back on all the reasons I have heard people give for making this huge  effort to walk to Santiago. 

Some have heard the language of the church and walk in faith. 

Others have heard the voice of adventure and walk for the thrill of it.

Still others have heard the call to step away from the day to day life and listen to what their heart is telling them. 

Still others walk to understand why they walk.  

Every one of them is hearing Santiago speak to them in his own language and in his own way. 

A family is walking together, laughing about having to eat the pilgrim meal of merluza (hake) and chips for three nights in a row. 

A parish group, walking short sections with their priest and collecting their suitcases from the bus each night,is laughing about how tired they are.

A man from northern  Italy is walking with his wife, his sister, his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law and they are all laughing.

What is it about this walk?

We sleep in rooms of twenty beds with men snoring in five of them and we laugh about it.

Our feet are covered with every blister remedy sold in every drug store in Europe. The  skin is hanging off and we show them off with pride and make jokes about them.

Our backpacks are heavy and overflowing and still we smile and brag about who carried the heaviest one. 

The common denominator on this walk is a smile.

Stephen and Ross from New Zealand are smiling .

Fran and Don from Oregon are smiling.

Jo-Ann from Toronto is smiling.

Lisa and Peter from Washington are smiling.

Chris from California is smiling.

Boy have I gotten this one wrong.  This is not some penitential procession.This is a Festival of Feet. These people are smiling. These people are happy !

Christians, Jews, believers, non-believers, We have met them all as they have  been pulled down  the path by a force they may not even be able to name.

Santiago, who died believing he had failed as a missionary, now draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to his shrine. 

Watching this motley collection of happy pilgrims, he must be smiling too.

Late in the day, we passed the River Labacolla where pilgrims traditionally washed before arriving at Santiago. We decided to wait.

We rounded the corner of the Santiago Airport which signaled our arrival into the outskirts of the city. 

We documented our arrival with a photo and if you look closely, you’ll see we too, are smiling! 

Oct 12

Today was just one of those days. 

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe it was a let down because yesterday had been such a great day.

This morning was cold and foggy.  I didn’t want to get out of bed.  I didn’t want to walk one step. 

What is the question? The answer is no!! 

Dressed and full of bread and coffee, we are off into the dark. 

One last look at the monastery 

So here was my problem.

Somewhere in the night I had fallen into a brat trap and I needed to find a way out of it. 

I tried walking fast and hard. I tried walking reallly slowly. Nothing worked. As beautiful as the sunrise was and it was beautiful, I thought.  So what. Who cares?

I worked my way through a list of possible reasons for feeling the way I did. 

Was it the company? 

No, B is just as good as ever- pure gold. 

Did I ache?

 No. I worked my way up and down my body. No blisters, knees ok, hip behaving. Even my head was on straight. 

Backpack  too heavy? 

No. We had sent our big backpacks ahead via the brilliant post office delivery service. This new innovation is the “mature walker’s” ( translate old) best friend. 

Go on line to”mimochilas@coreos.com and in at least ten languages you can arrange to have your backpack picked up and delivered from your present location to your next location. 

Either pay online or stick 5euros per bag in an envelope and attach it to your backpack. 

We figured if it didn’t arrive we’d at least save five euros a day and never have to do laundry again. 

We did this ten times and the post office was ten for ten.

My daypack contained a liter of water, my raincoat and a well stocked kitchen. ( one tangerine , two cookies, two wormy apples and four Justin’s peanut butter packets.) Total weight four pounds.

Backpacks were not the problem. 

Our day was a reasonable 17  miles, not  too many ups and downs and there even three bars for coffee and bathroom breaks along the way.

Under any other circumstances, a perfect day. 

But what did I want?

I wanted to hide in a corner and read a book. I was sick of cheese, bread and tomatoes at every meal. I was bored with looking at mushrooms. I’d eaten more Pimientos  from Padron  than was healthy. I had tried all the red and white wine I wanted to try.  I was tired of tromping around in the great outdoors. I had walked and seen enough.

I was tired of dirty clothes.  I was tired of a dirty me. I was just plain tired.

I wanted PIZZA with some good old fashioned canned mushrooms and nice slimy green peppers on top of it.

I wanted a good book, a soft chair and a corner to hide in.
If I had been running a marathon you could say I had hit the wall. 

And I had a problem . I wanted to finish this walk and I was so close. Then I remembered Mick. 

And Mick says “you can’t always get what you want” Actually he sang it. 

So I walked and sulked and enjoyed walking and sulking , and thinking about sulking and I took four pictures.

Thoughts on sulking.

Charlie’s father. ” If you are going to do it, don’t complain. If you are going to complain, don’t do it.

  Hmmmm whose idea was it to take this walk?

My line.  “Don’t whine. It doesn’t change anything and it makes you tiresome to be around. ”

Hmmmmmm. Best to walk alone with mouth shut.

Finally B’s line. “Get over it. Just do it.”

So one foot in front of the other, I grumped my way down the path.

The second line in my pal Mick’s song “you can’t always get what you want” is  “but if you try  you’ll find you usually get what you need.”

 I needed to get in down the road. So I “just did it “.  A nice pouty effort. No photo.  Use your imagination. 

We arrived in Arzua with less than twenty five miles left to Santiago. 

We ate a well balanced dinner of wine, potato chips and ensalada rusa – Spanish potato salad with tuna peas and carrots and called it a day . 

It was just one of those days and tomorrow would be a new one.  Such is life on the Camino.

Oct 12

I come from a long line of slow people. 

My great aunt who never drove, told her sister who she forced to drive her everywhere, “You know Amy, you  can’t always be the last car on the road.”

Her nephew, my father, had a truck that never went past second gear unless one of the kids was driving it. 

I have a friend who refers to me, his daughter, as Slug. You get the picture.

On the Camino B and I are famous for being the first on the path and the last to the alberge. 

But really what is the point of racing down the path. Slow has its advantages. 

 By the time we arrive, the  rush for beds is over. It’s too late to do laundry, there is no more hot water so we don’t have to take a shower and no matter what time you arrive there will always be something to eat and drink. 

Slow is the only way to go. There is so much to see and too much to miss.

Yesterday, as is typical in Galicia,  we left in the fog. We faced an  eighteen mile day on the same path we have walked every day for the past 29 days.  At our speed – a rousing 2 1/2 miles an hour- it will take us about eight hours. 

 

What could possibly entertain us  for eight hours? Plenty as you will see.

The first thing I notice is that the path is completely different. We are walking over huge soft ripples of grey stone. Imagine your are Gulliver walking over the back of a rhinoceros. Hard and lumpy like rolls of fat on an elephant .

We walk on this stone path for several hours.

Note two things. 

B, in her stylish neon jacket makes  her easier for me to find and harder for cars to hit.

Note also the nifty stone wall on the left. 

Up close every section is  different. This amazing wall, in the middle of no where, went on for miles. 

And  the stones themselves, they were covered with fuzzy black lichen. 

Before the day was over we would see other great stone walls .

The classic

The green monster

The tombstone

But I am getting ahead of myself. Back to the grey stones. 

Not only were the stones different, the vegetation surrounding us had changed. We were walking through yellow gorse, scotch broom and fading pink heather. The ferns which had been brown were now rusty red. 

 But as pretty as they were, early morning on the camino is the time for spiders and spider webs. 

Remember the snowflakes you used to catch on your mittens. Each one  was unique and they didn’t last very long. When the sun shone on them, they were gone. 

Spider webs are the snowflakes of the camino. 

It is easy to become obsessed with them and I  easily obsessed. 

They come in every shape and size. They are vertical and horizon. Some are perfect.  Beautiful right angles  and  perfect symmetry. 

Others are full of holes and mistakes- like the spider was learning to knit.

And last there are the three dimensional ones that are like cats cradle gone crazy or a fairy house built by Frank  Gehry.  

Well here’s the deal. A spider lives about twelve months. A spider as young as seventeen days old will spin a perfect symmetrical web. 

The older the spider, the worse the web. By eight months old the spider is losing his ability to make a web. His web making ability will decrease until he dies.

Spiders and their web spinning lifespan  are very useful in studies on the aging of the human brain. Not sure how that works but that’s what I read so it must be true!!!if not at least it is interesting. 

I thought back to the spider sculpture I saw at the Bilbao Guggenheim (see earlier blog) and laughed. 

In the woods the spiders make the sculptures. They have been doing it for a hundred and forty million years with no computers.

Our path shifted to the woods again. Galicia has one of the largest oak forests in Spain and we walked through several of them .

It was a nice change to have acorns bopping us on the head instead of chestnuts. First acorns are smaller and second the spiny chestnut  pod sticks to my hair! 

In addition to the oak and chestnut, there are many impressive trees and forests  on the path. 

Each tree  has a very distinctive trunk. They were very “touchable”. I wondered if I were blind would I be able to distinguish each type by rubbing the bark. Braille on the trail.  Bet the answer would be yes.

Pine

Plane tree

  Bircheucalyptus

My time  on the trail sped by as did the miles.

As we were approaching Sobrado dos Monxes we encountered two odd things.  One I can explain; the other I cannot.

Suddenly we came upon a field of about a dozen whale sized rocks. Just there, sprinkled over the land. Dropped  from the sky? Popped up from the earth?? Who knows .

I could find nothing about this so it is a mystery.  A cool mystery.

I can explain the large circular body of water we came to a few minutes later. 

Between 1500 and 1530 the monks at the local monastery made this lake.  It took thirty years of digging and damming but they needed a source of drinking water and water for their crops so they took matters into their own hands. Today it is one of the most successful and important ecosystems in Europe.

And if that doesn’t impress you I’ll leave you with some pictures of the monastery where they slept after they finished digging. They built that too, with help .

The Monastery of Santa Maria started in the 10th century as a Benedictine monastery. It was abandoned and became a Cistercian monastery in the 11th century and was abandoned again in the 17th century.  It was sold out of the church and again abandoned.

In 1954 it was re founded as a Trappist Monastery.  Today it houses a pilgrim alberge, a hotel, and welcomes tourists who come by bus  (and foot).

Just as we were leaving the monastery a large group of tourists walked out with us raving about much they had seen. 

As they filed onto their bus I thought of how much they had missed.

Oct 11

Growing up, every time I complained about something my father would say ” if every day were sunny, life would be a desert.”

For the past three days our days have begun shrouded in heavy fog. 

Not only was it foggy, it was cold. Two days in the 40’s and today even colder. There was ice on the car in our parking lot this morning. 

The first foggy day it stayed foggy all day but since we were walking in the woods it didn’t really matter. 

For the first time we needed to put on a fleece. Still my ears were freezing.

The  fog stayed with us all day. Everything  was grey and fuzzy but we were safe in the woods and it was beautiful. 

The next day was still foggy. This was more problematic as today our path crossed and recrossed a busy highway. 

Happily the Camino Norte takes good care of its walkers.  There are dedicated sidewalks along some roads and at 

particularly dangerous crossings,there are pedestrian buttons that set off flashing signs to warn to the cars and trucks flying through the fog.

One if the sad realities of every camino is that people are killed as they walk  along the highways.

To see memorials to pilgrims killed on their way to Santiago is disconcerting and we were determined not to  become another  statistic.

Cemetery in the fog!

This morning was the coldest yet. There was ice on the roof of the car in our parking lot. 

But by the third day we got it right .

We were prepared for the cold and the fog, knowing we had another long stretch in the road. 

I lead with my flashlight bicycle light and B followed in her glowing yellow jacket. maybe it was mid October but the mittens and ear warmers were put to good use. 

By the time we crossed the railroad track and entered the woods, the sun had come out. It was the perfect cold autumn day. 

 
Since this was to be our last long stretch in the woods before we reached Santiago,we wanted to savor this day. 

It could not have been more beautiful- easy walking, no cars, no people.

As I walked I reflected on the great variety of conditions we have encountered on this walk.  

Starting in Irun in mid September we were 825km (515 miles) from Santiago. 
When we saw this sign at the end of our second day we were feeling pretty good and very bad. Happy to have gotten this far, more dead than alive.

We scrambled up muddy mountains, and slid down the other side. We walked along the seashore and over the rocky cliffs. Every day was different. 

Some were short. Others felt like they would never end. 

We never could decide which was more painful. Going up or coming down   If the sign said it would take one and a half hours it would take us four. 

It rained. We sunburned our noses. Our maps blew away and it was glorious ( most of the time)  And suddenly we were more than half way there.  

In Galicia the markers record the distance to Santiago four times each kilometer.  It’s possible to get obsessed with these numbers, especially when you are tired. Then they seem to get further and further apart. 

 By the beginning of this week we had walked over four hundred miles and had climbed the equivalent of 2,222 flights of stairs. (We feel that every morning!)

So when we passed this marker yesterday afternoon we were ecstatic.  We were 66 miles  from Santiago. Coming down the homestretch.  We will get to Santiago either Sunday or Monday.

My thoughts as I walked today 

The camino is a metaphor for life. Some days are long and hard. Some days are easy. Some are  sweet and everything works.  Some are sour and nothing goes right.

But you need the hard to appreciate the easy. You can’t enjoy the sweet until you have tasted the sour. 

Another lesson learned, maybe relearned on the camino by the gift of time and solitude.

My father got it right. 

  If every day were sunny, life  would be a desert. 

Oct 8

We arrived in  Montenedo late yesterday morning. We had intentionally given ourselves a very short six mile day. 

After three brutally long and hilly stages  we had had enough. Walking had ceased to be enjoyable.  We needed a break.

 I had weeded another two pounds of weight out of my bag and was looking for a post office.  

Our clothes were beginning to smell like cheese. 

The logical decision was to take the afternoon off. B would do the laundry and I would unload the “stuff”. 

             Less stuff- smaller box- progress 

When our work was finished, we would tour the Cathedral of Saint Martin, known as the kneeling cathedral. It is tucked down in the town square, totally hidden until you are right beside it. 

 XIII frescos of the slaughter of the innocents  The ” English Madonna” taken by John Dutton from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London during the Reformation and brought to Spain where it became the altarpiece of this cathedral.

Sanctuary slippers in all the litergical colors 

My favorite pair.

XII Madonna and child 

The Holy Family

But today is Sunday and the Cathedral service schedule was not pilgrim friendly so we would do what countless other Christians do. We would worship in the country with nature. 

Mother Nature did not disappoint. She gave good church.

The temperature this mornings was in the mid 40’s but as usual the “initial ascent was long and steep”. Two hours later and fifteen hundred feet higher I was warm.

Surrounded by beauty on every side I was filled with gratitude. Thankful that I had the time to walk for seven hours with no telephone ringing. No interruptions.  No noise.  What luxury. What a gift. I looked out at  God’s world and gave thanks. 

After reaching our cruising altitude we walked on a quiet level road. Not only could I look out at the countryside, I could stop and enjoy nature up close. I could crawl around on my knees not quite praying but not far from it. Another gift of time. 

I found myself singing. First I sang All Things Bright and Beautiful. Then I tried For the Beauty of the Earth. I could only remember the first two lines so I sang them over and over and over or hummed or made up my own words. 

 Alone in the woods I could sing as badly as I did and no one complained. For that too I gave thanks. 

There was no sermon but with my old Quaker background I was very comfortable with long periods of silence.  

I had looked around. I had looked down and as I walked I looked into my heart and my soul. 

My church “service” lasted seven hours. I was the celebrant,  the choir and the congregation  and if I had been The Mystery  Worshipper , I would have given my  service all 1Os. Instead I gave thanks.