Verena and Lourdes

The morning city was vague with fog and mist, quiet and still as I walked west from the albergue, through the Portico de Camino and back towards the cathedral. Only a few cafe-bars and the occasional tienda were open. I stopped into one of the latter for some bread, and the old man behind the counter asked if I was German. I said no, los Estados Unidos and he brightened. I told him I was taking a train to Palencia, and he smiled and said "muchos barcos" (many boats), thinking I had said Valencia, and I smiled and nodded and didn´t correct him.

The few people in the cafe-bars looked as if they had been up all night, and no doubt had. The night before I had walked through the start of a neighborhood fiesta in the streets near the albergue, and while I wanted to stay out and participate, I had to return to the albergue before the door was locked for the night. Then, people were still fresh and excited, and men were playing music in raggedy groups as they marched along attended by friends drinking from bottles of beer. But in the morning fog the mood was subdued, almost glum. Three teenaged boys inside a cafe sat with their heads close together on a table, starting up sleepily when a waiter brought them cups of coffee. Outside another cafe a man slept on the sidewalk, looking surprisingly comfortable on the paving stones. Young women in rumpled party clothes passed alone along the streets. A pair of young men sat on a stoop talking and smoking cigarettes. A couple blocks away another man sat on the steps of a closed shop puking, while his four friends crowded around solicitously, the women cooing to soothe and console him.

The plazas around the cathedral were deserted, the spires of the giant church hazy in the mist. I stepped inside one more time, drawn by the giant angels holding up the ornate roof above the head of gold and silver St. James. They looked truly otherworldly, no cute cherubs but strange, uncanny beings. The bells tolled the half hour, and I left the cathedral to make my way down to the train station and my 9:00 departure.

The night before when I got back to the albergue, I had sat for a time out in the public room reading. But I soon fell into conversation with a young German woman, Verena. I had spotted her on first coming in and immediately wanted to know her story. At this point in my trip I´m less shy about just asking. She had walked from Sevilla, on the Via de la Plata, and looked tired, though she had arrived four days earlier. She had small eyes and a broad face, two lip piercings, a moon tattoo on her neck, a sun on the back of her hand. And she was traveling with a dog, who lay on the floor at our feet in a sleeping bag.

She had not started her walk with a dog, only the desire for such a companion. In Zamora she learned that dogs at the local animal shelter were "killed" (a word she apparently preferred to "put to sleep") after twenty days, and she determined to rescue one. There were various complications, but she did end up with a three-month old girl puppy, just what she had wanted. The hospitalera in Zamora where she was staying had called the dog Batussi, after an African tribe, because, Verena explained, "she is all the time running and very fast, and this tribe they are too all the time running and fast." The name had stuck.

But once she had the dog for a companion she was no longer allowed to stay in albergues along the way. At one point she had slept out for five consecutive nights, mostly in the rain, and she had no tent. "This it is hard," she said and gave a pained laugh. At the albergue in Santiago she could least sleep inside, but only in the public room, not in a bed in the dormitorio.

The dog had meant a slower pace too, as it would or could walk no more than twenty kilometers a day. "Only five before a rest," she said. After five the dog would lay down and go to sleep, and Verena would sit and wait an hour or so until it awoke and was ready to continue. "It is young," she said, "too much walking is not good for her bones." When it rained she wrapped the dog in her rain jacket, because "she need it more than me, and it doesn´t matter if I get wet." She said, "we two have to make compromises," but I laughed and said that it sounded like only one of them was sacrificing. She smiled and shrugged. She didn´t seem to mind one bit. She planned to fly Batussi home with her to Germany in a few days, and had already got the dog shots and a chip and a certificate of health. She was still looking for a carrier, but they were "much expensive." In the morning when I left they were asleep together in the sleeping bag, lying back to back.

The seven-hour train ride to Palencia was a lazy pleasure. The fog burned off and I watched the green hills of Galicia pass by, eventually flattening out and giving way to la meseta, where the green wheat has turned to gold in the last weeks.

I spent a couple hours talking with a Spanish woman, Lourdes, who lives with her husband near Negraira and was traveling to the Basque country to see relatives. She was in her mid to late fifties, talkitive and attractive. We sat in facing seats, kitty corner from each other and put our feet up. She has "only the one son," who lives in London with his girlfriend in a flat she, the mother, had bought for them. She has a flat in London too, and one on the coast in Cantabria near Santander. And she told me she owns "places" in Pamplona, and lives off the rents. "But I don´t need much," she said. "I live in teh country and there is no much expense." She had lived and worked in London for a time, and so spoke fairly good English, though she didn´t think so. "I don´t use it so much. My son, his girlfriend is English, but he say to me, no, you must not speak English to her, she must learn Spanish. But when they visit for only a few days I say, it is too short, I will speak to her in Spanish." She shrugged. "It is better."

She told me that people in Galicia eat too much meat. Her son is a vegetarian, which she seemed to think was going a little overbaord, but on the other hand he apparently could do no wrong. She did say that he and his girlfriend could be a little lazy when they came to visit. "They don´t even make the beds," she said. "My husband, he say, why you do all that for them? But it is only for a few days, and I am happy."

Near Ponferrada she pulled down a large, square bag from the overhead shelf. Besides this peice of luggage--which proved to be a soft-sided cooler--she traveled only with a purse and umbrella. The cooler was packed with food and she asked if I was hungry. I was but hesitated politely. She would have none of this.

Lourdes cut me a length of baguette, cut it open and put inside a large chunk of tortilla de patata. I took a bite and spilled a bit on my lap, and she handed me a cloth napkin. This bocadillo alone, along with the plastic cup of apple and piña juice she poured me, made a meal. But when I was finished she opened another container and handed me a large triangle of empanada with tuna. A moment later she held out a couple slices of jamon serrano. Not too much meat, just enough. When I thanked her for this largesse, she said, "it is good to eat," then shrugged and added, "it is better than nothing." Much.

I had three hours in Palencia, where it was hotter than it´s been my entire time in Spain. I walked slowly down the nearly deserted Calle Mayor, under a shaded arcade. A few people began to appear, mostly clerks come to re-open the shops after siesta.

The train to Espinosa was a local and made numerous stops. I got off with one other person and walked into the village. Near the first houses Manolo stood talking to two men. He broke off from them and we shook hands and he asked, ¿que tal?" and I said, "bien, muy bien."

Feeling good in Santiago

So often for me everything seems to fall into place at the end of a trip, and I experience a near perfect sense of well-being and satisfaction. That´s what I felt this afternoon sitting on a bench in a lovely green park in Santiago, where the city people take their paseos on wide gravel paths. Not that my trip is quite over, but the main part is done, and now I´m on to a couple bonus parts.

I left Muxia at 7:30 this morning via bus. Strange to be moving at such a speed after weeks of the more reasonable walking pace. Once in Santiago I walked from the bus station to Acuario Albergue, my last albergue. A pretty Spanish woman wearing lots of make-up took my credencial and wrote my name in her book. Incense was burning and the radio was playing Spanish pop music. The walls were brightly colored and draped with hangings, one dominated by large printed pot leaves. A hippy refuge. The woman walked me to the connected dormitorio, a dog-legged room with twenty-five or so bunkbeds, and chose an upper for me. Nearly all the beds were already taken. As I unpacked she took up a broom to sweep, singing along to a song on the radio.

After a little time on the single, unoccupied computer (again, everything was going my way), I walked into the old city, around the cathedral on already familiar streets to the tourist office. I got a map and walked down through busier and newer streets to the train station. There I found that a train left for Palencia at nine the next morning, and that I could make a connection in Palencia for Espinosa and arrive in plenty of time for dinner. After this great good luck I wandered through the city--which is maybe my favorite, right up there with Leon--and ended up on the bench at the park at the foot of a venerable eucalyptus.

I slept well last night, but at first my rest was in question. The man who had the upper bunk above me showed up only after dark, so I never saw him. I did sense, though, that he was smallish and middle-aged--and I could hear that he was Italian. As soon as he climbed up into his bed he started whispering to himself. At first this seemed maybe just a pre-bedtime conversation, maybe a companionable way to finish off the day. Nothing wrong with talking to one´s self, if one doesn´t go on too long. But it soon became apparent that his mutterings expressed not pleasantries but dissatisfaction, and not with himself: he did not like the snoring that was going on nearby. Now, this was strange to me. Muxia is at the end of the Camino for most people, meaning the communal sleep situation should be old hat. I´ve long been broken in to the snoring, which has been a feature of nearly every night. I don´t have a problem with it anymore; I can sleep through it. So for someone to be so annoyed and worked up about the night noise... I just didn´t get it. But the man did succeed in communicating a certain unpleasant tension.

After a few minutes of complaining in whispers to himself, the man began to talk louder--as if this would help? Then he loudly shushed a man snoring three bunkbeds over. To my surprise the snoring paused--but only for a moment. Then the rather high pitched sawing recommenced, each breath finished off with a short emphatic grumble. The man above me spoke out loud again, appealing to the dark in his indignation. Then he fell to angry mutterings. By this time I was getting uncomfortable. The snoring I could handle, but this man´s frustration was harder to sleep through. I thought he might get down and go over to interrupt the snorer´s sleep. Maybe things would get ugly. But he stayed in his bed and stuck with the muttering and complaining, tossing in a few more loud and useless shushes. Eventually I´m gusessing he accepted his fate, since he fell quiet and I fell asleep. And like I said, I slept well.

From the park I took my map and wandered the town, finding out all the large stone churches and convents, and walking up and down the narrowest streets. I poked into a number of souvenir shops but could find nothing worth buying for the folks back home. When traveling I am incapable of shopping; nothing ever looks remotely interesting.

In the Cafe Dakar I re-discovered that a tortilla is sometimes an omelette, not the tortilla de patata I´d expected. Still, I ate with good appetite, and drank a glass of beer.

By evening the city had become more interesting than ever. People filled the tables outside cafes, and hordes of small children ran about in the streets; a wedding spilled out of a church, and a large group of people in long black robes and pointy black hats went past carrying instruments, mostly bagpipes and drums. In the cathedral evening mass was in progress, and I went in to once more admire the giant angels holding up the golden roof over the head of St. James and over the altar below. Outside in a covered passage beside the cathedral two people played violin; nearby two men played clarinet and guitar together. In the Praza Praterias on the sotuh side of the cathedral, a man and a woman in black and yellow performed a song and dance and juggling act. They did a gymnastic number to a song from Dirty Dancing. When they were done another performer took up in the nearby Praza Quintana, entertaining the kids with funny hats and balloon animals and ring tossing....

In the Praza Obradoiro, on the front side of the cathedral, bands of peregrinos loitered, talking to each other and gazing up at the spires. Just as I had with my own group of pilgrims a week ago. All day long I saw people with backpacks around town, but they were all strange to me. Not a single familiar face. But more than once I saw these people recognize their own Camino frinds and fall on each other´s necks. Just as my own group had a week ago. All day long I was loving Santiago, but I also came to feel it was time to go.

Yesterday in Muxia I was sitting outside the tourist office waiting for it to open, when an old and heavy-set German man hobbled up and sat down beside me with a great sigh. We remained silent for a few minutes, and then he offered me a cookie from a white plastic bag. He said he had just bought them at the panaderia. I said no at first, and he said are you sure, and I said, ok, yes, I will have one. I´d seen him moving slowly along the path outside Corcubion a few days before, one of those people who seem to get along on desire more than physical strength. There in Muxia he told me that he had come all the way from Roncesvalles. I don´t know how long it took him, but I would guess some long time. When the office opened we both went in and got our credencials stamped. The old man shook the Spanish man´s hand and said now he was done. Tomorrow, he said, he would take a train east. In a couple days he planned to be back in Roncesvalles, and to start walking the Camino once again.

Dogs don´t like me

(longish bonus entry for the 28th, and for the dogs)

I haven´t been using my walking stick hardly at all the last couple weeks, but in a moment I can reach over my shoulder and pull it out of the side pocket of my pack. And why would I want to do that? To defend myself.

I have passed literally thousands of dogs in my walk across Spain. Most have ignored me, some have barked, some have strained against their chains in an effort to kill me. But until the walk from Finesterre to Muxia only two loose dogs (and most are loose) had charged me. After today´s morning walk I can add a dozen or so to that number.

The first attack came early. A large brown and white dog lay in the middle of the street outside a house; when I saw that our paths would cross I reached for my stick, merely as a precautionary measure. I thought I might slide by, but as I came close the dog rose up and began to growl in the back of its throat. I pointed the stick at it and tried to look menacing, but it rushed me anyway. I shouted "fuck off!" which is my standard request of an angry dog. It stopped for a moment, then rushed me again. I repeated my wish, this time puncuating the words by banging my stick on the pavement. The dog snarled, charged, stopped; I repeated my moves too--and after a few more dance steps backwards I was past and out of its range of concern.

Shortly after in a wood, I came around a bend in the path, on a stretch where tall ferns hemmed in the peregrino. I stopped when I saw two german shepards waiting for me a few quick leaps ahead. We looked at each other for a long moment... and then I said, "get on with you now." To my relief they complied, running up the trail before me and disappearing into the woods.

A few moments later, though, when I was stopped to have a pee, an ugly black and brown dog with death in its eyes came running silently up the path at me. I pissed all over myself as I hurriedly tried to switch hands from the little to the big stick. The dog turned around and ran back to its nearby house--to wait for me. And I had no choice, I had to pass its way. As I came alongside the farmhouse, the dog paced up and down a head-high wall, barking and growling and making ready to pounce on me. Luckily a man came out of a shed into the small adjacent garden, and he said something to dissuade the dog. The dog hesitated, clearly torn between the compulsion of obedience and the desire to rip out my neck. It seemed to be saying, "come on, man, I want him, I really want him. I need this, man, come on, come on! Let me do it, come on...."

Several times in the few moments it took me to pass I thought that its strong wish for my blood would win out, but just when the dog seemed ready to go ahead and be a bad dog the man would once again mutter some few words of remonstration, resulting in hesitation, just enough.

My day was quite tiring, not so much because of the thirty or so kilometers of walking, but because of the repeated experience of the fear response. When it looks and sounds as if a dog is going to attack, the fear starts up my spine, races up the back of my neck, and makes all my hair stand up as the terror rolls over the top of my head. This is draining and unpleasant.

The dog that interrupted my bathroom break lived in the small village of Rial. Picturesque, on a green hillside near the sea, with stone horreos half filled with corn--and way too many dogs. In Rial, and actually across all Galicia, it seems as if every house has at least three dogs, often more. There were lots of cats too, but they give one no trouble. So, I hadn´t gone another fifty feet in Rial when another dog came around a corner barking and snapping, ready for mayhem--and came to the end of its chain. All right, thank you (though my hair still did that standing up thing). But a half minute later, when I turned to walk past a small sawmill, two more loose dogs had at me. Fuck! I made a feint back and this scared off the larger of the two, but the smaller one and I dodged down the street lunging at each other, it barking, me yelling.

Maybe this is getting repetitious, but I´m not done.

I did have a respite for some time. As long as I wasn´t in villages or walking past houses I was fine. The woods were my refuge. And then I came down to Marineto.

I made a wrong turn and passed a group of farm buildings set down below the road. When I came into view of the front of the house, four dogs, graduated in size from smallish to giantish, jumped up and dashed up the hill at me barking bloody murder. Again the smallest was foremost. But I got past with a few jabs of my walking stick. I had surprised them and was nearly by when they reached the road. Imagine, then, my great sadness when after a kilometer or so I realized I had gone the wrong way and I would have to return to Marineto. The dogs were ready the second time, and it took more fencing work and more repetitions of various forms of the word "fuck" to get past them again.

The road led downhill and just five minutes later into another tiny village, Figueiroa. By this time I was dreading all built structures. The road narrowed to a ten foot wide lane between low stone buildings, and at the other end stood two dogs looking out at me. They barked with vicious intent as I came nearer their home, a home they were ready and willing to defend. I slowed, unsure.... But then a woman came out of a house and said a few words and the dogs moved aside, though they didn´t stop barking their displeasure with me. The woman said, "no problema" as I gingerly stepped past. Right. No problem.

Ten seconds later--and that´s not an exaggeration--I was set upon by a black dog in the most serious attack yet. This dog wasn´t kidding. It came in close and low, growling and snarling and baring its front teeth. I jabbed at it with my stick while taking steps backwards, but this only pissed the dog off more. In this moment I was truly terrified because it looked as if this dog was really about to take a chunk out of me with those bared teeth. Then I glanced over my shoudler and saw that there were three more dogs behind me. Shit, I thought, this is bad.

But just as I was looking for a wall against which to make my final stand, an old woman suddenly appeared, coming over a little rise from her garden below. She shouted at the dogs and they fell back. She looked at me and pointed to a turning I had missed while contending with the dog; I fled uphill out of the village, while she picked up a rock to throw at my would-be assasin.

There were a few other episodes, but you get the idea. I shivered to think what would´ve happened if I hadn´t each time been saved by the intervention (if nonchalance) of dog owners.

Later in Muxia along the waterfront I met a Spanish man named Danny. I´d seen him the day before in Finesterre, and he had made the walk to Muxia too, a couple hours behind me. We talked of the path, what we had seen along the way. At the end I said, yes, it was beautiful, but "muchos perros quieren matarme" (many dogs wanted to kill me). He laughed at my words, and then told me that he hadn´t had any trouble at all.

To Muxia, why not

A last day of walking, but a third ending--first Santiago, then Finesterre, and finally, on this day, Muxia. The route led north, inland but parallel and often in sight of the coast. Like Finesterre, Muxia is on the water and a fishing port.

Much of the way was on paths rather than roads, through pine and fern woods. Beautiful, but not in a way I expect or experience woodlands in the U.S. I wasn´t once in a forest in Spain that wasn´t apparently scheduled for eventual cutting. The woods almost always seemed more agricultural than wild. The pastoral landscape, the fields and hedges and stone walls, seemed much older, lasting.

The route was less well-marked than on previous sections, and twice I made wrong turnings. The first was fortunate, as it led me to a gorse-covered hill above the rocky coast. Back on the right way, I soon came down to a beach, where the Rio Lires empties into the ocean. The day had begun with sun, but a thin layer of clouds moved in mid-morning. I followed the river upstream, passing a large and old fish farm; the water below was boiling with some sort of fish, all with their snouts pointing up through the surface. Just beyond I crossed a footbridge into the village of Lires, one of the few villages in which I was not harrassed by dogs (see next post for details).

I saw only seven other peregrinos on this walk of thirty or so kilometers, and they were all going the opposite way, to Finesterre. Several confused looking people stopped me to discuss route finding.

Beyond Lires I came to a smaller stream, Rio Castro, and found that the water had risen up over the large stepping stones placed for crossing. I removed my shoes and waded, having to go thigh deep at the other side where the last two stones were missing. Not long after I came down a very narrow section of trail and discovered a tethered goat. Neither one of us was happy about my need to pass, but I squeezed by without incident.

I came back down to the ocean and walked the last couple kilometers on a road beside the water. To find the albergue I had to ask directions three times, moving closer after each question. I found it high up with the last of the buildings on a rocky slope above the town.

If it wasn´t for the small sign on the outside I would not have guessed I had arrived: a gray concrete block, just a few years old, but suggestive of totalitarian optimism. I slid open a metal grate and stepped into a forecourt, then pushed through a glass door and into a high, squared space: think Soviet youth group lodgings, or maybe accommodations for 70s Olympic athletes. There wasn´t a single other person in the building, and it smelled bad but not of the usual body odor and mildew. More like chlorine gone seedy, if that makes any sense.

Around a corner, past a corrugated metal staircase, I came into a wide-open, high-ceilinged public space, lit with skylights and filled with square orange chairs and smooth metal tables. Upstairs I found the dormitorio, with a dozen white bunkbeds. Just outside the room were more square chairs (blue this time) and tables, arranged in a tableaux suggesting death and abandoment, like the future as imagined in the film 2001. Motion sensitive lights flickered on as I moved through the building (and quickly flickered off as I passed into another part). A giant sliding glass door led out to laundry sinks, in the corner of a high, concrete-walled court. Think prison exercise space. Finally, up on a third floor I found an open patio, squared off, stonewalled and empty; a bit of the harbor could be seen through the spaces between dirty white apartemnt buildings.

I wandered through the albergue intrigued but also a little spooked. But then a German couple appeared to break the spell. Within a few hours the beds were nearly all full.

The town of Muxia was less appealing than Finesterre, maybe in part because it had very little attention to give to visitors. There were numeroous bar-cafes on the waterfront, and a picturesque breakwater sheltering fishing boats... but mostly it felt like a place for people who lived there.

I walked through town and out to a dramatic, be-churched point. The Sanctuario de Nosa Señora de Barca was built out among the huge shore boulders to celebrate the Virgin´s long ago visit to the spot via stone boat (she supposedly came to encourage St. James in his Iberian evangelizing). After the church, I visited the tourist office in town, where I was awarded my third certificate of accomplishment (there was one for Finesterre too). The latter two required no discussion of my religious life.

I returned to town and sat outside the Bar Wimpe in the sun at a plastic table and drank a beer. Later I returned to the south side of the point and sat in among the rocks and gorse, alternating between reading Dickens and watching the sun set towards the sea.

I go swimming

(A bonus post for the 27th, because there is always so much to say)

The albergue in Finisterre opened at five, and I secured a lower bunk by a window. A few minutes later I was headed out of town, crossing the narrow peninsula to Praia de Mar do Fora. From a hill above I admired the lovely beach, a half mile of white sand giving way on either end to black rocks and high green headlands. The clouds had all blown away to the south and the sun shone without the intermittent pauses of recent days.

Down at the nearly deserted beach I sat in the sand shirtless (a rare condition for me in Spain) and ate some bread and cheese and green olives. Then I walked down to the sea and stepped in--very very cold. But in just a moment I dove into the roiling water and swam out among the three and four foot waves. And in just a moment more I didn´t feel cold at all but nearly as happy as a person can be.

After my swim I sat on the beach for hours; the longer I stayed the longer I wanted to stay. The sound of the waves, the sun glittering on their crests, the wind and sand--all of this somehow undermined my usual impatience. I had that particular all-over good feeling that comes only after a swim in a cold sea, and more generally a satisfying sense of well-being so strong it was almost akin to an ache.

Later back in town I ate at a place by the port, Bar Miramar, where old men stood at the bar slowly drinking glasses of beer and smoking. The Miramar was suggested by the beautiful green-eyed woman who works at the albergue. "It is run by a family," she said, "very nice. The grandfather he will come over and talk to you." Actually he didn´t but the people were friendly. I had a good ensalada mixta (though I had to pick out the canned corn) and the best tortilla de patata I´ve had outside Montse´s kitchen. I sat by a window overlooking the port and the fishing boats, and Family Guy played on the television.

At the albergue when I signed in I had seen the Spanish Martinet--he was out front directing everyone within hearing to all the important sights in town. I also saw Carol, the American woman I had dinner with all the way back in Arre near Pamplona; she had been in Oliveiroa too, and you could hear her braying her bad Spanish througout that albergue. At one point she kept repeating the word "Pittsburgh" to someone over and over: "Pittsburgh!" she shouted. "PITTSburgh!" Not to be an ass or anything, but I was glad to discover that neither she nor the Spaniard had a bed near mine. A tall German woman had the bunk above me, and she eyed me with some distaste when I returned from the beach, I don´t know why.

Despite the minor setback of such company, I really liked Finesterre--the tall narrow buildings stacked up on the hillside above the water, the twisty streets, the stone pier reaching out from the town, the working boats behind the breakwater, the constant sound of crying seagulls. I lay in bed after dark and listened to the gulls, and ran over in my head the full day, and the full days of the last weeks.

Burnt toast

When I first met Salima, I thought that she was a sweet, interesting, talkitive young woman (she´s the same age as Naomi). Ten days or so later, my opinion has not changed, but I´ve learned that she is also a person who does not take any shit. This makes her a good travel companion. Though her Spanish is minimal, she does not hesitate to ask for what she wants, and, if she doesn´t get it, to ask again in a more pointed manner. This morning was a mild example--when her toast arrived at our breakfast table more black than brown, she simply sent it back and asked for a less well-done version. And why not. However, I would have just eaten it (and actually did, as my own was darkish as well). I admire forceful people, especially when they can pull off their forcefulness in a way that is reasonable rather than demanding. And Salima manages that. I told her she was indeed a lawyer, but I have a feeling her demeanor predates law school.

Yesterday when we arrived in Finesterre we had decided to get hotel rooms rather than wait for the albergue to open at five. In this Salima took the lead and the rest of us let her. The first couple places were full, but the third, Casa Velay, had one room, a double. Salima tried talking the proprietor into letting us four share the room but he refused. Instead he walked us five minutes along the waterfront to a house and took us inside. It wasn´t a hotel or pension, simply someone´s house with two available rooms upstairs. The problem was that it smelled like shit. Literally. For me this was an immediate deterrent, and it didn´t help that one of the rooms had only one big bed ("matrimonio," they call it here). The man who lived in the house, and who had proceeded us upstairs, might have been the source of the smell but I couldn´t tell. His neck was sort of collapsed, emphasizing his unshaven and massive jaw in a disturbing way, and he could only aspirate his words, which were utterly incomprehensible to me. Noting the pained looks on Salima and Mandy´s faces, I said (in broken Spanish) something like, ok, we´re going back downstairs and we´ll talk about it--just wanting to get back out in the street and have a big clean breath of air.

Once outside we simply said no thanks, and then returned to the Casa Velay. Salima and Mandy took the one room, though with some reluctance, and Eddy and I set off together to find other lodgings. Which we soon did at the Hotel Finesterre--two single rooms, twenty-five euros each. We climbed to the third floor and found the rooms passable, and you could see the harbor out the window if you craned your neck to the right and ignored the construction site just below. Eddy said, "is better than Darth Vader," which was inappropriate I suppose but it made me laugh.

After walking to the point we ate dinner, an excellent menu del dia--first ensalada con arroz, then a big platter of cooked potatoes and two types of fish, all soaking in a delicious orangey sauce. Salima thought the dessert tart one of the best pastries she´d eaten in Spain.

After eating we reprised the previous night´s discussion by addressing a number of further refelctive questions. I had one this time: would you walk the Camino again? The others all said yes, but I would´ve said no until recently (simply because I´ve done it, not because I haven´t liked it), but now I´m thinkng yes. I imagine that each time it would be a much different experience, depending on the people you met, but also on the albergues, the weather, the time of year....

Other questions ranged from the less interesting (to me) "do you have the sense that you´ve done the Camino in a previous life?" to the fascinating "what is a pilgrim and are you still one after you´ve finished the Camino?" Answers varied considerably to this question. I said yes, I was always a pilgrim, because I was always seeking--not so much something like St. James or Jesus or God or the city of Santiago, but simply experience and knowledge. Mandy also spoke of seeking as a constant in her life; Eddy said maybe he wasn´t so much a pilgrim, and that he had more questions at the end than he´d had at the start; Salima said she didn´t think of herself as a pilgrim, that she was trying not to seek but instead to live more in the present, to be happy now rather than always deferring happiness to a time of future accomplishment. Have I said how much I liked these people´s company?

We also spoke in a nostalgic manner of what we had done in recent weeks and would do no longer, all the Camino experience. It´s been something that has encouraged analysis and discussion, more so towards the end, and those are two activities that I sort of enjoy.

Today we ate breakfast together, then wandered around the waterfront. Finally the time came for parting. We shook hands and hugged, and Mandy and Salima and I kissed cheeks, and then they all got on the bus to Santiago (with reluctance--none of us has used such transportation in some time) and drove away.

So now I am again solo, after what seems a long time in company. There are a few people around town that I know. I ran into Susanne, the Hungarian woman, and I might join her on a walk to the end to burn stuff later. Still an acquaintance is different than a companion. I had only known Mandy two weeks, but it seemed much longer, and I´ll miss her.

It turns out that I am not quite done walking. One can walk one more day north along the coast to the town of Muxia. So tomorrow another day afoot. On my own this time, but that´s how I started and so it´s appropriate and even satisfying to finish that way.

Land´s end

Mandy and I set off together from Oliveiroa and climbed up between stony hills topped with big new windmills. We passed scrubby patches of eucalyptus, but most of the trees had been cut or burned off in the not too far past. Stone walls ran up and down and across the slopes, I don´t know why. Later Eddy suggested that they might be firebreaks, but if that was the case they hadn´t been working well.

In the mornings Mandy likes to stop at the first available bar for coffee, and so after five kilometers we got in out of a light rain at a white two-story building all by itself on a ridge top beside a lonely road. A handwritten sign outside warned that the next opportunity for food and drink was fifteen kilometers distant. Mandy ordered her coffee and "tostadas" (toast), while I asked for a queso y tomate bocadillo (cheese and tomato on baguette). I thought 3.25 euros was a little pricey, but the woman behind the bar had cornered the local market.

An older peregrino, a man in his ffties, was already sitting at the bar when we arrived. He introduced himself as Johnny Walker, and then he pointed to his companion, just coming out of the bathroom with a lit cigarette in his hand, and said, "and hees name Jack Daniels." At these words, the second man let out a loud "huey!" in agreement and celebration. The first man was Dutch, and he had walked all the way from Holland, starting off on April 8th. He told us that he had walked the Camino two years ago, and all across Spain "everyday sunny and thirty-five degrees!" (ninety?) He was disappointed with all the rain--and it has rained a lot, twenty of my twenty-nine days on the Camino. But only twice did it rain all day, and several times the rain came after I had finished walking. If it had been ninety everyday the walk would have been much more difficult.

Salima and Eddy appeared as I was finishing eating. Mandy decided to have another coffee, but I went ahead alone. The fifteen kilometers to the next town led over and between mostly naked hills, along ridge tops...until suddenly the ocean came into view. A beautiful sight, the rugged coastline to the south, the sea stretching far far to the east. I descended steeply into the large town of Cee, on a narrow bay. There I found a small grocery store--my first in several days. Buying bananas was a huge pleasure. It had been more than two days since my last platano. I bought oranges and carrots too, bread and chocolate (I´ve become fond of the latter during my time on the Camino; everyone is always sharing chunks of the big bars, and this long ago convinced me to buy--and share--my own).

After I re-supplied I went down to the waterfront and sat on a bench and ate a banana, then the rest of my bocadillo, and breathed in the salt air. Before long Mandy, Salima, and Eddy arrived. Rather than go back into the town, we continued around the bay to the adjacent town of Corcubion. But when the path led steeply uphill towards a ridge, threatening to leave town before we came upon another tienda, I asked a man for directions to a grocery store, and he sent us back down another steep road. Right near the supermercado we came upon a film crew shooting a scene from a movie. A little unexpected.

The scene was short--a half dozen people dressed in the 1930s garb (headscarves and berets) simply walking along--a man carrying a pail of fish, a woman with a basket of eggs, another woman with milk, and, oh, a man on a bike. I watched them shoot the scene repeatedly, while the others shopped in the store. I asked one of the film crew, a young man with shoulder-length hair and sideburns and clearly not local, the name of the film. I think he said "Marina Negra."

From Corcubion I went on alone again. I passed over one more ridge and after four or so kilometers came down to Praia Langosteira, a long, white sand beach wrapping around to the town of Finesterre. A breakwater stretched ufrom the town, sheltering a number of fishing boats. Beyond was the last point of land, finished off with a lighthouse.

But first I went down to the water and had a wade. In that moment, more so than in Santiago, I thought my journey had been completed. I had come from the Pyrennees, through Navarre and Rioja, across la meseta, through hilly Galicia, and finally arrived at the Atlantic. At the start I had thought of the sea as my destination, but there was so much excitement just before and in Santiago among my fellow pilgrims that I had gotten caught up in that destination--and happily so. But the last three days (or the last two, anyway) had been among the best of the trip, the most beautiful, the most fulfilling. Finesterre was necssary.

Later, in the evening after we were settled in the town, we walked the last three kilometers out to the end of the narrow peninusla. There on a bush and boulder covered slope below the lighthouse, overlooking the sea, the peregrinos come to burn things. It´s tradition to sacrifice something important, or maybe just something you´ve used up. Eddy burned a shirt, but I forgot the pair of socks I intended to immolate (the ones I ought in Burgos). We all took lots of pictures of each other, then separated to our own rocks and thoughts. Later we walked back to town, backtracking after moving forward for nine hundred kilometers.

Some penultimate questions

I left the albergue in the dark before the others and walked most of the day alone. The first stretch led uphill through dark forests on narrow paths, the sort of hiking that the Camino offers only occasionally. Eventually I did indeed come out on a country road, and for much of the day walked along such roads through rolling farmland.

The sun came and went, as did short bouts of rain. Warmth then a chill, the weather changing every few minutes.

In every village, and outside every house, stood a horreo, often more than one. These are granaries, long, narrow structures placed up on stilts and roofed with red tile, built of stone in this part of Galicia, but wood and brick further east. The farmers store potatoes and corn in them, supposedly, but most horreos appear empty; it seems that they are more decorative than practical these days.

I felt strong on the second day out of Santiago and walked the thirty-five kilometers to Olveiroa with much greater ease than the shorter distance the day before. The albergue wasn´t yet open, but a small Spanish man was sitting on the steps outside. I had seen him the night before in Negreira; he was declaiming loudly in the albergue that the United States was "the number five worse country in the world." I can handle criticism, but a martinet not so much. Salima was a little frightened of him, having seen him in other albergues and decided he wasn´t completely stable. She also said he reminded her of the oompah-loompah in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I arrived in Olveiroa he explained to me the eating situation--two restaurants, one expensive and so to be avoided, one more reasonable--and the sleeping situation at the albergue, concluding with a pat facial expression that said, "and now you know all that you need to know."

The albergue did not open for a couple hours, but I went around back and washed my socks and shirt in an outdoor sink. Then sat in the sun and ate a bocadillo I´d brought from Negreira, while reading from Dombey and Son. By the time the woman in charge showed up and unlocked the door, twenty or so peregrinos had arrived and were loitering about outside. We all rushed in; after Mandy and Salima and Eddy and I got two bunks together, I headed for the showers, and then shared a sink with an accommodating Frenchman to shave.

When we were selecting bunks I took a lower, Salima the bed above. I felt bad for a moment because I knew that Eddy would´ve taken the bed I´d chosen if given a chance. He is devoted to Salima. Not in a creepy way, but he is attentive. He´s 48 from Heidleberg, a thin friendly man with a wife and two teenaged kids. Last night he called home, for his daughter´s birthday, and afterwards told us that his wife had asked how his "girlfriend" was, referring to Salima. So it sounds like he´s keeping his spouse informed.

At dinner (at the expensive restaurant the Spaniard had criticized), Salima said, "so I´ll be Rachael," and she asked us a series of questions about our Camino experience, and we went around the table one by one answering. The questions included "did you have questions that were answered?"; "what was the most under-utilized item you brought along?" (for me it was the history guide to the Camino, an answer Salima rightfully deemed "boring"); "what will you miss from the Camino?"; and "how do you feel about coming to the last day?" We sat for a couple hours intently discussing these and other concluding questions.

As far as how I felt about coming to the end, I would say mixed. I look forward to returning home (though that´s not for another two weeks), but I like being on the Camino, I like the simplicity and pleasure of this life. I walk. I walk from albergue to albergue. I wash, I eat, I rest, I talk to other pergrinos. Then I sleep and get up and walk again. Such days are satisfying, interesting, uncomplicated. But of course not enough, not indefinitely anyway. Way back in Rabanal I met a man who had been on the Camino more or less permanently for fifteen years. That sounded and sounds like a personal problem. Arrival will be good, but it will also be a bit of a jar, I imagine. When I do stop and return home, I think I´m going to have to keep walking pretty regularly. I also am thinking of adopting the primero, segundo, dessert, wine and bread way of eating. What will I miss? Among other things, the menu pergrino each night.

On to Negreira

In the morning about nine I walked through nearly empty Sunday streets, down to the Cathedral once again, which was open. Inside I descended a narrow passage to St. James´ crypt, where a silver treasure chest held his remains. All the walking and seeking, all the churches built to honor him, the rise of the city of Santiago itself, a whole bunch of European history--all because a man´s bones supposedly traveled by sea (in a scallop shell?) from the Levant to a lonely spot on the far Iberian peninsula, and were brought to a starry field, where they lay undiscovered for eight centuries.... Then 1200 hundred years ago what was lost was found, and people from all over Europe began to wend their way to Santiago.

Outside I sat on a stone bench built into a wall of the cathedral and waited for my travel companions. Mandy and Salima and a German man named Eddy and I had decided to go on to Finisterre together. Earlier I had said goodbye to Rachael, with reluctance, and she went off to the bus station to start her journey back to Brighton.

At ten we set off around the cathedral. In the vast plaza in front, four drunk men stumbled over the cobblestones, one carrying a large cardboard box of wine on his shoulder. Clearly they had been up all night. Their shirts and pants were covered with purple wine stains, and their faces suggested not a pleasant debauch but a disturbing depravity. And so I started off from Santiago for the sea.

The morning sky had begun clear but soon clouded over. Dreary and humid. I felt out of sorts, I´m not sure why. Maybe Santiago had been the goal, and further walking was anti-climactic. After a couple hours Salima asked us to rate our snse of well-eing on a one to five scale. None of us was too chipper, but I gave a hopeful four.

The country we were walking through was certainly worthy of better feeling. Rolling hills, patches of eucalyptus forest, ferns covering the forest floor, ivy-wrapped oaks scattered along the path. There were farms all along the way too, busy with small groups of animals, cows and sheep and chickens and horses. Every house had a dog or two, and cats lurked through the streets of the small villages. In Porte Maceira we crossed a lovely river on a long 15th-century stone bridge. In a field nearby four kids were playing around a trash fire, chasing each other with smoking sticks and burning magazines.

We only walked twenty-two kilometers, but it semed much farther. I was tired, maybe becase of the humidity, maybe because of a slower pace. We reached Negreira, a good-sized town, about three in the afernoon. All the beds a the small albergue were taken. But we were offered blue mats, which later we could lay on the floor in the public room by the soda machine. Not ideal, but a place to sleep. The woman in charge was quite helpful and friendly--and would become more so later on, after we returned from town (where we visited an internet cafe and ate at a bar--nothing else was open on a Sunday). When we got back one of the mats had been filched, and there wasn´t enough room to put the others down until all the bucketheads with beds upstairs went to them. But they seemed intent on lingering downstairs, cluttering up our would-be bedroom. I sat in a corner with Dickens and sulked.

But then the hospitalera gestured to myself and my companions and led us to the "handicap room." Apparently no people needing such facilities had shown up. She opened the door and there were two bunkbeds, with a private bathroom through another door. We had ended up with the best accomodations in the albergue. I´ve been with a lot of people (ok, women) who like to say things like, "you just have to trust," and "you always get what you need," etc. I pretty much consider such sentiments ridiculous, but when they were invoked in this situation, I did not argue. I had a lower bunk by a window, and it was cool enough to sleep inside my down bag, and what else could a person ask for.

Santiago

Today I arrived in Santiago de Compostela.

I left at six and walked through a dark eucalyptus forest with my headlamp on. I climbed over two big hills and started to drop down into the city of Santiago. The closer I got the more people I saw on the path, all streaming towards the Cathedral and the end of their journies.

I came upon a German man carving a heart in the soft path with his walking stick. People often leave messages for those who are behind--writing in the dirt, arranging stones to spell out a message, writing on a piece of bark, using nail polish on a rock, or sometimes simply pinning down a piece of paper with rocks or sticks. There´s actually also a lot cellphone texting and calling, but that seems less interesting.

The suburbs of Santiago were not promising, but eventually I passed through the Portico de Camino and into the Old City, which was much more handsome. Narrow streets, rain-stained stone buildings, many churches and plazas, and finally the massive cathedral itself. Inside I wanted to put my hand on the marble column, the Tree of Jesse, where millions of pilgrims have worn down the stone, but it was fenced off for some reason. Too many pilgrims, I suppose. Behind the massive altar ("held up" by huge and almost Asian-looking angels) one ducks through a small passage and up several steps to the back of the head of St. James--a golden idol looking out over the congregation. Traditionally people hug him around his shoulders and kiss the back of his neck. I settled for a touch of the silver scallop shell (symbol of the Camino) protruding from his back.

In the cathedral I came upon Mandy, and we went to the nearby Pilgrim´s Office to get our compostelas--a certificate of Camino completion. A long line wound up a stairway into a small room. I recognized most of the people on the stairs; everyone was excited and hugging, and some were crying. At the counter I had to fill in my name and age and nationality on a sheet of paper, then choose one of three reasons for walking the Camino: "religiosas," "religiosas y otras," or "no religiosas." I put an x in the last column. The young woman quizzed me on this choice, as if I might have made a mistake. I repeated "no religiosas," and so she got out an alternative certifcate--one plainer, in Spanish rather than Latin. A sort of half-hearted congratulations. Yes, I had done it--or so my credencial said--but I had not done it for a reason that the Oficina de Pergrinos considered worthy of full approbation.

At noon I attended he Pilgrim´s Mass in the cathedral. Afterwards I sat with my people out on the steps in the sun--no rain for the first day in a week--and we basked in the glory of arrival. Eight hundred kilometers from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela. Twenty-seven days walking, twenty-seven different beds, hundreds of villages and cities, many different people from all over the world....

In the evening a large group of peregrinos from my cadre met in the vast plaza before the Cathedral, and we all sat in a circle and showed our bare feet. No one was unmarked. Later we went out to dinner together, and afterwards I had to say good-bye to many of the people, including Ben and Yasko and Bart (whom I had come to have a grudging affection for). At the end Bart asked if he could say a blessing, and then he did, the first time he had invoked God in all the evenings I spent in his company.

Salima had arrived too in the morning, and she and Mandy and Rachael and I went to a hotel (one star) rather than an albergue. Tomorrow Rachael leaves for England, but along with the other two women I´ll be setting off for Finisterre and the sea.

Bad albergue

The albergue in Melide last night was the worst albergue of the walk. The municipal albergues in Galicia are all pretty bad (private are much better, but there are fewer of those), but Melide wins for the dirtiest and most unpleasant. Peeling walls, black mold around the windows, filthy floors, strange and terrifying odors, sheets and pillows one hesitates to touch.... When we (Mandy, Rachael, and I) first arrived the woman at the front desk put down her knitting nad stamped our credencials. Once we were upstairs and saw the conditions, Rachael said, "why doesn´t the fat cow get off her ass and do some cleaning." The price was "donativo," which we all refused to do, which of course doesn´t help. Later Rachael packed up her gear and went up the street and got a room at a small and appealing hotel.

But first we had a picnic up on the third floor of the albergue, using a small table we set at the end of the long room, beneath two big windows. We pulled pillows off as yet unclaimed beds and sat on the floor. Outside the weather was cloudy, raining on and off, and a bit coolish. We had shopped earlier, and now set out bread and sheep´s cheese and blue cheese and beets and bananas and chocolate. Such food always improves one´s mood, which had been seriously damaged by our temporary living space and the blustery weather.

Later we walked down into the largish city and found an internet cafe. In a back room young teenagers sat playing with a puppy and smoking cigarette after cigarette. Young boys with mullets and rat tails (surprisngly popular with the youth here) greeted young girls in tight jeans by kissing them on both cheeks. Then they all lit up together.

Later I went out to dinner with Rachael and Mandy and Bart, who had appeared at the albergue not long after we arrived. We stopped first at Pulperia Ezequial to try the octopus, which is a regional specialty. A man behind a small counter pulled a pink octopus from a boiling vat of oil (water?), and then sliced the long tentacles into wafers using a pair of scissors. He poured olive oil and sprinkled spices on top of the pile then handed the wooden plate over to us. This version of pulpo was considerably better than what I´d had at the Christening feast. Less bouncy, more flavor. After our pulpo, we walked across the busy street for pizza, which should´ve been better. It had sounded good.

Today in Spain was old people scything day. Again and again I came upon old men and woman wielding ancient black scythes on patches of overgrown grass--sometimes in small drainage ditches, sometimes in the corner of a large field. They piled the cuttings in great heaps on various types of aged wheelbarrows. Rachael said "Buenas dias" to one old and toothless scything man, and he paused from his work to correct her: it was too late in the day--he had already eaten his midday meal, he said--for one to use "dias." "Buenas tardes," he told her, would be the correct phrase. But then as we were walking off he said, "buen dia," and Rachael said to me, "so what´s up with that?"

I walked with Rachael much of the day; her ankles were swollen and painful and we moved slowly. In the village of Santa Irena I did surge ahead, walking the last three kilometers into Arca de Pino alone (for a total of thirty for the day). I got a bed in big room at the bottom of the large albergue--which smelled of feet, but wasn´t as bad as Melide--then had a shower and shave and washed my socks. By this time I expected Rachael to show up. I asked a few people I knew who came in after me if they had seen her, but no one had. A little worried, I ended up walking back to Santa Irena, to see if she had decided to stay in the albergue there. But no. Back in Arca, Mandy and I checked the few pensions. Finally we gave up and went to dinner (spaghetti, some sort of Galician beef specialty with potatoes, and natillas for dessert: quite good). Afterwards I checked email and there was a message from Rachael. She had missed the turn to the town and gone on; by the time she had discovered her mistake she´d had no desire to turn back, and so carried on a full ten kilometers more before stopping. She´d taken ibprofun just before we parted, and apparently this palliative carried her through.

Communication among the peregrinos spread over the Camino takes various forms (or lack of communication)--but more on that tomorrow....

Rachael and the priest

So yesterday evening, after Rachael and Mandy and I had settled into our own private albergue, Bart the Jesuit came over to visit us. He wanted Mandy to walk on his back. Apparently he´d be making the same request for days, and Mandy had repeatedly demurred, as she did once again. But Rachael said she´d have a go. He lay down on the floor between two bunkbeds and she stepped aboard. For the next five minutes or so she expertly worked her feet over his back, while he groaned loudly and apparently with pleasure. Turns out she has trained as a massage therapist. After Bart left she said, "I just wanted to shut him up."

At lunch she had asked him if he missed having sex. He said, "my brother only has sex twice a month, so I figure I´m not missing much." But as Rachael pointed out later, "he talks an awful lot about sex for a priest."

At dinner last night he told us that during the first weeks on the Camino he had repeatedly dreamed of ex-girlfriends. Rachael said, "were they sexual dreams?" He said no, but then said, "Well, one was." Rachael asked him to elaborate but he became shy. Then Rachael said that she had only ever had three sex dreams: one involving Steve Martin, one with Patrick Swayze, and one with Starsky and Hutch. The latter she described to Mandy and I later back in our room; it involved a tent in the desert and Bedouin outfits.

At dinner Mandy turned the conversation from sex dreams to occult topics: palm reading, fortune telling, and astrology. She and Rachael entered into an animated discussion, while Bart became visibly bored. He ordered a hierbas liquer. Earlier he´d told us he´d had two whiskeys on arriving at the albergue. The life of a Jesuit priest seems pretty sweet. Full ride for doctoral work in Madrid, a month on the Camino (with ample funds for alcoholic beverages)--and he had studied for his undergrad degree in London. Of course there´s service of some sort too, at least later. Also, he told Mandy that the Jesuits take a vow of poverty. I´m not quite sure what that means these days.

This morning I set off at six gain, in the company of Rachael and Mandy. We walked about thirty kilometers, through off and on rain, through more rolling farmland, green and lush and occasionally forested. A mole ran out in front of and almost under the feet of Rachael and she screamed. We ended up in the largish town of Melide, which is not particularly attractive; the albergue is awful, the worst I´ve stayed in: dirty and run-down and unpleasant. A come-down after recent nights.

I´m only fifty kilometers from Santiago, so I´ll arrive at the end of the pilgrimage in just two more days. After a day of rest I plan to walk on another three days to the sea.

It rains in Galicia, but not all the time

After walking for all these days, I have become easy to please. Yesterday it was a great pleasure to simply be out of the rain.

I stopped early, in Sarria. I should say "we," since my decision making had become a group matter. Ben and Rachael and Mandy and I agreed that it would be good to stay at the O Durmiento albergue (privado, which in this case means fancy), and to stay together. Once up in our two bunkbed room, we all took off our wet gear, and Rachael and Mandy were content to crawl in their sleeping bags to warm up. I took a hot shower, which worked the same magic. Then I sat on the floor in the room and we talked and napped and read through much of the afternoon. To be dry and warm, to have a bed, and to have companionship--that was pretty good.

Later I went out into the city to walk around, to see the sights, to find a ciber cafe, to visit a grocery store. I came across Rachael, and we soon met up with Mandy for dinner, in a small stone restaurant. When Rachael said to the waitress "vegetariano?" (referring to her food wishes) the woman simply shook her head. Usually there´s at least some attempt to negotiate a solution. Rachael settled for fish. I had chicken with the inevitable french fries. Pretty good, not fabulous. The red wine was served at room temperature--an oddity, since it´s almost always brought to the table in a chilled bottle.

This morning I left Sarria at six with Rachael, and we walked through the dark city to the top of a hill where a stone church was illuminated by floodlights. The morning walk was one of the prettiest yet. The path ran along stone walls, beneath long, shady lines of big oak trees, through a hilly pastoral landscape. We passed numerous dairy cows, herds of sheep and goats, flocks of chickens. The narrow streets of the tiny villages were dotted with cow shit, but this did not detract (much) from their charm.

Mandy caught up with us and we stopped at a cafe in one of the villages so they could have coffee. By the end of the morning we reached Portomarin, a town above only the second lake on the Camino. We crossed a long bridge in the first significant rain of the day and climbed a long flight of stone steps and passed under an arch into the town. Ben had slept in at Sarria and would only be going as far as Portomarin (I expect, though, to see him again in Santiago). We only stopped for lunch--poor bocadillos quesos at a cafe on an arcade across from a large church.
We ran into Bart the Jesuit priest and he joined us for lunch.

The afternoon was long and less picturesque. Much of the path lay along paved roads. But the rain had ceased. The weather has been quite unpredictable in recent days, a mix of rain and sun and clouds, quickly changing from one to the other.

We three ended up walking 36 kilometers for the day, finishing up in a very small village, Ventas de Naron, where there were two albergues. We found that Bart had already arrived at the one we chose; but there were two separate buildings, an old and a new one. Bart was in the old one, but the woman at the attached bar offered us the new one--a yellow, parquet-floored room with six fresh bunkbeds. We ended up the only ones in the room, which was nice--and rare. Albergues are generally noisy affairs, but for two nights in a row this was not the case.

It occurred to me as I walked along today that I´ve had a number of different Caminos over the last weeks. The experience keeps changing. The last couple days I´ve been with the same people, not only at night but during the day, walking. This took a little getting used to, and I even contemplated surging foward on my own. But really I wanted to stay, and so I have.

Not so solo

Last night I stayed at a massive convent in the town of Samos, down in a green valley alongside a small river. Around the high stone walls loitered horned cattle and herds of ducks; vegetable gardens stretched along two sides. I had meant to stay in the previous town, Triacastela, but there I met Rachel (with whom I had dinner in Villafranca del Bierzo) again, and she convinced me to walk on another eleven kilometers. She was sitting at a table outside a bar/cafe and said she had thought I might come along, and so she had waited (this though I hadn´t seen her for a day and a half). I sat down and she gave me half her cheese bocadillo and invited me to come see her in England after I finished the Camino. She laughed and I smiled and didn´t know what to say.

We picked up Ben and Mandy in the town too, and the four of us walked to Samos together. This was one of the most pleasant and picturesque stretches yet, along a small stream, in under large trees, along the bottom of a small and lush and green green valley. There was no one else about.

I had started the day climbing steeply out of La Faba, in a light rain, towards the high point of O´Cebeiro, an ancient, stony village draped with fog. From there I dropped a long way down into Triacastela; by that time the sun had come out and dried me off. Also by that time I had walked twenty-six kilometers, so the extra stretch to Samos made this my longest day in some time.

At the convent, peregrinos shared a long room filled with about fifty bunkbeds. The curved ceiling was painted with flowers and medieval peasants scything wheat. There were no pillows, and an old German man had the bunk below me--an ominous sign.

I soon went off for a walk in the small town, and at a tienda I bought bananas, bread, and one of the best ice cream bars I´ve ever eaten. At an adjacent libreria (newstand/bookstore) I waited an hour while the man at the single computer played video games. My cyber needs are no more important than anyone else´s, I suppose, but this was annoying.

Later I had dinner with my travel companions at a restaurant across from the convent. Salad and chuletas yet again for me (I did actually get chicken in La Faba the night before), and an excellent tart helado for dessert. I learned that Ben goes on ten-day silence retreats (which is not the right word) at Buddhist temples several times a year.

Back at the albergue, the bedtime preparations were especially noisy. There are more Spanish on the Camino now, as it gets later in summer and I get closer to Santiago. And the Spanish see no reason for lowering their voices. They talk loudly to each other form bed to bed, and across the gaps, and the Germans, trying to sleep, shush them.

Today I left the albergue at seven rather than six. My Camino social life is changing my walking habits. Which is good, I´m glad to be with people, but there´s something lost too. I paid less attention to the land today, more to the conversation.

It was raining when we left Samos, and it rained all day, at times quite hard, harder than any previous day. My feet were soon squishy, and eventually the rain got through my suppsoedly waterproof gear. And it was cold. By noon we had reached Sarria, only fifteen kilometers from Samos; Ben decided to stop, and I wanted to as well, but had decided to go on with Mandy and Rachel, who both had deadlines that required them to do more walking. I peeled off to find an ATM (Sarria is large), and when I met back up with them at the albergue Ben had chosen, Mandy and Rachel had decided to stay too. Excellent. I was chilled and soaked right through.

It´s afternoon now and the sun has finally appeared, but I´m glad to have stayed in Sarria. As much as walking, I´ve come to appreciate the afternoons of showers and reading and talking and writing and ambling about town.... Speaking of which, I have some of the latter to do right now. And then of course there´s dinner.

Five more days to Santiago, after that three or four more to the sea. But things change so much in just a couple days. I don´t really know what´s ahead, except for more walking.

Girls, girls, girls (actually, women, women, women)

So, suddenly in the last few days I´m meeting all these women traveling alone. This did not happen earlier on the Camino. Yesterday I mentioned but didn´t name a young British woman I met. We had been walking along together in the rain for awhile, when I decided to stop and put on my rain gear. I was content to let her go on, but then I learned that her name was Naomi. When I stopped she asked if I wanted her to wait, and I said, yes, actually, yes, I did.

She was a tall, slightly gangly woman, twenty-five, tan, with a toothy and compelling smile, glasses, and brown hair carefully pinned up; she had started walking in France, a month and 900 kilometers back. She told me that the past year had been "difficult." I learned that she had been a PhD student at Cambridge, in medical engineering, but was no longer in the program since her stroke--the source of difficulty. She had been bedridden for six months, unable to read or listen to books or watch tv, as her brain could not manage such tasks. Luckily her friends had visited her everyday, which she said had been "lovely." She still was mostly unable to read, and was not allowed to return to her studies, now or probably ever. But apparently she was well enough to cross France and Spain on foot. We walked together through most of the morning, talking as we climbed further up into the mountains. We came to La Faba at noon, in a downpour; she decided to go on, while I stopped for the albergue run by the German couple. Lately it seems I am often losing people I do not want to see go. When I´d heard her name I´d immediately felt a connection, and talking to her that sense had become stronger.

In the albergue I almost immediately took up with yet another interesting and attractive woman. After my shower, I was sitting in the public room writing when Samila, a Canadian woman I´d met briefly the night before, appeared. We launched into a conversation that lasted much of the afternoon and evening. Like nearly everyone, Samila had her own fascinating story. Her father is Indian (from Africa), her mother Australian. She had grown up in Australia but immigrated to Canada at sevnteen, because her father believed that she and her two sisters would have a better chance of marrying in their faith in Vancouver. They practiced Ismili (which is no doubt misspelled), an offshoot of Islam (?). None of the three sisters had, as it turns out, followed the father´s plan (and he himself had taken up Eastern spiritualities and vegetarianism). Samila had gone to University, then law school in Calgary, then she´d worked for the last two years at a law firm in the same city. But she had quit and come on the Camino, in part to figure out her next move.

She was a small, slender woman who liked to talk, leaving no detail or digression untold. This worked somehow. We decided to have dinner together in the small vilage´s only resturant, but first we took a short walk. At the top of the village an ancient woman in a headscarf stopped us. She asked where we were from, and then told us that a family had long ago left the village for Connecticut to make money, and now their nietos (grandchilden) sometimes returned to visit the family left behind. She pointed out their house. We learned that she had always lived in the village, that her husband had been a farmer but he was dead. She spoke of the people passing through on the Camino, from all over the world. She said that the Celts had once lived in these mountains, and that the Romans had passed through; she talked about the Spansih Civil War, about all the death and blood. Two of her brothers had fought for Franco. She shook her head and said, "la vida es un gran misteriosa... un gran misteriosa." Before we left she gave us walnuts, showing us how to crack them by squeezing two together in her palm.

After dinner Salima and I went to the small church by the albergue, where a literary event of sorts was taking place. The German woman at the albergue, Anita, had asked everyone on arrival if they would be willing to sing a song or read a poem later at a gathering in the church. I´´d agreed and she wrote down my name. We entered the church a few minutes late, and pair of Frenchman were singing a song. Then one of them read a poem, then a Spanish woman read a prayer. Anita called my name and I went to the front of the congregation. First she asked me to tell something about myself and why I was walking the Camino; she translated my answers into German. Then I recited Bruce´s "Reason to Believe. I should have gone ahead and just sung, but I didn´t. When I had finished Anita stood up and with watery eyes said, "that was so moving." Then she kissed me on both cheeks. George, her husband, stood and did my cheeks too. Then Anita gave me a prayer handwritten in Engish and asked me to read it which I did.

Salima got up and recited a Rumi poem, "The Guesthouse." Her cheeks were bussed too.

At the end Anita asked us all to come to the front, and we stood in a circle around the altar holding hands and people recited the Lord´s Prayer in their own language. Finally Anita had us raise our clasped hands over our heads and then she said "buen Camino!"

We unclasped hands and Anita said we could stay in the church and sit quietly if we liked. She put on a cd of appropriate music. I did sit for a time, and watched George and Anita from behind, sitting close together with their shoulders touching, and I thought about how they take care of pergrinos day after day high up in the mountains in the tiny village, and how each night they get the pilgrims to sing and pray together in the little church.

Lesbians are cool

Yesterday, walking through the suburbs of Ponferrada, I came upon Yasko, the Japanese woman I met over a week ago in Terradillos. We´ve been regularly crossing each other´s paths ever since, often staying at the same albergue (there are a number of people I keep seeing). She was sitting on a wall resting, and she said, "can I ask a question?" She held up a cookie and said, "what you call this?" I immediately understood her confusion. The Australians and British on the Camino have been saying "biscuit," which is of course silly. I explained that I would call it a cookie. A biscuit was something else all together.

Today I climbed into more mountains, and rain fell off and on. I am near the border of Galicia, where it is much wetter than Castilla y Leon, the province I´ve been crossing for the last several hundred kilometers.

I left Villafranca del Bierza this morning at six, crossed a river, and immediately began climbing steeply up a narrow road on what is called the Pradela Route. Apparently everyone else stayed down low along the highway, because I didn´t see another person for the next three hours. After walking upwards two strenuous kilometers, I leveled out and traveled along a high ridgeline. The sun finally appeared over a farther ridge to my right and shined through a gap in the clouds, lighting up the green mountaintop and me. Sweet.

Eventually, alas, I had to descend from the heights, passing through a long and lovely chestnut grove and dropping steeply, knee-crunchingly, all the way down to the valley floor. There I met Ben, the Australian, and a young British woman (more on her later--yet another good story), and fell in with them for a stretch.

Last night I went out to dinner with Mandy and a (different) British woman, Rachel. An above average meal in the Restaurante Sevilla: ensalada mixta, chuletas, and a very good natillas. But even better than the food was the company and the conversation. Rachel was a lively, smart, and fascinating woman, and by the end of the meal I was ready to commit. Earlier we had discovered that we both had twenty-year-old daughters, which was an immediate bond.

In England she´s a midwife, but she has accepted a job in Australia, in Alice Springs, at a clinic for aboriginal people. She wore a moon goddess-y wrap but sensible hiking pants, and she laughed a lot. She was nosy, with a knack for quickly eliciting personal details, though without causing any discomfort. She soon had both my and Mandy´s romantic histories. She revealed that she had once gotten married in Las Vegas, but it didn´t take. She said that she was bisexual, that she had decided more than once to be a lesbian, but there was just something about men (an aside: she knew several of the older men at the albergue, and my sense was that she had made numerous conquests on the Camino).

My own lesbian story fascinated Rachel, and she asked a barrage of questions. "I didn´t know that Minnesota was so radical," she said. Somehow my sperm donor experience entered the conversation (like I said, she invited confession), which of course inspired more curiosity. Earlier, when we were talking daughters, she had said to me, "you´re going to have another kid, I´m sure of it." She now reiterated this prediction. I myself am skeptical. On the other hand, maybe I´ll be moving to Alice Springs, though she didn´t ask me to yet.

Tonight I´m at a small albergue on the edge of a small village, La Faba, high in the mountains. It´s raining again. On the last part of the steep, muddy climb to the village I had to give way on the path to several cows, followed by several dogs, then a man holding an umbrella and riding a donkey. The albergue is run by a German couple, and while George registered me for the night, Anita brought me a cup of hot tea and a cookie. Latr a Canadian woman I met last night arrived, and we talked and talked. Or I should say I listened and listened. But more on that tomorrow.

Suddenly I have less time to write, my social life has become so demanding.

I like to sing

I like to sing as I walk along, but the problem is I don´t know many songs. The only one for which I know all the lyrics seems to be "Reason to Believe" by Bruce. It´s a good one to know, and I sing it a couple times a day, but I still wish I knew more. Of course I know parts of many songs. Today I was walking along, and I thought, "oh, it´s Saturday." And that made me start singing: "Saturday, in the park, I think it was the fourth of July. Sunny day, in the park... ne ne ne ne.... people laughing, people singing, a man selling ice cream... hmmm hmmm... can you dig it... na na... yes, I can." And so on.

The albergue I stayed in last night had been open only ten days; the building was brand new, open and airy and clean and a little sterile. I arrived first, and after he stamped my credencial, took my seven euros, and put out his cigarette, the proprietor took me up to the third floor. I had no reservations about the room: large, with ten single beds spread widely along the walls: skylights in the slanted wood ceiling; and at the far end a huge window, thrown open to the sun and mountains. I chose a bed by the window.

I had asked about internet, and the proprietor had said no, but launched into some explanation that I could not decipher. It turned out that none of the many bar/restaurants in town had internet either, which was odd. Later, though, I learned that one could use the computers at the school, but only after eight. By then, after dinner, I only wanted bed.

I met a couple that I´d been seeing for days but hadn´t yet spoken to: Cathy (Vancouver) and Edwin (New Zealand). They´d been traveling for nearly a year, and had decided to finish off with a walk on the Camino, before returning to Canada. They had the calm and confident demeanor of the long-traveled.

Ben stayed at the albergue too, and we made plans for dinner. There was a second albergue, but apparently it was a little decrepit. I ran into Mandy in town, and she was staying at the other one; "the cooties have cooties," she said, describing the beds. She decided to join us for dinner, as did Bart, and Jasmine, a young and beautiful Geran woman with wavy dark hair and large, handsome nose.

We ate at Meson Palacio, by a river and a stone bridge. I returned, with success, to the ensalada mixta, and followed that up with a tortilla, which was good but not Montse-good. Ditto for the dessert, natillas.

Ham and eggs was one choice, and Bart said, "A priest once asked me if I knew the difference between contribution and committment. He said, when it comes to ham and eggs, the chicken has made a contribution, but the pig has made a commitment." Then a big laugh.

His stories did, though, get better. First, though, Mandy was for some reason telling about one time when she was a freshman and got wasted and passed out, and then some girl she hardly knew had written all over her in marker. This had happened to Jasmine too, it turned out. Bart had a different version. "Once when I was a senior in high school," he said, "I got really drunk and passed out, and these two girls, they were friends of mine, put two big hickeys on my neck, one on either side." His father had been amused, he told us, his mother was not.

Before anyone else could recall a story of debauchery, Bart jumped in with another. Apparently I friend of his had been college roomates with Chris Farley at Marquette. "So one time Farley gets drunk and passes out, and then his roommates shaved his head and eyebrows, and poured syrup and ketchup and a bunch of other stuff on him." The best part, though, said Bart, was that Farley had refused to shower for a week afterwards. Bart held out his hands and, quoting Farley, said "you made me what I am, you can live with me."

Bart also told us that he was having intense dreams. In one he´d had the night before, he´d been sitting around a campdfire, and John Denver had been there, with his guitar, singing "Annie´s Song." Bart turned to a person beside him, and said, "but I thought John Denver was dead." At that moment, Denver disappeared, poof. Bart looked at all of us: "so what do you think that means?" he asked. No one had a theory.

This mornign I walked downhill for an hour into the large city of Ponferrada. There was a big castle, built by the Templars a long time ago I don´t know how long, but it was closed for reconstruction. At least half of the old buildings in Spain are under re-construction. I paused long enough in the city to admire the large churches and expansive plazas, and then went on. Today was utterly different than yesterday. Mostly I walked on or along roads, through city and suburbs mostly. Some grape and cherry tree orchards too, but in almost everyone men were spraying the vines and trees. It was Day of the Chemicals. The last five or so kilometers of the thirty kilometer day were much better, up through rolling hills, through a couple tiny villages, more vineyards.

I came to Villafranca del Bierzo about one. A beautiful little town down in a narrow fold in the hills. I´m at a funky albergue, Ave Felix, where the proprietor is an old man with long wispy gray hair and the ability to speak a number of languages. He looked at my credencial, and said, "come on upstairs, Capper, I´ll show you your bed." Good words to hear after a long walk.

Mountains!

Today I set out in the dark, using my headlamp to avoid the muddiest spots. The rain had stopped, but clouds still filled the pre-dawn sky. It was cold--for one of the first nights on the trip I´d been able to sleep in my down bag. I walked steadily uphill as the light slowly grew, revealing bushy, wild slopes on either side of the path. Occasionally I came upon a small fuente among the high grasses, usually connected to a long concrete trough--water for the peregrinos struggling upwards. But I saw no other people for the first hour. Then I came into the small mountain village of Foncebadon, where nearly all the buildings were reduced to roofless, crumbling walls of stone the same color as the stone underfoot. A few people were just setting off from a tiny albergue, so I was alone no longer.

Another couple kilometers and I came to La Cruz de Ferro, a weathered wooden pole topped by a small cross. Surrounding the pole was a huge pile of rocks, built over who knows how many years by the passing pilgrims to mark the highest point on the Camino--about 5000 feet. A cold wind blew across the top and low clouds scudded past, but a few breaks had begun to appear, and the sun illuminated selected patches of green and yellow mountainside. There´s been little of the sublime in the landscape I´ve crossed over the last week, but today was different. I walked on a proper trail, not roads, through beautiful green mountains dramatically clouded and lit, and gazed down into narrow valleys, up at the rounded peaks running into the distance. The easiest, most satisfying day of walking yet, despite the rigors of climb and descent.

My dinner last night was not so satisfying. Not as bad as the Van-Dos disaster in Fromista, but second. There were three restaurants in Rabanal, and I had a look at each before choosing--and then chose wrong. How can you know? There were also three albergues, and I overheard a German woman ask a bartender which was best, but the bartender would only say they were all good. As for the meal, the fault was partly a poorly translated menu. Since the night was chilly, I decided to forego my ensalada mixta in favor of the "vegetable stew." Two words that sounded warm and good. But I was presented with a large dish of cooked green beans and peas, with a few bits of mushroom and asparagus tossed in. This is not something I would knowingly choose to eat, but I ate it, every soft, mushy bite. Segundo, the salmon steak I ordered could not stand up to the one of the night before. Not in color, texture, or taste. But the bread was very good.

I ate alone, so for entertainment I had to eavesdrop on the three Asian people at the next table (the only other people in the room). They were all young, each traveling alone, and all trying to communicate with each other in broken, painstaking English. The two women, Korean, were a little more adept than the man, who was Japanese. Much of their conversation at first seemed to consist of English-language practice. "Cee, gee, tee," they said to each other several times together, several times separately. They also worked on specific words, some of which seemed of little conversational value. "Ell-ee-font," the Japaneses man said, six or seven times in a row. Then the two women repeated the word. "Ellee-font," the Japanese man said, a little faster, about ten more times. A moment later one of the Korean women taught the man a more useful word: "go," she said. "Gah?" he answered, confused. "G-o," she said, and pointed to indicate movement. He nodded, vigorously in understanding, and repeated "g-o" over and over. "Son-doll," the other Korean woman interrupted, pointing to her feet. They all had a go at that one, before breaking into laughter at the ridiculous sound of the word. Towards the end of their meal they were picking bits of food off each other´s plates.

Earlier in the day I had run into Mandy when she was having a coffee at the bar in my albergue. We spoke for some time, and I want to retract the word "giggly," which I applied to her yesterday (and which was probably a little condescending). Upbeat, positive, sunny.... No those aren´t good words. Maybe ebullient. I´ve met only a few Americans on the Camino, so I asked her how it was that she had decided to do the walk. She took my how as more of a why, and said that after she quit her job decorating cakes she thought the walk would help her figure out what she wanted to do with her life. She seemed in the midst of a familiar mid-twenties crisis--a smart, educated person, she could find nothing in the career-oriented, obvious fields of work that appealed to her, and was worried that she had not settled on a clear path. Her father had worked in finance for the last forty-two years. "The same job," she said, with a mix of affection (for him) and horror (at such a prospect for herself). Pretending to be speaking to her father, she said, "so explain to me one more time, what´s a mutual fund?" She screwed up her face in mock confusion. "And annuities?" When she was a teenager her father would ask, "do you want to come work with me as an office assistant?" The answer--"ah, no, Dad." She was quick to add that he was always fine with that.

We walked into the village together to look for the tienda, stopping in on the way at an open church. Mandy said, with a hint of disapproval, "there´s always the big churches, no matter how small the village." She´s a lapsed Catholic but not an angry one. "My mom sent me to Catholic school," she said. "But it didn´t really work. I was that kid putting up her hand and asking, ´so if God is all loving, what´s his problem with gay people?´" She laughed. "The teachers didn´t like that sort of question." In the tienda I picked up a bag of peanuts, and Mandy said, "I am dying for some peanut butter." Me too, but they just don´t have it here. And it would go so well with all the bread.

Once I passed the high point earlier today, the path stayed high for some time. Over the next ten or so kilometers I pased through only one village, Manjarin, a small gathering of stone huts. I don´t know what the few inhabitants do up there. Maybe tend sheep or goats, but I saw few of either on the rocky, gorse-covered hillsides.

The clouds blew off, revealing more of the surroundng hills. I saw a small deer dash off through the bushes, the first wild animal I´ve seen larger than a rabbit.

Eventually I started to descend--and kept dropping for quite some distance. By the end of the day´s walk, eighteen kilometers from the Cruz de Ferro, I had come down 3000 feet. Coming down I passed through a pair of handsome (and more prosperous) villages, where the narrow streets were surprisingly precipitous. At the bottom, down in the valley, I came to the town of Molinaseca, and on the far side found an albergue. After the usual cleaning tasks, I sat on the veranda in a green plastic Heineken chair and read one of my books--but paused often to admire the surrounding green hills.

A man named Bart

So I´m walking along today in the rain and for some reason I´m thinking about when I was camping in Death Valley last January, and that made me think of sitting in the car one night listening to a University of Minnesota football game, a minor bowl, and it was the last few minutes of the game and Minnesota had an insurmountable lead and then they somehow blew it and lost. That made me remember how a couple nights later, camped in Anza-Borrego, I was again sitting in the rental car after dark and listening to another football game, this one with Boise State, who were losing at the end, again hopelessly, but miraculously came back and won. That made me remember the scene after the game when one of the football players got down on one knee and proposed to one of the cheerleaders. This moment made all the papers, and I later saw the picture. And remembering that romantic tableaux, I thought, the marriage proposal has to be one of our most sexist cultural rites. I mean, why does the man get to decide when it´s time to ask? Or any one person, for that matter. Shouldn´t such a momentous decision be a topic for discussion rather than a yes or no question?

It would have been nice to have someone to hash this out with, but I was alone, and so I nursed my disapproval for a minute or two, and then I started thinking about other things.

I left Astorga in the dark this morning at six. A light rain fell for the first hour, and then once I was out in the open countryside the rain became heavier. I had all my rain gear on, but soon my feet were wet. This is only the second time on the walk there´s been enough rain to soak through my boots, but that´s little consolation when you´re feet are actually wet. The rain lightened, though, after not too long. I passed through a couple villages but didn´t stop to rest on any of the wet benches (and there is rarely any cover offered in the small plazas). The path today led slowly uphill, into hills, dotted with great bushes of yellow flowers and the occasional grove of small, unregimented trees. Clouds hung low over the hilltops. I walked only about four and a half fours, 22 kilometers, to Rabanal del Camino. A short stage, but the next likely albergue was some way off, and anyway I wanted to stop and take off my wet boots and choose a bunk. Then I could write, and eat, and read, and maybe nap. All appealing prospects.

Last night´s dinner at the Cafe Gaudi in Astorga was indeed worthy of praise. The room was fancier than I´m used to, with big uphlostered squares on the walls. That means class. I sat at a round table in a corner with four others, and while they all opened with gazpacho, I stuck with the ensalada mixta and was not disappointed. Segundo, I had a lovely piece of grilled salmon, with two small new potatoes on the side. It was very nice to have something other than a part of a pig. (The waiter tried to translate all the options into English, but he was stumped by Sajonia. I told him "ham steak," but after several attempts at pronunciation the best he could do was "home stay.")

Ben, the Australian, was again one of my dinner companions (third time in the last six nights). Next to me was a young Hungarian woman, Susanne. I´d met her earlier in the day at a small shrine on the Camino. When I´d walked up she´d held out a large and newly opened chocolate bar, offering me a piece. She spoke some English, but was quiet through most of the meal. Not so the other two people, both Americans. Mandy, in her mid-twenties and highly freckled, was both giggly and witty, an unusual combination. She had a degree in sociology from UC Santa Barbara (a city in which she still lives), but had been working for a number of years as a cake decorator. She had quit the job and come over to Spain to walk the Camino--a plan that her parents had not liked at all. Her father had presented her with a hypothetical situation in which she would be walking along a lonely portion of the Camino, when suddenly a man with a machete would jump out of the bushes. "What are you going to do? What´s going to happen then?" he'd demanded. She had answered, "I guess what happens then is my time is up."

The last person was a man in his mid-thirties, Bart. I´d been seeing him off and on for days, but we hadn't spoken until a few hours before dinner, outside Astorga´s cathedral. He made jokes (well, joke-like comments), then laughed uproariously, which required me to smile against my will. He was stocky, with a smooth shaved head and a goatee, and had the look of a man addicted to Sports Center (which admittedly I watch a lot of myself). I was guessing he delivered Anheuser-Busch products to bars and restaurants for a living (he's from St. Louis). Or maybe drove a UPS truck.

He told us a long story about the best pizza in Chicago. Later he was unhappy with his dinner. He thought he´d ordered clams, but due to waiter´s poor translation skills was instead presented with a platter of cangrejos (crayfish). I know from experience that these are a lot of work for little payoff, and Bart´s experience was the same. He was a little bitter. The rest of us had all chosen the excellent salmon

After Bart asked me what I did, I asked the same, and he said he was a Jesuit priest. Not that I´ve known too many priests, but still this was a surprise. He´s been in Spain for a year, living near Madrid and working on his dissertation at the Unversidad de Comias. He said that he was being groomed as a "Superior," and for that position one needed an advanced degree. (His degree would be a doctorate in sacred theology, for which the acronym in Spanish is "STD." Bart said that he´d been telling "everyone" that he´d come to Spain to get an std--then he guffawed loudly). He´s currently writing his dissertation, an investigation of the philosophical and theological meanings of perseverence in the teachings of St. Ignatius.

At one point during the meal Bart told a story about a long-ago monk, a teacher in a small village, who was accused of molesting children. The monk was removed from his position, but remained in the village, and for the rest of his long life he was cursed and reviled by the community. "But when he finally died," Bart said, "and they came to prepare him for burial, they discovered that he was actually a woman." He stressed the last word, to emphasize our amazement. "And so he--she--had been innocent all along." No one said anything, and Bart asked me, "have you heard of that story?"

"No," I said, "but--." Here I hesitated, but then thought, what the hell. "But that doesn´t mean she was necessarily innocent." Mandy piped in, "yeah."

Bart started to say something--maybe something about a penis?--but then stopped. "I suppose," he said, a little annoyed.

I changed the subject and he soon recovered his hearty demeanor.

Mateus, please don´t do that

In an albergue the first week, two Frenchwomen stood near my bunk talking. As a parting remark, one woman said to the other, who was holding a towel and a toiletrie kit, "bon douche!" I hadn´t been listening, but then that last comment--innocuous if unnecessary--took my attention from my book. It probably shouldn´t have, though. One of the first things you´re told at an albergue is the location of the, in Spanish, "duchas" (showers). Sometimes they are labled in several languages, and except for in English the word is always similar to the Spanish one.

Speaking of cleanliness, it´s an obsession among the peregrinos. The first thing people do upon reaching an albergue (after snagging a good bunk; lowers by windows are preferred) is to head for the showers. Afterwards there is much shaving and lotioning and teethbrushing (as for the last, more than once I´ve been amazed by how long the Germans brush their teeth--it shames one into taking more time too). Once the body is cleaned and polished, the immediate next task is to do the washing. There is usually a sink or two for clothes, and soon people are crowded around scrubbing socks and underwear and shirts; those who can´t squeeze in use the bathroom sinks, though usually there´s a sign saying please don´t. Soon the courtyard is festooned with drying clothes, as are the bunks. Only then do people seem to relax and turn to lesser matters such as eating or napping or drinking wine.

At the albergue in Mazarife yesterday I was checked in by a friendly, shirtless and fiftyish man named Mateus. It seemed that whatever language a new arrival spoke, Mateus could respond in kind. I preferred Spanish, but after he saw "USA" on my credencial he would only speak English to me, though I continued speaking Spanish to him. Later, near bedtime, Mateus buttonholed an attractive German woman for at least a half hour, going on about something, I´m not exactly sure what, but I think he was trying to explain how best for her to approach the Camino, as she´d been having some physical problems. He talked, she nodded and produced strained smiles. At the end he reached out and tousled her hair. Tousled it. I´m sorry, but that´s not something you do to thirty-five-year-old women.

The other half of the small albergue´s staff was Pepe, who was more appealing and a litle older with a long gray ponytail. He was the cook.

Dinner was at seven, and nearly all of the twenty or so people at the albergue signed up. In the dining room downstairs a long wooden table was already set with wine and water bottles, cutlery and baskets of bread, and a plate of salad at each spot. Pepe waved us into the room, and then waved us to our chairs. I sprinkled olive oil and vinegar on my salad (always the only "dressing" choice), poured a glass of red wine, and happily began.

When we were all done with primero, Pepe carried out a huge pan of vegetarian paella (haricots, cauliflower, carrots, onion, and capers) and set it on an adjacent table. He served us each a plate, then encouraged us to have seconds if we wished, and I did. For dessert he passed out plates of fruit--chunks of melon, slices of orange and apple.

On one side of me sat a couple from Montreal, Pierette (67) and John (71)--she told me their ages unbidden. They had bunks next to mine, and the talkative John (who was Hungarian) had already explained to me his thinking on subjects such as daily mileage on the Camino, the current rules at Canadian-American border crossings, the number of flies in the room, and the fact that Toyota had overtaken General Motors. On the other side of me were two Italian women, Josie and Chincina, both about thirty. They had just started walking that day, from Leon. It came out that Josie had no hat and this elicited a concerned mini-lecture from John.

Pierette and John spoke heavily-accented and imperfect English between themselves as well as with me (apparently John did not speak French), while Josie and Chincina spoke only a little English. Yet they were both obviously interested in making the effort and participating in the conversation.

We talked of our homes, as people always do, relying overmuch on the familiar cliches. Somehow the conversation turned to Italian movies (I think because someone lamented the overweening influence of American films), and Pierette nearly swooned as she listed off a number of Italian actors she had adored in her youth. She was still crazy about someone named Don Camillo and had a number of his films on dvd. The two Italian women nodded approvingly at each name. One of them mentioned The Bicycle Thief, which we all agreed was great. But Pierette, who had watched it recently, said, "yes, but it is very sad. Afterwards I had to put in Don Camillo."

Earlier, while we still eating, Pierette had told me that she has three children and six grandchildren, all living close to Montreal. The youngest of the grandchildren is eight, and Pierette has taken care of her regularly since she was a baby. "I want to call her mother," Pierette said, "but I´m afraid the child will answer, and then--." She put a hand to her cheek and looked as if she would cry. She and John had considered starting their walk in Le Puy, but she told me that that would have meant three months away from the grandchildren which was too long.

This morning I overslept, the first time that has happened. But soon I was out the door and walking through quiet Mazarife and out into the countryside. Today´s stage was a little longer than any I´ve done since returning to the Camino--thirty kilometers. Along a small country road for the first part...through a couple sleepy villages...among fields of barley and wheat, and some corn today for a change. Rivers, the occasional stone medieval bridge. One long stretch was up over a hill and through an almost-forest of scrub oak, wild grass in the large spaces between patches of trees--an attractive savanna. From the top I could see Astorga in the distance, the twin towers of the cathedral rising up out of the jumble of red-roofed buildings. And Astorga is where I am now, in the Albergue San Javier. There is a tiny balcony off of my six-bunkbed room, and I can see the cathedral just down at the end of the narrow street. Astorga is big, if not as big as Burgos or Leon, and quite handsome on first impression. I´m loking forward to exploring after siesta, when all the shops re-open. The man who runs the albergue said that the nearby Cafe Gaudi offers the best pilgrim menu on the Camino and at eight o´clock tonight I plan to find out for myself.