Carol, will you please be quiet

At six in the morning, on my second day on the Camino, the lights came on in the big stone albergue in Roncesvalles. Some of the beds were already empty, as a few people had slipped off in the dark. I was outside myself in just a few minutes and tramping along a path in the misty woods. I soon passed a stone cross dating from the 14th century.

A couple miles down a long valley I came to the village of Burguete, still asleep in the early morning. On the far side of town the path led uphill, between pastures occupied by brown cows, and back into a forest of large, handsome beech trees. Over the course of the early morning I crossed a number of ridges, descending to small rivers and villages between. Finally, a longer descent took me down to the Rio Arga. The sun had burned off the mist and the day had become almost hot. I followed the Arga down to the town of Larrasoaña, where I sat on a bench by a fuente in front of the municipal albergue and took off my boots. I´d walked over seventeen miles in six hours.

Too fast, which would continue to be the case in the following days. When I walk I´m used to a fair amount of solitude, but there were so many peregrinos on the trail…. It seemed the only way to avoid them was to get and stay ahead (when I stopped at a small tienda, I felt quite impatient with the slow old woman who rang up my bananas and juice and yogurt). In retrospect this was a silly and hopeless strategy. It didn´t help that I was convinced I needed to reach the next albergue early, before the hordes, in order to secure a bed. Of course these considerations worked against the sort of walk I had imagined—leisurely, with time to explore villages, to lay about along the way. I knew my speed was not the best choice, but I couldn´t help myself. Besides the need for a trail of my own and a bed, I was still disconcerted at finding myself alone in a foreign place, and I responded with movement. I didn´t know enough Spanish, or how to eat breakfast, or any person within several hundred miles, but I did know how to walk.

The albergue in Larrasoaña wasn´t open yet, so I sat down to wait. After an hour I had recovered sufficiently, and was impatient enough, that I set off again, figuring I could go ahead and make it to the next refugio, six or seven miles over a few more hills. As I set off I thought, this might be a bad idea, but turns out it wasn´t. The day cooled, it rained lightly for awhile, and soon I came down into the town of Arre, near Pamplona, and crossed over a lovely medieval bridge to the adjacent Convento de Trinidad, where monks have been accommodating pilgrims since the eleventh century.

One of the current monks, whose quiet, reassuring demeanor helped to calm me down, stamped my credencial, then took me around to the albergue, a stone building behind the church. Much smaller than Roncevalles—a sitting room, kitchen, and back room with a dozen bunkbeds. Out a side door steps led to a small courtyard garden, where an elderly man was sowing seeds along a stone walkway.

Only three people had arrived in the albergue before me, only four came after. I don´t know why we were so few—I´ve never seen such a small number since, and certainly not at such a beautiful and comfortable albergue.

It was here I met the ageless Italian flash, Lino, and his American sidekick, Christoph. They had met on the train into St. Jean Pied de Port two days earlier, and Christoph had decided that Lino was a man to follow, considering his wide experience of the Camino. Christoph spoke a fair amount of Spanish, but Lino spoke only his own language. However, Christoph was managing to use his Spanish to translate (and learn bits of) Lino´s Italian—which made for an entertaining form of conversation.

We three went out to a restaurant for dinner, joined by two others, Carol (American) and Pierre (French), both sixtyish. Carol was overbearing, Pierre charming but exhausted. The next morning he took a bus back to his car in St. Jean, having completed a not fully successful two-day foray on the Camino. At the restaurant I had calamares (squid) cooked in its own black ink, which looked terrible and made me feel slightly ill. But it tasted ok. At one point it came up that I taught a class on science and religion and Carol let out an entirely too loud bray that startled us all. “How do you get away with that in Minnesota?” she said. I gave her a tight-lipped smile and suggested, “maybe you´re thinking of Kansas,” adding for myself the unspoken punctuation, “bitch.”

Besides Carol´s annoying presence, the meal was a success, helped along by an extra bottle of wine. We had no one language in common, but communicated through a surprisingly successful mix of English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

After dinner, Lino the tireless suggested a stroll around the town. When we finally returned to the albergue, I was more than ready for my bunk. Pierre, who had declined the bonus walking, was already asleep in the next bed, snoring away in a neighborly manner.