Dispatches Del Camino

Rain. It never stops coming. Rain, rain, rain. Sometimes it seems like all it does is rain.

It’s been raining for two days now on the Camino Primitivo. And there is no end in sight. Spanish news channels on television, which are wonderful media organizations whose reporters dress exquisitely, speak rapidly, and replay the same four news stories every six minutes, are predicting rain each day this week.

Walking in the rain is not fun. Especially in the remote mountains of Asturias. Your shoes squish into the mud. You lose your footing. You slip and fall. And even though this hike is supposed to be a spiritual experience, filled with deep meditation and reflection, fraught with subtle evidence of the supernatural, you cuss like a commercial fisherman.

Because even though you’ve always liked rain, even though you know rain is necessary for life to exist on planet Earth, even though you are a big fan of all water in general, when it’s raining on you personally, rain sucks.

The iron-gray sky looks woeful and despondent. The clouds seem angry. The dome of clouds appears to hover only a few feet above the treetops, like the stone ceiling of a gulag prison cell.

You are a sun-aholic. You are never fully alive until you are sitting in the sun. You crave the sun. You even bought an imitation sunlamp on Amazon once during a stretch of gray weather, because many reviewers claimed that this lamp would make you experience bouts of random joy during monsoon season.

The lamp’s advertisement images showed happy people hugging and wearing sunglasses and showing off perfect abs in the midday sunlight, while doing things like playing ping-pong or pickleball.

So, you bought one of these lamps and you dutifully sat beneath it for one hour per day with your little special plastic sunglasses, waiting for spontaneous bouts of pickleball to occur. Your wife would occasionally see you sitting beneath your $42 lamp and laugh, thinking you were a consummate ass. But deep in your heart, you knew she was wrong about the “consummate” part.

So each day, after your long walks through the rain, you are confined indoors. You sit in your albergue and you watch Spanish television in your damp clothes.

Spanish TV, you have learned, is hard up for new material to broadcast. You know this because over the past two days, you have watched three John Wayne movies on TV, such as “McLintock!” “The Horse Soldiers,” and “The Shootist,” which, although it was dubbed in Español, still made you cry.

The next morning, even though the rain has not let up, your mood has fallen further. Because you know you must put on soggy clothes that still have not dried from the day before, soaken shoes, and your waterlogged hat, and you must walk.

You are feeling grumpy when you exit the mountains and enter the next village. Your clothes are heavy and wet. Your whole body is cold. Your hair is matted to your slick forehead. And you are feeling extremely sorry for yourself because you are walking in saturated shoes.

Then you see a young man standing on the street corner. And you notice that this boy is missing one of his feet. And yet he is so sunny and cheerful.

An old proverb about shoes comes to mind as the boy blesses your journey by saying, “Buen Camino, peregrino.”

And suddenly, you don’t mind the rain.