Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
I wonder who is watching me right now.
Someone must be watching me because I, too, am watching others. I am in the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport. We are leaving Spain after spending the better part of a month here. And I am engaging in my second favorite pastime: people-watching.
We had a three-hour layover in Santiago de Compostela where we had nothing to do but sit in an outdoor cafe, downtown, watching hordes of pilgrims arrive at the cathedral and publicly rejoice in Santiago Square.
The ancients called this place the end of the world. And that’s what they believed it was.
It is among the grandest churches in the world. It is one of the greatest achievements of man that took so long to build that architectural periods changed several times throughout its construction.
Even so, when you walk into Santiago de Compostela the first thing you see is not the cathedral. You neither see the gilded grandeur, nor the ornate.
The first things you see are pilgrims.
Lugo, Spain, is a mini metropolis compared to the remoteness of the Camino Primitivo. For days we have been hiking in isolated mountains and faraway countrysides. It’s startling to see a city suddenly emerge from the landscape.
What is God?
This single question underpins all things on the Camino de Santiago, a trail inhabited by us full-time pilgrims whose lives are contained in backpacks.
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.
A rooster crows as day breaks over the surrounding Cantabrian Mountains. He crows every few moments, singing an anthem to morning, his voice ringing throughout the tiny village of Cornellana.
I am in a bar, drinking morning joe. My bartender is working his buns off.
Our first day walking the Camino. We leave our inn at Oviedo a little after daybreak. There are no people on the streets. No cars. Only one stray dog, dutifully cleaning his privates, and one old man hosing down a section of street in front of his shop while smoking a cigar the size of …
2:16 p.m.—We step off the plane in Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, and it is pure chaos. People crowd this ginormous public space like ants swarming a fallen Tootsie Pop. This place is like Black Friday at Walmart, only with less exposed thong underwear.
We entered Santiago de Compostela at 2:11 p.m. On foot. We’d been hiking since sunup. Our pace was slow. Our clothes, threadbare. I was muttering the 23rd Psalm—a kind of private meditation on the trail.
Some of the most powerful lessons we pilgrims have learned on this proverbial Chisholm Trail have not been about life, or the nature of the universe. Our lessons have been in relation to each other.
I am standing at a bus stop in the unrelenting rain. Although to call this a “bus stop” is being generous. It’s just a highway guardrail. I am alone on this empty highway, waiting to catch a ride out of O Cebreiro.
Somewhere in the distant mountains, my wife is hiking the Camino. I should be with her, but I am here with shin-splinted legs and swollen calves.
My taxi arrived at Ponferrada after a long, twisty, pleasant ride through the mountains. And by “pleasant” I mean that only one of three taxi passengers actually vomited. I paid our driver, then found a nearby bush where I could double over.
My wife and I parted in the lobby of the albergue. She was crying. It was a little-girl cry. The kind of crying you do when you don’t care who is watching you. She has never been self-conscious about her own emotions. Thank God nobody ever told this beautiful woman that it’s not dignified to cry in public.
My eyes first caught the sight of a rosary, lying on my nightstand. The rosary was given to me by a nun, a few villages back. The rosary bears a hieroglyphic-like symbol on it. I have no idea what this symbol means.
We limped into Rabanal Del Camino on three legs. I was holding Jamie for support as we ascended the inclined street into an isolated Spanish village with a population of 60 residents.
