My most vividly joyful day on the Camino de Santiago was also one of the longest. I woke, rolled out of my bunk in the corner, and made my sleepy-eyed way down three flights of stairs to the lobby where the owners had set up a buffet breakfast. It was a small room, and crowded, and the early morning confusion of many pilgrims vying for spots in the toaster and the rapidly diminishing coffee felt hectic until I squeezed myself in at a table with Pepe, Rosa, Bill & Jan the Canadians, and a young quiet Spanish couple I only barely recognized. The man looked a bit like Stephano, but with a kinder face, and his girlfriend or wife was the mirror image of a young Rachel Weisz.
With such intriguing faces across the table at breakfast, laughing and making plans for the day, comparing notes and blisters and passing bread and jam, I walked out the door into a navy-blue cold morning fully intent on taking the low route through the valley.
When I came to the decision point just up the block, though, I looked right across the bridge and toward the roadways and tunnels, and left to broken cobblestone street that shot starkly up past ramshackle houses and disappeared into mist and curves. I could see the mountain on Route Pradela right in front of me even though it was a substantial distance away. A couple of pilgrims walked by, poles clacking on the stones, and turned right. But Pradela whispered to me, and I listened. I went left, striking out on the steep uphill, and within moments I could look down onto Villafranca under the fog as the dawn just started to break over the far valley wall. It was deeply magical in that moment – I’d walked myself up above the earth, above the village, above the other pilgrims, and into a gorgeous elevated path that continued into the clouds.
For the next few miles I climbed onto the mountain, following the one path as it widened, narrowed, took twists and turns through cuts and draws, ran a ridgeline, rose above the power lines, and took me into a different world. I could look back and see the terrain stretching out for miles behind me, Villafranca twinkling in the morning underneath the bright rising sun; I could look below and see the road through the valley, pilgrims stretched out along the senda. Closest to me were clouds and pine trees that reminded me of nothing so much as North Carolina and parts of north Georgia where I grew up and played as a child. There were wide sections of pine needle carpet that could have been lifted from my parents’ back yard.
And the entire time I was up there, I didn’t see a single other pilgrim.
There were signs of other pilgrims everywhere: yellow arrows, waymarkers, and rock cairns (to which I added my own). But for the hours I walked in the morning before crossing over to the other side and dropping down to meet the main route in a village called Trabadelo, I was alone with my thoughts. My mind wandered all over the place: to my walk with Brother Sam and the Franciscan response to the gospels (I sang, loudly, skipped rocks and laughed at birds), to the breakup with Anne that in a complex way brought me to the Camino (I literally prayed the rosary until the bitterness and anger went away), to the gratitude and strength I felt given by God through the people I’d met and the sheer experience of going to a foreign country to participate in this incredible pilgrimage. I was physically full of joy – something above and beyond the excitement of a trip, above gratitude for its’ own sake, above happiness. It felt spiritual and plugged into what, for me, are our must sublime emotions. It was the kind of joy that allows you to take delight in the smallest, and the largest things.
Trabadelo was initially confusing, but after some wandering around I found a market and an open café sitting above the main Camino. When I walked in, I saw Esther and Robert sitting at a table, and after I dragged my brain back into the real world from its’ mystical cave, we were laughing and sharing coffee.
I should say, Esther and I were sharing coffee. Robert was drinking red wine. His third glass. At 11am. When I realized he was drunk, I instantly withdrew and went to the bathroom. I didn’t want to be that person, to step back from another pilgrim, but I felt fragile and contemplative after climbing Pradela. When I came back to the table, he’d already taken off, but Esther was still there and we left together. On the first stretch of flat road toward La Portela de Valcarce, she was distant and quiet, walking at different paces – so we kept awkwardly leap-frogging. I stayed in my head, and she in hers, and all we exchanged were smiles.
Somewhere before the village where I planned to stop at Albergue Brasil, we found a matching pace and started talking – first about our home towns, and dogs, and work, and then venturing into deeper subjects. By the time we walked past the albergue, I was feeling energetic and reluctant to part with my friend, so we kept walking. We stopped for coffee and sweets in a town called Herrerias – a gorgeous bakery run by a sharp-tongued, impatient woman who nonetheless loaded us up with delicious food and chided us for sitting outside in the midday chill. A couple of younger Asian pilgrims came in as well in the middle of an argument, and Esther and I chuckled about their histrionics; up above us was an elevated roadway bridge that reminded me so strongly of the Blue Ridge Parkway that for the rest of the day I could not shake the impression.
Shortly thereafter, the Camino began to climb – one of the steepest continuous sections as you climb through several tiny villages on your way to Galicia province and the apex at O’Cebreiro. The climb seemed to last forever, and although it was a bright, dramatically sunny day, I began to worry about making it to the top in time. Esther and I picked up our pace, becoming drenched in sweat and slamming snacks on the way instead of stopping at the bars and cafes; the string of villages were so much like Valle Crucis and Boone that I started having intense flashbacks and nostalgia for my old home – including the roadside cows and broken fences.
In the final village before O’Cebreiro I passed the Coloradans sitting outside an albergue, and they invited me to stay rather than walk on – they’d been hearing that some of the previous seasonal hostels were already closed for the year and so the municipal hostel in O’Cebreiro promised to be crowded, but I had kept myself going with the promise of the 12th century chapel there, and so I continued.
We walked into the town blinking and confused – on the far side there was a road discharging tourists from cars and buses, but between was a tiny, tiny village that could have been lifted wholesale from medieval Spain. Low rock buildings sat under thatched roofs, there were no streetlights, and the whole thing could fit in a city block. The church stood dominant on one end, the hostel on the other, looking over the valley ahead and the final push to Santiago.
In Galicia the hostels are well-funded and run efficiently by the government, and you can tell. The xunta packed 500 pilgrims into three stories like a barracks, and although it was massively crowded, loud, chaotic, and the showers had no doors, people were friendly and excited. I got the sense that many pilgrims were starting here or had just started and were justly filled with first-week enthusiasm and giddiness. I felt like a veteran, an old hat, with my three weeks’ experience.
Esther and I ran into Robert and one of his friends, and we first went for a mid-afternoon beer at one of the three restaurants just across from the church. I was bundled in all of my clothes but still felt cold – two weeks later O’Cebreiro would be under snow due to the elevation and its’ location as a buffer to the weather coming in from the ocean to our west. I left them a bit early to explore the chapel prior to mass. I didn’t realize beforehand that Iglesia Cebreiro was run by Franciscans, and I first spent time in prayer at the grave of the priest who largely reinvigorated the Camino de Santiago. He is buried in the church itself, just to the left of the altar. I remember feeling such overwhelming gratitude for this man’s efforts – a life’s work that helped ease the way to pilgrimage for so many, a life’s work that resonates in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of former pilgrims.
From the monk at the ‘gift table’, I paid 5 euros for a small book by the Bishop of Lugo about the Camino as a fundamentally Christian experience. Aside from the gospels themselves and Fr. James Martin’s The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, there isn’t another piece of spiritual writing that has had such a profound impact on my faith. Period. I’d go so far as to call it life-changing, even though it sounds cliché.
The mass was full, and beautiful, and celebrated in multiple languages. I ended up sitting next to the Spanish couple from breakfast – and when the Our Father came around I appreciated the man’s lack of hesitation to grab my hand through the prayer. He seemed full of faith and happy to celebrate the liturgy. I thought about how Queen Isobel would have celebrated her own mass in this very chapel when she went on pilgrimage and felt momentarily overwhelmed and dizzy from the largeness of history. The facts I could understand, but getting my brain around the concept proved difficult. I was starting to feel more comfortable with the Spanish mass, and when it was over I smiled at the couple next to me and reluctantly went outside for dinner.
Esther, Robert, Twan, Korean Li, and Polish Greg and I all ended up at a place that resembled a pub in England: dark heavy wood, large tables, good beer, and hot food in abundance. I spent the meal laughing with the newcomers at Robert’s stories from the sea, and when we left to go back to the albergue I was in high spirits. When we went into the enormous shared bedroom, we realized that all of us were randomly right next to each other in the bunks – a fact that cracked Esther up into girlish peals of tears and laughter; it felt like a sleepover in middle school. For an hour or so after, it sounded like one as well, as our section would become quiet only to break into raucous cackles when one person or another would make a raunchy joke in the dark. It was lovely.
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