At the outskirts of town was a contradictory sign:
I hesitated at This Juncture, Finally Decided to Follow the Small Arrow and Shell -- My Hunch Proved Correct
This morning, as yesterday morning, there was a stiff breeze in my face. Perhaps that made the walking harder but it was so cool and refreshing I was grateful for it. Being Sunday, lots of couples were out walking, many joggers and bikers. I never knew who would wish me a Buen Camino; quite a few did.
Not far out of town I stopped for a rest and who should appear but Mike the Canadian. I told him how providential it was that we met while I was talking to Dorothy, the wee Scot. Had she not been there, he and I would never have met, and I would not have learned about Barb’s boots getting stretched, and I would still be in pain.
Dorothy was struggling on the Camino when I met her. As I left her, I felt she wouldn’t be able to crest the long, steep hill ahead, let alone reach Santiago.
Mike said he had heard that she made it to Los Arcos, then took a bus to Logroño to visit with her mother for a few days and rest her feet, then returned to Los Arcos by bus to resume her Camino where she had stopped. That is the kind of determination that no doubt led to the saying, ‘God created Scotch whisky to keep the Scots from taking over the world.’
Mike’s carrying a full pack, but there is no way I can keep up with him. A tall young black woman walked up and wished us a Buen Camino; no way I could keep up with her either.
As I approached Navarrete, there was a fence along the trail, perhaps 200 yards or so long. Pilgrims had made crosses of twigs, paper, plastic water bottles and inserted them into the fence. Hundreds and hundreds of crosses.
I decided I needed to make one for Susan.
Here was another providential encounter. I was wearing a long sleeve Patagonia jersey which covered my arms to the wrist. But as I worked on the cross, the sleeve slipped down, revealing my yellow Livestrong band. A man had stopped a few yards away to help his girl friend with her pack. He immediately approached me, pointed to my wrist band, and asked, cancer?
He was from Boston; a very hearty guy with a strong, meaty handshake.
I told him about Susan. He wanted to know all about it. He showed me his wrist band. Similar, but wider and greener. He had lost several family members to cancer and he himself had cancer. He had designed a special tattoo on his calf, one of those looped ribbons, with three different colors for three different cancers. He was proud of it and let me photograph it.
He had non-Hodgkin´s lymphona. He said it was incurable. ‘It might be two years, it might be ten,’ he said. He pulled aside the neck of his t-shirt and showed me a very swollen lymph node; he said he had another in his groin. He had done the Camino before, but on a bicycle. Now he wanted to do it slowly.
He invited me to accompany them but soon had to pull away because his girlfriend said she had to walk faster to keep her feet from hurting.
A minute or two after he pushed on another young man joined me. Adrian. He said he was from God´s country, by which he meant Suffolk. We talked a while and I mentioned how kind the locals were. He said, ‘Too kind. That´s why I´m starting three days late.’
He had started in Logroño. He told me of a website called Couch Surfing. If you are headed some where, you contact a member in the area and see if you can stay with them, for free of course. He had written to five people in Logroño and three responded, yes, he could stay with them. He picked a young woman and all was agreed upon. But when he flew into the airport, she wasn´t there. Another young woman, a beautiful nurse, came up to him and explained that the first woman had had to leave town and miss him but he could stay with her.
He had planned to leave the next day, but they went out partying. At three in the morning he was still at a karaoke bar. The next morning he was wiped out and the nurse begged him to stay another day. He did. They partied again that night. Then the first woman returned and they all went out again.
When he left, the nurse begged him to return to Logroño later in May for a huge festival. He said he would think about it. He told her that if he came back, she would have to marry him. She said she would think about it.
I wondered how sexual this encounter was. He said, ‘You know how Latinas are, they touch you all the time (here he pawed me to demonstrate), but when you touch them back, they panic.’ Despite being from God’s country, he was waiting for his visa from Canada so he could emigrate to Toronto.
[Looking back on the Latinas I’ve dated, I have no recollection of them touching me excessively. I do remember an evening in the summer of 1966 when I had dinner on the deck of the white mercy ship HOPE, anchored in the harbor of Corinto, Nicaragua. Our group was seated at a large round table; local lovelies sat on either side of me. During dinner, almost at the same time, each of them wrapped a leg around mine. Not laid an ankle across my ankle, mind you, but draped their thigh over my thigh then entwined their leg under and around my calf and locking their heels across the top of my foot. No change in their expression, no wink or smile, no pat on the arm; the conversation went on without interruption. I found this totally engaging; too bad it never happened again.]
The landscape is mainly gently rolling farm land. Almost no wheat fields now, and just a few olive groves; vineyards everywhere.
As I left Logroño, a man passed me going the other way leading a burro, heavily laden with his gear. I saw the St. James scallop shell attached to his bags, showing he was a pilgrim. The donkey itself had a shell branded on its rump. Got a picture of that too.
The Burro with the Scallop Brand -- Sorry I wasn’t Quick Enough to Get a Close-up
Internet connections are hard to find. The one at my hotel last night in Logroño didn´t work, so I had to go to a locutoria, an internet cafe. It was run by a boy about 15 who looked bored to death. He assigned me a cubicle; it was one of about 12, all of them unoccupied. It was kind of sad and spooky to be there. Ten years ago it probably was hopping, now it’s dying.
The hotel I’m at has a computer that is impossible to use. There is a 2-3 second lag between hitting a key and seeing the letter.
At the hotel in Viana, the computer used Windows 2000 Professional, long in the tooth for an operating system.
Right now I´m in a bar, feeding euros into a computer every 25 minutes. In some places it’s less time.
But at least it works. I’ll try to return here after dinner and try to send some photos and perhaps more observations.
Your notes are deeply appreciated.
Un abrazo,
John
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