We´re pilgrims

Yesterday was the hardest day of the trail so far. 35k in a blizzard, the wind so strong the snow was blowing horizontally into my face. I kept wanting to take a picture of it, but what the fuck. Take out a white towel and look at it and that´s what it was. A huge black cloud lingered above, and below it seemed like a strip of promising grey light, but the cloud did not budge. I know weather moves, I kept thinking, I´ve been watching swirling weather forecasts for decades. Time passes, weather moves. This cloud did not move. I laughed for two hours about it. But as I descended on the other side of the pass, the snow turned to rain and I couldn´t laugh anymore. Soaked to the bone, I wanted to get to Ponferrada. The path was interminable. A Spanish air conditioner repairman, 34, also a pilgrim, said a couple days before that he´d meet me there for a Saturday night blast. The first time I saw him in the rain a few days ago, we shared a hotel room because the refuge was closed in that village on Sundays. The refuges charge pilgrims 3 or 4 or 5 Euros, so the hotel blew our budget. He acted holy, spoke of faith, the magic of the trail, his belief. After two days he was talking only of girls. And Ponferrada on a Saturday night. "Bad pilgrim," I called him, a joke he repeated 24 times without provocation or development or any added nuance. When I stumbled out of bed at 7 in a refuge, he would see me in the hallway and yell "Bad pilgrim!"

When I finally made it to Ponferrada, it was 9 p.m., he was nowhere to be found, and all the girls of Ponferrada were dancing in costume on the streets in a Carnaval celebration that my legs were too tired to take me to. "If all the fun is out there, why are we in here," I asked an auto worker pilgrim in the kitchen as I ate my basic noodles and tomato sauce.

"We´re pilgrims," he said, startled by the question. I realized then that in Spain this pilgrimage is a culturally elaborated phenomenon, like running a marathon in our country. It would be like asking someone the night before a marathon, "Why aren´t we out at the bars?" "Um, because we´ve been training for this for six months?"

Today was totally different, a sunny spring-like day in the 40s. Sunday, a day of rest, I took it only 23k. This morning I cooked at 7 a.m. for six pilgrims. On the trail I actually smelled a blossom of an almond tree. Perhaps that´s what opened me up. I had my first genuine emotion in 800 kilometers of walking. I had stopped to read Look Homeward Angel, and at Ben´s death, the mother clipping a lock of her son´s hair. I wished I´d had a lock of my old man´s hair. I took the bone (of dog?) from the strap of my pack where it had been hanging for some reason, some vague representation of death above the branch of life that had slipped out in the blizzard, and it became his tibia, and I held a funeral service for him there in the mountains by the side of the trail.