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Pedrouzo → Santiago de Compostela 18.6 km (11.6 mi) |
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¡Hoy es el día, todos!
Despite last night’s mental chaos, I actually slept pretty well and got up at 5:30 this morning. Why so early? Santiago has a special Mass for peregrinos every day at noon, and if I planned to get there in time, I’d have to hit the road early. So, with fresh batteries in the flashlight, I packed up and stepped out into the dark.
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When I say “dark,” I mean country dark. Once I left Pedrouzo and entered the woods, there was nothing to see outside my flashlight beam. Normally, that would make me awfully nervous, being a small rodent, alone and landlocked. However, with all that I’d learned about the eradication of large land predators from most of Spain, I felt a little safer. Then I remembered that Galicia is famed for its witches.
It started with a blinking light down the trail, as if someone were trying to signal me. As I got closer, the light split in two and turned into cat eyes. Phew! I continued along, noticing the hills ahead were aglow with a brush fire that filled the air with smoke. The path took me up a hill, and my flashlight, with its brand new batteries, started to sputter. That was spooky enough, but then, the flashlight burst back to life, and a huge bat, bigger than I am, swooped into the beam and out of sight. Cats and bats and blazes! Witches or no witches, I picked up the pace!
I sure was happy to see the first glow of dawn, though it had been neat to see some of the stars that had given Santiago de Compostela its name (“Campus Stellae” or “Field of Stars”). These stars faded away, replaced by the glowing lights of the Santiago-Lavacolla Airport. It was so strange to be walking past the airport that would take me home in only a few days. That reminded me: today is the 29th! I hadn’t planned to be here until the 3rd! Whatever will I do with myself? We’ll worry about that later. Right now, I need to take a bath.
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Historically speaking, Lavacolla served as a place for peregrinos to wash up before they entered the holy city. That makes sense. I mean, I sure wouldn’t want my final resting place smelling like cow poop! Plus, I hadn’t taken a swim in a few days, so this looked like a great time! The water was awfully cold, which was good for two things: washing away the last of my sleepiness and keeping me from taking too long in the water!
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After a trek past a campground and the TV Galicia station, I arrived at Monte do Gozo, the Mountain of Joy! This hill used to be the place where peregrinos would see the towers of the cathedral for the first time, but when I got there, the wildfire smoke and the size of the trees in the foreground prevented me from seeing anything at all! That wasn’t very joyous, but at least there was a neat sculpture to commemorate Pope John Paul II’s visit to Santiago in 1982. It also featured a depiction of St. Francis as a peregrino, which won favor from me!
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On the way down from the Mount, I met a fellow named Ionut, a Romanian paralympian, who, having lost his leg, his bike, and then, his father, has started a quest to compete in the 2016 Paralympic Games in Brazil and win a medal in his father’s memory! He’s collecting 1,000 names of people he’s met along the way to adorn his competition T-shirt, and he’s making a documentary about the process too! It’s called “Mil Caminos, Un Destino,” and I hope everyone will take a look when it’s released!
Bidding farewell to the Paralimpico Viajero, I continued into Santiago, excited, nervous, and wholly incredulous that this should be the conclusion of so long a journey! The Camino snaked through the modern outskirts of the city, where I noticed all of the shops were closed. That was odd, since it was only 11:00 in the morning, but I couldn’t worry about that just now. My priority was to get to the Pilgrim’s Office and register, so my name would be among those read aloud during Mass!
I didn’t see the Cathedral until I’d been in Santiago at least half an hour. When it appeared, my heart and my pace quickened. This was it! This was the finale! Everything had been leading up to this! Sure enough, as I spied the door of the Pilgrim’s Office, I ran into Steven, Jean, and Andrew all at once! Against all odds, I’d caught up with them, and now everyone was back together, sort of (Serge and Didier were checking into their hotel). Andrew and Jean had picked up some wicked bedbug bites at one of the albergues (I think it was in Arzúa), and I realized that, though I’d been sad to lose them around León, I was really glad not to have bedbug bites! They were all on their way to coffee, and though they invited me, I had to take a rain check. I had a date with the Inquisition after all! I told them I would see them in Mass and headed toward the Pilgrim’s Office and the compostela.
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I stepped through the door and into a long line of disappointments. There was a long line of pre-teens with backpacks the same size as mine, laughing and hollering, and showing off their credenciales with stamps from Sarria as if they’d worked so hard to get here! When I finally reached the front, there was no Inquisition, just a bored fellow who handed me a sheet and asked me to fill in the blanks: where I started, how I traveled, whether my reason was religious… He glanced over my credencial, stamped it once, and handed me my compostela signed “Willam Beaver!” They’d omitted an “i!”
That was a lot to take to Mass. I met up with Andrew, Serge, and Didier in the Praza do Obradoiro (Jean had vanished again), and we went inside the Cathedral. The marvelous architecture and artwork, the resonance of the organ, and the feeling of ending a journey with peregrinos from all over the world, all worked to undo what I felt in the Pilgrim’s Office, but something, something I couldn’t quite name, still felt incomplete.
That something followed me out of the cathedral and all the way to the industrial-sized albergue, Seminario Menor, where we checked in to our floor and set about looking for food. That led us to a small café, where the waitress was aghast, absolutely aghast at my request for zumo de piña for lunch! “We don’t do that in Spain,” she said. “You could have juice, but it would be very unusual.”
She was out of most everything else, especially bread, owing to the strike. A strike? Sure enough, the TV behind me was broadcasting footage of a nationwide strike over recent budget cuts to fight Spain’s economic crisis! That’s why all the shops had been closed on entering the city! Unlike the French, though, the Spanish did not build barricades and start singing! In fact, they started burning things in Barcelona!
Our waitress gave us her own taste of rebellion. After an hour, she brought us our small plates, then went to wait on a Spanish couple who had just walked into the café. As I ate, I watched her bring them a big basket of bread and a tall glass of orange JUICE without a quarrel! We hadn’t been rude or demanding, and those of us who could speak Spanish had done so. We joked that Jean shouldn’t have made the mistake of counting five of us when there were actually only four. In any case, she received an additional budget cut from us!
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After lunch, we split up, agreeing to meet up again for dinner at 7:00. More misadventures ensued! First, I went to take a picture by the Convento de San Francisco, and as I stood and smiled for the camera on the tripod, a trash collector came by and scooped me up! He thought I was garbage! I was so mad that I very nearly enacted Deadly Art #1, but I decided instead to run back to the Cathedral. At least I knew that it was a welcoming place.
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But the strike had moved in front of the Cathedral! The police had assembled and were staring down the protestors, mostly under 30, who were angry that 50% of people their age are unemployed in Spain! Right now, almost one in four people in all of Spain are unemployed! My goodness, that’s a lot of people not adding to a floundering economy! It sounds like a pretty grim situation, and I wonder how it will turn out, especially because Iberian Air is going on strike on April 9th, when one of their planes is supposed to take me home!
With all this conflict, I still couldn’t shake that pesky incomplete feeling. I went back inside the Cathedral to talk to the man himself, Santiago. First, after a stern reminder to take off my hat, I gave the saint’s statue a traditional hug then descended into the crypt, where the saint’s bones are said to rest in a silver casket. However, when I entered the crypt, I overheard some folks say St. James probably isn’t in there, considering his tomb was “discovered” over 700 years and 4000 kilometers from his execution in Judea!
In fact, there’s little to no evidence, outside tradition, that he ever came to Spain at all! Finally, it’s possible that the magical name Compostela might not actually come from “Campus Stellae” but “Composita Tella,” which just means “burial ground.” So if this isn’t the star road and the bones don’t belong to St. James, does that mean this whole cathedral, this whole City, and this whole Camino were built upon deceit? Was the woman next to me crying over a false idol? That troubled me greatly!
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My troubles followed me until 7:00, when we all reunited for a free dinner at the Hotel de los Reyes Católicos. The first ten peregrinos to present a compostela at the hotel’s parking garage at 7:00 receive a free meal of the wait staff’s fare. However, ours was not the only group to hear about this deal, and we ended up with a total of 11 people. That meant one of us had to sit out, and a huge battle of politeness and self-sacrifice erupted! Ultimately, Andrew cast himself from the group to attend a bar instead, leaving us to weave through the magnificent hotel to a cafeteria-style dinner of fish, potatoes, salad, and pineapple. We served ourselves handsomely, though to be honest, I had a heck of a time carrying a whole tray by myself. It weighed more than my backpack and had ten times the surface area!
Sitting around the dinner table, and later, when we reunited with Andrew at a (different) local bar, I realized that maybe it wasn’t important whether the Saint’s tomb is real. Even if the bones inside belong to someone else, the silver casket still sparkles! The reality of the Camino was all around me with these people, who sang and laughed and swapped stories and took embarrassing pictures of each other eating. Even though George does not seem to be here in Santiago, I think I have at least found the underlying beauty of the Camino.
That being said, the Camino still doesn’t feel complete. Maybe it’s just the month of forcing momentum every day, or today’s series of disappointments, but this doesn’t feel like my final destination. I still have a few days to figure that out, so we’ll see if I can discover the seventh miracle of the Camino!
Buen Camino!
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Total Distance Walked: 759.1 km (465.5 mi) |
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