Serenity, it's a Pyrenees Thing
Camino. Chapter 4
This is my serialized story of walking the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain with my sister-in-law. If you’d like to start at the beginning of our journey, click here.
Day 2. Marlene and I wake up in Borda, one of the two hostels located high in the Pyrenees. Late in the afternoon the day before we arrived after walking nearly thirty kilometers (17 miles) and climbing more 2,000 feet in elevation. We were glad to be finally at our destination. As one of the last couples to join a group of twelve pilgrims spending the night at the hostel, we were immediately welcomed by the other co-habitants with beer and meaningless chatter, which, to me, was disconcerting given we had been alone for most of the afternoon. I just wanted to take a shower and wash my clothes before dinner.
Borda is an interesting hostel in that all the backpacks, boots, etc., are required to be kept in a locker/mud room beneath our dormitory. Given our beds are fairly close together and the aisle itself narrow, it is not hard to fathom why. Still, with this being our first night on our pilgrimage, I found it hard to pull out of my backpack exactly what I needed to shower, sleep, and dress for tomorrow.
In an outdoor sink we washed our clothes both from yesterday (flying into Spain and arriving in St. Jean for the night) and today (hiking first to Valcarlos and, then, back to St. Jean before journeying up into the Pyrenees). Washing our clothes every day must become a normal routine, I realize - recognizing that skipping so in St. Jean was a mistake - as we only have three changes of clothing for the month-long hike. I am certain hanging our clothes in the late afternoon sun means they won’t dry by tomorrow, but leaving them out for the night has to be better than the alternative, which is packing them wet in our backpacks. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up my soap from the sink and later that night spent an hour with my flashlight futilely searching for the bar. My first gift to a hostel, I decided. Soap, though, is a precious commodity to lose. Between walking to Valcarlos and, then, losing my soap, I can count so many rookie mistakes I need to eliminate.
At dinner we enjoy the group of pilgrims who, like us, made their reservation at Borda. Our host and owner, Lorenzo, takes a moment to welcome us and have each of us introduce ourselves to the group as well as indicate our overall destination on this pilgrimage. It turns out not everyone walks to Santiago. In fact, several couples are taking the pilgrimage in stages and stopping miles before the final destination. So too, not everyone started in St. Jean - this is the beginning of my understanding how the strands of the Camino crosses Europe - most notably France where other cities serve as the starting point - before coming together at Santiago de Compestela.
We are up in the dark on Day Two and start out after an early morning breakfast at the hostel. Another couple, like us, but maybe ten years younger, is also walking to Santiago. The man, Bob, seems overly serious, but his wife, Theresa, seems to make up for his lack of social skills by being very engaging. She says she is his receptionist in their dental practice. Dentist Bob is walking the Camino to seek clarification on whether to leave his practice and become a deacon in his local Colorado church. He offers the group a prayer before dinner that, to me, didn’t seem overly inspiring and mangles an impromptu prayer when called upon after breakfast. Marlene, who works closely with a deacon she loves in her church in Pennsylvania, should be a deacon if the Catholic Church allowed women to serve in such a capacity, is not impressed.
We leave Borda with a packed lunch, saying goodbye to our first group of pilgrim-friends. Would we see them again on this journey? Continuing the walk up the mountain at 36 degrees, it isn’t long before I am glad I brought my jacket. We climb in elevation 2,600 feet within the first two hours and between yesterday and today will have climbed to 4,688 feet - one of the highest points on this journey.
Day Two is a spiritual awakening. I decide that morning to change my word for the trip from “survival” to “serenity.” The feeling of serenity within myself walking over the Pyrenees is overwhelming. My soul is full of joy. I endeavor, as I walk to the sun rising over the mountains behind us, to live for the moment, to not think ahead or relive the effort it took to get here, or even to think about past decisions I have made in my life. Rather I would focus on living in serenity with each moment of this journey, within my life going forward. This, it seems to me, is a worthy word for my pilgrimage.
As we work our way over the Pyrenees, I can’t help but think how many others have walked this route into Spain - not only the thousands over the centuries on this pilgrimage, but within the 20th Century alone, how many Jews or gypsies or minorities escaped persecution from the Nazis by crossing along this mountain pass - what must they have been thinking and how relieved could they have been leaving Vichy France. Or vice a versa, escaping Franco’s Dictatorship. This route truly has a feel of having been well traveled by many peoples for critical reasons.
The descent into Spain is harder than it first appears. We are glad to walk into the Spanish town of Roncesvalles to celebrate our first achievement - crossing the Pyrenees - and enjoy a beer with a Asian woman walking by herself on the patio of a busy restaurant catering to bus tours. However, rather than stay at the hostel nearby, a large monastery turned into a hostel with a mega-dormitory for the hundreds of pilgrims arriving from France at the end of every day, we chose, instead, to spend the night on top of the Pyrenees. Now though we still have a couple of hours of afternoon light, and with the Asian woman in our company, we walk on, past a production crew filming who knows what, following the Camino arrow down the mountain.
We should have stayed at the next town, Burguete-Auritz, where our Asian friend is staying and where Ernest Hemingway stayed in this area. It offers nice boutique hotels/hostels that we really should not have passed. Instead, we push ahead to the small town of Espinal where we made our reservations. This final 5K has us leave the main road and follow a dirt road between several active farms. The country road offers beautiful farm-life scenery past wire fences on either side, but is comprised of rough stones and caked dirt.
After the previous eleven miles hiking down into Spain, this proves to be too much for my feet and I am rewarded with my first painful blister on the bottom of my big toe of my right foot. I take a shower and lance the blister, wrapping it with Neosporin and a bandaid. I hope it will heal quickly and not be much of a problem tomorrow.
It is all good, though, and I determine with a grimace to stay serene. Our hostel is located over a bar, and it isn’t long before we meet an Irish man, Sean, who is speed-hiking the Camino. He left St. Jean that morning and wants to arrive in Santiago in two weeks. Though fun sharing hamburgers with Sean before going to bed, we don’t see him in the morning and assume he is miles in front of us.