Saturday, April 16, 2011

Pilgrims book excerpt 6 - nearing the end

It is incredible, this drive and urgency now pulsing through the Camino. I see feet raw with blisters, covered with white flaps of skin, pink flesh and weeping holes. I don’t know how they can manage 10 steps, yet they travel more than 20 km each day.

I wonder if people would push themselves so much if they were walking alone. But it can’t be that they simply don’t want to lose the people they are walking with, that they must keep up with the pilgrim horde. It’s almost as if a great hand is pushing us forward, urging us along.

In France it was quite common for people to rest for a day or more. But back then, Santiago was still more than 1,000 kilometres away. Now, we could be there in ten days or less. It seems impossible to stop.

It’s the third of July. Two months ago, I was arriving in Le Puy, nervous and unsure of what was ahead of me. Has it really only been two months? I am sure the calendar does not apply here. It has been two years. Or two decades. I feel my body growing old. The limbs are less sure. I tire more quickly. Once I thought about walking back from Santiago, now I look forward to arriving with a distant, faded zeal.

There are times when I want to get off this conveyer belt that keeps pushing us forward, ever faster. One morning I met an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with vegetables. I stopped and talked to her in my broken Spanish, asking where she was going and if I could carry her wheelbarrow for her. But even after she finally understood what I was offering, she would not let me help. She laughed with shy embarrassment, self-consciously adjusted her thick, plastic glasses, and encouraged me to go along. “Buen camino,” she wished.

I had been looking for some way to connect, to not just pass blindly through this beautiful countryside. The momentum of the Camino is growing, sweeping me into a mighty river in which it is difficult to steer my own craft, to cling for a moment to the shore.

No comments:

Post a Comment