Camino de Santiago Day 9: Ventosa to Santo Domingo de la Calzada
Walking alone and leaving behind the ghosts of dead strangers - I worry that in practicing gratitude for all I've done in my first week, that my Camino might have already peaked. Plus: chickens
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In Ventosa I’m alone again, and most people I’ve come to know over the first week are gone. You realise then that they could be gone forever.
Most people you’ve ever met in your life are gone forever. How would you feel if you knew you’d never see them again? If you suddenly started to think in such terms . You’re faced with this thought quite a lot on the Camino.
Here and gone.
The people you met and left along the way are effectively dead (even if their ghosts live on through social media) in that you’ll never see them again, or hear from them – you carry nothing more of them only their spirit, in whatever quantity they attached to and affected your own.
Some of them perform miracles on you and become saints in your mind, for what they’ve enabled you to achieve just by existing, whether you knew them well or they just stood there, things you couldn’t have conceived of before.
You must still walk alone though.
The greater the outer movement the greater the inner movement, regardless of what you think you’re thinking about, all this extended walking alone brings you closer to yourself; the closer you get to your geographical destination the closer you get to your inner destination – the answer to your questions, your reason for being here.
When you re-join the familiar world, or bump into familiar faces, you’ll be different after 2 days of walking alone, or 10 or 20. It feels like lifetimes have passed in a way you don’t get in everyday life, lived in circular routine rather than linear trajectory.
I’m hit with a strange thought as I come over the hill and begin a long gentle descent into Santo Domingo, across a big open expanse of farmland, no-one in sight: what if this is it? I’ve graciously acknowledged that my first week has been both incredibly enjoyable AND rewarding – but what if now it doesn’t get any better than this? Or just remains like the last couple of days – where I’ve just walked: sometimes up, sometimes down, but always alone?
God forbid: what if it’s boring?
It doesn’t last long but it’s something to ponder
The walking isn’t too bad
Though it would be nice to meet some people again this evening.
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I leave early in the morning. Not for the first time the day is made of ups and downs, and ups again, though don’t assume there’s no room for more downs.
The walk to Najera is long and boring.
I follow a gravel path past factories under bypasses and along a canal, the sort of place you’d expect to find discarded nappies and fridges and stolen trolleys, the remains of bonfires, burnt cans and cats fucked into canals, but I’m impressed to find none.
In fact I do believe that a couple of miles ago I passed the only pile of dumped rubbish that I would pass on the entire Camino, the realisation of its general absence quite remarkable and commendable. Â
I stop in a café, which I quite like, and look out at the town, which I’m not impressed with – until I make my way after into the old town proper, which I find quite charming. Remember: you’re walking from church to church, not from suburban fringe industrial estate to suburban fringe industrial estate; don’t judge a town until you reach its central plaza or place of worship.
Stopping seems to break momentum in either direction – stop if you don’t feel good, it might reset you, but don’t stop if you’re feeling good – because it might reset you.
There’s nicer scenery here: red dirt huge farms and distant mountains.
In Santo Domingo there’s a famous church where they keep live chickens, in memory of an old legend, and sure enough the chickens would wake us up at 6am.
I make some new friends and bump into some old ones. Catching up with the old ones - an eclectic bunch from Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, the US and Offaly - it seems like I’m not the only one who found parts of the previous days a slog. Even though I’m the only one who got seriously rained on, and even though we were separated by distances of many kilometres at a time (and of course, are different people), it seems like many of the people I shared the first week with were subject to shifts in mood and physical condition around the same times, or in the same places.
I’m starting to think that either certain sections of the road contain a particular unseen force that affects different people in similar ways, physicall and mentally, or that there’s some interesting energetic bonding going on by virtue of the fact that we all started the Camino at the same time, or have spent so much time together walking on the road.
Such series of events change the past and cast the last 24 or 30 hours of solitude in a new light – they were necessary, they were revitalising, - I might even now say enjoyable – I’m sufficiently re-energised for having spent that time alone, and now I’m ready to give myself to the world again.
A necessary stint spent in solitude before spiralling back to society to see what you’ve learned and measure how far you’ve walked.
Walk away from the world for a couple of days – just the odd 50km or so – to reclaim some of your humanity; then come back to it to share what you’ve learned about our need for human connection.
It’s not that I fear the chaos of solitude, but it needs parameters in order to have any meaning. One cannot walk alone forever, or it would be like an astronaut severed from his spaceship, floating away into inner space.
I may have misinterpreted the feeling coming down the hill earlier; rather than the trip having peaked, now I think it was just the feeling of the path – and the connection it forms to ordinary reality – dissolving behind me.
I inadvertently climb the bell-tower - about 6 stories of it - and am able to see approaching storms, as well as the roofs of the whole city, a new perspective on things. I resist the urge to take out my phone for a photo as I don’t trust my hands in the wind, and sure enough as I wait and watch the bells go off, causing me to jump so hard that if I’d had my phone in my hand, I would have tossed it off the edge.
You never know what to expect, something I’m conscious of but am still learning how to internalise so that awaiting the unexpected - or not - becomes effortless.
I have not seen it all yet, the first week only an introduction based on my expectations what I know of the real world, just adapting to the rhythm of the road, with its own community, culture, language and ways of doing things.
It’s only now we’re transitioning between phases, from the beginning to the middle, only now we understand how this whole thing works.
I’m feeling once again like we’re only getting started – a calm before the storm,
And now I’m more excited than ever for what lies ahead.
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