It’s a HOT 94 degrees in Roncesvalles today but when we start from Refuge Orisson after a quick breakfast of toast and jam, the temperature is in the low seventies.
However, within the first 20 minutes of the climb – as arduous as we have been warned – I am already breaking into a sweat and wondering with dismay how I am going to walk eighteen excruciating kilometers of rocks and steep inclines and a backpack seemingly full of the very rocks I am circumspectly navigating. We have all left more or less at the same time – Nance, M & R, Mac, Barbara – M & R are now teamed up with Barbara – and the rest of us alternate between stumbling ahead on occasion and falling behind when the going gets too tough. The hills are alive with the sound of music – the tinkle tinkle tinkle of bells on the flocks and flocks and flocks of sheep that we see after every twist and turn of our climb. A slight breeze now and then feels like a touch of Heaven.
As she does every morning ma enters my head abruptly and I am pulled back to the day I lose her. The first thoughts that cross my mind even as it is registering that she will never again open her eyes and look at me are piteously pitiful. I think about how she has taken with her my role as a child – a daughter – replaced cruelly with that of an orphan. I remember how when we first adopted our (younger) son I would often look upon him sadly thinking “poor motherless child” even as I chided myself saying “you stupid woman – *you* are his mother”. Even so I knew what my sadly jumbled thoughts meant and now I start weeping again for both of us – both motherless children. So long as ma was around I could still talk about my childhood – shared memories that only she and I had lived through. I think about the story she repeated many times – of when I was a few years old and we were living with my uncle in Bombay while my dad was away at a non-family Air-Force station – how I would cry up a storm if she left me with my uncle and cousin even for a couple of hours to do groceries. She would try to sneak away and invariably I would find out and hurl my sniveling sniffling self onto the balcony from where I would supposedly cry through the railing – “at least say – ‘I’ll see you soon’ – before you leave ma”! Did I have a premonition even back then – when I was so very little – that ma would one day leave me – for one last time – without saying goodbye?! I will no longer see her, not soon, not later – NOT EVER!!!! This thought is a pounding drum-beat inside my head and I find it unbearably sad and cannot stand the finality of it. My weeping has now changed from a quiet flow to loud gusty sobs – my throat is hurting from the big chunk of grief that is choking me and making it hard to swallow. I am grateful for the relative privacy as there is no one within sight to hear or witness my devastation. I also recognize that grieving (like childbirth) comes in waves – each time the intensity peaks it is followed by a respite – sometimes of a few hours and sometimes as long as a whole day – where both body and mind are so drained from the depth of the emotion that there is is no more room for sorrow – and for this too I am grateful.
The Sun is high and it is a scorcher of a day made worse by the steep ascent and the backpack that is getting progressively heavier. I catch up
with Nance and Mac and we all groaningly heave our packs off our backs and agree to break for lunch.
Lunch is a bocadilla (sandwich) – packed by chef Adonis at Refuge Orisson. After a few minutes of being off our feet and lounging as comfortably as it is possible to lounge on jutting rocks, the Pyrenees works its magic and we begin to appreciate the beauty of our surroundings – the mountains, the sheep, the wildflowers. Mac recounts an amazing experience he has just had – my first mystical magical Camino story. He says “you know how every pilgrim greets you with a “buen camino” as they walk past and how you look up ever so briefly to repeat back the same greeting?” It’s clearly a rhetorical question but both Nance and I nod our heads in agreement. Apparently a woman called out “buen camino” to Mac and when he turned around to wish her he saw nobody behind him or on either side or ahead – in fact not a soul in sight and yet he had heard the greeting loud and clear. He insists that he is not a fanciful person and is as cut and dried as they come and swears by the achy feet of a thousand pilgrims that he heard what he heard. I readily believe him and am thrilled and excited by the fantasy of friendly female spirits walking beside us – maybe one will wish me next knowing how down in the doldrums I am – maybe it’ll even be ma herself though I can’t imagine how she would be speaking in Spanish – unless – (of course that’s it) – there is no language barrier in the spirit world.
Energized by my wishful thinking I bounce back on my feet raring to continue and be on the lookout for spiritual encounters. A steady hour of plodding laboriously uphill puts paid to my spirit – within and without. Brutal as the climb is, I start longing for it when the descent begins. I am so glad that I have my trekking poles and they are veritable life-savers but even with those poles to steady and support my downhill journey my knees are feeling tremendous pain. Each step down is excruciating and I begin to fear that I will be stuck on this mountain top – neither being able to climb back up nor climb down – maybe I will have to be airlifted. By now the grunts and groans are audible and loud as many of us suffer some amount of agony. My knees are shaking in pain and I think of all the movies and books where mafiosos break the knees (with a hockey stick) of those who don’t pay their debts and I shudder in empathy knowing this is how they must feel.
It takes me 7.5 hours to walk 18 kms and I feel battered and bruised as I hobble haltingly into Roncesvalles. Luckily the monastery turned albergue is not very far from the path that emerges from the woods into the village. It is a huge albergue and after two days of tiny cozy Beilari and Orisson I’m lost in the sea of pilgrims. This week the volunteers helping out at the albergue are from Holland so I break into my standard Dutch routine – “Ik kan een klein beetje Nederlands spreken. Ik wonend in Nederlands voor twee jaren – eerst en Leiden en daan en Den Haag maar ik heb bijna alles vergeeten” – this translates to “I can speak a little bit of Dutch. I lived in Holland for two years – first in Leiden and then in The Hague but I have forgotten almost all my Dutch”. I don’t use up all my sentences in one go – I use them one at a time and I have perfected saying this with such a great Dutch accent that people are typically fooled into thinking I am actually very fluent and start gabbing back with great speed. That is when I either make an excuse and disappear or if that is not possible I switch to Spanish with a casual swagger and say “ahora hablo solamente espanol y ingles”. Most Europeans speak at least two languages so I cross my fingers behind my back and hope like hell they pick English and not Spanish because my Spanish speak is twenty more sentences than Dutch at best and random vocab words at worst.
We have to remove our shoes and keep them in a separate shoe room along with our poles. This becomes standard practice in almost all the albergues we stay in. Our bunk beds are upstairs and it’s 2 bunk beds to a “cubicle” – with curtains for privacy. Nance and I have begged for lower bunks and we get them though not in the same cube – however, we’re practically neighbors and fairly close to the showers and the toilets so that’s good. R & M are around the corner on the other side of the corridor and they and Barbara are still a threesome and have vouchers to dine at one restaurant and Nance and I have vouchers to dine at another. There is no sign of Mac and we get quite worried about him. There is a laundry room downstairs and N and I make the mistake of taking our clothes in separately and are told we must pay 3.50 each for washing and drying. Given that our bed itself costs that much, this seems excessive so we tell them we are together and would like to wash in one load but nope – everyone tries this so they are wise to our money-grubbing ways. However, a nice Dutch volunteer says that when my load is done my clothes will be “delivered” to my bed – all laundered and folded. For such an unexpected luxury, I ignore my twinging wallet. Meanwhile, Barbara has won over the volunteers as they are fellow countrymen and women and persuaded them to wash all 3 bundles – hers, R’s and M’s in one load, so theirs’ is 7e divided between three people. R tells me this is confidence so I am not allowed to fight with the volunteers and say “hey – how come you did theirs but not ours’ – NOT FAIR!!!”
Nance and I head over to our restaurant for dinner and bump into Mac. We are thrilled to see he made it ok. Mac is not staying at the albergue with the commoners but instead tells us that he walked into the first (and only?) hotel he saw and demanded they give him the best they’ve got. His room costs 80e and our jaws drop at this sinful extravagance – surely this is not very pilgrim-like, this indulgence?! But that’s Mac for you – obviously well-heeled – and not just with brand-name walking shoes. He tells us how he threw off his backpack and just flopped on the bed face down and couldn’t and wouldn’t get up for an hour. He is now ready for dinner but cannot dine with us because he doesn’t have an albergue voucher. Promising to catch up with him the following morning on our walk to Zubiri, we walk over to the dining room and sit down to a dinner of vegetable soup and bread, lasagna, gingerbread brownie for dessert and vino vino and more vino. We meet Stella and Dawn from Canada – Levi from Arizona who appears to be running the Camino at a great speed of 8 kms an hour or some such. We attend the mass at church after dinner and I don’t understand a word as usual but the others who do, are moved to tears. I am too tired and achy to find out what the priest said and drag my weary feet back to the albergue and climb up like a very old person with broken knees – one painful step at a time – up the endless staircase and stumble into bed.
