Pilgrim's Road

hoped the journey would give him time to think things out, but even if he found no answers, he thought the experience would have been worth it. Even being alone was something new to him, and it had felt very strange. Several times he had been on the point of giving up and going home. But after a week all that had changed and now he was really enjoying himself. He was looking forward to arriving at Santiago and wanted to push on as fast as he could.
    Kurt said he didn’t mind when he arrived. Walking the Camino was easy in spite of blisters, wet feet, aching shoulders and the like. Life was reduced to its basics: eating, sleeping and walking. It left your mind free. There was an unmistakable air about Kurt that I came to recognise as the ‘pilgrim look’. People encountered in remote mountains or on desert crossings sometimes have it too. It comes, I think, from being alone with one’s thoughts for long periods, while one’s body is being disciplined by long hard activity. Possibly the ‘pilgrim look’ reflects something of the inner struggle, or maybe it reveals a new sense of purpose or awareness, but however one interprets it, it is a less guarded expression than people usually present to the world.
    I found Kurt’s story particularly interesting. He was the only son of a man who had abandoned the priesthood in order to marry — a rather scandalous thing to do sixty years ago. Kurt said he thought his father had remained a priest in his heart and was never really happy or at peace with himself. He had died quite young, and Kurt had long intended to make the pilgrimage to Santiago as a sort of memorial to him. It was a journey his father had wanted to make, but had felt debarred from.
    By comparison with his father’s, Kurt’s own life had been very straightforward. He had pursued a successful career in medicine, had married someone he had known since childhood, and had raised four healthy children, who were now all happily married themselves. It was the death of his wife the year before, coinciding with his retirement, that had given him the jolt he needed to finally fulfil the debt he felt he owed his father. ‘If I left it,’ he said, C I realised I would never have the courage to do it. But you only have to start, the rest follows by itself.’
    Being with Kurt and Theo for an evening made me think how nice it would be to make the journey with other people. The ideal I felt, would be to walk or cycle alone all day, and meet up in the evening to share a meal, talk over the events of the day, and continue the issues that had been raised the previous evenings. But any ideas we three had discussed, or new thoughts we had raised would have to be pursued alone.
    One thing all three of us had agreed upon was how right it felt to be staying in the refugios whose simple basic accommodation was so much more in keeping with the spirit of the Camino than hotels would have been. Only when there was no hot water with which to wash, or when all one’s clothes were wringing wet and there was nowhere to dry them did one hanker for greater comfort.
    The following morning dawned even more darkly than the previous one and I was glad I had only a short day planned. Theo would be miles ahead of me by noon and Kurt would be somewhat behind, so there was little prospect of us meeting up again. Accordingly we made our farewells all, I think, feeling a little richer for the evening’s company.
    My journal records the day as one of ‘steep hills, monumental rain, and severe cold’. Further down the same page is another heartfelt moan of ‘wind like a cold fist in the face, biting rain, freezing fingers, with racing trucks, cars and more hills making the whole thing a most onesided battle’. A line of Bunyan, followed immediately by a question mark shows how low I was at that point.
     
‘...There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim’?
     
    In between the two crises de coeur is the record of a visit to the monastery of Santa María la Real at Najera. I think it was the only time in the day when the icy rain running down inside my collar ceased to matter. The church contains the ancient royal pantheon of the Kings of Navarre, for Nájera was once their capital before it was annexed by Castile. The sense of the Camino is very strong in the small area around the centre of the old town where the river flows in a great bow close to the overhanging cliff that shelters the