Grace Creek Almanac: Spanish Coast

SPANISH COAST – Our early September hiking along Camino Santiago’s coastal route carried us northward from A Guarda, near the border with Portugal. About 120 miles over seven days to Santiago de Compostela. Lots of rocky outcroppings and patches of beach, small vacation estates overlooking the Atlantic and nestled in tall dune grasses, clean and narrow stone-paved streets in small villages strung up against the sea.

Little churches and chapels of stone, houses and businesses of old stone construction–everything is built of stone and concrete including the landscape. It’s almost as if talented builders and the Tao Te Ching’s Master Carpenter planted magical stone seeds in the rocky underpinnings where they took root and grew and transformed in all kinds of minerally ways to become windows, walls, floors and roofs.

That’s right, they just grew up out of the ground that way.  (Strong coffee folks, that’s all I can tell you.) All stone except for the terracotta roof tiles.  I guess they burned up all the wood centuries ago for heat and cooking.

Entropy.  Taking the energy stored in wood and converting it for other uses. Entropy.  Releasing energy stored in walls protecting our egos so it can move to other parts of our brain for creative expression and understanding.

The Camino took us up and down coastal terrain through thick natural shrubbery and–closer to the paralleling coastal highway–across asphalt parking lots for touristy hotels, cafes and restaurants.

With August and vacation season behind us though, this was a quieter time. Also, at this distance from the final destination, not as many pilgrims greeted us with the ubiquitous Buen Camino! salutation.

Of course the closer we came to Santiago, the more populated the path became with the convergence of other Camino routes.

Halfway in the first day’s 18-mile hike, a red lighthouse perched high on a mountainous rocky outcropping in the distance north of us. While cautioning the maritime trade, the lighthouse for us also served notice that our way was about to turn eastward into Spain’s interior.

Clearly, ancient travelers afoot wanted to go eastward around that forbidding mountainous impediment as much as wary mariners wanted to stay westward of its dangers slinking down in hiding beneath the waves.

That interior section of the Camino over the much-less elevated pass imprinted the age of this journey deep and viscerally on my mind. Despite its rockiness, millions of travelers over thousands of years have helped level this often-steep section.

We picked our way over everything from gravel-sized stones to the rounded tops of vehicle-sized boulders. At one point I found myself staring at and mesmerized by wooden cart wheel-width ruts worn inches deep into solid granite. The agreeable scent of bordering tracts of cultivated eucalyptus forest further stayed my step as I considered the ruts.

If you’re thinking the same as I am, yup, you obviously know I was in a rut. But it was a pleasant rut I was in no hurry to shed.

Here was slightest but primary communication with ancients, like discovering an arrowhead in a freshly plowed field, holding it in your hand and thinking about the last hand that held it.  Communication was there in as common a thing as a rut. Ego melted in that consideration, melding my soul with countless others across the almost limitless scope of human experience.

Roman legions and their traveling communities eventually evolved into steadily northward flowing currents of pilgrims seeking a different form of treasure and higher authority.

John Denver sang about it with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: “Mountains may disappear, rivers will dry up, and so it goes with everything but love.”

But what about the rain-punctured egos I promised in the previous post? They’re up next but I’ve asked enough of you today.  If you’ve stayed with me this far, thank you for reading.  And don’t forget to spread a little love around.  A little by lots of us goes a long way.

Buen Camino!