Bloody Animals

Elegant, gentle Harry is really just a hound dog, a ruthless killer. When the fox took off almost under his nose, he just had to chase it. Pad and I watched from afar as Harry and Bella tracked the crafty creature across a wide field and into a tree-lined ditch, jinking and jiving, yipping with pure doggy joy. (Lulu was on the lead, and could only moan.)

We  saw the fox cut across an adjacent field. He gave 'em the slip, we thought.
We walked on, watching for Harry and Bella to catch us up.
Twenty minutes later came Bella, with flecks of blood on her legs and chest and muzzle. Oh my.
We climbed up onto the tumberon to see where Harry was. In the distance he was coming, head down, tired. Evidently the fox we saw run away was not the fox in question. Or some other fox had taken the fall for him. Because when Harry came round the corner, he looked like something from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
I do not like my dogs killing wildlife. Foxes have as much right to live as any other critter, but these dogs were born and bred for chasing them down. Lulu mixed it up before with these same foxes, not very long ago. Everyone came out of that encounter without any bloodshed, far as I know. But this time, Harry's face and paws, neck and muzzle were covered in fresh bright blood. It was not all fox blood. Harry's face was bleeding, his mouth was bleeding, his paws were, too. It looked like maybe the fox won this fight.

We got everyone home. We sponged down Harry, put some Betadine on the obvious injuries. I phoned the vet. He was out purging sheep. We'd have to wait til 4:30 p.m., bring him in then.
And we did.
By then, Harry's slender nose was swollen to a shnozz. Blood crusted his front end. He was sad, crying, limping a little. He knew he needed help. He jumped right into the back of the Kangoo.

Veterinary care is a great cultural disconnect between Spain and the United States. In America, when your dog is shredded by a fox, you drop him off at the vet's office and wait in anguish until they phone you up with the outcome and the bill. Here in Spain, the person who brings in the patient is the person who serves as surgical nurse, anesthetist, and handler.

Pet ownership here is not just cuddling and feeding and sweetness and light. It is pinning down the flailing, screaming creature who was your pet, watching him pant and twitch and fight as the second dose of tranquilizer takes effect. It's holding his head while his eyes roll and his tongue lolls and his blood and saliva dries on your hands and face and the walls of the exam room. It's looking someplace else while the doctor swabs the Betadine, runs next door for sutures that will dissolve inside a dog's mouth, while the doctor says "look, look how deep this bite is, the goddamn fox was going for his throat!" while he pumps a puncture full of black iodine with a plunger meant for printer cartridges.  

The Bar Deportivo is right across the street from the veterinarian's office. I wonder if the vet gets a percentage of all the pet-owners who head over there after their pets take on foxes, automobiles, rat poison, or the neighbor's bull. Or just the vet.  

Here in Old Castile, if you own a dog or cat, you assist the vet during "procedures." You give the follow-up injections to your animals -- intramuscular, or just under the skin -- donkeys, dogs, cats, rabbits. It's a given. You leave the vet with a little bagful of IV needles, the anti-inflammatory, the antibiotic, the vitamin, the one to make him sleepy. You learn quick how. Now I know how, too. I think this is a better way. Pet owners are so much more responsible this way... you see your pet suffer, you suffer yourself, you are hands-on part of the cure. You cannot just hand over the animal and a credit card, and pick him up when it's all over. It's your animal. You have to take care of it.

It took a full hour to stitch Harry's muzzle and gums and shoot him full of healing chemistry. He'll probably be OK, but he's going to hurt for a while. He's a mess. His stitched and shaven skin is sprayed with blue antiseptic and silver scar-forming stuff. He looks like a clown after a four-day bender. God knows what he feels like.

The vet carried him out to the car, laid him on a beach towel in the back. Once home, Paddy and I carried him, supine on the same towel, into the barn, onto the busted old sofa. The other dogs came to sniff him. His eyes rolled. They turned away and asked where their dinner might be.

I have to shoot up Harry Dog with two kinds of medicine for the next three days.
The vet didn't give us a bill. Not til Monday, he said. Not till we see how he's doing.

We will probably see that fox again, the vet told us. Tough as nails, foxes. His own terrier dog has its face carved up like this with some regularity. It's just awful, he says, but that's nature. That's life. That's dogs, foxes, pets, animals in Spain.

We signed up for this. It is how it ought to be. We stopped on the way home to buy him some soft, canned dog food. And for me, some Albarino, Galician white wine. Sustenance. Anesthesia.

Poor old Harry.
Poor old me.

Finished Men

They are dark figures, staring out of black-and-white pictures in black robes and collars, owlish spectacles, jowls, bushy hermit beards, adolescent peach-fuzz. They're men from another world, another time, far away from here.
They could be ghosts.
They are from towns I know, many of them quite near: Carrion de los Condes, Terradillos de los Templarios, Villada, Grajal de Campos, Fromista, Becerril. Others are from Camino towns: Banos de Montemayor, Villadangos del Paramo, Puente la Reina, Puebla de Sanabria, Zamora.
They are priests and monks and friars: Jesuits, Augustinians, Capuchin Franciscans, Carmelites, Dominicans, Hospitalers of St. John of God. Their names are Juan, Manuel, Alejo, Froilan, Miguel, Claudio, Tino, Victor, Damaso.
They are teachers and preachers, students, philosophers, healers and most likely sinners, too. Boys from here, some of them grown up, some of them very young indeed.
All of them are dead.
All of them are martyrs, killed for being clerics.
They were killed for being part of the Spanish Catholic church, a monolithic institution deeply loathed by many underclass, under-educated, underprivileged Spaniards back in the 1930's. Their soutanes and birettas set them apart, and when civil war broke down the old order, their uniforms marked these men for death.
Now, 80 years later, their pictures hang in honored places in the churches where they were baptized, back when they were baby boys, before they grew up to take vows. They are honored for their sacrifice, if not their holy lives -- there is no living memory of any of these men. It's assumed they all were beyond reproach.  

They are "Beatos" now, blessed, by papal decree in 2013.  They are not saints yet, but violent death made them special.  Death by firing squad, neglect, long imprisonment. Torn apart by mobs, thrown from moving vehicles, left to starve in a cold room. Many of them died together, and were buried in the same ditch, in places with names like Paracuellos de Jarama, Villecas, Algodor, Escalante Crossing.
They may not have died for the Gospel of Christ, but they died for their religion.
Martyrs, murdered for their faith, their souls gather under the altar in heaven and cry out "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord," or at least that's what St. John heard them saying, when he visited there.
And here we work and live and walk, surrounded by this cloud of witnesses. Here as Holy Week comes at us, contemplating the martyrdom of Jesus himself, and all the martyrs in the news -- Christians, Muslims, Martin Luther King, Jr., freedom riders, Meredith, Malcolm X... politics, religion, oppression, and vengeance, stupidity and violence so common they've become banal.
I wonder if Claudio and Victor and Alejo cried to God for mercy when the knock came on their door.

Even Jesus cried.
Not even God's son got a pass when the time came to die.        

Empezamos

Monasterio de San Anton, image taken from a website I will credit asap

The fading sun shone through a weird ruined rose window, made up of letters T. Taus.The symbol of St. Anthony. The moon rose quickly as we walked in what once was a church.
The Monasterio de San Anton is two kilometers out of Castrojeriz, and almost too Hollywood to be for real. It's a shattered church, roofless, with a monumental arch that every pilgrim must pass through on the way into town. The monks used to leave food out there for the passers-by who arrived after the gates had closed.
But the monastery went out of business 200 years ago. It was turned into a farm, its once-cohesive layout is now subdivided, fenced-off, sliced and diced into odd corners and bricked-up doorways. Somehow, ten years ago, a local foundation got hold of the part that once was the church. They installed a six sets of bunk beds in the sheep barn that once was a sacristy, and a camp stove and dining table alongside. They opened a bare-bones pilgrim albergue in the ruins.
There's no electricity and no hot water. There's precious little running water at all -- the spring the monastery used 400 years ago is still the only water supply, and it needs a good digging-out. No one's much disposed to that, because nobody really owns the place.
It's pretty much what most pilgrim albergues were like, 20-some years ago, before the Camino de Santiago became a money-making proposition.
Nowadays, hotels and albergues and hostels offer pilgrims heat, laundry, swimming pools, privacy, full menus and safety lighting... for a price most happily pay.
This old place operates on donations. It's open all day. Pilgrims who stay there have to put up with what they get -- cold water, candle light, a scruffy yard full of weeds and rubble, a dinner of salad and pasta and canned fruit, and probably a job washing-up afterward.
But a bed among the ruins... how romantic! (No matter if the mattress has too many miles on it.)
And after the sun goes down, there's a spectacular show of stars above the broken pillars.
There's an energy to San Anton. You can feel it humming by the gate, where the bees have a hive under the jasmine.

The Fraternidad Internacional del Camino de Santiago, as one of its initiatives, is going to staff the place. We (I am on the board of directors) can't criticize how built-up and commodified the camino has become if we are not willing to set an example ourselves. And so we will.

We visited today, me and Juan Carlos, FICS vice president and head of everything Camino in Astorga. We looked it all over, we asked all the important questions, we took notes. And we marveled a little, too. It is a magical place.
We're putting the documents together, and he'll take it all to the board after next week. It looks like a go. We need to raise about 15,000 Euro to bring it up to code, and it's a demanding post for hospitaleros. But it's the real deal. Total camino. Really exciting.  

March came in with a bright, warm, dry, fake spring. Things are beginning. After that long wait in the darkness, after the lonely cold, even when I really don't trust the light, things start to happen. The seeds planted in the dead black ground start germinating.

I am not sure how much I am supposed to say. I don't want to expose the tender shoots to too much light too soon. Things grow very slowly in this latitude. The papers are not signed yet.

But I have waited and waited, and worked, too.

priests round here have their work cut out

I haven't blogged because I am very deep into an editorial re-write on a very large book, a reportage, a true-life story of the crew of a World War II Pacific gunboat. Compelling, frustrating, hurry-up-and-wait stuff... How to keep the reader interested between the blasts of gunfire? It's challenging work, very time-consuming. Now that the albergue in Terradillos is open, we have almost no pilgrims again. And just now, that's a good thing.

Because we are starting things.
This summer we will -- God willing -- have at least one priest here in the house, serving Mass every day in Terradillos or Moratinos, in English or in Spanish. We have the blessing of the bishop and the support of the de facto pastor in charge of camino ministry for Castilla y Leon. It's an outgrowth of Camino Chaplaincy, a program pioneered by my friends John and Stephen in Santiago de Compostela. For the past two summers, volunteer priests have offered Masses and confessions in English at a dedicated chapel in the great cathedral, the goal of the Santiago pilgrim. This year, the program is expanding out onto the path itself... and because we have a spare room in the house, and a rather empty lineup of altars in our part of the Way, we decided to give it a shot.

Our first priest, an Irishman with experience in missions, arrives this week for a look around the place. We will feed him on suckling lamb and Ribero del Duero wine, and hope he likes the look of our scruffy little neighborhood. (Paddy has promised to be nice, and to keep off the Wittgenstein.)  

Oh, and we are deep in negotiations with Jose Antonio, our friendly builder. We want to turn the old kitchen and storage room and toilet into its own little apartment, but my vision, alas, outstrips available funds. I must compromise, or pick a winning lottery number, or find another builder.

And so grow the green shoots in Moratinos.
If you want to serve at San Anton, and you are serious about making the trip and living pretty rough for a couple of weeks, let me know in a week or two. I will start putting something together.

Thank you all for standing by while I sit in the dark.
I am a depressive old thing. But I find some pretty important things in there, if I shut up and just be still.  Because eventually, things change. The light comes on.
Just look at what blooms.