Summer Rocks

I am very happy. I am riding the waves of whatever the wind blows this way. And it´s blowing a nice warm breeze across the plains, riffling the fat heads of rye and barley, and sending sharp rye seeds down the ears of  poor Tim Dog. (One fat head seeks  another?)

The farmers are cutting grain and baling straw and sending up great clouds of dust. Work on the new pilgrim hostel is coming right along. (alas, not the Italian albergue!)  Sunflowers have another half-meter to grow before they bloom, but they´re getting there, and the great fields of them are going to be spectacular by mid-July, just in time to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

As you know, this is the very best time of year for me. Everything is so alive and bright and warm, right at its peak -- except maybe sunflowers and tomatoes, which gives me something to look forward to. (The tomatoes are getting near, however. I made a gazpacho that was right up there this week... another couple of weeks and it´ll be right in To Die For territory. I may even post the recipe, it´s that good -- if you guys want me to.) (I am feeling parenthetical. Just so you are warned, if I become discursive.)

I am doing lots of writing exercises in the wee hours of these days, following a track laid down by Natalie Goldberg, she of "Writing Down the Bones" fame. Religious Fundamentalists might have trouble with her approach to writing, but I´m of a Buddhist turn of mind myself, so she suits me fine. I can´t recommend her highly enough, her exercises keep me limber and sharp and very much alive and In The Moment. (I tried to link you to her books on Amazon, but these days it seems the Information Superhighway has left me in the dust. I have been on the Internet since well before Netscape and browsers, even, but now I feel stupid and slow. A dinosaur carcass on the Information Superhighway. (Which is, I am sure, an antique term.))

This is why the blog post is rather stream-of-consciousness, because the writing exercises I´m doing this time of night are that way, and I like to keep you guys on your toes, and I had a glass of Rectoral de Amandi (Mencia wine from the Ribera Sacra region of Galicia, the vineyards I passed on the Camino Invierno) before I sat down.. This is the only time I have to write, so you´ll have to take it as it comes.  Most of my real writing juice is going into a book. I am having a really wonderful time getting that project going, and it´s not the Moratinos Life book I talked about before, but something more timely that´s evolved right out of the middle of it.

And in the middle of all this wine and scribbling come the pilgrims, hospitaleros, and dramas, and Paddy falling off the bicycle and scraping the hell out of his elbow, an elegant garden luncheon with Marianne la Suiza, and a call from The Federation for me to come out to La Rioja to do an emergency hospitalero gig, and a call from the Church for us to open up Sto. Tomas here in Moratinos once a week so the passing pilgs can come in and have a gander. So we are doing all of the above. Kim is still here, making it all glossy and shimmery rather than ratty and unraveled, although I think she´s gonna hit the trail again pretty soon. (We did a Road Trip up to Ponferrada yesterday, and I took us on a sentimental journey up to Peñalba, where I started on the Camino Invierno a couple of months ago...we climbed a 3-kilometer mountain path to the cave where the holy hermit St. Genadio lived 1,300 years ago. (I wanna write his story. Except I think he was a woman. Really.) here are some pictures. And notice the new header. That´s Kim´s doing. She´s phenomenal. And she´s the header up at the top of this entry, looking all edgey.

Put it all together and it means we are happy here at The Peaceable Kingdom. We are doing what we oughtta. (Like the kiddie song, about the little white duck, swimmin´ on the water, doing what she oughtta-r.)

Summer rocks.

I might be another little while before I post again, due to that emergency gig. It´s between Estella and Los Arcos, for all you Camino-heads: out in the middle of the vineyards in La Rioja.

How I suffer.

He Had To Die

At first it was simple hen-pecking, dominance games, lovers´quarrels. But those eventually degenerated into bloody sexual battery. Soon the suspect, a cocky youngster with a bad attitude, was assaulting everyone in his path, challenging every authority, leaving a trail of blood and curses in his wake.

So we killed him.

This afternoon Milagros, a seasoned poultry handler, did what none of us had the guts to do. She gathered Mad Max the rooster into her blue apron, grasped him tight in her capable hands, and broke his neck.

Offing Max was not a sudden decision. Snowy the hen is just now recovering from the infected wounds beneath her wings, where Max´s spurs gouged her skin. All but two of our hens, all of them half the size of their magnificent mate, have bare patches on their backs, where his claws and beak ripped away their feathers. Chicken Answers website says mating doesn´t have to be so violent, but some roosters just like it that way. Solutions? Buy more hens. Separate him from the girls. Or casserole the cockerel.

We don´t want more hens just now. Yesterday we tried separating Max from the flock, but somehow he engineered a jailbreak – and soon the entire flock, battered and torn, was making a beeline for our vegetable garden. I rounded-up the hens easily enough (the girls come when I call to them), but once they were safely inside the fence, Max decided to take me on. Attacking Paddy has become a daily sport for him, but Max always treated me with respect. Until yesterday. It was time for a Showdown.

He ruffled his feathers into a Samurai warrior helmet, hopped forward twice on his absurd toes, then launched himself at me. I took all 20 pounds of seething chicken fury right at the knees. Wings flapping and claws clawing, he caught hold of my pantleg with his beak. He didn´t realize I was holding a chunk of kindling in my hand. I caught him a heavy blow upside the head, which sent him tumbling into the chicken yard. I closed the door behind me. Inside, Max picked himself off the ground and staggered upright. He shook out his ruff, stretched out his neck, and crowed.

He thought he´d won. Foolish fowl.

I went inside and sat down at the table where Patrick was reading. “We need to talk,” I told him.

“It´s that mad rooster,” he said, not looking up. “I know.”

We agreed we don´t need a cockerel. Hens happily lay eggs without any help from a male of their species. And they appear more presentable when their feathers are not gouged out.

This afternoon was my turn to sit at the church and greet visiting pilgrims, which usually means greeting visiting neighbors, at least in the slow afternoons. And when Milagros arrived, I told her about Max, the abuse, the attacks, the hubris. Milagros said she´d happily whack him for me. Roosters his age are delicious, she said, if you cook them long enough. Lots of dark meat. She walked home with me, scooped the big bird right off his feet, and carried him away to meet his fate.

And so this evening Estevín, Milagros´ son and our Honorable Mayor, delivered to The Peaceable the earthly remains of Max, tucked in a plastic bag, plucked and ready for the crock-pot. I was not present for the encounter, but Paddy and Kim told Estevín to take the critter home and eat him. They couldn´t bear to chow down on someone they know.

It´s full-circle then, for old Max – he returned to whence he came. Milagros and Esteban gave Max to us last year, when he was still a leggy youngster. Milagros said she´d give us another teenager to replace him, but the new guy probably will grow up to be just as nasty. That´s just how roosters are, if you don´t eat them when they´re young.

Max had a good innings. He got to grow into a magnificent creature, who greeted each day with a hearty song, stood his ground against Patrick´s daily incursions, and gobbled grubs and grain and greenery. He was wonderfully stupid and gleefully game. But he abused his wives. Which is something up with which we shall not put. Not in a place noted for peaceability.

It had to happen. I was not the executioner, but I was the executive – I made the final decision. I contracted the killing. His blood is on my hands.

And his carcass is on Milagros´ table. Stewed slowly with lashings of cognac, the fine fat free-range Max will make them a magnificent dinner.

All-Star Lineup

Just look what happens when I go away for a mere ten days. An All-Star lineup of Camino Personalities passed through here, most of whom I love and enjoy deeply. Kim and Paddy fed and accommodated them, and things only got a bit ropey once that I heard of.

The fun began before I even left, when Frederic from France showed up – only moments after Federico the Guitar Guy left with his latest crew of guitarristas. Last year both Freds were here simultaneously, and managed to make the chicken-hut door work. The two of them have nothing in common except both their names are Fred and both turn up here at the same time. Eerie. Frederic went to work cementing the cracks on the front of the bodega (he likes to work when he visits, God bless him!)

I left. Then the fun started. First came some Dutch and a Kiwi (a person from New Zealand). Frederic left when they did, heading out for Fatima in Portugal. A German man who stayed here two summers ago returned: Rainer, the guy who thinks he is Jesus. (A second coming of Christ?) We get lots of saints and True Believers here, but this one takes the prize. Paddy lost patience with the Son of God when he didn´t offer to help with washing-up. (I don´t think anyone was told to Go to Hell, thank God.)

That evening, Frank arrived – Frank the Scottish hospitalero. He stayed a couple of days and helped Kim make our dog-dug front patio into this: A lovely little herb garden!

You can see he finally got Nabi to cuddle up, too!

After Frank came Sue Kenney, a charismatic pilgrim from Canada. Sue´s life changed radically after she walked The Way, and she´s since produced inspirational books and videos, gives talks all over Canada, and hosts a website and Camino walks aimed especially at women who would probably never dare to do it alone. This summer Sue is walking the Camino back-to-front. She started in Santiago and walking eastward. (that´s her in the top photo, doing just that.) She stopped into The Peaceable for a night, and charmed them all with her many stories.

And then came George, accompanied by his godson Jake.

George Greenia is another Camino Personality, a medievalist and Spanish professor at College of William and Mary in Virginia. He and I produced a magazine together many moons ago. He´s a witty speaker and a top scholar on all things Camino... we had a quick visit in Burgos a month or so ago when he was there to address a conference on world pilgrimages. George´s present pilgrimage might look like a penance: he´s accompanying a group of 21 American pilgrims for five-plus weeks, many of them in a “high-maintenance” category. He´s pulled a muscle. A close family member died suddenly in an accident. But George keeps on ticking.(that´s George in the photo in the red jacket on the left, and his godson up there in shorts.)

I am happy to report that he and Sue and Jake went with Paddy and Kim and assorted other pilgs over to Carrion de los Condes that evening to hear yet another set of Peaceable friends perform at the beautiful Iglesia Santa Maria: Adam and Will, the guitarist and violinist who recorded an album here last October, are back on the camino, part of Fred/Federico´s concert series. Jake did a reading at the pilgrim blessing. And afterward, everybody came back to Moratinos for a great feast!

Once that great event passed, the Japanese arrived: Sonomi, Chisado, and Arigato. They were fascinated by the dogs, and Tim and Una allowed themselves to be petted and fussed-over endlessly. And our hard-boiled eggs, usually distinguished from the raw ones with smiley faces or a letter H drawn on the shells, are marked with beautiful Japanese characters. The ladies were here two days, and were succeeded by Hom Sung Bae, a Korean accountant and blog-follower. He stayed two days, too – he wanted to meet ME! Jet-lagged as I was I don´t think I made a great impression, but he seemed a lovely man. He bought Kim a birthday cake and huge candles to decorate it. 

Scattered among those days was a Murphy disappearance and reappearance; creation of an isolation ward in the chicken hut, courtesy Milagros; a big loud “discussion” at a town meeting over what to do with money earned keeping the church open last summer; four days of rain; and another film-making triumph from Kim.

I missed it all.

Now that I´m back, nothing whatsoever is going on. No pilgrims, no guitarists, no messiahs. Just a whole lot of weeding to do in the garden. Laundry, and dogs, and reading, and writing.

Here´s the movie. Hope you like dogs!

Home

Here I am at my mother's home outside Apollo, an Appalachian enclave in rural western Pennsylvania near the city of Pittsburgh. I lived in this area for many years, and spent much of that time planning how I might get out. It's a sad place to spend much time in. I could see only a bedraggled region raped and left for dead by a century and a half of mining, steelmaking, smelting, and every other kind of human pollution. Its low self-image and battered economy and general malaise always make it a great place to be FROM, rather than a place to Be.

It's a similar story down in suburban Washington, D.C., where I spent Friday evening and Saturday with my daughter Elizabeth. She lives along Columbia Pike, in a neighborhood called Tyson's Corner. A place with a name like that you'd expect to be broad fields and buggies and friendly farmers called Flem and LuElla... and it probably was, up til the mid-20th century. Now it is acres of apartment blocks, parking lots, strip malls and big-box retail outlets, threaded together with four-lane asphalt strips and blanketed with the smog of a million cars backed-up at every stoplight.

This is America, my home. And it is deeply shocking to a system so accustomed to the relative silence of The Peaceable Kingdom.

I know what is happening to me. I am trying to take this very slowly and easily. I am getting lots of sleep, avoiding alcohol and cigarette fumes, trying to eat lots of fruit and veg and vitamins.

Routines are important when you're culture-shocked. So this Sunday morning, on my way out of Virginia I stopped at St. Alban's Episcopal Church of Annandale for the weekly Eucharist.

I have not attended an Anglican church service for many, many moons, and this one was a beauty: Bach skilfully played on a sweet little pipe organ, hymns sung out with enthusiasm, a full complement of clergy in full vestments (there's a seminary in the diocese), flowers on the altar, squirmy children in the pews, and the gloriously poetic and approachable Rite 2 liturgy. Bread AND wine. And the priest was a SHE!

I had to struggle not to weep at the end, when the organist ripped through a Tallis postlude without missing a beat. I love going to Mass at Santo Tomas in Moratinos, and I may now be a practicing Catholic. But this service this morning? Extraordinary, and beautiful, and emotionally overwhelming. I surprised myself. My soul was at Home.

Later in the day, after a long journey north to Apollo, I took a couple hours' walk down McCartney Hollow to Roaring Run trail. (I hadn't had a decent walk for DAYS...) Yes, the abandoned trucks and rusting machinery and busted-down gas wells are still out there, but they're garlanded with knotweed and trumpet vines. The hillsides are dense with greenery, erasing the scars and ruts from view. I climbed the trail up Jackson Run, and at the falls a young couple splashed and paddled with their tiny toddler twins. Laughter and joyful shrieks echoed up the steep valley. Up above, the breeze tossed the treetops. A thunderstorm grumbled.

I picked the prickly fingers of a blackberry vine off my shirt and turned and listened to all the sounds around me. A robin sang out. Goldfinches. A red-wing blackbird. A brush-cutter. Children shouting. Someone shooting at targets with a .22 rifle, somewhere nearby. The waterfall.

I have not walked along that trail for more than 25 years, but I knew exactly where I was in the world. My father walked this trail, and his mother walked it, too. This is my inheritance. This is what Home sounds and looks and feels like, when you're from here -- grubby and redneck and sad, but still beautiful.

It is home. I don't belong here anymore, but what is Here belongs to me.

Somewhere in my DNA is a red-wing blackbird.

See For Yourself!

I always wanted to be a Patron of the Arts, but somehow figured that meant I had to be a millionaire first. But no, the Camino provides! We have tons of talented people stopping in here. They make paintings and photos, poems, articles, novels, plays, liturgies, wine, comedy sketches... even little knitted sock monkeys. And all we have to do is feed ém some dinner and send them to bed. What a deal!

Since we had such talented guitarists in the house, Kim got her Creativity (and her camera) going and made a couple of music videos this morning. They´re not exactly jump-cut song-and-dance costume extravaganzas, but they´re sweet and stable and full of little accidents of light and noise and critters. Which is to say, good reflections of Peaceable Life.

I will attempt to embed them here:

(the ending of this one is sweet!)




... and a backyard Bossa Nova:



(these are not showing up true to size on here, so just double-click on the screen and you´ll see them just fine in YouTube.)
I hope you enjoy them as much as Max the Rooster apparently did.

Hanging by a Fred

Our share of pilgrims has come and gone through this beautiful week of May – an expert water-dowser from Boulder, a fresh-faced filmmaker from LA via Pittsburgh, a small herd of polite Germans and their bossy Aussie wrangler. Kim came back too, which means everything runs sweet and neat.


Out on the trail the poppies and daisies and lupines are blooming madly. The sky is perfectly blue. I am just tucking into a tasty new book called “In Pursuit of Silence” when Fred and the Guitarristas roll up outside the gate.

So much for Silence. You may know Fred, a somewhat un-strung guitar-builder, NFL chiropractor, pilgrim, and sporadic Peaceable visitor. He loves the Camino, loves the pilgs, loves classical guitar music. He also loves a challenge. So he decided, for the 2010 Holy Year, to organize a top-class concert series for the pilgrims.

Truth be told, I am not the greatest aficionada of guitar music. I can take it or leave it. But Fred´s a friend, and Fred´s a fan. And so I have been hearing about this Concert Series for years: Master musicians take turns living in rented digs in a town along the trail, and offer free music to the pilgrims and the locals at some of the emblematic historic churches. Sounds nice, really, until you consider the logistics: Visas, short-term insurance and rental contracts, transportation, food, and language barriers, fees and honoraria and favors asked. Not to mention the prima donna factor: musicians are moody characters, sometimes veering into Vegan territory. Local parish priests, pilgrims, bureaucrats, and church councils are often no less manic, each with territorial issues to be skirted and exquisite ego to be massaged.

In short, it´s an insane idea. The kind Fred likes best.

After months of wangling introductions and Fred arrived on Tuesday and got the apartment all fixed up. He thumbed a ride to the little village where the professor lived, to pick up the car. And once there he learned the car he´d agreed-to was “no longer available.” There was another car, however, but the prof wanted Fred to fix it up and have it inspected first. Then the rental price went up. Then the rental contract morphed into a Bill of Sale. Fred said “wait a minute.” The prof exploded in a dramatic show of passion, threw Fred´s money in his face, drove him to a bus stop along a deserted road, and left him out there.

“He went all Spanish on me,” Fred said. “¡Increïble! And he canceled. He was supposed to play for the third week in June, and now I gotta find somebody else. And the bastard made me miss the big corrida (bullfight) on TV!”

Fred´s crazy, but he clearly has his priorities in order.

The first two musicians arrived in Palencia the next day, René from Cuba and Elina from Belarus. Happily, René still has relatives in Spain, and an uncle lent him a car. On Thursday the trio presented themselves at the Bishop´s Palace, ready to prepare for the night´s gala concert and kick-off reception.

There they learned that aside from the apartment arrangements, no one had done anything they´d promised. No concert was planned for that evening. No bishop, no cocktails, no meetings with the priests of Carrion, Fromista, and Villalcazar, at least not til June 2, when the priest who´d made all the promises came home from his annual holiday.
Did Fred come unglued? No. He poured them all a glass of tinto, and emailed The Peaceable.
“These guys want to play. Can you get the auditorium in Sahagun to open up? What about the hermita at Virgen de la Puente? What about Moratinos?” he said. I could read the desperation between the lines.

He wrote the note at noon. I read it ten hours later – too late for Thursday. Friday the auditorium had a high school graduation going on. Saturday was all we had. And Sahagun said No.

Fred doesn´t know what that word means.
So on Friday evening Elina and René played a pickup guitar concert at our little church in Moratinos. On Saturday we invited all the pilgrims, neighbors, and friends to hear a better-organized set of pieces at the bigger, more ornate church at St. Nicholas del Real Camino, the next village down the camino from Moratinos. (There´s a pilgrim refuge there, and the concerts are supposed to include some pilgrims.) So two world-class guitarists traveled halfway ´round the world to play for an audience 25 farmers, bartenders, geezers, goobers, and pilgs.

It was beautiful. The music, the sunlight splashing the retablos, the cava and jamon serrano after at Restaurante La Barrunta, the paella Paddy made for our dinner, the soft evening on the patio, and the music that poured over our walls til past midnight and drew the neighbors out into the alley for their final cigarettes.
The St. Nicholas concert was only the start of the series. Elina and René will go ahead and play Wednesday in Carrion de los Condes, as planned. They´re off to Barcelona to play a “real” orchestral concert next weekend. They seem happy enough with the way things are playing out, God bless ém. They´re happy to be in “Esapaña Profunda,” to see inside village churches and meet people and eat food and drink drinks no tourist tripper will ever encounter. They are lucky, and they know it.

I wonder if we the people in those pews yesterday have any idea how lucky we are. We had these two here for free. In Barcelona this weekend, someone´s paying them 3,000 Euros do do the same thing.

...And now to find a car for Fred.

Wherein a Canadian in Galicia is Bailed-Out

Funny old week it´s been, a very Camino week, with an extra dash of Hospitalero.

I told you that Lesley, a Canadian-trained hospitalera, was off to Miraz to try out the life of the volunteer  host at a pilgrim shelter. This particular "albergue" is special to us, as Patrick was one of the very first to volunteer there. We did two weeks in Miraz during our "Homeless Summer" of 2006, when we were scouting out places to maybe settle in Spain. Miraz was a bit too remote for us. It is Deepest Galicia, a tiny village where Gallego, not Spanish, is the primary language, and on the Camino del Norte, well off the beaten path.

Even though we settled elsewhere we´ve kept up our connections to the place, pointing people we´ve trained to serve there, supporting those on the job, and visiting whenever we were in the neighborhood. (Our kitchen countertops are made from granite mined in the Miraz quarry.) It´s a beautiful, peaceful spot. Or at least we thought so...

If you scroll back a year or so you´ll see my account of my last Hospitalera stint there, which was less than wonderful. I was paired with The Queen of Passive Aggression, and spent two weeks in misery and desolation, shivering through damp, gray days with wet firewood, a sinus infection, and a perfect bitch from London. I was assured afterward that this person would never again darken the doors of the Miraz albergue, and I chalked it up to Experience. I´ve volunteered at a lot of places, and a bad experience had to happen sometime. My number just came up.

But now Lesley volunteered there. And Leslie had a very similar experience to mine. She phoned me up in tears a time or two, wrote copious notes, and just generally had a miserable time... and this was her first stint volunteering on the camino! She´d come from Ontario at great expense to do this, and was treated like a stupid child by her co-worker. She called on the people in charge, but was met with stony silence.

(Paddy says it´s a syndrome: Person of a Certain Age outlives the spouse, who´s been bossed around for decades (or said spouse finds a more gentle partner). POACA is a righteous churchgoer, does the Camino. And as Hospitalera s/he finds a new niche: Lording it over a pilgrim hostel for two weeks per year, fixing everything that´s wrong with the Camino de Santiago.)

I can see both sides of this issue. Even though most volunteer teams get along just fine, the Coordinators (themselves unpaid) are probably full-up with personality conflicts. Volunteers must know there´s a mixed bag of people out there, and some strangers just don´t gel with others. They have to just scrape along somehow, tolerate, smile on through. Unless, of course, someone gets abusive.

And if Lesley is to be believed, things got there within a week. She was called "stupid." Her co-worker slammed doors, locked everyone out of the kitchen, shouted and raved at her in front of the guests, and just generally behaved like a martinet. The topper, though, was the toaster. Lesley´s co-volunteer decided that toasting bread at breakfast was too much work, and pilgrims don´t really need toast. And neither did Lesley. So she took the toaster and hid it somewhere.

In retrospect, this situation has all the makings of a situation comedy. But when you´re living it, things can get homicidal very quickly.

Miraz is 300 kilometers from Moratinos. Patrick had surgery this week and needed me near, so I was not amenable to bailouts. I listened to Lesley on the telephone. I made a couple of calls, sent a couple of emails, prayed a couple of prayers. It´s only a couple of weeks. I stuck out my misery there last year, I told her... but then I was the person in charge. I couldn´t leave the pilgrims at the mercy of the wacko I was working with. If you are being abused, you need to get out. But the decision is yours.

I left it in her hands. She stuck it out. I went to pick her up a day early, once I knew her replacement was on his way. Her replacement, you see, is Frank the Scotsman -- a patron saint of British hospitaleros.

Frank trained me and Paddy at Rabanal del Camino back in 2003, the first time we volunteered. He is a kilt-wearing character, a Lockerbie native, all charm and wit and common sense. If not for Frank I would have let Lesley just get a train back to the Peaceable. But I´ve not seen the guy for two years, and this was a wonderful opportunity.

And so I drove the 300 km. The weather was beautiful. The welcome was sweet. As I´d expected, Frank had swept into a toxic situation and put things right within hours, simply by smiling, and saying No. 

"No, we are not leaving the pilgrims waiting in the rain until the 4 p.m. Official Opening Time, when we are here and ready at 2 p.m."

"No, I don´t want to feel the cold. I think we should turn on the heaters so the place is warm. We have heaters here for a reason. This is the reason. If you want to feel cold, go outside."

And last but not least: "I want to toast my bread. Where did you put the toaster?"

And so Lesley was restored to sanity, and I stole an afternoon and evening of time with Frank. I showed him Friol, the market town, and he showed me where the nice little pension is in Parga, another charming little town to the north. We walked along a beautiful riverside path. We had big sea bass for dinner, the whole fishes. I could´ve stayed at the Miraz refuge, but I chose (like a non-pilgrim) to sleep in my own room in Parga, where I stayed up and wrote til 3 a.m. under the bare lightbulb: Dinner, room, breakfast for 20 Euro. I love rural Spain.

I learned that the nasty woman I served with last year at Miraz is scheduled to be a hospitalera there again in a couple of weeks. I hope it was just me, and that her next stint there is more successful, and the pilgrims  arriving then are treated much better by her this time around. Me? I will not volunteer there again anytime soon. Something is wrong.

I drove back home the next day with Lesley. We followed the Camino most of the way, stopped and bought a jasmine vine and marigolds outside Lugo. We visited Gordon, a South African trainee, who keeps a "stealth albergue" in a tiny town outside Portomarín. We stopped near Samos, at a tiny derelict watermill in a backwoods valley where Lesley´s sure she lived in some previous life. The millrace roared. The greenery was lush, buzzing with honeybees. The highway howled from the overpass way overhead.

We stopped at Triacastela and drank cider and ate KitKats. We took a wrong turn at Astorga, and ended up going cross-country through towns made up of bodegas, where it looks like everyone lives underground. The shadows grew long. The sky continued blue, but shifted from plain cotton to serge to velvet. Lesley told me about her marriages, her twin boys, her sociology career at a string of Canadian colleges. In the background were Neil Young, Cole Porter, Bebo y Cigala, Bach, the highway and passing cars. Outside the windows were mountains, windmills, exit ramps, detours, plains and petrol stations and pilgrims, pilgrims, piligrims.

It was day-long, warm and beautiful. Lesley called it a Rescue Mission.

I call it a cruise. I don´t want to do it many times, or it won´t be so special.

And it made me want to walk again, that stretch of Camino I missed in April, from Ponferrada onward via Samos and Sarria and Portomarin. The Invierno is not far south, but this path really does have a vibe of its own. It´s the Real Camino, as over-sold and paved and pimped-out as it may be. I love it still.

Maybe I will go back and walk it again. Maybe in the Autumn, when the crowds thin out. Maybe...

Lesley´s gone on now to walk the Norte from San Sebastian. Life at the Peaceable is a round of gardening, dogs, neighbors, doctors, and often pilgrims in the evenings -- last night we hosted a pilgrim from Pittsburgh, a freelance writer. Imagine that.

The fields are lush, waving in the breeze. The Lugo flowers seem to like life here on the plain.

It´s time for a snack. I think I will have some toast.