Building Bridges Over Food & Shared Experience
Building Bridges Over Food & Shared Experience
by Leonard Vance | Tucson, AZ
Five pilgrims are huddled down in a remote hamlet in the Galician borderlands, in a town with no central square, no markets, and no public buildings. Just off the street, locked, seemingly abandoned, and surrounded by tall, unkempt grass sits a tiny stone church maybe the size of a walk-in closet, awaiting worshippers. It has been hours since we arrived, and other than the albergue owner behind his glass counter of odd foodstuffs, we have yet to see another soul.
We hail from different countries: Netherlands, Germany, Malta, Philippines, and the United States, most of us walking alone on this quiet stretch of Camino Sanabrés for our own reasons and at our own paces. Arriving mid-afternoon, I took the unused room upstairs to protect others from my snoring, and am now (mostly) rejuvenated after a shower in a phonebooth-sized stall and a siesta. It’s been a long while since anybody has cleaned the room, and I fear the water I drip on the dusty floor might cause weeds to sprout next week.
Awake and across the street, I despair of constructing any meal from the eclectic offering of food when fellow pilgrim Mark joins me at the counter. He recognizes some Italian tomato sauce and a tin of canned squid and offers to make dinner, and we all soon gratefully accept.
An hour later, we gather before an immense, steaming pile of linguini with little tentacles sticking out among the pasta. I cannot honestly think of anything that tasted better on that Camino. Perhaps it was the plentiful wine and the company as we shared stories around our little room, or maybe it was just the hunger built around that grueling afternoon climb into the mountains, but in any case, a bit of light shone forth from the Galician backcountry that night as we built bridges among us through food and shared experience.
It has been years now since then, but I often recall that evening, taking comfort from the remarkable ability of the Camino to connect people through chance encounters.
Editor’s note: Check out our La Concha Winter 2025 review of Leonard Vance’s book: An Atheist on Pilgrimage: Tales of Humanity from the Camino de Santiago (self-published, 2024).
