The Precise Moment Between Need & Surrender
The Precise Moment Between Need & Surrender
by Glenn Davis | Clemson, SC
I arrived in St. Jean Pied de Port later than I wanted. I knew what to pack and wear, but I had studied little about the route itself. I love surprises and wanted my pilgrimage to open up to me on its own terms, like chapters in a book I was desperate to read.
The air was crisp for late May. The clock tower watched me cross the Nive Bridge at 10:38 a.m. all by my lonesome. Rue d’Espagne lay quiet after the assault by shopkeepers on pilgrims who left before me. The Camino officially starts at a rupture in the old city wall, a doorway to the Pyrénées called the Porte d’Espagne. Cobblestones give way to asphalt that climbs into the mountains. “Climbs” sounds gentle compared to the experience. It’s the kind of climb you bargain with God in half-breath prayers most of the way to Roncesvalles.
Halfway, French cyclists resting at the feet of the statue of the Virgin of Orisson played a joke on the gringo. As I passed, they shouted, pointing left at a T-bone in the road. Forty-five minutes later, the trail dead-ended face-to-face with a horse at a farmhouse on the valley floor. My first Camino miracle provided me with a boy who drove me back to the smirking Madonna cradling a laughing baby Jesus, the gesturing bikers long gone. I’m sure my screaming curses still linger in the fog rolling over the hills.
The second day out of Roncesvalles came with stiff legs and a breeze that bit at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A short time later, the sun hit me like a thrown stone. Stripping off my jacket, I was nearly bowled over by an Atlanta attorney, a physics tutor from the Midwest, and a female Irish postal worker who could fit the F-word into a prayer.
By Logroño, the tutor had gone ahead on a bike, and the Irish gal’s feet turned into ground chuck. She drowned us in drink one last night before catching her flight home. At dawn, I left on my own, the Camino stretching ahead like an unfinished novel, and my phone charger still plugged into the wall outlet.
Any other time it might have soured the day, but in the early afternoon, I fell into step with a guy from Barcelona who owned a phone supply store. He reached into his pack and handed me a charger without missing a step. Fascinating how the Camino can strip you bare one day, then hand you a small miracle the next—as if it listens all along.
A week later in Hontanas, pilgrims in bright clothing spill across the small plaza, their colors bleeding together like an abstract painting. A few familiar faces smile and wave. Hell, everyone smiles and waves. The Camino has a way of stripping people down to their better selves.
“Tomorrow’ll be a killer,” a fellow pilgrim said as we sat with sweating beers at a sun-faded table outside El Puntido.
“Nothing could be worse than the first day,” I told him.
He raised his brows in agreement as we touched glasses in that quiet covenant strangers sometimes make on the road. We lingered over more beer and a steak that bled its juices into the plate like some small sacrifice to the day’s walk. We raised our glasses, toasting to the miracles of the Camino with its strange ability to knit up the broken places in people, and lastly, blessed (he cursed) the hill waiting for us in the morning like an old adversary.
It’s an easy two-hour walk to Castrojeriz, the kind that loosens your muscles and tricks you into thinking the trail is your friend. At the edge of town, I could see the Camino winding like a white python up the side of a high mound that resembles a beached whale. An hour later, I sat at a shelter on the crest, killing a bottle of water in between gasps while my eyes traced the Camino’s pale thread cutting through the patchwork of green and brown to the horizon. Itero de la Vega lay at least ten miles ahead and, while stuffing the empty into my pack, I realized I’d forgotten to resupply my water.
Without a tree for shade, my head beaded, drenching my hat and shirt, my pack taking on weight like a sinking boat. A few hours later, a stand of trees and picnic tables hemmed in by a brick wall came into view. A battered van sat in the shade, spilling flamenco music from its windows. A metal tub full of water bottles bobbed in the melting ice on one of the tables.
The Camino provided, as it always seems to do—not early, not late, but in the precise moment between need and surrender.
