León, Astorga, Hiker's Madness

 León

I walk the 40km to León. It’s mostly flat, and much of it trails alongside motorways and down dirt tracks between warehouses, service stations and café-bars with plastic chairs. Today is the day that I decide to try dictating into my phone so that I can write as I go, because otherwise the endless dirt roads will swallow me whole. I won’t subject anyone to the whole thing but here’s an excerpt:

I don't know whether it would be a god awful idea to more as a piece of kind of almost art or poetry than serious non-fiction writing to just attempt to dictate something from start to finish I mean obviously once it was presented publicly nobody has to believe that it's not edited, in fact they might not comma and actually I think there would have to be some edits just because of the quality of the transcription but I sort of like the slightly frantic unpunctuated rambling tone of it which again is more a feature of the of the software and of my delivery which is actually relatively slow and stately on a kind of me also walking breathing heavily and stopping to think about what I want to say. New sentence you know that just wrote down the words new sentence I don't want to learn the oh my God that's a dead barn owl

Oh my God that’s a dead barn owl. 

Maybe it had been hit by a car but that seems unlikely considering the lifestyles of owls, who in any case have exceptional hearing. Perhaps the silent hum of an approaching electric vehicle is what did for it but it seems more likely it succumbed to some sort of potent owl disease or had a heart attack. What do birds do when they have a heart attack and they can’t clutch their chest? It doesn’t do anything but it feels like an essential part of the process to claw at yourself in anguish. To endure pain without arms must be worse in ways we can’t even imagine. 

A friend writes to say that it probably ate a poisoned rat, which seems a fairly safe bet.

It’s quite exciting seeing a dead owl. Fundamentally all owls must die. They die all the time. Owls are no more immortal than any other bird. But they must ordinarily die in quiet, shady little spots, in holes in old dead trees and the rafters of abandoned barns. They tend not to drop from a street tree by the side of a highway and thud to earth, at least in my experience. But then why is it so surprising? Eventually all beautiful, interesting animals become beautiful, interesting corpses. 

It’s a shame it wasn’t a recent death. It would be fair to describe it as a little maggoty. That said, even if it was fresh I wouldn’t know what to do with it, except that I might be tempted to give it a little stroke to see if it was as soft as it looked. Sell it to a taxidermist perhaps. My dad once found a dead sparrowhawk and it did make its way to a taxidermist, though not to sell. He kept it, and it now occupies pride of place above the fireplace, perched with straight-backed dignity on a chunk of wood. I don’t know how maggoty it was when he found it, but I suspect he put it straight in the freezer before the putrefaction became too much to tolerate. You associate taxidermy with the old and the mad and while he is a little old and a little mad now, it must be a madness I’ve caught, because I spent a good thirty seconds standing over the owl wondering if there was anything I could do with it.

I spend the afternoon out and about in León with new friends. We choose a commercial hostel rather than an albergue for the purposes of staying out late, but the curfew of midnight still turns out to be far too early and it is only with some misgivings that we finally go back from a night of drinking patxaran (a spiced basque liquor made from sloes), where I wake up the entire dormitory by drunkenly slamming my laptop into one of the metal bunk beds. 

León, like Burgos a week and a half earlier, is a beautiful medieval town dominated by a Gothic cathedral. For whatever reason today it seems to be saturated with stag and hen parties. Look up and see the dark wood and drunkenly sagging frontage of buildings hundreds of years deep. Close your eyes and feel the cobbles under your sandals. Sense the weight of history bearing down on you. And then open them again and see seventeen Spanish people dressed as babies, or animals, or in kink gear, or in some sort of custom t-shirt covered in in-jokes and photographs. Listen to the shrieking and the banter. Saturday night in Spain is not unlike Saturday night anywhere else. 

I often find that I struggle to find the words to describe the places I pass through, because I simply don’t spend enough time there. This is not a holiday in the normal sense. The vast majority of places I am in for long enough for a coffee or a sandwich at best. I arrive exhausted and sometimes with legs so wobbly there’s a danger of them collapsing under me. Finding a bed is first priority and perhaps later a trip to the bar, but a beer in one bar is much like a beer in another. This isn’t meant to be dismissive of this part of Spain, which is slowly creeping under my skin. But it’s hard to pick out any one place or any one day and give a coherent impression of it. Half the time I don’t even recall the names. Baking roadsides, Estrella-branded sunshades, grass which browns under the June sun, purple thistles and red poppies alongside the asphalt. Fields of wheat. Soon there will be mountains, woods, dirt tracks and butterflies again. For now I am on the road in the most fundamental sense possible. 

Here’s the main cultural difference between mixed dorms and gender segregated ones - in the latter, every man over the age of 50 arrives and almost instantly gets naked. Listen: we are all human animals. Father Time comes for us all. All of our achievements will turn to dust. But it’s quite a sight. Alternatively bony and flabby, permatanned and liver-spotted, boney elbows and strange outgrowths. They look like the carcasses of rotisserie chickens. This is what I imagine when people declare themselves to be into dads, but that’s my own age talking. I am surely old enough to be a dad too, although my natural joie de vivre and cherubic cheeks mean I still pass for younger. Still, if I’d had a child when I was 18 they’d be drinking in parks around now. 

Day 2 in León comes with a trip to the cathedral, an altogether more peaceful visit than the overwhelming, interactive Burgos. León’s cathedral is home to the most astonishing collection of stained glass I’ve ever seen. An audio guide (which I ultimately regret using; I’d rather experience ignorantly and peacefully) explains the way in which the colours chosen reflect the nature of the sun likely to cross them - the warmth of the sunset, the coolness of the North face - and the corresponding importance of the figures depicted. Later I attend vespers in the chapel attached to our donativo (a pay-what-you-can albergue owned by the Benedictine Monastery). I try my best to feel something. It is mostly singing, voices washing around the high corners like a warm breeze. After a time however I am only thinking about how my knees hurt, and marvelling at the nuns being able to stand up for so long. I have some crucial deficiency which prevents me from experiencing these services beyond a surface level. So it goes. 

Later I go into a bar purely on the strength of a sign out front which says “No Reggaeton Zone”. Absolutely sold. I eat a chorizo cooked in wine and absolutely swimming in rich, salty, paprika’d sausage oil. I chase it all down with bread. I’ve probably had the equivalent of a half pint of olive oil but I hear it’s good for the skin. 

The next morning the streets are full of municipal workers hosing away all the piss from the night before. 

A relatively uneventful couple of days pass - as I search my recollection now I don’t remember anything except hills, roads, bocadillos and quiet, shuttered villages. Eventually I reach Astorga, a beautiful Roman city built on a long rocky promontory that it dominates the landscape around. The air smells of honeysuckle on the approach. Gaudí built a palace here and we walk around the cool chambers. The religious art is striking for how realistic it is - looking at the faces of the sculptures and frescoes it is easy to see them as the real people they were. The vaulting archways above are typically Gaudí and put me in mind of starfish, or coral, or scales. The colours on the stained glass are delicate and the spaces bright, airy, calm. I love Gaudí. 

The next day something strange happens to me. I sleep poorly in the intense heat, and wake up with more aches and pains than usual. The target town, Foncebadón, is at the top of a long, steady incline. It’s on top of a mountain as we enter the Montes de León, a range we will spend the next few days traversing. Foncebadón is a natural resting point because it falls 26km from Astorga and just before a punishing scramble across the mountain pass. Something in the long hill gets my heart pumping and, perhaps coasting on adrenaline, I decide I’m going to keep walking.

On top of the mountain there is no cover, and the heat is at least 35 degrees. I eat a colossal salad of beetroot and goat’s cheese, I drink a large beer, I fill up every bottle of water I have. And then, leaving the other walkers behind, I set off. I realise I have been seized by a kind of madness. I do not feel tired at all. I have fallen into a kind of easy rhythm which I could keep up for hours. Days perhaps. I feel a strange lightness and I start to have grandiose thoughts. Do I have some sort of special natural capacity for walking? Should I have been a marathon runner in another life? Have I achieved a kind of zen state in which I simply push away all pain and discomfort?

Sometimes in these states it’s best not to observe them directly, as that might cause them to skitter away. Marvel too long at the fact you don’t feel pain and it will creep back in. Pain is jealous like that. This time though it doesn’t make any difference. In some respects it adds to the manic energy, the feeling that I’m unlocking some dormant part of myself, some primeval need to climb over mountains.

Here is what I see: sandy tracks through overhangs of conifer follow the curve of a doglegging road, steel barriers with blurry black asphalt beyond. This winds past a closed food truck and the ruined village surrounding it - this was once a stop on the Camino, now just a pit stop set up by an enterprising local (presumably taking a nap when I pass through). The remains of what was once a bar is visible by the roadside and it is still festooned with tattered, sunbleached flags, signs pointing X miles to Bangkok and Y to Milan. 

Soon after I leave the road behind and the mountain pass begins in earnest. Winding rocky tracks, the kind taken by goats and lizards, fringed with huge yellow blooms of Spanish Gorse and patches of heather. Green depths and misty distances. Make no mistake, this is high up. The highest point for miles. The mountains stretch off until they’re just foggy hulks on the horizon. Bright, flat, hard sun, but not the sun of the plains, because this sun comes with a dry wind, spiced with the smell of the flowers. Spanish Gorse smells like bergamot or chamomile, I can’t decide which. Rich and heady and tickling your nose as the dust rises. Ants criss-cross the path and eagles watch to see if you’re planning on dying. When the wind drops there is no sound except the bees and the dirt underfoot.

I pass the Cruz de Ferro - a looming iron cross erected for pilgrims to stop and lay down a burden. For many this is a rock they have carried the whole way. Others leave notes, stickers, books, pictures, photographs and even a colossal engraved stone memorial. It feels prurient to look too closely. One stone reads, in Sharpie: ‘Tricha - RIP. Free of him.’

For all of this I am alone.

Riding on this wave of euphoria I begin to wonder whether I should do the full 50km to Ponferrada, but some tiny trapped voice of reason manages to penetrate the thick haze of Gorse flower and burning sun, and I stop in El Acebo, which means holly. There’s one in the garden of the albergue.

You aren’t allowed to eat in the room but I have some leftover and only slightly burnt risotto so I demolish it hunched over in my bunk like I’ve got into a can of dog food after the apocalypse. 

I’ll probably be fine tomorrow.

This is dramatic irony, I am catching up with this several days late. You already know how the next one is going to begin.