| Spain Excerpt
Naïve & Abroad: Spain
Limping 600 Miles Through History
Before we leave beautiful Andalusia a little history: There are sophisticated cave drawings 25,000 years old. Romans exported olive oil, bad wine, and dancing girls. Moors introduced sugar cane, oranges, lemons, cotton, rice, and merino sheep. The Moors perfected the Roman irrigation systems. Romanies - Gypsies - brought flamenco. Islamic culture reached its peak here. When the Moors were driven out Andalucia was left without their skills. No one knew how to operate the irrigation systems. No one knew how to farm. I walked the beautiful Andalusia. The other Andalusia is hopelessly arid and poor.
The Christian Reconquest was possible because Islamic culture was in severe decline. Islam had no Reformation... no Enlightenment... no Industrial Revolution.
This was the best Islam would ever be.
Bullfighting is what remains of the Mass of a religion founded by a Persian mystic, Mithras. In Mithraism, the son god sacrifices the father god. In the Mithraic Mass, a bull - father god - was killed by a young man - son of god. It is not known if the young man wore tight, shiny pants when he killed the bull. Mithaism was popular with the conquering Roman soldiers. Christianity was the religion of the weak/meek. The meek have not inherited the earth, but my pacifist friends - most of them atheists - cling to that scripture.
Olé is a corruption of Allah.
After Andalusia the camino enters Extremadura. Extremadura means hard extreme. My introduction to Extremadura was hard and extreme.
It was an eighteen mile uphill day. I climbed the first mountain pass. I carried three liters of water. The camino climbed a steep 1,000 feet in a series of ups and downs before crossing a pass to Monesterio. I did not know I was sick. I thought I was tired. The camino became a highway. Traffic was fast. The highway snaked upward toward the pass. The verge where I walked was three feet wide, with a guardrail. Fast cars cut corners. The blast from speeding trucks tried to knock me off my feet. There was heavy construction in places.
I asked a construction worker how far to Monesterio. "Four kilometers." he said. After a time I asked another construction worker. how far to Monesterio. "Three kilometers." After what must have been more than three kilometers - uphill - I asked a construction worker how far to Monesterio. "Four kilometers, over the pass."
I jettisoned water. I struggled onward. It was more than four kilometers. The climb was steep. There was nowhere to rest. I did not drink enough water.
Above the highway surrounded by pines was a tiny chapel - hermita, don't pronounce the aitch - built on a spot where Isidoro's disciples camped on their way to deliver his remains for burial in Salamanca. Cretins with spray paint leave their mindless memorials on the chapel walls. New Spain is everywhere defiled with graffiti. Italy recently passed harsh anti-graffiti laws.
That night I slept in a small hotel. In the night I woke in a soaked bed. Sweat pored off me. My fever had broken. The next day would be good.
The soils of Extremadura are so frail - and rains so unreliable - in some areas a crop is possible only every eighth year. With European Union farm subsidies, Extremaduran farmers plant wheat they know will not make. On the other side of Spain, soils around Valencia are the richest in Europe. Some years. five crops are possible.
The harsh land of Extremadura sent many of its impoverished sons to the New World. Many returned rich. An hidalgo - hijo de algo, son of something - was a free man when few men were free. He owned land, usually very little. He had a horse. He had a sword. He had fanatical pride. Through service to the king he could be granted more land. He could become rich. A poor hidalgo could make his fortune, and earn a title faster, in the New World. America was the Land of Possible. It still is.
 Two Hundred Yards from the Goal In the plaza in Salamanca I met the only American I would meet on the camino, Jim, a retired director of a Modern Art museums. Jim is a veteran walker. A year or two earlier Jim walked the northern camino. On that walk, Jim visited the new Guggenheim Art Museum in Bilbao. Jim liked the Frank Gehry designed building. He was less pleased with the exhibits. Like everyone professionally involved with art, Jim ducked my unanswerable question... what is art? After Santiago, Jim continued walking around Spain for four more months. Walking becomes an addiction.
Peggy Guggenheim - founder of the trust that funded this and other Guggenheim art museums - was a woman of vast wealth, great generosity, and no taste. There are few better examples of money in the wrong hands. The Guggenheim fortune was largely built from mines and smelters in Mexico in the time of Porfirio Diaz. Like other foreign exploiters of Mexico of the time, Meyer Guggenheim and his seven sons paid starvation wages. Workers were abused, exploited. The Guggenheims contributed to the causes of the Mexican Revolution. Bad art is a fitting legacy.
Earlier on the camino, Jim met an Irish bureaucrat from the European Union in Brussels. The Irishman was on the camino to work through a personal crisis. One evening Jim found a village albergue - pilgrim refuge - door locked. A note on the door said the key was in a bar across the street. At the bar. he was told the woman who kept the key had gone to Salamanca for the day. Jim hung around the bar for almost three hours. waiting for the woman to return. When she returned, the woman told Jim she had given the key to another pilgrim. Jim returned to the albergue. As Jim raised his hand to knock, the door opened. The Irishman had locked himself in for a nap. This was the closest Jim came to his own personal crisis on the camino.
In the Spain of the 60s, a good shine on black shoes was mandatory. Some Spaniards shined the soles of their shoes to avoid offense if someone saw the underside of a shoe. This attitude survived from the Moors. It was bad manners to show the bottoms of one's feet. Salaryman in New Spain wears unpolished, square-toed, tan shoes with an ill-fitting, cheap, dark suit. In Old Spain, tailors flourished. In the plaza in Salamanca, I saw the only perfect shine I would see on the camino. The tall, older man's suit fit. In the Spain I knew, there were bootblacks everywhere. I did not see one in seven weeks in New Spain. A chic woman in a power-red suit and spike heels fell crossing the plaza. A dozen hands were instantly there to lift her to her feet.
The sign on a hearse read LA DOLOROSA, the sadness.
I ran into Weinand. Weinand and Bathilde were walking together when she fell and hit her face on a rock. The nose-pieces of her glasses were driven into her face. The lenses of her glasses tore gashes under her eyes. The rock broke teeth. Weinand got her to a town. He stayed with her for two days, until she was able to take a bus to Zamora where she has friends who can help her home to Belgium.
In Salamanca, large group of French high school students crowded into McDonalds. France is the most profitable country outside the US for McDonalds. Take that Jose Bové!
An old man I asked for directions told me he walked the camino from Seville to Santiago an unlikely eleven times. He gave me improbable advice for the remainder of the route.
At a table near me in the plaza an American student at Salamanca university sat with her visiting parents and grandmother. They were happy. The women all talked at once. They left the man with his glass of wine and cigar while they went shopping. He dozed in the sun.
On the steps of the new cathedral, a student gave an obscenity-filled, impassioned speech about something I could not follow. Other students filmed the performance. At four in the morning, a drunken German couple returned to the pension arguing loudly. His voice was deep and harsh. Hers was tiny and squeaky. They slammed their door. and were quiet.
It is cold in April on the meseta, the high plain. I left Salamanca in a light, cold, wind-driven rain. By the time I reached open country rain fell hard. My heavy jacket shed rain. My rain pants were in my pack. I did not want to open my pack in mud and heavy rain. I followed a muddy track through wheat fields. My boots filled with water. This sounds unpleasant. Oddly, it was not. Walking downhill - even slightly downhill - in mud is tricky. I was concerned my boots would not dry overnight.
The weather cleared. There were a German couple, a Frenchman, and a French woman at the refuge when I arrived. The French were not together. A row of boots dried in the afternoon sun.
On the Infertile Plain of Extremadura
One Pilgrim Stops to Rest. Others Catch Up.
A tall, deeply tanned, woman of a certain age arrived at the refuge leading a tall, handsome, black horse carrying her luggage. She wore a broad-brimmed black Spanish hat. Her entrance could not have been more dramatic. She was Marliese, The Horsewoman. We would become friends. The horse was Farolero. Farolero means lamplighter. Farolero is a gentleman.
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