Chapter 10
Walking Through Time
The morning after the celebration in Ribadiso, the guitar was silent.
The pilgrims had begun to walk. Some beds were already empty. Others still lay curled up in their sleeping bags. The stream flowed past the old stone buildings as though the night had been no different from any other night.
The community had dissolved.
The house remained.
I placed my hand against the wall before putting the pack on my back. The stones were cool after the night. They had held the roof above us while we sang, ate, and slept. Long before that, they had sheltered other walkers, people who came on foot wearing different clothes, speaking different languages, and carrying different ideas of what awaited them in Santiago.
I knew none of them.
Nor did I know those who had built the walls.
Yet their hands had made my night possible.
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At first I had experienced joy on the Way as something that arose among those who were present.
A slice of cake was passed across a table.
A stranger listened in the forest.
A hand checked for fever.
Someone took out a guitar.
But at the stone wall in Ribadiso I understood that the community was larger than the people I could see. Joy also had a history. We could gather there because someone before us had built a place for the tired body. Others had cared for the buildings, repaired the walls, and opened the doors again.
The hospitality had not begun that evening.
We stepped into it.
So it was with the whole Way. I had thought of the Camino as a distance I was going to cover. From Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago de Compostela. About eight hundred kilometres. A line on the map, divided into stages that could be counted and completed.
But a road is more than the distance between two places.
It is also the time that has passed over it.
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I often stopped at the old stone bridges.
Other pilgrims walked past while I remained standing. Some wanted to reach a particular hostel. Others had found a good rhythm and did not want to break it. I had known this impatience earlier too. Now I could stand still and look at the way the stones rested against one another.
A bridge seems simple once it is there.
The foot steps onto it without asking who measured the width of the river, who found the stone, who shaped the arch, or who stood in the water while the foundation was laid. We notice the work only when the bridge is missing.
At Furelos I crossed a bridge from the Middle Ages. The river moved beneath its arches. The stones carried the weight of me, my pack, and everyone walking ahead of and behind me. They carried us without knowing our names.
I tried to imagine the first day the bridge was finished.
The workers must have stood somewhere nearby and watched someone set foot on it. Perhaps they were proud. Perhaps they were simply tired and wanted to go home. They could not know how many would come after them, or that a Norwegian pilgrim many hundreds of years later would stop in the middle of the bridge and think about their hands.
The work had outlived the workers.
It was not a monument to their names. It was a connection between two banks.
Perhaps that is the most modest form of greatness.
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I come from craftsmen.
My family includes people who worked at Swedish ironworks and later at Næs Ironworks. Hammers, fire, iron, and knowledge held in the hands. The work passed from one generation to the next, often without the person doing it putting a name to what was made.
Perhaps that is why I stop at bridges, walls, and forged fittings.
I do not see only an old object. I see a movement that has hardened into the material. Someone has raised the hammer. Someone has felt when the iron was at the right heat. Someone has chosen this particular stone and twisted it into place.
Craft thinks with the hands.
It leaves behind a thought that others can touch.
My ancestors could not know that one day I would walk through Galicia. They did not know the bridges I crossed. Yet it was as though their gaze followed mine. I did not ask only whether the structure was beautiful. I asked how it had been made, what it had cost in strength and patience, and whether the person who made it had been able to rest afterward.
History came closer when I saw it as work.
Then it no longer consisted of kings, dates, and great events. It consisted of backs that had bent, hands that had become sore, meals eaten in haste, and people walking home at dusk.
It was their work my feet rested on.
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A few days earlier I had come to Portomarín.
The Way descended steeply toward the River Miño and then crossed a long bridge. The town stood higher up. It seemed new and old at the same time, as though someone had tried to reconstruct a memory.
That was exactly what had happened.
When the valley was dammed in the 1960s, the old town was submerged. The most important churches and some other buildings were saved. The stones were numbered, taken down, carried uphill, and assembled again.
I walked around the square church and could still find the numbers on the stones.
They were small traces of an enormous undertaking.
A stone had occupied a particular place in a wall down by the river. Then it was loosened from the context to which it had belonged for centuries. It was marked, moved, and placed in a new wall higher up.
The stone was the same.
The church was the same.
And yet nothing was quite the same.
Beneath the water lay the streets where people had lived. Doors no one could open any longer. Stairs that led nowhere. When the water level fell, remnants of the old town could appear again.
I thought about what it means to preserve something.
We cannot save a lived life by keeping everything unchanged. Time does not allow it. People move. Houses disappear. Workplaces close. Those who told the stories die.
Yet something can be carried forward.
Stone by stone.
Story by story.
Not as a complete repetition of what was, but as a new context in which the traces are still visible.
The numbers on the church wall did not try to conceal the break.
They showed that the building had been carried.
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Along the Way I repeatedly encountered names beginning with hospital.
Hospital de Órbigo.
Hospital da Cruz.
Old hostels and buildings that had once received sick and exhausted pilgrims.
I had previously thought of a hospital as a place for medical treatment. On the Camino, the word took on a broader meaning. Here it was about giving shelter to the stranger. A bed, a bowl of food, water, care, or simply somewhere to lay the body down.
Medieval walkers had no modern shoes, lightweight packs, or phones. They had no weather forecast and could not book a room before they arrived. Many walked because they were ill. Some hoped for healing. Others carried guilt, vows, or grief.
Not everyone arrived.
Places that received them therefore grew up along the Way. Monasteries, churches, religious orders, and villages made hospitality part of the Way itself.
I had slept within the legacy of this care without thinking about it.
The hostel in Ribadiso was not merely an old building made available to tourists. It carried an action forward. A body arrived tired. A door was opened. The body was allowed to rest.
The forms had changed.
The movement was the same.
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I had already sensed the presence of earlier walkers on the high plain.
Outside Hornillos del Camino I passed what my notes described as an old hospital for pilgrims with leprosy. The surrounding landscape was open and almost empty of people. The walls, the heat, and the stillness made it easy to imagine them.
I did not see them as a historical crowd.
I tried to see one human being.
A body with sores. A face others turned away from. A walker who may have lost home, work, and a place in the community, but who still had a direction in which to walk.
What did he hope to find in Santiago?
Healing?
Forgiveness?
A place where he was not only his illness?
I did not know. Yet I felt a strange kinship with him out there on the plain. Not because our lives could be compared, but because the same Way received both our feet.
At Atapuerca I had seen an exhibition about people who lived in the area long before the first pilgrim set out for Santiago. They too had hunted, sought shelter, cared for children, mourned the dead, and helped injured members of the group.
The distance in time was almost impossible to comprehend.
Yet the needs were recognisable.
Food.
Warmth.
Protection.
Another human being.
In this way, the Way had begun to enlarge my idea of who “we” were. The community did not consist only of those who carried pilgrim passports. It reached backward toward people who had lived in the landscape without knowing our names, our beliefs, or the destination of our journey.
We did not share the history.
We shared the vulnerability.
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In Viana, a French nurse had tended my foot.
In Rabanal, an English couple had baked cake and set the table.
In Palas do Rei, someone had called a doctor when the Polish woman developed a high fever.
I had thought of these events as expressions of individual goodness. They were that too. No tradition tends a wound. A human being does.
But tradition can make the hand ready.
It can build the house, put out the bed, and teach us that the stranger who arrives has a claim to be received before we know his story.
The old hospitals had given this action a form. The people I met filled the form with new life.
Care moved through time in the same way as the Way.
No one owned it.
Each generation received it and decided whether it would stop or be carried forward.
When the nurse refused payment for tending my foot, she said she did it out of love. Later I put my hand on the forehead of a strange woman. I had not planned it as repayment. Yet something had been handed on.
In this way an action can remember, even when the person does not.
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At Cruceiro de Lameiros I stopped in front of an old stone cross.
At the bottom, a hammer, nails, thorns, and a skull had been carved into the stone. Signs of suffering and death. Higher up were signs of life and fertility.
The stone explained nothing.
It allowed the opposites to remain in the same column.
Life did not overcome death by erasing it. Joy did not make suffering untrue. Both were carved into the same material.
I had begun to understand this on the Way. The joy that came during the last week did not make the first week’s unease or the boredom of the high plain meaningless. It carried them with it. Without the stillness I failed to find, and the obedience I struggled with, joy might have been little more than exhilaration that the destination was drawing near.
Now it had acquired weight.
It was not an escape from what was difficult.
It had passed through it.
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A little later I came to Ligonde.
Beside the Way lay a cemetery. The graves faced the path, as though the dead too were watching those who passed.
I stood in front of a large cross.
In my notes I called the place a pilgrim cemetery. I imagined people who had walked across Europe but had not had the strength for the final stretch. I pictured them being buried there without each person receiving a memorial stone of their own.
Whether everything I was told about the place was historically accurate, I do not know today.
But what I experienced in front of the cemetery was real.
For the first time I was not standing only in the traces of those who had arrived. I was also standing before those who had died on the Way.
What did it mean that they did not reach Santiago?
Was their walk incomplete?
I still carried the measuring scale in my body. The kilometres grew fewer each day. Santiago waited. The pilgrim passport was to be checked, and a document was to confirm that I had walked far enough.
At the cemetery, this accounting became too small.
A person who had walked for months or years could not be reduced to the final kilometres that were missing. The steps had already been taken. The people had already been met. The prayers had already been prayed. The pain, the hope, and the days on the Way could not be invalidated because the body stopped.
Perhaps they had not failed.
Perhaps they had simply remained on the Way in a different way from the rest of us.
We walked past them, and they reminded us that no one had been promised arrival.
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I had read history all my life.
But on the Camino, history was not primarily something behind me. It lay beneath my feet, stood in the wall, and rested by the roadside.
Gadamer writes of tradition as something in which we already find ourselves, not as an object we can set at a distance and examine without ourselves being affected. We never come to history empty-handed; it has already helped shape the gaze with which we encounter it. I understood something of this as I walked.
I was no longer merely observing the old Way.
It carried me.
The bridge was older than my memories, but it received my foot. The hospital had been built for people long gone, but its walls gave me shelter. A greeting, a blessing, and a meal had moved through centuries and reached the table where I sat.
I was not outside history.
I was a brief event within it.
That did not make me smaller. It made the belonging larger.
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When I later reread Kierkegaard’s discourses on the lily and the bird, I recognised joy as something received.
The lily has not created the earth in which it stands.
The bird has not created the air that carries it.
Nor has the pilgrim created the Way.
I had trained, packed my rucksack, and learned the route. I had put one foot in front of the other. No one could do that work for me.
But almost everything that made the walk possible had been received.
Someone had cleared the path.
Someone had painted the yellow arrow.
Someone had laid the bridge across the river.
Someone had raised a cross.
Someone had opened a house.
Joy did not consist only in receiving these things. It consisted in discovering that I had received them.
Gratitude may be the form joy takes when it looks backward.
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The day after Ribadiso, I walked on toward Santiago.
The Way left the forest, followed asphalt for a while, and returned among the trees. Not far from Salceda, a memorial plaque stood beside the path. A pilgrim named Guillermo Watt had died there in 1993, only one day’s walk from Santiago.
His shoes had been preserved at the memorial.
I looked at them.
They were empty, but they had walked.
Santiago was near. With every stone marker, the number became smaller. Everything on the Way told me that the destination would soon be reached.
The memorial said something else.
The distance remaining did not decide what the walk had been.
Guillermo Watt belonged to the Way, not because he reached the cathedral, but because he had walked it. In the same way, the dead at Ligonde belonged to it. So did the craftsmen who built the bridges without themselves being pilgrims. So did the nurse, the hosts, and all those who had opened a door.
And so did those who had not yet begun to walk.
One day an unknown foot would strike the same stone as mine.
Another hand would rest against the wall in Ribadiso.
I would not be there.
But perhaps something I had received could nevertheless move onward.
◆
I put the pack on my back again.
I had less than a day’s walk to the next bed and only a few days to Santiago. The clock and the kilometres still measured the walk. They told me when I had to get up, how far I had left, and whether I was ahead of or behind schedule.
But they did not measure the time through which I was now walking.
That time had begun long before me.
It continued after I had passed.
I set my foot on the Way as though it belonged to me.
Now I understood that it was I who, for a little while, was allowed to belong to it.
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