The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago

7. Visions

 visions I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of. —michel de montaigne, essays I strained to see through the fog, trying to spot a yellow arrow or a splotch of paint to convince myself I wasn’t lost. I’d been walking for nearly four hours since leaving Villafranca del Bierzo early that morning , following the Camino route to Trabadelo and Vega de Valcárce. It had rained hard most of the way, but now, only a dismal drizzle. The route follows the Río Valcárce as it cascades down a steepsided , wooded valley that cuts through the last set of mountains before Galicia. It might have been a pleasant walk if not for the rain and the stream of cars and trucks spewing diesel fumes and road spray as they roared by. In Portela, I rested by the river beneath the oak trees and ate an orange while watching the trout rise in the eddies along the bank. Later that morning, nauseated by the fumes I’d been inhaling and slightly deafened by the traffic, I stopped for my café con leche at a roadside hotel outside Vega de Valcárce. I studied my maps, mentally preparing myself for the long climb to O Cebreiro. I’d walked about twenty kilometers and had another dozen or so to go. Two hours later, I wondered if I’d taken the right route. The road from Vega de Valcárce to Herrerias was a gentle climb, and I made good time despite the rain. But beyond Herrerias the footpath climbed steeply, zigzagging upward through chestnut woods to the village of La Faba. By the time I reached Laguna de Castilla, about three kilometers beyond La Faba, I was running out of energy. To make the situation SIBLEY, The Way of the Stars.indd 97 SIBLEY, The Way of the Stars.indd 97 7/25/12 9:19 AM 7/25/12 9:19 AM  the way of the stars worse, I was climbing in a bank of cloud so thick I sometimes couldn’t see more than a few yards in front of me or on either side of the trail. I knew I had roughly another eight or nine kilometers of hard climbing before I reached O Cebreiro. But walking in the cloudy mist left me disoriented and fearful that I’d inadvertently wandered onto a path leading away from the pilgrimage route. I had no idea how far I’d come since I couldn’t see where I’d been, and I couldn’t estimate how far I had to go since I couldn’t see much of anything ahead. And except for the squelching of my boots on the muddy path, the patter of rain on my jacket and hat, and my own labored breathing, I heard nothing at all. Rationally, I knew there was no way I could get lost so long as I stayed on the path. I knew the law of gravity would keep me on the ground. I knew I was climbing since I could feel the forward tilt of my body and the strain in my legs. Every now and then a copse of windtwisted scrub oak loomed out of the fog, and I felt connected to reality. But at other times it seemed the entire world—trees, rocks, flowers, fields, sky—had disappeared behind a veil of gauze, leaving me alone in some cloud of unknowing with only my thoughts to convince me I was still in the world. I took comfort from my walking stick. Gripping it, seeing it stab into the mud, and leaning on it to ease the strain in my legs provided a physical reminder that there was more to being in the world than thinking .Yet when I stood still, surrounded by fog and silence, it was easy to imagine myself as a disembodied consciousness floating in some opaque and formless space. Like the fog curling around the trees and boulders, tendrils of crazy thoughts twisted through my mind. Was this what it was like to cross the borderland of consciousness into death? Did the mind just drift away from the body? Did your consciousness fold inward like a collapsing star, getting smaller and smaller until the brief brightness that was your life—all those memories, ideas, and dreams— blinked out, disappearing into the immense unknown from which you came? Such speculations kept me company as I...