Off the Road (14 page)

Direct eye contact is not
good in such circumstances. Wild dogs, like thugs in New York City, don’t like
being stared at. It implies some kind of judgment. Peripheral vision is key.
These three dogs are deep inside this field but well within my scope. As I
approach their parallel, they send up a few introductory barks. I have no fear
because I read them perfectly. They won’t be bothering this passing pilgrim.
These are territorial claims, pure and simple, nothing more than warnings to
stay on the road.

Suddenly all three break
into a furious sprint, tearing at the air with their howls. They are coming
straight for me.

I can see that they bear the
marks of wild Spanish dogs. They are plagued by mange. One is large; the other
two are medium-size. One has a dead ear, permanently bent over. Another runs a
little crabwise sideways; his backside is rubbed raw, absolutely hairless in
bleeding patches. These are seriously ugly dogs.

The leader is the one with
the bleeding rump. They pull up short some twenty feet from me. I walk very
slowly but deliberately. I don’t want them behind me. The three stand side by
side, moving as one. They begin to circle. They stop in front of me and I inch
closer. The lead dog rips with a frightening bark, fierce shredded blasts. He
knows what he means, and I read him clearly.

A strange fear overtakes me,
and it’s one I have never felt. Of course I’m scared of them attacking me,
alone, on this empty plateau. But that’s not it. I am scared because I know
that I am prepared to kill them. I have my knife in my left hand and my stick
in my right. My breathing is rapid. My pupils must be pinholes. We are locked
in direct eye contact. My frontal lobes have closed down and handed off total
control to that reptilian stub in the base of the brain. Nerve bundles that
haven’t been tickled since the Pleistocene epoch have taken over my main features.
I am instinctively making faces. My mouth is pried open and my teeth bared.
Sounds gurgle in the back of my throat. There are no choices left. I am almost
standing on the outside, watching, when it happens.

On the plains of Castille, I
bark. I didn’t know humans made noises the way birds of prey caw, cats
caterwaul, or coyotes bay. But we do. And you can’t really appreciate the human
ululation signifying the will to kill until you’ve felt it pour out of your
very own face. It’s a ragged, oscillating sound (Tarzan isn’t that far off).
Strange, it’s rather high up in the register, pubescent, and not all that
dignified, even comical in its bestial ineptness.

With my pack still on my
back (to drop it would signal cowardice), a force that says it is better to
charge than to be charged sweeps through me, and I bolt directly at my enemies.
My knife is gripped underhanded, and my spear waggles in the air. And then I
bark—again and again. It originates somewhere in a sleeping pocket of my solar
plexus and screeches through my vocal cords with the force of a childhood
vomit. My entire body convulses with explosions:
“Lalulalulaluaaaaaaa.”
More or less.

The dogs jerk forward, but
the force propelling me toward them won’t let me flinch. Like any good bluff,
you can’t let up on your pose and you have to suffer the consequences if you
get called on it. My face is squeezed into a Nordic mask of blood-red fury. I
lunge and bark. The effect is a threat that translates roughly “I will slice
open your bellies, smear your entrails in this dust, and perform grand pliés in
the viscera.”

This is a simple,
straightforward message, and one that on some primal level they comprehend. And
without further linguistic exchange, they signal their comprehension by
suddenly sprinting into the wheat field and leaving me be.

They continue barking. But I
know this sound well. This is the cry of losers; they are trying to save face.
This is the canine equivalent of shouting insults—from a distance—at the big
guy who has just laced you in the playground. I storm up the road, unafraid
that they are at my back. (I glance once or twice to make sure.) But they
haven’t moved. The two pack dogs bark the loudest—a kind of toadying sound.
Maybe they are kissing up to the lead dog, who snarls.

My hands are shaking. My
pulse, which is usually high with all the work of walking, is racing. The
succubi who have haunted me all day redescend, and a new spookiness consumes
me. I am carrying on a delightfully stupid but vaguely reassuring conversation
with myself when a grand blast of thunder rolls across the plains. The clouds
are now in full costume dress, big black tumblers wheeling from left to right
across the stage before me. They have dropped a little more in altitude,
brushing my hair with static. A sweet metallic aroma fills the air, and I see a
few drops of water darken the blond earth.

Vast sheets of rain explode
from the clouds as I frantically pull out my poncho, logically located at the
bottom of my pack. The wet plastic sticks to my skin, and the dripping cowl
obstructs my view. On the horizon a broad streak of light flares, as if someone
turned a spotlight on and off. It’s sheet lightning, well known to be harmless.
But I count the seconds—thousand one, thousand two, thousand three, thousand
four, thousand five, thousand six. A peal of thunder sounds. I remember my
father teaching me this trick when I was a little boy. Each second between the
blast of light and the sound of thunder represents a mile. This is part of the
lore of storms we learn as children. I am dredging up a good deal of that lore
just now.

The lightning is six miles
away. How much farther do I have to go, and will I walk into this lightning
storm? I have been walking for nearly five hours. A kilometer is roughly twelve
minutes’ walk. And how many kilometers is it to the next town? And how many
kilometers equals a mile? Two point two, or is that kilograms? It’s metric, so
isn’t it the same? But how could it be? Gallons and miles don’t share the same
ratio as kilos to kilometers. But maybe—

A jagged white line tickles
the horizon. This is not sheet lightning anymore. Thousand one, thousand two,
thou—

Not a good sign.

Another flash of light
momentarily drains all the color from the landscape. I saw this one
hit
the ground—far up the road, but still within the field before me. I walk to the
left side of the road since the clouds are tumbling to my right. I pick up my
step. What was that other bit of lore? Lightning strikes the tallest object. My
eyes sweep the panorama of endless wheat fields— midget stalks stretching to
two feet at best.

I am six feet one. Lore is
surfacing freely.

Never stand beneath an
electric line.

Never stand beneath a tree.

Lightning is just a
gathering of static electricity.

Lightning doesn’t come down
to earth but actually moves up to the sky.

In a car you are safe
because the wheels are made of rubber.

My shoes are made of rubber.

Lightning never strikes in
the same place twice.

A bolt blasts the earth
directly in front of me, maybe fifty yards away. This is a network of bolts,
like a grid. A tic-tac-toe board of light and heat. The thunder booms at once.
Should I turn around and back away from the storm? Can I outhike a storm?
Should I curl in a little ball and try to hide among the wheat? Should I stand
still?

I decide to run in a forward
direction and augment it with a bit of heartfelt shrieking and babbling. With a
pack on my back, this job is neither graceful nor particularly effective. I
can’t scare away lightning like dogs. This really is some kind of message. The
dogs failed, so they wheeled out Zeus’ old-standard deus ex machina.

I can’t believe that I am
going to die out here, struck by lightning. Bolts are now exploding on both
sides of me like bombs. I can see them clearly. I can
smell
them. In my
mind, each spot is marked by charred wheat stalks and a modest puff of smoke. I
run for fifteen minutes. Run and scream, to be accurate. Run and scream and
hoot and howl and hoo-wee, to be even more accurate.

I am surrounded by
illusions. Lightning is blasting at my side. Voices scream in the wet wind. I
hear footsteps pursuing me. Up ahead, another hallucination makes the horizon
suddenly telescope and shrink, drawing itself toward me. It gets nearer, and as
it does so, the earth cracks open at the edge and a small black cross pops up
out of the ground before me. Following behind it, a small stone pyramid forces
the cross higher until it is clear and visible and lovely—an optical illusion
that undoubtedly has comforted pilgrims for a millennium. And, shortly, an entire
church pushes its way up out of the muddy earth and into view. Other buildings
crowd around its side and rear up. A town in a valley.

The pilgrim’s path suddenly
drops off into an alley of stone. I can hear the rumble of cattle and the
cackle of fowl. The rain gathers and sluices through this street, softening the
manure into a sludge and freeing pent-up odors. At the church I run to its wall
to try to get out of the downpour. This is the town of Hontanas. In old Spanish
the name was Fontanas, literally “Fountains”—so named since it was the first
watering hole after the hot blistering plains. An open doorway across the
street reveals four old women playing cards.

“Pilgrim, would you like a
sandwich?” one of them says to me in Spanish.

“Yes, yes, please, please,
yes.”

“I will bring you one.”

I call out a thank-you from
under the slight eave of the church.

“You were caught in the
rain,” another says.

“Rain!”

I can’t even think of what
to tell them.

“It was raining very hard,
wasn’t it?” another adds.

“Rain!” I say in my simple,
awkward Spanish. “Beautiful ladies. Rain! Dogs death birds hell fear”—I am
capable only of uttering nouns for the moment—“Rain! Yes, rain, but there were,
there were”—I can’t call forth the word for lightning. “How do you say in Spanish
when light comes down from the sky?”

“
Tormentas?”
one of
the ladies answers.

“Tormentas.
Yes, yes, that is the word,
isn’t it?” I am laughing crazily, at myself a bit, but mostly from relief.
“Tormentas,
sí, sí, tormentas. Muchas tormentas. Tormentas grandes.
Muchissi-mas
tormentas."
I am laughing the laughter of an idiot. I am hysterical. I can’t stop until the
woman appears with a sandwich. She hands it to me cautiously. The sandwich is
huge—ham and a Spanish omelet on a baguette the size of my arm. I tear into it
like a jackal.

By about the halfway point
of the Spanish leg of the road, which is where I am here on the Castilian
plains, the pilgrim becomes something of an amateur of the church. Not the
abstraction of “the Church,” but of the building itself.

The road to Santiago is absolutely littered with churches. They anchor every village, town, and city.
Often, they are seen situated alone in a field or tucked into the corner of a
glade, taking in the country air—all that is left of a village or monastery
that went belly up a few hundred years ago. The road is a walking tour of the
entire history of western architecture up to and including some of the most
embarrassing contemporary monstrosities: new churches that look like bloated
cafeterias with chain-link fencing twisted into the shape of a cross, a fish,
or something unidentifiable.

The pilgrim takes up church
watching for many reasons. They are always the first view of any town. In
Hontanas, the church burst from the ground and swept me into her embrace. On
any normal day’s walk, a church always appears in the distance like a waiting
behemoth, the buttresses of her haunches tucked at her sides, with her head up,
always vigilant and alert for the call to stretch and slouch toward Jerusalem.
In time, the little houses come into view, like pups gathered around her for
safety.

It is said that Gibbon
received his vision of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire after
witnessing a group of monks ambling and praying among Latin ruins: the rise of
Christianity had necessitated another bureaucracy’s collapse. One would like to
know what Gibbon would make of the image of the church on the pilgrim’s trail
today. Most are unoccupied, unused, and unwanted. I have yet to meet a priest
who manages fewer than four of these village churches, and none is too happy
about it. On any given day at any hour, even in the smallest towns, the
churches are always bolted and locked. The few silver chalices that haven’t
been filched, or the paintings that haven’t been cut from their frames, or the
silk robes with gold embroidery that haven’t been lifted at night, or the few
elephantine folios of five-hundred-year-old illuminated liturgies that haven’t
been fenced in Barcelona are hawkishly guarded by the ubiquitous Spanish widows,
each of whom seems to carry a heavy ancient key to the nearest church.

Most of the churches are in
poor condition because of neglect; their exterior sculpture has been worn by
wind and rain to featureless fetal shapes. The interiors are eaten by mildew;
the stone flakes into powder at the touch. But a pilgrim who says a kind word
to any weathered old woman in black can watch her produce the rusty key. And
then he may enter.

Pilgrims admire churches
because they are always cool on a hot day and because pilgrims are, in almost
every church, the star of the show. No church on the road neglects to honor the
pilgrim in the presumed eternity of stone. We are cut into the walls, carved
atop the capitals, painted onto panels, and sculpted in wood. Our image is everywhere;
and our patron Santiago, in one guise or another, looks out from nearly every
wall. After a brutal day’s walk, sitting in the cool of thick stone, it’s hard
not to feel a little flattered.