#felt and looked like an actual arcarde

[red-akara]

play pretend

Is it actually open?

I haven't seen any activity in years.

No sign of the cool kids

or rotary telephones

or broken cash registers

that defined such dreams.

A neon flooded memory.

A pinball machine collects dust.

Just beyond the bar table,

you could imagine the scene

"Step right up, sir, that'll be twenty five cents!"

"I only have one bottle cap, does that work?"

And then there's laughter in the room.

Happy faces.

Sticky cream soda on their lips.

You could remember it

as if you were finally back.

[silverhands-etcetera]

Gimme 40 Acres.

I made the widest U-turn possible on the Camino. There are points where all the different routes connect, as they all funnel together toward Santiago, and at any one of these intersections a peregrino has the option (though few take it) of setting off toward a different starting line, rather than merging into the bottleneck that condenses all of the paths into the the homestretch leading to the checkered flag in Santiago.

Turning myself around toward another city wasn’t something I’d ever considered, but by chance, one of the meeting points of the southern Caminos is in Merida, where I met my friend Blanka, who was walking from the north and reached the intersection at the same time I did.

While I was taking the long loop down to El Puerto, Blanka continued walking south and east, coming closer & closer to Córdoba, and eventually Granada. My three-step U-turn involved a semi-truck, and midnight bus ride, and one final leg in a BlaBlaCar.

A what?, you say?

A ride sharing app, -native to Spain? I’m not sure. But everybody knows about it, it’s cheap and safe and the exact opposite of a mode of transportation that I’m inclined to use. But I needed to get out of the city and into a tiny no-horse town in the vallley of Los Pedroches, at the top of Andalucía, on the edge of the sierra. One car was going there- a fella driving to his county home late in the day, after a day of work in the city.

The meeting point was a gasolinera on the edge of Córdoba, about a 40-minute walk from El Centro. I spotted my targeted black VW Golf and said Hola to Jose, who looked at me & said “you came here walking? That’s crazy, it’s way too hot for walking”

Sure thing, buddy.

The highways cut around the mountains, and put me in the village of Alcaracejos in less than an hour. In a smooth, swift turbodiesel, the inclines were hardly noticeable, but the crest of the last mountain overlooking the valley of Los Perdroches gave clear perspective on what was going to be involved in finding one’s way out of the basin once a peregrino has feet on the ground.

I was dropped at one edge of town, and the hostel was at the other, it was perhaps five minutes covering the distance between. It was good to see Blanka again. It was good to be back on the Camino. I was traded midseason from Equipo Macarena, to join the newly formed Equipo Contrario- the only team walking the wrong direction on the Camino Mozarebes.

This Camino has far fewer peregrinos than La Plata, and the municipal hostel was empty except for us. I shared a few pieces of standard I-IV-V americana on the guitar (what I refer to as “rewriting Rockytop”) and she busted out a Hungarian folk tune on her flute, with depth of melody and uniqueness of phrasing that makes a guy put the guitar down, rather than try to follow with something by Hank or ET.

–

My new team doesn’t wake up early either, thankfully. But we had a walk of at least 35km (perhaps 38, opinions conflict) to the village of Villaharta.

The Camino leaves the valley almost immediately, with a climb that maintains a steady rise for at least a mile before giving to plateaus & dips, where you can see the first tall mountains of the range. At this first leveling, a man behind a fence called out to us, telling us that we were too far away from Villaharta to make it in a day, and that we’d be sleeping in the mountains for sure. -that mountain there that we could see- well that was halfway.

He offered to take us a few kilometers down the road in his car.

Wasn’t this the Camino De Santiago? -we asked him.

He replied that it was, and that peregrinos pass by here all the time going the other way, but there was no way we could walk to Villaharta. I wondered where he assumed the incoming peregrinos were coming from, since we were all in agreement that there was nothing in between here & there.

We’ll walk, gracias.

–

Following arrows, one can walk all the way to Santiago without any missteps, and without a map. But going in the other direction requires a lot of looking back, and at times you’ll find yourself in a place that may be a confluence going north, but appears as a fork when going south, and the only way to know which way the camino came from is to go down one path or another until you find arrows, or not.

But only in finding arrows do you have the proof, walking along without an arrow doesn’t mean you are on the wrong fork. It might mean that the last arrow is just up around the next bend. More than once we ventured down separate forks putting precious distance between us in search of the right path, calling out and waiting for the other when we’d find proof. On a day this long, it was good to be a team in this venture.

We’re both strong walkers, but in the course of a day, we each have our moments- Blanka finding the urge to run more often than I. Mostly on the downhill sections, where she gains a lot of ground on me, but I cringe at the thought of my steps falling hard on a steep decline- …you go ahead, kid. I’ll keep any cartilage that’s left in my knees right where it’s at & in one piece, for now..

She did lament that this camino has been a little tougher than when she did it two years ago, and I told her how it gets even better as you get older, and things will start to get easier -then I had to try to relate my brand of sarcasm. ..the best jokes are the ones that you have to explain, right?…

–

It was a long & ever-changing day, but with the blessing of big, fluffy clouds keeping the direct heat of the sun off us for several hours of the mid-day. But as we reached kilometer 30, the cover had turned into just a spattering of little fluffy sheep up in the sky, with wide swaths of sunshine in between them. What’s more, the final 5 (or 8?) kilometers were all uphill. We were exhausted, and only hoping that our goal was at the crest of this never-breaking hill.

The path ended and we followed under the power lines, along the paved road that hopefully led into town. It was 7pm as we reached the first streets of Villaharta. We had been walking for 11 hours.

There’s no hotel in Villaharta proper, there’s only the municipal hostel, which we knew nothing about.

Blanka greeted a man lifting a huge stack of tiles out of the trunk of his car & asked him if he could direct us to the hostel.

“Look, you’re going to get lost, but..” the man went on speaking, standing with 50 pounds or more of floor tiles in his arms in the hot sun of the street, as he directed us to the end, then left, then up, then right, etc..

After the first two turns, we asked the same question again to the next people we saw.

A man with a perfect wave of white hair, loading a beautiful, 40 year-old, two-tone Citroen walked over to us, with perfect straight posture of his shoulders and hips despite a two-inch platform on the bottom of just his right shoe. The municipal hostel is just the locker room of the municipal sports complex, he says, and we’d need to find the man with the key -that would be Juan Claudio.

“Look, go directly down here, and at the first street, there’s a grocery -that’s not the street, and it’s not the next one either. Go to the third street, at the pharmacy, and go to house number 4, ask for Juan Claudio, he has the key.”

Again, halfway there, we began doubting ourselves, and asked an abuela if she could help us. We were talking to her when the man with the Citroen drove by and told her our story.

Ah! Estas buscando Juan Claudio. The abuela was The Abuela, that is to say the grandmother of Juan Claudio. She was visibly proud of the importance of her grandson, but told us that he was out of town, and if we’d walk with her, up here we’ll find her granddaughter sitting in the street and she will help us.

The granddaughter was not to be found, but two other local girls were. There was much confusion as to whether Juan Claudio was actually out of town. La rubia was in accord with Abuela, but la morena was certain that the car she saw leaving town that looked like Juan Claudio’s wasn’t actually him…

It went on like this for some ten minutes, with much explanation of circumstances, but no solutions for the peregrinos. We were even shown to the house of the Mayor, (which everyone in this town pronounced as “arcarde” rather than “alcalde” -which led me to consider if “Villaharta” was something derived from local dialect, and really that this village on a mountain was “Villa Alta”?..)

The mayor wasn’t home, and eventually, la rubia gave us the personal phone number of a woman named Lupe, who works for the city. She can help us.

We went to the bar, for some much needed supper & beer, and gave Lupe a call. Blanka navigated the phone call (and the preceding wrong number) with perfect Spanish over the phone, which can be difficult, but ultimately, Lupe couldn’t help us either.

It was 9:30, with supper in us, we felt less desperate, but still dirty and tired. But we knew where Juan Claudio lived, and he’d have to come home sometime…

We rang, & Juan Claudio opened the door, barefoot, and with a baby resting on his shoulder. We needed to call ahead, he told us. If he doesn’t know that we’re coming before 3, he can’t help us. These were the rules.

We didn’t move.

He asked if we carried Credentials -Blanka does, I don’t. He told us we’d have to leave in the morning, which was fine, we had no plans of taking up residence in the locker room. -he was just checking, he said. He’s had to call the Guardia Civil to evict people before.

Juan Claudio was cracking, he told us to run ahead, he’d come over & unlock it for us in a few minutes.

–

Villaharta is just a speck on the map, half the length of the island of Sabula, but they’ve got a soccer field up on the hill overlooking the town, with basketball hoops and facilities for any athletic pursuit, despite not seeing enough children in the pueblo to make one side of a soccer match.

The sun was set, and it was hot. We dragged a giant mat cushion out of the stuffy, mosquito-laden locker room, and laid out on the hot concrete soccer pitch. I hadn’t been outside for such a clear sky & stars for the duration of this trip so far. There was no light in the town, & the entire sky was visible, and with the full reach of my knowledge of astronomy, the most interesting thing I could say was “hey look, there’s the Big Dipper”

It was an epic day on the ground, finished with an infinite night sky. Once again, time has a different course in Spain. It just goes on forever.