The trees tell me it’s time to stop walking

Re-emerging. Coming back from an experience defined by its relentlessness.

I’ve been suffering the last 2 days, trudging instead of walking, feeling the effort of every step. But today I recognise the closing of this particular path, the way the trees draw tight around us, shielding the hum of the motorway that has become an ever present companion these last few days into Santiago. The sky darkens and presses on us and in this darkness we walk down a hill into a forest of eucalypts.

The smell of them dislocates me because it takes me home, to Australia. I think of the choices we made to return there from Germany ten years ago, when you were born, your Mum ferrying you across continents at 6 months. I still remember watching her dance on the main stage in Freiburg before we left, the weight of you distending her belly and her balance, pitching us forward into a future we now inhabit.

A future tied to a land of eucalypts.

They rise up differently from the forests we’ve been walking through. These gums are prized for the way they thrust themselves into the light, for the verticality of their timber. I heard they’re used in the textile industry but for what, I’m not sure, only that they seem to be everywhere in this part of Spain.

This is not the only country they’ve been exported to, we saw them all over Peru when we travelled there B.U. (Before You). Our guide, a local Inca descendant with a upper body like a beer barrel, told us they were a real problem, they were too thirsty and drank up the water table because a tree used to arid conditions takes everything it can.

That seems less of a problem here…

The wind shifts through a grove of towering gums and I recognise the sound. I feel myself being called, a song for the end of this path. Tomorrow we reach Santiago, tonight we sleep 10 kms away from it. If we stay up late enough to see it, the city’s lights will fill the cloudy sky with white noise.

I wonder how old these trees are? The gums were planted purposefully this century I assume, but the others, the twisted and gnarled woods, the occasional large tree that splits the soil and rises between stone walls, how long? How many pilgrims have these trees witnessed walking along these path? Our feet falling on the dirt, steps thrumming through their roots, buried deep, mute witnesses to our passing.

As I have this thought I realise I don’t know if I’m ready for any of this to end. It seems sudden after the endlessness of our path, but it is a moot point because tomorrow we will arrive. We will complete the walk. We will be carried home in the belly of a plane. I will go back to work. I will remember. We will make a book of photos of our trip. We will talk about it together, for a while, to try to hold onto it.

You will tell everyone we forced you to do it.

This will never happen again. These steps will never be taken from us.

This is the camino of our lives, nursing our hurts, our loves, carrying our hopes, packed and strapped to our backs. Foot sore. We go.

The trees whisper it

We go blindly. The rain collects in the emptiness and falls upon the page before us.

They know

Each foot falls. No longer trumpeting explosions of dust. In the creeks water bends and fractures, each raindrop descending and making a perfect circle, perfectly expanding into the next.

Venn diagrams of us.

Sorry to bring science into it…

The trees whisper it

We are walking together, often apart. You. Me. Your Mum. Us.

There will be no end.

One day my ashes carried in your arms, like that film with Martin Sheen.

Sorry to bring Hollywood into it…

The aircraft are close now as we walk around the airport for the final descent down the hill. Factories spew the horizon. Fog wraps the valley, the trees thrust out of it, the crowns of their heads lost. Somewhere in the valley ahead of us is the place where we finish.

The beginning of our next camino.

The trees whisper it

The trees know.