You see dead people

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Fields of flowers so unexpected they cause a bloom in us.

We are finally here, walking. We’ve left Burgos and the choices we made in Australia 13 months ago are becoming real, even if the questions we asked ourselves back then are still unanswered. Should I have brought this shirt I’m wearing? These shorts? That extra book for Sam? What about the sleeping bag? We could have brought only the liners but we opted for the bag because it was still cold when we looked on google. Now, out here, it feels warm, the sun is strong on the back of my legs and last night the room we slept in was hot and stuffy. Maybe we should have brought the liners not the bags?

Random thoughts are left to roam and evaporate in a landscape that is quickly emptying as we walk out of Burgos into the wide open wheat fields of the Meseta.

A lot of people skip this part of the Camino but we have opted to begin our journey here. That’s your Mum’s fault and I thank her for it. It’s beautiful. We climb up onto the tops of mesas, plateaus that are flat on top and that rise up unexpectedly out of the surrounding farmland. There is wheat growing, and barley or oats, I’m not sure which. Fields of hard, husky grain like the backs of grasshoppers thrusting their spiny way out of the soil.

And flowers, everywhere. Yellow, white purple, the blood red of poppies, which you tell us mark the remains of the dead. You remember something the teachers said at school when we stop for lunch next to the path. You point at the poppies and say, there are dead here, people who fought and lost, just like the soldiers who died in Burgos defending their castle. You tell us we are walking through a world littered with the dead.

You say it with relish but then spook yourself and want to move on. I look around at the flowers rising up out of wheat fields, turning their bright faces to the sky. It’s strikes me that with so much history buried beneath this soil, you are probably right and after we’ve eaten our bread, jamon, olives and cheese I slowly, gingerly, get back to my feet.

Once back walking I stride ahead and a man passes me on a bike. He looks me in the eye and wishes me “Buen Camino”. It’s not my first. All the way out of Burgos we’ve been getting them, but this one makes me stop and something shifts, even though the moment is nothing unusual in and of itself. I am walking, the man passes on a bike, he looks me directly in the eyes, he says “Buen Camino”, I reply “gracias” and he rides past me. Nothing unusual but suddenly, completely, walking next to a field of wheat under an open sky, I feel blessed.

I repeat the words under my breath. Buen Camino.

If you google translate those words you get “good way” or “good journey”. I always assumed it was like saying “have a good walk”, especially if the “way “part of it refers to “The Way” then maybe it means “have a good pilgrimage”. That’s how I had been treating it as we walked out of Burgos, as we got lost on the way to a supermarket and kept being directed back to the camino by friendly locals. I thought everyone was telling us to have a nice walk, have a nice day. But now, beneath the gaze of the meseta, suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead, I realise it means much, much more.

Buen Camino. Two words stretching out like the horizon from where I stand, shared across time and space.

I look at the sky, the wheat, back towards your Mum and you trudging along the dirt path next to each other and throwing grass darts. It’s as though my eyes have only now started to adjust to the light of this ‘way’ that stretches away ahead of us and I realise my journey doesn’t end in Santiago because the blessing I have just received from the man on the bicycle is a blessing that travels beyond a dirt trail stretching from one geographical point to another. It’s an acknowledgement of a bigger path, the one we all tread, crossing innumerable roads and hills and shadowed valleys. A recognition of our shared humanity, from life to death, the pilgrimage of all our lives weighed against the expanse of sky, of sun, of pain and discomfort, joy and uncertainty. All things weighed in one moment, suspended between past and future.

I am overwhelmed. You are walking with me. Kate also. We walk together. And my eyes burn, they fill with everything I see, an unavoidable collision of things.

He catches my eye.

He speaks.

He moves on.

The blessing stays.

Buen Camino Sam.