OK…..here’s one of my best Camino stories ever. On the Camino this year (2013) there were several groups of young Spanish and Italians. They usually left after I did in the morning as their late night drinking often interfered with an early departure but they were young and healthy so they would pass me during the day with shouts of “Buen Camino” and ” Hasta la vista.” ( See you later) and an occasional “Que tal?” ( how are you?) Often when I arrived at the albergues they would be there.
I knew many of their names and spoke with them frequently in the evenings as I would often see the same group for three or four days. Among them was a tall, lanky 22 year old Italian kid, One morning I ran into him on the Camino… His friends had all gone on and he was hobbling along due to an infected blister on his heel. As we walked along together trying to carry on a conversation in our limited Spanish he told me that he wanted to learn English so he could sing American songs. Turns out his favorite singers were Johnny Cash and The Beatles. Songs I knew so as we are going along he starts singing and I’m trying to sing the words so he can repeat them but the trail is a fairly steep up-hill trek and even if it weren’t neither of us can carry a tune….but we are having fun and laughing so the time flies by with “Yellow Submarine” “I Walk the Line” and ” You are my Sunshine” ( which he insists is a Johnny Cash song) as well as countless others. We were doing a great rendition of “Ring of Fire” putting our knees together and swinging them from side to side as we squatted down singing ” I went down down down…” and waving our arms over our heads as we sang “and the flames went higher”. Mind you, this is all happening while we are trying to walk uphill on the edge of a little country road. Somehow we bumped into each other, lost our balance and after much flailing ended up falling into a roadside ditch. So there we are on our backs with our packs on like two upturned turtles covered with mud and water. We looked at each other and started to laugh. Un tortuga ( turtle) he says waving his arms and legs in the air. I’m spitting mud as I say ” Tortuga muerte” (dead turtle). Then he looked over at me and sang “Hey Jude don’t let me down… Take a sad song and make it better.” I started to laugh and so did he. Next thing you know we are both laughing so hard we are crying… still lying on our backs in the mud. A car with some young Spaniards drives up,…. Do they offer to help? No, they just roll down the window and take a picture before laughing and driving away. (So probably it is out there somewhere on utube.) We just laughed harder. Eventually after much slipping and sliding we righted ourselves, crawled out of the ditch and started walking again….singing as we went. Several hours later in the late afternoon we caught up with his friends who had stopped for a drink in a roadside bar. When they looked at us they asked him if everything was ok…. I’m sure we both looked like we had been wrestling pigs. He told them the story as we reenacted it for them and everyone laughed. “One of my best days on the Camino” he told them. I agreed and we both smiled. He hugged me goodbye and went on with his friends. I decided to stay on the small town and try to clean up a bit.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never see him again but I guarantee that we will both probably be telling this story for years to come and that it was a day neither of us will forget.
In what seems like a heartbeat strangers become friends and then family…….. Camino moments …….Camino magic.
Buen Camino
Scallop Songs 