shrug: I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. Though as Shinto obviously wouldn´t, we´d never make it there anyway.
It was really very hot — hot enough for me to put my head under every fountain spout we passed — and having lunched alongside us in a steeply pitched field, Shinto lay down in the shade. That's nice, I thought, and was still thinking so when the time came to leave. 'Let's do it, Shints,' I said, clapping my hands before stooping to raise the saddle with a weary huff. I could understand why Hanno had urged me to unpack and unsaddle Shinto every lunch-time, but as long as the sum of my sloth, fear and incompetence remained greater than or equal to concern for his welfare I wouldn't enjoy the procedure.
He didn't want to do it, of course. He didn't want to do anything. He angled his lazily defiant countenance up at me and then let it fall gently back to the cool meadow grass, grunting in sumptuous repose. It took fifteen minutes of ratcheting foolishness to get that animal to his feet, a success eventually achieved by charging towards him banging that big bowl above my head like a tambourine. If I detailed Petronella's physical response to this spectacle I'd probably have to change her name.
As would typically be the case, the ruminative lunch break put us right at the back of the pack. It wasn't just that we weren't seeing pilgrims — we weren't seeing anyone. At the end of another slightly fly-blown village — most of the camino settlements are strung out along the road, enabling me to say 'ribbon development' for the first time since tenth-grade geography — two boys were idly punting a football at a towering wall of green concrete. I didn't yet know that this was the end flank of a pelota court, or indeed what pelota was, but I did know this: those two boys were the first non-pilgrim, nonmotorist humans I'd seen since Roncesvalles. Surely this was taking Sunday too far.
Up an improbably angled ridge of flaking slate, past a 10-foot granite block claiming to record the stride length of Roland, around the desolate remnants of a long-abandoned refugio. A sweeping, panoramic glimpse of the green-pined hillocks beneath and around and the vast blue heavens above, then the foliage closed around us and Shinto found something new to scare him to a standstill: dappled shadows on the path. It was interesting, though, to see how quickly he voted these the lesser of two evils, when approached from the rear by the rival evil of that loud man with his bowl. Thus it was that we blundered at some speed through the trees, down a crumbling escarpment and, after eight hours on the road and a further two in the field, up and across the narrow, humpbacked medieval bridge at Zubiri.
It was a splendid little bridge, and not just because Shinto crossed it. A lot of the camino has been rerouted through rebuilt towns and relaid around redrawn fields, but here I knew my feet were in the right place. A reminder of who I was supposed to be following, what I was supposed to be doing, that this wasn't just an overambitious hike. Leading Shinto up its steeply pitched cobbles I accepted that thus far I'd barely paused to consider the pilgrimage's history and legacy. It had been easier, for the sake of both mind and body, to dismantle the 1,000 years behind and the 500 miles ahead into day-to-day logistics, the homespun routine of snorers and lunch-time and laundry.
And so I tied Shinto up to a shrublet that sprang from a wall at the bridge's apex, and got the books out, and found that if I led him down into the river below — hah! — and then walked him three times round the bridge's central pillar — hah! hah! hah! — by ancient tradition he would thenceforth be protected from rabies. The vaccination came at a price, though, because reading on I discovered that for centuries the locals ran a protection racket here, letting through pilgrims who agreed to pay a 'toll', and hurting — or indeed killing — those who didn't.
It was really very hot — hot enough for me to put my head under every fountain spout we passed — and having lunched alongside us in a steeply pitched field, Shinto lay down in the shade. That's nice, I thought, and was still thinking so when the time came to leave. 'Let's do it, Shints,' I said, clapping my hands before stooping to raise the saddle with a weary huff. I could understand why Hanno had urged me to unpack and unsaddle Shinto every lunch-time, but as long as the sum of my sloth, fear and incompetence remained greater than or equal to concern for his welfare I wouldn't enjoy the procedure.
He didn't want to do it, of course. He didn't want to do anything. He angled his lazily defiant countenance up at me and then let it fall gently back to the cool meadow grass, grunting in sumptuous repose. It took fifteen minutes of ratcheting foolishness to get that animal to his feet, a success eventually achieved by charging towards him banging that big bowl above my head like a tambourine. If I detailed Petronella's physical response to this spectacle I'd probably have to change her name.
As would typically be the case, the ruminative lunch break put us right at the back of the pack. It wasn't just that we weren't seeing pilgrims — we weren't seeing anyone. At the end of another slightly fly-blown village — most of the camino settlements are strung out along the road, enabling me to say 'ribbon development' for the first time since tenth-grade geography — two boys were idly punting a football at a towering wall of green concrete. I didn't yet know that this was the end flank of a pelota court, or indeed what pelota was, but I did know this: those two boys were the first non-pilgrim, nonmotorist humans I'd seen since Roncesvalles. Surely this was taking Sunday too far.
Up an improbably angled ridge of flaking slate, past a 10-foot granite block claiming to record the stride length of Roland, around the desolate remnants of a long-abandoned refugio. A sweeping, panoramic glimpse of the green-pined hillocks beneath and around and the vast blue heavens above, then the foliage closed around us and Shinto found something new to scare him to a standstill: dappled shadows on the path. It was interesting, though, to see how quickly he voted these the lesser of two evils, when approached from the rear by the rival evil of that loud man with his bowl. Thus it was that we blundered at some speed through the trees, down a crumbling escarpment and, after eight hours on the road and a further two in the field, up and across the narrow, humpbacked medieval bridge at Zubiri.
It was a splendid little bridge, and not just because Shinto crossed it. A lot of the camino has been rerouted through rebuilt towns and relaid around redrawn fields, but here I knew my feet were in the right place. A reminder of who I was supposed to be following, what I was supposed to be doing, that this wasn't just an overambitious hike. Leading Shinto up its steeply pitched cobbles I accepted that thus far I'd barely paused to consider the pilgrimage's history and legacy. It had been easier, for the sake of both mind and body, to dismantle the 1,000 years behind and the 500 miles ahead into day-to-day logistics, the homespun routine of snorers and lunch-time and laundry.
And so I tied Shinto up to a shrublet that sprang from a wall at the bridge's apex, and got the books out, and found that if I led him down into the river below — hah! — and then walked him three times round the bridge's central pillar — hah! hah! hah! — by ancient tradition he would thenceforth be protected from rabies. The vaccination came at a price, though, because reading on I discovered that for centuries the locals ran a protection racket here, letting through pilgrims who agreed to pay a 'toll', and hurting — or indeed killing — those who didn't.
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