Unforgettable steps that unite on the Way of St. James

I often remember Joe Murdock. He was one of the first people I met when I started the Camino Primitivo, and the last one I met when it was time to finish it. It could be said that ours was a perfect and circular relationship: we met in the centre of Oviedo/Uviéu, at the foot of a zebra crossing that we crossed together to end up in the long descent of La Argañosa, and we said goodbye at the top of Monte do Gozo, next to the sculptural group that shows the joy of two pilgrims when distinguishing, in the distance, the towers of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

I remember the words he said to me when, rather foolishly, we both realised that it was quite unlikely that we would meet again in the future: "We'll bump into each other one day, walking". We gave each other's hands a firm shake and then hugged. Before I lost sight of him - I had arrived in Santiago the day before and this visit to Monte do Gozo was a way to take a closer look at what I was too anxious to reach my destination to see as closely as I deserved - I stood for a few minutes watching his silhouette descending the hillside. Joe was a big man from Detroit who was on a pilgrimage with his companion Vivian. I think we hit it off because we were both not very talkative. He was barely fluent in Spanish and we understood each other in a macaronic English that could borrow some truly exotic linguistic borrowings. They say that the Jacobean routes bestow the gift of languages on those who walk them. Judging by the way Joe and I hit it off, that assertion may not be nonsense.

I said that Joe was one of the first people I met on the Camino Primitivo because, when we met, there were more people around. There was Vivian, but there was also Rubén Manilla, a 74-year-old Mexican who was about to walk the more than three hundred kilometres between Oviedo/Uviéu and Compostela for the third time, after having cycled the French Way. For more than thirty years he had managed the Mexican branch of an American industrial firm and now, happily retired, he tried to set aside a break from time to time to jump the ocean and take to the roads. I lost Rubén that same morning, at the top of L'Escampleru, and recovered him late in the afternoon, when, exhausted, he was hanging out in the streets of Grau/Grado until dinnertime.

Between one thing and another, I had had the chance to meet Tara Ramsey. I met her in the village of Premoñu, although we only exchanged a brief courtesy greeting, and we met up for good a few kilometres later, on the outskirts of Puerna. It was then that I learned that she was American, that she had come from Washington DC to embark alone on the Camino Primitivo and that she had just opened a blog where she planned to keep a record of her adventure, partly to keep a kind of personal diary and partly so that her mother, who had been worried on the American side of the Atlantic, could follow her wanderings.

Rubén and Tara were, for many stages, my most constant companions on the Camino. We started walking together and, although we soon dispersed, the reunions at the end of each day soon became a habit. We lost sight of each other for good in Grandas de Salime. Rubén and she stayed at the hotel set up by the dam and I preferred to finish in the village. By then, María José and Raquel, two girls from Murcia who had started the journey in Tineo and whom I met in Pola de Allande, when the route made me stop there in the middle of the Hazelnut tree festivities, had already joined our group.

It may seem like a chaotic inventory, but that is part of the essence of the Camino. Somewhere I wrote that the course of the Jacobean itineraries is very similar to the course of life. When you start, you are nobody, just an anonymous figure who, with your rucksack on your back, joins a sea of people moving westwards. Little by little, you meet people with whom you will have unequal relationships: with some people you will share long walks, with others you will see and stop seeing each other as it suits you at random, and most of them will only be blurred shadows, faces and voices that will fade in your memory after a while. Arrival at the Obradoiro is success, but it is also a small death: there is nothing on the other side; once there, it is time to undo the steps, return to the familiar routines and, in many cases, lose contact with all those you met, those who for many days became an inexcusable point of support when it came to moving forward.

Several years have passed since I walked the Primitive Way and the inventory of absences is large. I never heard again of the seven Taiwanese I met in Tineo, and in Allande, and in Lugo, and to whom I facilitated the entrance to the monastery of Obona, in one of the most picturesque experiences of the pilgrimage to Compostela.

Nor do I know anything about the fate of the Australian couple with whom I was chatting on a stretch of the south-west of Asturias, who were shortening the stages as far as they could, because they were getting on in years and their strength was not enough. Once I stopped to chat with another couple, this one Italian, who seemed to be in an incurable crisis. There was a Catalan pilgrim, Santiago, who walked alone of his own free will and was never very intimate with anyone. I liked him from the beginning and he agreed to have a beer with me the last time we met, in the Plaza Mayor in Lugo. "I want to know that I can do this alone," he said before we said goodbye at the foot of the walls of the Galician capital.

I have heard again from those who most frequently matched their steps to mine. Rubén writes to me from time to time from Mexico to send me hugs. He is getting closer and closer to his eighties, but he still dreams of one day flying to Spain to embark once again on the Camino. I also exchange messages with Tara from time to time. I know that she has a dog called Dora and also that she lives with some trepidation the changes in the convulsive American political scene. Through Facebook I get occasional updates from Jorge, who coincided with me between San Román de Retorta and Ponte Ferreira and was kind enough to slow down his athletic pace when my right ankle got silly and I needed a helping hand in case things got ugly and I had to go to an emergency clinic. Raquel and María José are still in Murcia and a year ago they returned to Galicia to do the French Way, according to what they told me themselves. Joe also tells me things, who writes to me from time to time to share with me the plans that will take him to follow new paths through the most unsuspected places. He is a born walker, as quick to follow in the footsteps of St Teresa of Jesus and her successive foundations as he is to stray into the wildest corners of the world. " We walk together", Rubén told a waitress who served us in Campiello to explain the bond that united us, and that expression sums up better than any other the webs of complicity of an odyssey whose uncertainties are only revealed to those who decide to embark on it.

So going along knowing that everyone is well, that better or worse they are getting on with their lives, that there is still some Camino planning for their imminent horizons, is always comforting. "We'll see each other someday, walking," Joe said as we parted on the heights of Monte do Gozo. Although I still think it is most likely that we will never meet again, I can't help but recognise that I would like his words to be right, and that sooner rather than later that reunion will happen.