Day 2 or La Frontera

Notes on Day 2, February 26, Huntto to Roncesvalles



Today is the day that I summitted the Pyrenees. I was so glad I stuck with French Jeanine´s advice and took the Route de Napoleon, even with the aubergue mishap yesterday. My guidebook said it was the harder and more isolated route, and I now know what I would have missed if I had gone the highway route through Valcarlos. I had the trail entirely to myself today and I was reminded of a certain poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference

-Robert Frost



The point at which at roughly 1100m the path left the paved road did make me a bit nervous (and believe me, the symbolism of leaving the paved road behind for the truly wild trail is not lost on me given my recent life chaos).



But about 200m from the summit, I really had to go to the bathroom. Funny. But there are no Port-0-Lets on the top of the Pyrenees. Well, a girl´s got to do what a girl really has got to do.

People I tried really hard not to pee on myself, ok. I really did. But when you are on an open mountainside 1250m above sea level with your bare white ass hanging out for every sheep and hill pony to see and the wind is blowing like God just sneezed, there´s bound to be some overspray.



On to the Spanish border! It´s amusing that when you cross the border (La Frontera) into Spain, there is no one to check your passport, no x-ray machine to walk though. You simply pass through a cow stile and bam, Bienveido A Espana! Now I had to remember to greet everyone I met differently: "Buenos Dias Senor Cow, Buenos dias Senor Seep, Adios Senora Chicken!"



I summitted at Col de Lepoeder at 1450m above sea level and took an awesome picture of myself which you can´t see cause I don´t have time to upload it (this internet cafe I'm at in Pamplona closes in 10 minutes).





About crossing borders: It occurs to me that I should write a little sumpthin´ sumpthin´on why I named this blog "La Frontera", which literally means border in Spanish. A year before I read Liz Gilbert invoking the term Antevasin (a border dweller) to describe herself, I read Gloria Anzaldua, the Chicana lesbian philosopher and poet who has written eloquently about living life at the borders, geographical, cultural, sexual, mystical, personal. One of her poems begins:

"Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap

a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent crash"

It resonated. The intersections, the borders, the messy places where lands, people, philosophies, ideas, spirits rub together are where life happens. I was at my own intersection at the time I first encountered Gloria, trying to understand if I was going to make a violent crash and divorce my husband.

This trip is a border crossing for me, literally, figuratively, spiritually. The walk across Spain is a walk across a bridge over the borderland between my old life (tired, uninspired, trapped) to my new life (limitless, loud and purposeful).

The steep and immediate descent ended at the monastery at Roncesvalles where I met other pilgrims arriving after me and from the city route from Valcarlos.



Tonight I sat down at a table with Eddie the Italian, Elaina and Sonja the Spanish school friends, another Spaniard named Geunthar of all things, Hunn the Dutchman who likes Rush Limbaugh, Charlie, my Irish buddy who is 70 years old and walked the entire 24.8km from St. Jean to Roncesvalles in one day for fuck´s sake (though he admitted it almost killed him), and Pin, the tiny but intrepid South Korean girl, and together this little band of Peregrinos (pilgrims as we are called - sometimes affectionately, sometimes not) ate fresh mountain trout and french fries and talked about The Camino, the American presidential election, reform in Amsterdam´s red light district, and the wonders of South Africa. We drank the most delicious red wine I have ever had. Perhaps it was so good because it was wine from Navarra, or perhaps I was so tired and sore that moonshine would have tasted as good to me, but I doubt it.



And now I´d like to dedicate this day´s portion of ¨The Camino¨(as it is universally called) to my dad. Like Saint James himself, sitting astride his horse, sword drawn, defending Spain against the Moors, my dad has been my defender in this last year. Dad was in my thoughts today because I managed, how I know not, to delete all the pictures from my first day of travel. I did not think I had inherited the woefully technologically challenged gene from my dad, but apparently I did. But he was also with me because at the end of the day I ate fresh, buttery, flaky mountain trout (head still on and all), and I thought of my dad every time I forded a small stream on the trail and gazed in the waters and wondered if there were any trout in there for him to catch.

I love you dad.