Day 33 or Enselmo the Walnut Witch

Notes on Day 33, March 28, O´Cebreiro to Triacastela

When I walked out of my hotel this morning a bus load of German tourists unloaded right in front of me. One of them raised his camera and took a picture of me as if to say, ¨Look! There is a real Peregrino in the wild!¨ I guess I am officially part of the scenery now. But I´ve earned it.



I started off with the faintest if futile hope that the weather would have cleared from yesterday´s foggy white-out. What I really wanted though, was a weather miracle. I wanted a stunningly glorious sunny day with blue skys clear enough to see to Gibraltar from the peaks. Instead, the sock-in was actually worse than yesterday.



The heartbreak deepened as I read my guidebook for today which promised ¨the most stupendous views in every direction¨ from this elevation, and all I saw was the same impenetrable, immovable wall of white fog that engulfed the mountain yesterday. And with each turning the path took, each turning that I knew just had to promise the most breathtaking view, I felt my heart swell and then sink again at the inevitability of the fog, thick as mucous, staring me in the face.

I could have been walking in the red light district in Amsterdam and I would not have known the difference. I could have been marching into a pen of hungry, man-eating anacondas and I would not have seen them. I was hiking on a foggy mountain road with cars that couldn´t see me, which freaked me out. And later the visibility cleared from 20 feet to 200, and I couldn´t decide if this was helpful or just a cruel tease, because I had only pale glimpses of snow laced fields and I could hear waterfalls, but I could not see them.



And all the while it still rained and the rain changed the trail into a stream and the mud changed the stream into sludge again and I am now wearing the trail on the bottom third of my pants.

My spirits flagging, I stopped in a bar for some hot chocolate (they do hot chocolate pretty well here in Spain) and immediately I spotted Elainie and Roberto sitting next to a new guy at the bar. We did the requisite kiss, kiss (which always makes me feel so exotic and European) and then I ordered my hot chocolate and they introduced me to Joe from Oxford, England.

Joe is adorable. Not like want to take him to bed adorable, but like want to put him in your pocket and carry him around with you adorable. He´s 26 with a mop of long unkempt hair and a low pitched voice, which, when combined with the British accent and his penchant for irreverent phraseology, is want to take him to bed adorable. So we chatted each other up for a bit and then I headed back out into the bleak of Galicia.



Galicia is heavy with Irish roots. As early as 1,000 B.C. Celts arrived here by boat and began to get down with the Iberians, introducing a lineage of Celt-Iberians that is culturally distinct from the rest of Spain. You can sense the Irish about this place. I have walked through countless intimate cabbage patches growing by the roads, their tall green stalks plucked free of leaves which, together with potatoes and, if you´re lucky (and thank God I haven´t been yet), bits of pig´s head, end up in your piping hot bowl of sopa de Gallego in the evenings. The landscape, which if one could actually see it, is green and rolling and pastoral. It is so reminiscent of pictures I have seen of Ireland that one could easily get confused as to where one is hiking. And the pagan traditions run deep here as well I am told. I have seen countless little witches on key chains in more than one wayside gift shop.

In the afternoon, after a long descent from the hopelessly invisible peaks, the sun burned off some fog and I could finally see the valleys I could not enjoy from above. And with a sigh I did my best to appreciate the little consolation prize I had been given.

I caught up with Roberto and Elainie on the trail, and we carried on about the fog of the morning, how we were all worried about getting hit by a car, how Roberto and Elainie couldn´t see the trail markers and ¨got lost in the way.¨ I like how instead of saying ¨on the trail,¨ Roberto says, ¨in the way.¨ It is an accidental misappropriation of language on his part, but I love the happenstance meaning of it. His ¨choice¨ of the preposition in makes one a part of this road, not separate from it, and his word way symbolically evokes an inner path as well as an outer one.



We started dishing about our divorces (Roberto and Elainie are both each other´s second spouse), and I gave them the Cliffs Notes version of my reasons for leaving my marriage: that I was too young when I got married, that we were just wrong for each other to begin with, that we grew apart and that I wanted to live my own life and I found I could not do that with my ex. I left the more salacious details out.

Joe caught up with us and he and I went ahead now, yammering on about politics and the war and everything else wrong with the world. But we stopped dead in a small hamlet when we came to the most enormous, aged, gnarled, old tree I think I have ever seen. I swear it looked like it was occupied by some wizened, ancient spirit of the forest, like it might slowly awaken and speak to us.



And then, it did. Was that the tree that just said that? No. We turned around to find an old man, just as wizened and ancient as the tree, with red eyes and a red hat to match, and a worn and tattered sweater, approach us with a box of walnuts. ¨Nuescas. Una Euro. Una Euro.¨ He wanted to sell us the walnuts. I looked at Joe. Joe looked at me. We stood for a few moments deciding what to do, and then we figured what the fuck, lets get some walnuts.



So we stood while the man cracked walnuts for us with a heavy stone and we ate them, sweet and crunchy and from these very woods, right there under the spirit tree. He talked to us, but we didn´t understand much, and finally Roberto and Elainie came down the path, and they stopped when they saw the tree too, and joined us with the Walnut Man.

Roberto greeted him in Spanish and suddenly a torrent of language came from him. The man kept pointing at me and asking ¨Senorita? Senorita?¨ He wanted to know if I was a ¨miss,¨ in other words, unmarried. And when I said yes, he babbled on so fast I had no hope of understanding. And Roberto´s eyes got wide and he looked at me and said, ¨He is some kind of witch or something!¨ ¨Why?¨ I was desperate to know. ¨What did he say?¨ I was a bit panicked that he had predicted my doom or something, or read my aura and found out I am actually a Libre and not a Sagittarius. ¨I can´t believe it!¨ Roberto exclaimed. ¨He is saying to you ´live your own life! Don´t get married!, Do what you want to do with your life. Live for you!´ you know, the exact same things we were talking about back there in the way! This is weird, man.¨

It was weird. Really weird. And the four of us stood stuck to the ground for ages listening to this man insist to me that I live my own life, no one else´s. And Joe turned to me and said with curious wonder in his voice, ¨It´s like we´re the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, you know? We´ve been stuck here with this guy for 10 minutes, but really five years have passed and our families all think we are dead and have stopped looking for us.¨

Roberto found out this woodland sage´s name is Enselmo. In all I think it took us forty minutes to untangle ourselves from Enselmo, his walnuts, and his prescient prattling. But we finally did, and when we made it to Triacastela, we were relieved to find it was still 2008, and that we had not been put into a trance and trapped.



But at dinner that night, pregnant Maria told us all that she overhead a school teacher on the trail telling her students that the tree, the crazy huge old spirit tree, was 1,700 years old.