At five, when the pitch black sky had caught up on me, when the rain started and the lightning was getting too close, I had spotted the bridge and the narrow ridge underneath it already but I was still hoping for a farmer´s shed to appear or something else with walls and a roof. It didn´t and the oak tree seemed a good option but the rain got heavier and heavier and when there was a small break inbetween the showers I took my wet things and walked to the bridge. The ridge was big enough for my mattress and I cleared the rubbish away but the water is leaking through the walls and by now the ridge is completely wet as well. The last option is a lower concrete level, not completely flat and overgrown with thick blackberry bushes but I found a long metal rod and managed to trim them down so there is enough space for my inflatable bed. The area might be wet later on as well, but that is a later worry. If necessary I just sit up all night and write and get going before the sun comes up. It was a sunny day, the solar panel worked at top speed, my iPad is powered and the spare battery is full. There is even a good internet connection here. I´ve got food and chocolate and I found an almost full pack of cigarettes on the road. I´ll be fine.
It was a day of extremes with the most beautiful morning I experienced in a long time. I woke up in a bird observatory where I had moved to unplanned because my sleeping place of choice was also the rather big wild boar population´s favorite hang out. There was an amazing full moon, I saw it rise out of the sea from my window first and later on it moved slowly through the clear sky, lighting up everything. I slept a few hours on the wooden floor in my sleeping bag, woke up with Orion, the Great Hunter staring at me. I sat up for a few hours and went back to sleep.
I was at the beach, not even a minute walking from my shelter, before sunrise. There was still a big moon hanging in the sky opposite of the sea. The mountains underneath it were coloured in an unreal shade of blue. The sea was ferocious, big waves. The sky turned pink and yellow and then it happened, like it happens every day but I rarely see it and I never saw it under these conditions. An empty beach, the sun and the moon on both sides of the sky, noisy sunlit waves, mountains in all directions apart from where the sun came up.
I ate my breakfast, I am still not tired of chestnuts and wallnuts and pomegranates. The little red seeds that fell on the sand shone like diamonds.
In the far distance two big boats were balancing on the horizon. I remembered how before I left Barcelona, before I had even made a decision to go on this walk, I had read my fortune in the coffee remains of my coffee cup. My Turkish friends had shown me how to do it. Drink the coffee, put your cup upside down and wait for a bit, then turn it around again and look carefully. I had seen a long sea journey.
My original route didn´t go along the seaside but I decided to get back to the old Mediterranean path and although I first wasn´t sure if it was a good decision, passing a lot of industrial buildings in the beginning and then fishermen with cars along the big river everywhere, once I saw the sea I was happy about my choice.
The sun was out all day, I was in a birders paradise. Once I started walking, now and then one or two people with huge camera lenses passed me, ready to catch what they saw. There were wooden boards with pictures, showing what animals and trees were around. Wild boar -but I knew that already-, foxes, big deer.
Yesterday I had felt lonely and I thought about my last months in Barcelona. The dancing, the walking along familiar streets, eating dinner with friends, drinking vermuth at a local bar, talking through the night. Barcelona had forgotten about me but it didn´t matter.
I was hoping somebody else would sit on my favorite stone in the sea now and then and I was sure my silent Muñoz friends, legless and unmovable in their cagelike house at the square in front of the beach, would have other visitors. I hadn´t forgotten about Barcelona but I have to admit the city I love isn't in my mind always either.
But people sense it when you are lonely and in the middle of the night I read new messages coming in from a new friend who suggested walking with me for two days in the weekend, an artist friend from the UK had send me a donation and told me she was looking forward to tell her daughter about my walks when she would be old enough to understand. I was touched. Two years ago, on my first long walk, I had walked with her virtually on a late summer day on my way to the South of France. Rowan wasn´t born then yet and that day my friend took a day off from her worries about putting a child into this world and was going for a walk along the seaside. I would walk at the same time in a different country and think about her unborn child. I did. We "met" at one 'o clock, thinking about each other. And today, last night, she wrote me a message again and in the morning, when I was staring at the amazing sunrise, I thought about her. I collected some small shells for Rowan, the child with the name of a tree that attracts birds.
There was another message from a Facebook friend whom I hadn´t known for a long time and who was keeping an eye on my journey, asking me if she could help me in any way. And today a wonderful message came in from one of my sister´s old schoolfriends, a girl I remember as always smiling, still living like my sister in the village where all of us grew up. She sent me money to buy chocolate to keep me going and she wrote that she somehow understood what I was doing but not completely. I liked that a lot. Sometimes I don't completely understand it either but I guess that is one of the reasons I am doing this.
Today I realised my Facebook posts still automatically say I am in Barcelona but I am not there anymore. Part of my heart is but it has grown bigger on the road, being fed by all the people I met, nature, the charming villages, the small pleasures of a cup of coffee, a warm meal, washing my hands with warm water. I can afford to loose my heart everywhere, or at least parts of it. The holes fill up quickly again.
And I am not more lonely here than I am in a city I live in for a while, but in a city it is masked by my social life, people kissing me on the cheeks when they see me, touching my arm when I talk to them, joining me on the dancefloor. It isn´t a sad kind of loneliness though, although it sometimes makes me feel sad. Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet about loneliness, about solitude beautifully;
"And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us."
I love stumbling upon beautiful villages along the road and when there is time I sit at the village squares to take a small break or when there is a cafe, order a cafe con leche. Today there was a big village with a castle and a cathedral. There were restaurants and I checked the menu's, the last time I had sat down to order a warm lunch must have been more than a week ago. I found a cheap spinach cannelloni that was just what I was apparently hungry for. The terrace outside wasn´t meant for eating though and the waiter directed me inside, into the very fancy restaurant of the hotel. I hadn´t looked in a mirror for days and had no idea what shape my face was in but I could see my hands. They looked like I´d been living rough for two weeks. I was the only one in the room who was wearing a suit though. All the tables had expensive heavy table clothes with matching napkins folded carefully. Silverware and multiple wineglasses. The menu was in four languages and I spoke with the waiter in French. I had been thinking about a glass of wine before I went in but the wine was more expensive than the cannelloni I was going to order. Six euro a glass. Not today.
My table was only a few inches away from the couple seated next to me. I didn´t really notice them at first, being busy downloading the last three editions of the Dutch magazine I´ve got a subscription on, but when the man started talking louder and louder I looked at them. At first I thought that they were a couple with a big age difference but listening and looking at them I realized he was probably her son and they were on holiday here. He was extremely rude, told her again and again how wrong she was, how stupid she was, that she didn´t know anything. He opposed everything she said being very clearly extremely annoyed by her. She shyly tried to keep the conversation going, sometimes defending herself but it only made him angrier and more aggressive in his talking. I wanted to say something but I didn´t want to embarrass her. I think they were Swiss, talking in German, probably not realizing I could understand everything. I tried looking at the man a few times but no subtleties would stop him. I tried to eat but I couldn't. So I spoke up and told him he was being aggressive and that he was misbehaving. He shut up, not knowing what to say and the mother, like mothers do, tried to fix it, to take away the attention or maybe she was just happy to talk to somebody else. She asked me how come I was speaking German and where I was from. When I said I was from the Netherlands her son nodded his head and said "yes, of course" in the most derogatory way but I just smiled and he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the conversation. Suddenly it was as if he didn´t exist anymore and the lady, who told me just before she left that she would turn eighty this year, asked me all sorts of questions. I don´t think she fully understood why I was on the road but it didn´t matter. I think she enjoyed our little conversation and I was happy I got her out of being bullied by her son. Verbal aggression is terrible and it is always hard to know if you should interfere. When he left the table she stayed a little bit longer, we said our goodbyes and wished each other happiness and a good life. But I could see how sad she was and it was painful to hear her say that there wasn´t that much left for her, being eighty already.
I dared to order a coffee without looking at the menu, payed, left with a full belly and sat at the steps in front of the cathedral to grease my walking boots. I walked. It was late already, the days are so short and there is so much to do. I had seen the dark clouds already and I walked quickly, trying to stay ahead of them and I did for a bit. I had forgotten I was supposed to leave the old Mediterranean path for a bit to save some time but it didn´t matter. There was lightning and thunder and the mountains became invisible. I joined the cows and then moved to the bridge.
By now I have slept a bit. After I started typing I heard gunshots nearby, it is hunting season and I know I have to be careful when I am off the beaten track. There were sounds in the bushes, probably ducks or an otter. I heard footsteps over my head and decided to switch off all the lights for a bit. There is not much left to do in the dark but sleep. So I slept. And woke up in the moonlight with the Great Hunter back over my head. He makes me feel comfortable. Wherever I am, he is there to watch over me. Not even an earthquake will shake me.
It shook the bridge though and it woke me up. I couldn´t imagine it being anything else and I saw friends in Barcelona posting on their Facebook that they had felt something as well.
I checked my timeline and saw that while I was sleeping a far away friend had send me a smile, kisses and a hug, at that moment, in that order. Those things shake me up, touch me, make me realize how fragile life is, happiness is.
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