Inner-dramas - Rabanal

It didn’t rain all the way from Astorga to here, but I can see it’s just started falling in the simple stone street outside the window.  Like so many villages in northern Spain, this place is little more than a track through an enlarged farm. 

I’m sitting in a room in the La Senda albergue.  My things are downstairs in the dorm and I’m showered.  I was the first person here, though not the first to Rabanal.  I reckon most will have passed through the village or gone on to the next albergue by the church, where we stayed last year – the Gaucelmo.  Others will have set off from somewhere further back between Astorga and Leon.  Twenty kilometres is enough for me.  I’d chosen La Senda because it has an adjoining café-bar; because I liked the smiling warden and his silver beard, and because he told me there was a wood-fire upstairs in the lounge.  That’s where I’m sitting right now – fine and dandy in my flip-flops.

Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” has been keeping me going all day.  I’ve been trying to pull-together the lyric in my memory while walking along, just letting it play with hardly any distraction.  The sound is as vivid as if it was coming out of a speaker, but I haven’t got the words together yet.  As a special treat, I’ve just listened to it by the fire on my iPod – the studio version on “Highway 61 Revisited”.

The night before setting off I was browsing the Web and hit on an article in “Rolling Stone” magazine from June this year.  I didn’t know it was fully fifty years since Dylan recorded that song.  The article cribbed accounts from musicians who were involved in the session, including Al Kooper who’d just been invited to come along as a rookie session guitarist and ended up jumping in on the organ, not even knowing how to turn the thing on.  His account of how he ended up on the track is rock genius.  In the end, Dylan loved the sound he made and it gives the track a big part of its identity.  Like I said…

My friend Danny gave me a copy of the Bootleg Series “Royal Albert Hall” album and his own account of what was going on when the fans turned on Dylan when he came out for the second part with the band plugged-in.  It’s popular music legend.  It took me years to get into listening to it – driving back from staying with my friend Michelle in London, it just came.  Dylan and the band struggle against chants, slow-handclapping, 60s protest turned on one of its own finest exponents.  Some walked out but, eventually, the music won.  Just before launching into “Like a Rolling Stone”, you hear him say to the band, just off-mic, “Play it fucking loud!”  And they do.  He almost screams that lyric in an act of musical triumphalism every bit as lasting as any great stone arch from London to Paris to Madrid.  Wonderful.  Now I can’t go anywhere without it.

What’s that got to do with walking the Camino de Santiago?  Everything.  Reflection.  Thinking about what’s going on in the mind of the little boy being dragged into places and situations he never really had an interest in.  What’s important?  Well, music is; time.  Understanding what the hell is going on and what I’m meant to think of it.  People have been busy telling what to think since I was a tiny kid – they still are.  I need some space.  I need some time.  I’ve got nine days walking this route again.  I’m not an antisocial person.  Far from it.  But I need some space and to know my own mind.  Maybe that’s why I lose myself so deeply in music. It’s like disappearing into the hills.

I walked from Astorga to Rabanal pretty-much on my own.  I stopped for breakfast at a Camino café at Murias de Rechivaldo, just five k outside Astorga.  I’d forgotten to fill my water bottles, so it was a necessary stop.  There was only one other person there – Vladko, I think he said his name was.  From Estonia.  He was waiting for some friends.  I passed a few words with the woman who was serving to empty breakfast tables, laid out like bait for the peregrinos she knew would come.  She filled my water bottles for me before I moved on.

Pierre was long-gone into the distance.  At least it was fully light.  I didn’t stop at the next village, Santa Catalina de Somoza, just saying buongiorno to two Italian cyclists.  I did pause to pick up a worm that was drying in the sun on the path and found some wet foliage for it to recover in.

I was surprised how quickly I made El Ganso and the Cowboy Bar café.  I stopped in for old time’s sake and had an empanada with a glass of sidra – my first farm cider since leaving Somerset in August.  Two couples were at the table next to mine.  Group dynamics are such an interesting thing to watch.  The biggest seemed to be laying down his wisdom in a boorish, overbearing way while what appeared to be his wife smiled and fawned and the acolyte pair opposite smeared it thickly onto their tostada.  I’d watched him earlier becoming impatient because the bartender didn’t understand his English.  Now he was busy generalising the whole Japanese population from what he’d seen on a visit.  I marked him out for avoidance.

A couple of kilometres along from El Ganso, I suddenly became panicky that I hadn’t had my credencial stamped since Astorga.  Scenarios played-out in my head where albergues refused me because I had no evidence of having walked.  El Ganso had been the last opportunity before Rabanal to get a stamp.  I stopped and looked back.  No.  I even toyed with the idea of flagging-down a taxi or passing car on the road – should one come.

Cutting up a rubble track through the woods, I began to see sticks woven into the wire fence to form crosses – it’s shown on the map in Brierley’s guide as Via Cruces.  I remembered the sight from last year.  Somewhere among them in the dirt might be the two sticks I pushed together with my shoe.  Again, nothing ventured…

On reaching Rabanal, the La Senda albergue was one of the first buildings, standing just to the left with its adjoining café.  It was an uphill walk to reach the rest of the village.  That was the final deciding factor.  It looked closed, but the nice man with the silver beard showed me around and I paid the six euros.  He stamped my credencial.  I couldn’t help myself – I had to point out that I hadn’t had a stamp since Astorga.  It didn’t matter, of course.  Maybe in the English-run Gaucelmo, further up the hill.  But this is a different Camino to last year.  I decided that it was time to bring my paranoias under control – all these scenarios charging around my imagination.  Just so much wasted energy and no peace – for what gain?  The inner-dramas wear me out.

For the next half-hour, the albergue was quiet enough for the warden to give me a free Spanish lesson while showing me around.  I was soon sitting in the comedora, warming myself by the fire, listening to Dylan and scribbling nonsense into a notepad.