Pointless Ups and Downs (PUDs)

I wept my way across the meseta . . . not because I underwent a religious or spiritual experience or because I discovered a great insight, but because I discovered I was allergic to wheat. Yes, wheat. I had read about all the waving wheat of the meseta and how it served to drive pilgrims and dogs crazy. But nowhere had I read about how wheat could make a person’s eyes stream. From Nájera westward, I wept thick tears, so profuse that I gave up trying to wipe my eyes because my cheeks would just get raw in the process. Anyone seeing me would have surmised that I was mourning something or someone great and important in my life. Little did they know.

Before leaving, I had also read about the unrelenting flatness of the meseta and how boring it was. I had seen photographs that I later composed of a lone tree sticking out of a vast horizon. I dreaded the Sendero, a thirty-kilometer pathway marked by saplings every ten meters that runs parallel to the road in the Province of Palencia.*

Somewhere in all the preparation, however, I missed reading about the “Pointless Ups and Downs (PUDs).” Long-distance hikers call any rapid climb and descent a PUD. The meseta surprisingly had a few of its own in store for us. So when I wasn’t weeping from all the wheat, I was slogging up some meseta only to come down it again. There were times when I was ready to bag it — especially on the blazingly hot days.

One day we arrived in Castrojeritz about noon. We hadn’t paid too much attention to the guidebooks in advance so figured we could find something to eat on the way out of town. I was still in rapture about the massive poppy fields we had seen entering Castrojeritz, so was not too concerned about lunch. We left town and realized that we had missed every opportunity to eat and all we had between us were a few crackers. We stopped and ate what we had and then set off … up. Up this meseta that was ridiculously steep, a pointless up for what would be soon a down that we well could have walked around. Even as I groused about this inconvenience, we walked to the far edge of the meseta. Stretched out before us was the most amazing view that took my breath away, made me forget my tears and shut me up. We literally could see for sixty or seventy kilometers — where we would have to walk, for sure, but we had been gifted with perspective.

Ana says of her walking: “When you get to the top of the mountain, and you see the valley below … you are so very small, and yet you are part of it all. And the communion is so intense, that you are never the same again.”

The pilgrim puts up with weeping eyes, pointless ups and downs for those rare moments of communion which are so exquisite as to defy words. ¡Animo! Courage! It is worth all the inconveniences.

*All my guidebooks are packed away so I cannot nail down just where the thirty-km sendero is, I think it is between Carrion de Los Condes and Mansilla, either in the Provincia de Palencia o Leon. I am sorry I cannot accurately locate this information. The Senda is a pilgrim path that starts in Carrion de los Condes and goes for 30 kms alongside the road. What amazed us were the poplar trees planted at 10m intervals, with a place to rest every 1 km. If you were really into trudgery, you could literally count the meters. Eventually the trees will grow high enough to shade the pilgrim, but in 2007, they were saplings. The province, I believe, set up the senda in an attempt to be hospitable, but we longed for the simple paths in the woods that come later in Galicia.