Lawrence Block - Step by Step

(And, thanks to the Fascist dictatorship that had kept Spain backward and impoverished for decades, the villages hadn’t changed that much, either. We walked through some of them — in Galicia, especially — just as they were beginning to change; we would see farmers plowing with oxen, and then a mile away we’d spot Japanese cars parked in a village that still hadn’t been wired for electricity. If we’d walked the Camino a few years earlier, those cars wouldn’t have been there; if we walked it today, I expect we’d find tractors had replaced the oxen.)

The Camino, steering clear of roads and wending its way on ancient paths, was a great improvement, but it wasn’t always a simple matter to stay on course. It’s in the nature of paths to wander around, crossing one another more or less at will, and unless a trail’s well marked, a hapless peregrino can zig when he should have zagged.

Various local bodies were charged with the responsibility of maintaining the trails, and some of them were more diligent than others. The first time we got lost, however, it wasn’t the fault of the locals. They’d done a good enough job of posting the trail, if only we’d known what to look for.

The trail had led us to and through a village, but once we were out of it we couldn’t figure out where to go next. There were no signs to help us out, and a woman eventually noticed us wandering to and fro and asked us a question, which of course we couldn’t understand.

I said or tried to say that we were pilgrims, and were looking for the Camino to Santiago. “ Flechas! ” the woman said.

“Fletchers?”

“ Sí. Flechas! ”

That didn’t help. We wandered some more, half-looking for a sign saying FLETCHER’S. You won’t be surprised to learn that we couldn’t find it. Another helpful local said the same curious thing, but chose to elaborate. “ Flechas! Flechas amarillas! ”

“Fletchers again,” I said, “but yellow ones this time. I wonder what the hell he was trying to tell me.”

“I don’t know. What’s a fletcher, anyway?”

“In Spanish? Beats me. In English it’s one of those old occupational surnames. I forget what a fletcher did. Fleisher means butcher in German, you know, as in flesh, but a fletcher’s something else. Oh, I remember. A fletcher is an arrowsmith.”

“It’s a rock band?”

“No, it’s a guy who makes arrows. I guess there used to be more call for that sort of thing, but — oh, fuck me with a stick.”

“Yellow arrows.”

“We’ve been seeing them all day,” I said. “Remember? We were trying to figure out if they were making some sort of political statement.”

“And what they were saying was, ‘Follow me.’”

Flechas amarillas.

So that was a new word for us, and a useful one. The yellow arrows didn’t entirely eliminate the possibility of a wrong turn; there were often more turns than arrows, and some of them were so arranged as to lend themselves to more than one interpretation. And before long we learned another new Spanish word, senda, which means path.

It was easier to remember the word than to avoid straying from it, or to find it once it had been lost. And more than once Lynne sang:

We got lost repeatedly, but most of the time it wasn’t too bad; we’d find our way back to where we’d gone wrong and pick up where we’d left off.

Until the day that prompted this entry, the Day from Hell.

It started out like any other day, and the weather was certainly favorable, the sun shining away in a cloudless sky. We were out of the hills now and entering the flat plains of central Spain, which made for easier walking. And so we walked, and kept on walking, until we realized we’d lost our way, and didn’t know where the hell we were.

It wasn’t entirely our fault. We’d crossed an invisible boundary from one province to another, and the Yellow Arrow Brigade in the new place turned out to be a bunch of slackers. The route wasn’t marked the way it was supposed to be, and we were by no means the first people to lose our way.

As we found out when a woman popped out of her front door and regarded us with some alarm. “ ¿Peregrinos? ”

“ Sí, ” we said, proud of our command of the language.

“ ¡Ay! Perdido! ”

Perdido was another word we knew. It means lost.

And she’d evidently had occasion to use it before. She clued us in on where we were and how to get back to where we ought to be, and we’d gone a good distance out of our way, and the sun was higher in the sky now, and there was no shade along our route, and if we were not exactly disgruntled, well, you couldn’t say we were gruntled, either.

It got worse. I don’t remember all the details, but one thing after another was going wrong. Our spirits were sagging, and it seemed like a good time for an emergency meeting of the Peregrino Group, so I recited the preamble and Lynne talked for a while and then I talked for a while and we said the prayer and walked on.

And, of course, things continued to go wrong. We’d skimped on breakfast and couldn’t find anyplace to have lunch, so we went without. And we’d missed an opportunity to fill our water bottles, and another opportunity had not come our way, and we were running out of water. That’s never a good idea, particularly when you’re walking in the heat of a blazing sun.

Earlier, on our way through Andorra, we’d discovered the importance of drinking enough water. If your water intake’s not sufficient, your mood turns nasty.

We found this out empirically, when we realized we were snarling and snapping at each other for no discernible reason. I couldn’t figure out why, and then it struck me that I hadn’t peed in hours, and neither had Lynne. So I drank some water, and suggested Lynne do the same, and our mood lifted and the snapping and snarling stopped. From there on in we made sure we had water, and made a point of drinking enough of it to keep from killing each other.

But now, on what was perhaps the hottest day thus far, we were running out of water. We’d be able to fill our water bottles at the next village, wherever it might be. As far as we could tell from our map, the next human settlement was a long ways off.

On a day like this, a little surliness was the least of our worries. I didn’t really think we were going to die for lack of water, but people did just that from time to time, and not only in the real world. Think of all the film actors you’ve seen crawling across the Sahara or the Mohave or the Gobi, crying out “Water!” through cracked lips, their tongues swollen, their makeup caked.

We thought of them, I’ll tell you. And, while we were thinking of them and other unpleasant prospects, we did what we were getting so good at doing in trying circumstances.

We got lost again.

I don’t know how it happened, but I can guess. The same swine who’d failed to provide flechas amarillas early on had failed once more. And we’d missed a turn, and here we were, hopelessly perdido .

At least we didn’t have to worry about walking around in circles. As long as we kept the sun in front of us, we’d be walking west. And it wasn’t hard to know where the sun was, because there it was, grinning furiously down on us, glaring right into our eyes, baking our brains.

The Spanish army saved us. We weren’t on anything resembling a road, just a path running across the center of a vast stretch of open ground, so we were not expecting to hear a car coming up behind us. We turned, and there were a couple of open jeeps filled with young men in uniform. We’d managed somehow to find our way onto a patch of land that the military used for maneuvers, and it was just our good fortune that their day’s agenda called for a lot of driving around and saluting, instead of, say, artillery and mortar practice.