GALICIAN RAIN
The topography for today’s stage is supposed to be relatively easy—lots of short climbs and descents, but nothing major. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
There is one little complication. All the weather reports for the last 24 hours have said the same thing: Rain, RAIN, R-A-I-N.
But I am in denial—which, as they say, is not just a river in Egypt.
I come bouncing out of my albergue in the dark at 7:30 am. Feeling only a light mist on my face, I naively believe that I can get by, at least for a while, without full rain gear. Stupid! What was I thinking? Hadn’t I looked at the net at 10:00 pm last night and read that there would be “heavy rain” today with “an accumulation of an inch or more”? I must be losing my marbles, because I somehow forgot or ignored that.
Almost immediately, the heavy rain begins. I get out my poncho, put away the electronics, cover the guidebook with a plastic bag (in part because yesterday’s rainfall nearly destroyed the book), cover the backpack in a double layer of plastic, and set forth into the downpour. What I didn’t do before starting, of course, was to take out the shiny black waterproof pants that I have been carrying since I left DC on September 2, but that as of today have still never had one second of useful service. They are stuffed as always at the bottom of my backpack in a secure place where no one will ever find them—including me. So, on the one day when I absolutely need them, they are resting comfortably at the bottom of my pack, as dry as a fossil in Death Valley.
I cannot go back to the hotel, and I cannot face the rain without a coffee and a croissant to go. So, before heading into the wilderness—today’s path is mostly through forest, with no towns of any size—I stop at the one open bar in Arzúa. There is a television going (there always is, in every bar in Spain) and it shows a map with the weather. The entire northern portion of Spain, including every inch of the Camino from France to Santiago, is covered with little cloud symbols, with lines of driving rain coming out of them. The driving rain lines seem particularly energetic in Galicia. No hope for me. No escape.
You just have to point yourself in the right direction, put one foot in front of the other, and start moving. So, that’s what I do. For almost five hours. Without a stop, and without ever sitting down.
By 10:00 am, the rain is coming in buckets. Large buckets. The path is a field of mud, puréed with cow dung into a thick, sloppy brown-black ooze. There are massive puddles everywhere, and each time the ground is uneven, a river of water descends toward me.
I trudge along in my poncho, thinking of those American soldiers in the Korean War memorial in DC, moving forward through the mud under their ponchos, in the cold and the wet, trying to keep some part of their bodies or equipment dry, undoubtedly without much success. But they, of course, are armed with rifles and are fighting a war. I am just an old, unemployed guy taking a walk.
My poncho is a great big bag of a thing that does a brilliant job of keeping the rain off my shoulders, off the top of my head, and out of my backpack. But from five inches above the knees and down, everything is exposed and gets wet. The dirty secret is that most everything above that gets wet as well, either from osmosis as the water in my pant legs moves up into the dry areas above, or from the tremendous sweat that accumulates inside the poncho. In the end, you are wet, cold, and doing the only thing you can do—walk forward, as far as you can, along the path, going west.
By 11:00 am or so (I don’t know the real time, because my watch is buried away with all the electronics), I realize that I am on the cusp of a new tragedy. My expensive boots, which I was assured were “absolutely 100% waterproof,” are about to fall to an advancing enemy as relentless as ISIS—water. The left one is already breached; and within 20 minutes, it is a water-soaked mess. The right one falls a short time later. At that point, the extremity of defeat has arrived.
I try to remember if I have ever been this wet before (while clothed). Yes, once. Woodstock in the summer of 1969, when I sat outside while it rained for three days of psychedelic misery. But at least that was a warm July rain. This is October rain.