Camino Jacobeo del Ebro. part four
Friday 17 October — Morning
Leaving Cortes
The Peregrine leaves the brief warmth of companionship and the sufficient ritual of coffee to commit to the Camino Jacobeo del Ebro.
The first illusion of the day dissolves when a hoped-for fellow pilgrim resolves into a leaning strand of bamboo, confirming the solitary nature of the Way.
The Plateau of Unromantic Truth
The walk settles into a difficult geometry: twenty-plus kilometres of relentless straight ahead.
The landscape is a series of contrasts — the odour of chickens and pigs, the fleeting flight of starlings, the distant hum of the Autopista del Ebro.
This straightness mirrors an inner reality.
Under a shadowless, diffused sky, loneliness spreads like a plateau.
Wind turbines stand still, heavy ogres resting on the Peregrine’s shoulders — the body of a depressive state.
He concedes the truth: El Camino isn’t romantic.
He measures the difference from before.
Aubrac was his King Lear — pathos, element, confrontation.
Today is Hamlet — self-obsession and stasis.
The Defiance of Action
He refuses paralysis. I keep walking.
A passenger train flies west, a hare bolts across the path — unthinking momentum answering his will.
He sets one aim: two hours until the monotony breaks.
The Clean Break
Two hours later, the disused station platform grants reprieve.
A pylon stands like a guillotine — a clean cut through the gloom.
Mood lifts.
He leaves Sofidel’s smoke trailing into grey and returns to the flat path, fortified.
The plain unchanged; he changed.
Rabbit droppings mark life.
A freight train thunders west.
He eats bread — the simplest, most unromantic sustenance — and walks on toward Tudela, carrying the quiet knowledge that he has crossed the unromantic plateau.
Friday 17 October — Afternoon
The Pilgrim Between River and Machine
He takes the narrow road beside the Aragón canal.
On his right, rapid water keeps its rhythm; on his left, beyond the railway, machinery grinds the fields.
Engines and water form the twin pulse of his march.
He thinks of the Ebro as older than humanity — once wandering freely, before dams and canals fixed its course.
He imagines mosquitoes rising from still pools, land and creature in uneasy balance; wonders if people were once more immune to bite and fever.
Memory drifts north to the English fens — brides dead of the ague, a man who buried twenty wives.
Saxons endured where others sickened; Romans suffered, their Mediterranean blood ill-suited to damp.
Venice follows — a different conquest of water, beauty raised from mud.
Endure or adorn: two answers to drowning ground.
He recalls Ely, Cambridge, Peterborough: low light, endless horizon, the weight of quiet.
Everywhere the echo of water beneath soil — memory of what once was river.
He keeps between canal and machine; steel and irrigation yield to memory and endurance: the same story in different tongues.
Saturday 18 October — Morning
Alfaro: The Pilgrimage of the Crisp Bread
The Peregrine sits amid the wreckage of his morning.
Yesterday he beat the depressive plateau, dismissed Hamlet with an un-ticketed train, and sealed survival with pinchos and Rioja.
Yet Day Five begins with debt: the phantom of a pig’s ear from the “shitetown” of Tudela still at work in his gut.
Outside: a locked albergue, a shut police station — an existential wurligig of circularity.
At the counter, farce peaks.
He asks for tostados con tomate and a café largo.
The counterman — tragically distracted — burns the bread, then offers the dichotomy of solo (intensity) or americano (dilution).
He scrapes the charred slices with machine-gun fury.
What remains is not toast but crisp bread.
The Peregrine holds his silence, cherishing the only perfect thing on the table: a sealed bottle of Vichy Catalan — immune to burnt hands and wandering mind.
What began as things are not right resolves into dry laughter.
Not threat — comedy.
Tostados consumed, Vichy cherished, he steps out at 8:15 a.m.
Not peace but conviction.
The Way³ is necessary; the seal holds.
He walks toward Logroño and leaves the café to its own friction.
The Peregrine, the Imbecile, and the Sandalled Step
Outside, grace: a boy with a dog, joy uncomplicated.
A plain road, cold air, cyclists flashing past, fingers stinging with England’s memory.
Three pilgrims exist — quiet company, unromantic and sufficient.
Seven figs appear — sweet bounty; four more, unripe.
He photographs the sun; his shadow leads.
A Stewie Griffin scrawled on a shipping container grins from the absurd.
The path degrades to pebbles, stones, grit.
Sandals read the ground like Arabic script — demanding, beautiful, present.
He strays river-ward, corrects without drama: the path mostly illusion.
Construction cuts a new road; an open hole waits.
He steps round it laughing.
Motion has him again.
Rincón de Soto — Noon
The Peregrine and the Future Ruin
He descends beneath the gaze of the future ruin.
Olives to the left, almonds to the right.
Unfinished pylons raise their steel arms, cables unstrung — ribs of a cathedral that never found faith.
A man in a 4×4 passes, cigarette pinned to his lip; smoke curls with oil and dust.
The Peregrine becomes the hinge of a half-made world — fruit and metal, harvest and skeleton.
Agriculture, industry, pilgrimage blur; a JCB hums a mechanical psalm.
Day Five — Rincón de Soto to the Ebro
Noon rises under a pale veil: blue above, dust below, the alto wrapped in mist.
He leaves with a quiet sufficiency — every action enough.
Maize bread from Horno de Abuelo sustains: yellow, mellow, seeded with sunflower, sweet density carrying him back to Morro de Pago above L’Esquirol, between Perpignan and Montserrat.
A señora stands at the verge, transistor to her ear.
Time bends; they pass unchanged.
Two bananas, two apples, the last Navarran rusk — the rusk feeds, the coffee bolsters, the Vichy lifts.
Toilet, stretch, onward.
Heat thickens; humidity rises as the river nears.
Construction throws its umbra across the Camino.
A train roars left; silence afterward feels earned.
Snails cling to dry stems — tiny spirals of patience. Waiting for the rain, he thinks, and smiles.
A blue sign: Paso provisional.
He turns. Paso paso — step by step — lesson of snails and living alike.
Progress is not forward but inward; motion, the cure for ossification.
Air smells of mud and green.
Sheep droppings mark transhumance — a pilgrimage older than maps.
The Camino returns to essence: river, dust, witness.
At last the Ebro shows — a soft silver curve behind reeds.
He cannot tell whether he has come to the river or she to him.
Heat, hum, and water speak the same truth:
meeting happens somewhere between motion and consent.
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