When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

Signs

Porto heaves with sounds and sights. On the waterfront the restauraunts, packed, are spilling their patrons across the cobbles, each who raises a glass of Porto Ribieira at the command of a Falo guitarist who holds them all under his spell.

I am in not-quite-balcony-not-quite-room, that serves as a shoe storage area and holds a few tables which leave me ample comfort for writing on. The window before me is wide open and a fat gibbous moon gloams upon my skin, now darkened and roughened by days sweating in the sun.

Porto is the halfway point, the mark by which I finally give myself some slight respite and allow some space and time to unwind. I have travelled over 200 kilometres on foot from Entrocamento to this very spot, following the winding trail of yellow arrows, catholic shrines and shell signs. It is an old, old, pilgrimage trail from Lisboa to Santiago, where lies the shrine of Saint Sebastien. It is the lesser known approach, and I am proud to make it, to place my foot in the prints of others who took that fated path less followed.

This is to be something of a drawing up of the events of these last 2 weeks (a few days more a few days less) and I hope, dear reader, you will have the patience for those spots where the narrative flow snags upon a dearth of detail, or are not frustrated where the story skips along through narrows that mights be taken to have much more to say.

Suffice to say, that though thus far I have not met with the spectacular miracles that my fellow pilgrim Paolo Coehlo, of whom I'm a great admirer, was witness to, I have as yet found a few instances of spectacular good luck, profound coincidence, general weirdness of the best kind, which inclines me more and more to accept as evident the gentle providing by some great and benevolent being for those who set off seeking knowledge with pure heart.

Though it is a mighty stretch to call myself a Catholic or even a Christian I do keep a little red book of the gospels close at hand, find a source of inspiration in the personage of Jesus Christ and assent to the existence of a God.

In this cynical day and age, faith is looked upon as close enough to stupidity, and perhaps more dangerous. But I will be the first to defend it, though I am but a spiritual waif and stray begging my scraps from first one creed and then another. I sometimes think, if only, to be born into a simpler day and age, in mediaval Tibet, or pagan Britain. In that simplicity lies depth, and truth, a million leagues abroad of the information age-affliction, with its constant round of skeptic discourse.

On this matter I'll say no more, but to the matter at hand, how my wanderings along the Caminho de Santiago began.

Entrocamento was no sort of place to start, the trail did not even pass through it but near it. With my scant preparation, and my comrade Pedro's scant patience, the expedition looked like it might be, if not scuppered, then certainly clipped in the wing at takeoff. Pedro, though kind enough to give me to the lift to Estrocamento, was not inclined to hang about and the signs of consternation showed on his latin-carved features as we wandered about the poxy town, asking first one obliging (yet unknowledgeable) pedestrian, then another. I told him several times that he was within his rights to leave at any time and I would make my own way.

Finally, after an unsuccessful rapping upon an oaken church door, we headed back to the centre, whereupon I spied a sign.

It was a shop sign. It read 'Rio de Norte.'

I asked Pedro if that was a cinema, he said no, it was a furniture shop.

"I've got a feeling about this one. Let's go there and ask, and that will be the last one."

And the last one it was.

The furniture shop was bedecked with mirrors and had small statues of the virgin Mary in all the corners. A middle aged woman with thick rimmed glasses and tawny hair emerged and exchanged a few words with Pedro. She looked concerned, but then perhaps it was her usual look, then she got out her phone and started dialling a number.

"She says that she knows someone who lives near the Caminho, and he's going back there now." He said this without the slightest hint of surprise, being himself no stranger to spooky goings on.

At that point we said our goodbyes, rather briefly, our friendship being comfortable, close and dependable rather than sentimental.

So as I waited (the time promised was around 15 minutes and took considerably less) I pondered on the question, what exactly was it that made me transfix in such a curiously knowing way upon the sign and the shop, and swerve towards it with such a quiet confidence as if knowing from the start that it was there? And it wouldn't be the first time this has happened, even though I do not claim to be a psychic.

And if I now focus in on that exact moment as I saw the sign, it is as much for my own edification and record. There was a certain calm, a sensation of 'knowing', a cessation of the usual back and forth of worrysome inner discourse. That tangible 'knowing', a million miles from 'I think I know', 'I'm pretending to know', or 'I want you to think I know.'

My ride arrived, a van full of bracken-wood and its boy-eyed driver, who drove me some miles out of town, to a fairly nondescript stretch of road where he pointed me out a yellow arrow, spray-painted loose on a lampost.

From there the going was set, I was as much an automaton in my movements following the yellow sign here, the scallop shell there, never the need to plan or find a route that work having been predone for me.

Later, the signs were to come fast and thick, but in those first few days of walking, the trail was sparsely populated, and the signs sometimes faint and easy to miss.

It may have been the first or it may have been the second, I'd been walking some distance and the signs were conspicuously absent. I bloody-mindedly kept my pace and it was only when I came to a highway that I stopped to ask whether I was on the Caminho. The answer was not what I had wanted to here, I had to endure a 4 kilometre hike back the way I'd came.

I found the little sea-shell marker after a little anguished slog in the heat. As I rounded the bend, another walker came up behind me, the first fellow pilgim I'd seen on the whole way.

His name was Tom and he hailed from Germany. We had some interesting discussions about renewable energy which even now is booming across the globe, but particularly in Germany where the sheer logic of clean technology coupled with its environmental benefit has a doubleweight appeal.
And now, the thing is, that once again prophecies started to come true. I had told to Pedro my wish and intention to travel to either France, Germany or Norway, once I had wrung every last ounce of pleasure from the Portuguese heat. And all at once, this Tom, blurts out:

"You should know. I am planning on going to Norway in midsummer. There are still spare carseats."

I was effusively happy at this. Not only was he on his way to Norway (at the height of nightless Scandinavian Summer no less) , but he would pass through Germany and France on the way, so I had all my options layed out before me.

"Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful." Was all I could say.

Not only this but I had the previous day met yet another German brother by the name of Car Sten, who though not a-pilgrimming was more than happy to talk with me, and mentioned that he had worked in solar panel installation in Cologne and would find it easy to get me a job there if I so desired.

I'm sure you have such tales of your own, of times when everything seems to slot into place. Once they called it 'the favour of the gods' and later they called it providence. Still later it became a question of luck, then chance, then randomness.

Now the modern mentality merely scoffs without much need for explanation. Where are your graphs and pie charts? Can you falsify your hypothesis?