Alia Volz
Down Like a Child
I round a bend in the dirt tractor road, and there’s a gigantic white pyramid gleaming in the sun. It’s so bright that I must look away, blink hard to recover my sight, draw my gaze back slowly. I register hive-like activity around the base. Men at work, wearing hard hats coated in white dust. A bulldozer, a crane, a water truck—all pure white. Like heaven or a hospital.
It takes me a moment to realize I’m looking at a quarry. My pyramid is actually a pile of rock torn from the hillside, machine-pummeled into rubble and poured into a conical heap the height of a three-story building. Limestone, I believe, caliza in Spanish. Strange machinery hovers above the pinnacle, some hybrid between a conveyor belt and a praying mantis.
I lean against a boulder across from the quarry’s entrance. The rock takes the weight of my backpack, relieving my sore shoulders. I’ve been walking for thirty-nine days, also some nights. I’m midway through the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a 790-kilometer pilgrimage across Iberia dating back to the thirteenth century. Though I’m not religious, I enter every church along the way, from grandiose cathedrals to hushed wooden boxes. I became a pilgrim because I felt lost and believed I might find myself on this trail. As if my true self were a place I could visit, or a shiny pebble I could carry home in my pocket.
The stretch I’ve been walking for days—between Burgos and León—is the wasteland phase. These hot, achy slogs through Spain’s desiccated innards lack the splendor of the mountainous beginning. Many pilgrims do this part by bus, but that seems like cheating to me. I intend to travel on my own feet until this path collides with the Atlantic Ocean. Everything else is negotiable. I’m willing to go where the trail leads.
Until the quarry, today’s walk was brown. Brown dirt, brown rocks, brown plants, brown ants. Earlier this afternoon, I was napping in the meager shade of a diseased pine tree beside a bare wooden cross and woke up singing “Amazing Grace” out of tune, the bluebell sky spinning overhead. I’d never woken up singing before, and it occurred to me that I was still drunk from the wine I’d had with lunch. I also realized that I’d snapped somewhere on this trail. I’m not currently of sound mind.
In the scorched center of Spain, most pilgrims set out in the misty predawn and get their walking done before the sun becomes uncomfortable. Me, I’m not a morning person. I’d rather suffer through the worst afternoon or stumble through nights violent with stars. I like to walk alone. All that matters is the rhythmic thud of my walking stick, my boots grinding stones into the dirt, and my breath.
During my first weeks of walking, I tried too hard to find significance everywhere: in the soulful eyes of blond Pyrenean cows, the weeping blisters on my heels, the groaning windmills of Alto de Perdon. Ancient medieval towns dissipated into the countryside and then coagulated into other ancient medieval towns. Bits of my personality shriveled up and blew away in the wind. I was falling apart.
One morning, I awoke in a dry irrigation ditch beside a field of corn, a half-empty bottle of Cutty Sark wedged beneath my sunburned cheek. I watched the feet of other pilgrims walk past me on the trail, heard their quiet morning conversation. They pretended not to see me. But I try not to fret over what the others think. There are many caminos on the Camino, and this is mine.
When it’s too dark to see the trail, I follow the Milky Way like the pilgrims of yore. In 813 AD, the hermit Pelayo saw stars dancing in a field in Galicia. Bishop Teodomiro heard the story, ordered the field excavated, and unearthed the long-lost tomb of Santiago, known to anglophones as the Apostle James. A chapel was built, followed by a church, and eventually the lavish, booming Cathedral that stands today. Starlight gave birth to this tradition. Or so the story goes.
Propped against the boulder across from the quarry, I fan my face with my misshapen straw hat. Sweat trickles down my nose, calves, and neck. My tank top and shorts are pasted to my skin. Construction vehicles stir up white plumes.
There’s something I’ve always wanted to do at a quarry, and the workers haven’t noticed me here yet. I’m wondering if I can sneak in right now, if I can get away with it.
When I was little, my family lived in a rural California town with a quarry on the outskirts. Through the school bus window, I saw these huge gray-white piles of ground rock, as tall and mysterious as the pyramids of Egypt. They looked like giant mounds of sugar. I flattened the greasy underbellies of my fingers on the Plexiglass and imagined myself teleported to the apex of one of the rock piles: from that great height, I would survey the yellow hills as the bus disappeared around the bend; unsupervised, I would tumble down the blur of the pyramid’s face at hyperreal speed.
This urge has stayed with me, a tiny, persistent tug. If I climb my white pyramid now, I wonder if anyone will notice. The machinery is loud, the men busy. They wear goggles and protective headphones.
I approach the quarry’s entrance, then lose my nerve and return to the boulder. I sweat more. I consider leaving, but I might never again be unmoored enough to try this. You have to know when you’re free or it doesn’t count.
When I enter the quarry, I’m met by a mustachioed man on a bulldozer. He’s not bulldozing anything, just cruising around the lot like he’s been waiting for me to make my move.
“Buenas tardes,” he says. “Necesitas algo?”
I’m dusty, but pink underneath. I carry a knobby walking stick and there are underwear and socks hanging from my backpack to dry from the sink-washing I gave them this morning. This guy doesn’t seem surprised; he’s seen pilgrims before. The Camino made the road I’ve been walking. It made all the nearby towns.
In Spanish, I tell him I’d like to climb the cone, but I don’t know how to say, and tumble down like a sideways tornado, like a child, so I act it out by rolling my hands like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. This is me, tumbling. Me at a disco.
He squints.
I ask if he’ll let me do it.
He glances over his shoulder, shrugs. “Claro, mujer.”
It’s obvious to me that I’m not the first pilgrim to talk gibberish at the men of this quarry while they’re trying to work.
I remove my pack, relishing the feeling of lightness, the momentary floating sensation. Up close, I see that my pyramid is made of small, jagged rocks of roughly uniform size. They look sharp. I begin to climb. Oh, it’s not easy. The stones give way, my feet sink. Every step releases a deep, resonant clacking, like a pebble beach when the tide drags the rocks against each other. Stones burrow into my shoes and socks. The pinnacle looks unreachable. The harder I climb, the deeper I sink into the rubble, and it’s a tired metaphor for life. I scrabble, using hands and feet, dragging my belly up the face. I wish the man would go back to bulldozing, so I could slink back to the trail and pretend this never happened. I’m gushing sweat and seem to be going nowhere. But when I look down, I see that I’ve climbed very high. The man in his bulldozer appears miniaturized.
A turkey vulture crosses below my line of sight, its black fingers splayed over the brown valley. A stone village bakes in the distance. It’s now or never, child. I plop awkwardly onto my butt, and wriggle sideways. Gravity takes me, ready or not, mostly not. I don’t tumble tornado-like. I bump, land, bump, land, catch air, bump, land. It hurts everywhere. The descent is both faster and slower than I’d like. There’s no freedom in this, only falling. Rocks in my mouth. Hair mummy-wrapped around my face.
Then it stops.
I’m lying in a heap, not even at the bottom of the cone, but on a chunky patch a dozen feet up. I stand shakily and wade the rest of the way down. I’m covered in white powder like Lucille Ball trying to bake a cake, and I’m bleeding from my legs and face. When the bulldozer guy asks if I’m okay, I say yes, but I’m lying. I heave the pack onto my shoulders, welcoming the weight. Hold me down, friend, hold me down.
Just walk back to the road like it’s nothing, I think. Don’t limp. Later, after I’ve rounded this bend and the next, I will sit down and cry a little. I’ll try to clean myself up, a lost cause; there will be time for lost causes. Right now, I must focus on walking. A pilgrim, after all. One step and another step and another step closer to Santiago de Compostela.