Day 11: Islares – Santoña (secret number of not-enough k)
- Frida Stavenow
- Sep 18, 2022
- 9 min read
After Ralph joins me on the cape we go to a surf shack overlooking the water. We drink beer and milkshakes and I eat a ribeye burger with goats cheese, caramelised onions and rocket. Yes, while stoned. Yes, after nearly two weeks of alternating between bread-sardines-tomato and the albergues’ pilgrim’s menus, which, while always (okay, usually) well-intended, are far from dependable in their gastronomic ambition.
Yes, it’s like a small, culinary orgasm.
We’re both pretty stoned so the conversation isn’t too serious but we still get through a bit of past relationships and resulting patterns. At times it definitely feels like a date, even though we’ve talked about it and agreed to just stay friends for the time being.
So after the surf shack chucks us out (22:15! Are they also pilgrims!?) we walk back to the camping and go to sleep in our separate beds in our private cabin. At two in the morning we wake up from the rains finally beginning. I take in the laundry and lie awake for a while, listening to the smattering of raindrops and smelling the freshness return to the earth. Yesterday on the beach in Castro a very tanned lady who watched my stuff as I swam said Cantabria hasn’t seen rain for three months. There’s a hose pipe ban and crops are failing, not only in Spanish Mindhunter’s summer cabin down by the N-634.
Usually, when my 7:30 alarm goes off I am either already up and packed or chilling in bed watching everyone else get up and packed. Not on Day 11. On Day 11 it feels like I must have made a mistake, it must be 4:30! It is not. I walk to the camping bathroom, and when I come back, the cabin is locked and Ralph is gone. I wait in the chilly morning air for about ten minutes, until he comes back and says he’s going for a walk to the water. There is a strange vibe. Is he pissed we’re just friends? Or does he just feel a bit rejected? Early morning grumpiness?
Either way, we agree to look at a plan for the day when he comes back. Maybe get some breakfast at the Camping Restaurant, which opens at nine. It’s only 15k to Laredo, where there’s a big sandy beach, and if that albergue is full, another 6k to Santoña, which also has a beautiful beach and lots of accommodation options. I stay in bed and write, feeling we are safe.
Breakfast is a strained, polite affair. After some to-ing and fro-ing we decide to separate. He sets off for a campground some 30k down the road where he’s hoping to share a cabin with another pilgrim from the badass girl gang, after which we all plan to reunite at an infamous albergue in Guemes. As he’s about to leave, the light is really pretty so I raise my camera to get a photo. “Nope!” he shouts and ducks out. Things have changed, I guess.
I retire to what is now MY private cabin (until the insanely generous checkout time of noon) to write and recharge with my favourite fuel solitude.
To take the stress out of the day, I book a bed in a youth hostel in Santoña. But as I lie back and watch the sky clear up, it occurs to me I might not even go. Maybe what I wanted, after all the faff, was to stay here on my own? Maybe that’s a totally avoidant behaviour that has probably and will probably continue to cost me friendships? Maybe that’s okay?
A few days ago I was reading a book called In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons From 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules, because I will read everything Cheryl Strayed touches. In it, Karen Karbo wrote about JK Rowling:
To be blasé about what others view as a shortcoming is pure difficult woman. Please join me in a thought exercise: That thing you hate about yourself? Accept it now. Make no excuses for it. Be inspired by Jo Rowling, and embrace your complexities! Your public, like hers, will simply have to deal with them.
True, ol’ JK shortly thereafter got way cancelled, and also true, being “difficult” is perhaps not ALWAYS an admirable life goal. But if you have a problem with people-pleasing, occasionally striving for it isn’t the end of the world. “Difficult” was my father’s favourite complaint about me when I was a kid. “Krånglig,” in Swedish. “Why must you be so krånglig?” echoes in my mind to this day when I fail to function along the most direct routes of the mind.
And so, I snuggle up with my tendency to push people away and spend a glorious morning catching up on writing beneath the campground’s cozy blankets.
Around ten past midday, I’m getting ready to leisurely saunter out of my cabin when I realise the disaster – the phone I thought was charging while I was tapping away on it with my excited little fingers was not plugged in, and I’m at 19%. Before I’ve even begun my very confusing, 30k, already much-too-delayed hike across motorways and unmarked sidepaths. Fuck. It’s a six hour walk if I DON’T get lost. Good luck with that. There are no towns or shops along the way, and all I’ve got is fruit, chocolate and a tin of sardines.
An image of me, lost and starving as the sun sets over another psycho killer holiday home, flashes before my eyes as I start making my way to reception. Which is where I meet Ole and Sabine, cheerful German holiday-makers on their way to Laredo in a camping van. What should I have done, chosen certain death!?
And still, as they drop me off just above Laredo not even ten minutes later, I do feel a bit of guilt. I did ask them to stop sooner, so I’d get at least 15k in, but there was nowhere safe to do so on the A-8. So arrived at Laredo I am, at 12:27, with a half-charged iPhone battery thanks to Sabine and Ole’s five star Uber service. Soz. Pure bad pilgrim. As penance, I decide to scale the mountain at the edge of town, where I eat my lunch staring philosophically at the appropriately named Puerto de La Soledad. Ralph must be somewhere along the N-634, or maybe walking up some slippery hill inland, if he took the longer, scenic route, which, let’s face it, he probably did. Was I mean in any way? Did I fuck up? Did I lead him on? I think no. I think we met, connected very strongly, explored our connection, and then that connection turned out to not signify the obvious physical and emotional compatibility that I believe we should all strive for. I think that’s okay, but still, a part of me feels bad. An appropriately guilty conscience, or the narcissistic vestiges of a slowly crumbling pattern of people-pleasing? Jury’s out.
We did talk about attachment the day before, establishing that I’m avoidant and he’s anxious, types that often attract each other and then spend the rest of their lives in a devilish dance of childhood abandonment trauma reenactment. So who knows. Maybe dude is just practicing self-care.
After lunch I stroll down into Old Town, which is very pretty, and then onto the beach, which is huge, sandy, and also very pretty. I am so happy to be alone. There’s going to be learnings about solitude for me on this trip, I can feel it.
Two essay titles I think about on my solitary walk through Laredo: “That’s Cheating! Neo-Catholic Discourses on Suffering Along the Camino de Santiago,” and, “It’s not ALL Our Fault; in Defense of the Love-Seeking Avoidant.”
The rest of the time I spend thoroughly enjoying myself, running after butterflies and learning about sandflowers. I suppose these activities are possible also in company. I think one of my behaviours may be that I give too much of myself in social interactions, which causes a need to withdraw and recharge, which causes sadness in those I withdraw from who thought they’d found someone who wanted to play as much as they did. I mean I do. Just not as often. Is this terrible?
I don’t think so. But maybe I should be clearer upfront. Get a face tattoo or something. A scarlet A for Avoidant – love me like you would a cat; caress me don’t hold me; trust that I’ll come back and (most likely) I will. Avoidants do want love, too. Our anxiety just shows up in different ways.
The beach walk in Laredo is interminable. Flat, hot, hard. There are no other pilgrims, until, after about an hour and a half of walking on the grass next to the stone path, a backpack-carrying man I’ve never seen before appears on a bench. He’s got lots of tribal tattoos, long wiry hair and a wild look about him. We nod to each other, and I walk on. Soon I hear him walking behind me, which totally breaks the illusion of solitude I’ve been enjoying all day. So I sit down on a bench to write down some scenes that have come to me for a novel set at an ayahuasca camp – the one that made me miss three turns on my way up from Deba to the weed hotel – and wild tribal guy walks past again. Another hola. “A Dutch Jason Momoa,” appears in my head, although I have, of course, no idea where he’s from. But he does look like Momoa, if Momoa had lived another very difficult fifteen years.
After a few minutes, I get back up and walk to the end of the beach promenade in glorious solitude. There’s a ferry from Laredo to Santoña, and before the ferry there is a restaurant, and at the restaurant terrace is Dutch Momoa. He waves grandiosely – arm straight up, several back-and-forths – so I walk up to say hi. Without preamble, he launches into a story about a crazy albergue owner stealing his food the night before. Woah, can he talk. I ask if I can join him, and in-between bits of rushed narrative about the albergue owner getting drunk, a Spanish girl showing up after being robbed and Dutch Momoa offering her his bed to sleep on the floor “like a guard dog,” I manage to get an orange juice and coffee ordered.
Before our drinks show up I’ve learnt that he got sentenced to three months rehab for driving under the influence, celebrated his release by buying a bottle of vodka, then spent eleven years in the Peruvian jungle drinking shit tons of ayahuasca. He doesn’t seem to be into much of a back-and-forth, so I sit back and listen, ask a few questions, and enjoy the ride. Man sure is an adventurer. He’s walking from his home in Belgium (although, turns out he is, in fact, Dutch, so yes, I am a seer) all the way to Finisterre (2,700 km, apparently) and sleeps outside. Usually does 40k a day. He talks about transmuting dark energies and being a cycle breaker. His healing, he says, is for the previous seven generations of addicts.
“They did not know. Their actions came from not-knowing. But I,” – he points to himself, to his deeply furrowed, leathery skin; his bright blue drinker’s eyes; his crazy, wiry and still somehow sexy, disastrous, knowing being – “I know. So it’s up to me. Do I want to keep writing the same story? Or do I ‘put a point.’ Turn the page. And write a different story?”
I ask if he has been able to forgive his parents. He tells me about an awful event that happened when he was three, how grandmother ayahuasca helped him see what had actually happened, how he asked his mother but she refused to talk about it. His father – also an alcoholic – had already killed himself, so he couldn’t ask him. But it doesn’t matter, he says. “You don’t need to go back. You just need to go forward.”
“But don’t you need to go back and re-experience the trauma in order to heal it?” I ask, all objective and stuff. “Don’t you need to know what happened?”
He shakes his mad explorer’s head. “No. It doesn’t matter what happened. You don’t need to know. It’s irrelevant. Forget about the past. All you can control is the future.”
Dutch Momoa, Camping Playa Arenillas’s philosophical-whiteboarder-in-chief, and every basic Camino bitch all agree, then: you’ve just got to keep walking.
Basic Camino Bitch. New blog name?
Anyhoo. I don’t know how long we sit there, but I learn a lot. At the end I pay for his coffee, feeling like I want to give this in exchange for the huge amount of novel inspiration + eerily spot-on life advice he’s given me. We stand up to get the ferry – and who do we run into?
You know it. Got Into Berghain, whom I don’t feel bad calling by his original fake name anymore, now that he’s being all weird with me. He certainly looks surprised to see me in Laredo, not to mention in Laredo while having a coffee with The Man of Men. The vibe is awkward. All three of us get the ferry across. Dutch Momoa stops outside a supermarket and gives us both Buen Camino hugs, and GIB and I walk on. Soon, the turning for my hostel shows up, and GIB all but runs off up the path. No hugs.
To reach the hostel, I have to walk way out of town, past anchovy canning factories and smelly swamps into a weird industrial-looking area. But hey, can’t argue with €7,55 a night. Once I’m inside the hostel it’s all chill though, and I end up in a room with Gertrude, a German girl I made friends with in Azkiku, and a new German girl who seems super sweet. All pilgrims.
Later new German girl, Gertrude and I go out for food and wine and lots of catch-ups. I tell them about the serial killer house and the weird morning and Mr Man. G spins off on a soliloquy on male sexuality that feels a bit Jordan B P but what the hell do I know. We all have cheesecake. G and I talk about abandonment triggers and bus cheats. I’m really starting to feel at home on the Camino.
We go back to sleep in a warm dorm of six women I all know. I am so glad it’s only week two of this life.
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