The something of nothing

Ah, the meseta. The great interior plateau of the Iberian peninsula. Hot, dry, vast, solitary. It is day 14, although in truth I have stopped thinking of time like this. Each day on the Camino is its own perfect—or not-so-perfect–self-contained  little narrative. Yet as the days continue, they begin to lose these hard edges. For all that they are distinct—the landscape, the weather, the people–they are the same: I awake in the dark, put on the same clothes, lace up the same shoes, heft the same backpack. Walk. Stop for café con leche. More than once. Eat the lunch I packed the night before, always the same: cheese, bread, red peppers. Walk some more. End the day sleeping in surroundings more humble than I ever could have imagined. Awake in the dark. Walk.

But leaving Burgos after an indulgent rest day, after a night luxuriating between crisp sheets in a private room, after a full day of day of wearing flip-flops and strolling through parks, the meseta now spreads out before me. And it is something else. Officially, the meseta runs from Burgos to Astorga, about 220K, but the heart of it, the vast nothingness of it, the bleak, flat, emptiness of it, runs maybe half that distance. These are long days of staring at far-off horizons and failing to see, often for many hours, a single sign of human habitation. These are days where a single tree in the distance takes on mirage quality, and you think: Is that a church steeple? Could that be a village? You walk three more hours and find out it is just a tree.

My first day of walking the meseta, from Burgos to an isolated albergue (aptly named the Oasis) is the most challenging 10 hours—yes, 10 hours–I’ve experienced so far. The walking itself is easy. The terrain is flat; the ground is solid. But the landscape is so overpoweringly empty, so seemingly endless, I lose a sense of myself. Of my actual body moving through space. If that sounds trippy, it’s because it is. It is both deeply discomforting and absolutely liberating. Sometimes simultaneously.

That day is half slog, half trance. I would like to report that as I trudged along I thought big thoughts. Or any thoughts. Or that insights and revelations flooded my sensory-deprived brain. Nope.

But I can report this: At the almost empty Oasis albergue, the owner invites me to sit on the little front porch that faces out to the nothingness and brings me a glass of cold water. Then he does my laundry and hangs it out on the line to dry. It comes back to me folded with a small shell necklace on top.

“No sane person fears nothingness.”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (yes, Uma’s father)