“One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call” - Paul the Apostle
Yesterday began early, ended late, and saw the most walking yet- over 40km from Chateauvillian to Langres.
I woke up already tired. I slept only a few hours, with the anticipation of the challenge to make it to Langres in the back of my mind.
I stirred two packets of instant coffee into boiling water and locked the door to the pilgrim apartment behind me at around 7AM.
The boulangerie was already open. I took a pain aux chocolat et almond and a word of good advice from Delphine, the baker.
« Arc - en - Barrois » she wrote a green post it note after I told her my plan to walk to Langres. It’s the name of a town that lies about halfway.
I filed this in my pocket and set out.
I started out on a path with no outlet along the historic site of Simone de Bouvier’s summer retreat. Then I walked across the antique car rally setting up in the park and into the woods.
The morning forest was something I’ve never seen before. Light filtered through the mist and trees. Deer scattered all around. I looked at their faces when they stopped to stand perfectly still between the trees. I realized there were more of them and my eye adjusted to pick them out from the shadows.
I reached another impassé at the end of the woods, the equestrian center. This time, I stopped inside to ask for directions.
Truthfully, an erratic personality had stopped to ask me too many questions on the empty dirt road in front of the horse farm, and entering seemed a good way to end the conversation and reroute. I calmed myself with the horses until a kindred spirit in the familiar uniform of a fleece, jodhpurs and ponytail arrived to point me back to the big road.
I had to walk back the whole length of the forest to get there, but as they say, « n’est pas grave »
I listened to some reggae music as I walked through hay fields and watched antique cars zip by on their way to the show.
By 1PM, I reached Arc-en-Barrois - Delphine’s suggestion. It was lovely, but I felt greedy with all the daylight left, so instead of finding an accommodation there, I asked the tourist office for help to phone the pilgrim hostel in Langres.
My intentions set, I picked up lunch at the quick market- fruit, crackers, a Caesar salad. Wolfing down salad with a plastic fork in anticipation of the work in front of me I reminded me of my life in New York.
I couldn’t even fathom how after walking all morning I still had 30k left to reach Langres. Looking at the map I speculated taking the road through Arc - en - Borrais, while lovely, added 5k.
But here I was, a tank full of gas; with nothing to do but make it happen. The tourist office gave instructions to show up at the address in Langres whenever.
I walked through a green tunnel of forest and empty road for another hour, and by 2PM, 25k on the day, I was ready to call it. Afternoon fatigue was setting in. I saw one sign for a hotel in the middle of nowhere, my current location. It seemed too good to be true, but I stubbornly followed a mile out of the way. Looking for one miracle in a village of papered windows and locked doors.
I saw a single soul, a postal worker. I explained my situation for 10 minutes and she confirmed there was definitely no hotel nearby, Langres was 25k away, and she had to go back to work so, Bon Chance!
I had been convincing myself for an hour I was too tired to keep going, but I had no choice now. After my sojourn into the little town yielded nothing but extra walking, something broke inside of me. There was no phone-a-friend today, no towns, no data on my phone, no stores, no hotels. I needed to help myself. I prayed for a new miracle, that I would the strength to make it to Langres on my own two feet.
Something about the conversation with the postal worker had emboldened me. The fatigue lifted as I left behind my conviction that I needed to take a nap and started putting one foot in front of the other. At first, looking at my feet in unchanging forest made me dizzy. Did I need to sit down? I couldn’t, so I drank down enough water to make my Aunt from Arizona proud. I was listening to one Harry Styles song on repeat through the speaker of my phone. Was I going insane?
“Just stop your crying it will be alright...”
Somehow the music helped me move forward without thinking of how far I had to go or how long I had been at it already.
When the landscape changed from forest to farms, with faraway towns visible in either direction, I knew I would make it. I watched my emotions change in front of me like the path I was walking. I had been so convinced I couldn’t walk a step more at 2PM, now four hours later I was unstoppable. I was thinking and feeling a lot of things, none of which I trusted as much as my legs steadily moving me forward.
As I closed in on the city, a caring woman named Elizabeth who introduced herself as an accueil de pèlerins offered to take me the remaining 8k to the presbytère. She had just hosted another American pilgrim last night who I would meet at the hostel, she knew the way.
It felt like a miracle, it felt no different than taking another step forward on my own two feet.
Within an hour of arriving in the city after 12 hours of walking in the closest thing to absolute solitude I’ve ever experienced, I found myself laughing with a group of other pilgrims from Milan and Frankfurt about all the things the Camino brings - wet boots and muddy bikes, jumpy goats, champagne and long stretches along the canals.
As I looked around the cheery Senegalese restaurant where we were eating dinner, I was in awe of how the landscape and my mood had changed so drastically again.
Then we returned to the hostel. I was surprised to find a familiar face- the man from the Netherlands, who in Reims had sparked the conversation about nature of friendships on a pilgrimage when people are always coming and going.
We all spent more time socializing, exchanging emails, and joking around - about broken bicycles, about the friendliness of Germans, about the goats!
One of the Italians asked me;
“Does it happen often, that you meet other pilgrims and all share a meal Iike this?
I thought back to the day I’d had- 12 hours, 42k- my slowest marathon ever on an empty course between feet and my backpack- and smiled.
“Not in a while!”
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