A600AASS Day 5 - Léon to Villar de Mazarife
18.10.22
25 Km
Quintana Roo Dunne.
This was the name given to Joan Didion’s daughter with her husband John Dunne. She was named Quintana Roo after a state in Mexico.
We passed a sign to another Quintana today, on our way to a village called Fresno. Fresno is also a city in the Central Valley of California, that long slice of impossible agriculture from which Joan Didion came, and to which returns in her writing.
In 2014, I drove through the Central Valley with Gus and Lane. It was the tail end of a trip I memorialised in a set of photos called Death March.
And it was the death of John Dunne that inspired one of Didion’s most remarkable books, The Year of Magical Thinking. Written in the year after John’s death and while caring for an ailing Quintana, it’s a beautiful reflection on the unexpected ways in which grief can affect us.
I discovered Didion when I left California for the first time. And now, whoever I go back to the States, I pick up whatever of hers I haven’t read from the airport book store. She helps me make sense of what I’ve just experienced.
She’s also the writer that inspires me most. With the eye of an ethnographer and a scalpel-like turn of phrase, she cuts clean to the core of whatever she chooses to eviscerate, laying out the entrails for us all to examine if we have the stomach.
As we sped down the Central Valley on Interstate 5, I watched field after field of alfalfa slip by. Verdant green stretched to the Coast Ranges to the west and the Sierra Nevadas to the east, huge irrigation booms marking time as their arced forms ducked and dived past the windows of our car.
I passed fields of alfalfa today, too, but it was my feet and my walking sticks tapping out the rhythm that would get me to Villar de Mazarife, our stop for the night.
And now, I’m writing to make sense of what I’ve just experienced.
I’ve always associated hiking sticks with groups of practically-dressed women of a certain age. I see them marching through parks as they put the world to rights. I never thought that, one day, I too would join their ranks. At the end of a 24 kilometre walk with a 36 litre pack, I’m willing to concede that what the sticks take away in dignity, they give back in support for a body that is almost entirely unprepared for this walk. They say that whatever you need, the Camino provides, and given the first-day aches, I’m grateful for gifts of anti-inflammatory gel and a surplus knee brace to get me through tomorrow.
It should be an easier day. We’ve only got 15 kilometres to walk before we reach an albergue — as hostels along the Camino are known — run by an Australian woman. We’ll be served delicious vegan food and the option of yoga classes. But if I’m as tired tomorrow as I am today, I’ll stick to my writing.