It was a dreary, rainy, long walk in mid-Spain, mid-Camino, mid-October. Thirty or more kilometers, with at least half of it through rocky, rain-lashed fields as far as the eye could see in either direction. It was one of those stretches where all you can do is long for soup and dry socks, hope that the next hostel has enough hot water for everyone and convince yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  The sort of day where you struggle to remember why walking across Spain ever seemed like such a great idea.

Terradillos de Templarios was small and forgettable. Humble in an un-picturesque, one-bar, ten dirty houses, melted cow pies in the street sort of way. It was the type of town most pilgrims choose to bypass, pushing ahead to the next bigger city with more comfortable and cheerful surroundings.  However, today my companion Simone and I could no longer bear the slosh of wet feet inside soggy boots, the cold slap of dripping ponchos on exposed skin, the increased heaviness of our packs as they became waterlogged.  We were desperate to be warm, dry and no longer hungry.

We followed the yellow arrows to the one albergue in town.  A hand-painted wooden sign in the front yard read “Los Templarios”.  It had twenty four beds and only six of them were filled. And they had a fireplace.  We almost wept.

After putting our names down for dinner, we were shown to our room.  It was small, chilly and crammed with four metal-framed beds holding ancient, sagging mattresses.  Stained pillows rested on each one. Estela, the no-nonsense farm wife hospitalera walked over to the radiator and turned it on.  My shoulders eased down from around my ears where they had been hunched against the cold all day long.  She showed us where the bathroom was.  Where to leave our wet boots.  “Gracias. Gracias. Gracias.”  was all I could say.

After showering and changing into dry clothes, we reluctantly struggled into our nearly-dry rain ponchos and crossed town to the bar for dinner.  There were only eight pilgrims in town that night and we all ate together.  Over the ubiquitous menú peregrino of lentil soup, pork chops, fries, iceberg salad, rough red wine, bread and Dannon yogurt, we argued about love. In English, Portuguese, Spanish and German, we dissected what it really is. How you can tell when you’ve found it. What to do when you lose it. How to find it again. No consensus was reached.

Later that evening, sitting in front of a smokey fire, I watched Ramon, a cheerful, beefy man from the Canary Islands, peel off his socks and wince. I asked to take a peek and cringed.  Some days before, he told me, he’d developed a silver-dollar sized blister on the ball of his foot. He drained it and cut away the dead skin, cutting far too closely to the living flesh. We do things as pilgrims that we could never consider in our normal lives.  What would merit a visit to a doctor and possible crutches was a badge of honor on the road.He had been walking on this open wound, in wet boots, for several days. Bathing in communal showers. Wearing hand-washed socks of dubious cleanliness. I could see that he was in tremendous pain, not only from the wound in his foot, but from all the other knotted, strained muscles in his whole body, and particularly the other foot and leg that had been compensating for the abuse. I offered to clean and bandage it, but he waved me off, insisting that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Eventually, I convinced him to accept help. “Tengo buenas manos” I told him.  “I have good hands.”   I made eye contact with Simone, indicated Ramón, and she understood instantly. The three of us went to the room we shared with a middle-aged psychologist from Barcelona, Alberto, who was already reading in bed. Simone and I set up our traveling shrine on the window ledge – a red plastic votive candle, travel-sized icon acquired at the church in Le Puy, France where I’d begun my pilgrimage, a stone Simone carried with her, painted with the Virgin Mary and a couple of wild flowers gathered from the yard of the albergue. Simone began to sing a simple melody from her childhood in Austria.

Ramon lay face down on his cot. Simone sat cross-legged on the facing cot and continued to sing, her eyes closed.   I pulled a small bottle of olive oil from my pack, poured some of the green-gold liquid into my hand and handed the bottle to Alberto.  He took one leg and foot and I took the other and together we went to work.  I could feel the tense, erratic hum in his body begin to slow down as the flesh of his calf and foot softened under my hands. His face was buried in his pillow and soon his shoulders and back began to began to shake with sobs from a very deep place.   He raise his head and twisted around to look at Alberto and me.

With tears in his voice and streaming from his eyes, he said “Joder, coño. ESTE es amor.”

Fuck, man. THIS is love.