Wind-driven litter skipped down the street in Torremejia. I slept in a pilgrim refuge in a small, scruffy palace. The refuge had slow drains. Rural Spain is a land of slow drains. 

At the refuge I met Fussy Fritz. Fritz wore a black girdle. Fussy Fritz completely unpacked his rucksack. He arranged and rearranged his possessions on an empty bunk.  Fritz later e-mailed photos, with a note that read like a love letter. Fritz lasted two more days on the camino before surrendering to a painful foot. It was a religious pilgrimage for Fritz. He should have welcomed the discipline. New Catholic.

The keeper of the refuge was an ample, cheerful bottle blond refusing to defer to age or weight. She dressed like a teenager. While we talked she received a text message from an Italian pilgrim much taken with her. She was what passed for glamour in that village. 

Today tiny - really tiny - tractors are everywhere busy in vineyards and olive orchards.  The Spaniard is a tidy farmer. The tiny tractors get in close to better weed vines and olive trees. In Torremejia I bought corn plasters. It has taken me this long to think of corn plasters.

The problems with my feet are acute. I will walk four-hundred miles before I figure out what wrecked my feet. I learned near the end of my pilgrimage my feet were much discussed up and down the camino. For reasons not clear, I was dubbed The Lone Ranger. There are flies in the restaurant where I wait to be fed. Raw toes and flies on the table are not mood elevators. Pain saps the will. 

Peter and Marianna left their RV in Merida and bicycled out to find me. I missed a turn and would have missed them had I not felt something wrong and retraced my steps to the missed turn. I did not see another pilgrim that day. Peter and Marianna met Fussy Fritz on the track. They asked if he had seen a Texan.

“Do you mean Marcus Wilder?”   

In Merida, Peter, Mariana, and I explored Roman ruins and ate and ate and ate. At one meal we ate a special ham from hogs fed only chestnuts. The fat tastes like butter. This ham - mostly fat - is $40 per pound.  I heard about - but did not see - ham that sells for $75 per pound.

Roman temples…enduring roads…magnificent bridges still in use…the acoustically correct open theater…were built by slaves. Romans had an endless need for fresh slaves to replace those worked to death.  

It was Holy Week.  There was not an un-rented hotel room in Merida. I was exhausted. My feet were a distraction. Peter and Marianna were tolerant of my sour mood. Peter left Marianna and me on a park bench and went off on his bicycle to find a room for me. The owner of a small hotel telephoned around and found a room in a pension outside the town. He drove me there. The kindness of strangers is a constant on the camino. The man operating the pension was even odder than the toothless old man in Almendrelejo.  No record was made of my stay.

Merida was established as a retirement town for Roman veterans. One assumes wives were slaves or local conscripts. In the Spanish Civil War, Col. Juan Yague’s Moroccans had to take Merida twice before the Reds were finally driven out. Between battles in Merida, Yague’s fierce, barbaric Moroccan troopers - a troop is a group, an individual is a trooper -  fought eighteen hours hand-to-hand to take nearby Badajoz. The defending Reds fought like dogs. Reds always fight like dogs. Communism fires men’s souls. The Soft Left softens spines. Consider the European social democracies. 

The Moors improved Roman roads and irrigation systems but the flat land was difficult to defend. Extremadura changed hands many times during the Christian Reconquest. After the Moors - farmers and engineers - were driven out, the land was divided among orders of knights who helped defeat the Moors. The knights were hopeless farmers. Food production fell. Hunger drove Extremadurans to the New World.

In Merida, Moors built a mosque in the Roman Temple of Diana. The Spanish word for mosque is mezquita. Is there a connection with mesquite? No, there isn’t.

  He can be reached at marcuswilder2@sbcglobal.net

Copyright Marcus Wilder 2006