My friend Chris, one of the Professors I met in 2017 on my Camino told me about a recently released Prime Video series called 3 Caminos.
The premise of the series is that 5 people meet while walking the Camino de Santiago in 2000 and become fast friends, not an uncommon experience I know personally. The story carries on as the characters grow and mature. They meet again on the Camino in 2006 and again in 2020.
Many things change during the 20 years of the program, some for the better and some for the worse. But the writers did a fair job of capturing the emotions, the conflict, relationships and hardships that real life people experience. Things that you experience while living your life or walking the Camino which are one and the same.
I was particularly touched by the relationship between the characters of Luca and Roberto. Many of us experienced similar bonds, bonds of friendship and compassion that spanned age, gender, and nationality.
While watching the next to last episode, they showed the Pilgrims climbing up towards O’C and the path up to the Galician Frontier. Along this way, they show the beautiful valley that leads back towards Villafranca del Bierzo, to me a stunning view.
So beautiful that this path is where I chose to leave a stone for my Grandmother. It’s a black river rock, well smoothed with time and the actions of tumbling and being scrubbed by sand, water and other stones.
As the Pilgrims trudged up the path toward the frontier marker, I was looking at the few fence posts shown along the way…hoping to see the stone. I didn’t, by now it may have fallen or have been moved but, for me, it will always be there.
When the Pilgrims arrived at the boundary marker, I paused the show and took out my iPhone and looked at the picture that my friend Katja took in 2019 and compared it to that in the movie, taped I guess in the Spring of 2020. While they’d scrubbed a lot of graffiti off the marker, much was still there that I have in my picture. Dumb as it may sound, it took me back there for a moment and made me smile.
I miss those moments and I miss the friendships and something as mundane as a short television program reminded me of just how much.