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Guernica Magazine

At the Bend of the Road

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.
Photo by Aube Rey Lescure.

MISSING: Have you seen this pilgrim?

The flyers are pasted to dusty window panes in roadside cafés, stapled to skinny utility poles along fields, pinned on the overloaded cork boards of pilgrim hostels. It is July, 2015. Three months ago, along the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage trail through Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal that is increasingly popular with secular walkers and international travelers, a woman disappeared. Her name is Denise Thiem. She is a forty-one-year-old Asian American woman from Arizona. In the picture on the flyer, her face is framed by jet-black hair. She sticks out her tongue as she rests on a stone bench, a turquoise backpack nestled at her feet like a patient dog, waiting to get up and go.

Nine hundred kilometers of road, a horizontal line drawn across the Iberian peninsula, is a long way to walk. In the desert-like mezeta, the stretch between Burgos and Léon seems to consist of nothing but interminable wheat fields, there is little for eyes to rest on but the wavelets of heat distorting the horizon, the occasional utility pole, the flyers. I look away from the missing woman. No, I have not seen her, and my first instinct is to unsee her. Instead, I listen to the winds rustling through the wheat, like waves rippling an inland sea. This flyer cannot, must not, intrude on this landscape, of golden grass rising to the skyline, abandoned mud houses with shattered windows. Before I saw the flyer, the mezeta had the parched romanticism of an old Western movie set. Now it begins to thrum with something sinister.

I put the flyer out of my head and pick up my pace, heading toward a village where blocky red buildings line the main street, where the cheap metal chairs left out in the sun will sear red marks into my thighs. I unbuckle my backpack, its blue fabric soaked through with sweat, and order a calamari sandwich, defrosted squid rings on a baguette slathered with mayo. I check my phone’s battery. Then I hoist my backpack onto my aching shoulders again, and pause to watch a herd of goats being shaved on the outskirts of town. The animals writhe and groan weakly among mounds of wool, disconcerted, but not altogether disturbed. The other goats just watch, waiting their turn.

I imagine innocent explanations for Denise’s disappearance. Perhaps she’s gotten lost, or had a spiritual epiphany that dictated she should unplug, fall off the map. Perhaps she just wanted some time to herself. I myself am a loner pilgrim, and proud of it. I don’t stop at churches for communal masses, or start the day’s trek with a pack of new friends, like many others do. Being a pilgrim, to me, has come to mean a one-on-one relationship with the road, a private contemplation of its beauty and its difficulty. I walk in solitude. Later in the day, I may drink a cold

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