We’d had a spate of rain and were due more rain in a few days, but for the final weekend of September, my last before returning for a new academic year at the language academy where I teach, the weather was fine. Even glorious. On Saturday, my running partner and I did an 11-kilometer trail race, and on Sunday we decided to go for a long run in the mountains to test the state of our legs after the exertions of the previous day.
“Pick a place,” he told me.
I hoped I could direct him to a road I’d often seen across the valley as we drove south from Asturias into León over the pass at Pajares. “How do you get there, do you suppose?” I’d idly asked more than once, gazing at the ribbon of highway on the facing slopes. He had never supplied an answer or even guessed at one, so now was my opportunity to provide it.
“Start at Campomanes,” I said, naming the town at the base of the road that climbs up to the pass. My idea was to take a parallel road from the town and hope for the best. The map on my phone was so tiny that I could make out almost nothing of the roads and terrain, unless I zoomed in, meaning I lost any notion of where I was in relation to known spots. That’s the problem with a small screen—either detailed but severely restricted in scope, or very basic when covering a large area. So I guessed at the highway and guessed at a destination. Braña Curuchu. Then I turned on the directions on the app.
The app sent us up a narrow mountain road, ever curving, ever climbing, and into a tiny town on a steep hillside—a jumble of old stone houses and stables, all built seemingly one on top of another. Some looked ready to slide off the mountainside. The sharp-angled lanes were narrow, none of them wider than an arm span. Stop and consider is my modus operandi in such a situation, but that is not my friend’s way. His is proceed blindly. So he did, slowly, easing his car past one obstacle after another, the stress building as the way became steadily narrower, the lanes increasingly steep. Should he have turned down a dead-end alley between two houses, he would have had a very difficult time backing out.
“What if it were raining? If the road were wet? Dios mío,” he said between clenched teeth.
I looked at the sky, but the heavens were clear blue. I bit my tongue for fear of saying the situation might indeed have been worse. I closed my eyes. I opened them. I wondered, as my friend was asking, how I’d ever gotten us into this fix.
On a particularly steep uphill stretch between a house and a terraced garden, the car stalled. Instead of asking again if I should seek directions, I hopped out and ran back around the corner to where I’d seen a man beside his stable. The man was now leaning on the railing of his porch, and he seemed to be half smiling and half frowning, his face a disapproving What have you gone and done? but his eyes a jolly Didn’t expect this, did you?
Responding to the message in his eyes, I grinned up at him. “How do we get out of here?”
“Straight,” he said. “Keep on straight.”
But did he mean straight from where we were, now paused on a hillside, or straight on from his house down the narrow road we had just passed? I knit my brows.
“Where are you trying to go?” he asked.
I said that we were exploring and that we didn’t know exactly where we wanted to go. Right now, though, we just wanted out this maze and back onto the main road.
When the man offered to drive the car out himself, I surmised that he thought I was alone or with another woman. What man would let another man extract him? Certainly not one who preferred to press on blindly rather than ask for directions or even pause to think. “Well,” I said, neither accepting nor refusing.
The man came down from his porch and together we walked around the corner to the car. The villager gave some instructions to my friend, who calmly accepted the directions as if they confirmed what he already knew. Then the villager told us about a trail through the fields and forests that would take us to the top of a peak. We thanked him. I got back into the car, and we proceeded, discovering almost immediately that we’d come full circle and were back on the road that had brought us into the village. We parked and got out. Now, finally, for our adventure! We took a likely looking path and followed it to the top, where we found we were indeed at Braña Curuchu. From the ridge, hundreds of meters above the road that I had tried to find, we looked across the valley to the highway to León.
On a subsequent trip to León, my friend pointed out the mountain across the valley that we had climbed, though we had reached it from the far side, not from the ribbon of highway below it that had been my original destination. His distance vision is sharp, and he could see the silhouette that was the marker at the peak. “You were there,” he said.
“What a fun adventure!” I answered. “Next time, you choose.”
