At the entrance to Zambujal, a pair of dogs were waiting.
It was just before sunrise. I’d been walking for half an hour already, my white and black backpack cinched around my waist so that I walked with its attentive tightness around my gut. This was my favourite thing about my backpack, which had accompanied me on two other walking pilgrimages — this was my third — to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. At 380 miles — from Lisbon to Santiago — this was my shortest trek so far. The other two, both on the French Route, had been 500 miles each.
Heavy and strong, the backpack wrapped itself around me — from its shoulder straps to its buckles at the chest and hips for even weight distribution — a demanding, symbiotic embrace. Filled with everything I owned — all my toiletries, clothes, food, and money — its corset-like squeeze was grounding, comforting. I walked with a bear-hug to my midsection: there, there, I’m here; you and I are in this together.
Back home, where I’d worked in special education as a teacher assistant for five years while putting myself through art school, we used to offer our kindergartners “squeeze vests” when they needed help calming down after becoming excited or distressed. I’d never tried one on; the vests were all too small for me. But I imagined — I hoped — their effect was something like this. This sort of benevolent, governing embrace, the tightness and the gravity, like a needy, granite guardian angel.
God knew no one else was holding me out here. In the middle of Portugal, where I was hiking solo, I was finding this route to Santiago much less well-marked than the popular French Route. There were fewer pilgrims here, too — just a few crazies, all of us unkempt and in various stages of discomfort or epiphany.
Zambujal barely merited a mention on the map. A few streets slotted between houses surrounded by baking skirts of farmland. It was too early to expect any cafés or albergues — pilgrim hostels — to be open. I wanted to grind through as quickly as possible, aiming for an adequately awake beacon of civilization further on, from which poured rich fountains of coffee.
The dogs stood in the dawnlight, looking at me. They stood statue-still at either side of the road where the town began, like gates. A medium-sized shaggy one, and a large one with short sandy hair. Both had collars. The larger one was suddenly in motion, tail wagging, trotting toward me.
I held still. I didn’t know if the dogs were friendly. I assumed they didn’t speak English.
The large dog sniffed me, then leapt up against me, suddenly radiant, wagging with renewed vigour. There was a strange familiarity to the gesture. As though he were happy to see me because he recognised me. I knew this made no sense. But I’m used to my own nonsense, so I crowed back to the happy dog, flattered and bemused.
And then both dogs followed me out of town.
It took me a few minutes to realise they weren’t just wandering but coming with me. They wove back and forth, smelling things, marking important bushes and significant poles. There was no one else around. Except for birdsong, the town was utterly silent.
The smaller dog was clearly an acolyte of the big dog, who led the march: head high, dog-smile fierce and final, his fine, shaggy coat like a commander’s uniform.
Both dogs were exultant. They moved in perpetual celebration. The alpha behaved as though I was taking him for a walk: running ahead, investigating shrubs of import, running back to me, or to Lieutenant Dog to report his findings. He was so sure of himself, so at ease with me as a travelling companion. As though we’d met before. But why? I was nobody. A stranger. An American stranger. Someone should warn him.
I became increasingly worried as we walked. They were loose, they were roaming. Were they lost? Had they escaped from someone’s yard? If so, I had no way to help them. I couldn’t start banging on Portuguese doors at 6:30am in a foreign village to ask about a pair of dogs. But then again, I couldn’t just let them wander. These dogs were good people.
On the other hand, by now I’d noticed that dogs in Portugal were generally given freer rein than the ones I knew back home in New York. Earlier in the route, I’d watched a dog expertly cross a busy street with no one around him; no one had acted as though this were remarkable. So I decided I would trust the dogs, mostly because I had no other choice.
Alpha Dog zoomed up on my right after a brief off-path foray, smiling broadly.
“Are you a pilgrim, too?” I asked.
Alpha didn’t respond. Seeing I was still around and chugging along, he took courage and mounted another expedition into the fields.
By now, we’d left the town behind and were walking through farmland. The sun was up, and the three of us were edged in fresh, unpasteurized light. Newborn and unsanitized — exactly what you want in a walking pilgrimage. Undomesticated days, with their pockets full of daisies and daggers and their mute eyes brimming. You want tides of possibility to scrawl their high water marks under your skin.
Zambujal had vanished behind us. How far did these dogs intend to go? Should I walk back to the town with them? I had a sudden image of arriving in Santiago with two dogged dogs dogging my steps. How I would feed them. How did one hike with dogs? Where did one buy dog food?
But now the smaller dog was hesitating. He kept looking ahead at the leader and affecting subtle I’m-not-sure-about-this poses. Finally, he stopped and wavered, head cocked. I walked past him, but he stayed planted. I didn’t see him after that.
The larger dog, meanwhile, went loping on ahead, vanishing around a bend. I walked on, but didn’t see him.
I was alone. I had the sensation of an uncomfortable responsibility simultaneously passing out of my hands and settling onto my conscience for good.
I walked until I came to a place where, on a hill bordering the path, someone had arranged a proliferation of sculptures, shrines, grottos, and bits of art out of plaster, found wood, detritus, shells, and oddities so that these sculptural works looked down on the pilgrims, holding signs full of welcoming platitudes.
Outsider art. As an art instructor for and with neurodiverse artists, this was one of my favourite forms of artwork. I slowed down.
Saints made of painted trash. Paths paved with scallop shells. Profusions of brightness, of the white plaster and the daubs of synthetic paint in the middle of the mild green hills. Untrained exuberance, chromatic largess.
A little farther on, there were multiple welcome signs, and a little gate that stood open to a humble, open-air breakfast: apples, crackers, instant coffee, milk. Trail magic, Camino magic. Messages in multiple languages proliferated, all saying something like: Welcome, we are three former pilgrims, we live here on the land, making prayer and art, and providing breakfast. Donations are welcome and support us here. Please take anything you need. There was a stamp and a logbook. I stamped, signed.
The apples were small and sweet. I picked up one for the road, intending to move on — I’m an ambitious walker in the morning, gnawing through miles like rawhide — but I was drawn to the property’s many tiny walkways, squirming between sculptures and shrines. Crunching into my apple, I began to move through the maze.
Then I saw the dog. Lying on his side with the complacency of arrival.
“Hello,” I said.
He smiled, panting.
Further along the makeshift paths, there was a larger shrine, a human-sized one, albeit with a door so small you had to crouch to get through it. Made of rocks and mud, and plaster, clearly by hand. A sign outside declared that its purpose was for prayers of peace. Visitors were invited to enter, pray, and ring the bell over the door.
I went in. The shrine was small, and the entrance was smaller; you had to crouch to enter.
It was like stepping into a block of amber. Hovering stillness. And closeness, like the inside of a conch. A round, intimate space, like a geode, dim as the vestibule of a church, with a central stalk-like column in the middle. The curved walls were honeycombed with niches for relics, saints, and little creations, dim-flashing in the candlelight as though someone had flipped a crown inside out.
A voice said, “Have you come to pray for peace?”
I froze. Shielded by the pillar, there was a man, barefoot, hunched, clutching a crucifix, utterly silent, as though part of the structure. He was barefoot.
“Yes,” I said. It seemed wise.
“Then sit down.”
There were two metal folding chairs adjacent to him, squeezed into the space before what seemed to be the main shrine.
I sat.
“Lord Jesus,” he said. The man had a slight accent from somewhere unidentifiable. He added Mother Mary and all the saints, so I reminded God I was Christian but not Catholic, and God nodded patiently. (I mean, probably he did. That was the vibe I got.)
“We come to you to pray for peace.” The man then prayed for peace around the world — in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine, in Russia, for the cessation of wars everywhere.
In the Christian Scripture, the prayers of the saints are described as incense rising through the ages before the throne of God. Here in this small, hand-made shrine, with its walls as curved and snug as the squeeze of my backpack, it was as though the walls had been blackened with the soot of prayer, the whole place caked and redolent with supplication. It was intense, overwhelming. Like the pressure at your temples when you dive into deep water.
I struggled to interpret the sensation. Was it bad? Should I embrace or resist? I was aware of my theological self, standing at the threshold of the experience like an ideological immune system, extending dogmatic axioms into the Otherness, doctrinal leukocytes at the ready. But the data I gathered was meaningless as a foreign language. The feeling was simply there, intensely there. A great and powerful stillness.
I began to cry. My tears tend to go off like guns — violently, all at once, volley after volley, until something surrenders.
I sat in my metal folding chair and listened to the man pray. I was used to people acting out under the influence of the Spirit, or the muse, or their own private universes. I grew up in a Pentecostal church; people yelled out prophecies, spoke in tongues, fell on the floor, and cast out demons. I went to art school in New York and Los Angeles; people splashed red paint into canvases, discussed inverted urinals as high art, and posed nude. And I was classified as a special education student through elementary and middle school, joined by a cohort of neurodiverse peers until I was declassified midway through high school. So, why not drop out of life and build a shrine out of rocks and plaster in the middle of the empty hills by an ancient pilgrimage route and spend each day praying for peace in the middle of a bunch of statues made of Poland Spring bottles? Sounds great to me.
The man prayed on. Surrounded by candles and rosaries and handmade statues, I was both seduced and repelled. Something about the place recalled the wild altar calls of my youth, with the pastor urging us all toward a sort of supplicational peristalsis, as though we could propel ourselves into the presence of the Holy through a cocktail of brute force, angst, and volume.
But here there was no noise, no hype. The candles went on burning. The rosary clicked in the man’s hand.
At last, the man finished praying and invited me to add anything I wanted to. By now I was weeping openly, so I politely sobbed. It’s okay, thank you. He concluded the session with an Our Father and an Ave Maria in his own language. And then I bolted outside in search of a tissue, as my nose was running like a tapped maple tree.
As I fumbled in my pack for a tissue, the dog came up to me as though summoned. I looked into his eyes, and he met mine.
It is a strange thing to be instantly comprehended by a creature without language.
Without hesitation, the dog came over and pressed himself against me. His whole body. Calmly, in silence. I bent down and enveloped the dog, and we stood there, pressed together, our ribcages filling and relaxing one against the other, his steady breath coaching mine.
The dog’s fur was soft and rough at once. Downy tufts tangled together. He smelled like a farm: dirt, hay, animals.
The man came out of the church. In the light, he was pale-eyed and pink-skinned under a crinkly brown patina of sun damage. Slowly, he rang the bell three times. Then he approached us — slowly, slowly, as one accustomed to days full of nothing but wind.
“Is this your dog?” I asked.
“No.”
The dog was a lionish colour. When hugged, he felt like warm, dry grass.
“This dog is a saint,” the man told me.
Without urgency, the dog increased the pressure of his head against my abdomen.
“A dog saint,” said the man, repeated, in case I missed it.
“A dog saint,” I parroted. I wasn’t sure what else to do.
“His name is Roc, for St. Roc. St. Roc cared for lepers, and when he contracted leprosy, he went into the mountains to die without infecting anyone else. And a dog came to him and brought him food every day, and licked his wounds, and he recovered.” He paused and looked up into the hills, as though they might be full of leprous saints in various stages of divine healing. “This dog is named for him. St. Roc.”
“He followed me here,” I said.
“Yes,” said the man, unsurprised. “Every morning, he waits at the gates of his town for the first pilgrim. Usually, the first pilgrim is here by 6 or 6:30. But today you are here, the first pilgrim, at 7.”
I’m one of those horribly extreme morning people. By my standards, I had slept a bit late; I didn’t get up till 5:45, just before sunrise. The day was half gone.
“Roc waits for the first pilgrim to come here, because he does not want to walk alone. He guards the pilgrims on their way here. Then he stays here all day, with the shrine and the gardens and with us, who live here in this place of prayer. And at sundown, he walks back to town, to his owner.”
“Does the owner know?” I stammered.
“His owner knows where he is. He agrees that this is good for Roc to be with us and guard the pilgrims. A dog saint.”
I remembered how Roc had leapt up when he saw me, as though he recognised me. And he did: I was his pilgrim — the first pilgrim of the day, the one with whom he would walk to the shrine and the gallery of the Pilgrim Commune. He was waiting for me.
The man told me his name was Nicholas.
“The most important thing,” Nicholas said, “Is the message of Fatima. Three words: Don’t be afraid.”
I nodded.
“And move out of the cities and live somewhere rural so you will survive. The end is coming soon,” he added. “We must pray for peace.”
I nodded again, a bit more diplomatically than last time.
Later, when my atheist friend Stef stumbled upon the man’s art-shrine-breakfast domain, she described the shrines here and along the rest of the route as “creepy.” Nicholas recoiled. The many statues of Mary that peeked out of windows and niches along the way were a great mercy and spiritual defence for the pilgrims and locals alike, he contended with the passion of one who has been told his mother is ugly.
“You should not say this thing,” he admonished forcefully.
When Stef retold the story later, she quoted him as saying “You’re going to hell,” which I am equally sure he did not say. But perhaps we both heard what we were expecting.
It was Stef who first called the man crazy, after we left him. It was kind of strange, in retrospect, that this label never occurred to me. That it never entered my mind. Special, ascetic, hermetic, ardent, fringe, committed, religious, austere, mystic — these were my adjectives. I’d accepted him with a kind of radical naïveté, as a feature of the landscape, a bend in the path.
When Stef appeared on Nicholas’ donativo doorstep a few minutes after Nicholas finished telling me how to escape the Apocalypse, he took the opportunity to read us a homily. Stef looked unnerved by the Surprise Sermon. I judiciously didn’t tell her she was in the presence of a dog saint.
After the homily, Nicholas escorted us down the road for almost a kilometre, on sharp white gravel in his resolutely bare feet. Roc followed, bounding alongside the trail with tawny four-legged delight.
As we walked, Nicholas regaled us with accounts of the apparitions of Fatima, and the shrines by the road which protected both houses and the passersby (this was when Stef was roundly rebuked for her accusations of creepiness), and the Queen of Heaven, whose money turned to roses.
“We are all saints,” he told us.
Roc trotted ahead, sniffing the foliage, staying close.
Eventually, Nicholas halted. “I must leave you now,” he said. “Gather around. Don’t be afraid. Do not be afraid.”
He knelt down on his knees and prayed for each of our feet. A prayer for Stef’s left foot, a prayer for Stef’s right foot, with his hand on each respective appendage. And then a prayer, and a hand, for my left and right.
And he kissed the tip of each of our sneakers.
Stef looked at me over his crouched form and, with her eyebrows, urgently telegraphed further alerts of detected creepiness. I attempted my most diplomatic nod of the day.
Finally, without a word, Nicholas stalked away, silent and serious and secure in his calling, our labels falling deciduously from his retreating back as Roc gambolled at his leathery heels, both of them leaving us in the capable hands of the Camino de Santiago.
