Had we made our journey to San Sebastian, Spain in summer, we would have been tanning our skin instead of hiking mountains. But who I am to complain? We couldn't have had a better time. Hemingway wrote about this place, and why not? It seems to have it all: white sandy beaches, coastal mountains, late night hotspots and tapas to last for days. San Sebastian even has a island in its perfectly shaped half-moon bay, protecting beach bums (and there were a few, even in December) from dastardly waves.
Who says you can't eat appetizers for dinner?
For Dave and I, San Sebastian became the first of our symbolic climbs. "We should climb that hill over there later," he said to me as I munched on a bocadillo de tortilla de patata (a bread roll stuffed with a thick egg and potato pancake). "Yeah alright," I said, not knowing that
I was not merely commiting myself to climbing to the golden Jesus statue here, but also every other high point we would find in the next two weeks. It was a blessing that I didn't realize it then. So, after dropping our bags off at the train station, we trudged back to the coast, walked down the wrong pier to the mountain and found that we would have to either swim or trudge back in order to get to the
base of the mountain. Back we went.
We reached it's base in total sunshine. Sunshine. I had not seen this kind of sunshine since California, so I took a minute to bask in it. Before the minute passed we were on our way, up the southern side of the semi-mountain, semi-hill, semi-shrine to Christ. Only a third of the way up, the vistas were already breathtaking. I snapped two photographs. It felt good to try and capture the sunshine any way I could, if even the futile attempt it was.
Up we went, step by step. Dave offered to take the backpack. My left shoulder obliged. Left foot, right foot. Halfway up. Another set of stairs met us there. More pictures. Finally, when it seemed we were there, we hit a dead end, and Dave tried the old-fashioned climb: the limbs of trees and the mudded hillside. I watched, and then he came to his senses and found a grass stain on his white khakis. The staircase around the corner led us to the Jesus shrine, a
three-dimensional tribute of gold. I set my eyes on the north, the Atlantic Ocean, which was crashing angrily into the innocent Spanish coast. The coastal outcropping of granite held strong, for now. We snapped more pictures. We breathed. It was heavenly.
And then our daydreaming ceased, and the clouds rolled in. This was, after all, December. We raced to beat the storm to shelter. We lost. Badly. By the time we had descended the north face of the mountain, it was a torrential downpour. The wind shattered my umbrella. The tides had literally turned and it seemed that the sea might win out on the once-rebellious outcroppings. Sand was being made. Thunder. Lightning. Without the umbrella, we were drenched. But no matter, we had conquered it. We had pictures to prove it. We had pictures of the sunshine. We had breathed non-London air. We had lived. And we would find shelter. All in due time.
We had started one of many trends; we were view-finders.
