The Magic Door

Three Stories

Uno: Last week, as we trudged along in the heat toward Fidenza, my Brazilian friends H & V were telling me about a time they were walking on the Camino Santiago. They were tired and hungry, and it was pouring, but they were in the middle of nowhere and had no choice but to keep going. Desperate to find some sort of shelter, they spotted a sign on the side of the road advertising coffee.

Coffee? Here? they wondered. It didn’t seem possible. But as they continued on The Way they came upon a door.

“Not a house,” H insisted to me. “A door.”

V agreed. “Sort of like ruins,” she said, her turquoise walking poles beating a samba rhythm on the asphalt.

Inside the door was a spotless space with four spotless beds. It was run by a married couple — a South African man and his wife who, after traveling and opening schools in Nepal, stumbled upon the site while walking the Camino themselves. They immediately decided they wanted to live there and run a place for pilgrims.

On the road to Fidenza V told me that when she and H left the shelter, although it was still raining, they both felt reinvigorated. After a few minutes of walking they stopped under a tree to admire the view. Everything around them was utterly beautiful. 

“Was the moment beautiful because we had stopped at the door?” V said to me. “Would we have even noticed it if we hadn’t stopped in for coffee? Or would it have been just as beautiful no matter what because it was simply beautiful?”

“Perhaps all of the above?” I said. “Perhaps it’s all connected. If you hadn’t stopped for coffee, the moment would have been just as beautiful, but you wouldn’t have been there, in that exact moment, to experience that exact beauty.”

In Italy, on the Via Francigena, it wasn’t raining, but we were hungry, hot, and tired. We hadn’t eaten lunch, and though we could see Fidenza on the horizon, the town was mocking us with the many twists and turns we would have to take to get there.

“We sure could use the magic door right about now,” I said.

Due: On the woodsy trail leading out of Fidenza, my Swiss friend JF told me a story the other day of a time when he was walking the Camino. At the time, JF had been alone, and he hadn’t met another pilgrim for several days. Then, in a tiny village, at an intersection in the middle of the town, feeling the pangs of loneliness, he happened upon an Indian monk who was returning home on foot after receiving medical treatment in Denmark.

The two men talked, and JF shared his picnic lunch with the monk. Sensing that the other man was poor, JF offered to give him some more food to carry for the next day. But the monk refused the offering, saying that he had enough for this day and that God would provide for him tomorrow. And with that, the two men continued on their separate ways.

In the cool shade under a canopy of trees in Italy, JF spoke warmly to me about the man as if they had met only yesterday, or as if he were a close friend. “I still think about him often,” JF said, his eyes full of gratitude remembering this sliver of a moment he’d had years ago with a stranger. “If either of us had come to that intersection even five minutes earlier or five minutes later, we never would have met.”

Tre: Two weeks ago I was trekking alone on the Via Francigena on the way to Orio Litta. While I had spoken to numerous locals and met a couple of pilgrims my first couple of weeks on The Way, I was feeling the isolation that comes after days of utter solitude on the road.

The leg was a fairly easy one, not even 17 km, but it had started raining the night before in Santa Cristina, and it had been raining all day long. I missed a route marker (which was conveniently placed behind a tree) and got lost in a muddy field, and everything I had on was soaked through. My hands were so cold and wet that I couldn’t fasten the straps on my backpack, and after four hours in the rain, I could feel the beginnings of a blister on my left pinky toe. I had passed through a couple of small towns, but I couldn’t find a single open bar or café, nowhere to sit down, dry off, and relax.

In need of a break, I stopped at an abandoned building and plopped down on the pavement under the awning. I peeled off my wet socks to inspect my feet and sipped from my water bottle while I contemplated my next move. Could I live under this awning?

A woman stopped to see if I needed help. No grazie, I just want to sit somewhere where it’s not raining.

A man stopped to see if I needed help. No grazie, I really just want to sit here.

Then, about fifteen minutes after I’d sat down, a group of pilgrims passed me. They, too, were drenched, but they were walking together, and they were smiling. They were happy. Amongst them was a golden retriever, led by (rather, leading) a man carrying a guitar.

“Hey, I talked to you the other day,” I said to the man. And I had; the man had called the ostello where I was staying to see if he could bring his dog there, and the woman in charge had handed me the phone, thinking I could act as translator.

The man grinned at me. “Join us,” he said. “There’s a bar up ahead.” I pulled out a pair of dry socks, picked up my pack, and ten minutes later met up with the group at the bar.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I would travel with this group for the next ten days.

We all need the magic door from time to time to help us keep going. But the thing about the magic door is that it isn’t something that you can consciously look for; it isn’t even something you can define or describe until it presents itself to you. Sometimes it’s a person or a place of refuge, and sometimes it’s as minuscule as the light passing through the leaves of a tree. But it tends to find you at the moment when you need it the most, at that moment you’re about to give up, giving you just what you need to help you keep moving forward. The magic door gives you a small sense of hope, connects you to the world, or shows you a moment of beauty you might otherwise have never noticed.

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