Lucky is the shoe well travelled

“…Now, for good luck, cast an old shoe after me”
-Proverb


It is 3am, it is pitch black. I am completely alone, in a forest, in the middle of Northern Spain.

I can’t see the Camino de Santiago trail markers. I am torchless and scared. Sunlight is at least three hours away. I have no way of knowing where to walk, nor how to return to where I began.

In a distant clearing, two flickering lights oscillate menacingly in unison.

Flick…Flick…Flick…Flick….

They play with my mind, now racing with wild, otherworldly representations.

Aliens. The lights are definitely aliens. Of this, I am more certain than of anything I’ve ever known in my life.

Puente La Reina’s dulcet, amber-hue cobblestone alleys felt so comforting when I left my hostel earlier, encouraging my ambitious efforts to get an early start to avoid the morning pilgrims and the scorching Spanish sun.

But I’m not in town anymore. And the lights are edging closer.

Flick…Flick…Flick…Flick


Frozen in my tracks, with fear lodged in the pit of my stomach, I scramble desperately for something visual—anything, to take my mind off the flickering.

I fixate deeply on the beaten old red sneakers that brought me here. Locked in overdrive, my memory reel flashes back across my Big Adventure—ever since that morning when I left Australia to hit the skies with little more than a saxophone, a guitar, and my slick red shoes…

…I watch the sneakers creep tentatively through shady Tangier alleys at dusk… tapping jazzily as they busk for Euro inside the tipsy cloisters of Temple Bar. Over foggy, medieval moats in Cesky Krumlov, they saunter, and heave bruised, weary legs up the angular inclines of Luang Prabang’s golden temples. They sprint manically at midnight through a haunted Edinburgh intersection...March jovially across lush lakeside wilderness deep in the Minnesotan woods. On planes, over oceans, open plains and deserts…

Memory collides with the present and my disheveled sneakers remain, sedentary, trapped in this abyss.

Fossicking madly through my pack as the scenes flurry past and the lights edge ever closer and closer, I thrust my arm deep in desperation—I pull it out, and by some miraculous serendipity, it clutches the tiniest, most insignificant pen torch I never knew I had.

Shaken, nostalgic, with fear slowly metamorphosing into triumphant, exasperated butterflies, I am witness again to the Camino signposts, and am saved.

As I leave the stalker aliens and deep lurking fear in my wake, I trundle boldly again toward the next unknown field. I watch on as my old red shoes shine brilliant scarlet in the comforting halo of a lucky moment.