I was hiking deep in the northern part of the valley, down near my humble place of beginning. My eye was drawn to a smooth river rock lying near a jagged limestone outcropping. We have gullies but no rivers in La Mancha. There are no smooth rocks native to this land.
The rock’s story isn’t hard to guess.
I walked the Camino late at night, hoping to find her eating bugs at the lights. But there was no sign of her. I was in denial for a time. I told myself you can’t plan for a fox. You run into them when you run into them. Perhaps, I told myself, I’d just had a run of bad luck.
Few people from La Mancha visit the valley and almost none have ventured deeply into it. People come to La Mancha to study with the Wizard, get married, or drink whiskey at the Fang & Feather. They aren’t prepared for a safari.
The famous Bells of La Mancha are embedded in the wall that separates the villages of La Mancha and Engelbrecht. An inscription in the wall offers a glimpse into its history. At some unspecified time in the past, a woman named Michelle gifted the wall to La Mancha. “These are the bells that helped her” is all the inscription says.
People tear up and down the Camino Dulcinea, lost in the business and busyness of weddings. They go up the hill fussing with the bride’s hair and down the hill talking to caterers on the phone. That is all most people know of the ancient Camino.
Meadow Lane, running east and west, curves gently around the base of First Mountain, which dominates the landscape of La Mancha. The lane is well named, for it was nothing more than a sparse and rugged meadow when the Wizard came to this land roughly twenty years ago.
I entered the Wizard’s tower on a Sunday afternoon and ascended to the roof where I found this Phasmatodea Icarus, frozen in death.
I saw a full moon through the darkly purple boughs and heavy greens of an oak deep in the Valley of Dulcinea.
While many thousands have been wed beneath Her watchful presence, few ever truly see Dulcinea.
Beyond Engelbrecht Inn & Tavern and the Lost Boys is a crude trail leading westward toward the Gully of the Wild Things. There are some painted rocks along the trail. If you come across a collection of animal bones on a crude shelf wedged in the branches of a tree you are getting close.