I wandered along the twenty-meter-wide O-shaped promenade, looking for a place to stay. Their small-to-medium wood bodies were painted white with bright stripes of green, blue, or red. Half the fishing boats were out at sea and the other half oscillated before me, up and down on a shifting tide. The track took me to the river that had long ago carved this stone bowl, then to where it decanted into the sea next to the protected harbor. I descended into town on the zigzag footpath past stone cottages with terraced gardens overtaken with hollyhocks, nasturtiums, yellow broom, and upright prehistoric stems of collard greens. I took a deep breath and inhaled a mixed perfume of salt air, seaweed, fresh cut grass, and manure. I also wanted to experience something I feared we were losing: our connection to nature, to living in some semblance of balance with the earth, and to our own healthy wildness within. I hoped this time to walk more deeply into this geography where patience, harmony, tides, seasons, herds, and harvests defined priorities. It had been this outrageous mix of wild and tame, nature and human, rugged and kind that had called me back. I could just make out Luarca's bowl-shaped harbor at the bottom, and on the other side of its rocky ridge, a churning dark blue ocean. I turned to the path that wove through the slope-hugging, slate-roofed seaside town below my feet. Dense oak and pine forest formed a thick line in the far horizon between sweeping meadows and jutting purple-blue mountains, their toothy peaks reaching far into the sky. All around me fanned velvet green hills dotted with ivory sheep and caramel cows. I hoisted my pack, thanked the conductor, and stepped out onto the station platform set high above the town. On that first visit to western Asturias, I had been short on time but fully mesmerized by this arrowhead-shaped green sliver of land wedged between the pummeling Atlantic Ocean to the north and the towering Cantabrian Mountains to the south. It amazed me that he had remembered me, but then, this was a place where people noticed everything, took their time with each other, and fully inhabited the world around them, both wild and tame. With evident pride he commanded his two-car, narrow-gauge train on its twice-a-day trajectory from here to the neighboring region of Galicia and back. He had recognized me from two years earlier as soon as I had boarded the train in Oviedo, the provincial capital of Asturias in northwestern Spain. "Next stop, Luarca," announced the conductor, looking straight at me. Local knowledge and remote footpaths in northern Spain lead to a wolf encounter and a deeper walk in the world.
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