What if there were no conflicts? No worries? No antagonists? Then you would be describing our situation hiking at the northern tip of Portugal, crossing an estuary in a small red boat, and landing like first settlers on the empty, sandy shores of Spain.

I call it “la paz de la costa,” where your only job is to observe the sea, watch its waves curl left-to-right to form a tunnel of light-green water, topped with a dollop of white foam.

Watch. Repeat. Watch. Repeat for miles upon miles without tedium because each wave is like a snowflake, unique enough to have its own personality. Consider the slow-roll wave, whose thrust is barely enough to form a curl, compared to the high arching wave who dares to come so close to shore it will knock rocks and shells onto the beach.

For millions of years, this pattern has remained constant without my participation, until now, as Nancy and I walk the Portuguese Camino Coastal Route to Santiago. Even having lived by California beaches I’ve never studied waves as intensely, because on this hike, we are walking hours upon hours, days upon days, watching always to our left for seascapes we can memorialize in our older days.

Sometimes the tide was in and sometimes it was distant. When it was out, I felt obliged to explore tidepools, finding small shelled creatures and crystal waters. The science forced me to recall my grade-school learnings, a field trip to La Jolla, California, where we poked at urchins, and examined the undersides of starfish.

And why are there tidepools? Could I remember? Yes, because the moon’s gravity pulls on the earth, making it bulge. The ocean waters move closer to to the position of the moon. So each morning’s low tides along the rocky Iberian coast exposed water-worn rocks, many so smooth you’d swear they’d been machine polished. But other rocks were so stubborn, they kept their cragy construction, despite millions of years of abuse.

I should have also remembered that tidepools are slippery. I fell. Not even my walking polls could save me, though it was a slower slip than it would have been without them. The end result? A few scratches that would heal quickly.

From this tidepool view in Portugal, hills and mountains poked out with conspicuous grandeur. Leaving Vila Praia de Ancona en route to A Guarda, I spotted a perky coastal mountain alone in the far distance. I had read about Santa Trega, but I didn’t realize that was the mountain, sitting 328 meters (1,076 feet) high in neighboring Spain.

Was I so close to Spain already?

Moving slightly inland, we walked through an evergreen forest that brought us to a river.

“Water taxi?” a woman asked?

“No we’re walking,” I naively answered, until I realized where we were. We were on the border between Portugal and Spain, and there was no way to walk across the water.

Ferry service has been discontinued on the waterway. “It’s has something to do with conflict, maybe political reasons,” an English-speaking woman said, explaining that her friend was offering us her husband’s boat as passage to Spain.

For five euros, Nancy and I took seats as the sole passengers on his small craft.

Nancy thought surely we were going to be murdered by a stranger, but the stranger-captain throttled up his boat onto a sandy beach (there were no docks to be seen), introducing us to a new time zone, a new language, and a new view of Santa Trega.

Atop this mountain sit ancient petroglyphs. We did not hike up to see them, but as we headed west around Santa Trega toward the Atlantic, we saw the next best thing — split images of petroglyphs painted on trees. At first glance, they were just interesting designs painted on multiple tree trunks.

The surprise, however, is that at a certain point along the trail, a hiker’s perspective changes. The multiple images merge into a single picture, despite the significant distance between trees.

Walking among eucalyptus and coastal trees, small villages, and barren paths on our way north, I guess you could say we did find an antagonist — weather. For the most part, we eluded the rain, lightning and thunder. But with each turn of the head toward the ocean, we could see magic at work through the distant storms: sun beams, mammatus clouds, and, ultimately a rainbow. No worries, just beauty to behold.

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