Pilgrim Strong: Rewriting my story on the Way of St. James

1

The End is the Beginning

Never, never, never give up.

Winston Churchill

Not everyone has to walk across a country to let go of their burdens and have a long talk with God. That’s just what I chose to do. My 500-mile pilgrimage experience started forty days earlier with all kinds of life-changing expectations. Almost none came true.

The Camino de Santiago gives birth to another pilgrim the moment he heads for home. And thus, as the walking’s done, the real journey begins. Every pilgrim who’s walked Spain’s ancient path leaves it somehow different from when they began, those new revelations typically affirmed over time. It’s what you do with this experience that matters. The end is where it really begins.

During a three-hour winding bus trip back from Finisterre to Santiago, my head cleared just enough to realize the full-blown state of exhaustive delirium with which I’d entered the square at St. James’ Cathedral two days before.

The most important practical task of the moment was the new focus needed to get home. Much as I wanted simply to collapse, circumstances still required shaking off the physical toll of the pilgrimage a few more hours. Ignore momentary feelings of distraction. Stay focused. Don’t be a crybaby. Keep moving. You learn the simplest, most effective coping mechanisms and mantras in the Camino’s first teachable moments.

Finisterre, a small fishing village just a few hours from Santiago de Compostela, is the most westward point of the Iberian peninsula. The ancients believed it was the true end of the earth. Standing there, you understand why. It’s as satisfyingly alone as I’ve ever felt. Here, at this extreme locale, I was a good 600 miles from the Madrid airport, ultimately the place where I could turn over all responsibility for getting home to someone else. It would bring such relief. But for two and a half more days I was still a sojourner whose sole job was figuring out the bus schedules to Santiago, locating a bed for the night, finding the train station, buying a ticket to Madrid, hunting down another bed and catching a plane. Memphis was 72 sweet hours away.

I’d just walked across Spain. Surely I could bring this to a close with a little touristy travel. Yes, you’re tired, I kept telling myself. But it’s not such a big deal.

Somehow, the whole forty-day experience already seemed a surreal eternity lost in the past. After so many weeks of walking, in the first moments a pilgrim re-enters the real world, he is unknowingly fragile, and must slowly reacquaint with rigid things like time. On the Camino de Santiago, time decompresses. Camino time stretches without limit just as the Old Roman Road leads forever west through the skyscape-defined Meseta.

The first leg of the three-day journey home now well underway, the bus ride was a peaceful, restful sensation, heading south through coastal Galician villages, and a warm, crystal-clear azure day. Truman Capote loved writing in these parts. I understood why.

The feeling I’d long anticipated was almost shockingly absent. This should feel like victory—the triumphant, conquering sojourner having claimed his prize at the zero marker. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s population, I reasoned, has ever felt the magnitude of the achievement I’d just— But no, I knew immediately. That idea was nonsense, at odds with practically every lesson about humility I’d just learned. As we turned from the coast eastward through the twisting mountain valleys en route to Santiago, and as I sat watching the kilometers click past the window, all I could think about was how relieved I felt that the walk was done. I should have been down on my knees thanking God. The only thing my spirit could muster was thanking Him that the 500 miles was finished, that I wasn’t completely cold for the first time in nearly three weeks, and that with massive amounts of fabric softener, my clothes might take on something of a neutral odor by the weekend.

After two days of transition from weary walker to recovering tourist, my mind finally gave my body, now 31 pounds lighter, permission to know how much it had masked the pain of an inflamed, hemorrhaging shin that dictated my gait every aching step of the final hundred kilometers from Portomarin to Santiago de Compostela.

The original plan to arrive on Thanksgiving Day had been blown a week earlier. By that time, any preconceived goals of time or state of being no longer mattered. I just wanted to make it. Just finish, even if I had to fake it. And then go home.

Throughout, my wife and mother sent text messages and emails reminding me to listen to my body. Nothing is worth hurting so much, they said, as wives and mothers do. I remember laughing about the reply I wanted to send them, but didn’t: My body says it wants a queen-sized bed with clean sheets, fluffy blankets, and a western omelette with wheat toast, around 7 am, por favor. I stopped listening to my body two weeks ago. If I hadn’t, I’d already be home, y’all.

The leg hurt like the dickens, I was beyond exhaustion, and my sleep pattern never allowed much more than five broken hours a night.

But the very suggestion of not finishing what I’d come to do was hateful. I abhorred the mention of anything less than a respectable finish on two legs. I’d be the one who had to live with how this turned out, no one else, so don’t tell me how to finish. Every day the last week I just prayed God would carry me a bit further. It was indeed a one-step-at-a-time endeavor.

From Portamarin on, I would have crawled a hundred kilometers through the cold, sticky Spanish mud before giving up on planting my walking stick at the resting place of St. James the apostle. What a blessing in disguise that my mind took over to mask how much those last miles hurt. It would be nice to remember more about it, and to have enjoyed more of it. My arrival at Cathedral Square wasn’t the glorious moment I’d imagined for three years. But it was done.

Maybe the power to arrive was God’s divine intervention. Perhaps it’s what some call Camino magic.

Somewhere along the way, I began calling it #PilgrimStrong.

For directional purposes, most primary footpaths on the great hiking trails are marked with a blaze. Hence the term trailblazer. A blue blaze often marks a side trail leading to some purposeful destination off the main path. The side trails you read ahead denote sidebar anecdotes somehow relevant to the bigger story.

Why the hashtag on

#PilgrimStrong?

Despite the minimal necessities a 500-mile walk requires, modern pilgrims nonetheless struggle with what to take, what they can leave behind, what they must not. The current age of instant communication, concerns about safety, and recording memories brings to the top of the list the decision whether to carry a smartphone.

For me, documenting the journey and sharing it in real time was an important part of my pilgrimage therapy. I carried both a smartphone and a GoPro recorder, and was wired all the way across Spain. To plug or unplug is a huge decision. Notwithstanding my own choice, I highly recommend an unplugged pilgrimage to anyone who asks.

Because I wanted friends and family to have a sense of the daily experience, I posted photos, video snippets, and short stories like clockwork. American Pilgrims on Camino (APOC), an informational social media forum where past and future pilgrims share information, was a key distribution point for my posts.

Those posts told a story. They were real accounts of what I was doing, feeling, and experiencing. No filter. The response was far bigger than anticipated, and it created a following and a dialogue. Within days, there were thousands of new friends following and encouraging me across Spain.

No matter how difficult your undertaking, nobody likes a whiner, crybaby or complainer. Whatever the pain, however much it hurt, I pledged not to complain about my choice to walk the ancient footpath across a nation. When I saw the strength exhibited by other pilgrims on the Camino, even in myself at times, I began using the hashtag #PilgrimStrong on my social media posts. It conveyed the essence of so many things. And it caught on.

2

Day 40: 12 Miles to Santiago

I didn’t come this far to only come this far.

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For three years, I’d often imagined the thoughts and emotions those final steps would well up inside and what my heart would feel in that pinnacle moment as the cathedral’s spires came into sight. Surprisingly, it was a moment for experiencing another Camino truth I learned to embrace, and I let it sink in as other pilgrims walked their last of a million steps alongside me—the imaginative expectation versus the reality. How we wish things to be versus how they really are, presupposing rather than permitting things to freely unfold, being as I imagined I should be, instead of who I am.

The thinking time afforded on the relatively short 19-kilometer walk from Arzúa to Arca on Day 39 helped me formulate two critical priorities for the forthcoming final night on the Camino, the absence of either a complete deal breaker for my 10 euros. I desperately needed a facility that (1) had heat, and (2) was willing to turn that heat on.

It’s one thing to experience pain and fatigue for a moment. It’s another to experience both for several weeks. But when you’re tired, hurting, cold, and wet for days on end, it brings an entirely new dimension to misery. My weather experience honestly wasn’t all that bad, and I recall it in terms of three distinct periods.

The first began from St. Jean Pied de Port with two weeks of a persistent cool, windy, dreary dampness all the way to the charming village of Castrojeriz, some 325 kilometers down the trail. Only two occasions produced real rain, much like the late fall weather back home in Arkansas. Those days were entirely manageable, and it’s a certainty pilgrims embarking from the French side of the Pyrenees have been baptized by conditions far worse.

Two weeks in, at the end of an uncharacteristically brisk walk into Castrojeriz early on a Saturday afternoon, the clouds cleared. The sun lit the countryside with vibrant greens, yellows, and reds that lifted my spirit. It’s amazing how simple sunlight can make you feel when it’s been absent so long. As my friend Jakub Jasinski and I strolled into town that day, it seemed every other breath we spoke was a reference to sunshine.

It was the beginning of a fair-weather pattern producing nothing less than perfect conditions for the next twelve days. The sunshine, warm temperatures, and low winds let me move efficiently across the Meseta. I offered a prayer of thanks for every glorious day. It couldn’t last forever. But for those twelve days, it was about as glorious as the Meseta gets.

Yet the Camino had no intention to make finishing so comfortable—or so easy.

Passage through Galicia exacted a stiff toll for its beauty. The conditions became cold and damp again through most days. With few exceptions, it remained that way to the end. It was bad enough until we trudged through a seven-hour snow storm from O Cebreiro to the safe haven and lower elevations of Triacastela. I promised myself that if I ever made it home, I’d never be cold again. That’s been a promise kept. Blankets are now scattered about everywhere in our home. I’m also more of a sweater guy these days.

My throbbing shin, now chronically pained, forced a much slower pace in the final three days. I’d altogether abandoned the idea of walking into Santiago with Naomi and Aida, good friends with whom I’d shared the trail for the last ten days. Twelve miles a day was max now, so I adjusted the walking schedule and pace accordingly.

My walk evolved to more of a hobble-shuffle movement, where the remaining good body parts learned to compensate for those that had become inefficient. But it was still forward movement, and with less than forty miles to go, that was enough.

Three hours ahead of Arca, I caught Naomi and Aida, who’d stopped for a mid-morning breakfast in Salceda. Though we’d been walking companions, and an unlikely brother-sister-sister family for the past 200 kilometers, it had become obvious days earlier that my increasingly irregular pace would bar our unspoken goal to walk the final steps into Cathedral Square as one. I was both happy and sad that I’d be alone at the end.

Momentarily rejuvenated, and with next-to-last-day enthusiasm, we walked together again as one unit, excited about the finish and a final Sunday forecast for sunshine and fair skies. For a few short hours, it was like the old times of ten days before. I was no longer disappointed to miss my Thanksgiving Day finishing goal by three days and figured that for some reason, God had just wanted me to make my final steps to the cathedral on a blue-sky Sunday. Back home, my wife’s prayer for the last week was that I’d not only finish, but finish with joy. Everything was simply lining up for the answer to her prayer. Joy always comes easily on a Sunday, it seems.

There is an ever-present and transient nature to camaraderie and friendship throughout the experience of a long hike. You’ll part ways with friends perhaps dozens of times, but never know for sure when you’re saying goodbye for the last