One Walk of Life

It’s been two and a half months since I and our intrepid students finished the Camino de Santiago, so I’ve had ample time to process the experience. And my left ankle is nearly its normal size, the swelling having mostly abated. There are dark marks on my feet where the massive blisters used to be; part of me hopes they remain as permanent symbols of the walk – Camino tattoos. My knee still squeaks when I walk, but maybe that’s just because I’m old. The reflection I anticipated doing while on the Camino had to wait until I was no longer tromping through the mud, lancing blisters on the feet of students and shivering through damp, chilly nights.

The physical hardship has begun to recede in my mind and taking its place are a sense of achievement, a focus on the positive moments, and an appreciation of something gained. I liken it to having a baby: going through it is painful, messy and wet but the memory of that dissolves quickly when you find you have something incredible in your hands. Continue reading →

Day 4, the day I got lost, came to an end in our last albergue in Pedrozo. Once we’d all returned battered but safe, we piled into a restaurant with the group of spanish boys from Melilla in North Africa for pizza, mounds of french fries and croquetas de jamon. It was a feast of food and friendship. The boys were the only other people we’d encountered on the camino (March sees few pilgrims) and we met them on our first night after they welcomed us in Portomarin’s plaza with ‘the wave’. They became our constant companions and struck up friendships with the kids in our group. Honestly, they were quite a distraction for the girls… Continue reading →

All but two of the group set out from the almost non-village of Ribadiso at 7:30 a.m.  We walked 15 minutes into town and stopped for cafe con leche and packaged donuts, the only items available that morning at the restaurant. We had donned our pack covers and ponchos because, yes, it was already raining steadily. In spite of the rain I set off with high spirits, enjoying the chatter of the teenaged girls. There were two adults on the walk that day, instead of three, one for the ‘fast’ group and one (me) in back to walk with the ‘slow’ group. The town quickly disappeared behind us.  And in what felt like mere moments, the kids disappeared.

It had been a fact for the entire walk so far that there were wildly different paces and abilities. It had been a fact that I was well suited for the slow group; I’d not only kept up with the slow group, but also occasionally slowed my own pace to be with them. But something odd happened this day. Within about half an hour even the slow groups in front of me had vanished. It was common to lose sight of walkers (caminantes) for a bit as curves in the trail were encountered or trees obscured the view. But this was something new. I realized that I couldn’t hear the echo of their voices. I couldn’t see flashes of their brightly-colored ponchos through the trees. They were gone. I was alone. Continue reading →

The sun did rise as it’s supposed to on the second day of the Camino, but it didn’t seem to, obscured as it was by the charcoal grey clouds. We set out from Portomarin at  7:30 in the morning, stopping for a few moments for cafe con leche and a small pastry in town. And it was uphill from there. The next few hours were always steadily -and sometimes sharply- up. By the topographical map of the Camino, 15.8 km of our 25 km trek that day was ascendent.

The other chaperone had stayed behind with some students who were unable to walk with us. They had been sidelined by twisted ankles, swollen knees. So the wonderful Laura, a teacher from the school in Barcelona to which we were headed the following week, walked in front and I, fittingly, took the rear. Like day one, it wasn’t long before we were separated by pace. Unlike day one, it didn’t take long for the physical challenges to begin nipping away at positive attitude. Unlike day one there was no cozy restaurant to provide an afternoon respite, and the sun never came along to provide a beacon of hope.

The pain came early on this day because of the constant rise of the trail. Hamstrings  (dubbed stringos de jamon by the students- maybe you had to be there to find that amusing) were stretched to their limits. Shoes soaked by rain and mud exacerbated the already painful blisters from the day before.  And then there was the rain: the steady, pelting, freezing rain. As we trudged through it I kept thinking about Forrest Gump describing the rain, “We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.” Yea, Gump rain it was.  I thought about silly things like this to keep my mind busy and to keep myself from getting too discouraged. I’ve been around students long enough to know that stress can be highly contagious.

One of the queries we gave the students to consider before we began was, What do you do with pain and discomfort?  I think we all believed that this query would be theoretical. We believed that the queries we would spend the most time pondering were the more romantic What has brought you here? What do you want to do with your life?  Alas, the soggy skies and the intensity of our physical condition precluded any serious consideration about these lofty questions. No, we were focused on getting to the end of the day – an end that seemed far away and impossible to reach, even by 10am.

So, what did we do with the pain and discomfort? We endured it. Each endured it in his or her own way. Some students found the answer in walking faster to get it over with, to reach food and warmth more quickly; others had to stop and cry, to release the mental anguish it was causing; others suffered in silence; still others found a way to laugh at how sad we must have looked from afar. Whether laughing or crying (and sometimes both at the same time), we put one blistered foot in front of the other, planted it in a puddle and gave each other encouragement. “You can do this. WE can do this.” The Spaniards we had met the day before provided encouragement as well, designating some of their group to walk behind our slowest group  for a while to ensure we were OK. Some walked with others in groups ahead, and friendships were born. There is unity among all pilgrims. Even so, they eventually forged ahead, leaving us to slog it alone. I was able to (barely) endure it by trying to provide assurance for the kids. (Responsibility is a good distraction.) Sometimes we walked arm-in-arm talking about various things to amuse ourselves. Sometimes complained about our sore feet, knees, backs and ankles, the cold wet clothes – although I constantly worried about keeping a balance between empathy and perseveration. If we wallowed in the pain, we’d never make it. If I wallowed too much it would have doubled their worry. And sometimes we walked in silence for long stretches.

There was a moment near the end of the day when six of us had thought we’d reached our destination only to find we had one more kilometer to walk. We erupted together in shouts and tears, tormented by the thought of going on.  As we resumed our turtle’s pace, the rain gave its heaviest assault of the day. Hail decided to come along as well, just to make sure we were the right amount of miserable. It was comical really, something out of a bad movie. So we laughed, even as we ached.

After our nearly seven-hour walk and were together once again, fairly dry and slightly less frozen, we dined –  our first food since the morning pastry. Food that is earned tastes twice as good as it should, I can tell you. Although still reeling from the challenges of the day, still full of emotion and body parts throbbing in pain, we shared our stories and made jokes.  We found once again the laughter that has sustained us, that has made us one. None of us would appreciate until later that this was to be the beauty of our Camino. This. 

The following is the post I wrote for Westtown School’s Senior Projects Blog:

The first steps on the Camino are toward obtaining the pilgrim’s passport, a document that is stamped along the way to show that you have actually walked to the cathedral in Santiago and not, say,  taken a taxi. Was it a sign that the first church we came upon in Sarria was closed? We’ll see. We wandered through the streets and came upon a convent that answered our ringing of the bell. We purchased our pasaportes de peregrinos and the caretaker carefully impressed the stamp that signified the beginning of our journey.

Our start was a slow one. The students stopped to admire the beautiful vistas and buildings in Sarria, organizing themselves for group photos. In spite of the late start, our packs felt light and spirits were very high.  We were ready for this. Vamos!

The trail quickly ascended and the rigors of the Camino began to reveal themselves almost immediately. The air became misty. The crisp morning temperatures became more frigid. The physical abilities of each person of also made themselves known. After about an hour, we were not walking as a group, but in small groups with those whose paced matched our own. The Camino is, in one way, how we imagined it would be: surrounded by verdant fields, hugged by medieval villages, traversing lovely forests. It’s also something completely different than any of us could have imagined.

The Camino is peppered with farmhouses and ‘towns’ that consist of sometimes only three or four buildings. We came upon one such village and there was a tiny church that was built about 500 years ago. We entered the church where a priest was positioned in a chair at at the entrance; it was strange how he seemed to be awaiting our arrival, stamp in hand.  He pressed the stamp to each of our passports and as we said ‘gracias, padre’ he bid us ‘buen Camino’ the salutation of those on the path. We decided to sit a moment in the pews of this ancient edifice built for pilgrims. As we sat in silence, the priest said that he would like to make a special prayer for us. He ascended the altar and said a blessing for pilgrims in general and for us specifically. After the blessing we continued in silent worship for a short time. I wondered what the students were reflecting upon in those moments; assuredly some thoughts were pleas for the rain to subside and for a restaurant to emerge from behind a rainbow- I’ll admit to a rain-ceasing-food-providing prayer myself. But I know it was much more than that: a powerful moment for all of us to consider the millions of footprints made before us on this journey, to consider what it means to make this kind of pilgrimage, to consider ourselves and our lives.

We resumed walking and the rain came harder. It got colder. We got hungrier. Much of the trail was still uphill. In these hours we got our first glimpses of our ‘real’ selves,  the ones that emerge in times of strain and discomfort.  As a whole, the group remained positive until the hunger kicked in. We passed several places to eat, but all were closed. As we were beginning to wonder if the snack bars in our packs would be our lunch, we came upon a small old tavern on the trail, so small that our group of 14 filled the space.  We huddled together and ate as though we hadn’t eaten for days, instead of hours.  The simple, hearty country food filled our bellies and the opportunity to sit down together warmed our hearts. As the meal came to a close, the sun made an appearance and gave us hope that we could make it the next 10km.

The sun mostly accompanied us the rest of the day and we were able to enjoy those verdant fields and the incredible vistas over the rolling hills of Galicia.  Later we arrived in Portomarrin via a stone stairway blistered, sore, and exhausted, but so proud that we had 25 km under our belts. We were greeted with ‘the wave’ in the town plaza by a group of Spaniards from North Africa  – a group we did not know at the moment would become our constant companions on the Camino. It was a hard day, but it was a very good one.