Dispatches Del Camino

Everyone calls it something different. The Camino has many different names. The Germans out here call it “Jakobsweg.” The French call it the “La Chemin de St. Jacques de Compostelle.” The Chinese we’ve met say “Cháoshèng zhě zhī lù,” which means “Pilgrims Path.”

The South Koreans call it “Santiago Gill.” The Ukrainians call it “Camino Podolico.” We Americans, who speak fluent Roy Rogers, cannot help but refer to it simply as “The Trail.” Which is why many of us Americanos say “Happy Trails” to each other, despite the ribbing we receive from sophisticated Europeans who neither understand why we say these words, nor why we giggle after we say them.

Either way. My wife and I have walked this path for a long time. We have been out of our own country, living in sweaty albergues, municipal hostels, b.o.-scented dormitories, and the occasional bedbug-fumigated bunkhouse for one month and a half.

We have been hiking The Way for most of this time. For five of those weeks, the Camino de Santiago has been our only home.

The cohort of international pilgrims has been our only community. We are a family. eat together, sleep together, cry together, go to the bathroom together. We walk together. We shower in the same foul stalls.

We share everything. Food. Clothing. Water. Toiletries, phone chargers, nail clippers, antiinflamatorios, music. We bandage each other’s blisters. We loan each other Euros for cafés. We share pocketknives, boot laces, and even—this actually happens—sports bras.

We even share sickness. Currently, a lot of the pilgrims are sick with what is being termed “Camino Flu.” The virus has been making the rounds, hopping from albergue to albergue. It’s an intense, quick-moving head cold. But everyone gets a turn experiencing it.

When you first begin the Camino, you think the most meaningful pieces of the magic are going to come from the countryside, the villages, the spirituality, the food, the historic significance of the route, and the charming locals. But it’s not about those things. The majority of your experience out here is other pilgrims. In some ways, it’s almost entirely about the other pilgrims.

Some of the most powerful lessons we pilgrims have learned on this proverbial Chisholm Trail have not been about life, or the nature of the universe. Our lessons have been in relation to each other.

How do we handle each other? How do we treat one another? How do you react to a pilgrim who has funky, negative energy? What do you do with a toxic person who wants to walk alongside you, draining your mental fortitude, killing your spirit, and sapping the life from your inmost soul? Is it wrong to leave such a person behind? If not, how do you do it in a nice way?

How do you live, authentically, without auctioning off your entire personhood to an exploded sense of obligation?

And where does God fit into all this, you keep wondering. How come you feel His presence so much more out here than at home? What’s the reason?

Is it because you’re not surrounded by the trappings of ordinary modernized life? Is it because, currently, your whole world is crammed in a 32 liter backpack? Is it because, due to an overabundance of seasonal hikers, you literally have no place to lay your head tonight? Or is it because despite each predicament, you somehow know it will all work out.

Because it always has worked out.

You’ve been stuck on the streets of Estella, about to sleep on the doorstep of a closed church, when some random stranger appeared in a minivan. He spoke no English, but he was fluent in humankindness. He drove you 20 minutes, found a bed for you and your wife, and asked for nothing in return.

You’ve been trapped in the isolated pueblito of Rabanal, with an injury, and no available beds. And the townspersons made space for you, innkeepers shuffled you from bed to bed, to help you out. A local woman went to town for you, bought you new shoes, out of pure generosity.

You thought you were finished with the trail forever. You thought it was game over. And now you’re walking the trail again.

What is this? What is this unique charitable behavior called? This kind of thing would, after all, never happen in real life.

Or would it? Maybe this stuff happens all the time. Maybe it’s always around us, and yet you never notice it. Maybe the milk of human compassion is always available to you and me; maybe the sweetness of heaven’s love is always there, lingering just within arm’s reach, but we refuse to notice it. Maybe THAT’S the Camino.

Then again, maybe—just maybe—there is no Camino at all. Maybe the Camino itself was always inside your breast, locked away in your heart. Maybe you were already WALKING the Camino, for your whole life, always walking, you just never realized it. Maybe life itself is simply one long Camino, and your only job is to love it.

I don’t know. Either way, we arrive in Santiago tomorrow.

Happy trails.