Buen Camino: My Unexpected Walk Across El Camino de Santiago

*Hey ya’ll. I wrote this several years ago about my experience unexpectedly walking El Camino de Santiago in northern Spain in 2016. Several literary magazines showed inital interest in it but in the end no one took it. So I figured I’d place it here. Enjoy!

I came to walk El Camino de Santiago, the roughly 500 mile trek across Northern Spain, in a very unusual way. Typical me. I always have to go against the grain, do things my own unique way. This was no exception.

            It all started in early 2016, when I began badgering my girlfriend, Anna, about the need for us to travel Europe. We were 33 and 31. I hadn’t been out of the country—minus a stint in British Columbia—since 2007, when my ex girlfriend and I traveled all over Europe for five weeks. The reason for the long break was because a few things had happened. One was that, between 2006 and late 2010, I’d hitchhiked up and down both coasts and across the United States. I’d hopped a freight train. I’d moved more times than I can remember. In 2008 alone I moved five times. Just in that one year.

            But also, I was an active alcoholic. From 2000—age 17—to late 2010—age 27—I was a a hardcore blackout drinker. When I started, I couldn’t stop. And then it was a roll of the dice. What version of me would come out that night? It was anyone’s best guess. Nice/fun Michael? Sad Michael? Angry/belligerent/violent Michael? Judgmental Michael? Depressed Michael? Excited to be alive Michael? Pick a number. Get in line. Run for safety.

            When I got sober, at nearly 28 years old, it was all about changing my life: New friends; back to college (San Francisco State University); writing like a fiend; staying in one apartment long enough to establish that elusive thing I’d yearned for for so long: roots; finding a partner; etc. I promised myself I wouldn’t travel for some time. Why? I’d been traveling for a decade. Moving up and down California. Moving across country. Taking Amtrak trains across the nation half a dozen times. Driving across the continent. Thumbing. Europe twice. But that all ceased in 2010.

            So when 2016 arrived, I suddenly felt this need, this almost lurid, cryptic lust for international travel. I had to go. I worked on Anna and, finally, over time, she agreed to go. She, too, had traveled much in her twenties. She’d lived briefly in Spain. Seattle. New York City. Had traveled to Brazil. Samoa. She, too, like me, like so many people, had endured a tough time when it came to maneuvering the world as a sensitive artist, trying to discover “who she was.”

            Anna and I had been together for three years. We bought a home together six months prior to this travel discussion. We were young and in love and learning the ropes of serious, intense adulthood, responsibilities I never could have fathomed five years back. But now I was sober. A new man. And yet. I still had that travel bug. Big time.

            In March, 2016, Anna and I ended up spending a month traveling through Germany, Austria, and Italy. At the end we stayed a week in Naples. It was fantastic. We stayed in an Air B and B that was a tiny, rustic, traditional flat at the top of a steep hill. When we walked out to the porch in the morning, cup of tea in hand, steam curling out of the mug, we could see the shimmering blue bay—the Tyrrhenian Sea—Mount Vesuvius, and the ancient city sitting down there just waiting to be explored. Cars and taxis swished back and forth on the ribbon of road paralleling the water, and it reminded me a little of The Embarcadero in San Francisco.

            We went to museums. We took a ferry to Sorrento. We took a speed train two hours north to Rome, saw Vatican City, The Collosseum, the Sistine Chapel. We went to Pompeii. We walked around Naples, exploring excitedly.

            And then our time together came to an abrupt close. We’d traveled a whole month. Now it was time, as we’d planned, for her to return to El Cerrito, and for me to carry on along the French Riviera, northwest from Naples, and then dip down into Valencia, Spain, all by train. I had set up Couch Surfing stays in each place.

            And yet, that morning, when we split up, the yellow taxi idling, waiting twenty feet away by the apartment, at the top of that steep hill, the two of us holding each other tightly in a bear hug, when we detached we were both wiping our eyes. I felt this visceral ache in my stomach, like rocks being thrown at my gut.

            “I love you, babe,” I said.

            She looked up at me, her warm brown eyes, searching. She clutched me again, wrapping her arms once more around my torso. I glanced back at the taxi. The man wearing a porkpie hat lifted his arms. I nodded.

            I carefully pushed her away. We had to do this. Our arms slid from each other, fingers still grasping, and finally our fingers detached, too, and then I walked back and hucked my pack into the trunk with a clang. I stepped into the back seat of the taxi, he reversed on the loose gravel, kicking up pebbles, and we arrowed down the hill, around and around, like a corkscrew.

            I’d looked back one final time as we’d moved and had seen Anna standing on the porch, arms crossed, eyes wet and full, knowing we’d see each other again soon but feeling like we were somehow losing each other.

            Everything changed in Valencia. I’d stayed in Marseille, France, on the southeastern part of the coast. Then Narbonne, on the southwestern side. I’d dipped down into Spain, along the eastern coast. All by several different trains, seeing some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable. In Valencia I again stayed in a small Air B and B apartment. I wrote. I drank cups of tea. I walked around, exploring the beaches and the town. My plan was to head northwest after a few more days to the cultural and political capital of Spain: Madrid. After a week I’d take a train way, way northeast to Paris, stay there a week and finally fly home.

            But it didn’t happen that way.

            I was beginning to feel tired of big cities. New York. Berlin. Naples. I was feeling lonely, in a good way; introspective. I wanted nature. Solitude. Time. I wanted to do something spiritual. I got online and researched Pamplona. I soon realized that the famous spiritual path, El Camino de Santiago, The Walk of St. James, ran right through Pamplona. It was a few days in by that point on The French Way. There were many different “ways” to walk the Camino. The most popular was The French Way, which started in St. Jean Pied du Port in southwestern France and went through the Pyrenees, then dipped south into northern Spain and headed west 500 miles across the country, ending in Santiago de Compostela. Since the Middle Ages—the 12th century—religious and now secular people had been walking the path to the remains of St. James, a symbolic journey that represented the cleansing of the self, renewal, and the finding of the self or re-finding.

            I had seen the film The Way, with Martin Sheen, his 39-year-old son dying on his first day on El Camino, how Sheen walks the rest in honor of his son, dropping his ashes along the way, how he expects nothing but ends up transforming as a result, how he meets incredible people from all over the world, seekers. I wanted to do this. No: I hadn’t trained. No: It was unplanned and unexpected. No: I couldn’t do the whole thing. I was expected back in a few weeks. It wasn’t enough time. Anna and I were attending a wedding in mid-May. But I could do a portion, I told myself. I could do that.

            Two days later I was ready. I stood in the center of Pamplona, my pack stuffed and heavy on my shoulders. I’d gone to Caminoteca, a local Camino store that sold ponchos, tents, sleeping bags, any equipment you might need. Including your Camino map and Peregrino (Pilgrim) passport, which was going to be stamped each night I stayed in the Albergue (hostel). At the end, the man had said, in Compostela, you’ll take your passport to the registration desk at the cathedral and they’ll ask you some questions and then hand you your diploma, your certificate of completion. I nodded, thanked him, and walked out.

            I was standing there, leaning against a store’s brick wall, eyeing the little golden stars I was supposed to follow out of town to the trail which would take me to the next town, all the way 450 miles across northern Spain, when a woman zigzagged down the street, seeing me, smiling. She was my height—5’7—with brunette hair, wearing hiking boots, loose hiking pants, a blue T-shirt, a massive smile on her face. She stopped and said, “Amazing, isn’t it?”

            I tilted my head, wondering if she was talking to me. “What is?”

            She smiled bigger. “The Camino.”

            I shrugged. “I haven’t started yet.”

            “Ah,” she said, lifting her pointer finger. “You will see.”

            She’d started in St. Jean, she said, and had been going for several days already. She was in her late twenties. Her life, she said, had been perfectly planned. Undergrad, straight As, honors classes. A master’s degree. Now pre-med. Her father had pushed her to be a doctor. So she could make good money and retire early and travel widely when she took vacation. She was supposed to be taking her final medical exams right now, she said. But instead she had said Screw It and had flown to Spain and started walking the Camino. “It’s not my life,” she said. “It’s my father’s.”

            “So,” I said. “You walk the Camino to…find out?”

            She nodded. Hands planted on her hips. “Something like that.”

            “Wow,” I said. “I respect that.”

            She smiled. “You’ll see. The Camino changes you.” She paused. “Why do you walk?”

            “Why?”

            Laughing, she said, “Everyone walks for some reason. Maybe you don’t know yet. Don’t worry: You’ll find out.”

            We shook hands and she said “Buen Camino” which I would soon realize was common and meant “Good Walk.”

            What followed was that I, of course, walked the entire Camino. From Pamplona, that is. Twenty-nine days across Northern Spain. That first day felt so freeing. I followed the gold stars on the sidewalk, pointing towards the trail which seemed elusive, as if it’d never come. I wound through parks and the city center and narrow roads and over bridges above freeways. Other hikers abounded. Some held walking sticks. Some were in groups. Some were solo. Some walked fast. Some slow.

            By the afternoon I already wanted to quit. That first day.

            It started raining. The ground turned into mud. My cheap olive-green poncho was mostly useless. I was cold, wet, and annoyed. Why was I doing this? Why was I here? What was the point? Hours passed. Mustard plant exploded in bright yellow swirls along verdant, expansive fields. Jagged, snow-capped mountains jutted beyond. The road in Pamplona had ended and the trail had begun. Some new door had been opened. I had entered. I hiked through miniature towns with old clattering structures and crumbling buildings and homes. Cows. Sheep. Old Spanish locals.

            That night, at Puente La Reina, my first albergue—essentially a hostel, sleeping on bunk beds with thirty other people crammed into a room—I met Andrew, a man in his fifties from San Diego who had just relapsed. He, too, like me, was an alcoholic. But I was sober. He had been. His thirty-year marriage had just crashed and burned. So he’d jumped on a plane and gone to St. Jean Pied du Port and had started walking. Here he was, sitting on a bench next to me as I wrote in my journal, both of us warm and safe from the rain outside, his thumb and middle finger holding a shot of Bourbon, his wavy surfer blond hair, big smile, telling me his harrowing story.

            He slammed his shot. Ordered another. “I paid for that woman to travel the world. Now she’s leaving me. Fine. It’s my turn now.”

            He told me he’d met two pilgrims (as hikers on Camino were called), Dagna, from Germany, and Gabriela, from Venezuela. I soon met them and it became clear I would be hiking with the trio. So much for solitude.

            Several days passed. I wrote in my journal, keeping track of what happened, how I felt, what people said, how the trip was going. More tiny provincial towns. I walked with Andrew and Gabriela and Dagna. Gabriela was 40 years old, twice divorced, with a 16-year-old daughter. Beautiful in a conventional way. She owned a hotel with her father outside of Maracay. Despite the fact that she’d only months ago fallen down some stairs and injured her foot, against her doctor’s wishes she decided to walk Camino.

            Dagna was short, thick, and German. Dark-haired. She had suffered severe depression recently—had considered suicide—and was seriously considering leaving her husband. She’d quit her job and had been recovering emotionally for months. She’d discovered Camino and decided it was the remedy she needed.

            Dagna and I developed an obvious connection. I felt connected to Andrew due to his drinking problem and because men can understand each other in a certain way. I felt connected to Gabriela because she’d had serious relationship struggles, and because she persevered through it all and did what she needed to do. I respected that. But it was Dagna who I really related to in a deeper way. Depression. Wanting to leave the horror of a 9-5 job, unsure what course her life was taking. Scared. It wasn’t me anymore, but it had once been, certainly. And a part of me was still that way. Because you never change completely. You never leave your past entirely.

            The four of us walked, Gabriela and Andrew slowly, me and Dagna more quickly, ahead by a football field or so, talking about her marriage, her nervous breakdown, her suicidal ideation, how she’d grown up in Hamburg and had moved to Munich for a man, which had been a mistake, but then she’d married that man, and now, at 34, five years into the marriage, she wanted out, but she didn’t know how to tell him. Or, really, herself. And so she walked. 

            The four of us hiked day in and day out, usually 12, 13, 14 miles or more a day. We stayed in the same albergues. We stopped and ate lunch in the tiny towns. We passed over bridges above rushing streams and rivers. We talked about everything. We joked with each other. Every day when we arrived I spent a few hours writing in my journal, recording it all. They referred to me as The Writer. They half joked that I’d write a book about the trip and they’d all be in it.

I thought about my past. I thought about the drugs and drink and moving and thumbing and trains and cars and chaos. I thought about sobriety the past six years. Starting a freelance editing career. Pursuing my writing. Getting my work published. Falling in love. Buying a home. It was truly incredible, how low I’d been, how far I’d come. I thought about my father, how detached he was, how separate he and I were from each other. I thought about my mother, how close we were and yet, how conflicted I felt about her, how turbulent our kinship. Mother and son. And her story, her own haggard childhood, the dissolution of her own family in the mid 1960s.

We each had our own reasons for being here, for walking. Each day we woke, sipped caffeine, packed, and started trudging, once more, on the path. Jagged mountain peaks rose up in the far distance. I downloaded audio books and walked alone. I listened to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on Audible with my headphones.

“I went to a ‘psycho doctor’ for a while,” Dagna would say, both of us laughing because she knew she wasn’t saying it correctly and that ‘psycho doctor’ meant something different from psychologist. Psycho Doctor might be a character’s name in a horror movie. But then she’d talk, very candidly, about going to see a shrink, about trying to talk her way out of the hole she’d invariably dug herself into. I related to that hole. That black void. That fear. That shame. That terror. The desire to snuff your soul out, extinguish yourself. I understood that.

            One morning the four of us sat down for breakfast in a small café in Burgos. Our packs were stacked against the wall next to each other, purple and black and turquoise and red, hiking poles next to each. We ate eggs on toast and Spanish tortilla. Tea. Coffee. Andrew held a cigarette, unlit, between two fingers.

            There emerged two main problems. One verbalized, one not. The nonverbal one was that it had become clear that Andrew was deeply “in love” with Gabriela, and that Gabriela did not return the love. Andrew’s drinking had been slowly increasing over the course of the trip. He’d injured his ankle at one point several towns back, slamming two shots that morning, not ten AM, to curb the pain. His drinking was beginning to consume him.

            We all knew he was projecting. He’d just lost a 30-year marriage. His drinking was skyrocketing. Once on Camino, he’d relapsed after two years sober. Now he was an emotional train wreck.

            The verbalized one was that Dagna wanted to go off on her own. She wanted to hike solo. She’d started this trip, she said, intending to hike alone, and then, at the very start, just out of St. Jean, she’d met Gabriela and then together they’d met Andrew. It was time for her to go.

            Gabriela decided to also go off on her own. Andrew was severely disappointed in the whole state of affairs. He wanted to remain bonded as a group. I realized that there was a very deep hurt underneath all his wavy hair and good looks and youthful boyish energy and external bravado, and by being with us he forgot about that pain. He had gone to Camino not to examine, not to face, not to test, but to avoid, shove aside, deny, forget. This struck me like a ton of bricks.

            And so, the four amigos split up. I stood first, hugged them all, said goodbye, saluted and said, “Buen Camino.” They smiled and waved and repeated the mantra back. I walked outside, letting the glass door close behind me, eyed them all once more, Dagna still waving at me, faced the long, unfurling, curving trail ahead of me, took a deep breath, and started hiking.

            I soon realized that this had been the biggest gift I’d been given on Camino. I needed the solace. I, too, like Dagna, had begun this trek seeking solitude. Seeking life experience. Seeking some spiritual awakening, a deeper understanding of myself, others, the world around me, life, existence. And so it was for the best. To be on my own.  

I wrote in my journal at albergues, uninterrupted. I woke and left when I felt like it. I didn’t need to worry about talking to anyone. I hiked at my own fast speed, not needing to slow down. I watched the same landscape pass and walked through similar towns. I got annoyed at more Californians, older middleclass people from America who wanted to talk about the bizarre phenomenon that was Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to power. It was too close to the bone, too familiar.

            But alas, the Universe works in mysterious ways. I bumped into Gabriela again, in Astorga, west of Leon. She smiled when she saw me. Without Andrew or Dagna, we walked together and got to know each other on newer, different terms. Funny how things are altered or tweaked depending on who you’re with. Soon we ran into a German man in his fifties who I’d briefly chatted with back in Najera, days ago: Stefan. Stefan and Gabriela knew each other from the trail previously as well. Before long, it was the three of us.

            Stefan was a city prosecutor from Cologne. He’d studied law in Pennsylvania in the eighties, he said, and had two kids. He was divorced. At first I couldn’t quite read him. Tall, relatively thin, with silvery hair that leapt off the edge of his forehead, he had warm eyes but a stern German tone and attitude. He was very opinionated. A conventional, middleclass aesthetic thrummed through the man. And yet, I liked him, and he liked me. The 33-year-old tattooed writer from California who’d come on this journey last second, unplanned.

            Stefan had a thing for Gabriela, too. It was hard not to. She was intelligent in a specific way, spoke gorgeous Portuguese, and with that blond straight hair, light shimmering off it, men desired her. For me it was different. I had a partner. Gabriela was older than me by seven years. Twice divorced, with a teenage daughter. Maybe she was some sort of fragmented older sister. And maybe Stefan a wayward, stern father figure.

            But we walked, the three of us, up hills, down into valleys, across those green fields, beyond T-forks on the road, a green field and four different directions to go marked by wide dirt trails. We passed potato and sheep farms. Rangy, feral dogs. Bulls. Cows. Stefan would get out of breath going uphill. He and I clashed sometimes, about certain topics. Religion. Spirituality. The purpose of life. He could be harsh. It was just his nature. And yet, there was a fondness for each other.

            At one point, near Ponferrada, we climbed a mountain on a narrow black ribbon of road. Gabriela was behind us a ways and we waited but she still didn’t arrive. Finally we gave up and started hiking. Stefan began breathing hard. We trudged. I can be a murderous, brutal taskmaster when it comes to hiking. But he kept up. It was cold out, had been raining and the trails were filled with mud. We’d tromped through that minnow stink mud for days but now we walked the road. Cars swerved around us on the narrow black asphalt.

            At the top, we looked back and could see mountains and the valley and the curving muddy trail. It was spectacular. We walked to a series of cabins and picked one, entering.

            Inside it was loud, raucous with yelling and energy. The place was packed. To our right: A kitchen, workers going mad trying to get dinner ready. It was warm inside, which was a huge blessing. I glanced back at Stefan. He eyed me, red-faced, still breathing hard, shook his head and said, “You crazy bastard. We practically ran up that mountain.”

            I smiled, and we weaved past people, past the rectangular dinner tables filled with pilgrims talking and laughing and gesticulating and yelling and we ended at a desk. A young Spanish man sat behind it. We nodded and shucked our packs off, pulled our passports out. He checked them, stamped them, and jerked his thumb up the narrow staircase.

            We walked up the stairs, three floors up, found our room, mattresses on the floor, people surrounding us, some taking showers, some sleeping, some talking. We set our gear down.

            An hour later, after showers, throwing clean clothes on, we sat at the tables with the others. Gabriela had arrived. Her knee was acting up again. Her injured foot was hurting. That was another trait admired by the men on Camino: She was a fierce, independent woman. The doctor had told her she couldn’t do Camino, that it was risky. She’d told him to shove it. She had a bad knee, which was perpetually covered by a rubber brace. She walked anyway. Perseverance. Power. Decision. This men respected.

            We ate. Someone grabbed an acoustic guitar sitting in the corner and soon we were all singing along to some song. People chugged cold beer. Laughed. Raised their fists in joy. Exclaimed loudly how happy they were. We’d all been walking for weeks. Our feet were beaten and blistered. We were exhausted. We were drained. We were ready to be done. I’d stopped in some town days back and had gone into a pharmacy and had them pop my feet blisters and had them put ointment on and wrap the wounds. Then I’d bought new shoes which I used for one day and ditched. My REI Keen boots I’d bought before we left for Europe were perfect. I’d just needed to get the feet wrapped.

            That night I walked upstairs alone, hearing the loud drunken music and singing until the wee hours, Gabriela and Stefan still down there when I finally closed my eyes and passed out around 2 AM. It was one of those nights I should have been with them all. I would have been, had it been six years prior, pre-sobriety.

            Gabriela, Stefan and I arrived together to the end, Santiago de Compostela. We’d walked 450 and 500 miles respectively, roughly a month for me and over a month for them. Incredible. I’d learned much. About myself, my life, who I was, what I was doing. I’d learned that I was really, truly done with drinking. I’d learned that I loved Anna greatly. I’d learned that I still craved adventure, especially when it’s off the cuff and unplanned. I’d seen relationships come together and tear apart. I’d gotten to know several people from other countries, learned of their lives, their loves, their struggles. I’d discovered that I was not alone in this world, and that I was not the only one who suffered emotional pain. Others did, too.

            I saw that in Andrew’s eyes as he projected love onto a woman he didn’t really know, who was emotionally unavailable. Maybe that’s why he’d pursued her: The unavailability. Maybe that made it safe. Maybe his pain had been so towering, the hole inside so deep, the fear so strong, that he’d decided to simply close the lid and not look, to just pretend it wasn’t happening, to look the other way and keep going. I saw it in Gabriela’s eyes, her two failed marriages, her always saying how everyone should “smile” and “be happy” and “positive,” a mask hiding the pain and insecurity underneath. I saw it in Dagna’s eyes, when she talked about clinical depression, suicide, her crumbling marriage, not knowing how to end it. I saw it in Stefan’s eyes, claiming he enjoyed his aloneness, his lack of a partner, his being on his own.

            And then there was me. Stefan, Gabriela, Dagna, Andrew: They all held a mirror up to me. Was I any better than them? More superhuman? Of course not. I had been broken for so long in my life, all through my teens and twenties. My drinking had aided my swift, rugged rebellion against my family, my mother, my father, society, everything “normal” and “conventional.” I’d been running. All that time I’d been afraid. All that time I’d been reacting to my parents. It was so mechanistic: Parents parent, kids react. But in doing so, incidentally, I had been able to hit an emotional bottom. I got sober. That was the new door. The hinge moment. I opened that door and started walking. I heard the door behind me close. I was scared but the path unfurled ahead of me, just like Camino.

            And here I was, six years later, still sober, a writer, with a long-term partner, a home, a career, and so much to be grateful for. Was I perfect? Far, far from it. I was a very wounded person. My mother’s broken childhood, her black hole heart, had transferred into me. I had that black hole. I had that wounded, sensitive heart. I had that writer’s need to create, to swallow death whole and spit it out. I had that terror inside, that fear of trusting people, society, the world.

            But I had come. I had found Camino. I had faced my fear, as I always had.

            I never did see Dagna or Andrew again. Stefan, Gabriela and I stayed in Compostela for several days. I heard Spanish music during the day, outside my open window. We walked around the Catholic cathedrals. We clomped around on uneven cobblestoned streets. We attended Mass. Heard the service in Latin. We got our passports stamped, took pictures of us holding our diplomas, certificates of completion. We had dinner one last night, just the three of us, me Stefan and Gabriela.

            Stefan talked about how all three of us had “solved” our individual problems, how we were trudgers on the road of life, ambitious, intelligent people who had taken the proverbial bull by the horns. We’d changed our lives. We’d taken command of the wheel. I’d simply stopped drinking. He’d learned to be alone. Gabriela had broken from the chain of men and had become independent and happy.

            But what he said was untrue. It was too black and white, too simple. Life was more gray area than that, more complex. I had quit the drink, sure, and I was mighty lucky to be alive, mighty lucky I’d stopped, but that didn’t mean my mind wasn’t insane sometimes. That didn’t mean I’d “defeated” alcoholism. That didn’t mean I didn’t still have that black hole around my heart, or that fear of hurling myself off the edge of the metaphorical cliff. It didn’t mean sometimes I didn’t still consider death, suicide, taking it to the next logical level.

            Stefan? He tried too hard to convince himself that everything was A-ok. But it wasn’t. This became evident in his attraction to Gabriela. It was less her body he sought, I think, and more her companionship. He needed that warm body next to him, that reaction against his stern words, that woman behind the scenes taking care of him. Beneath the big talk and tall body and silvery hair and blustery opinionated ranting was a scared, insecure little boy. I knew it. He knew it.

            Gabriela? She wasn’t independent. She’d been first with Andrew and then with Stefan, both older men who wanted something from her. She had the codependent streak. She needed men in a similar way they needed her. She wanted to save them, help them, provide for them. It was her own looped, unhealthy cycle.

            The verdict? In the end, Camino changed us and yet it didn’t change us. We remained fallible. Human. Flawed. No big revelations would save us from genetics or death or bad choices. Only we could do that ourselves, if we were lucky. Instead, I learned that people are people. I am who I am. Stefan was Stefan. Andrew, Andrew. Dagna, Dagna. Gabriela was Gabriela. And this was somehow comforting. The idea that nothing could be transmuted into something else. That we were fundamentally who we were. That didn’t mean we couldn’t change.

            I’d hugged Gabriela and Stefan, shaken their hands, smiling, and told them “Buen Camino. Stay in touch.” I’d stepped up to the train and had disappeared. It was one of those moments where I wanted to cry, not because I was sad—though I was sad—but because it was over. I’d finished the Camino. It was done. It was an experience I’d never, ever forget. Already I missed the trail, the landscape, the Spaniards, the rangy feral dogs, journaling every night, staying in stinky, crammed albergues, even the Californians and other Americans. And worse: I missed them. Andrew and Dagna and Gabriela and Stefan.

            As I sat, the train bulleting back east across all the land I’d just walked for the past month, I leaned against the seat and knew that life was very short and that I was still very young and that I had many, many more years in life, many more doors to open, and that, even though they were all flawed human beings—and I was a flawed human being—I’d loved them. They had saved me, all in their little ways. Unconsciously. Without knowing it. Without trying. Only being themselves. Suffering on their own silent trail of tears, as we all must do.

            I wasn’t exactly sure if this described Stefan and Gabriela and Dagna and Andrew, or even, if I were honest with myself: Me. Anymore, at least. But there had nonetheless been something magical about this journey, hiking across Northern Spain with complete strangers, getting to know them, sharing some of our deepest, darkest secrets, being as honest as we could with each other, learning how to love one mile at a time, understanding how to trust, letting go of some internal need for things to be a specific way. It was less like hiking a trail and more like allowing oneself to be floated down a river. At least for me.

            Buen Camino.