Not a Very Good Pilgrim

The bar had three things going for it: shade, cold beer, and chairs. We had walked something like twenty miles that day and my feet had reached the stage where taking my boots off felt less like relief than surgery. Ann sat across from me. She was English, living somewhere in Spain, and she had attached herself to our group a few days earlier the way people did on the Camino, appearing at a fountain or a bar and then simply walking with you until she didn't.

She looked at me over the rim of her glass.

"I think you are not a very good pilgrim."

I laughed, because I assumed it was a joke.

"The Camino is for people who need to work something out," she said. "A breakup. Someone died. Something in their life they have to figure out. You don't strike me as someone who needs to do that right now."

She was right, and I knew it, and I still didn't have anything to say. So I nodded and drank my beer and let it sit there on the table between us like a fourth chair nobody was using.

I first heard about the Camino the way a lot of Americans did, from a 2010 Emilio Estevez movie called The Way. The real thing is older and stranger than the film. It isn't one trail but a loose net of medieval pilgrimage routes strung across Europe, all of them draining toward the same point: the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, in the far northwest corner of Spain, where the bones of the Apostle James are said to lie. People have walked to it for over a thousand years. The first one on record was King Alfonso II of Asturias, in the ninth century, who walked from Oviedo to see for himself whether the newly discovered remains were the real thing.

Traditionally, your starting point was wherever you were standing when you decided to go. There's no trailhead. Months later, I came across a Camino marker on a wall in Austria. Now there are official routes: the Northern Way along the Atlantic coast, the Portuguese Way up from Lisbon, the English Way through Galicia, the Primitivo cutting down the spine of Asturias. The busiest by far is the French Way, which starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees and runs roughly 490 miles across the top of Spain.

I didn't start there. But I'm getting ahead of things.

When I decided to do this walk I prepared for it the way I have prepared for most of my travel, which is to say I did almost no research at all. This is deliberate. Research gives you expectations, and expectations give you a version of the trip you're supposed to be having, which then sits in the way of the one you're actually having. So I drove east from the west coast to Asheville, the tail end of two months living out of my car, booked a flight to Madrid and a few nights at a budget Ibis, left the car at a friend's house, and went.

Everything I owned for the next month fit in one pack: two shirts, shorts, long pants, a light fleece, two pairs of socks, a rain shell, a hat, a lightweight sleeping bag and a liner. That was it. There is a particular clarity to that, knowing that the entire material inventory of your life is on your back and weighs about eighteen pounds.

I'd meant to walk the Northern Way, along the coast, but word was that pilgrims up there were struggling to find beds with so many hostels shuttered. So I scrapped that before I ever left home.

Getting to the trail turned out to be its own small problem. Spain would let me in on proof of vaccination alone. France still wanted a test, and crossing an international border purely to satisfy a piece of paperwork so I could turn around and walk back into the country I was already in struck me as a poor use of a day. So I found the farthest north Spanish city that made sense, which turned out to be Pamplona, of the bulls, and got on a bus.

Which is how I ended up standing in the middle of Pamplona with no idea where the Camino actually was.

I knew it ran through the city. I did not know how to find it. So I wandered, which is my usual method, and eventually stopped an old man on a side street and asked him in the broken Spanish of a man who has learned his Spanish entirely from menus.

He laughed. Then he pointed at my feet.

Set into the pavement, an inch from the toe of my shoe, was a brass scallop shell.

"Siga las conchas". Just follow the shells.

The scallop is the symbol of the Camino, and once you know to look for it you cannot stop seeing it: cast in bronze in the sidewalk, painted on a wall, hung from the packs of everyone walking in the same direction. The ridges all run to a single point, which is either a very old metaphor for the many routes converging on one cathedral or a happy accident that somebody made into one. Pilgrims used to carry them for practical reasons too, as a bowl for water or soup. I know how it sounds, that I flew across an ocean to walk a trail I could not locate in a city it runs directly through. But that was roughly the level of preparation I brought to the whole enterprise.

The first albergue set the tone for every one after it.

Masks in the common areas, strictly enforced. Masks in the sleeping quarters, apparently optional, and by apparently optional I mean nobody wore one, ever, anywhere. To satisfy the government rules the albergues were running at something like half capacity, which meant that instead of forty strangers sealed into an unventilated room breathing each other's air all night, there were twenty. I never understood the logic. You would pull your mask up to cross a hallway and then take it off to sleep four feet from a Dutchman with a cough. Nobody seemed troubled by this but me, and after about a week, not me either.

The albergues themselves are built on a single principle, which is maximum bodies per square meter. The bed is a vinyl-wrapped mattress that is either lumpy or hard as a plank, never the middle. You're handed a paper sheet and a paper pillowcase, disposable, faintly medical, and you spread them over the vinyl and unroll your bag on top. There are never enough bathrooms. I stayed in places with three toilets and three showers for fifty people, and there is a specific etiquette that develops around this that nobody teaches you and everybody learns by the second night.

But the rhythm of the place got into me faster than I expected. You arrive somewhere between one and four in the afternoon, sunburned and salt-crusted. You get your credencial stamped, the little pilgrim passport that fills up over the weeks with the inks and crests of every town you've slept in. You claim a bunk. You shower. You wash your one spare set of clothes in a concrete sink and hang them on a line in the sun, and they are dry in an hour because northern Spain in August during one of its hottest recorded summers is dry in a way that gets into your sinuses. Then the same thing tomorrow. And the day after. There is something about doing an identical small ritual thirty days in a row that empties your head out in a way I didn't ask for and couldn't have arranged on purpose.

And then there's the morning. Nobody warns you about the morning. Pilgrims start moving around five, and because everyone packed the night before in the dark, the first sound of every day is plastic. Stuff sacks, grocery bags, rain covers, all of it crinkling at once in a dark room, forty hands rummaging for a headlamp. You lie there hating them. Then you get up and do it yourself and become that sound for somebody else.

A few camino beds

What I did expect was that I'd meet people and fall in with them, and that happened almost immediately. What I didn't expect was how quickly it would stop feeling like meeting people and start feeling like family.

The group formed the way they all do, by accident and repetition. You walk the same pace as someone for an hour. You end up at the same bar. You both stop at the same albergue and there they are again at dinner, and by the fourth day you are planning tomorrow together, where to walk to, where to try for a bed. People peeled off and new ones appeared, but there was a core that held.

My Camino Family

The unspoken rule, and it was genuinely unspoken, was that it was your Camino. If you wanted to walk in silence you said so and people let you go. If you wanted company you fell into step and someone talked with you. Nobody took it personally. I have never been in a group of people that handled this so gracefully, before or since, and I think it's because everyone there had at least a vague sense that the person next to them might be working on something heavy.

Some days it was beautiful. Some days it was just work. The Camino is not a wilderness trail. It's rocky farm track, gravel, and long featureless stretches of highway shoulder with trucks going by, and there is almost no shade anywhere. The first day I finally walked into what looked like actual forest, the trail was still a wide dirt road cut straight through it with the sun coming directly down the corridor, and the trees did nothing at all. There were afternoons that felt less like a pilgrimage than like an errand I had assigned myself for reasons I could no longer reconstruct.

The many roads endless roads of the camino

And through all of it, Ann's line, sitting there.

Because she was right. I had just spent two months driving in loops around the United States with no destination, sleeping in my car, and if I'm honest that was where whatever sorting-out I needed had already happened. Somewhere on a forest road in Oregon, not on a Spanish farm track. By the time I got to Pamplona I wasn't carrying anything. I was there for the experience. I wanted the miles and the story and the beer at the end of the day.

Looking back, I don't think the Way of Saint James is built for that. It isn't for travelers chasing a good anecdote. It's for the people who are carrying something they need to set down somewhere along those hundreds of miles.

People like Annais, the French restaurant manager who had spent years grinding against the casual sexism of her industry and was trying to work out what she could do instead that would actually mean something.

People like Anna, shy and German, walking off a bad breakup one dusty kilometer at a time.

People like Linus from Slovenia, burned out of his marketing job, trying to reassemble what work and life were supposed to look like in a post-Covid world.

People like Hainna from Denmark, who only seemed whole when he was surrounded by people who needed something explained to them, so that he could be the one to explain it.

People like Wolfgang from southern Germany, years past his divorce, still the primary caregiver for his kids, still trying to work out what the shape of his new life was.

People like Marie from France, who I'm fairly sure was just looking for love.

It's for people whose souls need something they can't quite name. I know that feeling. I have lived in it for long stretches. I just wasn't living in it that September.

Ann didn't say it to be cruel. It was the kindest and clearest thing anybody said to me on that entire walk, and she said it after knowing me for about three days. She saw exactly what I was doing there and she declined to pretend otherwise, and she was right not to let me off the hook.

She walked with us for a few more days and then one morning she wasn't there, which is how the Camino works. You don't get goodbyes. You get the shells, and the next town, and whoever happens to be walking at your pace.