Why the Camino?

-The question I always get asked.

The sound of the mail truck pulling away on the rural highway gave me an excuse to get away from the computer where I was writing. I walked the hundred steps to the dirt shoulder of the rural highway, opened the rickety mailbox, and pulled out a newspaper I knew I hadn't ordered. I looked at it and said, “Damn, damn, and then damn,” again, as I not only recognized the publication, but also the woman featured on the cover. Two blows to the depths of my heart and soul. Glad no one could hear me. That wasn’t my usual way to speak.

Oh, my, I could not believe it.

It was my very first issue of the AARP! The American Association of Retired Persons had somehow found me and realized it was my birthday. It was October 1, 2001, and I had just turned 50 this very day. A few months before, I had moved way out, far from Denver, into the country for solitude, twelve miles down a winding road out of Trinidad, a tiny historic town in southern Colorado, right by the border with New Mexico. I was there to write, to just be by myself, and regroup after a grueling time dealing with politics and bureaucracy as the Executive Director for a state-wide nonprofit for children’s mental health.

My plan was to write a book, heal, and figure out the rest of my life. It was very quiet and the little farmhouse I was staying in was isolated, and yet now, looking at the newsletter in my hands, I felt like there must be a big all-knowing eye in the sky watching me. These were pre-Siri, Google Maps or satellite days, but somehow this Big Eye in the Sky had pinpointed me as the latest Baby Boomer to turn 50 years old and deserved to get her first issue of the standard newspaper for the aged. It was a shock. I wasn't ready for it. “This newspaper is for old people, not me. Oh, no, this can’t be happening.”

But the worst part of it was that the woman on the cover was Shirley MacLaine walking the Camino de Santiago. I muttered “damn” again. Why? Why her? What does she even know or care about the Camino? It's just another silly adventure for her, full of fanciful stories to invent and document for her next metaphysical book. Even though the books had gotten sillier and more outlandish all the time, I confess I still read them all. But her latest was just really too much, and I figured that this one would be too, and spoil the Camino for me.

It was so upsetting.

I walked back to the house and looked at the article. Sure enough, her latest book had just come out called The Camino: A Journey of Spirit. “Spirit,” I bet. I’d read enough of her books to know it would be just another novel adventure for her to showcase more of her past-life romances with knights and kings, and former lives as an Egyptian princess, as an orphan raised by elephants, or as a model for Toulouse Lautrec.

I thought back to long, long time ago when I was still young. It was 1977 and I was twenty-four, working on my master's in Spanish Literature. For our master's exams to earn our degree, we were responsible for being familiar with all the literature written in the Spanish language, from the early development of the Spanish language from Vulgar Latin (vulgar meaning everyday Latin spoken by the Roman soldiers) all the way to the present in Spain, and then also all the countries in Latin America that were Spanish-speaking, so that included a lot of literature. Novels, essays, plays and poetry.

That year, out of all the places and eras, I was most drawn to the study of Medieval Literature, At the same time, I was taking a course in Spanish Culture and Civilization and the supplemental reading, along with our academic text, included James Michener’s tome, Iberia. I was especially intrigued to read about the ancient pilgrimage called the Camino de Santiago. Thousands of people from Ireland to Scandinavia, Germany, France packed a small bag, took off from their doorsteps and walked hundreds of miles to reach the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, in Northern Spain.

They were soldiers and priests and nuns and prostitutes. There were criminals that had been told by the judge that they could either walk the Camino or go to jail, and some people were sent by their villages to try to plead for the blessing of rain to save their crops, or others that went that knew they might not have long to live, hoped for healing. I was fascinated. Way before the term “bucket list” was popularized it became a dream of mine, to somehow find the old, overgrown, neglected path and take the journey myself.

Well, I got pregnant the last month of graduate school, and my husband and I moved back to Colorado, in with my parents in Denver. They were world travelers and always up for another adventure, so we made plans to go to Spain with the baby in a Snuggly backpack and at least explore the remnants of the Camino by car. But baby Jesse was premature and came close to death many times with what was diagnosed as SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, so I couldn’t take a shower or run the vacuum home alone for a year. I needed to be able to hear the monitor in case he quit breathing and run to arouse him enough to breathe again. Separations, another son and then a divorce followed and soon I was raising my kids as a single mother. Survival mode for years, certainly no money for travel.

My dream of the Camino faded away. Once in a while it surfaced again with a yearning and ache in my heart, knowing that I needed to be on the Camino, that I was meant to do it somehow.

I got older and older, of course, and more sedentary, as the kids left home and I was working in nonprofits and teaching college. Finally, when I thought of walking the Camino, I realized in middle age, that I was so sedentary I wasn't even sure I should attempt a long walk. I had become the type of person that would park closest to the entrance at the grocery store, so I didn't have to walk very far through the parking lot. Who was I to believe that I could walk 500 miles?

By that time, I was teaching at a small community college in the desert in Southern California. I checked to see how far the college was from home and thought maybe I should at least start trying to walk to work to get some exercise. I knew it'd be good for me anyway, but it just didn't happen. After growing up in the lush tropics, in Puerto Rico, the desert was very unappealing to me. I sat at my desk for hours and hours and graded hundreds and hundreds of papers and only walked as far as the kitchen or bathroom. Many of my students were in the State Prison, so with distance education, I didn’t even have to walk to different classrooms during the day.

I was looking at Facebook during a break one day, and gasped. My old friend Bonnie was on the Camino! She had been my boarding school roommate when I was in 10th grade, and she was in 9^th. She had come from South Dakota, and I had just come from Puerto Rico two years before. South Dakota was the state with the very least ethnic diversity, mostly settled by Germans and Scandinavians, and she was of Polish and Eastern European ancestry. When I told her about my childhood in Puerto Rico, being immersed in Latino culture, it seemed hard for her to imagine what that might be like. Now there she was on the Camino. I didn't begrudge her being there instead of me, but what did she know about the culture and the language and everything that had magnetized me for years, that had drawn me into the rich lore and legends and history of what the Camino meant? Maybe it was kind of silly, but down deep I kind of hoped that everyone who walked it appreciated the opportunity as much as I would have if I ever was that lucky, and had taken the time to learn about its history and significance. Maybe she had. I just wondered.

I read that she was writing a master’s thesis on the value of exercise for school children and had developed a program for students, so was this just an act of physical exercise for her? Just like in Colorado, people like to brag about how many “fourteeners” they've climbed, that is the mountain peaks over 14,000 feet, as a kind of trophy. Was the Camino like that for her, just to show she could do it? It stirred up the yearning in me once again, to see if I could do it, to get out there and experience it . She was certainly very capable physically for the challenge, but it still gave me hope. She was a real person, like me. It inspired me to believe that if Bonnie could walk the Camino, I could do it and needed to do it.

A few years later, I saw a Swedish friend on the Camino walking with her sister on Facebook. We were graduate students together, not in the Spanish master’s program, but in a later MA at Iliff School of Theology. She had returned to Sweden and there she was now on the Camino. I'm doubted that she knew any Spanish. What did she know about Spanish culture, the history? Was it just a fun thing to do with her sister?

I was crestfallen once again, not envious that she was doing something that I hadn’t been able to do, but because my own dream had turned into a mirage. I well knew I wasn't getting younger, I was more sedentary than ever, never a “couch potato” watching TV, but a “reading potato.” I didn’t begrudge her one bit, it was cool to see her out there, but I declared out loud to myself, “I have to walk the Camino somehow.” My yearning intensified, especially since soon I was going to turn 60. I remembered that Shirley MacLaine did it at 62 but she had been a dancer all her life. She was in shape, and I hadn’t been in shape for 20 years or more, if ever. I didn’t even do well in PE. I knew if I got much older it would never happen with my muscles already wasting with age and non-use. I had to make it happen. But how?

Well, first of all, I had to leave my teaching job with the promise of tenure and an interesting variety of classes to teach and escape the desert where I was living t make sure I survived. The heat and isolation were withering me into a prune, not only my skin and body, but also my spirit and soul.

I sold my cute house with a backyard full of orange, grapefruit, lemons and fig trees, left my interesting, promising, well-paying teaching job and moved in with my parents in Corona, a suburb inland from LA and Orange County, closer to the beach that I’d continually missed from my childhood on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. I looked forward to feeling more at home in a subtropical environment, as I figured out how to create my Camino dream

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