Don't tell me how to Camino

This story, written by Patrick Boxall, is the winning entry to the Freely Travel Writing category in the We Are Explorers MOMENTS competition. Congratulations, Patrick – this ripper of a story deserves the top spot.

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We called him Naked Red Calf. He fell from the top bunk and the slap of skin on concrete woke everyone in the room. I wasn’t there, but I’m told they turned on the lights and saw him splayed out on the ground, groaning. He was naked. He had sunburned calves. He was – will always be – Naked Red Calf.

I met him in Pamplona. Day four of the Camino de Santiago. When I asked how he was going, he pulled a ziplock bag from his pocket and held it to the soft evening light. ‘I’ve been feeding my brother to the cows,’ he said, beaming. I slowly backed away.

We crossed paths often. Walked and talked. He came from North Carolina and had struggled, he said, with addiction issues. His brother had succumbed to them. The walk to Santiago was an opportunity to straighten himself out; to honour his brother, who no longer walked beside him.

‘Can I be honest?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

‘I’m not sure about the feeding-your-brother-to-the-cows thing.’

‘It’s what he would’ve wanted,’ he replied, no hint of a smile.

Many walk the path to Santiago as an exercise in healing. In shedding the past and stepping into whatever comes next. But the future, if it comes, doesn’t always come easy, and Naked Red Calf understood that better than any of us. He soon picked up an injury; an ankle, I think. We encouraged him to rest, to take some time, but he didn’t want to fall behind.

He was stubborn. He pushed his body to breaking point. Most evenings, I’d watch from a shaded table as he hobbled across a plaza in search of a place to crash. He’d eventually appear with a glass of wine and a grin; no vino no camino, he’d joke.

He fell in love easily; with people, with places. The green Galician forests. The Meseta’s endless plains. He’d spend the morning walking with a stranger and have post-pilgrimage plans by evening. He’d go on to spend time in Finland, then a few weeks walking in Ireland. He was Irish in the way all Americans seem to be; a long-lost cousin in Skibbereen, a great aunt in Knocknagashel. Enough of a connection to claim Guinness as his lifeblood.

We had a running joke that the towns along the Camino weren’t really towns at all. They were film sets populated by actors, the latest iteration of reality TV. Luke – an Irishman – and I grew increasingly paranoid, but Naked Red Calf was having none of it.

‘No,’ he said, waving his wooden staff at the surrounding farmlands. ‘This is it. This is real life.’ He wanted to know what was growing in the soil. He wanted a garden of his own once he returned home. A plot to grow food, a porch to play banjo – this, he said, was enough.

Luke and I spoke about epiphanies. He’d met someone who’d walked the Camino the previous summer and warned him about false epiphanies. After weeks of walking, this man convinced himself that he was born to be a farmer.

‘I had this overwhelming desire to get my hands in the dirt,’ he told Luke. ‘But then, once I made it home, I realised something. I fucking hate farms.’

I can’t say whether Naked Red Calf had any epiphanies; if he did, he didn’t share them. What he did share was his bad days. One glass too many and he’d be stumbling to a church to light a candle for his brother. And in Santiago, on the night we finished, he was overwhelmed with emotion. He fled the restaurant and left his wallet on the table. I searched streets filled with celebrating pilgrims and found him crying, alone, on a doorstep. He wasn’t ready for his walk to end.

I tried to calm him with a common saying: the Camino begins when you go home.

His response?

Don’t tell me how to Camino.

We stayed in touch. He’d call late to relive long, lively dinners and crisp mornings in the mountains. Over time, these calls became less frequent. I took it to mean he was doing well, but it didn’t come as a shock to hear he’d passed away.

There’d been no accident. No darkness. His body, we were told, simply gave up. His friends posted messages and photos. They spoke of his garden. Of his enormous pumpkins, his love for his chickens. How he’d sit on his porch and speak about red wine and Van Morrison. About really hard times and the good times that always followed.

I can imagine sitting on his porch and telling him, in all seriousness, that he had taken a good path; literally, Buen Camino. But I know, of course, what he’d say in response.

Hero image 📸 Patrick Chen