The magic of a bloody long walk

The women were in their mid-sixties, maybe. British and retired. I can’t remember their names and I doubt they remember mine, but I do remember thinking they were utterly batshit.

This was their seventh time walking the Camino de Santiago, they said. The same route every year: 800 kilometres from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

They told me it was addictive and I didn’t believe them. They told me I’d come to understand, and still, I didn’t believe them.

Fast forward eight years and I count myself fortunate – and not at all batshit – to have clocked close to 3,000 kilometres on pilgrimage paths in Spain, Portugal, Norway and Japan.

And though I’m yet to repeat a route, I’ve come to realise the women were right; it’s addictive, this walking, in ways I still struggle to explain.

Earlier this year, I spent six weeks walking the Shikoku Henro, a 1200-kilometre Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan. The pilgrim’s path is up and down in every way, with blissful days on forested trails offset by mind-numbing stretches of coastal highway.

During those monotonous seaside stretches, I found myself with too much time to consider the big questions.

What were these long walks giving me? Was I even enjoying myself? And if I were a sandwich, what would be my filling? How much would I cost?

As always, the answers – to everything but the sandwich hypothetical – revealed themselves in the people I met.

Three hundred kilometres into the pilgrimage, fresh off a hellish highway trudge, I ran into a Canadian woman at the edge of Kochi city.

I was happy to have someone to speak with and we walked together for an hour or so, sharing our experiences so far. She was eager to know why I was walking and I was embarrassed to admit there’d been no great motivator.

‘It just felt like something I wanted to do,’ I said, before launching into an overcooked story about leaving my walking staff at my accommodation that morning. I told her it felt like losing a child, like losing a part of myself.

The woman explained she was walking the pilgrimage in honour of her 17-year-old son, who had died a year prior. He took his own life, she said, and Japan had been his favourite country. She told me it’s impossible to understand this kind of grief until it happens to you.

Then she asked if I’d met Park. I hadn’t. He was a Korean pilgrim, she explained. He’d had a parachute accident in the military and had broken basically everything.

She said the two of them often walked together. They spoke about pain; how they walked with it, through it. They understood each other, even though it was a different kind of pain. 

‘But you just keep walking,’ she said. ‘That’s all you can do.’

It’s an interaction that has stuck with me, and not only because I’m still embarrassed – to put it mildly – at having compared the loss of my walking stick to that of a child in front of someone who has in fact lost a child.

It’s an interaction that has stuck with me because of the woman’s openness, I think. Because of her honesty and acceptance. Her generosity.

And the more I think of these things – honesty, openness, acceptance, generosity – the more clearly I see how large they loom through the long walks I’ve given my short life to.

When I think of these things, I think of the elderly Japanese fishermen who pulled their truck to the side of the highway and handed me a cold can of coffee.

I think of the man who rushed out of a restaurant and returned with an enormous orange from his backyard, asking the chef to slice it up before presenting it to me on a plate. ‘Add salt,’ he instructed. ‘This is how we enjoy it here.’

I think of the people I met along the Camino de Santiago. Of the batshit British women, yes, but also the Swede who was recovering from a brain tumour.

He’d decided to walk across a country; a few months prior, he could barely walk to the bathroom. I think of the way he would puff his pain-relieving ‘medicine’ at night, then gingerly lace up his boots each morning, without complaint, before striding into the pre-dawn haze.

I think of the divorcées who shared yet another kind of pain. The college kids who admitted to being paralysed by choice and were learning to take things one step at a time. The retired cop from New Mexico who insisted that if a wine’s alcohol content is less than 14.5%, ‘it’s like kissing your sister’.

No! Too honest! 

I think of him and his wife – how they saw me limp into a bar and rushed to buy me my first glass of wine.

They wanted to know where I came from, what my plan was, why I was walking. I remember being so tired that all I could do was shrug and point to the Pyrenees peaks through the window. Unlike the comment about kissing sisters, no further explanation was required.

It’s addictive, this walking, in ways I still struggle to explain. Maybe it’s the forward momentum. The act of moving alongside others. Travelling in the same direction with the same intention.

Whatever it is, I’ve come to understand you can’t carry both armour and a backpack; to throw the latter over your shoulder, you have to discard the former.

It’s an invitation, I think, a way of letting the world know you’re open for business. And business – on these paths, at least – is booming. 

So long as you keep walking. 

So long as you steer clear of your sister.