Prologue to Adventure
Camino. Chapter 1
This is my serialized story of walking the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain with my sister-in-law. If you’d like to start at the beginning of our journey, click here.
I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and loved the idea of hiking to worlds unknown. Boys Life and Field and Stream only solidified my fascination with the outdoors. Later, in my early teens, we moved to the small town of Gettysburg and were surrounded by twenty-two miles of protected battlefield which I biked and hiked for years. I fell in love with the rolling hills of South Central Pennsylvania.
In college, I hiked in the state forests near the Penn State campus, and, in fact, my junior year I took a Free-U course on the common trees of Pennsylvania. Taught by a graduate student forester, it became one of my most favorite courses. To this day, the thought of exploring with a small group of students the forests in Center County, where Penn State is located, is one of my most cherished memories.
After school, in the mid-1970s, a friend and I traveled across the United States for five months camping in state and national parks and often hiking out of an old, four-wheel drive vehicle, into areas not accessible to most visitors. The sense of freedom, of being out on our own in the wilderness, affected me profoundly.
As someone who loved to write and majored in creative writing as an undergraduate, it wasn’t long before I was journaling about my hiking experiences. In truth, though, I often wrote about not being sure of myself in the outdoors (for reasons we’ll discuss) and frequently deferred to friends who I felt were much more knowledgable about backpacking and camping. To this day I still feel like a charlatan.
Unfortunately, in the late 1970s my life changed when my mother died in an airplane crash. With my father dead from cancer years earlier, my siblings and I jumped into running our family business. My dreams of hiking and writing came to a complete halt. Several years later I left my family’s business for graduate school, fell in love with my soon-to-be-wife, and, together, started our own family. As a result, being a responsible husband and father became my primary focus.
I was lucky, though, as I worked at Duke University as a fundraiser for a scientific organization running three biological research stations in the tropics. Not only was I required to write in support of these operations, but I also traveled to their remote locations in the rainforest, dry forests, and montane forests of Costa Rica. At these stations, I frequently went with the researchers into the forests to visit their research sites. I felt like I was hiking the woods of Pennsylvania once again.
Looking back, near the time when I first thought of retiring, my wife Karen, between jobs, agreed to accompany a friend of ours on her pilgrimage from Porto, Portugal to Santiago, Spain. Our friend mourned the death of her son and carried some of his ashes to spread along the way. I enjoyed following them with a copy of their daily itinerary and hearing of their hike through nightly phone calls. As a result, I became fascinated with the ideals of the Camino.
It wasn’t until during my first year of retirement that I actually renewed my love of hiking. This came about when we adopted a border collie, who liked to go on long walks. Soon Rosie and I were exploring all the streets in my neighborhood,
and subsequently, it wasn’t long before we hiked the local trails too. This is when I heard about North Carolina’s Mountain-to-Sea Trail, which extended across the state from the Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks.
One section of that trail crossed the county near my home, encompassing a thru-hike of 78 miles. In the fall and early winter one year Rosie and I walked that section of the trail both to the east and west, and I rediscovered over the 157 combined miles my childhood passion of hiking.
I imagined walking the entire Mountains-to-Sea Trail, at 1,200 miles across North Carolina and even, once more, the Appalachian Trail, clocking in at 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine. But, in the meanwhile, the Camino was high on my bucket list.
The idea of making a pilgrimage across Spain before attempting the other trails came
about in the summer of 2021. In early July we were at my wife’s family reunion at the home of Karen’s brother, Mike, and his wife, Marlene, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. The home and back patio was full of family members as this was the first gathering of Karen’s family since the Covid “lock down.”
I recall walking into Marlene’s crowded kitchen at one point that Saturday afternoon and seeing a map of the Camino taped above one of the kitchen counters. I was spell bound and totally intrigued. The map started in France and highlighted a line that extended across Spain to the city of Santiago near the Atlantic coast.
“Who’s walking the Camino?” I asked, “and why didn’t anyone invite me!” I said this in jest, thinking it would generate a rise and a response from one of Mike and Marlene’s adult kids. I assumed someone much younger than me was planning this pilgrimage.
I didn’t expect Marlene, of all people, to step forward. Marlene is five years younger than me and tiny - five feet if she is lucky. BUT she is a powerhouse of energy and has been instrumental in organizing the family reunion for years.
Marlene said she had been preparing to walk the Camino since before Covid, but due to the world-wide shutdown, had to hold off on her travel plans until Spain allowed foreigners back into the country. That said, she now thought things were opening up enough to hike the trail and I was welcome to join her.
Without talking to Karen, my wife, or looking at our schedule, I immediately agreed!
I should say, at the time I was sixty-eight years old, completely out of shape, gaining weight like crazy and nursing my second bad case of plantar fasciitis in my right heel. If truth be told, who knew where I would be next summer.
I developed my first case of plantar fasciitis seven years earlier running marathons in my early 60s, and after running the Chicago, New York and Boston Marathons, it all came to a head when, for the first time, the pain in my right heel became too painful to walk on. I immediately stopped running and went to my doctor who recommended I talk to someone in the local running store. The sales clerk didn’t expect it to take more than a year to recover and suggested aI buy a very cool pair of running shoes.
My second case of plantar fasciitis occurred when I decided to walk 50 miles a week - seven miles a day - to stay in shape after hiking our local Mountains-to-Sea trail. A noble goal that resulted in a ten-pound weight loss, but also, a second bout of plantar fasciitis in my right heel that May. My frustration was horrible and, once again, as I began my recovery, my weight to climb into the 230s.
This, then, was my state of affairs two months later when I traced with my finger the Camino map on Marlene’s kitchen wall. Of course, I was joking about joining her. How could I not be! Not training, overweight, and nursing my second case of plantar fasciitis, how serious could I get?
In November of that year at the family Thanksgiving dinner, with my right foot feeling much better, I came to believe I was destined to walk with Marlene that upcoming summer. In my heart of hearts, I knew I could do this. However, Marlene took my
commitment with a large grain of salt. Marlene had studied the route. She reminded me I was committing to walking five hundred miles across the Pyrenees to high chaparral, called the Mesita, to another set of mountains, the Cantabrians, become coming into Santiago. I would be walking over tough road surfaces, endless fields, and the cities and towns of Northern Spain, just to reach the Cathedral of St. James. With the schedule she had devised, I was committing to daily hikes between twelve and twenty+ miles. How could she not wonder if I was ready?