What does it take to become a Camino pilgrim? A divorce? A job loss? Ennui? People of all ages and persuasions pack their trekking poles and alight in France or Spain or Portugal for their personal 500-600 mile adventure, and many have no idea why until they arrive in Santiago de Compostela, enlightened. Sometimes this why? is not answered until weeks or months later. Angela Leslee was walking to get over the “alleycat of a man” she had married (big mistake). Did she? Carolyn Gillespie, facing an empty nest, dressed in her best hiking shorts to indulge the “middle-aged survival instinct that urged me to run knock-kneed while I still had the chance – to jump, like an overweight Lara Croft, off the platform I had been on so long.” Did she, too, find a new and improved Carolyn at trek’s end? John Pearson watched the movie The Way and recovered his long-lost, youthful fantasy of wandering aimless around Spain. “I must have watched it 10 times,” he said in his Camino memoir, “like my children used to watch The Lion King.” If he made it to Santiago, he certainly saw Spain. And then what? Even poor blister-afflicted Bill Bennett…well, he had no idea what he was doing on the trail, but there he was in Saint Jean, at his start on the French Way. “I was excited,” he tells us in his written recollections. “I was thrilled. I was finally there. After two years of dreaming of walking the Camino, I’d finally arrived. I felt like a pilgrim. I felt special. I felt somehow…medieval. I felt part of something that was beyond my immediate comprehension. I couldn’t wait till tomorrow to start what I knew was going to be an extraordinary journey. Possibly even a life-changing journey.”
An extraordinary journey. OK, I wasn’t technically right there outside Santo Domingo de Calzada, Spain, with W. Lee Nichols, who was walking the Way to recover from cancer surgery. But from my perch in Paris, I could relate to his thrilling sense of life-renewal. There he was, enjoying, “one of the longest and most pristine hikes in the world,” as he reports in his travelogue titled Talking with Cats. He adds, with some awe:
Devoid of billboards or modern buildings strung along the roadside, the path leads from one historic medieval village to the next. Each day we pass oceans of wheat, miles of rolling vineyards, and sweet-smelling orchards of almonds, olives, and fruit trees. Shepherds herd flocks of fleecy sheep that flow like liquid down hillsides, across the pilgrims’ pathways and on to greener pastures. There is a timeless thread of tradition on the Camino that reassures, ‘all is well with the world.’
All was SO well in my own world with kitty, that W. Lee’s further words moved me to celebrate this special time with a second mocha éclair as I sat people-watching in a sidewalk patisserie. Why not? Life is short, and this was Paris! If he could remain cancer-free after completing the Camino, his legacy to his grandchildren would be the message, as he writes, “go, be, live, and know that the world is populated with good people full of love and joy.” As if to prove the wise grandpa’s point, Monsieur the server brought me an extra-extra-large cloud of whipped cream with which to top my hot chocolate, and he flirtatiously winked to even old moi to amp the joie of the day.
I texted Gina, at work in San Francisco, and Karen, now back in her office in L.A., not to gloat over how I got to get all lazy and fat in a foreign land while they were doing business – and life – as usual, but rather, to ask: did your taste of the Camino change you? True, Gina trekked only three days and spent four getting the kitten’s future in order, and Karen took no steps on the official trail but shared Camino’s care as we adventured from château to château; she even leant her puppy-pure heart to the wild, crazy plan to one day adopt a cat. Still, both were pilgrims in the sense I was, for okay sure, none of us had actually (yet) slept fitfully in an alber-goo, or suffered radical, miserable hip-knee-foot pain, or even met a world’s worth of annoying walkers or talkers or snorers we wanted to avoid. But in being smitten with the Camino kitten, weren’t we all embodying the very definition of “pilgrim” – that is, a traveler who has come from afar who is on a journey to a holy place? Really, what does one do in a holy place if not worship? No way was it not worship, what we were doing, we three doters on the abandoned orange urchin that dominated our hearts. Our Camino may not have seen us alongside W. Lee on that hill overlooking Pamplona, where a wrought-iron art installation depicts, as he remembers, “the long pageant of pilgrims (since the year 950) that have braved the climb, the winds, and the perils to find their chosen paths in life.” But it was holy all the same.
“I’m the same. But please, send me video of Camino!!” Gina begged. “I miss him!”
“Changed? Um, not really. But be sure to give Camino a big hug from me!!” Karen pleaded. “I miss him!”
Later, in our Air B&B on Avenue Kléber, where a huge picture window opened up on the rarest of Paris rarities – a garden view – I sent Gina video and delivered Karen’s kiss and asked the object of so much affection if he had any special requests now that we had arrived in the City of Light. Maman, he replied from the window’s sill, where he sat chattering at a sky filled with chirpy birds flitting to and fro. I want OUT.
“Is that so, my kitten?” What Camino didn’t know was my sister Camille would soon arrive, but rather than shake him with this news, I decided to play it cool.
“I am afraid that for the time being, you are an indoor-only kitty, my love.” I thought it wise to wait so he would not be afraid. My “extreme” sister, dubbed as such for her adventurous spirit, would rather not go for a hike when instead she could climb Alaska’s Mount Denali, which she once did with a team of men only. Not for her to simply stroll the beach collecting shells; rather, she must jump into the ocean fully clothed to rescue a non-swimmer the surf had knocked over and was sending out to sea. Give her any disaster – fire, flood, avalanche, landslide – and Camille is there, frontline, helping the helpless with her gutsy, selfless self. I knew well what to expect when she and her daughter Jacqueline, my niece, landed in Paris for their planned two-week trala around France, but I wasn’t sure Camino could handle it.
“We’ll do Chamonix!” my sister had said.
“Uh-oh,” I return texted. “What does that mean, ‘do’?” My God. Chamonix-Mont Blanc in the French Alps was ground zero for “extreme” in every sporting sense. Ice-climbing, paragliding, mountaineering, mountain biking, backcountry ski-touring, ultra-marathon trail-running – these were exactly the sort of endeavors that revved Camille’s jets. She once had me spend four frigid nights on Mount Shasta in a tent in a mountaineering adventure where I just about disappeared forever into a crevasse and she came thisclose to being killed by a falling boulder.
“Just so you know, I am not going paragliding,” I told her. “And neither is Camino.”
“How do you know you two wouldn’t love it?”
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