Why the Camino, and Not Just Any Trail

My daughter asked me a good question the other night, and I fumbled the answer. Not because I didn't know how to answer her, but because I couldn't find the right words, ones that seemed weighty enough to convey what I was thinking and feeling.

She has watched Ultreia take shape, and she’s glad I’ve found this thing to build. But she was puzzled by one part of it, and she said so. "Aren't there other trails, other places you could go that would be just as good? What's so special about the Camino?"

She never assumed it was a vacation. That was not her confusion. Her question was deeper than that, and it is the same question almost everyone asks when they first start thinking about the Camino. There are beautiful long trails all over the world. Why this one? Why not somewhere closer, or higher, or wilder?

I gave her an answer as we drove to dinner. It was not a very good one and I've been thinking about it ever since. I want to try again here, because I think I can get closer this time.

I start with the most obvious thing, which is also the thing the Camino shares with every other long trail. You walk. I walked about sixteen days on my Camino, from Porto to Santiago. With Ultreia, we walk seven or eight, starting in Tui. Either way, you get up each morning with one goal: reach the next albergue. You step out into the bright Spanish sun, put one foot in front of the other, and then you do it again the next day, and the day after that. There is a strange clarity in having exactly one task.

I will be honest: none of that is unique to the Camino. The Appalachian Trail would give you the same repetition. So would a hundred other trails. If the walking were the whole of it, my daughter would be right, and any long path would do.

But the walking is not the answer. It is what makes the answer possible. Day after day of putting one foot in front of the other slows you down and empties you out, and that emptying is what makes room for the things that actually set the Camino apart, the history underfoot and the people beside you. The repetition is not what makes it different. It is the ground the difference needs.

Let's take the history first. That part is harder to find elsewhere. You are walking a path that pilgrims have walked for twelve hundred years. The scallop shell is everywhere. The cathedrals rise up along the way, and at the end there is the Cathedral of Santiago itself, with the remains it has drawn people toward for centuries. You feel, in all of it, that you have stepped into something much older and much larger than your own small trip. That is real, and I don't think you get it on a trail near home.

And then there is the part that actually got me, which is the people.

I think about Simon and Hillary, the Italian couple I met my first night and then off and on throughout my first week. My second night on the Camino I woke in an albergue to find them in the bunks beside mine. Hillary, whose English was as limited as my Italian, looked over at me and said, "Good morning, Rob," as if to an old friend. Or Giulia, the first pilgrim I ever met. She had arrived hours ahead of me at that first albergue, already showered and changed into clean clothes. She greeted me so I assumed she ran the place. She did not. She was a pilgrim like me, just faster. For the next several days our paths kept intersecting in surprising, coincidental ways: in a small cafe, at a crossroads on the trail. And then at the very end, she was one of the last friends I saw before I left Santiago. The first face on the way out, nearly the last on the way home. The Camino has a way of arranging things like that.

That is the thing a vacation never does. It keeps handing you back the same faces.

A couple of nights in, at an albergue in a Portuguese town called Aguçadoura, the wifi was down and the only working outlet was in the kitchen. That is where I met Freya, a Danish college student I mistook for an American because of her accent. When I expressed my surprise, she explained the source: years of "Friends" and "Gilmore Girls." She pulled in her sister Nadia, who was earning a law degree back in Denmark, and a handful of friends from other countries, Gaya from Italy and Sally from Australia, and we all ended up around that kitchen for a couple of hours while they put together a shared meal. The conversation turned to food, and to pizza in particular. I tried to explain Chicago deep-dish pizza. Gaya listened to all of it, patiently, the way you might listen to a child explain something he does not understand. Then she set down what she was holding, looked at me, and said, with the full authority of her entire nation behind her, "That is not pizza!"

She was not joking.

I kept running into that group too. Days later, Phil and I walked into another albergue to find the Danish sisters already there. I greeted them like old friends, and a German woman named Ena, standing nearby, someone I had never met, asked, "Is this THE Rob?" Apparently I had become famous. I still have no idea what they had been saying about me. She was so delighted to meet THE Rob that she sat us down for drinks on the spot.

That happened a lot. People would matter enormously for an evening or for several days, and then the Camino would simply take them back. Ena, gone. Freya and Nadia, gone, though we found each other again on Facebook. There was another young German friend named Sophie, nineteen years old and somehow more like thirty-nine, who walked with us for days and decided that Phil and I were her "old American uncles." That is exactly what it felt like. And there was Christiana, yet another German friend, who knew roughly when we would reach Santiago and was waiting for us in the plaza in front of the cathedral, because she wanted to see our faces when we arrived.

I used to think the brief encounters counted for less than the long ones. I have stopped thinking that. There are the greetings, "Buen Camino" and "Ultreia," called out by strangers you will pass once and never see again. There are the people I walked with for days, who I came to know more deeply. And there are the ones I met only once or twice, over a latte or a single dinner, who mattered too, in a different way. People like Paul and Rachel from the UK or Janice from China. Acquaintances can be important people. Maybe they were exactly the people I needed to meet at exactly the moment I met them.

"The Camino provides." It really does. Phil and I said it to each other constantly, the way nearly everyone on that road eventually does. A stranger steps forward with directions just as you realize you are lost. A cafe appears at the moment you were sure you could not go another kilometer. A new face arrives offering precisely the companionship you did not know you needed. When my hiker's wool blew away in the strong ocean breezeon on day four, it was Sara from Denmark, who had accidentally ordered an entire case of the stuff and who peeled off enough to last me the rest of the walk. I do not want to make it sound too religious, or too mystical. But the three things I have described, the monotony, the history, the community, come together into something greater than the sum of its parts. For me, it felt close to magic.

I am not the first to reach for that word. In his book The Walk of a Lifetime, Russ Eanes calls this same thing, "Camino Magic," the good that arrives at the very moment your own careful plans have fallen apart. He spends the better part of a page describing it and closes by saying that he had, at last, named the thing. When I read him, I recognized my own walk. What Phil and I had been calling "the Camino provides," another pilgrim had already named.

And here is what I would tell my daughter now, which I could not quite reach the other night. It was the daily walking that loosened my thoughts and gave me time to reflect, the slow work of the "neutral zone." It was the awareness of being part of a history of pilgrimages shared by the millions who had walked before me. And it was the community of pilgrims with whom I now shared the experience. Out there I was not Rob the administrator, or Rob the faculty member, or even Rob the drummer. The titles fell away. So did age, and nationality, and status. I was Rob the pilgrim, stripped down to a fellow human being sharing the walk with other human beings. The Camino took everything I usually carry to introduce myself, set it down by the side of the road, and then kept handing me exactly the person I needed, when I needed them.

That is what is so special about it. Not the trail itself. What the trail makes possible.

Rob is the founder of Ultreia, a coaching and pilgrimage practice for professionals at the threshold. Learn more at www.walkwithultreia.com.