Carrying Everything on My Back
The Only Way On El Camino is Forward
Hello from Europe! Tomorrow, one of my best friends and I will fly to Bilbao and walk for one week on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela – the northern route. Twelve years ago, my mom and I flew to Spain on September 11th and walked from St. Jean Pied de Port towards Santiago on the Camino Frances. It was a leisurely stroll with my mom in tow, although my pace picked up significantly after she went back to work midway through the walk and I continued the journey solo.
El Camino is a religious pilgrimage that pilgrims have been walking since the 9th century. The pilgrimage starts from your front doorstep and ends at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where the apostle James is said to be buried. There are many routes threading across Spain that lead to this sacred site in the northwestern corner of the country.
I first heard about El Camino from a college acquaintance, a student a few years older than me and therefore full of infinite wisedom. “You must do it,” she said with fierce intensity; we were returning to campus after a weekend-long backpacking trip and she had just finished telling me about her time on the Camino. Her words stuck with me and less than a year later, I was on the trail.
Walking el Camino distills your life to the simplest form: wake up, walk, sleep, repeat. Each day, you follow the yellow arrows guiding you towards Santiago. You carry on your back the bare essentials: a towel, blanket, pajamas, toothbrush. At night, you rinse the sweat from your clothes and hope they’ll be dry in the morning.
My friend Selena and I used to travel together often as college kids, but we haven’t had a bonafide adventure in some time. When I approached her about taking a trip together, we knew we wanted to do something low-key and low cost. She’s the one who suggested El Camino; I’d always wanted to do the northern route, which hugs the Bay of Biscay. So, here we are.
We planned this trip several months ago, but it’s always funny the way timing works out. I’ve spent this past week by my father’s bedside. He had a small procedure on Wednesday, and he’s physically doing fine. But the fact of his early-onset dementia adds another dimension to the story. My father cannot speak for himself. He doesn’t have a grasp of what’s happening to him or why strangers are poking him. He did not give consent for the procedure because all medical decisions are in the hands of my sister and I. We do our best to do right by our father.
The past week has been a blur of chasing down doctors, playing songs on Spotify to cheer my father up, writing long emails to keep my family updated, sending countless messages to various people involved in my father’s care and life. My father’s eyes welled up with tears when he saw his brother’s face on FaceTime, sending his well wishes all the way from Belgium. Needless to say, I’ve been glued to my phone, always waiting for a return call from a doctor or an email from the social worker.
Before I left, I changed my voicemail message to let callers know that I would be out of the country for a few weeks. I’ve set an out-of-office reply on my email. My husband has encouraged me to leave my phone with a friend instead of carrying it with me on the Camino. “Everything will be fine,” he says. “Just go and be on the Camino.”
Sometimes I feel like the phone becomes an extension of my person, a lifeline that I cling to when the rest of my world is shifting beneath my feet. With this tool, I can be productive. I can make calls and demand that doctors pay attention to my father’s care. I can do research and learn the facts. I can stay busy by keeping the rest informed. I can do all of this, and yet, I’ll never be in control of one major thing: my father’s disease. No matter how organized or on top of everything I am, it doesn’t change the fact that my father has dementia and that’s a damn shame.
As they say on the Camino, Ultreia. Onward.