Peregrination [perəɡrəˈnāSH(ə)n] NOUN: a journey, especially a long or meandering one. Synonyms: travels · wanderings · journey · expedition · exploration ·excursion · perambulation · trek · trip · odyssey 

Day One (almost): I’m doing it. I’ve always wanted to hike the Camino de Santiago. I had hoped Sophie would pick it for her senior trip, after all her years of Spanish and love of hiking. An 800-kilometer trek through the rolling green hills of northern Spain, through villages and pastures, sometimes skirting the sea? Who doesn’t have a bucket that will fit in? Alas, in the time before this, when life was as expansive as all that, we did not. We chose something else that went down in the rubble of 2020. History, now. We walk the dog. We walk to get the mail. We walk from room to room wondering…Will I ever get out of here again? And we travel….in our dreams.

The photos online may as well be from another planet, pulling me away from these long, dreary winter months: endless expanses of bright sun and sky slung over pastoral landscapes. Is that a path? Why, just look at that path! Endless, verdant fields beneath a warming sun, filled with everything we crave: promise. hope. direction. purpose. It will be a virtual walk, naturally. Little sun-baked way leading from the foreground into forever, like a portal. Hosted by an online organization as clever and inventive as the rest of ’em these days: Camino for Good. Their motto: “Walk locally, travel virtually.” All we have to do is register, pay a “small fee” and commit to walking three miles a day for the next 150 days. Yes, five months. But pandemic months, I think, are a little like dog years, so they don’t seem to add up the same. Like, wasn’t it just a couple weeks ago the shops were closing in clear sight of Easter and the schools were shutting down — just for a “week or two”– until “this thing” “blows over”? See? A week or two 11 months later–that’s life in pandemic years. This time last year…I was subbing up at the high school, on the cusp of Spring, mask free and maybe washing my hands a little more frequently and instructing Ellie on how to get her hands on some Airborne before making the flight to her grandmother’s before spring break….the “break” that brought her home and never took her back. The day the music died. Sophie sitting out in the driveway in that so abruptly grounded green car just wailing, as the Governor’s address rained down all that was done, decided, derailed and dead to us, gone forever. We cleaned up the mess of course, we moved on and leaned in and like many families–when we do stop to count our blessings we find if we really count them there is little time to do anything else, for they rain down, too. And college girl? I know she is not here so that is a small success, but did she ever go back? And back to what? More on that with my next post.

We will not go back. We will never go back. And so the walking appeals very much as a way out. It’s called a “March” actually, The March to Santiago: Journey of Hope and Healing. Hippocrates called walking man’s best medicine. I’ll go with that. So what if it’s “virtual”? What’s the alternative? All I am doing “for real” these days is biding time, spinning wheels, cancelling and rescheduling, undoing, reigning in, waiting. Oh yes, and waiting. Did I mention waiting. Lots of very real, non-virtual, in-person waiting. Waiting on life. So to step through a portal where distance and possibility explode into life again, living, breathing–new places, sights and scenery to explore–well, this is very inviting indeed. This I know: we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us. With my online registration, I will get a passport and a map. Each time you enter your miles walked you get a little video tour of the town or village you’re arrived in, a testimony from a fellow pilgrim and maybe a little history or photo array of the chapel there or a pre-recorded interview with one of the owners of the albergue. My would be-host on this can-do journey. I will walk, for real, each day on foot on pretender suburban streets that look the same as they did yesterday and will look–well, all too familiar on days 80 and 110, 142. But in my imagination, fueled by–yes, Zoom, Google maps, cell phone apps and the internet–I will travel free.

From an online guidebook: “The Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James) is a large network of ancient pilgrim routes stretching across Europe and coming together at the tomb of St. James (Santiago) in Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. The history of the Camino de Santiago dates to the beginning of the 9th century with the discovery of the tomb of the evangelical apostle of the Iberian Peninsula. Since this discovery, Santiago de Compostela has been a peregrination point of the entire European continent.” The organization I sign on with was founded by five hikers–real hikers, with real actual mileage on this thing, and an international following of who love the Camino. At its heart, this virtual walk is a “pay back” fundraising and relief effort for the many hostel- and inn-keepers in the small villages who struggle for survival, now that the pandemic has shuttered their livelihood. For years, villagers and local land workers have hosted the thousands of pilgrims coming through along the way. Now, the Camino has been closed for several seasons into this spring 2021, and so the already small, already poor establishments that operated largely by donations are threatened for survival. The registration fees will go to so that they can continue their hospitality for another thousand years.

According to my online research, a pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life. Ok, yes to all of that and double on the “expanded meaning.” I try not to boil it down because if I do the basics will be enough to dissolve it: more time spent online and money spent, period. But I will not let inertia and reason weigh me down. A true traveler may have one eye on the present but she has one foot in the future, already itchin’ and looking forward to the next trip. It’s true, great quotes for walking” “A year from now, you will wish you had started today” (Mary Lamb). Mostly I am excited to have something to tether the days, configure them in a way that points to something (ironically) real and more meaningful than this slog of time. A year ago, almost, I was coming in through the garage after grocery shopping once every three weeks in an all-but hazmat suit, putting my milk and eggs into a radiation chamber Bill and Will built in a footlocker and then stopping in the laundry room to shuck my outer clothing before showering. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever wiped down a banana with a disinfectant wipe before consuming it, it kinda makes you yearn for the old days, you know? Today, we are still wearing medical grade masks to pick up a pizza and shunning friends like they have the–er, plague? And you think a virtual hike sounds like a bust?? Bring it on! Pandemic Fatigue is real.

So today I walk my training route one more time, making sure it meets to distance I need to reach the coordinates half a globe away, trying to be open to the transformation a pilgrimage can work from the very first steps. And I gear up: I find my hiking boots, clap the dirt from them, dig in the back closet for the walking stick I most recently hauled up Old Rag (See Ground – July 2020). Remember, millennial, it’s all about the equipment. Who cares if I’m puttering around the same neighborhood circuit day in and day out like an oversize Robovac, this here is a bona fide world-wide adventure. My gear says it is, and my passport stamp seals the deal. In the mail I will get some–how do we call it? “Swag”: an official Camino neck gaiter and a scallop shell badge to sew to my backpack. (Backpack! I hadn’t thought of that! Now, surely I will look like a fruitcake in my own subdivision). These accoutrements will go nicely with the topographical map of Spain I order off Ebay. Yes, a paper map. Going to post it on the kitchen wall. How else can you see where you are in relationship to where you are going, and where you have been. There are a few things, frankly an app will never capture and one of them is true distance. And the other is beauty. This is a journey of many coordinates. And many, many steps. It is true, what the proverb says: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

This one.