Several years ago, I coached a client through a few drafts of a memoir. About twenty years earlier, he and his wife, always up for travel and adventure, had tried long-distance hiking. It had been disastrous: they’d done no training, they were wearing new ill-fitting boots, and their six-year-old son was with them. They abandoned their hike about halfway through.
A few years later, both approaching milestone birthdays, they were mulling over how to celebrate and decided to give hiking another try, this time doing lots of research and physical training, and leaving their children with family. It went so well and was so fulfilling that they made it an annual tradition.
At first, they did a few hikes in England, a hiking-friendly country. Then they decided to tackle something bigger: El Camino de Santiago, a trail for religious pilgrims that starts in the French Pyrenees and makes its way across northern Spain and Portugal to its terminus in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. Around 800 kilometres long, it takes thirty to forty days to complete; they broke it into three segments, which they completed over three years.
I’ve been intrigued with the idea of hiking the Camino ever since. So, Maryanna Gabriel’s (class of 2022) book, Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023) immediately leapt out at me. A bit adrift after the unexpected death of her mother, Gabriel was seeking a way to deal with her grief and reconnect with her inner self. She attended a talk about walking the Camino, where a stranger with whom she exchanged a few brief words leaned in and said, “Walk the Camino. You’ll know why.”
Her travel memoir, Walking the Camino, is exactly what the title promises: a chronicle of Gabriel’s experience, from that moment at the talk, through months of preparation, and from the beginning of the famed spiritual route in the Pyrenees Mountains to its end at the Atlantic Ocean. Just a few days into the hike, she writes about a moment when she’s resting with some fellow travellers, talking about the ineffable quality of the Camino.
I lifted my head at a pause. Something unusual was happening. I was trying to understand a rushing sensation from a great depth. I examined Bjørn intently.
“May I have your permission to pray,” he asked. His blue eyes twinkled.
It was getting late, customers had departed, and the owner had disappeared. We were alone. Kris and I glanced at each other and nodded.
Intonations of sound emerged. Rumbles that seemed ancient and long forgotten. Vowels tumbled, then halted, and gathered momentum. Bjørn tossed back his head and boomed in a crescendo of resounding benediction, a cascading river that encircled us then rolled upwards into the starlight. The sound was unlike any language I had ever heard, Latin but not Latin, Hebrew but not Hebrew, Spanish but not Spanish, but seemed to contain elements of these languages. The effect was musical and the intent benevolent. It uplifted the heart and I was filled with the wonder of it. Of babies, and cinnamon toast, dragonflies on mountain lakes, of angels blowing their horns, of kisses and custard and roses, a flower dappled in sunlight and pollen and dewdrops, the laughter of children, a first candy cane, of cookies and fire crackle, the crunch of snow, the crinkle of presents, of soft knitted socks, and the snuggle of Sunday mornings. A profound peace coursed through me, as though I had been enormously blessed. Was it from this world or beyond?
The reverberations slowly died away. Had Bjørn been speaking in tongues? I roused myself. I had to ask.
“Does this happen often?”
He mumbled and looked at me shyly from beneath shaggy brows. “Sometimes.”
Beautiful, visual, lyrical writing.
Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s done the Camino comes back with similar stories of wonder and awe and peace. The writer I spoke of earlier was at a complete loss to express his feelings as he and his wife drew close to and finally reached the end point, the finish line they’d been striving toward for three years.
I don’t know if I’ll ever walk the Camino. It seems huge, daunting. But if the kind of experience Gabriel and my writing client describe awaits along the route or at the end, maybe, just maybe, I should do it.
Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is was the 2022 winner of the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Other winners of this award from among the graduates of the MFA program include:
One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton
The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart
The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by Andrew MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.
Other books of inner exploration through travel:
How to Clean a Fish: and Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral
Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Scott
