To reach the basilica at the top of Monte Santa Luzia, which overlooks the Portuguese city of Viana do Castelo and a sizable portion of the Iberian coast, you can either climb six hundred and sixty stone steps, or ride a funicular etched into the mountain in 1923. After flying four thousand miles and walking forty-five, I decided to take the funicular.
The funicular seats twelve, the basilica at least a hundred. But the afternoon I arrived, the first of October last year, was one of Santa Luzia’s foggiest. As I rode the incline up into the compounding mist, as I wandered the summit, as I knelt in the basilica and tried to feel something, I saw almost no one and I saw almost nothing. In fact, I could hardly see more than ten feet in front of my face. Which, if I’m honest, was how I’d been living for quite a while.
First, let me retrace my steps a bit. I said I’d traveled to Portugal for Santa Luzia. That’s true. It’s also true that by the time I reached the basilica, I was on the third day of the Camino de Santiago, the Catholic pilgrimage to the spot in Spain where, according to tradition, a ninth-century hermit had discovered the remains of St. James the Apostle.
Like the Christian pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem, the Camino has many routes. Its dirt paths branch across Europe, a medieval circulatory system with the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela at its heart. (“Santiago” is Spanish for “St. James.”) The most popular route is the Camino Frances, stretching almost five hundred miles from the Pyrenees at the French border to Santiago. At any normal pace, it takes at least four weeks. I chose the Camino Portugues de Costa, a one-hundred-sixty-mile variant that, at around twelve miles a day, takes about two weeks.
People walk the Camino for all sorts of reasons, religious and not. As to why I walked, the simplest answer is this: my mom died when I was twenty-two, my dad when I was twenty-five, one from a rare and interminable lung disease, the other, suddenly, from COVID-19. By twenty-seven, I felt as though I’d skidded far into the margins of my own life.
In the wake of losing my parents to lung problems, I had also become something of a hypochondriac. When going on short walks or just sitting in my apartment, I’d reach for my mom’s old fingertip oximeter. Even after a healthy reading, breathing felt like something I had to remember to do.
I wanted to find my way back to center—and to prove to my stubborn mind that my lungs still worked. I chose as my cure not church, nor therapy, but the Camino. In June of last year I quit my job; in July, I started to walk around my neighborhood; in August, I bought a hiking pack just big enough for clothes, soap, a wide-brimmed sun hat, a journal I’d never use, and a camera I would. In September, I turned twenty-eight, immediately got COVID, then swabbed my first negative test the morning of my flight to Portugal.
By October, if the weather (and I) held up, I’d reach the basilica atop Monte Santa Luzia, look out over the coast I’d conquered, and feel at peace.
James, son of Zebedee, began his life in one place but ended it in two others. His head, separated from his body by King Herod for following the crucified Christ, now resides in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. His body, according to Catholic tradition, ended up in modern-day Spain, after encounters with an evil pagan queen, a boat rowed by angels, and a dragon guarding a cave to hell.
Approximately eight hundred years later, a man named Pelagius followed a trail of stars to a hill in northwest Galicia. At the hill’s base were three bodies in a stone sepulcher: apparently James and his companions. Pelagius the Hermit told Theodemir the Bishop, who told Alfonso the King, who told Leo the Pope. A sepulcher became a chapel, a chapel a cathedral, and a cathedral the heart of a city: St. James of the Field of Stars, or Santiago de Compostela.
Pilgrims flocked and kept flocking, gracing this formerly anonymous spot with an ambulatory reverence otherwise reserved for Jerusalem and Rome. They needed housing, wayfinding, and a badge to identify them as pilgrims, demands met by new churches, stones placed at crossroads, and, most important, scallop shells worn over their robes. The shells’ converging lines symbolized the many routes to Santiago. The Camino Frances, connecting Paris to Catalonia, Aragon, and Galicia, became the flagpole from which modern Spain unfurled. Iberian Christians, partly supported by this steady stream of believers and their coinpurses, pushed their erstwhile Moorish conquerers back into North Africa. They rechristened their headless hero Santiago de Matamoros, or St. James the Moor-Slayer.
Over time, straw beds became albergues, or pilgrim hostels. Stones became yellow arrows, painted on any available surface. Scallop shells achieved ubiquity; now, if you ask for mussels in France, you’ll be served coquilles St. Jacques. The cathedral in Santiago became as opulent as cathedrals could be before the introduction of the flying buttress. Standing atop the creation was St. James himself, with scallop, hat, and walking stick.
The early Camino likely reached its peak around the time of Columbus. Then came the Reformation, Spain’s imperial collapse, and the growing concern that the holy fingers, femurs, and hip bones gathered in churches along the Way might have less-than-reputable provenance. By the Franco years, the pilgrims that remained trudged to Santiago on the shoulders of highways.
Today, though, the Camino thrives. If you don’t know it, you don’t know enough Catholic retirees with weaknesses for roast lamb; lapsed humanities grads on gap years; or ecumenical enthusiasts for Long Walks and Big Thinks. Catholicism not being nearly the prerequisite it once was, the Way of St. James attracts seekers of food, fitness, and faith, the latter often loosely defined.
Almost 500,000 people walked the Camino last year, more than double the amount from twenty years before. After all the Spaniards on holiday, Americans make up the second-largest group of walkers, despite widespread religious disaffiliation. The experience is ready-made for anyone who wants to close a chapter in his life, to tell a new story about himself. Downsize to a backpack, follow golden arrows through auburn fields, and, at the end of it all, as you breathe in the cathedral’s incense, perhaps you’ll feel complete. Who wouldn’t want two, three, four hundred miles to figure their shit out?
If you, like me, attended Catholic school in the mid-2010s, then your picture of the Camino de Santiago starts and ends with Martin Sheen. In the constellation of made-for-classroom movies, betwixt Stand and Deliver, McFarland USA, and every other movie about rugged men making Christian choices, sits The Way, from 2010, written and directed by Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez.
In The Way, Sheen plays Tom, who despite working as an ophthalmologist, cannot see what’s wrong with his country-club life. When his son, played by Estevez, dies on the Camino, Tom flies to Europe to collect his son’s body, only to end up finishing the walk in his place.
Over his month on the Camino Frances, Tom meets a jolly Dutchman, a curmudgeonly Canadian, and a hopelessly blocked Irish writer, forming what pilgrims call a “Camino family.” Like Dorothy in a North Face, Tom learns a lesson from each of them, all boiling down to the big one in the film’s tagline: “Life is too big to walk alone.”
It’s as cheesy—and as deeply affecting—as it sounds. Long after I stopped attending Mass, or thinking of Jesus as a cool older brother, Tom and the gang stuck with me.
As much as anything else, that movie brought me to the Camino. I ended up taking the Portuguese Way rather than the Frances, though, because no amount of grief was worth four weeks of hot Spanish cornfields. The Camino de Costa, over roughly two weeks, takes you up to Santiago via miles and miles of beachfront boardwalks, the Atlantic gifting a constant breeze to any pilgrim who walks by.
The ocean air in those first couple days reminded me, as most things do, of my mom. She grew up in Scituate, on the Massachusetts coast. We’d often sit by the town’s old lighthouse—near the end, with an oxygen tank lying by her feet. Whenever I breathe in ocean wind, I wonder if that’s what oxygen therapy feels like.
My mom was Cape Verdean. Had siblings who’d been born on the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa, back when they were a Portuguese colony. She spoke a Portuguese Creole, which slowed only marginally as her breaths came more quickly. Here in Portugal, seeing the Atlantic from its opposite side and hearing people talk like her, it filled compartments in my soul that I’d forgotten.
My faith had been vibrant, dormant, sedentary; it had never been peripatetic. The weather was perfect between Porto and Monte Santa Luzia: I would walk five hours a day to the sound of the waves, talking to no one but myself and my mom. Comebacks to half-remembered conversations would escape my lips before I could realize I’d begun to whisper aloud, my eyes flicking from the arrows on the boardwalk up to a heaven I apparently still thought was right above my head.
As for talking to the living, I struggled to fit my nose around Portuguese vowels. Mainly my companions were the seagulls shading by the bungalows, the clouds lounging across the sky, the Portuguese photographer taking pilgrim photos and selling printouts for five euros. I did my best Martin Sheen walk when he trained his camera on me.
Sometimes, hours into a hike, I would wonder: where was my jolly Dutchman? My curmudgeonly Canadian? Shouldn’t I stay in pilgrim’s hostels instead of off-season beach hotels? Speak to someone else who’d willingly signed up for this?
But mostly I occupied myself by taking pictures: of horses grazing near stony rubble, cats tiptoeing on railroad tracks, cows gawping at the ocean. Always the ocean, in impossible blues and whites and grays. I couldn’t quite articulate the questions on my mind, but I knew their answers lay somewhere in the water, or in the Martian rocks spiking up out of it in Toblerone formations.
If the answers weren’t there—as the little pinpricks of loneliness suggested—then surely they were up ahead, at that gray speck atop a far-off, forested mountain. Over days and days, that speck crystallized into the jewel of the Portuguese Camino, the cover of each and every guidebook: the Basilica de Santa Luzia. Surely, up there, I could take one last look at Portugal and say goodbye to the faces I had superimposed over the water. Like those other rugged men making their Christian choices, I could finally close this chapter left open much too long.
In those first days on the Camino, I told just one person why I was walking. I think his name was Tom, but the ocean wind had wrecked my hearing, so I’m not entirely sure.
He was asking everyone he met why they’d started the Camino. After three days of talking to seagulls, I had to tell somebody, so I told Tom from Singapore about my parents. Afterwards, feeling much too exposed, I hurried on before we could walk together. He was nothing but kind, but I wanted to get to the mountaintop.
That mountaintop, of course, turned out to be all fog. Walls and trees and lampposts would load in and out of my vision as in a low-budget video game. The basilica appeared out of nowhere. Inside was too silent even to pray.
Any hope for the view was dashed. Out where the Atlantic and half of northern Portugal should’ve been was only the kind of purgatory that slicks your neck with mist. Bested by Santa Luzia, the patron saint of the blind, I bought a pocket rosary from the gift shop, boarded the last funicular down, and tried to breathe again. Two days later I crossed into Spain.
The fog proved prophetic. Rain followed me over the Spanish border, wetting my shoes, then my socks, then my feet, until blisters bubbled up on both feet. Churches, the only dry places in which to apply Neosporin, became places not for quiet reflection but for practical sanctuary. Watching me hobble through yet another fishing town on my way to the next empty hotel, a pilgrim from Maryland let loose a little border-state wisdom, saying as he passed, “it ain’t nothing but a thing.” Still quite far from my destination, and smelling all over like Biscoffs and the wet interior of a hiking pack, I was sustained by those words.
It took seventy-seven miles, nine bridges, and several moments of pilgrim kindness like that one to break down my desire to be alone. I missed people. Arriving in the Spanish port town of Baiona, I booked a bed in a decent-looking pilgrims’ hostel. There, by the laundry machines, I met Maia, who invited me to a group dinner. In addition to Maia, walking the Camino before moving to South Korea, there was Jaden, preparing to hike the Pacific Coast Trail; Johanna, a nurse from Germany; and Jean, a former Buddhist nun and current EDM producer. They prepared a spaghetti dinner to which I contributed a sleeve of Biscoff cookies for dessert.
The four of them became my companions for the rest of the rain-soaked walk.
I have many fewer pictures from this part of the Camino because I was occupied with the simple pleasures of meaningless conversation. And because it never stopped raining. The path had snaked away from the coast at this point, turning inland toward Santiago, yet the water followed, dropping so much rain that the paths flooded. I hopped from rock to rock with these college kids like something out of The Jungle Book, avoiding the snails roused from their hiding places. I skipped rest days and architectural gems to keep up with the group, ranking Marvel movies instead of boarding funiculars. Which is all to say that I made friends, and maybe there’s nothing quite as extraordinary as that.
Something about the sudden novelty of speaking aloud, or perhaps the incipient hypothermia, made every coincidence feel like a minor miracle. I’d mention another pilgrim from days back, and she’d appear on a rock moments later. I’d decline to walk together in the morning—wanting to take my pictures and find my answers—only to get momentarily lost, turn back onto the path, and run into one of them.
On one of these days, I walked with Johanna, the nurse. After years in hospitals with sick parents, I liked nurses, and how they did things I couldn’t. So for the first time since crossing into Spain, I opened up about why I was there, about my mom and my dad and all the rest.
And this nurse from Cologne said something like, “Wait. I’ve heard this story before. I think I know who you are.”
Which is all to say that I made friends, and that maybe there’s nothing quite as extraordinary as that.
This hit me like a truck. Johanna, it turns out, had met Tom from Singapore, the guy I’d opened up to back in Portugal, and he’d told her about the pilgrim walking to cope with the deaths of his parents. This probably doesn’t sound as miraculous to you as it did to me in the moment. But then and there I was separated from the narrative facts that had overtaken my life. There was a guy on the Camino who’d lost his parents, and there was a guy on the Camino ranking Marvel movies, and the two had only met by chance through a German nurse.
Being seen rocked me more than any seeing I had done. There, on a dirt path turned to mud by the endless rain, I was Robert first, parentless second. I was sheared from my story, a being apart from it, able to hold it only when I wanted. In front of this nurse and God and whoever else would pay attention, I was just me.
I spent the last day of the Camino, my twelfth, alone. From the south, the path into Santiago is a series of highway underpasses and busy streets. I ate nothing, only wanting to reach the cathedral. When I arrived at the Camino’s official end, the Plaza de la Quintana in front of the cathedral, I followed the example of the other pilgrims there: I took off my pack, stood it up on the cobblestones, and leaned against it as I sat and gazed up at the spires.
After about twenty minutes, Maia and Jean reached the plaza. They took off their packs, sat down on either side of me, and teared up. Not, I think, with much Catholic fervor, but from the weight of the past hundred miles sliding off their shoulders. From my left, Maia handed me an apple. From my right, Jean, remembering our hostel dessert, produced a sleeve of Biscoffs. Unable to take my eyes off the cathedral, I thanked them as profusely as I could.
Attending the pilgrim’s mass later that night, I thought, not for the first time, that I’d finally go back to church. As everyone slowly filtered out of the city, catching planes across the world, I kept wandering back to the plaza. Not to see the church, but to see the pilgrims leaning against their packs in awe.
Being seen rocked me more than any seeing I had done.
The Camino did not, in any way I can recognize, solve my life. I have proof I can breathe. And separating from my story, out there on the path with Johanna, was probably beneficial. But a story, even a sad one, is a shell, and in losing mine, I lost constriction and protection at once.
I’m now more addled by non-linearity, thrown into despair when arrows are not close at hand to guide me. Occasionally I remember that talking to people is a good thing; most times I don’t. I’ve only been back to church once. But I can still smell the incense from the Botafumeiro, the giant censer flown through the cathedral during pilgrims’ Mass.
The night before reaching Santiago, I stayed in a hostel called O Lagar de Jesus—Jesus’ Wine Press. At dinnertime, the hostel arranged its pilgrims along one large table to serve them their final Camino meal.
I sat across from a retiree couple from Alaska. The wife had been an ASL teacher back in Anchorage, and she would unconsciously form words with her hands as she spoke. In the oversharing atmosphere of this last supper, she told us she had ADHD, a condition she said was well-suited to the Camino. After decades of bridling her bucking mind, on these dirt paths she could let it run free. She could, for instance, stop walking for ten minutes just to look at a snail, free of its shell, as it made its way across a puddle. She could—and did— soak in as much of this image as her mind desired.
I want to be that snail. I want to leave my burden at the water’s edge, and inch slowly through the ripples. I want to look at the far shore with room in my mind for only one thought: It ain’t nothing but a thing.