Which way is The Way?

Hey Sam,

Recently we made you walk 450 kilometres along an ancient pilgrimage in Spain. Camino de Santiago. The path of St James. The way.

Yes that’s right, we made you. We forced you. At least that’s the version of events you like to tell now. That version, that story, has earnt you some big laughs, both during and after the course of our camino. I remember at one of our first communal dinners on the trail our host, after giving you gifts of croissants, decided to ask you what lessons you had learnt from walking the camino so far.

“To never walk it again.” You said to significant and clearly self affirming laughter.

450 kilometres is not the full camino. That would be 750+ starting in St Jean Pied de Port, across the border in France. We started our journey in central Spain, a town called Burgos, which is approximately 500kms from Santiago. When I say 450 I’m factoring in a couple of train journeys in and out of Leon to avoid the suburban sprawl.

This was all due to your Mum’s research on the subject. Beginning in Burgos put us at the beginning of a fairly flat part of the pilgrimage. Flat, open, hot. A place called the Meseta. That was a good choice because you had time to deal with walking first, before we added hills. My contribution to your Camino was more prosaic, I taught you your first Spanish words, how to say thank you. “When you sit down in a park and get back up, you have a grassy arse”, I told you.

Job done.

Over the next few weeks I’ll keep posting some of the stuff I wrote along the way, but I’ll only post photos of the back of your head because you’ve recently become mortified by the idea of your face on social media. That’s the subject of another blog but for now rest assured I have listened and none of this will be socially damning. Also it’s not really a record of our trip but a bunch of thoughts and feelings that were embedded within it, often written on the trail as I dug out my notebook and tried to capture some of the complexity I was experiencing in that moment. I want to get those thoughts down here because the story you’re now telling yourself, the joke version where you “liked everything about the camino except the walking” is only one version of events, only one Camino. The real one was much larger, it wasn’t flat like the Meseta, or fogged in like Galicia, it’s not easily reduced to a tagline, or a joke.

After the first couple of days of walking your Mum asked you what you liked about the camino so far.

“Two things”, you said. “One, Iceream. And two, my mind is free to roam”

I don’t want you to forget that Camino.

The one where we walked beside each other for 26 days, eating croissants and saying Gracias with too much emphasis on the last vowel sound. The one where we spent hours making up stories about Thistle Man, The Lord of Weather, Mr Mind and Dr D. The Camino that held pilgrim gifts, great friends met for only a day, lands above the clouds and below the trees, saints in silver tombs, giant pots of incense swinging above our heads, portraits in blue pen, magic walking sticks, the threat of blisters, tears and trials, giant slugs that looked like poo, Cola Cau, Aquarius, fresh orange juice, menu del dias, a horse called Paula, a friend named Jay, a Minotaur in the labyrinth of an ancient Albergue, Castles, too many masses in Spanish, your first novel (and your second, third, fourth and fifth), a road, a track, a path winding through forests, towns, fields, farms, mountains, valleys. A way forward, never seeming to end but always leading us towards our conclusion.

Don’t get me wrong, I love your stories, especially the funny ones, but our stories make us up. They become who we are. In your case that’s a 10 year old who just walked 450 kilometres along the road to Santiago, the Pilgrim’s Way and, as a boy with an aversion to school and an imagination that is as endless as the sky in the meseta, life can get challenging. So whatever you do don’t forget what you accomplished over 25 days in June/July this year.

Hopefully this will help you, and me, remember.

Buen Camino.

Love, Ragnar.