LITMIR.BIZ

       The west-facing door of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy

LE PUY

      The train followed a valley as it climbed into the Massif Central, the rolling high country in the middle of southern France. We left modern suburbs and then sprawling farms behind as the land grew wooded and steep.

      Just across a river, on top of a hill, was a crumbling stone castle. Most of our train car companions ignored it, but Eric and I couldn’t look away. You don’t see many castles in the States.

      We stopped in a few shabby-looking towns, where most of the people not wearing backpacks got off. There were just half a dozen of us left to hear the garbled announcement that we were arriving in Le Puy-en-Velay.

      This was it. From here, we would walk.

      Eric and I gathered our packs, adjusted straps that still felt awkward, and stepped into the chilly April air two thousand feet—or six hundred meters, since I had to start thinking in metric—above sea level. We exited the station onto a modern-looking street and looked blankly around.

      Based on everything I’d read about Le Puy, I’d been expecting towering cathedrals and cobblestone streets. Instead, I faced a parking lot and a featureless white apartment building. I hadn’t prepared for this.

      Every year, a quarter of a million people follow some part of the Way of Saint James. They travel by foot, bicycle, or horseback toward the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, about sixteen hundred kilometers from where we currently stood. They come from around the world, and for a multitude of reasons. It’s not uncommon for complete strangers to ask, “Why are you walking the Way?”

      I never had a good answer. I certainly wasn’t there for sport. In the spring of 2015, at thirty-eight years old, I didn’t look like someone who could—let alone would—walk a thousand miles. I wasn’t the “outdoors type.” I didn’t run marathons, climb mountains, or even exercise regularly. Sure, I walked almost everywhere in my urban neighborhood, but I’d never been backpacking. My idea of a hike was a three-mile stroll through well-tended, preferably flat, city parks.

      Nor did I go to France looking for a miracle or pursuing an existential spiritual quest. Even the word “pilgrimage,” with its religious undertones, made me uncomfortable. I’d grown up in a traditional Baptist church and was educated from kindergarten through college in Christian schools, but my relationship with the church had changed over time. Over the past decade we’d amicably gone our separate ways, and I wasn’t interested in revisiting the relationship.

      And no, I wasn’t seeking the answer to some important question, grieving a loss, or looking for a radical change to my everyday life. Eric and I both did meaningful work that fit our personalities and passions. We had good friends, a healthy extended family, and hobbies galore. We were childless by choice, so there was no drama there. We lived in a city I loved, in a corner of the world I thought was just about perfect. But yet here I was, in a remote corner of France few Americans had ever heard of, with a plan to walk all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Why was I here?

      Well, because twenty years of postmodern adulting had burned me to a crisp. My life, like that of most of those in my generation, was controlled by the relentless demands of screens. I ran a publishing consulting business and spent my days, and too many nights, hunched over a laptop. Though I controlled my schedule, I had trouble believing that I could take a day off and still pay the rent. I had four separate email inboxes, all of them filled with demands on my attention. My electronic calendar was a rainbow of appointments, commitments, deadlines, and tasks—all overlapping. My social media habits had accelerated with the rest of my life’s demands. I constantly checked my smartphone. Some days I couldn’t get from my apartment to my car without opening Facebook. What if I missed something?

      What I was missing was a life that felt real. I was here because the Camino, with its thousand years of history, felt real.

      I first heard the phrase Camino de Santiago in 2010 from a fellow writer who blogged about her one-week trek along a medieval trail. She described endless rain and mud, steep climbs, physical pain, and blisters. Nothing she said should have appealed to me, sheltered and sedentary in my comfortable urban cocoon, with a cat purring on my lap. And yet, something drew me to look into it further.

      I knew the wilderness called to Eric. When he was a teenager, his church youth group took him on backpacking and canoe trips through a Canadian national park. He loved it so much he went back as a college student and became a trip leader. For as long as I’d known him, he’d talked about walking the Appalachian Trail someday. For just as long, I’d told him he’d have to go alone. I don’t sleep in tents, and I don’t eat freeze-dried food for weeks on end.

      But the way my writer friend described this Camino thing seemed different. A long trail that didn’t follow a steep mountain range, but instead wound through pastoral towns and countryside? A well-marked path dotted with hostels offering affordable beds and showers and wine every evening? A historic journey that didn’t require smartphones, or email, or the latest app? The Camino called to me.

      I did what any self-respecting book lover would do. I went to the library and checked out everything with the words “Camino de Santiago.” The first book I read set the course for everything that followed.

      Conrad Rudolph’s Pilgrimage to the End of the World is a slim memoir with grainy photographs and an emphasis on art and history. To be honest, it’s not the most informative book available, but it cemented in my mind that Le Puy-en-Velay, France, was where a person went to begin their walk to Santiago de Compostela.

      It would be months more before I understood that Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, eight hundred kilometers closer to the holy city, was the more common starting point for modern journeyers to Santiago. Of the fifteen thousand Americans who arrived at the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago in 2015, fewer than two percent started in Le Puy-en-Velay. But for me, “the Camino” was already established as a three-month, two-country, thousand-mile journey that went not just to Santiago, but all the way to the Atlantic Ocean at Finisterre.

      Instinctively, I knew that a thirty-day trip wasn’t enough for the extended, intense sabbatical I desperately needed.

      The next question was how I could convince my husband to fly off to Europe for a quarter of a year. It’s not that he’s put off by new places. Between us, Eric and I have sold our belongings, packed our cars, and moved across the country half a dozen times, often without jobs or housing lined up. We’ve lived in every time zone in the continental United States, but international travel had never been part of our shared experience or vocabulary. Neither of us grew up in families that

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