10

It was absurd and ridiculous to think I could walk eight hundred miles a few months after lung surgery. The longest I had ever walked was four miles. But I believed I could do it, and we don’t know what we are capable of doing until we do it.

I soon discovered someone had walked the old mission trail just a year earlier, and afterwards had put together a hiker’s guide, what he called a “self-published labor of love.” Ron Briery, a high school music teacher, grew up on the mission trail in Arroyo Grande, California, and it was still calling to him. He walked the entire trail in less than two months. When he returned home, he sat at his kitchen table and pieced together his Hiker’s Guide to California’s 21 Spanish Missions Along El Camino Real.¹

When I ordered a copy of the book from Ron, I mentioned that I dreamed of walking the entire distance from San Diego to Sonoma in one long walk. He encouraged me to go for it.

“Edie, you would be only the sixth person to do it. I’ve spent years looking for people who have walked the entire eight hundred miles to all the missions in one trek. I know of four others besides me: Father Richard Roos, a Jesuit priest; Stephanie Dodaro, a young lady from San Francisco; Beppe Sala, an Italian who walked with me; and Kurt Buckley, a former army officer.”

I began sharing my dream with friends and family. A close friend, Ron Graham, gave me the confidence that I really could do it. Ron grew up poor, but he became one of the world’s most acclaimed mathematicians. He also became a professional acrobat, a world-class juggler, and a trampolinist who taught himself to speak fluent Chinese, play championship-level Ping-Pong, bowl perfect games, throw a boomerang, and play the piano.

Ron Graham never asked why I wanted to do such a weird, crazy thing. He knew why and thought it was great.

Ron loved to walk and often walked fifteen or more miles a day. He suggested we complete a seven-mile test walk, and though I was very tired at the end and grateful to be finished, he believed I was strong enough to walk the whole distance—which increased my confidence exponentially. Ron was well versed in statistical probabilities, and his life was a testament to possibilities. If Ron believed I could do it, I knew I could.

Ron and his wife, Fan Chung, also a renowned mathematician, offered to loan me their campervan, QRandom, for two months. The van—which bore QRANDOM on its license plate—was named after an obscure mathematical theory positing that many things that appear to be random really aren’t. Instead of chaos, there is connectedness, a higher order.

Perhaps my quest wasn’t really random after all.

The plan soon became that Dale would drive QRandom to my stopping point along the trail so I had someplace to sleep each night. I would set out each morning and hike according to Ron Briery’s guide. I knew it would be challenging. Some days required hiking more than twenty miles. Ron Briery was a healthy man when he undertook this challenge, not a woman who had battled cancer for five years, was missing half her liver, and barely had a right lung. But I comforted myself with the thought that Dale would be waiting each evening in that campervan to encourage me and have food and water at the ready.

While the idea to walk was still taking form, tragedy struck. My friend Steve Wang lost his heroic battle with colon cancer. Steve had been with me steadfastly as we sat together during chemotherapy for four years. I had fought alongside other patients of Dr. Fisher as well—Marko, Barbara, Joan, and Mary, a breast-cancer patient of another doctor. When Steve died, just Mary and I were left.

Losing Steve was heartbreaking.

Steve was a man of deep Christian faith and prayer, and the bravest person I had ever met—the kind of person you want fighting beside you in the trenches. When we met in the infusion center and discovered we were both patients of Dr. Fisher and on the same aggressive oxaliplatin and Xeloda chemotherapy regimen, we made plans to compare notes and help each other during the toughest times. “Together we can make it through this,” we assured each other. We had trust in God’s grace and tender mercy to sustain our spirits, and in Dr. Fisher to help us fight. For months, we scheduled our oxaliplatin chemotherapy infusions for the same day so we could support each other.

As we sat there side by side, laughing and talking as the chemo slid through our veins, a nurse once came over after hearing we’d both survived five years of continuous cancer treatment. “How do you do it?” she asked. “How have you survived five years of this?”

Neither of us answered.

Steve and I knew cancer cells were survivors, not us. Cancer cells rapidly become resistant to whatever chemotherapy is thrown at them, and surgery is like taking an ax to a forest of a billion seedlings, with each hack releasing more seeds onto the ground. A single remaining cancer seed is all that is needed for recurrence and progression.

The truth was Steve and I felt more like hostages than survivors.

He skied, ran, and lived exuberantly while going through cancer hell. He was young and had teenage children, a beautiful wife, and a successful career.

Steve had fought a fierce battle, and now he was gone.

I tried to contain my tears at his memorial service, but my heart was breaking. A fellow warrior who had become a dear friend had finally succumbed. His wife, Lisa, tried to comfort me with the truth: “He’s not suffering anymore, Edie; he’s at peace.”

I couldn’t erase Steve’s death from my heart and mind. He had fought so hard for life, and he deserved to live. Why didn’t he? Why am I alive? Why am I so lucky? Some questions have no answers. We ask them anyway, over and over and over. My walk now had a new, unexpected purpose: perhaps I would be able to emotionally scatter the ashes of the many friends and loved ones who hadn’t made it to this day.

I felt an obligation to live, really live, life—the life denied so many I had come to know and love at the cancer center.

I was making last-minute preparations when Ron Briery called. “Edie, my wife, Sandy, and I are attending a meeting in Santa Barbara and have decided to walk from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Would you be interested in walking with us?”

I couldn’t believe it. The chance to walk the first three hundred miles with the very man who had charted the path before? Of course I wanted to do it with them. But they were leaving in a week. I had planned to leave in a month. Would I be able to get everything ready in time?

In addition, a business emergency arose that meant Dale could no longer leave. I needed to find someone to drive QRandom so I had a place to stay each night.

I called my best friend, Jan Boelen Sinn, in Oklahoma to update her on my plans and this new wrinkle. But in the course of the phone call, Jan had an idea. Her close friend Deb Dawley was in between jobs and might be able to drive the campervan. My heart fluttered with the thought that here was a solution. I promised to pay her. And before I knew it, Deb Dawley was flying out to California to help me with my dream.

I was now ready to follow the mission bells. I didn’t know where they would lead or how far I could walk. I didn’t care. I would be happy with an hour or a day, with a few steps or a mile. Whatever God allowed.

February 20, 2013, was a cold, wet morning. At eight o’clock, Dale, Ron Graham, Meg Grant, Deb Dawley, and I stood at Mission San Diego with Ron and Sandy Briery. Meg had followed through on her promise. She would walk the first twenty miles with me, and then rejoin for another ten days after Ron and Sandy ended their journey in Santa Barbara.

I had alerted friends and family. I told people they were welcome to join me for any part of the trip, that I would welcome the encouragement and the companionship. But really, this was a very personal walk, a walk of thanksgiving, to celebrate living, and to thank God for his bountiful blessings and tender mercies.

“You have only one life,” Mama always said. “Don’t waste it.”

I had reached out to the missions along the way, and the priest at Mission San Diego, Monsignor Richard Duncanson, prepared a special blessing. As I bowed my head, feeling the light touch of his hand on my shoulder and hearing his melodious voice lifted in prayer, my heart soared. I felt more alive than I had in five years.

Thank you, God, was the cry of my heart.

Afterward, I paused for a moment under the five bells hanging aloft in the forty-six-foot-high bell tower. Directly above me was the enormous and majestic Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), a 1,200-pound bell recast in 1894 from fragments of other bells that had been used and broken in bygone days. When Harrye Forbes had arrived at the mission in 1913 to install her first mission-bell guidepost, the massive Mater Dolorosa was “picturesquely posed upon a pile of crumbling adobe that was once the tall, graceful tower of the mission.” Forbes said its clang was “like a mother of sorrow wailing over a crushed and broken child.”² It took years of love and hard work to restore Mission San Diego to its previous glory.

As I walked out of Mission San Diego and headed north on El Camino Real mission trail, the bells were ringing, and none rang louder or more joyously than Mater Dolorosa.

The old El Camino Real is a former footpath, mule trail, and wagon road that zigzags from coast to inland valleys. In 1905, George Wharton James described it poetically: “The El Camino Real was never much of a road from the road-maker’s standpoint, but to the historian, the romancer, the artist, it is one of the most fascinating highways in the world.”³ Even then, it was no longer a remote road far from civilization, in nature and peace and quiet as Junípero Serra would have walked it. It was paved in 1902, and California expanded rapidly along the mission trail. The first three hundred miles from Mission San Diego to Mission Santa Barbara is mostly concrete—sidewalks, bike lanes, and highways.

The fear of death by cancer was replaced on that first day by fear of death by vehicle. As a walker, I was the least important person on the road. Large trucks were number one, followed by cars, motorcycles, bicycles, horses, and last, walkers. At all times, I was attentive to traffic danger. The heightened awareness, rather than taking away from the pleasure of walking, actually enhanced it. I was walking in the now, in the moment, all my senses alert and awake.

A severe weather warning was in effect the first few days of our walk; there were scattered rain showers and a cold wind blowing from the ocean. I learned that outside stuff, like weather, is almost unnoticeable. It was pouring rain and I hardly noticed it. The first hundred miles were an inward journey, not an outward one.

The first day, Ron Graham and Dale stopped walking at noon to return to work, and Ron and Sandy Briery and Meg and I continued walking to Pacific Beach’s Campland on the Bay. There, as promised, we found QRandom and Deb Dawley, a welcome smile at the end of a long first day. Meg and I stayed in the campervan while Ron and Sandy pitched the tent they carried in the backpacks they had strapped to their backs.

I was in awe of their ability to hike those distances with that pack on their backs. I carried nothing but essentials—like a can of bear spray and a toothbrush with the handle sawed off—stuffed in a Cabela’s multi-pocket fishing vest and a small lumbar fanny pack with water.

Meg and I awoke groggy before sunrise from a loud knock on the door: Dale and Whitney had brought us breakfast. We ate a quick bite before heading out, catching up with Ron and Sandy within half an hour. This would be a tough day on the mission trail—eighteen miles. Meg stopped her walk in Del Mar to take the train back to Los Angeles, and I continued walking alone. I was sad to see Meg go but so thankful she had both encouraged me to go for this and also followed through on her promise to walk with me.

The first week was a challenge to my body. Feet are tender and blister easily, and by day three, my toenails started turning black and coming loose. I wore guaranteed-blister-free double-layer socks and stopped every three hours to smother my feet in Vaseline. At noon, Ron Briery stopped and wrapped duct tape around each toe and both feet. By the seventh day, my feet were wrapped in duct tape too.

Sandy had had hip replacement surgery fourteen months earlier, but now she walked tall and confident—and fast. Sandy was my inspiration. She convinced me that if she could do it, I could too.

“Don’t worry, Edie,” she said one day when I was out of breath, my back ached, my hips creaked, and my feet dragged. “Just keep on walking, and you will feel better in no time. You are retraining your body to move.”

She was right. I slowly walked all the hurts, pains, and stiffness out of my body. I learned to pay attention to even the smallest detail, and retrain my awareness to pick up my feet, align my head and shoulders, relax my arms, and tighten my stomach. I became owl-eyed. To avoid roadside hazards and move out of the way of whatever came hurtling toward me, it was important to look ahead, down, and around all at the same time.

El Camino Real north of San Diego followed the Pacific Coast Highway and historic Highway 101, the mother road of California. This old, narrow, winding coastal highway had retained its original charm, and vintage 1920s road signs marked the route.

Mission bells were every mile. Each bell filled my heart with indescribable joy.

It took four days to walk from Mission San Diego to the second mission, Mission San Luis Rey. The walk was along the coast, through the picturesque beach towns of Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Oceanside, and along miles of uninhabited beaches. It was as beautiful a walk as existed on the planet.

Dale, Whitney, Stefanie, and Ron Graham drove up from San Diego to walk the last six miles to Mission San Luis Rey. Our group of seven arrived at the mission at noon, the bells ringing as if to welcome us. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Diana Holm, was there to greet us in a leg cast with crutches.

As we walked into the mission, I marveled at its beauty. In the noonday sun, it looked like a medieval fortress, and I paused for a few minutes to reminisce of days past when hardened men told of stopping their horses to gaze for a few minutes at its glittering white façade. It looked like a castle from afar.

I was physically exhausted but spiritually exhilarated. It was Saturday, and the mission, a thriving parish church, was filled with people. We didn’t stay long, just long enough to light a candle, say a prayer, and head to a nearby Mexican restaurant for a celebration lunch before the six-mile walk back to QRandom.