11
This walk was not for the faint of heart.
As I woke up on day five, I was facing the longest walk on the mission trail: twenty-five miles. This would be a test of will, and it would take my broken body to its edge.
During World War II, the former Rancho Santa Margarita (originally part of Mission San Luis Rey, and later, a Mexican land grant) became Camp Pendleton, and 122,798 acres were transformed into the largest Marine Corps base in the country. Camp Pendleton is off-limits to walkers, but six months earlier, Kurt Buckley, a former military officer, had sought Ron Briery’s help to walk the entire mission trail from north to south, and Kurt was eager to walk through the base with us. He called ahead for permission, and after a long wait at the entry gate, the marines let us through. We were not allowed to stop or eat, and would be escorted off the base if we left the road for any reason.
It was stifling hot, without a breeze. Somehow we managed to keep walking hours without a break, and made it through the ten miles on-base. After exiting Camp Pendleton, we still had four hours to walk to our campground, mostly along old Highway 101. The deteriorating highway hadn’t been used for sixty years and was now a bike path that hugged the wild California coastline.
The twenty-five-mile walk left me famished and aching, but that was nothing compared to what I faced the sixth day, when my walk almost came to an abrupt and painful end.
We had been walking for several hours, and Ron and Sandy were far ahead of me. I was walking alone on a tight, narrow road with no shoulder and in the distance saw a group of cyclists coming toward me at top speed. Did they see me? Would they stop? I had found that bicyclists are more aggressive toward walkers than the drivers of cars and trucks. Ron Briery had warned me, “I’ve had a hard time deciding how to share the path with cyclists. Be careful! Some of them slow down, and some of them don’t.”
They saw me but did not slow down, and a guardrail blocked me from stepping into the ditch on the side of the road. In a panic, I tried to jump the guardrail, but instead tripped in a deep pothole. Luckily, I got out of the way of the cyclists, but my left ankle was screaming in pain. I had twisted it, and was still miles away from camp. I knew there was nothing I could do except lace my hiking boots tighter and keep walking.
Cancer had taught me that when you think you can’t go on, you can.
I painfully limped three miles along the San Juan Creek Trail, a quiet, almost-empty creek bed to Mission San Juan Capistrano and completed the day’s walk.
I hobbled in and sat my exhausted body in one of the wooden pews in the only original mission church in California still standing in which Junípero Serra celebrated the sacraments. I sat reverently under the ancient arched roof built of locally quarried stone and tried to breathe in Father Serra’s spirit and be comforted that he had done this walk before me, also on a wounded left foot.
When Father Serra left Loreto, Mexico, for San Diego, his left leg was inflamed and his foot was badly swollen and infected, with oozing sores of raw, exposed flesh. He was in severe pain and could not stand on his feet; it took two men to help him onto a mule. His inflamed leg looked cancerous,1 and it was feared the frail missionary would die in the scorching hot Mexican desert long before reaching San Diego. At one point, Father Serra was in too much pain to ride and had to be dragged on a stretcher behind a mule.
Compared to Father Serra’s foot and leg, my injury was bothersome but insignificant. When I got to the QRandom, I soaked my bruised foot in ice and took two thousand milligrams of ibuprofen to reduce swelling. My ankle was swollen the next three hundred miles, but I walked anyway. After five and a half years of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, a sprained ankle was no big deal.
Ron and Sandy Briery were experienced pilgrims. They had walked Spain’s Camino de Santiago many times before. Yet the California mission trail was like no other in the world. It was a wild and undefined walk, exuberantly rugged, unpredictable, scary, boring, beautiful, unpleasant, and exhilarating. We meandered through concrete and asphalt, freeways, huge cities, backcountry, wilderness, steep mountains, railroad tracks, creeks, and suburban sprawl. There was daily confusion—intersecting paths, trails that ended, streets that changed names, and roads on maps that no longer existed.
Like California, El Camino Real was crazy weird but also insanely beautiful.
Mapmakers in the early twentieth century described El Camino Real as a Broadway of Beauty, for the missionaries chose fertile valleys and breathtaking ocean vistas as locations for their missions, and the trail, therefore, meandered between the valley and ocean, from one spot of great beauty to another.
The untrodden wilderness is alluring and romantic, but also dangerous. Often, Ron, Sandy, and I walked miles apart. On remote stretches of beach and deserted roadways, I occasionally came upon old, beat-up vans with no side windows. Everyone knows that serial killers and kidnappers live in old, beat-up vans with no side windows. I didn’t want to disappear without a trace. I walked faster, and sometimes carried on loud conversations with nonexistent companions. Once, when passing such a van, I heard a loud click as the doors locked from inside. The poor guy living in the van was scared and must have thought I was demented.
If Ron said he was going to leave at seven o’clock in the morning, he left, with or without me. It was my responsibility to be ready. I never missed a morning, and Ron’s habit of timeliness became my habit. Discipline is important on a long walk and in life. You have to get up and get going.
Ron was also a stickler for honesty. If he walked 15.9 miles, he never fudged and said he walked 16. “Edie, walkers cheat ourselves when we aren’t honest,” he said. “I know some will buy my hiker’s guide and say they walked the whole mission trail, but will fudge half of it. That’s how they live life.”
What Ron didn’t say is what I felt in my heart. If you miss even a fraction of a mile, it might be where you learn the greatest lesson of your life, or where you see the most magnificent beauty, or encounter a life-changing event.
The mission trail was too wonderful to miss a thing. I was determined, God willing, to walk every inch of it.
After walking six days and eighty miles, our feet began to feel the test. The only time we paid any attention to our feet was the beginning of the day. If a toenail was hanging by a shred of skin, we either cut it loose or wrapped it in protective duct tape and kept walking. We paid little notice of body aches and pains. We kept walking, and, gradually, pain went away.
Our focus was entirely on the road and paying attention not to trip on a curb or turn an ankle. Trucks, cars, and cyclists sped by, and each was a potential threat. For hours we walked near the beach and ocean, and the scenery was spectacular. Later, we walked along picturesque streets abounding in whimsical stores and exotic places to eat. We hurriedly walked on; walkers have no time to shop or sip lattes, and if we stop, our feet swell and cripple us.
When I stopped, it was only for a brief moment to close my eyes and breathe deeply into my rasping lungs or feel the sun on my face. As my eyes turned in, my heart turned out.
It was a four-day walk from Mission San Juan Capistrano to Mission San Gabriel through sprawling Los Angeles. When we turned east from Newport, El Camino Real followed Harbor Boulevard past Disneyland. A friend from Newport, Joy Penner, walked with us. The old mission trail through Costa Mesa, Anaheim, and Whittier lies beneath 250 years of progress: the thirty-mile walk was all cars, concrete, and large buildings. There was a wildness to progress too.
The concrete jungle was as dangerous as a real jungle. We crossed overpasses above three major freeways (Interstate 405, Highway 22, and Interstate 5), weaving back and forth a dozen times. Traffic zoomed past and was a dizzy blur. We walked facing traffic and waited for just the right instant to run across busy turn lanes. A misstep or a fall would end our lives or maim us.
We stopped once a day, briefly, for lunch. We were sweaty and smelled. After hours of walking on city concrete, my feet started to swell in my hiking boots, a warning sign of blisters. Before ordering food, I removed my double-liner-guaranteed-blister-free socks and air-dried the lambswool liners in my hiking boots. Before putting shoes and socks back on, I rubbed petroleum jelly into my feet and toes. My feet were sore, but I had few blisters.
We were mistaken for homeless. People in cars at stoplights offered us money. In fast-food cafés we sat away from other diners, usually outside in a corner.
I was slow crossing a busy intersection in Anaheim, and someone yelled at me, “Get a job!”
Frankly, I would rather be yelled at than looked at with pity.
Late afternoon I walked into a convenience store for cold water. The manager met me at the front door, blocking the entrance. “Do you have money?” he asked. I was taken aback until it dawned on me that he thought I was homeless.
“Yes,” I said a bit too eagerly. I took five dollars from a zippered pocket in my twenty-two-pocket fishing vest to show him I could pay for the water.
Cool air blew from the ceiling and felt good against my hot, sweaty face. I turned to face the ceiling air and saw my distorted, pathetic image in the rounded security mirror hanging from the corner wall above the refrigerated water. I looked deranged and, yes, homeless. In that instant, I felt it, too, and was filled with conflicting emotions of pride for being who I was, and self-contempt for being smelly and dirty and who he thought I was.
I noticed the dirt under my fingernails and my sweaty hands gripping the five-dollar bill; the money was wet and soiled.
I didn’t say a word. I gave him the five-dollar bill.
“Let me get it for you,” he replied, taking the soiled money carefully between two fingers. A few minutes later he returned with a cold bottle of water and change.
I thanked him and politely left.
He’d obviously had a bad experience with the homeless and was distrustful and suspicious. It clouded his judgment. He saw me as homeless and undesirable, instead of a person with dirty fingernails and sweaty hands.
He did me a great favor. When we become they, an inner transformation occurs. There is no longer separateness. I understood what it felt like to be scorned and homeless. But being homeless does not diminish a person, nor does it take away her human dignity. Neither do dirty fingernails and sweaty hands.
Only other people can do that. We must not allow them to.
Mama would never allow it. She taught us to never pay attention to what others think. “How you are outside is not as important as inside,” she assured Edmond and me after a smart aleck on the school bus made fun of his farmer-style overalls and my old-fashioned hand-me-down shoes.
It was my first week of first grade riding the school bus, and with the five-year drought Daddy hardly had money for cotton and wheat seed, much less for school clothes. Edmond, a second grader, was wearing worn but clean overalls. I wore an old, scuffed pair of shoes, the laces tattered, with too little left to tie properly.
When the taunting started, Edmond pushed me protectively behind him on the bus seat. “Look outside the window, Edith,” he ordered as he stood up to face the big bully, and started swearing, fists flying. Swearing was something Edmond was good at and did often. Fighting was too. Other kids, even big kids, didn’t mess much with him. He could be like a junkyard dog let unleashed.
The bully ran to the back of the bus and never taunted us again.
At Christmas, Mama somehow scraped together enough egg money to buy Edmond a pair of denim jeans like the kids in town wore, and a new pair of shoes for me. Mama was like that, acutely aware, but never probing. She always found a way when something was important and never made a fuss about it.
I had little energy the last fifteen miles from Whittier to Mission San Gabriel. It was the tenth, and hottest, day of the walk, and there was no cooling breeze.
El Camino Real meanders through the Whittier Greenway Trail, built over the old rails of the Pacific Electric red cars that operated from 1903 to 1938, carrying rail passengers to local cities and beaches. It was a striking reminder of the hundred-mile Los Angeles metro rail system in place in the early 1900s that was dismantled in favor of carbon-fueled automobiles and freeways that are clogged arteries of traffic and congestion.
Places are born and they die, but spirit remains. Animal trails became human footpaths that became El Camino Real that became the Pacific Electric train line that became the Whittier Greenway Trail. El Camino Real was to California what the Via Appia was to Rome and the Great North Road to England.
The old mission trail sprouted new life with each passing generation. It was a trail for natives and explorers set on conquest; a road traveled by sinners and saints in the name of religion; a route traversed by miners seeking riches; a path of westward expansion and progress; a migrant highway of hope and happiness; and today, in the twenty-first century, it is a golden freeway of technology geniuses upending the world order.
I walked in rhythm to the gospel of movement and became a star rover journeying through a long chain of existences.
I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for having the opportunity to walk here, and become part of it, and breathe its spirit.
After leaving Whittier, the Friday afternoon walk along the San Gabriel River Parkway was spiritually intoxicating with the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains in the distance and the sounds of nature caressing our senses. The terrain was rugged, and the trail was deserted. It was hard to believe we were walking in Los Angeles, home to four million people.
The dirt path under my feet probably looked much the same the day Los Angeles was christened in 1769, when the Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí celebrated mass next to a beautiful river he named Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de la Porciúncula2 (now the Los Angeles River) after the tiny country church of Our Lady of the Angels near Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis prayed.
Few places along the California coast don’t have some connection to the missions or carry Spanish names derived from the calendar of saints.
We were dehydrated and exhausted by the time we arrived at Mission San Gabriel late Friday afternoon. The grounds were quiet, and the museum unmanned. I was surprised to be left alone to browse books dating to 1489.
I quietly lit a candle in the darkened church in gratitude and thanksgiving for the safe journey and this joyous life. I thought of the countless other pilgrims who had found shelter and solace in this beautiful old Moorish-inspired mission named after Gabriel, the most famous angel in the Bible.
“Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you,” advised St. Francis de Sales more than four centuries ago.3
Angels came often in the night in my dreams. The night I discovered cancer was exploding again in my liver and lungs, Edmond came to me in a dream. He was older, with thinning gray hair, his body frail and worn with age. He was sitting in a chair with light behind him. I had to squint to see his face. To reach him I had to climb up stairs. At the top of the stairs the steps were missing. There was a mesh rope bridge with frayed ends, which I grabbed and climbed. I managed to get to the top floor, where Edmond was seated. He was speaking. I could see his lips move but could not hear his voice. I looked to my left and saw a dirt road and started walking.
I suddenly woke up. The clock read 1:11 a.m.
I felt at peace. Deep in my soul I knew what Edmond was telling me in the dream: that he was there with me every breath and every step of this frightening journey through cancer. And so were a host of other angels, living and dead, new and old, known and unknown.
Now, on the walk, sleep was a challenge. I slept almost upright in QRandom, propped up on a wedge, with pillows stacked on top. My lung sometimes made gurgling sounds. It was fluid. During the day when I walked, it drained. At night when I slept, it accumulated in my chest. Sleeping upright helped it drain. Or so I told myself. I did know that it was painful to sleep flat. There was too much pressure on the still-fresh lung incision, and sleeping flat irritated damaged nerves in my chest and ribs.
Yet when I slept upright, my swollen ankle ballooned and was so big that in the morning I had a hard time lacing my hiking boots. But as soon as I started walking, my swollen ankle deflated and my lungs inflated.
If I can move, I’m not sick.