14
The mission trail became deeply personal.
For more than a hundred miles through the Central and Salinas Valleys, I walked through land overflowing with milk and honey, beside fields of red strawberries, green vegetables, and purple grapes. The harvesters reminded me of my own family members who traveled west to look for work.
This was where Uncle Wilburn was killed working in the fields, where Grandpa Littlefield picked grapes to make enough money to return home after his dream of striking it rich ended badly, and where Edmond worked on oil rigs when the oil bust hit Oklahoma.
For generations, Okies were inspired by hard times to roam and ramble. The prairie wind blew them like tumbleweeds from one place to the next. Man is by birth an itinerant traveler, and life allows no more than a fleeting amount of time in any one place. El Camino Real was just another hot, old, dusty road to a Dust Bowl Okie, and “so long, it’s been good to know yuh, and I gotta be moving on.”
The mission trail was a daily reminder that it’s not how fast we walk—it’s how far; it’s not how long a relationship is—it’s how deep.
After Mission Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude), Meg and JoBeth returned to Los Angeles, and I walked alone to Mission San Carlos Borroméo del Río Carmelo, named after the sixteenth-century archbishop of Milan. The mission is known simply and affectionately as Mission Carmel. Dale had hoped to meet me there, but problems at work delayed him a few more days. I didn’t mind. Deb had one week left to drive QRandom before her job interview in Houston. I enjoyed walking alone, and I knew I could count on Deb to use GPS to keep track of me on wilderness trails.
I arrived at Mission Carmel on Easter Sunday, the fortieth day of my walk. The timing was coincidental and unplanned—at least by me. After a few morning sprinkles, the sky cleared, and the day was radiant and hot. By the time I reached the mission, my shirt was drenched in sweat, and when I took a seat in the cool stone interior, the sweat running down my back made a wet imprint on the wood pew.
Mission Carmel is the crown jewel of the missions, and where Junípero Serra died and is buried.
Father Serra passed away so quietly that all thought he was sleeping. The tiny room at the mission where he died was filled to overflowing with wildflowers of every color, gathered by Esselen tribal members who spent the night-watch hours after his death in prayerful lamentation, singing with extreme tenderness and affection the “Rosary for the Soul of the Deceased.”1 His dear friend Fray Francisco Palóu laid him to eternal rest in a plain redwood coffin at the foot of the altar he loved so dearly, beside another cherished friend, Father Juan Crespí, who had died two years earlier. Nineteen years later, Father Fermín Lasuén joined them, uniting in death the lifelong friends who preached the gospel together from Mallorca to Mexico City to Loreto to Carmel.
As I arose from the pew and stood near the altar where Fathers Serra, Crespí, and Lasuén lie side by side, the mission bells rang out their joyous Easter hymn of praise.
I closed my eyes and turned inward. The music of mission bells is not in the chimes, but in the silence between. Be still, and know that I am God.2 It is in the space between breaths where I find him and where I now heard the bells of Mission Carmel.
Finally, after six hundred miles, my feet stopped hurting. I know it sounds like hyperbole, but life became transcendent and intensely vivid and even the most ordinary was infused with wonder and awe.
The final two hundred miles was a slow remembering of how tragic and sad and profound and wonderful life is.
The mission trail from Salinas Valley to Mission San Juan Bautista was filled with roadside memorials. Each memorial marked the spot where someone had died in an accident, suddenly and unexpectedly.
Mama’s younger brother, Wilburn, died here, a thousand miles away from family, but there was no memorial for him.
When the Depression hit in early 1930 and a drought turned Oklahoma into a dust bowl, Grandpa Looney lost his farm. To survive, everyone in the family worked in the cotton fields, starting in April, and ending when the last boll had been picked, usually early November. Year by year, the drought became worse. The dark rain clouds ceased to come, and the cotton fields, like everything else in Oklahoma, dried up and blew away in huge clouds of dust.
After Yvonne, the baby of the family, died of untreated whooping cough because they had no money to pay a doctor, Wilburn—the fourth child and second son—realized he had to leave Oklahoma and find work to help the family. When Grandma refused to let him take the rails or hitchhike, he fixed a broken motorcycle and took off for California on a hot July morning. Wilburn soon found work here in the Salinas Valley and further down the dusty dirt road in the San Joaquin Valley. He took what work he could find and was grateful to have money left over to send home.
Two months later, after a long day of working in the fields, Wilburn was killed when a large farm truck struck his motorcycle. His mangled body was sent back to Oklahoma for burial. A cloud of gloom hung over Mama’s family, devastated by the loss of two children in less than four months.
Soon after the accident, Grandma Looney received a letter from Fresno, California, informing her of the death benefits payable by the insurance carrier of the company whose truck had struck and killed Wilburn.
Grandma Looney refused to talk about the letter, and it lay unanswered on the table for months. After a while, the insurance company sent a representative to the Looney house. Grandma Looney listened in silence as he pleaded with her to sign the paper and take the money. Grandma Looney quietly but fiercely asserted they would not take a penny of blood money.
The insurance representative looked around the dirt floor shack at the hungry children and the gaunt, long faces of the parents. Never had insurance money been refused by anyone. He pleaded with Grandma Looney to take the money for the sake of the family.
“No,” she whispered resolutely, slowly shaking her head, “I will never accept money for the death of my son.” He pleaded with her to reconsider. She refused.
As the door closed behind him, Grandma Looney took the letter and placed it on the burning fire logs. The barefoot children watched the letter burn until the last ember vanished.
As I passed humble wood crosses in ditches and farm fields, on the side of railroad tracks, and on fences, trees, and telephone posts, I said a prayer for Uncle Wilburn and each precious life that ended suddenly and tragically on the side of the road.
The road through Salinas Valley was long and tedious. A spot underneath my big toe felt hot, a sure sign a blister was forming. I sat on a rock and removed my socks to dry my feet with a small paper towel I kept in my pocket, and applied petroleum jelly.
And then I saw the small “teardrops” scattered in the dirt below where I sat. They were the small, droplet-shaped seeds of a wild grass, called Job’s tears, named after the Old Testament prophet who endured great suffering.
The grass filled the shallow ditch in front of me. I stared in silent reverence at the thin green stalks blowing in the wind. Almost hidden in the tall grass was a small wood cross. A faded yellow plastic rose was next to the cross.
It was another roadside memorial. Someone had planted Job’s tears next to a cross, and wind had scattered the seeds.
I was hot and tired, thirsty and exhausted, and my body hurt.
I was walking to forget. For five hundred miles I had walked quickly, hoping to leave myself and my fears behind—but my fears were still with me. Job’s tears opened the vault where they were buried.
The seeds ripped open old wounds and unleashed years of emotion. Waves of grief and sorrow swelled up inside me and poured out, assaulting my thin body. I heaved and shook with anguish, and tears cleansed the raw, open wounds.
I cried for Mama and Daddy, and Grandpa and Grandma Looney, and Uncle Wilburn, and Grandpa and Grandma Littlefield, and my brother Edmond, and all the souls who begged God for relief and mercy as they lay dying.
I cried for Steve Wang, and Marko, and Barbara, and Joan, and Sally, and Mary, and the hundreds of patients who had sat beside me at cancer clinics and hospitals—who begged God to let them live.
I cried for my friends and family who lived honest and simple lives, and begged God to give them strength and courage.
I cried for Job and Saint Agnes and missionaries and persecuted people of faith who begged God to protect them from evil.
I cried for me. For the thousand dark days and sleepless nights when grace and gospel music kept me alive, and I pleaded, on bended knee, Lord, help me, please. I’m begging you. I cried until the paper towel I dried my sweaty feet on was soaked to shreds with tears.
And then I could cry no more. I felt a sense of release, of lightness. As if something I had been carrying for six hundred miles had now been shed. I didn’t need to carry it anymore.
I put a handful of Job’s tears seeds in my pocket and continued walking.
Afterward, whenever I passed a roadside memorial, I paused to say a prayer and drop a seed or two.
You cannot avoid hardship in this life. It had been instilled in me in those drought years of childhood, as I’d watched Edmond struggle to overcome alcoholism, as I’d watched Daddy work so hard in the cotton field for so little and Mama make a life for herself and her children. We can’t take away hardship. But we can stop and remember. We can acknowledge pain. We can pray for grace.
And, ultimately, healing.
Walking up old San Juan Road north of Salinas, I heard someone call my name. The voice was clear and distinct. I stopped and looked around. “Yes,” I answered. No one was there. The only sound was a quiet wisp of wind. Thou knowest not the way of the spirit, as you do not know what is the way of the wind.3
I never heard the voice again. I still listen for it.
I arrived at Mission San Juan Bautista two hours later.
An original, unpaved section of El Camino Real borders the mission, and I took off my hiking boots and walked barefoot in the dirt to feel its holiness.
Since the beginning of its history, this King’s Highway is where missionaries and thousands of other souls have sung aloud, sunk upon their knees in prayer, and wept in anguish.4
As my bare feet stirred up their dust, I tingled with their aliveness.
I knew I was walking on holy ground.
The next day, Dale arrived to drive QRandom, and I said a very grateful good-bye to Deb Dawley. From then on, I walked alone, and each day, Dale parked QRandom and rode his bicycle to where I was walking and explored nearby roads and trails as I walked.
The next nine days took me through more strawberry fields and vineyards and over precipitous mountain trails. This section of the walk took me to four missions: Mission Santa Cruz, Mission Santa Clara, Mission San José, and Mission San Francisco.
Of all twenty-one missions, Mission Santa Cruz was the only disappointment. It was built next to Branciforte, a colony of ex-convicts and thieves banished from Mexico that later became the town of Santa Cruz. The mission suffered from disasters caused by both nature and men; it was abandoned in the early 1800s and destroyed by an earthquake in 1857. Today, there is no mission, only a small replica church and adobe dwelling with limited hours of operation, run by the California State Parks. I walked along busy city streets for three hours and asked a dozen people if I was on the right road. None were even aware there was a mission. Most didn’t know what a mission was. I felt sad. When a mission becomes a museum and tourist relic and no longer functions as the spiritual heart of a community, something very precious is lost.
In contrast, Mission Santa Clara, a three-day walk from Santa Cruz, was alive and vibrant. The old mission moved five times, victim to floods, fires, and earthquakes, before its final resting place as the heart-center of Santa Clara University. Thousands of students pass the mission on the way to class, filling the air with laughter and vitality. The bell tower holds three ancient bells that still ring jubilantly over campus and town.
The three-day walk from Mission San José in Fremont to Mission San Francisco took me across San Francisco Bay. As I walked the five-mile Dumbarton Bridge across the bay, Dale gleefully raced his bicycle back and forth four times. I laughed at my husband, as giddy and adventurous as a ten-year-old boy. This was why I had married him. Joy was always present, adventure something to be sought. How thankful I was to have him by my side all these years.
I had a few Job’s tears seeds left in my pocket that I had been saving for Palo Alto.
My friend Steve Wang and his teenage daughter, Jacqueline, were buried there, a few blocks from El Camino Real.
I missed Steve. Since his death, I had not been back to our favorite spot in front of the large floor-to-ceiling window at Stanford Cancer Center. The Job’s tears were for Steve and Jacqueline—and Steve Jobs, who was buried in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery. Although I did not know Steve Jobs, I mourned for him too.
Steve Wang had seen him occasionally at Stanford Cancer Center. “Edie, we need to hang in there; there’s got to be a breakthrough soon. Some of the smartest guys in the world are working on this, and a guy as rich as Steve Jobs can afford to spend billions on a cure,” Steve would say, and we’d both smile and shake our heads with fervent anticipation.
Steve Jobs was a bright shining light to those of us living with stage 4 cancer. He was our superhero, a master of the physical universe—rich, creative, and uncompromising. Surely, we thought, with his wealth and sheer intelligence, he could outsmart cancer, even find a cure. We were betting on him to defeat cancer and save us. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” he said in a 1993 interview. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”5
He loved to walk and was famous in Palo Alto for his long walks. It was the first thing he did with his sister when they were reunited as adults.
I wondered if walking kept his inner flame alive, too, the way it does mine.
Steve Jobs’s final moments, as recounted by his sister, Mona Simpson, at his memorial service, had helped me reconcile the end of me. She wrote, “Steve’s final words were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”6
We can’t know what he meant, but the words thrilled me. What did Steve see? I wanted to see too—but not yet.
Not yet. I wanted to live OH WOW, OH WOW, OH WOW now, and not wait until death.
I scattered the remaining Job’s tears next to mission bells along El Camino Real in Palo Alto, pausing for a prayer of gratitude, and kept walking.
That evening, I fell asleep, feeling that I, too, had done something wonderful.
I arrived midafternoon at Mission San Francisco, known from the beginning as Mission Dolores, after the swampy lagoon in front that was later filled in and graded. Two new friends, Ruth West and Lin Galea, walked with me. Dale greeted us with cheers and applause in front of the mission, along with two lifelong friends, Arch and Jeannie McGill, and a group of tourists recruited by Jeannie.
After a quick tour of the mission, I had another hilly four miles to walk to Lombard Street to a motel near Golden Gate Bridge, ready for an early morning departure when I would cross the bridge to Mission San Rafael.
Walking through Los Angeles, and now through San Francisco, I saw large numbers of people living in cars. They were modern-day Joads, parked in carefully selected residential areas and quiet streets. I felt compassion, but did not pity them; pity is often dismissive and diminishing. Maybe this was their choice; this is what they wanted. Their car was their home, and at least they had one. Many don’t. Edmond often didn’t. Grandpa Littlefield didn’t. Most Dust Bowl Okies didn’t. They hitchhiked mostly, or rode the rails, and stopped just long enough to make enough money to move on, leaving only a dusty footprint.
There are as many ways to live life as there are roads to walk. On the mission trail, we see them all.
The two-day walk to Mission San Rafael was divinely beautiful; from the marina and presidio of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and Scotts Valley, and then along the Larkspur Path, up steep Wolfe Grade Road to the mission.
Mission San Rafael was founded as a sunny health resort, a hospital for Ohlone Indians sickened by foggy, damp, and windy San Francisco. There is nothing left of the original mission, not a stone or an adobe brick. A new chapel has been built in its place. I stopped to feel the sunny warmth on my face and to breathe the fresh morning air. Twenty miles to go. It was hard to believe I was nearing the end of El Camino Real mission trail.
If you ask Sandy Briery the most terrifying part of the eight-hundred-mile mission trail walk, she doesn’t hesitate: “Crossing the Petaluma River Bridge on Highway 37 outside Sonoma.”
The bridge was half a mile long, with only an eighteen-inch ledge to walk on and only a thigh-high concrete guardrail to protect a walker from falling off the bridge into the swirling water below. Cars and trucks whiz past, and there are frequent accidents.
If it scared Sandy, I knew the bridge must be bad, and I worried about it for days. To calm my fears, Dale walked the bridge the day before and felt it was safe. “Just don’t look down,” he advised, “and don’t worry about trucks blowing you over the low guardrail; there’s water several hundred feet below if you fall.” I think that was supposed to make me feel better.
So I braced myself with deep breaths, calming thoughts, and prayer before I began. I forced myself to look straight ahead and not down at the river hundreds of feet below. The tips of my fingers skimmed the low railing, and I was acutely mindful to not fall. I breathed slowly and whispered the Jesus prayer. Afterward, I felt great personal satisfaction from facing and overcoming my fear. “Cross that bridge when you come to it” is a reminder not to worry, and surely comes from fear of crossing dangerous rivers.
After the Petaluma River Bridge, I walked several hours on Highway 37, past Pedestrians Prohibited signs. A highway patrolman stopped and cautioned me to be careful. I stepped over several rattlesnake carcasses and was more terrified of the tall grass at the side of the road than of traffic.
I arrived that evening at Cline Cellars, where Dale and Arch and Jeannie were waiting with a glass of champagne. Tomorrow would be my last day walking, just six miles to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma.
When Dale and I woke up that morning, the parking lot next to QRandom was filled with friends who came to walk with me to the last mission. There was Ron Graham, who had loaned me QRandom; Ron Briery; two new friends, Steven Woody and Marucia Britto; and several strangers who’d heard about the walk and decided to join us. It felt like a fitting way to end this journey. In celebration, in community, in gratitude.
After just two hours, and 6.4 miles, I was there.
It had taken fifty-five days of walking, three rest days, and 796.5 miles, to reach Mission San Francisco Solano, the last of the twenty-one Spanish missions in California.
I had averaged fifteen miles a day.
As we approached the mission, Arch and Jeannie waved and cheered. The State Park manager had tied twenty-one white balloons above one of Harrye Forbes’s small iron mission bells. An original three-hundred-pound mission bell hung in front of the mission, and before going inside I joyfully rang it twenty-one times.
Inside the mission, a special surprise was waiting. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Sally Canfield Coupe, my roommate at Stanford Hospital, where, seven months before, we’d both had surgery to remove cancer from our lungs. We collapsed in each other’s arms, laughing and crying, too overcome with emotion to speak. Just for a moment, we shared the most utter, complete joy that comes from simply being alive and filled with grace. And we both knew why I walked all those miles and never wanted to stop.
The day I started walking the mission trail I didn’t know how far or how long I would be able to walk. It was a walk of faith, taken one step at a time. It had connected me with God and grace, healed my body, empowered me emotionally, and cleansed my spirit. I was born anew.
I felt truly alive walking El Camino Real mission trail, and even though I was physically exhausted, I didn’t want to stop. When I stopped, I felt the same rocking sensation people feel when they have been on a boat for a long time. My body was still walking even when I was standing still.