15

When I walked into Sonoma, I passed a large, weathered mission bell inscribed “Loreto 1697.” The bell was a reminder that the California El Camino Real mission trail started in Loreto, Mexico, and the first mission was built there in 1697, seventy years before missionaries set foot in San Diego.

Looking up at the Loreto bell, I noticed several hawks soaring above me and riding the wind before turning south and out of sight. I longed to follow them, and I felt the stirrings in my heart for another wild and crazy adventure.

I knew right then that if God allowed me the time, I was going to Loreto. I was going to walk the mission trail where it started.

No one had walked the entire sixteen-hundred-mile El Camino Real mission trail from Mexico to California in 250 years, not since Junípero Serra.

I had already walked half of it. I yearned to walk all of it.

The long walk from San Diego to Sonoma was emotionally and physically cleansing and spiritually transforming.

It was also more.

Every long walk is a walk away from something, and I was walking away from cancer. I was motivated by fear. I walked to rid myself of the terror of cancer and to overcome the fear of it coming back. For more than five years, I had lived with a constant, pressing awareness of death. I had become a hostage. I had tiptoed around cancer, fearful of arousing it, fearful of its rage.

I knew the best way to live with fear was to keep moving. Once I started to walk, I was not afraid anymore; all was well. I felt that if I stopped walking, the cancer would come back.

I didn’t stop walking.

Cancer came back anyway.

Exactly two years after the start of the mission walk, I saw it smiling back at me on a CT scan.

This time, it was in my remaining left lung, and the tumor was deep. Surgery would require removing a wedge of healthy lung tissue, and Stanford Cancer Center opted for high-intensity radiation instead. A month later, I had parathyroid surgery and a biopsy of a tumor in my throat.

Once again, cancer was a wake-up call—and a call to action. I was determined to not let cancer squash my dream.

Harry Crosby, a historian/photographer who grew up in the San Diego area, had come closer than anyone to retracing Serra’s epic 1769 journey from Loreto, Mexico, to San Diego. Harry’s dozen or so hand-drawn maps from multiple mule-pack trips in the mid-twentieth century were the only detailed maps that existed of the old eight-hundred-mile Baja El Camino Real mission trail.

For months, I pored over Harry’s maps, comparing them to old trail maps and locations mentioned in historical reports and journals.

Eighty percent of Lower California was rugged sierras and a land so cruel that horses and even surefooted mules were known to plunge off sheer steep slopes, and where bones of parched, thirsty men melted into desert sand.

Could I make this more than a pipe dream? Could I really do it?

I read everything I could find about the mission trail in Mexico: missionary journals written three hundred years ago; diaries of gold rush prospectors who journeyed up the Mexico peninsula on the old El Camino Real to California; and three centuries of scientists, naturalists, and adventurers who had written of the treacherous deserts and mountains from Mexico to California.

I slowly began to develop confidence and belief that I could do what no one else had done. The desire felt almost primal, to beat not only cancer but also the elements I knew I would face; the improbability of somehow navigating this ancient trail was empowering.

I could do it.

I would do it.

I was ready.

I was ready to be free of worry.

I was ready to be free of fear.

I was ready to be free of cancer.

I was ready to be free of self.

I was ready for the grandest adventure of my life. I was ready to walk eight hundred miles through one of the driest deserts in the world and through the spine of the Sierras. I was not about to let cancer stop me.

And I had to do it now.