34

We left Rancho Cuatro Milpas at sunrise the next morning and headed northeast to the mountains.

Alfonso was a cabalgata rider and not a Sierra vaquero, and El Palomino was not a Sierra horse. By the end of the day, Alfonso and El Palomino were both struggling for breath.

And Valla? I could hardly get her to move. I worried she might die beneath me at any moment.

There were a few trails on the side of the highway, but often not. Alfonso didn’t seem to mind. He rode El Palomino onto the highway, expecting traffic to slow or stop for us.

But Valla was unstable on her feet, and I feared she might slip and fall, or throw me off. I begged Alfonso, “Please, let’s not ride on the highway!”

I had fought too hard for life to end up as roadkill.

We had been on horses six hours with hardly a break. The wind was cold, and the sky looked like rain. It was time to find a place to camp or spend the night. We rode across a pasture toward Rancho Santa Rosa. Alfonso knocked on the door of the old vaquero shack. No one answered.

“No problema,” Alfonso said. “Los caballos aquí.” We will leave the horses here.

The rancho was rundown with only a small manure-covered cattle lot, an empty water trough, and a small haystack. I waited on the porch while Alfonso found water for the animals and tethered El Palomino and Valla on a long rope in the dirt yard with a bale of hay. Dora picked us up in the truck, and we spent the night at a small ranchita by the highway.

When we arrived the next morning, a vaquero from a rancho across the road came over. He had seen old and tired Valla standing in the front yard. He had horses and mules to rent. Would I like him to saddle one for me? Did I need another vaquero?

“¡Esta es mi tierra!” This is my land! Alfonso proclaimed proudly, shaking his head and looking offended. He knew the trails. We did not need another vaquero.

By the end of the day, I regretted not hiring the vaquero.

Alfonso said it would be two hours from Rancho Santa Rosa to Mission San Miguel. We encountered many fences, and Alfonso was not prepared for fences. He did not carry pliers, a knife, or a machete. His hands were no longer as tough as the side of a mule. They bled as he pried open barbed wire gates with his bare hands.

After riding four hours, we appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, but Alfonso was confident. “The missionaries built a road from San Vicente to San Miguel. This is the old road,” he reassured me. “Este es El Camino Real.”

When we came to an old deserted rancho, he announced proudly, “Este es Rancho La Misión.” The ancient rancho of the mission extended for miles. “Esta es la ruta.” This is the route.

El Palomino and Valla were exhausted. El Palomino was a younger horse and would recover. Valla was old and did not need this journey over steep rocky mountains and through thickets of thorns.

Alfonso made a small whip for me out of a tree limb, and I reluctantly whipped the dear horse, but she would not go. I tried talking sweetly in a cajoling voice, but she would not go. I pleaded with her, but she would not go.

Out of frustration, Alfonso took a lariat and tied Valla to El Palomino. The younger horse, like a tow truck, pulled Valla every step.

I was reminded that sometimes God doesn’t carry us; sometimes he pushes us, and other times he pulls us.

I felt Valla’s chest heaving beneath me. She did not want to go up a mountain or through canyons or even a flat road. She wanted to stop. She desired eternal rest.

I was beginning to feel like my old horse.

Instead of two hours, it took six hours of hard riding to get to San Miguel. In San Miguel, no one knew where the old mission was. Alfonso stopped people to ask for directions. They led us astray. A man in a truck told us the old mission was east in the hills, and we rode an hour up a mountain until the road ended. An elderly woman walking on the road gave us directions to a church. We rode another hour. It was an old church but not Mission San Miguel.

We finally found the mission ruins a block off the highway we followed into town. We had wasted two hours riding in circles.

Mission San Miguel was another formless slab of adobe. It was enclosed behind a wire fence and we stood outside looking in. The mission had struggled for survival and moved three times in twenty years. Lost mission records and untold personal stories, like the ever-eroding adobe walls, are dust in the wind.

Alfonso took El Palomino and Valla to a local rancho, and Dora took me to Hotel La Fonda. The hotel had been in San Miguel for over half a century, built by a Jewish couple. Dmitri, from Ukraine, and his wife, Sara, born in Siberia, had both lost family in the Holocaust and eventually emigrated—first to Los Angeles and later to San Miguel, Mexico, where they built a beautiful hotel. The hotel was aging gracefully but it, too, looked tired.

Many older hotels in northern Baja have been converted to cancer clinics, appealing to the dying and desperate. Less than a mile from Hotel La Fonda is where Steve McQueen received apricot pits, better known as laetrile, to cure his lung cancer, a virulent strain of cancer called mesothelioma. Cancer kills even cool guys.

Steve McQueen fought a good fight. He tried chemotherapy, surgery, and apricot pits. We all have our Plan D; D is for desperate. I have been there. I know how he felt, and why he was willing to try something as crazy as apricot pits to stay alive.

I knew the next day would potentially be my last day on the mission trail. It was three days before Christmas. It was time to go home. It was time to rest.

It was also time to celebrate. Dale had put up the Christmas tree, and Whitney and Stefanie were waiting for me to come home to hang the ornaments.

The decorations held precious memories. There were handmade paper ornaments from elementary school, hand-painted plaster ornaments from summer Bible school, and souvenir ornaments collected during family vacations. And Dale’s dad, Palmer, had given us an ornament every year for Christmas until he passed away. The last thing we put on the tree was the silver star tree topper Dale had made from cardboard and aluminum foil the first year we were married.

At night, just the simple act of lighting the tree in the evening helped us capture and hold on to the feeling of the Charles Dickens character that promised, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”¹

I shook myself out of pleasant memories and into the present, walked over to the window in my hotel room, and stared up at the moon, hanging like an ornament in the night sky. I was grateful not to be in my tent, freezing along El Camino Real. Here I had a soft bed to rest my tired bones.

Before drifting into sleep I prayed, “Dear heavenly Father, thank you for teaching me about life and suffering, and letting me be with these dear people and know them, for letting me feel cold and hungry, for letting me feel afraid, for letting me feel alone—knowing all is well, for you are with me. Thank you for all the lessons you have taught me on old El Camino Real. I am a better person for it. Muchas, muchas gracias. Amen.”

I was thirty-eight miles from the California border.

There was no easy way to get there. None of the trails to the border followed Junípero Serra’s journey. In 1769, Father Serra walked up the beach to San Diego. Today, an eighteen-foot high, three-hundred-foot-long fence extending into the ocean blocks the trail.

I was up before sunrise, anxious to check out the beach. I was hoping we could continue north, following the beach, as Junípero Serra had done, until we reached the border fence.

Hotel La Fonda was on a rocky bluff high above the beach, with no easy access. The wind was howling, and the tide was crushing against the base of the cliff. Even from a distance, my face glistened from wet ocean spray. Father Serra walked the beach to San Diego in late spring, when tides were lower and surges more predictable. I knew it would be foolhardy to take horses on the beach in swelling winter tides—or attempt to walk the beach to the border.

I had one more mission stop in El Descanso, and Alfonso and I continued north as best we could on side streets and through private property. When a massive flood destroyed Mission San Miguel, it was moved eight miles north to El Descanso, and renamed Mission San Miguel la Nueva. Only a few adobe rocks remained. Alfonso and I walked quietly and solemnly through the sad rubble.

As we prepared to leave the old mission ruins, Alfonso could no longer lift himself into the saddle. He stood on a large boulder in front of the mission to hoist himself atop El Palomino, and struggled even then.

After a few minutes of riding alongside the rocky beach road, Alfonso stopped to rest in the saddle. His chest heaved with each slow breath, much like Valla’s. I wasn’t sure which one would fall over first.

Alfonso no longer rode tall and straight in the saddle; neither did I, and walking was a struggle.

Alfonso was nervous. “If you want to ride a horse to the border, we should ride to Tecate. The border at Tijuana is no good. There is too much traffic. It is Christmas. There will be thousands of cars lined up at the border,” he said slowly and painfully. “Tecate may not be any better.”

He paused and lowered his head. With labored breath he whispered, “No es bueno. Nada.”

I knew Alfonso was finished riding. I had learned it was useless to argue with a vaquero once his mind is made up. Alfonso was ready to load his horses in the truck and drive to the border. As if on cue, Dora pulled up behind us in the truck.

I considered my options. I could get in the truck and drive to the border or double down and press Alfonso to keep going—although I was reluctant to do so because he didn’t look well and he sounded worse.

Or . . . I could walk the thirty-eight miles alone to the border. I was too exhausted to walk much more than thirteen miles a day, so it would take three days. That meant I would get to the border on Christmas Day. All I needed for a three-day walk was in my twenty-two-pocket fishing vest in my gear bag. Alfonso and Dora could meet Dale at the border and give him the rest of my gear.

I could do it!

And then I stopped my wild scramble thoughts.

Some people say that a feeling of completeness is good. But I say a feeling of incompleteness is better. It means there’s still something left to do. For if we have done all we dreamed to do already, doesn’t that mean we are ready to die?

Did I really want my mission walk to be over?

I never did like endings. That’s why I fought so hard to live.

I started to smile, and then to laugh. I tingled with anticipation of another adventure.

Alfonso already had the horses loaded. He and Dora were ready to go, with or without me.

I climbed merrily into the truck.

I would save one last walk on El Camino Real mission trail. Save it, and savor it.

When I needed an infusion of grace I would put on my hiking boots and start walking along the beach exactly as St. Junípero Serra did, and I would find my way through the California border to Mission San Diego, where it all started. As I looked out the dust-pocked window, watching the beautiful, harsh, brutal desert whish by, I thought, with a smile, When I come back, it’s going to be the most beautiful walk of my life.

And that was that. I was ready to go home. I was ready to see my family, and tell them the ridiculous stories of the cactus wounds, the crazy mules (and vaqueros), the narcos, the hardworking and loving people, the missions. All of it. I had so much to tell.

I still didn’t know how much time I had left. I knew there was another PET scan right around the corner, in ten days. There always was.

And with each scan, I would pray to God to give me strength to face the news with grace and peace. I was no longer terrorized by the thought of cancer coming back.

The mission walk was my transition point, where I moved beyond disease, where I found stillness of mind, where I surrendered to grace, and where, through grace, the fear of death was slowly replaced with peace.

The long walk had taught me that it was within my power to get rid of fear. And now I knew, without a doubt, that when my time came, I would be ready.

But not yet.

My mission walk wasn’t over. Not yet!

I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer that God would allow me to keep on walking, and that he would grant me . . .

A warm bed to rest upon, I care not where.

Food to nourish and replenish, I care not what.

Sun through a window, I care not the dwelling.

Kindness and affection, I care not from whom.

A daily place of worship, I care not if inside or out.

Silence and grace . . . For I care only to know Thee. Amen.

I opened my eyes and smiled, the murmurings of Dora and Alfonso talking excitedly about Christmas with their grandchild a soothing soundtrack to my thoughts. I knew that Dale would be waiting anxiously for the call I would make as we neared the border. That he would meet me there, eagerly embrace my bony frame, and take me home to warmth, comfort, family, and food.

This Mexican trek had been my journey alone, just as my journey in death will be solitary. As in life, I knew Dale would want to finish with me. We would walk the last walk alone, together. I was so thankful that for as long as I had breath in my body, I had that man by my side.

But I knew now, as never before, just how much strength I had on my own.

There were more battles ahead. I knew there would be hardship and suffering. But God would be there to guide us through it.

All is well.