Uphill
“The way of the Camino is always up,” she had said. She was kidding but not. With few exceptions, the final half-mile or more to the doorstep of our accommodations on a given day was straight uphill. We had to earn it, I joked [but not]. Those ten days we walked for hours, walked all day, walked for miles—over gravel, over dirt, over paved highways, over rocks, over ancient Roman roads, over rises, over bridges, over literal mountains. Some of it must have been downhill, or even flat. I don’t especially remember those bits.
We didn’t carry a ton, but still, there were a good ten pounds strapped to each of our backs for every one of those steps. We toted layers of clothes and liters of water and portions of lunch. We hauled things that weighed ounces but added up: hand sanitizer and sunglasses and reusable utensils. Hats and hankies. Our trekking poles when we weren’t using them. The scallop shell, four our so inches in diameter, we each had hanging off a zipper pull. Water. The packs themselves. Often, my damp socks and sports bras, laundered in the sink the previous evening, rode along with me, airing out as I walked.
One night I climbed the main drag of St. Jean Pied de Port—another insanely steep cobblestone street—back to our hotel. This was after dinner, so my backpack was back in my room and I was wearing rubber sandals. Those details aside, something about this moment was strange. “I feel like I’m walking on flat ground,” I realized out loud to my friend. He agreed. Even though it was late and we were tired, without the resistance of our packs, the weight of our own bodies suddenly weren’t providing resistance anymore—at least none that we could feel.
Did you ever play that game where you stand in a doorway, press the backs of your hands outward against the jamb for 30 seconds or a minute, and then step forward and marvel as your arms float upward, in direct opposition to gravity, without you doing anything at all? That’s the only way I can describe it—and I suppose that’s precisely how resistance training works. Gradually the body finds a new relationship with gravity depending upon how much extra weight you are carrying, or lifting, or pushing against. Take that weight away and the movement becomes effortless. After only four days, this was already beginning to happen to us.
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It was the same with sweat. On that 85-degree autumn day in southern France, in the first few minutes of our walk, perspiration began to drench me in ways and in places I was not used to. It hung out between my shoulder blades, hemmed in by the pack; insinuated itself between my palms and the foam grips of the poles. It rolled down my temples and lower back and shins, got absorbed by the merino wool garments I’d been advised to procure, kept on coming. Not half an hour into our ten-day trek, I expressed, aloud, my wonder at it. (OK, I complained.)
“Yes! Nice! Let those toxins go,” she said. Reframing, always reframing.
Showers never felt so good as they did at the ends of those days. I washed my hair joyfully every single night. Whenever I had my own room I walked around in my underwear, walked around naked, walked around with as little as possible touching my skin.
Still, the sweat became a welcome companion on the walk. It was part of a shedding, a letting go. It was one of the ways the Camino leached from me all the old, toxic, needless shit that I so longed to leave on that path—in its towns, its graveyards, its fields. I watered it all with the stuff of me, pouring endlessly from my depths, from my years on this earth.
It became a different kind of resistance training: to wit, I stopped resisting the sweat. I let it come, let it flow out, let it blanket me and get all over everything. Really, I had no choice.
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On my final two days of the trip, after I’d parted from the group to walk alone, I was gifted extremes of both wetness and hills. A steady rain followed me the entire 22 kilometers on the first day, only ceasing within a minute of when I arrived in the town I’d be staying in that night (after a final uphill mile, of course).
My very last day of walking dawned dry and sunny, and I set out cock eyed and humming along the waterfront. The Atlantic, churned up from the previous day’s storm, sent jaunty sprays up the sea wall and over the rail. I registered them as nothing more than part of the splendor of what was sure to be a divine last day. And with no way to time where my body would be when a wave decided to crest the wall, I ended up right underneath one—which turned out to be not a spray at all, but a straight-up wave. In less than a second I was wetter than I’d been in an entire day of walking in the rain.
After checking to make sure everything was still on me and intact, I laughed at myself, laughed at the Camino’s mischief, laughed with the locals walking past me. I changed my socks, took off some sopping layers, walked up more hills in the sun, and eventually dried, believing the most harrowing moments of the day’s walk behind me.
Sweet, sweet summer child.
The wave, turns out, wasn’t the Camino bidding me a giggling goodbye. It was telling me to stay awake for what was to come: the steepest, meanest, most repetitive series of hills of the entire two weeks—of my entire life. Hills I hadn’t been warned about, or at any rate wasn’t expecting. Sweat and climbing, climbing and sweat. And all without the support of the group, which had included the saintly luggage porters who’d driven the bulk of our belongings from town to town. My bag was packed tight with additional stuff: toiletries and chargers and book and spares of everything. At least a pound or two heavier than it had been all trip.
Preoccupied as I was with staying alive and upright, with my own outrage and with finishing the day (for by now I felt done, done, done), any awareness I had of how my body was still changing, my stamina still deepening, was dim at best. Plus I figured the changes were vague, temporary and would vanish when I got home.
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When I did get home, Covid kept me relatively motionless for a solid week and a half. When I could move back out into the world I had to do so slowly, leaving the stairs and hills of my usual routes for another time. Necessary as that time of stillness ultimately was, I assumed it had atrophied my muscles and blurred my body’s newfound abilities—just as it was beginning to do with the memories themselves.
One day, feeling still not wonderful but nevertheless restless, I gave it a shot. Started moseying upward, promising myself I’d only go a mile or so uphill with a straight shot back should I have to abort. My chest still ached a bit from the virus, but my legs, I realized, were doing what was still, evidently, automatic for them. They walked as though along a flat stretch of road. Despite my mildly sore lungs I wasn’t short of breath. Despite my immune system still doing its damndest to win me back, I felt none of the drag of opposing gravity.
And oh, I’d been sweating throughout those days of sickness. Sweating when it was hot, when it was cold, when I was covered in blankets or free of them. Sweating in my sleep, sweating in the shower. Understanding implicitly that this was my body voiding itself of this silly virus that had invaded, pushing it out through pores. Detox! I let it drench me, and the sheets, and my clothes, and the air. Now, the faint miasma that began to form on this first walk didn’t even register.
I started to re-engage walks with friends: my primary and preferred way to socialize. As we scaled the steps and inclines on our routes I wasn’t panting with them, like I used to. And it’s not like they aren’t in shape—by and large they are way more fit than I. Something, though, seemed to have shifted in a fundamental way.
Sure, it was in large part the resistance training. Amazing things can happen in a very short time when we do something consistently—even/especially difficult things. It’s how habits are built and broken.
More than that, though, the understanding that keeps breaking upon me like the wave that day is that I’m walking with far less baggage. Without a pack loaded with stuff. Without the painful obligations I felt daily to every human being on the planet that wasn’t me. It didn’t all just suddenly go away on the Camino, but a good amount of it did. It was leached, it was sweated out, it was walked away.
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The Camino begins, goes the wisdom, long before you set your rubber soles upon its path. I’d signed up for this October walk back in January: the start of what would be the most massive year of change in my life. Any one event would have constituted the Event of the Year, and I had at least half a dozen. One of my dogs died. A good friend died. I met and formed a relationship with my birth siblings. I decided to leave my job—an event just as soul-rocking as the actual leaving. I created a business: a real little corporation with its own bank account. My mother in law died and I did what I could to help my husband in its complex, emotionally heavy aftermath.
And at last, I walked. By then everything that had been heavy in my soul had gotten shaken up, was floating in me like glitter in a snow globe. On the walk, my body learned how to let it go. How to let go, period.
Of course none of it is permanent, or complete, or will continue to occur automatically without upkeep—which, in this case, means uphill. The way of my ongoing Camino is always up. I make my walks these days as uppy as I can. Let these sacred practice sessions fill all the space I have to give them. Let them be my prayer and my gratitude practice and my moments of release. Fill my newly spacious lungs with air and let the sweat roll.
Life around this body feels similar. Historically it’s been an exhausting, effortful slog, I realize, because I’ve been carrying around bags and bags of what I perceive to be others’ needs. That is some of what I left on that endlessly capacious path.
