The Night on the Mountain

Over a year ago, First Presbyterian Church in Holland, Michigan, hosted the launch party for my most recent book, The Traveler’s Path. Forty or fifty people — friends, family, and church members — were gathered in the church's M&M Café. When everyone was seated, I offered a welcome and then read aloud my favorite story from the book, which my wife has heard more times than she can count. I had read it enough times at my desk to know where the funny parts were — or where I thought they were. I looked up at the right moments, expecting a few chuckles.

Instead, the room was quiet.

Not restless quiet. Attentive quiet. Disconcertingly quiet. And I’ve been thinking about that ever since, because I suspect everyone there that night understood the story better than I did. It isn’t a funny story, after all. It’s a story about being afraid.

So let me tell it again for those of you who weren’t there and haven’t read the book.

The Camino Francés begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a French town nestled at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the first day of walking is famously one of the hardest of the whole 500-mile journey — up and over the mountains, into Spain. I had read the pilgrimage guidebooks. I had trained, or thought I had, which on the first morning amounts to the same thing. I remember seeing the road tilt upward almost as soon as I left town, and I remember feeling equal to the challenge. A 20-lb. pack on my back and the whole Camino ahead of me. What could a mountain teach me that I didn’t already know?

A great deal, as it turned out.

What went wrong was my over-confidence — or hubris, which happens to be one of the seven deadly sins. The sensible thing to do would have been to take a rest day after flying from the U.S. — in other words, time to recover, rehydrate, and let my body figure out what time zone it was in, before asking it to cross a mountain range. Somehow I didn’t know that 17 miles on the first day, with a 5,000-foot change in elevation, on an unexpectedly warm end-of-February day would be difficult for a man whose body still believed it was somewhere over the Atlantic.

At some point in the afternoon, the day stopped being an adventure and became something closer to a nightmare. The sun was going down, and I was alone on a mountain somewhere between France and Spain. The fear that followed was something I haven’t experience many times before.

There was no shelter I could reach before dark, and no version of the evening in which I walked my way out of the problem. So, I considered my options, which narrowed rather quickly to just one. I rolled out my sleeping bag beside the path and crawled in. (Actually, I rolled out the sleeping bag on top of my rain poncho, the only time I was to need it on the Camino. )

Here is something you should know about me: I hate camping. I learned later that what I did is called “cowboy camping.” Under the stars. Without a tent. I lay there listening to the night sounds — every rustle an animal, and every animal, at least in my imagination, recognizing me as a meal.

When light came, around 6:00, I realized that I had made it through the night. And so I rolled up my sleeping bag, repacked my backpack, and kept walking. The other 483 (or so) miles followed from that decision.

Here is what I didn’t understand that night and didn’t fully understand even after I wrote that chapter in my book: the fear was not an interruption in my pilgrimage. It was in many ways the beginning of it. I had walked out of Saint Jean that morning carrying a certain version of myself — a man who had been a pastor for more than 40 years, who had crossed an ocean to serve a congregation, and who was reasonably sure he knew what he was made of. The mountain dismantled that man in a single evening. Pilgrims like to say the Camino gives you what you need rather than what you want. What I needed, apparently, on the very first night, was to be small and afraid, and then to find a way to keep walking.

Maybe that’s why nobody laughed at the launch. My guess is that everyone in the room for my launch has had a night like this — not on a mountain, but in a hospital room, say. Or when the telephone rings unexpectedly late in the evening. Or a first day at something they aren’t sure they could do. You don’t laugh at a story you’re inside of.

This fall I’m going to walk again — the Via Francigena this time, the stretch from Lucca to Rome. People ask me why, and I have a bunch of respectable answers about Tuscany, pilgrimage, and the writing project I hope to work on when I return home.

But the honest answer has something to do with that night on the Pyrenees. I know now what the first night out can feel like, but I’m going anyway, chastened. I'm a different person.