The Walker and the Saint
(NOTE: The Walker and the Saint by Edie Littlefield Sundby was published in The Wall Street Journal, September 2015.)
I started walking Father Junipero Serra’s old California mission trail the day I was told I was dying of cancer.
I’m not a Catholic, but I love to walk. So did Father Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan missionary who traveled more than 24,000 miles in his lifetime, mostly by foot, and founded nine missions along the El Camino Real, from San Diego to San Francisco.
I believe that walking has helped keep me alive. Statistically, I shouldn’t be. Eight years ago cancer was discovered in my gallbladder, and it spread everywhere—liver, groin, bowel, glands in my neck and throat. Massive amounts of chemotherapy, multiple radical surgeries and high-intensity radiation have spared my life. But the cancer invariably returns. Three years ago it re-emerged in my liver and lungs; it was subdued only after 18 intense months of aggressive treatment that included removal of my right lung.
A few months after that surgery, I walked 800 miles in Father Serra’s footsteps along the old El Camino Real mission trail, averaging 15 miles a day for 55 days. On the 40th day, after 600 miles, my feet stopped hurting and life became transcendent and intensely vivid. Even the most ordinary moments were infused with wonder and awe.
Like countless other walkers through the ages—Father Serra in the 1700s, or Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century—I find that long-distance walks ignite what Thoreau called the “great awakening light” that lies within. At the end of the 800-mile trail I didn’t want to stop walking. But I did stop, and gradually over the next two years, day-to-day sameness dimmed the great awakening light.
Early this year a CT scan revealed that the cancer is back, this time a tumor in my remaining lung. It was time for another mission walk, to connect with the wellspring of joy within.
By chance—if there really is such a thing—a year ago I became acquainted with another mission walker, Joyce Blue Summers, who walks the trail in segments, flying to California every few months, usually alone. She lives in Dallas but grew up in California and has fond memories of family visits to the old Mission San Luis Rey. Neither she nor I had shown much interest in walking before commencing our separate travels. Thoreau believed that one becomes a walker only by the grace of God: “It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker,” he wrote in what he considered his best essay, “Walking,” published in the May 1862 Atlantic Monthly.
By luck, or Providence, Joyce was preparing to walk the first wilderness segment of the mission trail—a 48-mile trek between old Mission Santa Barbara and Mission Santa Ines. She asked if I would walk with her. I said yes, as long as she was willing to walk a different path than one I had previously taken. “Life is too short to retrace steps,” I said. She agreed.
This 48-mile stretch is, in my opinion, the hardest of the 800-mile trail, as one must cross the rugged Santa Ynez Mountains. There are three choices, none good. One trail, called Arroyo Burro, follows an old Indian and prospecting footpath through the wilderness. It is a three-day walk requiring full camp gear, food and water. When I walk I carry less than 6 pounds—essentials like an extra pair of underwear, a can of bear spray and a toothbrush with the handle sawed off—stuffed in a Cabela’s multipocket fishing vest and a small lumbar fanny pack. Even that little weight becomes painful as sensitive nerves in my abdomen and shoulder, damaged in liver and lung surgeries, become irritated.
A second route, San Marcos Pass, is direct but also terrifying. It is an exhausting and steep walk up twisty Old Stagecoach Road to a deadly stretch of pavement described by the local newspaper as littered with “gratuitous gore.” The 32-mile road is mostly a two lane no-passing zone without a shoulder, following tight and blind switchbacks cut into the mountain. Rocks tumble down as cars speed by day and night. This is the route I walked previously, and I still shudder at the memory.
Joyce and I decided that Refugio Pass, the path of the Franciscan priests, was the best alternative, although getting there would require a three-day, 30-mile walk along the beach, careful planning and luck. Our ability to complete the walk would depend on tides and weather, and beach closures wherever and whenever the endangered Western Snowy Plover is spotted nesting in beach scrapes.
Planning a 30-mile beach walk that can be done only at low tide is not easy. Google isn’t helpful. Satellite GPS maps show what was, not what is. Nature isn’t neat and logical. Not even Google can predict surging tides and shifting sands. Perhaps Google assumes no one is foolish enough to wade into churning surf to get around an impassable rocky point, or walk miles over beaches of stone and oil seeps. A walk like this is foolish—but also one of faith.
The first day we walk 13 miles: six along the Santa Barbara coast plus seven to and from hotels. We commence at sunrise, and for 4 miles we’re imprisoned between towering sea cliffs and the ocean, on a narrow ribbon of sand that is submerged at high tide. Set back from the cliffs is the posh Hope Ranch enclave, where Snoop Dogg is among the residents. Nature’s steep bluffs kindly hide the mansions from sight.
Joyce and I walk apart, in silence. She is a solitary, not a social walker. “As I see it,” she says, “We are two solo walkers walking together.” The perfect long-distance companion.
We weave between rocky points, driftwood, kelp piles, seashells and beach scrapes with dozens of nesting birds. The beauty is indescribable. Like Thoreau, we are “elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence.” It has been a few hundred years since the Europeans first explored these beaches. Gaspar de Portolá, commander of the first Spanish expedition, noted in an August 1769 journal entry that it took him a day to travel “no more than half a league”—a little over a mile. The terrain remains wild and formidable.
We come to More Mesa, rising 200 feet above the beach. In 1861, T. Wallace More bought a thousand acres here for $5 an acre. Before being murdered by squatters, he made a fortune mining tar seeps along the sea cliffs and selling asphaltum to pave San Francisco’s streets. Along the wild beach below, oil seeps amid sand and stone, coating the large rocks that block the beach. Undeterred, Joyce and I slowly crawl over slippery boulders and wade through beach tar. By the end we smell like a freshly paved road.
Other challenges lie ahead, like the Goleta Slough. When the Franciscans arrived in 1769, the slough was a huge estuary with “many marshes and lagoons,” Father Serra’s pupil and friend, Father Juan Crespí, wrote in his diary. Two hundred and fifty years of civilization have reduced the slough to a fraction of its original size, but if we are to continue it will be through the slough’s surging tidal waters. Joyce unfolds a small walking stick she carries for such purposes, and plunges in first, using the stick for support and to gauge the depth. Once again Providence smiles on us. The swirling water is thigh deep and navigable; Joyce carefully makes it across. I quickly follow. We finish the day by leaving the shore route and walking 2 miles up a road to a cheap hotel.
The second day’s route is a bit shorter, 11 miles, but with more rocky barriers. As we climb down toward the ocean the next morning, the sun lightens the sky but not the sooty darkness at the base of the rocky bluffs. More than a century ago thick black clouds of smoke rose here from try-pots burning chunks of greasy gray whale fat being melted into lamp and heating oil. The whaling station operated less than eight years, but long enough to permanently stain the bluffs. Bones may still be found under the sand where these 30-ton devilfish were stripped of their outer layer of fat and then left to rot.
High ridges jut into the sea and separate the beach into a dozen private playgrounds. Joyce and I feel the joy and excitement of childhood as we play blind man’s bluff through tides surging rhythmically around rock fortresses. By noon, when we stop to rest, we have seen no one for hours. The beach is ours. It is paradise. Almost. The sand is littered with tar balls. There are over a thousand petroleum seep fields in the area, leaking over 25 tons of oil a day from the seafloor, effectively an oil spill every day for the past several hundred thousand years. Microbes consume most. What is left washes ashore.
Pieces of corroded metal occasionally protrude from the surf, remnants from an oil boom that lasted forty years. In 1969 an oil platform 6 miles from shore spilled thousands of barrels of crude into the sea and fouled 40 miles of coastline—ending oil production along the California coast.
We pass an ancient cactus clinging to a steep sloping hill. Local legend has it that before World War II, a Japanese captain waiting for his tanker to fill attempted to get a clipping of it. But he slipped and fell headfirst into the thorns. A group of oil workers on the dock laughed as he struggled to free himself. The humiliated captain returned in 1942 in command of a Japanese submarine and fired at the oil storage tanks. He missed, causing damage to neither tanks nor cactus, but inflicting considerable psychological trauma on coastal residents.
It is midafternoon when we reach the end of the day’s walk. Our feet are tired and our throats thirsty. I use my iPhone to book the cheapest room available within 12 miles, an unheated canvas yurt at El Capitan Beach. We walk the narrow dirt path up a canyon to a main road, summon an Uber car, and watch the screen in amusement as the driver makes numerous U-turns attempting to find us using GPS.
Our third day requires rising before dawn—the lowest tides of the month are predicted, and we have three hours to walk 8 miles along the exposed beach. Except the beach turns out to be 8 miles of rock. We struggle to walk a quarter-mile an hour. Joyce and I quickly lose sight of each other. The terrain is difficult, but I experience the sort of ecstatic contrast that Thoreau described: “My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.”
My entire being is intensely focused and aware. With every slow, purposeful step I feel more alive. My body arches forward against weathered rock, bent in a crouched position like a wild animal. My mind empties and a heightened sense of well-being floods my senses. Nature is overwhelmingly beautiful, and peaceful. That peace becomes my peace.
We pass an endless stretch of soaring cliffs, and canyons with wild-sounding Spanish names: Tecolote, Dos Pueblos, Las Varas. Soon they become cañadas: Cañada del Venadito, Cañada del Refugio. This is wild and free California as Father Serra might have seen it.
Near one of these canyons a World War II prisoner-of-war camp once stood, housing hundreds of German soldiers from Gen. Erwin Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps. At night the POWs were kept under heavy guard; during the day they harvested crops at nearby Edwards Ranch. Some prisoners fell in love with the area and returned after the war to settle.
We come upon a manicured mansion, with darkened windows and no sign of life, set back on a hill. An alabaster stairway leads down to the shore, and there, in the middle of our wild beach of stone, is a green patio with freshly cut lawn, blossoming flowers, and palm trees almost too perfect to be real. To our tired eyes it looks like an artificial sound stage of a Hollywood movie set.
We walk on, past wind-carved outcroppings of Monterey shale so loose it flakes when touched; magnificently etched stone sculptures rise out of the sea. Beyond this rocky passage the stone is too wild and the sea too high. The path of the padres exits the beach and follows an old Chumash Indian trail atop the mesa. The overgrown path runs between railroad tracks and cliff’s edge. It offers a shortcut to Refugio Beach and the base of Santa Ynez Mountains, but shortcuts are of no interest to Joyce and me. The walker who follows the footprints of man may miss the footprints of nature and lose the way. We follow nature.
Our feet have soaked in gritty salt water for the past four hours but we have no time to rest. There are four tortuous miles of rocky coast before we get to Refugio Beach. There are no reliable maps of this area. The only one we could find before departing was a hand-drawn map from 1998 with little detail other than a few place names and a warning, “passable only at minus tides.”
The day becomes grayer, the water higher. At one point to proceed we must climb atop a deteriorating sea wall stamped “1932”. Thirty feet below us waves lash against piles of rock along the wall’s base. It is similar to walking a balance beam and we concentrate on looking ahead, not down.
We come to a stone fortress; the water is too high to pass. A seagull watches from atop the rock. We turn back, hoping to find a path up the steep slope to a trail above the beach, but even then, I can’t help but look forward. Through the mist, the faint outline of the seagull is barely visible, still on its perch, looking as sad as my heart felt. “Live free, child of the mist.” Thoreau wasted no time on sad reflection. Once ascended to the trail, I look down at the beach below. A faint glow breaks through, a “lighting up of the mist by the sun.” The seagull takes flight.
We reach Refugio Beach and spend the night at Circle Bar B Ranch. Jim Brown, the owner, entertains us at dinner with stories of rancheros and cowboys, of his wanderings through mountain canyons and along creeks as a young boy almost 80 years ago. The sun is setting on the West, and Jim’s life. He pauses. “Don’t get me started,” he says with a laugh that belies the pain in his eyes, the yearning in his voice. The West is myth. It is legend. It is mystery and poetry. It is disappearing.
After three days along the coast, we have a fourth day of walking to reach Mission Santa Ines, our destination—it lies 16 miles away, over the Santa Ynez Mountains, to the east. Like Thoreau, we head that direction not by choice. “Westward I go free,” he proclaimed, “but eastward I go only by force.”
For the first 3 miles, we walk through a canyon of cultivated fields, the air heavily scented by the perfume of lemon and avocado leaves. Wild yellow mustard flowers line the road, their ancient seed scattered by Franciscan priests to make the El Camino Real easier to find.
Farther up, the road becomes steeper and the switchbacks more severe. Joyce walks ahead while I stop. I am thirsty, my water bottle empty. Spying a road that leads, after less than a mile, to Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan’s modest vacation home, I head that way. I walk through the gate to the ranch. An ancient-looking white horse comes from out of the trees and leads me to the house. As I drink from a hose, the white horse stands facing west, sunken eyes watching me. I turn to leave and the horse follows, its head low and mane dragging. Soon it, too, will become dust and return to the earth. Flesh comes and goes. Thou knowest not the way of the spirit.
Joyce is several miles down the mountain by the time I catch up with her. The daylight is fading as we make our way to Mission Santa Ines. By the time we arrive, darkness has fallen, but the chapel is alight with parish life. We savor the glowing scene from the outside, and decide not to disturb it.
Joyce returns home to Dallas. I check into a room at Stanford’s medical center, awaiting cancer treatment.
Every long walk is a great undertaking. A Franciscan friend of Father Serra wrote, more than 250 years ago, “Great undertakings have always encountered great contradictions.” Great lives do too. Father Serra’s old mission trail is still wild and free. It has been a trail for natives and explorers set on conquest; a road traveled by sinners and saints in the name of religion; a route traversed by miners seeking riches; a path of westward expansion and progress; a migrant highway of hope and happiness; and, today, in the 21st millennium, near Palo Alto and San Francisco, it is a golden freeway of geniuses upending the world order. The dirt is the same; it is spirit that breathes new life.
I live with a constant, pressing awareness of death. I know that the best way to live with fear is to keep moving. Once I start to walk, I am not afraid anymore; all is well.
Life is lived one step ahead of death, and each time cancer strikes I am determined to keep pace, God willing. Walking is a metaphor for life: I walk one step at a time, one day at a time, and God decides how long and how far.
I pray God take me, not in bed, but with boots on, walking west and free on St. Junipero Serra’s mission trail.
(This is the extended on-line version; a shorter version appeared in the print edition and is available here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-walke...)
I started walking Father Junipero Serra’s old California mission trail the day I was told I was dying of cancer.
I’m not a Catholic, but I love to walk. So did Father Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan missionary who traveled more than 24,000 miles in his lifetime, mostly by foot, and founded nine missions along the El Camino Real, from San Diego to San Francisco.
I believe that walking has helped keep me alive. Statistically, I shouldn’t be. Eight years ago cancer was discovered in my gallbladder, and it spread everywhere—liver, groin, bowel, glands in my neck and throat. Massive amounts of chemotherapy, multiple radical surgeries and high-intensity radiation have spared my life. But the cancer invariably returns. Three years ago it re-emerged in my liver and lungs; it was subdued only after 18 intense months of aggressive treatment that included removal of my right lung.
A few months after that surgery, I walked 800 miles in Father Serra’s footsteps along the old El Camino Real mission trail, averaging 15 miles a day for 55 days. On the 40th day, after 600 miles, my feet stopped hurting and life became transcendent and intensely vivid. Even the most ordinary moments were infused with wonder and awe.
Like countless other walkers through the ages—Father Serra in the 1700s, or Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century—I find that long-distance walks ignite what Thoreau called the “great awakening light” that lies within. At the end of the 800-mile trail I didn’t want to stop walking. But I did stop, and gradually over the next two years, day-to-day sameness dimmed the great awakening light.
Early this year a CT scan revealed that the cancer is back, this time a tumor in my remaining lung. It was time for another mission walk, to connect with the wellspring of joy within.
By chance—if there really is such a thing—a year ago I became acquainted with another mission walker, Joyce Blue Summers, who walks the trail in segments, flying to California every few months, usually alone. She lives in Dallas but grew up in California and has fond memories of family visits to the old Mission San Luis Rey. Neither she nor I had shown much interest in walking before commencing our separate travels. Thoreau believed that one becomes a walker only by the grace of God: “It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker,” he wrote in what he considered his best essay, “Walking,” published in the May 1862 Atlantic Monthly.
By luck, or Providence, Joyce was preparing to walk the first wilderness segment of the mission trail—a 48-mile trek between old Mission Santa Barbara and Mission Santa Ines. She asked if I would walk with her. I said yes, as long as she was willing to walk a different path than one I had previously taken. “Life is too short to retrace steps,” I said. She agreed.
This 48-mile stretch is, in my opinion, the hardest of the 800-mile trail, as one must cross the rugged Santa Ynez Mountains. There are three choices, none good. One trail, called Arroyo Burro, follows an old Indian and prospecting footpath through the wilderness. It is a three-day walk requiring full camp gear, food and water. When I walk I carry less than 6 pounds—essentials like an extra pair of underwear, a can of bear spray and a toothbrush with the handle sawed off—stuffed in a Cabela’s multipocket fishing vest and a small lumbar fanny pack. Even that little weight becomes painful as sensitive nerves in my abdomen and shoulder, damaged in liver and lung surgeries, become irritated.
A second route, San Marcos Pass, is direct but also terrifying. It is an exhausting and steep walk up twisty Old Stagecoach Road to a deadly stretch of pavement described by the local newspaper as littered with “gratuitous gore.” The 32-mile road is mostly a two lane no-passing zone without a shoulder, following tight and blind switchbacks cut into the mountain. Rocks tumble down as cars speed by day and night. This is the route I walked previously, and I still shudder at the memory.
Joyce and I decided that Refugio Pass, the path of the Franciscan priests, was the best alternative, although getting there would require a three-day, 30-mile walk along the beach, careful planning and luck. Our ability to complete the walk would depend on tides and weather, and beach closures wherever and whenever the endangered Western Snowy Plover is spotted nesting in beach scrapes.
Planning a 30-mile beach walk that can be done only at low tide is not easy. Google isn’t helpful. Satellite GPS maps show what was, not what is. Nature isn’t neat and logical. Not even Google can predict surging tides and shifting sands. Perhaps Google assumes no one is foolish enough to wade into churning surf to get around an impassable rocky point, or walk miles over beaches of stone and oil seeps. A walk like this is foolish—but also one of faith.
The first day we walk 13 miles: six along the Santa Barbara coast plus seven to and from hotels. We commence at sunrise, and for 4 miles we’re imprisoned between towering sea cliffs and the ocean, on a narrow ribbon of sand that is submerged at high tide. Set back from the cliffs is the posh Hope Ranch enclave, where Snoop Dogg is among the residents. Nature’s steep bluffs kindly hide the mansions from sight.
Joyce and I walk apart, in silence. She is a solitary, not a social walker. “As I see it,” she says, “We are two solo walkers walking together.” The perfect long-distance companion.
We weave between rocky points, driftwood, kelp piles, seashells and beach scrapes with dozens of nesting birds. The beauty is indescribable. Like Thoreau, we are “elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence.” It has been a few hundred years since the Europeans first explored these beaches. Gaspar de Portolá, commander of the first Spanish expedition, noted in an August 1769 journal entry that it took him a day to travel “no more than half a league”—a little over a mile. The terrain remains wild and formidable.
We come to More Mesa, rising 200 feet above the beach. In 1861, T. Wallace More bought a thousand acres here for $5 an acre. Before being murdered by squatters, he made a fortune mining tar seeps along the sea cliffs and selling asphaltum to pave San Francisco’s streets. Along the wild beach below, oil seeps amid sand and stone, coating the large rocks that block the beach. Undeterred, Joyce and I slowly crawl over slippery boulders and wade through beach tar. By the end we smell like a freshly paved road.
Other challenges lie ahead, like the Goleta Slough. When the Franciscans arrived in 1769, the slough was a huge estuary with “many marshes and lagoons,” Father Serra’s pupil and friend, Father Juan Crespí, wrote in his diary. Two hundred and fifty years of civilization have reduced the slough to a fraction of its original size, but if we are to continue it will be through the slough’s surging tidal waters. Joyce unfolds a small walking stick she carries for such purposes, and plunges in first, using the stick for support and to gauge the depth. Once again Providence smiles on us. The swirling water is thigh deep and navigable; Joyce carefully makes it across. I quickly follow. We finish the day by leaving the shore route and walking 2 miles up a road to a cheap hotel.
The second day’s route is a bit shorter, 11 miles, but with more rocky barriers. As we climb down toward the ocean the next morning, the sun lightens the sky but not the sooty darkness at the base of the rocky bluffs. More than a century ago thick black clouds of smoke rose here from try-pots burning chunks of greasy gray whale fat being melted into lamp and heating oil. The whaling station operated less than eight years, but long enough to permanently stain the bluffs. Bones may still be found under the sand where these 30-ton devilfish were stripped of their outer layer of fat and then left to rot.
High ridges jut into the sea and separate the beach into a dozen private playgrounds. Joyce and I feel the joy and excitement of childhood as we play blind man’s bluff through tides surging rhythmically around rock fortresses. By noon, when we stop to rest, we have seen no one for hours. The beach is ours. It is paradise. Almost. The sand is littered with tar balls. There are over a thousand petroleum seep fields in the area, leaking over 25 tons of oil a day from the seafloor, effectively an oil spill every day for the past several hundred thousand years. Microbes consume most. What is left washes ashore.
Pieces of corroded metal occasionally protrude from the surf, remnants from an oil boom that lasted forty years. In 1969 an oil platform 6 miles from shore spilled thousands of barrels of crude into the sea and fouled 40 miles of coastline—ending oil production along the California coast.
We pass an ancient cactus clinging to a steep sloping hill. Local legend has it that before World War II, a Japanese captain waiting for his tanker to fill attempted to get a clipping of it. But he slipped and fell headfirst into the thorns. A group of oil workers on the dock laughed as he struggled to free himself. The humiliated captain returned in 1942 in command of a Japanese submarine and fired at the oil storage tanks. He missed, causing damage to neither tanks nor cactus, but inflicting considerable psychological trauma on coastal residents.
It is midafternoon when we reach the end of the day’s walk. Our feet are tired and our throats thirsty. I use my iPhone to book the cheapest room available within 12 miles, an unheated canvas yurt at El Capitan Beach. We walk the narrow dirt path up a canyon to a main road, summon an Uber car, and watch the screen in amusement as the driver makes numerous U-turns attempting to find us using GPS.
Our third day requires rising before dawn—the lowest tides of the month are predicted, and we have three hours to walk 8 miles along the exposed beach. Except the beach turns out to be 8 miles of rock. We struggle to walk a quarter-mile an hour. Joyce and I quickly lose sight of each other. The terrain is difficult, but I experience the sort of ecstatic contrast that Thoreau described: “My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.”
My entire being is intensely focused and aware. With every slow, purposeful step I feel more alive. My body arches forward against weathered rock, bent in a crouched position like a wild animal. My mind empties and a heightened sense of well-being floods my senses. Nature is overwhelmingly beautiful, and peaceful. That peace becomes my peace.
We pass an endless stretch of soaring cliffs, and canyons with wild-sounding Spanish names: Tecolote, Dos Pueblos, Las Varas. Soon they become cañadas: Cañada del Venadito, Cañada del Refugio. This is wild and free California as Father Serra might have seen it.
Near one of these canyons a World War II prisoner-of-war camp once stood, housing hundreds of German soldiers from Gen. Erwin Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps. At night the POWs were kept under heavy guard; during the day they harvested crops at nearby Edwards Ranch. Some prisoners fell in love with the area and returned after the war to settle.
We come upon a manicured mansion, with darkened windows and no sign of life, set back on a hill. An alabaster stairway leads down to the shore, and there, in the middle of our wild beach of stone, is a green patio with freshly cut lawn, blossoming flowers, and palm trees almost too perfect to be real. To our tired eyes it looks like an artificial sound stage of a Hollywood movie set.
We walk on, past wind-carved outcroppings of Monterey shale so loose it flakes when touched; magnificently etched stone sculptures rise out of the sea. Beyond this rocky passage the stone is too wild and the sea too high. The path of the padres exits the beach and follows an old Chumash Indian trail atop the mesa. The overgrown path runs between railroad tracks and cliff’s edge. It offers a shortcut to Refugio Beach and the base of Santa Ynez Mountains, but shortcuts are of no interest to Joyce and me. The walker who follows the footprints of man may miss the footprints of nature and lose the way. We follow nature.
Our feet have soaked in gritty salt water for the past four hours but we have no time to rest. There are four tortuous miles of rocky coast before we get to Refugio Beach. There are no reliable maps of this area. The only one we could find before departing was a hand-drawn map from 1998 with little detail other than a few place names and a warning, “passable only at minus tides.”
The day becomes grayer, the water higher. At one point to proceed we must climb atop a deteriorating sea wall stamped “1932”. Thirty feet below us waves lash against piles of rock along the wall’s base. It is similar to walking a balance beam and we concentrate on looking ahead, not down.
We come to a stone fortress; the water is too high to pass. A seagull watches from atop the rock. We turn back, hoping to find a path up the steep slope to a trail above the beach, but even then, I can’t help but look forward. Through the mist, the faint outline of the seagull is barely visible, still on its perch, looking as sad as my heart felt. “Live free, child of the mist.” Thoreau wasted no time on sad reflection. Once ascended to the trail, I look down at the beach below. A faint glow breaks through, a “lighting up of the mist by the sun.” The seagull takes flight.
We reach Refugio Beach and spend the night at Circle Bar B Ranch. Jim Brown, the owner, entertains us at dinner with stories of rancheros and cowboys, of his wanderings through mountain canyons and along creeks as a young boy almost 80 years ago. The sun is setting on the West, and Jim’s life. He pauses. “Don’t get me started,” he says with a laugh that belies the pain in his eyes, the yearning in his voice. The West is myth. It is legend. It is mystery and poetry. It is disappearing.
After three days along the coast, we have a fourth day of walking to reach Mission Santa Ines, our destination—it lies 16 miles away, over the Santa Ynez Mountains, to the east. Like Thoreau, we head that direction not by choice. “Westward I go free,” he proclaimed, “but eastward I go only by force.”
For the first 3 miles, we walk through a canyon of cultivated fields, the air heavily scented by the perfume of lemon and avocado leaves. Wild yellow mustard flowers line the road, their ancient seed scattered by Franciscan priests to make the El Camino Real easier to find.
Farther up, the road becomes steeper and the switchbacks more severe. Joyce walks ahead while I stop. I am thirsty, my water bottle empty. Spying a road that leads, after less than a mile, to Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan’s modest vacation home, I head that way. I walk through the gate to the ranch. An ancient-looking white horse comes from out of the trees and leads me to the house. As I drink from a hose, the white horse stands facing west, sunken eyes watching me. I turn to leave and the horse follows, its head low and mane dragging. Soon it, too, will become dust and return to the earth. Flesh comes and goes. Thou knowest not the way of the spirit.
Joyce is several miles down the mountain by the time I catch up with her. The daylight is fading as we make our way to Mission Santa Ines. By the time we arrive, darkness has fallen, but the chapel is alight with parish life. We savor the glowing scene from the outside, and decide not to disturb it.
Joyce returns home to Dallas. I check into a room at Stanford’s medical center, awaiting cancer treatment.
Every long walk is a great undertaking. A Franciscan friend of Father Serra wrote, more than 250 years ago, “Great undertakings have always encountered great contradictions.” Great lives do too. Father Serra’s old mission trail is still wild and free. It has been a trail for natives and explorers set on conquest; a road traveled by sinners and saints in the name of religion; a route traversed by miners seeking riches; a path of westward expansion and progress; a migrant highway of hope and happiness; and, today, in the 21st millennium, near Palo Alto and San Francisco, it is a golden freeway of geniuses upending the world order. The dirt is the same; it is spirit that breathes new life.
I live with a constant, pressing awareness of death. I know that the best way to live with fear is to keep moving. Once I start to walk, I am not afraid anymore; all is well.
Life is lived one step ahead of death, and each time cancer strikes I am determined to keep pace, God willing. Walking is a metaphor for life: I walk one step at a time, one day at a time, and God decides how long and how far.
I pray God take me, not in bed, but with boots on, walking west and free on St. Junipero Serra’s mission trail.
(This is the extended on-line version; a shorter version appeared in the print edition and is available here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-walke...)
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