The Ends of the Earth by Vaughan Supple '23.5

The Ends of the Earth

Words & Photos by Vaughan Supple '23.5

An old Welsh woman with fragile eyes told me you’ve gotta find a seashell on the first day of the trek. “Hide it deep inside your pocket,” she said, “somewhere it won’t fall out.” It represents all the weighty thoughts and feelings that, by the end of the trail, you hope will dissipate into invisible ash.

This was a custom of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage through the north of Spain that we embarked on in autumn of 2019. My travel partner and I began one September morning in a modest Spanish villa, rising at dawn and hiking up steep green mountains adorned with hoards of sheep. The journey took us across the north country, through dozens of towns and cities on our path to the shore. With a few threadbare clothes, bags on our backs, and trusty boots on our feet, we walked five hundred miles along grassy meadows, lonely highways and scorched forest footpaths. We passed through castle ruins, hollow churches, lively courtyards and rainy brick bridges.

"A million particles of salt flew through the air"

Hiking the Camino each day, you start to get into a rhythm: rise early and begin the route, stop for a quick lunch before resuming the walk, settle down in a nearby town around dusk and then chef up dinner before retiring for the night. This particular day, the last day of the expedition, was no exception to that rule, and yet there loomed an entirely foreign atmosphere by the evening. We wandered like sleepwalkers, silently contemplating the remaining steps on our footpath, which dwindled with each passing second. Our daily routine had become rhythmic, almost musical; we’d been dancing to the same tune for the past two months. In a feeble attempt to keep the music going, we shuffled more slowly than usual toward our final stop. Eventually, though, the end of the trail came into view. Up ahead, we saw a lighthouse perched upon the edge of rock cliffs, overlooking the vast Atlantic. I climbed out past the barrier and found a cranny in the rocks where I could sit alone. Caterwauling over sheer rugged rock, the wind was an incessant scream sent from Earth to deter tiny humans from scaling her shores. But in their decided ferocity, the howling gales became a meditative constant. I became drowned out in time, like the cyclical waves one hundred feet below. I clutched my palms against the stone and gazed out, my squinting eyes watering at the grandeur before me. Out past the cliffs lay an ocean of endless magnitude, restless and uniform all the same. At the horizon, the sea kissed the underbelly of the setting sun, so hot and piercing in its fury that the entire sky was ablaze with color. A million particles of salt flew through the air and a million more inhabited the teeming whitecaps below. In the core of my being, I began to feel the combination of awe and fear that the religious call God.

I sat and watched the sun’s red light fade over the final day of the expedition. What I felt inside was at times contradictory: a bittersweet mélange of triumph, melancholy and nostalgia. All of this endured as I listened to the ocean crash against the rocks and all that remained was a sense of fulfillment. We had walked until there was nowhere left to walk and now we’d reached the ends of the Earth, a quaint coastal town called Finisterre: finis meaning “end” and terre meaning “Earth.”

The sun had dipped down below the horizon, and after an hour or so, the sky was dark and lonesome. Time had no apparent speed and everything moved in

"It represents all the weighty thoughts and feelings that, by the end of the trail, you hope will dissipate into invisible ash."

cycles: the waves, the wind and the rotating beam of dim luster cast out by the lighthouse above. Its light traced its way across the edges of the shore, illuminating the darkened cliffs, then shooting out over the sea into nothingness.

I recalled the old Welsh woman with fragile eyes and reaching into the depths of my backpack, I pulled out the seashell I had scouted on day one. Despite its size, it now held a great weight in my palm. I nestled it on the edge of the rock face and I left it there with everything else that had followed me to this place. I know the wind continued screaming into the night, but in my memory, everything is silent.