he sun was still rising when I realized I wasn’t alone on the trail. The forest was just thick enough to make the world seem enclosed by the arc of the holm oak tree branches overhead. The open fields of Navarra and vineyards of Rioja lay ahead, and I was savoring the fleeting feeling of a small, private world. Having left Estella in northern Spain that morning, I was roughly 100 kilometers in on my almost 800-kilometer walk across Spain along the French Way of El Camino de Santiago when I caught sight of a fellow pilgrim, Wheelbarrow Man. I estimated Wheelbarrow Man, with his frizzy white beard and hunched back, to be about 60. He was carrying two sizable packs — one backpacker’s pack and a smaller pack on his front. His companion, a taller, slender, wispy-haired woman speaking French, carried another pack and trailed softly behind as the man dragged the wheelbarrow over rocks and roots and other uneven surfaces. I had been trying to guess their story since I first spotted them on day one in the Pyrenees. In the six days since I’d begun my journey in Saint Jean Pied de Port, France, I’d confirmed my suspicion that no amount of planning could have prepared me for meeting the wide variety of
pilgrims walking the Camino path. They came from places farther away, spoke more languages, and walked for more reasons — reasons I never could have anticipated. In coming together, we asked each other why: Why leave whatever life you’ve left to walk across Spain? When the trail finally brought me back to Wheelbarrow Man that morning, I broke the silence with the typical pilgrim greeting: Hola, Buen Camino! In basic conversational French I had picked up at cafés during a study abroad semester in Angers, Wheelbarrow Man and I ran the gamut of ice-breaking trail conversations — Où as-tu commencé? Comment es vos pieds? D’où es-tu? Où va-tu aujourd’ hui? (Where did you start? How are your feet? Where are you from? Where are you going today?) — before I launched into what I really wanted to know: Why push a wheelbarrow such a long way along such unfriendly terrain? Wheelbarrow Man answered in gruffer French than I was used to. All he said, or perhaps all I understood, was that he was carrying everything for his friend. He nodded backward to the wispy-haired Frenchwoman who was looking upward, onward, anywhere but where we were.
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