The albergue looks like a mountain chalet. We are snugly situated deep within the Fonfaraón Mountains, which climb high into the Spanish sky, separating us from an entire civilization below the cloud line. 

Here atop the world, the mountain peaks look like incarnations of the Appalachians, with a fuzzy, green carpet-like texture, rounded edges, and swooping valleys that gather pools of fog like a white lake. 

We will be hiking this today. 

We have slept in bunkrooms for the past several nights. We have listened to much snoring, much nose blowing, much belching, and many lower-intestinal expulsory events. 

But we pilgrims know each other by now. We have been hiking together at different paces for the past week. We have eaten alongside each other, slept with each other, shared supplies with each other, confided in one another, and partaken in each other’s B.O. 

Besides, we are all here for the same reason. The reason: to witness some of the most powerful beauty on our planet. To conquer the mountain. 

We will

walk the Ruta de los Hospitales, a strenuous path upward toward the sun, miles above Spain. The views up there, veterans tell us, are like painted landscape scenes that never seem to stop. The overlooks just keep coming, one after the other. 

Pilgrims come from all over the globe to hike the Camino Primitivo simply to see what we are about to see today. They are here from South Korea, France, Russia, Sweden, Washington, D.C., Cameroon, Serbia, Australia, and even Jefferson County, Alabama. 

We talked about it all night over dinner. We talked about it in the bunkrooms. We talked about it just before drifting off to sleep. Some of us are unsure whether we will make it. Some of us are unsure whether we should even try. 

“Take time, pilgrim,” the old Frenchman said. “Take time to stop and smell every flower, not just some of them.”

He was old. If not in body, in soul. What little bit of white hair he once possessed had vanished. So had some of his teeth. 

It was midday. He was drinking beer at a café in Salas, Spain. By the looks of it he was on his second, about to round third, and on his way toward home plate. 

“Stop and see every vista,” he said. “Even if the view looks like one you have seen before. Take it in. Spend a long time with this view. Sit with this view. Don’t be in a hurry to finish the trail. Try to finish last if you can. 

“Stop and greet every horse with a handful of bread. Say hello to every sheep, every cow, every duck. Treat them as your best friends on this Camino.”

So that’s what we did today. 

The first horse we met approached the fence

to greet us. He was friendly and animated. My wife named him Roger. Roger tried to eat her shirt. He was grateful for the apple I gave him. 

Roger said hello with a burst of air through his nostrils and a little whinny. Then, Jamie and I petted his head. We took turns rubbing his ears and caressing the broad patch between his eyes. Roger was content to let us give him this little two-man massage. He leaned into us to make our jobs easier. 

Next, we stopped to admire the mountainous views even though there were so many of them. So many arresting views that each vista almost began to lose its impact. So many fragrant wildflowers the air itself stung your nose. 

We stood before the massive…

A rooster crows as day breaks over the surrounding Cantabrian Mountains. He crows every few moments, singing an anthem to morning, his voice ringing throughout the tiny village of Cornellana.

I am in a bar, drinking morning joe. My bartender is working his buns off.

Cornellana is a charming town. The yards and apartment balconies are adorned with clotheslines, weighted with fresh laundry. Tiny, little-kid clothes. Boys’ underpants, tighty-whities, flapping in the wind. Pink frilly nightgowns, multicolored socks, old-woman dresses, aprons, red brassieres, blue jeans, T-shirts.

The terra-cotta rooftops, stained with age and black mildew, host ferns growing between the tiles’ crevices, and old-school TV antennas mounted to each ridgeline, which blanket the roofline of this small village.

It’s mostly silent this morning, except for the gabby rooster, of course. This is because this town, by and large, has no A/C. Thus, no humming compressors drone in the ever-present background, no thrumming 16-ton monster units belching out a middle C for hours, days, months, decades on end. Only quiet.

The two guards park their cruiser and enter the café. They have a seat next to me. More men enter, both young and old. These are locals, not pilgrims. They all enter the tavern for coffee and bocadillos and socialization. They do this every day.

Namely, because socialization is an important thing here. No. It’s THE important thing here.

This is why bars and cafés are perpetually crowded with locals who surround sidewalk tables and lampposts, laughing and carrying on. There is no special occasion for this. Life is the occasion.

“We do this every day,” says my bartender. “For many hours of each day.”

They socialize more than work. They socialize as often as they eat or drink. The Spanish live to socialize. Elderly people, teens, middle-aged.…

Our first day walking the Camino. We leave our inn at Oviedo a little after daybreak.

There are no people on the streets. No cars. Only one stray dog, dutifully cleaning his privates, and one old man hosing down a section of street in front of his shop while smoking a cigar the size of a grown man’s upper thigh.

We wind through the city, heavy-laden with the packs upon our backs, making our way past the Catedral de San Salvador. I’ve forgotten how heavy a backpack can be. It’s been a year since my last Camino. There are some things you forget.

We say a quick prayer outside the cathedral. And just like that, our feet are officially on the Camino Primitivo.

It isn’t long before we are in pure mountains. The hillsides swoop upward, through dense forests, past white-foamed streams, along picturesque mountain pastures composed solely of sheep manure.

Monstrous cumulus clouds overtake our mountains, and the air grows spicy with the smell

of fresh mint and the scent of coming rain. Distant claps of thunder sound, and a quilt of mist falls from the iron sky.

The earth is muddy and soupy. The smell of foliage becomes so strong it waters your eyes.

We pass our first pilgrim of the day. A small older woman with red pixie-cut hair, a smile on her face, and a German accent. She pauses every mile to remove a leather-bound book from her backpack and recite scripture quietly to herself. Then she prays the Anima Christi in Latin.

The incline grows steeper with each step until our noses are touching the soil as we trek ever upward.

After a full day of walking, we arrive at our albergue in the hamlet of Palatína. Although to call this a village would be gracious. Palatína is merely a wide spot on the trail.

Pablo…

We find a table in the old Spanish café and order two cafés con leche. I order our breakfast by repeatedly tapping the menus and saying in English, “Uh, I’m sorry, I don’t know this word...”

My waitress finds my ordering technique amusing.

“Why do you say ‘sorry?’” the Spanish woman asks sincerely.

But I don’t understand.

“Sorry?” I reply.

“You keep apologizing. Why?”

“Because my Spanish is awful?”

The waitress laughs. “But you did nothing wrong. Why do some Americans always say ‘sorry?’”

So I explain that we Americans who say this aren’t necessarily apologizing—per se. It’s a figure of speech. A habit. We overuse the word “sorry” even in situations when we have nothing to apologize for except Kim Kardashian.

And we aren’t the only culture to use the superfluous apology. The British start 99 percent of their sentences with this word. The ultra-polite Canadians also liberally use the S-word. My cousins live in Montreal and say that if you want to get a Canadian

to say “sorry,” just step on their foot.

But why do I, personally, do this?

With our pilgrimage to Santiago beginning today, I am wondering why I say “sorry” so often. People back home are always telling me I subconsciously apologize too much. And now people in Spain are saying the same thing. What does this say about me?

Well, for starters, it probably says I carry a lot of shame around. Which is true, of course. I was ashamed of everything as a kid.

I grew up in an abusive household. I learned how to say “sorry” whenever my father was in a bad mood. The children of such households quickly learn the art of effusive apology.

Also, I experienced shame when my father died. This is because his suicide was violent and ugly, published in local papers, along with his…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hi. How are you doing? How’s the family? Have you made any progress on that request I made earlier about Florida Powerball?

Right now, as I’m sure you know, I am miles above Madrid, Spain, captive inside a plane. There are hundreds of us human passengers crammed inside this aircraft, like oysters in a can.

And I can’t help but watch all the people.
Such as the young woman, with her phone sitting face-up on her tray table. She is traveling alone.

She keeps scrolling pictures of her kids. And I’m pretty sure she’s crying because she keeps dabbing her eye with her pinky.

At least I think they are images of her kids, because the children in the photos look just like her. She’s with them in many pictures, too. Holding them. Playing with them. Smiling with them.

I know heartsickness when I feel it, God. I can feel hers. Give her strength.

And the man on my other

side. He is older. He looks like he’s in frail health. There is a telltale scar on his neck, right at the base of his throat, from what I believe is a tracheotomy.

His wife keeps fussing over him. She’s nervously asking whether he’s taken his medication. She’s so adamant about this. So panicky.

She is also quite insistent that he not eat much salt. She is forbidding him to eat the sodium-packed airline food, but to eat instead the special salt-free food she packed even though this “special” food tastes flavorless and not unlike—to use his exact words—“something passed through the system of a cow.”

Ease her fears. Restore his health.

And the college-age girl behind me. I can hear her conversation with the older woman who is sitting beside her. They obviously don’t know each other. The older woman is sort of…

My packing list for the Camino:

Hiking boots. The route we will be taking to Santiago this year is called the Camino Primitivo. It is the oldest route to Santiago. The first pilgrim to hike this particular route hiked it 1,200 years ago, shortly after the birth of Willie Nelson.

We will be hiking over some serious mountains. So I wear boots.

Last year we were told by “experts” not to wear boots for the French route. I wore them anyway. And I was glad I did because we hiked over so many rocky slopes and mudholes I cannot imagine hiking in, say, Keds.

Sometimes I think we have too many “experts” and not enough novices. This is just my expert opinion.

One ultra-light backpack, made of parachute material that manufacturers proudly call “water resistant.” And by “water resistant” I mean, of course, “it doesn’t resist anything.”

This is the same backpack I carried on my first Camino. It has a hydration bladder inside, with a drinking hose protruding so that, while

hiking, you can effectively and efficiently look like a Class-A idiot.

When it rains, I wrap my backpack in a poncho and the pack magically becomes “water resistant.”

One fiddle. Check. It’s an old fiddle from the 1930s. It was the kind of fiddle your grandfather would have purchased out of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. The kind poor hillbillies played. It sounds like cheap trash. But I was born cheap trash. So I like it.

Last year, I carried this fiddle across Spain, and I learned a very important lesson: If you play a fiddle for Spanish people, they will give you free beer. This is why much of our first Camino is a blur.

Two main T-shirts. One of them has Mark Twain’s signature on the front. Samuel Clemens is my hero. The other shirt bears the Superman insignia. Not because I think I’m Superman,…

We leave for the Camino in two days. And I’ve been thinking about it.

We’ve been planning this trip for months. We’ve been doing six-hour training walks, eating healthy foods that taste like wet napkins, and gathering our outdoor gear.

This will be our second Camino.

People ask you about the Camino when they find out you’re doing it. Their main question is usually a version of: “Why?”

This question comes in different iterations. “Why are you doing this?” “Why are you doing this to YOURSELF?” Or in my case: “Why are you doing this AGAIN?”

And you always reply, “It’s the people.”

Whereupon, they look at you funny, then wait for you to explain. But you never can. There’s never enough time.

And even if you could choose adequate words, you still couldn’t explain something the heart feels. So, others naturally assume you’re going for the exotic experience, and for all the natural beauty. But you’re not.

It’s not the enormous sky. It’s not the arresting greenery found in craggy alpine valleys. It’s not the Pyrenees Mountains, capped

with clouds, so you can’t tell where the sky begins and the earth ends.

Neither is it living out of a backpack, having nothing to your name except what you can cram inside—which in your case is two T-shirts, a change of shorts, and a Montgomery Ward fiddle.

It is the older Brazilian woman who walks beside you. Limping because of her bad hip. Who stops at every landmark to pray. Who finds a miracle in, literally, everything. In every flower. Every sparrow. Every stray cloud. Who kisses you whenever she hugs you even though you’re an uptight American who does not kiss strangers.

It was the group of teenage boys you expected to be typical junk-food-eating, girl-chasing teens. But who, instead, walked in contemplative prayer, trying to find clarity in life. They were reading books by Saint John of the…

My granddaddy said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog. Someone who treats a dog badly, is a bad person. A person who treats a dog with regard and deference is a good egg.

Right now, my wife is holding our blind coonhound, Marigold. She holds our rescue adoptee like a baby. Not like a dog.

Marigold’s face was struck with a blunt object. Her optic nerve scarred over. She lost her vision. The doctor removed one eye.

“What probably happened,” the vet said, “is that someone paid a lot of money for this hunting dog, but Marigold turned out to be gun shy.”

Her abuser wasn’t happy about shelling out thousands of bucks for a dog who doesn’t like noise. So he took his frustration out on the animal. He used a hard object. Perhaps the butt of a rifle.

My wife is softly humming to Marigold. “I love you,” she is quietly singing to the animal.

We’ve had our dog several years now. Life with

a blind dog was tricky at first. Not like having a regular dog at all. When we feed Marigold treats, for example, you have to touch her to let her know you’re near. Then, Marigold simply opens her mouth widely, gyrating her head back and forth.

“I don’t know where you are,” she’s saying, “but I’m opening my mouth to make it easier for you.”

Marigold’s internal schedule is all screwed up, too, because blind dogs can’t sense light or darkness. So they have no idea what time it is. Sometimes Marigold wakes up at 1 a.m. and starts licking my face. And I start cussing and I say, “Please go back to bed.” Whereupon Marigold barks with glee. Because there is nothing half as fun as 1 a.m.

But, we love this animal. Namely, because we don’t have kids. As a result, my wife…

My Uber driver is in her mid-30s, and she is friendly. She is driving us to our hotel, and we are stuck in gridlock traffic.

There is a network of tattoos adorning her limbs. As she drives, I notice a thumbprint tattoo on her neck. I ask about this tattoo.

First she doesn’t reply.

Then she says quietly, with a pained smile, “It’s my son’s thumbprint.”

I am prepared to let the subject die here, but it is she who breaks the quietude.

“He died last month. He was twenty-two.”

She goes on to tell us that it was an accident. The accident happened in her house. It happened in front of his little brother. It was bad.

She drives in silence for a long time. I offer her an “I’m sorry.” I hate saying this phrase in response to such discourse. It sounds so inauthentic. Even so, the only thing I hate worse than saying these two words is not saying them at all.

“He was an organ donor,” she says. “So they did the honor walk for him.

The whole hospital lined the hallways to watch his bed roll by. Everyone. Doctors, nurses. Even the janitors. Everyone was there. My son saved so many lives that day.”

Then she offers us a common piece of wisdom. But this time, the words fall differently onto my ears.

“Life is so short.”

We are dropped off at the hotel. There are no restaurants within ten square miles, so we need to call another cab to take us to dinner.

The cab arrives. It’s a young man. He’s nice. He’s got a story too.

He says he started driving cabs after his mom died. He had been her primary caregiver for so long, he’d forgotten what it meant to be around the general public.

“I’d been isolated so long, taking care of her,” he says. “When she was suddenly gone, I…