Jack Hitt
Tarpley, left, and Yancey Hitt, during the walk they took to Santiago with their father, the author, in 2010.
The best miracle happened outside the town of Portomarín. There'd been a number of them on this family trip — with my wife and two daughters — walking the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. That July morning my youngest daughter, Yancey, and I stepped out of a forest and onto a field — and, it seemed, into a previous century. Hundreds of pilgrims milled about, locals sold trinkets, jugglers wandered by, musicians played, people handed out refreshments and offered showers at a community center.
Suddenly a stranger stepped up to me and said, "Excuse me, did you lose your camera?"
He then handed me my camera and explained that he had found it in the grass. He had clicked through a few photos, looked up and, at that instance, Yancey's blaze of red hair — right there in the picture taken the day before — emerged from the forest.
I started riffing about the road to Santiago and serendipity, how when you slow down one's pace to that of an ox then ... The man cut me off with the simple language of miracles. "Thank St. James," he said, and walked away.
And there we were, my 13-year-old and I, looking at each other as the lugubrious issue of Old World religion shambled forth. Miracle — how to even talk about the sacred? (Sex was so much easier.)
Still, this stranger's nod at the pilgrimage's patron ("Santiago" is Old Spanish for St. James) provided me with an opening — to talk about how the Camino de Santiago was founded in the ninth century when a peasant discovered the tomb believed to be that of Jesus' apostle James in a cave in northwestern Spain; about how the road had been reinvented for so many reasons — as a recruiting station for armies resisting the Moors, and later as a tourist economy pioneered by the Cluniac monks in the late Middle Ages. It was littered with relics and stories of miracles, and every possible segue into a father-daughter chat about spirituality and the possibility of being a true pilgrim even in the age of atheist champions like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
But Yancey rolled her eyes, and the message was clear: save it, Dad, for another day.
I had already walked the road to Santiago two times and written a book about it. So, a few summers ago, when Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen reworked some of the material from my book into a movie ("The Way"), the two girls decided it was time to tackle the camino as a clan.
As a practical matter, there are few family outings easier than a pilgrimage: a backpack and sleeping bag each, a few changes of clothes, sunblock. The less stuff, frankly, the better. We rented a car in Santiago, drove to Bilbao and then walked west for some 200 miles.
There's nothing quite like quitting one's comfy hotel after a breakfast of chorizo and café con leche, hoisting a pack and walking out the door. The transition into hobo is immediate. Meandering through a Spanish city with a backpack is hardly arduous, but then the outskirts come, and then a dusty trail alongside asparagus fields, and soon sweat and fatigue. And there you are, in a brute animal slouch, lugging the weight of your own self and belongings, watching the miles go by very, very slowly, the sun hissing just outside your sunglasses. When we pulled into a pensión that night, we soaked our steaming feet in cold water. If it hadn't been for extreme hunger, we would never have made it downstairs for dinner.
There are five main Spanish pilgrimage routes to Santiago. The most commonly taken is known as the French road, which enters Spain at Roncesvalles (where Roland blew his horn as the Saracens slaughtered Charlemagne's rear guard, if heroic verse can be trusted). It is 650 miles from there to Santiago.
Spaniards accommodating pilgrims are well into their second millennium of doing so. There are comfortable hotels along the way, and most villages have a hostel specifically for pilgrims, costing no more than a few euros.
Jack Hitt is the author of "Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain," and, most recently, "Bunch of Amateurs."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 23, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the site of the westernmost point in Europe. The westernmost point in continental Europe is Cabo da Roca, Portugal, not Finisterre, Spain.
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