Finding quiet on the 507-mile route Camino de Santiago

The pilgrimage road to Santiago is 507 miles. Photo by Elissa Esher.

BISCAY, Spain— The only sound on the road to Santa Agueda is the lonesome gong of a cowbell. Every few minutes, a cluster of birds will begin to chatter, probably about you, or a moan of wind will resound from the pine trees, but not often. Only I and other pilgrims who have walked the medieval route on the Camino de Santiago from Bilbao to Portugalete, along with the handful of locals who live in this 600-foot-high region of the municipality of Berkaldo in the Spanish Basque Country, know this.

After walking the five miles from Santiago Cathedral in Bilbao with no music, no podcasts, no chitchat, and no subway announcements, we know it all too well.

The northern route of the Camino de Santiago is a roughly 507-mile pilgrimage that follows the north coast of Spain from the city of San Sebastian to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. According to “Culture Trip,” the path was formed in the 8th century by pre-Christian nomads who, following the pattern of the Milky Way, sought the edge of the earth which, for many years, was thought to be the location of the modern-day city of Santiago. For over 1,000 years, however, it has been walked by Christians seeking to touch the remains of Saint James. Today, approximately 325,000 people walk the Camino every year.

I remember the first time I told someone I was going to walk five days on “The Way.” My best friend and I were sitting in my RAV4 one winter evening in a badly lit parking lot deep in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. We had a pumpkin pie propped up on the armrest box and were eating it with plastic forks from the Whole Foods cafeteria – a tradition of ours. It was 11 p.m.

“I think I might do something crazy,” I said.

When she asked me what, I explained the Camino to her.

“You’ll probably get kidnapped,” was her first reaction, understandably.

Abby Hamilton, a senior at Syracuse University at the time who was developing an app while simultaneously celebrating her recent acceptance of a full-time position at Microsoft, had just given me a long pep-talk about how I have all the resources, brains and know-how to be a great American writer but might never realize it if I couldn’t shake my “addiction to dependent men.” In other words – my savior complex. I had recently broken up with my most recent bachelor-in-distress.

“Every time you take two steps forward, you meet some douchey guy and convince yourself he’s worth taking one step back,” I vividly remember her saying earlier in the same conversation. The words stung, as most truths do.

The medieval route on the Camino de Santiago to Santa Agueda. Photo by Elissa Esher.

After a string of back-to-back short-term relationships between my third year of high school and my third year of college in New York City, my friend had noticed my career drive and personal development repeatedly weighed down by the type of men I chose to let into my life – handsome, charming, often well-liked but never really got over something in their past and therefore became either a sloth, an addict, an abuser, or all of the above.

“You need to do something for yourself — no dumb boys, just you proving to yourself you are capable of doing something big by yourself.”

I had already had the same thought, though I’d never tell her. It’s why I’d charted out how far the Camino would be from my study abroad program in Valencia, Spain, where I planned to spend a month that summer. That’s when I said I might do something crazy.

After paying your respects to whatever god you pray to at the church of Santa Agueda and filling up your water bottle, you descend a dirt road – first through pine trees, then past a bar, then more trees again but this time you’re ascending and then, suddenly, you’re at the edge of the mountain – its peak is to your left and only its steady descent is at your right, so steep the trees stand sideways.

I followed a cow down this portion of the road. Its owner – a pre-teen boy – had beat it out of the stable with a stick as I was making my way out of the church and, with a reluctant lowing, it had begun trudging down The Way – an unexpected pilgrim.

Listening only to the sound of the cow’s bell that, like a metronome, kept us in sync, the cow and I marched together for most of the two miles between Santa Agueda and Cruces, a small city at the base of the mountain. Hours into my first day on this silent walk, I had already begun to miss the sound of my own voice. I began practicing my French on the cow. I hadn’t spoken French since my freshman year of college. When the cow left and, with it, my illusion of companionship, I somehow started praying out loud.

This was all without witness. It would have been dangerous if the Camino was not known as one of the safest trails in the world. I could be making it up. But what I wrote in my journal that night was, “Today, I experienced what it is to live without witness and to need no distraction from that fact.” The total solitude unabated by Netflix, swiping through Tinder, or Instagram comments produced the believer and proficient French-speaker hiding in me.

Noise pollution is a given for any New Yorker. According to the New York Times, the problem is only getting worse as the number of noise complaints per year in the city has more than doubled since 2011. Some New Yorkers have even come to crave the noise, finding themselves unable to sleep without it. My roommate, Ava Midkiff, likes to open our window as she goes to sleep to take in the sounds of the city, and noise-generating apps like White Noise enjoy considerable popularity among people who find the quiet eerie. We adapt to the noise and we accept the din. But should we?

According to a 2011 World Health Organization study, exposure to environmental noise has significantly negative effects on our health. Silence relieves tension, can regenerate brain cells, and can even help the healing process of the sick. Most importantly, however, silence allows our brains to tap into our “default mode network,” our inner stream of thought that generates daydreaming and allows our brains to replenish their mental resources. Scientists say that daydreaming – imagining our future or the future of others – makes us able to be more empathetic and allows us to make meaning out of our experiences. Our brains take advantage of the break from the ceaseless attentional demands of noise by putting that energy toward more important thought processes – focus, problem-solving, decision-making, and the generation of new ideas.

Maybe this answers the question of why some nuns take a vow of silence, why some Hasidic fathers believe silence between them and their son will make the boy wiser, why Buddhist monks believe meditation is the path to nirvana, and why I and so many like me have resorted to total isolation in the quiet parts of the world to fix something broken inside.

I got lost somewhere between Cruces and Sestao that first day of my Camino. No surprise, if you know me. For a little less than seven miles I walked on vacant highways and parking lots, guided solely by Google Maps rather than the blue tiles depicting yellow shells that pilgrims are supposed to follow. I hadn’t filled my water bottle for an hour, I desperately needed to change my tampon, and my phone only had 20% battery life left. I ducked in the first coffee shop I saw and ran to the bathroom without even looking at the barista. It wasn’t until I emerged that I realized I was the only customer in the building. Feeling my face grow warm, I ordered a cappuccino and a glass of water in my broken Spanish and, producing a charging cord, mimed plugging it in. She said she’d plug it in for me in perfect English. I laughed. She was the first person I’d met who spoke English since I arrived at my Airbnb in Bilbao the day before. 

“People walk El Camino for many different reasons,” she said in an accent that was more reminiscent of the Basque language spoken in the region than the Spanish I knew. “What is it for you?”

I told her I wanted to regain confidence in myself as a single woman, to not let my desire to save people lead me to be dragged down with them anymore, and to enter my senior year of college in New York City with no distractions.

Her first reaction was to laugh and say, “For most, it’s a divorce.”

Then, she added, “It’s good because, on the road, you can hear yourself.”

The Basilica de Santa Maria de Portugalete. Photo by Elissa Esher.

I left the café when my phone battery was at 50 percent. I waved goodbye to the barista I now wish I had the name of and caught up with the Camino again, following her directions. A couple who looked around 65-years-old called out “Buen Camino!” to me from a little further down the road, just as signs for the upcoming pilgrim’s hostel and Vizcaya Bridge – the hallmark structure of the city of Portugalete – came into view.

Walking the usual amount per day on The Camino de Santiago, almost every hike ends with a church. On this day, the blue and yellow tiles lead me to Basilica Santa Maria de Portugalete – a visibly ancient cathedral modest in size but teeming with flying buttresses and stained glass of what I later learned to be 15th century Spanish gothic style. The church was closed that day, so I sat on the front steps, pulled my journal out of my backpack, and scratched down everything I had been thinking in the quiet that day until my pen ran out of ink. A bell tower which, I thought, looked like a layered wedding cake, cast its long shadow over me as I sat there with my back on the front archway and my blistered feet propped up in front of me.

I never pray out loud or in public. I always admired the way my mother would pray loudly over me with her hand laid on my head at church, and when I was in Jerusalem I remember staring in admiration as an elderly woman, almost too frail to walk, threw herself down on the stone at Church of the Holy Sepulchre where my tour guide said Jesus was laid after being taken down from the cross. She was crying to God out loud, weeping. As a Christian who has, admittedly, always wrestled with doubts, the unabashed profession of belief implicit to public prayer is inspiring — it announces the committal of oneself to something nobody else can see, a kind of trust I have never been able to possess.

But prayer at churches along The Camino is more like a communal breath in. While it is hard to say precisely how many pilgrims are non-Christian, it is commonly acknowledged by those who know The Way that many if not most pilgrims are atheist, agnostic, or of another religion. They walk the road either to draw closer to whatever deity they pray to or simply for the physical challenge and mental refreshment. Even so, as I sat at the front of Santa Maria de Portugalete that July evening, I began to notice that every pilgrim who passed would stop. Whether they tried to come in, touched the church’s stones, took a picture, or simply stared in awe, the experience of wonder over this structure built to honor something outside of this world alongside those whose spiritual beliefs likely vastly differed from my own was, for me, enough to make my close my eyes and whisper, “Hey” to God — the closest I ever came to public prayer.

The view approaching Portugalete from the Camino de Santiago. Photo by Elissa Esher.

I have since learned that the pilgrim’s journey from Bilbao to Portugalete is known as one of the ugliest, most confusing and most physically taxing portions of the Camino de Santiago. To me, however, the experience of walking 17 miles, getting lost, getting sweaty, shutting up and listening to silence, and the shock of breaching the initial discomfort that comes with that only enhanced my feelings of self-sufficiency going into the next four days on the road. My time there was not perfect — at many points it was lonely and seemingly pointless – and I can’t pretend that following the path of the milky way fixed all my issues.

I can, however, attest that the quiet made me able to listen and respond to myself more deeply than at any other moment in my life. My mind returns to the sound of my pink sneakers on the dirt road and that rhythmic cowbell on noisy, anxious, Brooklyn days, reminding me that healing is a journey, reminding my presence in it, and reminding me of the simple fact that I am able. 

Elissa Esher is a journalism student at The King’s College in NYC. She has interned at Brooklyn Paper and is on Twitter @eaesher