The Walker and the Saint
By Edie Littlefield Sundby
I started walking Father Junípero Serra’s old California mission trail the day I was told I was dying of cancer.
I’m not a Catholic, but I love to walk. So did Father Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan missionary who traveled more than 24,000 miles in his lifetime, mostly by foot, and founded nine missions along El Camino Real, from San Diego to San Francisco. The California missions were a great undertaking, and on Wednesday Pope Francis will canonize Father Serra in Washington, D.C.
I believe that walking has helped keep me alive. Statistically, I shouldn’t be. Eight years ago cancer was discovered in my gallbladder, and it spread everywhere—liver, groin, bowel, glands in my neck and throat. Massive amounts of chemotherapy, multiple radical surgeries and high-intensity radiation have spared my life. But the cancer invariably returns. Three years ago it re-emerged in my liver and lungs; it was subdued only after 18 intense months of aggressive treatment that included the removal of my right lung.
A few months after that surgery, I walked 800 miles in Father Serra’s footsteps along the old El Camino Real mission trail, averaging 15 miles a day for 55 days. On the 40th day, after 600 miles, my feet stopped hurting and life became transcendent and intensely vivid. Even the most ordinary moments were infused with wonder and awe.
Like countless other walkers through the ages—Father Serra in the 1700s, or Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century—I find that long-distance walks ignite what Thoreau called the “great awakening light” that lies within. At the end of the 800-mile trail I didn’t want to stop walking. But I did stop, and gradually over the next two years, day-to-day sameness dimmed the great awakening light.
Early this year a CT scan revealed that the cancer is back, this time a tumor in my remaining lung. It was time for another mission walk, to connect with the wellspring of joy within.
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A 48-mile stretch between Old Mission Santa Barbara and Mission Santa Ines is, in my opinion, the hardest of the 800-mile trail, as one must cross the rugged Santa Ynez Mountains. There are three choices, none good. One trail, called Arroyo Burro, follows an old Indian and prospecting footpath through the wilderness. It is a three-day walk requiring full camp gear, food and water. When I walk I carry less than 6 pounds—essentials like an extra pair of underwear, a can of bear spray and a toothbrush with the handle sawed off—stuffed in a Cabela’s multipocket fishing vest and a small lumbar fanny pack. Even that little weight becomes painful as sensitive nerves in my abdomen and shoulder, damaged in liver and lung surgeries, become irritated.
A second route, San Marcos Pass, is direct but also terrifying. It is an exhausting and steep walk up twisty Old Stagecoach Road to a deadly stretch of pavement described by the local newspaper as littered with “gratuitous gore.” The 32-mile road is mostly a two lane no-passing zone without a shoulder, following tight and blind switchbacks cut into the mountain. Rocks tumble down as cars speed by day and night. This is the route I walked previously, and I still shudder at the memory.
Then there is the Refugio Pass, the path of the Franciscan priests, was the best alternative, although getting there would require a three-day, 30-mile walk along the beach, careful planning and luck. Our ability to complete the walk would depend on tides and weather, and beach closures wherever and whenever the endangered Western Snowy Plover is spotted nesting in beach scrapes.
Planning a 30-mile beach walk that can be done only at low tide is not easy. Google isn’t helpful. Satellite GPS maps show what was, not what is. Nature isn’t neat and logical. Not even Google can predict surging tides and shifting sands. Perhaps Google assumes no one is foolish enough to wade into churning surf to get around an impassable rocky point, or walk miles over beaches of stone and oil seeps. A walk like this is foolish—but also one of faith.
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We pass an endless stretch of soaring cliffs, and canyons with wild-sounding Spanish names: Tecolote, Dos Pueblos, Las Varas. Soon they become cañadas: Cañada del Venadito, Cañada del Refugio. This is wild and free California as Father Serra might have seen it. We walk on, past wind-carved outcroppings of Monterey shale so loose it flakes when touched; magnificently etched stone sculptures rise out of the sea. Beyond this rocky passage the stone is too wild and the sea too high. The path of the padres exits the beach and follows an old Chumash Indian trail atop the mesa.
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There are four tortuous miles of rocky coast before we get to Refugio Beach. There are no reliable maps of this area. The only one we could find before departing was a hand-drawn map from 1998 with little detail other than a few place names and a warning, “passable only at minus tides.”
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Every long walk is a great undertaking. A Franciscan friend of Father Serra wrote, more than 250 years ago, “Great undertakings have always encountered great contradictions.” Great lives do too. Father Serra’s old mission trail is still wild and free. It has been a trail for natives and explorers set on conquest; a road traveled by sinners and saints in the name of religion; a route traversed by miners seeking riches; a path of westward expansion and progress; a migrant highway of hope and happiness; and, today, in the 21st century, near Palo Alto and San Francisco, it is a golden freeway of geniuses upending the world order. The dirt is the same; it is spirit that breathes new life.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-walker-and-the-saint-1442614049
= new reply since forum marked as read
and discovered I had to subscribe to read that in it's entirety. 
Back in my childhood (I was 13 in 1953) my dad worked for the Auto Club of SOCAL.
One of his duties was tending to the Bronze bells that are/were arrayed along the south end of the old mission trail.
He brought home a cracked one and it's holder. That got planted in concrete and was was part of our backyard.
When I was older, a friend and I 'did the trail' on our motorcycles.