When Walking Becomes More Than Transportation

 “Every day a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

 

Trans Canada Trail and Pilgrimage Reflections

 

Several years ago, somewhere along one of our first long trails, walking stopped being simply a way of getting somewhere.  I am not sure exactly when that happened. Perhaps it began on the Camino Francés en route to Santiago de Compostela, where walking was obviously part of something larger than transportation. Each morning we left one place and headed toward another, but the kilometres between them mattered in ways that would have been difficult to explain before we began. There was time to think, time to notice, time to talk with people we might otherwise never have met, and enough repetition in the daily rhythm that eventually walking itself became part of the experience rather than merely the means by which we reached Santiago.

 

When we returned to Canada and eventually began our #Hike4Birds journey along the Trans Canada Trail, we were not setting out on another pilgrimage. The goal was very different. We hoped to walk across our own country, explore its landscapes and communities, observe its birds and wildlife, contribute to Citizen Science, and encourage others to reconnect with nature. The route stretched thousands of kilometres (now 28,000 km) across Canada rather than toward a cathedral, and on most days on it our concerns have been considerably more practical than spiritual reflection.  En route, our days have become an almost constant consideration of food, water, weather, campsites, sore bodies and whether the trail shown on the map actually exists ahead of us.

 

Yet pilgrimage has had an odd habit of finding us anyway.

 

Canadian Caminos

 

In Nova Scotia we unexpectedly encountered the arrows of the Way of Stella Maris along trails near Musquodoboit Harbour. We had not gone looking for a Camino. We were simply following the Trans Canada Trail toward Halifax when familiar-looking yellow arrows and way marks appeared beside us. Having walked pilgrimage routes through France, Spain and Portugal, there was something wonderfully unexpected about finding echoes of those experiences on a Canadian trail.  Namely, a number of regional pilgrimages across the nation - Canadian Caminos!

 

Prince Edward Island offered another variation. While walking the Confederation Trail, we learned about what was becoming the Island Walk, a route developed in part through inspiration from the Camino de Santiago. Here again was the idea that travelling slowly through communities could offer something different from simply visiting them. The route was not merely designed to move walkers around an island. It invited them to experience rural landscapes, small communities and the rhythm of travelling under their own power. 

 

At the time, these encounters seemed interesting, perhaps even coincidental. Then we continued walking.

 

Ontario brought us through landscapes connected with the pilgrimage to the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, where established recreational trails also form part of a route toward one of Canada's important Catholic shrines. In Sudbury we encountered another Camino-inspired path hosted by the Rainbow Routes Association, this time entirely urban and regional, created not because people needed a more efficient way across the city but because walking through its green spaces offered an opportunity to slow down, undertake a physical challenge and the chance to reflect.

 

Along the Trans Canada Trail in our broken journey across Quebec, we had also visited Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Québec and learned more about the long traditions of pilgrimage that already existed in Canada. The more we travelled, the clearer it became that the Camino de Santiago had not introduced Canadians to the idea of pilgrimage. People have long travelled toward sacred places here, just as Indigenous peoples moved across these landscapes for purposes, traditions and relationships far older than the trails we now follow. What seemed new to us was not pilgrimage itself, but discovering how often modern recreational pathways were being used to recover something of their slower rhythms and the opportunities they afford people.

 

Hiking and Pilgrimage

 

Somewhere amid all of these encounters, I have begun wondering whether the distinction between hiking and pilgrimage is always as clear as we make it.  There are obvious differences, of course. Pilgrimage traditionally involves intention, often spiritual or religious, and usually some meaningful, communally agreed-upon destination. Hiking does not require any of those things. A person can walk simply because the weather is beautiful, because they need exercise, because they enjoy birds, because they want to reach the top of a hill, or because there is nowhere else they would rather spend an afternoon than in the outdoors. There is no need to transform every walk into a spiritual undertaking, and doing so would diminish the particular traditions and beliefs that give actual pilgrimage routes their meaning.

 

Yet long-distance walking repeatedly seems to create conditions in which reflection becomes difficult to avoid. Perhaps part of that comes from repetition and a life reduced to essential routines. Each morning begins in roughly the same way. You pack what you have, shoulder it, and begin moving forward. For hours there is relatively little to do except walk, notice what is around you, deal with whatever the day presents and continue toward somewhere you hope to reach by evening. The simplicity can be deceptive. Physically, the day may be hard. Mentally, however, the absence of many ordinary distractions leaves unexpected room.  In the process, thoughts wander. Problems that seemed enormous at home sometimes shrink after several hours beneath an open sky.  Concerns regain perspective; other questions grow larger. Conversations become longer because neither person has somewhere else to be. Silence becomes comfortable once more rather than being a period to fill. A landscape that would pass in minutes from a vehicle remains beside you long enough to acquire detail. You notice where forests change, where birds become more numerous, where farms begin, where water flows and where communities have grown.

 

This was something we had already begun noticing during our first year on the Trans Canada Trail. In Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Soren, a gentleman who, along with his wife Pia, hosted us for an evening, suggested that walking was the only way to really see things. Later, while off trail and travelling quickly by train through landscapes we had previously crossed on foot, we began to understand what he meant. Places that had taken us days to experience vanished through the window in hours. We recognized individual crossroads, buildings and stretches of trail because we had approached them slowly enough for them to become familiar.

 

Walking gave those places time to become more than scenery.  Perhaps pilgrimage has always understood this. The physical destination matters, but so does the time required to reach it. Santiago would be a very different experience if pilgrims simply stepped off an airplane in front of the cathedral. Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is easily reached by road, just as Midland, Sudbury or Winnipeg can be reached far more efficiently without walking for days. Efficiency, however, is not the point. The distance creates time, which gives way to attention. That may be the connection we have been encountering again and again across Canada.

 

We began the Trans Canada Trail thinking about crossing the country. Maps encourage that way of thinking. They reduce enormous landscapes to lines between places, and progress becomes something measured by watching your location move across the page. On foot, however, the line grows. It is not just a stage - the space between two towns may contain an entire day of birds, weather, conversations, discomfort, unexpected kindness and thoughts that would never have occurred if the distance had disappeared beneath the wheels of a vehicle.

 

Increasingly, I wonder whether this is why people continue creating new pilgrimage routes even in a world where religion seems to be fading as an aspect of our lives and almost no one needs to walk anywhere. Walking may no longer be the most efficient form of transportation, but perhaps that is precisely what gives it value.  It forces us to experience the space between departure and arrival.

 

The Canadian pilgrimage routes we keep encountering seem to understand this in different ways. Stella Maris uses existing trails and communities to create a journey of spiritual reflection en route to Halifax. The Island Walk invites people to move slowly around an entire province – the circular nature of the route gives way to so much in its design. The Martyrs’ Shrine pilgrimage follows trails through central Ontario toward a sacred destination. The Sudbury Camino takes something as familiar as an urban pathway and asks people to experience it differently - not simply as infrastructure for getting from one place to another, but as somewhere to walk with intention.

 

Our previous Canadian Caminos post explores those routes more fully, but what interests me increasingly is what they share. They give people a reason to slow down. That sounds simple, but after thousands of kilometres on foot I am beginning to think there is more to it than pace alone.  Walking slowly enough allows curiosity to interrupt you.  A bird can stop the day.  So can an old building, a conversation, a river, a historical plaque or a moment that arrives unexpectedly while there is nothing to distract you from thinking about it.  This does not mean every trail becomes a Camino, nor does it mean every hiker becomes a pilgrim. We certainly have days when our thoughts extend no farther than the next grocery store or where we might pitch the tent. Sometimes walking thirty kilometres is simply tiring. Sometimes rain is merely wet, hills are merely exhausting, and the supposedly reflective mind spends several hours contemplating nothing more profound than a strong cup of coffee.

 

Perhaps that ordinary quality matters too. Pilgrimage, at least as we experienced it in Europe, was never composed entirely of revelation. Most of it involved putting one foot in front of another, washing clothes, finding food, getting lost, laughing together, complaining together, sleeping and doing it all again the following day, following the arc of the sun the next day. Meaning grew up around those ordinary routines rather than replacing them.  The same seems increasingly true of our walk across Canada.

 

We did not begin the Trans Canada Trail as pilgrims. We still would not describe the entire journey that way. Yet the country keeps placing us on pilgrimage routes, and each encounter has made us reconsider what walking is doing beyond carrying us across a map. Perhaps the common thread is not religion, destination, credentials or even the word pilgrimage. Perhaps it is paying attention to the moment we are in, the world around us, and the people we are near once more.

 

To walk somewhere is to give that distance time.  To give a place time is to give ourselves the chance to notice it.  And when we notice enough - the birds, the landscape, the people, the history and perhaps something within ourselves - travelling begins to become something more than transportation.

 

There is still a very long trail ahead of us.  For now, we will simply keep walking and see where it leads. Sorry for the long rambling thoughts.

 

See you on the trail.