When is a Journey Complete?

When are you done on a Trail?

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding / Four Quartets

Standing at yet another trailhead and another point of the compass in Canada, after 6 years of hiking, we had finished the Trans Canada Trail. Yet completion is not always the same as finishing. And finishing is not always the same as being done.

We set out believing completion meant reaching the end of the path. Province to Province. Atlantic to Pacific. Pacific to Arctic. One foot after another until the map ran out. But the longer we walked, the more complicated the notion of completion became. A journey can end on the ground and continue in the mind. A route can be completed when all the distance is covered and yet remains unfinished in the mind. A trail can be crossed, photographed, written, documented, and still not be something you are entirely done carrying inside.

 

We have felt this before on pilgrimage – after the Camino Frances and Camino Finisterre. You have the Compostela and have reached “the end of the world,” yet each day we carry the experiences, memories, and lessons of the Way with us.

We never expected the same feeling at the end of the Trans Canada Trail.

Complicating Completion

Certainly, people can say that no one has completed the “entire” Trans Canada Trail if it means no one has walked, paddled, cycled, skied, and traversed every possible official segment, spur, water route, reroute, and evolving alignment in every mode and every jurisdiction. That is true, but that type of framing obscures another truth. There have been people who have completed national crossings on the TCT. There have been people who have given years of their lives to following the line across the country. There have been people for whom the trail was not an advertising concept but a lived geography.

Dana Meise, Sarah Rose Jackson, Dianne Whelan, Mel Vogel and Malo … now Sonya Richmond and Sean Morton.

But maybe the harder question is not whether others recognize reaching each ocean or each trailhead completion. Maybe the harder question is whether the person who has walked the line feels complete. Sometimes someone keeps walking on because they are still searching. Sometimes someone stops not because they failed but because the journey has already given them what they came for. Completion is not such a simple notion.

What Completion Means

Broadly speaking, I think we have come to see that there are three general types of completion.

The first is official completion – this is the version defined by trail organizations, set out on maps, printed on certificates and acknowledged by most of the public. It is the kind of completion most people understand first, because it gives a journey set limits and a boundary. It says: this is the route, this is the start, this is the end, and this is what must be done in order to say you have completed it.

There is value in that kind of completion. Trails need maps. Pilgrimage routes need cathedrals and credentials. Long-distance paths need trail blazes, records, set routes, and shared understandings. Without some agreed-upon framework, completion becomes so personal that it can no longer be communicated to anyone else. Official recognition gives shape to effort. It allows a walker, cyclist, paddler, or a pilgrim the means to place their private journey within a larger narrative.

With that said, in some ways, the official completion is also the narrowest form of completion, because it depends on who gets to define the trail, what version of the route is being recognized, and whether the people making those definitions understand what the journey is like on the ground.

Recognizing this does not make official completion meaningless. It simply means it is merely one layer of truth, not the whole truth. It can acknowledge that a route exists, that a goal has been set, and that a person has reached certain recognized points or trailheads along the way.

For us, official completion mattered because the Trans Canada Trail was the national pathway we set out to follow. We did not invent the line across the country. We followed the idea, the maps, the local pathways, the signs where they existed, and the broader promise of a trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. But our completion could never be reduced to a certificate or a public claim. It was not made true by institutional acknowledgement, and it was not made false by institutional silence. It was made true by the years we spent walking, by the geography we crossed, by the communities we passed through, and by the fact that the journey was lived step by step on the ground.

The second type of completion – is a sort of physical completion. This is measured by days, kilometres, route choices, blisters, and wear on the body as one continues on and on and on. It is the version that is lived on a trail – the way Sean and I lived it on the Trans Canada Trail, and the way so many people live it on pathways around the world every day. It is the sense of being done the trail because you have reached where you needed to reach or accomplished what you set out to accomplish. This sense of completion is imperfect – for everyone but the hiker who lives it. It is imperfect because of all journeys are imperfect, but it is perhaps the most honest form of completion because it is lived, it is hedged in real experiences, and happens out in the world.

The third type of completion – is the hardest one of all. It is when you confront yourself and your mind. It is when you ask – Are you done with this journey, or is the journey still doing its work in you? Have you reached the end, or are you still trying to understand what the end meant? It is when you have long left the pathway, and the trail still calls you to and continues to shape your days.

The notion of completion is complicated - some journeys are complete long before they end. Others end long before they feel complete.

Completing the Trans Canada Trail

Completion is not always the same as finishing, and finishing is not always the same as being done.

On pilgrimage, we saw people stop before Santiago because they had received what they needed. That is not failure. It is recognition. Others reached the cathedral and still seemed unsettled, because arrival is not the same as resolution. The TCT is similar, only stretched across years and a continent. We reached the oceans. We reached the trailheads. We walked around the compass across Canada. We completed the route in the only way such a route could honestly be completed by us on foot. But that does not mean the journey has finished speaking to us and shaping us.

Perhaps completion is not the moment when there is nothing left to say. Perhaps it is the moment when the walking stops and the meaning begins to surface. We completed the Trans Canada Trail in the physical sense: by crossing the country, by following its national pathway from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, by adapting where the mapped line met the realities of land, water, weather, closure, and safety. But in another sense, the trail is not finished with us. We are still writing it, still questioning it, still living with what it asked of us and what it gave back.

Maybe that is what completion really means on a journey this large. The fact remains that while we completed the TCT on the ground, the work of understanding it continues. The line did not disappear behind us. Instead, it became part of how we now see distance, the country, ourselves, and the world ahead

See you on the trail!