The Walker and the Saint - WSJ 11/11/15 9:59 p.m.

The Walker and the Saint

ENLARGE

The author on Goleta Beach near Santa Barbara, Calif. Photo: Joyce Blue Summers

By

Edie Littlefield Sundby

Updated Sept. 18, 2015 9:27 p.m. ET

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

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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.

By chance—if there really is such a thing—a year ago I became acquainted with another
mission walker, Joyce Blue Summers, who walks the trail in segments, flying to California
every few months, usually alone. She lives in Dallas but grew up in California and has fond
memories of family visits to the Old Mission San Luis Rey. Neither she nor I had shown
much interest in walking before commencing our separate travels. Thoreau believed that
one becomes a walker only by the grace of God: “It requires a direct dispensation from
Heaven to become a walker,” he wrote in what he considered his best essay, “Walking,”
published in the June 1862 Atlantic Monthly.

By luck, or Providence, Joyce was preparing to walk the first wilderness segment of the
mission trail—a 48-mile trek between Old Mission Santa Barbara and Mission Santa Ines.
She asked if I would walk with her. I said yes, as long as she was willing to walk a different

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path than one I had previously taken. “Life is too short to retrace steps,” I said. She
agreed.

This 48-mile stretch 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.

Joyce and I decided that 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.

The first day we walk 13 miles: six along the Santa Barbara coast plus seven to and from
hotels. We commence at sunrise, and for 4 miles we’re imprisoned between towering sea
cliffs and the ocean, on a narrow ribbon of sand that is submerged at high tide. Set back
from the cliffs is the posh Hope Ranch enclave, where Snoop Dogg is among the
residents. Nature’s steep bluffs kindly hide the mansions from sight.

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Joyce and I walk apart, in silence. She is a solitary, not a social walker. “As I see it,” she
says, “We are two solo walkers walking together.” The perfect long-distance companion.

We weave between rocky points, driftwood, kelp piles, seashells and beach scrapes with
dozens of nesting birds. The beauty is indescribable. Like Thoreau, we are “elevated for a
moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence.” It has been a few
hundred years since the Europeans first explored these beaches. Gaspar de Portolá,
commander of the first Spanish expedition, noted in an August 1769 journal entry that it
took him a day to travel “no more than half a league”—a little over a mile. The terrain
remains wild and formidable.

We come to More Mesa, rising 200 feet above the beach. In 1861, T. Wallace More bought
a thousand acres here for $5 an acre. Before being murdered by squatters, he made a
fortune mining tar seeps along the sea cliffs and selling asphaltum to pave San
Francisco’s streets. Along the wild beach below, oil seeps amid sand and stone, coating
the large rocks that block the beach. Undeterred, Joyce and I slowly crawl over slippery
boulders and wade through beach tar. By the end we smell like a freshly paved road.

Other challenges lie ahead, like the Goleta Slough. When the Franciscans arrived in 1769,
the slough was a huge estuary with “many marshes and lagoons,” Father Serra’s pupil and
friend, Father Juan Crespí, wrote in his diary. Two hundred and fifty years of civilization
have reduced the slough to a fraction of its original size, but if we are to continue it will be
through the slough’s surging tidal waters. Joyce unfolds a small walking stick she carries
for such purposes, and plunges in first, using the stick for support and to gauge the
depth. Once again Providence smiles on us. The swirling water is thigh deep and
navigable; Joyce carefully makes it across. I quickly follow.

We finish the day by leaving the shore route and walking 2 miles up a road to a cheap
hotel. The second day’s route is a bit shorter, 11 miles, but with more rocky barriers. Our
third day requires rising before dawn—the lowest tides of the month are predicted, and
we have three hours to walk 8 miles along the exposed beach. Except the beach turns out
to be 8 miles of rock. We struggle to walk a quarter-mile an hour. Joyce and I quickly lose
sight of each other. The terrain is difficult, but I experience the sort of ecstatic contrast
that Thoreau described: “My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.”

My entire being is intensely focused and aware. With every slow, purposeful step I feel
more alive. My body arches forward against weathered rock, bent in a crouched position

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like a wild animal. My mind empties and a heightened sense of well-being floods my
senses. Nature is overwhelmingly beautiful, and peaceful. That peace becomes my peace.

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. The overgrown path runs between
railroad tracks and the cliff’s edge. It offers a shortcut to Refugio Beach and the base of
the Santa Ynez Mountains, but shortcuts are of no interest to Joyce and me. The walker
who follows the footprints of man may miss the footprints of nature and lose the way. We
follow nature.

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.”

After three days along the coast, we have a fourth day of walking to reach Mission Santa
Ines, our destination—it lies 16 miles away, over the Santa Ynez Mountains, to the east.
Like Thoreau, we head that direction not by choice. “Westward I go free,” he proclaimed,
“but eastward I go only by force.”

For the first 3 miles, we walk through a canyon of cultivated fields, the air heavily scented
by the perfume of lemon and avocado leaves. Wild yellow mustard flowers line the road,
their ancient seed scattered by Franciscan priests to make El Camino Real easier to find.

Farther up, the road becomes steeper and the switchbacks more severe. Joyce walks
ahead while I stop. I am thirsty, my water bottle empty. Spying a road that leads, after less
than a mile, to Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan’s modest vacation home, I head that way.
I walk through the gate to the ranch. An ancient-looking white horse comes from out of
the trees and leads me to the house. As I drink from a hose, the white horse stands facing
west, sunken eyes watching me. I turn to leave and the horse follows, its head low and

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mane dragging. Soon it, too, will become dust and return to the earth. Flesh comes and
goes. Thou knowest not the way of the spirit.

Joyce is several miles down the mountain by the time I catch up with her. The daylight is
fading as we make our way to Mission Santa Ines. By the time we arrive, darkness has
fallen, but the chapel is alight with parish life. We savor the glowing scene from the
outside, and decide not to disturb it.

Joyce returns home to Dallas. I check into a room at Stanford’s medical center, awaiting
cancer treatment.

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.

I live with a constant, pressing awareness of death. I know that the best way to live with
fear is to keep moving. Once I start to walk, I am not afraid anymore; all is well.

Life is lived one step ahead of death, and each time cancer strikes I am determined to
keep pace, God willing. Walking is a metaphor for life: I walk one step at a time, one day at
a time, and God decides how long and how far.

I pray God take me, not in bed, but with boots on, walking west and free on St. Junípero
Serra’s mission trail.

Ms. Sundby’s op-ed “You Also Can’t Keep Your Doctor,” about her ObamaCare
experience, appeared in the Journal on Nov. 4, 2013.

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