Chapter 2: Les Baux, France (2010)

Everything I knew about the Camino before I began my 1,000 mile walk: scallop shells, rock piles, pilgrim passports, a Diamond Vision scoreboard, and meeting a cool, Vermont, Robert Frost sort of God.

You can really play the pilgrim out there. It is late summer 2010, and we’ve only lived in France for a month. I’ve seen two pilgrims already just by chance, and oh, my goodness, the first one! I was with the children and we were walking down from the old castle in Les Baux, which is very near Arles, the start of one of the four main French pilgrimage roads. This fellow came up the ancient street with his four-hundred-pound backpack and his eight-foot walking staff, a great wooden, knobbly affair as tall as Moses.

He wore a thick hat with a giant image of a scallop shell probably four-square inches across the front of it. I think it was something he created himself in the fashion of street evangelicals, with their elaborate cardboard signs and their station wagons plastered over in menacing scripture. He walked right up the center of the cobblestone road where we were coming down, making great strides with his staff. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to ask the children to kneel as he pa…