“It doesn’t really have anything to do with my education.”

That is what I usually told people who asked why I was going to walk El Camino de Santiago for college credit. I was going to go and see some new sights and eat some new food and smell some new smells. I wasn’t going to really learn anything.  Now, at the End of the World, I realized that I have loved and lost, faced parts of myself that I have fled for years, and acknowledge aspects of myself that I never thought existed.

I’ve spent a lot of my life living inside my head. My general lack of self-confidence kept me from befriending people I admired and taking chances that could have become stories for my grandchildren. Buying a plane ticket to Spain for three months was the first in a series of decisions that made me very uncomfortable. One click meant a commitment to being uncomfortable. I didn’t speak Spanish, know how to use the subway, and I had never left the United States.

I walked in solitude, I hitchhiked to Portugal, and I spent the weekend in a beachhouse with a thirty three year old woman. If I hadn’t just said “yes”, I never would have realized that I am comfortable in my own company, learned proper hitching etiquite, or discovered so many uses for olive-oil.

Most days of my Way have been so dense with living that the day before is quickly forgotten. Most nights have been filled with delicious dinners, cozy social drinking, and dreams so vivid that they are hardly distinguishable from reality. I have lost myself in the wilderness, and smiled when I realized that I had absolutely no clue where I was heading.

I pushed myself out of my comfort bubble, and I had the greatest adventure of my life.

“…I was encouraged to find that many people now of college age—those who belong to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured environment—have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in the woods.” (Louv 3)

I carried Richard Louv’s words in my pack from one side of Spain to the other. It was hard not to feel like I was one of these children he used to preface his work The Last Child in the Woods. I spent my summers skipping smooth stones across olive-colored rivers, bushwacking my way through blackberry thickets, and ducking all-too-courageously into hopefully-deserted bear caves. I had the taste as a child, of how one can loose a sense of time and identity in the forest, in the whadow of a mountain, or waist deep in a flow of mountainmelt. I undertook my walk without the company of my classmates, but I seldom felt lonely. I never forgot that there was life all around.

Every city that I arrived in, Madrid, Burgos, Pamplona, Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, was in stark contrast from the mountain paths that I became very comfortable on. Upon entering these dense metropolitain areas, I was unsettled. There were the crouds of people, on their phones, looking into their palms. The sounds of traffic flowing along arterial highways drown out the birds that sung the anthem of my walking. When I passed by children at reccess, they were very blaitantly caged, or “containerized”, as University of Maryland professor Jane Clark puts it. I sat with a few friends at a beach in Finisterra, and children had been let out for reccess on a school up on the hillside. Many of the children reached through the bars of the fence surrounding their concrete play-area, waving down at my group and I, skipping stones out into the calm cape.

So why were those children so strictly contained to a concrete jungle when a beautiful beach lay just down the hill? The plain truth is that “countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order” (Louv 27). Out of petty fear of scraped knees and seaside-kidnappers, those kiddos are on a daily basis deprived of the adventure and exploration that is ceasslessly available on a sandy beach. My friends and I spent hours stacking rocks (physics), playing frisbee (motor control), and meeting foreigners on the sand (social skills). Those children spent their reccess clinging to a metal fence, staring down the hillside at us.

“[W]e can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors…and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems” (Louv 31).

As modern societies advance further down a dominantly digital pathway, mental and social maladies become ever-more prevalent among our youth. I rarely saw children in the small mountain pueblos through which I passed daily, and in the cities, I had several run ins with angsty and sometimes threatening young people. A friend and I once came upon a gang of teenagers throwing stones into windows several stories above. They shouted indecipherably at an old woman making her way home. She was so frightened by their rambunctious behavior that she asked us to walk her to her door. While their actions cannot directly be attributed to living in a city and deprived of nature, they did live in the projects of Madrid, and not the valleys of Cantabria.

Luckily, within the problem lies the solution. Alienation from the natural world breeds problems, but immersion can be incredibly nurturing and healing. I began my walk to Santiago de Compostela having just shakily separated with my significant other. In the city of Burgos, I struggled to clear my head. After leaving the city, I was much more easily able to cope. My thoughts and feelings were more clear in the mountains and beside the ocean. In a matter of days I was “over it”. There is something about nature that calms the mind. Thoughts and feelings come and go like clouds. The pace of the mind is slowed. During my walk I learned to trust myself, in a time when many people my age don’t have the confidence to order a pizza over the phone.

The closer we grow to the intangible companion of technology, the further we stray from our home. Louv’s “nature deficit disorder” becomes an ever growing problem, and our school systems do little to bridge the gap. The is getting outside. Instead of watching on a screen, get out and see it for yourself. The natural aspects of our world are quickly being extracted and used up, and our humanity goes with it.

I have never found myself so incredibly frustrated with an academic instructor. So many times I found myself glaring at his shiny forehead, thinking “Damnit, why wont you just tell us what you want?!” Bill Arney is without doubt generously qualified for his position. To the classroom he brings a wealth of knowledge that is oftentimes hard to categorize as first person experience or something read from a book. He is resourceful in his allegories, or at least for those who have managed to follow his train of thought that deep into a monologue.

My frustration in class and while writing comes from the standards that Bill holds for his students. He pushes us to think deeper, to adapt to foreign perspectives as if they were our own, and to challenge our own thinking. Our seminars were often quiet, but only because so few of us felt confident speaking on the level of intangibility that was expected of us. When conversation arose, it could very likely take flight, and I think that each and every student could leave each class feeling enlightened and slightly belittled, for better or worse. Learning is no joke to Bill. He expects of his students the same efforts in thought as the subjects of our studies.

I suppose that my one gripe with Bill would be that I received less personal attention to my work than I might have liked. Spoiled millennial? Maybe. Bill seems to expect a high level of devotion and quality of our writing, and while I feel my writing has vastly improved, I think that it could have more so, had Bill provided more specific critiques. Likely I expect too much. After all, I am one of nearly twenty students who write for Bill for each assignment, I am thankful for his feedback in the safe of such a workload.

All in all, it has been a great pleasure working and learning under Bill. I would enthusiastically pursue his course offerings in the future, in spite of the guaranteed challenge that they would present.

Ethan Rogol served as our Spanish Language instructor for this quarter only. Ethan was incredibly enthusiastic, bright, and patient with his instruction. We all enjoyed his integration of music into our classes, and how ready he was to cater to varying experience levels. His approach to learning language is tradition with more practical touches, which make for a classroom full of waving hands trying to pantomime a haircut to less fluent piers. I enjoyed his class, and feel as though I leave for Spain much more capable of finding a place to rest my tired bones at the end of a long day walking.

In the Spring, I was lucky to interact with Bill Arney in a fashion that few students ever do with their instructors. I met with Bill several times along our walk through Spain. We usually discussed my writing, and I found it much easier to gain concrete advice and criticism in this environment. It was refreshing to be around Bill in a more casual setting. When I faced a miniature existential crisis of sorts, I forced myself to talk to Bill, and his advice, while a bit sryptic, was helpful. Above all else I am so very grateful for this opportunity that he has created for myself and the other students. Walking to Santiago de Compostela has been the best decision I have ever made, and It certainly wouldnt have been the same without Bill Arney.

For me, The Evergreen State College was going to be a magical transmutation machine. I would go in with undirected passion and a can-do attitude, and come out with a clear set of goals, connections to get me there, and probably a head of dreadlocks. At the end of my first year taking classes in Olympia, I think that the college has done its job, transmutation complete.

I came to Evergreen wanting to become an educator, but education is a broad term. In the last nine months, I have worked in a kindergarten class at a local elementary school. I have led friends on adventures into the Evergreen forest and into the surrounding mountains. Each day has left me more sure of my path.

Spring quarter, I walked across Spain, from Irun to Finisterra, a distance of over 900 kilometers. Almost every night I slept in Albergues run by volunteers, some former pilgrims themselves. One evening I arrived in a tiny beach town not long before dark. I had walked two stages that day, passing through several major cities and places to stay. When I reached the last albergue for another four hours walk, a sign posted clearly on the door read “FULL” in three different languages. In spite of their full house, the pair of hospitaleros welcomed me. They made space for an extra bed, made space around the table for a home-cooked meal, and made room in their busy schedules to show us pilgrims a beautiful sunset, and talk with me for hours about their work. I left the next morning with two warm hugs, an e-mail address, and an offer to be a hospitalero myself in the coming years.

I learned two very important things on my walk; that anyone can warm the hearts and make a difference in the lives of complete strangers, and that education and learning more often occurs out in this great big world than it does in a mediated classroom. El Camino de Santiago has not only changed my direction, but also clarified my goals. I will be leaving Evergreen, to pursue a degree in Outdoor Education and Therapy at Western Washington University. There I can combine my passion for the outdoors with giving to others. I also plan on taking up those two hospitaleros on their offer, so that I may give something back to the Way that gave so much to me.

Even if my path is not through the Red Square for the next three years, I found it there. I would not be here, in Europe, living through the most adventurous time of my life, had it not been for the Evergreen State College, but I no longer need to “figure it out”. Transmutation complete.