The Body Keeps Walking
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
- Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”
North County Trail, New York, April 2026.
Ten miles and change. A trail called North County, a sky so blue it seemed painted with watercolors, and a back that got with the plan and didn’t hurt today.
The path opened ahead of us flat and long, sometimes bordered by split-rail fences wearing soft green light. I had the feeling I get sometimes on a good walk: the sense that the path doesn’t end, it just continues past where you can see. That the horizon is not a wall but a door. It’s the same feeling I expect to have in June, somewhere outside Astorga, entering the long stretch of the Camino Francés. The anticipation of walking the Camino has been teaching me things from a distance, and one of them is this: the path looks impossible until you are on it, and then it becomes simply the next step.
Red, white, and the tufted crown. North County Trail, April 18, 2026.
Today, spring was performing at full volume. The redbuds had gone full magenta against the blue sky. Crabapple branches held their buds like small fists of deep pink, each one about to open. And there, along the edge of the trail where the leaf litter meets the grass, I found bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis): three flowers in a cluster, each one an almost embarrassing white, with a crown of yellow at the center. Bloodroot blooms for two or three days. That’s it. The petals fall at the lightest touch, the faintest breath of wind. It doesn’t waste itself on longevity. It shows up entirely, and then it goes.
Rousseau wrote that he could only meditate when he was walking. “When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” I’ve come to believe the same is true of something else: that joy is not a condition the body happens to be in, but something it generates through motion. Walking doesn’t just cheer me up. It thinks for me. It remembers things I’ve forgotten.
We played frisbee on the way back, which is either an extremely sensible strategy for forgetting you’ve already walked nine miles, or proof that the body has its own wisdom separate from the part of us that keeps a running tally of suffering. I threw badly, retrieved enthusiastically, and felt unreasonably happy about it. By the time we finished, I had forgotten to be tired. The body, given joy, simply continues.
I’ve been training for the Camino since early Spring began: longer walks, more strength training, paying attention to what the body tells me between sessions. Last week, during our first 10-mile hike with backpacks, my back spoke up, loud and insistent. This week it was quiet. That’s the thing about physical training that no one explains clearly enough: it’s not linear, and it doesn’t always feel like progress while it’s happening. The adaptation is mostly invisible. And then another Saturday morning you walk ten miles on a trail in New York and realize, somewhere around mile eight, that the back is not hurting (can’t say the same for the feet yet). The body has been quietly doing its work all along.
Walt Whitman called it “the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.” He was writing about freedom, about the road as a kind of birthright. I’ve been thinking about it differently lately: not as freedom from something, but as movement toward. Toward Astorga. Toward Santiago. Toward whatever version of myself arrives on the far side of 17 days of walking.
Violet and yellow, playing within me.
The violets were everywhere on the margins of the trail below the fence, small and purple and unbothered. The lesser celandine had taken over the verge entirely, yellow beyond yellow, a color that invades and insists on itself. A pond appeared through the trees, the water grey-blue and still. A rusted gate opened onto rolling fields so green in this still early Spring they looked invented rather than sown.
This is what I came outside to remember: that beauty is not a reward for effort, and joy is not something you earn after the hard part is over. They are threaded through the hard part. They are the reason you go. Hiking really brings me a lot of joy and happiness. Every movement does that.
61 days until we board the plane to Madrid.
The body is nearly ready. I am getting there.