I can’t explain the feeling I’m having here, standing on the beach in Comillas, a little seaside resort on the Cantabrian coast of Spain. I’m wading in the water, actually, because my feet are aching, and as I stare out to sea, my mind drifting, it suddenly occurs to me — ten days and 250 kilometres into a planned twenty-three-day walk across Spain, west from Irun along the centuries-old Catholic pilgrimage route to the famous cathedral town of Santiago de Compostela — that my journey has really, finally begun.

Which doesn’t make sense, given that my body is telling me this pilgrimage (or whatever it is I’m doing here; the question remains open) began long ago. Call it another “long-walk paradox.” I’ve been making a list. I scrawled the first one into the margin of my Los Caminos del Norte guidebook back on day two. My trail mate, Dave, and I were climbing around the lighthouse south of Pasajes San Pedro, having just parted company with Heidi from Michigan, who’d pressed a Spanish-English dictionary into my hands after our lunch of calamari bocadillo on the quays. (I’m just, like, really worried about you guys walking all the way across Spain not speaking any Spanish.) Then she disappeared up the trail, walking at a speed neither of us could have quite matched jogging. We climbed on up the hill, past the graveyard and around to the lighthouse, gasping in the heat. Somewhere out there, we stopped and I wrote “Long-walk paradox #1: pain/beauty” in an unsteady hand, standing on that wild shoulder of Basque greenery above the heaving, Windex-coloured sea.

I’m not even sure what I meant by that now. Pain/beauty. Perhaps I was imagining a hypothetical third quality that encompassed both. But now the day is collapsing around me. Spanish families are packing their coolers and rolling up their beach towels, heading for their cars, heading home. The sun is dipping toward the western ridge, the sky growing long, deepening from blue to grey. Dave is back in the pension, reading Beevor’s The Battle for Spain. Our conversation has been getting thin at the edges, with hundreds of kilometres still to go. I’m out here soaking my feet, remembering that I was in Bilbao a couple of days ago and didn’t see the Guggenheim because I was so tired that lying in my hotel watching Gran Torino seemed like a better idea. Eastwood riddled with bullets at the end, stretched out on the lawn like a crucifix. Eastwood rebranded as Christ — shoulda seen that coming.

And here one of the beach kids boots a soccer ball past his friend, and it rolls all the way down to the waves where I pick it up and throw it back, and he stares at me, curiosity edged with suspicion. Me standing there in the waves with my iPhone, pecking in notes. I guess I don’t look like I’m from around here, even if I’m doing what people have been doing along this coast since the remains of the apostle James, the brother of Jesus, were first discovered in Galicia in the ninth century. That is: walking west, wondering why.

I thumb-type the words. “Long walk paradox #2: the walk really starts when you feel like you’ve already been walking forever.”

2.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.
— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from The Four Quartets

People tell you all kinds of stories about why they’re doing it, taking weeks to come this way. Down the Basque Hills and across the sands of the Playa de la Arena, up to El Haya, down the blaring Cantabrian motorways, the misty back lanes, through the shaking pines and fragrant eucalyptus, the red dirt, the gossiping donkeys, the halting breeze. They tell you they’re heading to the festival at Santiago, or they’re meeting friends in Finisterre. They tell you they’re travelling on the cheap before finishing school. But most commonly they talk of freedom, which is a jarring answer if you associate the word with autonomy, self-definition, individual routes through the maze of life. On the north coast, there is only one way to Santiago de Compostela, and you are reminded of your surrender to that path every kilometre or so by a yellow sign or a scallop shell indicating the way forward. This way. Up that hill. Turn left past the churchyard. The markers make rudimentary the human day, collapsing all options, all routes, all avenues to one. Freedom. Really?

But that’s what they say. To be free. To feel free. A political science student from Germany. A nursing instructor from Norway. A bookie from the UK, same story. He says, “I just like the freedom. Just walking. No hassles, right?”

I’m more in sympathy with a theatrical agent from Germany who stops to watch me photographing flowers outside a café. I’m killing time while Dave works his BlackBerry inside, handling emails from a job that never stops. She says, “That should be a nice shot.” And when we get to the point in the conversation where we talk about why, she says, “Well, I guess to change my mind about a few things.”

Nobody talks about religion, faith, metaphysics. None of that. Nobody says, because my mother died three years ago and I haven’t been the same since. Nobody says, because not long ago at a party I got into a drunken argument about philosophical materialism — the belief that the only thing that exists is physical matter — and found myself yelling at a woman, “Then why are we here? Why are you here?”

Nobody would admit to that. To losing it. To getting belligerent over the possibility of transcendence. Nobody would admit that, because it would indicate that you somehow needed to walk 800 kilometres across Spain.

I confess. Guilty. I somehow needed to do exactly that.

3.

We walk and walk and walk. We talk at first, but then much less. On the first day, Dave said, “A friend warned me that you and I would probably be doing top ten movies of all time by the end of this thing. Because by day twenty, dude, we’re going to have talked about everything else.”

Dave’s friend was wrong. Make no mistake. I’m here because our friendship is an old one. We’ve been pals since college, and have stayed in touch ever since, even after he set off on an international life that has taken him from Geneva to South Africa to London and beyond. We’ve stayed in touch for a reason, and when he suggested this trip over dinner in London, where I last saw him, I didn’t hesitate. For me, Dave may be the only person on earth from whom the suggestion to walk 800 kilometres together would not seem insane. So there’s talking to be done. And in the morning, with a coffee con leche and a wedge of tortilla inside us, with fresh legs, breathing light, cool air and smelling the farms, the soil, the botanical plenitude, words are free and our discussion is as wide as the horizon, as curious as the world. Politics, money, books, kids, family. What’s up with mutual friends. Religion once, nothing too personal.

But on tired legs, with the sun high as we climb a long slope toward a final ridgeline, our destination a smudge of buildings some stubborn distance ahead of us, our progress imperceptible — during those stretches we’re prisoners to what we’re doing. Marooned in the flow. Paradox #3. You take somewhere around 25,000 steps a day. Each one of these depends on all the others. Each is mission critical. So each one — each single footfall, crunch of broken stone, scuff of dust, kicked pebble skipping ahead — is both a tiny non-event and one occupying a space as large as the universe. Each footstep, in the moment you take it, is all you have. And there comes a point each day, sometimes as early as mid-morning, when words simply fail. If there’s conversation after noon, it’s generally about food.

We eat like teenagers. The trek might be worth it for this alone, the metabolism roaring like a blast furnace. We eat slow-roasted lamb shoulders, platters of octopus and smoked ham, anchovies and green olives, patatas con chorizo, oxtails, bocadillos with thick slices of cheese or rings of fried calamari. Once, escalope jamon, which turned out to be ham cold cuts breaded and deep fried, perhaps our only culinary disappointment. In Castro-Urdiales, we found ourselves looking out over the boats in the harbour, eating a whole monkfish cooked in oil with slivers of garlic and served with bread. And in El Haya, a slab of beef churleton between us, grilled an inch and a half thick and served with crisp fries and tangy salad. The owner kept pouring us more brandy, pleased to see us devouring the local specialty, reminding us all the while that he normally ate a whole churleton himself, sometimes two. After dinner, we talked with Horst, a German economist who worked on contract for bmw and spent long months walking in between.

Then we slept. We crashed, we went deep. And we awoke huge spirited, talkative, filled with the energy of our plan.

“Get to the Primitivo,” Horst had told us, speaking of the mountain route from Oviedo over the remote inner hills of Asturias and Galicia and down to the walled city of Lugo. “Hurry through Cantabria if you have to, but take your time in the mountains.” Horst had already covered 4,000 kilometres when we met him, and would cover 4,000 more by the time he returned home late in the year. Lost fifteen kilos so far. He showed us the notches on his belt.

So that’s where we’re going. That’s where the whole trip is now heading. To the Primitivo. To the Original Way of the medieval pilgrims.