Your Footprints Are the Path
A pilgrim reflects on lessons learned along two journeys, one in New Haven and another along El Camino.
By Abigail Storch
When the pandemic hit, like everyone else, I started walking. My sheer relief at the warming weather and the lengthening light drove me outdoors as soon as the clock struck five in the afternoon. Sometimes my husband would join me, strolling the streets of Prospect Hill in New Haven, Connecticut, and gazing at the beautiful houses along St. Ronan Street. We crisscrossed street after street of statuesque mansions and fancy farmhouses, Dutch colonials and Italian villas, marveling at the architecture and looking up prices on Zillow as we walked.
But I soon tired of Prospect Hill. For four years, I had lived, studied, and worked in the neo-Gothic Yale citadel, traversing the roads in only five of twenty neighborhoods that make up New Haven. So one day, I decided to venture into the more unfamiliar spaces. Dwight, Newhallville, West River. Dixwell. Edgewood. Beaver Hills. Saturday by Saturday, I left my apartment with my headphones and Google Maps and walked every single street of one discrete neighborhood. On the longest day, I walked sixteen miles, but I usually averaged between ten and fifteen. I wanted to understand New Haven more fully—to learn in some small way what it means to dwell here not just as a student passing through, but as a local citizen with a stake in its flourishing.
And learn I did: about developers and monopolies and property owners who care not a whit about the people who live in their properties, and about a few who do. About housing segregation and the history of each neighborhood and the delicate dance between local activists and police officers and city officials. During my months of walking, I chatted about the city with whomever was willing: transportation engineers, city planners, managers of public spaces, community organizers, local politicians, and small business owners.
There are many things you don’t know are there until you walk right by them—or at least I didn’t, until my pilgrimage-in-place. A little library of spiritual books just off the curb on Hazel Street in Newhallville, one of the most dangerous streets in New Haven. A thriving Orthodox synagogue packed with Yiddish speakers in Beaver Hills, where I found a child’s dreidel on the sidewalk. An arts incubator and gallery space for artists of color in Dixwell, and just a few streets down, a jail. Each Saturday, I returned to my apartment more curious about the neighborhood I’d encountered: its history, its evolution, what it’s like to live within that particular web of streets and buildings.
The legend of the pilgrimage route begins with a murder.
In graduate school, I traveled to Spain with my choral ensemble to perform Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles, an hour-long a cappella work based on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage route. There are many variations on the Camino, but the most famous is the Camino Francés, which begins at the border of France and Spain and winds its way through Spain’s chilly northern regions until it reaches the city of Santiago de Compostela and, finally, the Atlantic Ocean at Finisterre (literally, “land’s end”).
The legend of the pilgrimage route begins with a murder. After the resurrection of Christ, the apostles scattered to the corners of the ancient world to preach the Gospel. The eighth-century apostolic breviary proclaims that St. James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, preached in “Spain and the western places” (at that time, the Roman province of Hispania). Upon his return to Jerusalem, King Herod ordered James beheaded. Here, the story gets murky: Some accounts maintain that his tomb was miraculously “translated” from Jerusalem to the Spanish region of Galicia as his stone tomb morphed into a boat and sailed there. Other traditions hold that the disciples brought James’s body back to Galicia to commemorate his mission to the people there.
But on one point they all agree: Centuries later, a hermit named Pelayo was led to James’s burial place by a ring of stars and discovered the saint’s remains. From then on, the city at the western edge of Spain would be called Santiago de Compostela (“St. James of the Field of Stars”), and Christians from all over Europe would make their pilgrimage through northern Spain.
This sense of mystery, danger, and magic twinkles throughout the tradition. The medieval poet Gonzalo de Berceo collected the tales he had heard about miracles that pilgrims witnessed along the road in his popular thirteenth-century book Los Milagros de Nuestra Señora. According to the lore, the devil prowls the Way of St. James while the Virgin Mary keeps a watchful eye on the road in case she needs to save pilgrims from Satan’s clutches.
With shelter and food available every few miles of the Camino, contemporary pilgrims are removed from most of the perils of the road. But for close to a millennium, the pilgrimage was the furthest thing from comfort. Travelers braved the threat of thieves, storms, and hunger. Haunted by the presence of these pilgrims, there is a certain strangeness to the road, the path worn smooth by so many desperate feet—the feet of those who actually believed that a God who could move the bones of his saints from Jerusalem to Spain would come to their aid.
“There is a kind of value you internalize when you live in beautiful spaces. You believe you’re worth something.”
– Darrell Brooks
Orchard Street, a thoroughfare that cuts diagonally through New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods, was once known to locals as the Corridor. Passing through several gang-dominated areas, it was the epicenter of the city’s drug sales and murders.
One dark evening in February of 1994, a grandmother and seven-month-old baby, Danielle Monique Taft, were shot in the brick building at the corner of Munson and Orchard Streets, caught in the crossfire of a shootout between rival gangs. Charlene, the grandmother, was permanently paralyzed. Danielle was killed.
The shooting rocked a city already on edge. Ask any longtime New Haven resident, and they’ll tell you they remember it like it was yesterday. In that decade, New Haven made the top ten list for highest violent crime rates per capita in the entire country. Townies despaired at how far their beloved city had fallen. When asked what it was like back then, the ones who are still around shake their heads and tell of hearing gunshots every day. When you heard shots, you dropped to the ground, one Newhallville lifer told me.
The pastor of Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church, Bishop Theodore Brooks, was devastated. Facing his congregation the next Sunday, he didn’t know what to say. But he heard the voice of God telling him to claim the land. So he marched out the front doors of the church, with the entire congregation following behind, proclaiming blessing throughout Orchard Street and beyond. Then his family started flipping crack houses.
Today, the Beulah Land Development Corporation sits in a small three-story house on Orchard, a few doors down from the church. If you knew about the Corridor’s history, you’d be astonished by how lovely the homes are on the street. You might wonder how such nice houses got to be there.
One afternoon, I went with a local church group to check out Beulah. Darrell Brooks, the pastor’s son and Beulah’s Chief of Operations, met us in the parking lot. We followed along as he pointed out house after house—some shiny and newly renovated, some gutted, and some properties they were trying to buy.
The Beulah Corporation buys dilapidated houses, foots the bill to renovate them, and then sells them to community members at a fraction of their market value, essentially giving the buyer a gift of hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. Beulah is funded by donations and a few grants. Over the past thirty years, it has transformed and resold forty houses and counting.
Beulah doesn’t skimp on the extras, either: the interiors have sparkling new appliances, mosaic tile backsplashes, elegant light fixtures. They’re utterly lovely. And to hear Brooks tell it, the beauty is the point. “We want to show people that just because they don’t have extra money doesn’t mean they should be barred from beauty,” he told us. “We want to communicate to the people in this neighborhood that beauty isn’t only for the few. There is a kind of value you internalize when you live in beautiful spaces. You believe you’re worth something.”
Perhaps the stories passed down by the medieval pilgrims aren’t as far off as we think.
The first night of the Spain tour, we performed in a small stone chapel in Roncesvalles, a tiny village near the French border. As daylight waned, concertgoers filed in to take their seats, but this was a far cry from our regular glitzy New Haven or New York audience. For these people, pilgrimage was not an abstract concept to explore for an evening. For the next six weeks, it would be a way of life.
They all wore sneakers, and since it was raining, most had on long raincoats and waterproof pants. Many if not all were staying at the Roncesvalles albergue that night before beginning their five-hundred-mile journey the next morning. I studied the faces of members of the audience, wondering why each of them had chosen to do this. I wished I was one of them.
While the pilgrims of the Middle Ages most often walked the Camino in search of miracles, today there are as many reasons to walk the Camino as there are pilgrims. For Dave Dean, a travel blogger who walked the Camino in late 2020, the pilgrimage was a way to celebrate turning forty. “It’s an important birthday, and I figure it needs a milestone to go with it,” he writes. “Getting drunk with a bunch of friends is not much of an achievement. Walking across the top of Spain is.” When asked why he walks the road over and over, three-time Camino pilgrim Leslie Gilmour writes, “Because it is there, and I am a walker.” On the message board of a Camino-sponsored website, a student wrote that she walked the route to practice her Spanish. One man wanted to improve his troubled marriage. One Minneapolitan walked because he was “sick to death of college.”
But while smaller in number, some pilgrims do still go in search of the spiritual. In his 2019 book A Pilgrimage to Eternity, New York Times journalist Timothy Egan documents his pilgrimage on the Via Francigena, a route from Canterbury to Rome, as an attempt to reconnect with the Catholicism of his youth. Educated by Jesuits, Egan lost his faith after a local priest attempted to molest his brother and succeeded in molesting his brother’s friends, a violation that drove one of the friends to suicide. “One of the reasons I’m on the Via Francigena is to see whether I can maintain my wonder of what could be, while never forgetting what was,” he writes.
Perhaps the stories passed down by the medieval pilgrims aren’t as far off as we think. In an interview, Egan recounts this story with a palpable sense of incredulity:
Something happened to me in the third-largest domed basilica in the world, the Duomo di Santa Margherita in the town of Montefiascone, Italy…. I went in on a dark, stormy night, and I saw the woman in the crypt: Santa Lucia Filippini. She’s 300 years dead, and she’s lying on her side in this glass encased coffin. And I’ve got to say, she looks pretty good. Her skin looked great.
When I went up closer to her, I swear to God, her eyes opened. I watched it; I took pictures of it. And then just as slowly as they’d opened, those eyes closed.
I wrote the priest in the parish to ask about it. I also met someone later on my pilgrimage who’s an ex-physicist from the ex-Soviet Union—he was on pilgrimage to do penance for what he felt was his responsibility in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster—and this guy saw the exact same thing as me.
So what do I take away from that? One takeaway is this is a kind of fraud designed to get people to believe. But another is that we just don’t understand it.
I’m drawn toward what Augustine said about miracles: They’re not contrary to nature, they’re just contrary to what we know about nature. I don’t really know, but I know what I saw.
Egan isn’t sure what to make of his experience. But he returns to U.S. soil convinced that Christianity is alive somehow—though what this means, he still can’t quite explain. But the fruit of his journey is a changed heart, attuned to the possibility that things may not be as they seem, that there are unseen forces at work in us. Maybe that’s what all the Camino pilgrims are looking for, even the ones who might not articulate it that way.
Perhaps it’s only as you walk that the meaning opens itself to you. Caminante, son tus huellas, / el camino, y nada más, Antonio Machado famously wrote. Traveler, your footprints are the path, nothing else.
He was growing vegetables and herbs for the neighborhood.
My final walk of 2020 was in the Edgewood neighborhood on the darkest day of the year. The sun was set to disappear at 4:21 p.m. As 4:00 drew close, I looked on my map at which streets I had and hadn’t walked, determined to finish.
As I rounded the corner onto Edgewood Avenue, my last street, all of a sudden, bursts of red, pink, and orange lit the sky. It was the kind of sunset that brought people to their doorsteps. I passed a little girl, framed in the glass of a storm door, and then a man, standing in his front yard. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked as I walked by. “The sky is on fire,” he replied.
Then, just as quickly as the colors flared, they were gone, and I was walking alone at night. No one was out and about, and I was on edge. I passed a police officer who gave me a quizzical look, and then several cop cars parked on corners.
From about thirty feet away, I saw a figure moving in a yard, hidden by shadows. As I approached, in the dim glow of the streetlights, I realized that it was a teenage boy. There were slabs of wood laid out in the yard. Between the yard and sidewalk were four raised-bed garden boxes.
The boy’s back was to me, so I tried not to startle him. “Are you making a garden?” I asked softly. He was, he told me—it was something he started doing in the pandemic. He was growing vegetables and herbs for the neighborhood.
The sign behind him: “Sojourn Market.”
At least for now, the road teaches you to be a witness, seeing and testifying to the repairers all around you.
There is an old Mesopotamian legend of a nomad who is promised an inheritance by a deity. He leaves everything behind, following the deity’s voice. “He went out, not knowing where he was going,” the legend has it. “By faith he went to live in that land of promise… whose designer and builder is God.”
There is a tale of a saint in northern France: Benoît-Joseph Labre, the patron saint of wanderers. Called to walk the earth as a mendicant, he begged and slept on the open road, worshiping at shrines all over Europe. He died at age thirty-five of malnutrition in Rome. When asked, he insisted that he was walking in search of a better country. “Our comfort is not in this world,” he would say.
Sometimes you set out down the block, outfitted with existential questions about where you belong. You’re not entirely sure what you’re looking for, but in some theoretical sense, you want to repair the breach, restore the streets. You want to change the city—or maybe, you just want to change. To care.
As you walk the city streets, a few miles away, a pastor’s son hands the keys to a newly renovated house to a woman for whom eviction has become a way of life. A man stops everything to behold a sunset. A boy builds a garden in the winter darkness.
You are a student of the road. At least for now, the road teaches you to be a witness, seeing and testifying to the repairers all around you. Those who are telling others: Believe this: you’re worth something.
The road teaches you this: that there are places in this world where, in the aftermath of murder, homes are built to be given away and stone churches reach toward the heavens. Where nomads are visited by deities, and corpses open their eyes.
You walk by—and then you stop.
Abigail Storch is a graduate of Eastern University and Yale Divinity School. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, she now lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.