We will start walking before sunrise. Pilgrims are lacing up boots in the darkness outside our hostel, on our way to Santiago. Many languages are spoken. No English.

It’s cold in these mountains. And windy. A guy sits beside me. He has a Southern accent, like I do.

“This seat taken?”

His name is Steve, from Chattanooga. We shake hands. He and I are so grateful to have someone to speak English with that we are talking blue streaks.

“Isn’t this amazing?” Steve says. “To be in a place where you don’t know anyone, and yet you feel so close to everybody?”

He’s right. It is strange. To feel deep comradeship with total foreigners. People you might otherwise never interact with.

But you’re speaking now. In fact, you do more than speak. You empathize. You connect. You complain about the weather. About the five-minute showers. You’re all in this together.

Breakfast is light. Steve has Cornflakes. I have coffee. I'm trying to coax my muscles into another day of abuse.

A Korean man at the table sees my cowboy

hat and is intrigued. He asks to try on the hat, communicating solely in hand gestures.

The hat is four sizes too big, and droops on his head like Speedy Gonzalez’s sombrero, but he is thrilled. The man poses for pictures with his friends, holding pretend air-pistols, saying to the camera, “I am Crint East-rood.”

Our walk begins.

The sun is not yet up. Pilgrims are on the desolate highway, trudging onward in the dark of morning. We are in the far flung hills.

There are no houses out here. No barns. No evidence of man. Just farm animals, kept captive without fences. Because where would they go?

It’s foggy, we can't see anything except our own feet.

Then the sun comes up. Sunrise starts slow, and intensifies. Like the second movement of a symphony. That’s when we realize we are…

We walk into the village, coasting on fumes. We are covered in mud and sweat, clutching our backpacks. Looking for rooms.

The woman at the hostel utters four magic words. “Si, we have beds.”

This is amazing. There have been no beds in Spain for Holy Week. It’s almost Easter Sunday and we have been beggars, compelled to walk the Camino de Santiago with our hats in hand, and our hands out, looking for beds.

“Puede ayudarnos?” (Can you help us?) is a phrase I’ve grown too familiar with, asking strangers.

Many pilgrims have grown discouraged and already abandoned the trail. I know two pilgrims who dropped out and caught planes home. One woman slept in a public restroom. Spain is simply too full to find rooms. I think everyone in this country must sleep standing up.

Even the little pueblos are packed. Easter in Spain is like Times Square on New Year’s Even, minus the giant ball and the public urination.

But we have a bed. Tonight. Us. A

warm bed. With a shower! I could cry.

Tonight’s hostel is small. This place is, by all means, a total dump. The bunk rooms look like Club Med for bedbugs. I don’t believe the staff has cleaned this place since the Spanish-American War. The shower smells like an intergluteal crevice. But to me, this place is pure heaven.

We are served a communal dinner. The table is surrounded with pilgrims from many nations. Denmark, Taiwan, Bosnia, South Korea, France, Austria, and Jefferson County, Alabama.

A woman brings us wine in clay pitchers, which we drink from mismatched plastic tumblers. The soup is simple, potatoes and leeks. The bread is hard enough to sand oil stains from residential driveways. And it is the best food I’ve ever tasted in my…

We leave our inn at daybreak. Our innkeeper is awake and already at the front door, wearing a robe, waiting to say goodbye to us. Like a mom seeing her kids off to school.

She gives us a heartfelt and emotional goodbye in French, with double kisses and everything.

“Dieu sout avec toi,” she says.

I don’t speak French, so I answer, “Ten four.”

Which she evidently doesn’t understand. And there’s no way to explain such a philosophical concept as “ten four,” so I give her a hug instead. The French, I am pleased to learn, are huggers.

And we’re off.

Jamie and I are wearing heavy packs. But not as heavy as some pilgrims. Some hikers have fallen victim to overkill packing. They are wearing packs the size of Hondas. But they will learn. Just like we all will. That on the Camino, as in life, it is not how much you carry that matters, but how much you are able to leave behind.

There are a handful of other pilgrims leaving San-Jean-Pie-du-Port

at the same time we are, making their exodus on foot. You can pick us “peregrinos” out of the crowd because of the enormous backpacks we carry.

Soon we are all on a highway which winds through impossibly green hills. A thick fog drapes itself over the earth. Sheep everywhere. Some of which stand directly in the road and poop.

But this is all part of the experience. The fog, the livestock, the poop. Just like life.

When you close your eyes, all you hear are the patter of your own footsteps. Occasionally you will pass other pilgrims. They all have reasons for walking.

Soon we are all climbing steep mountain highways. And it’s all starting to sink in. This is not a “vacation.” This is not supposed to be “fun” in the traditional sense. There are no tour guides. No tour groups. No itinerary. No…

3:03 a.m.—I’m awake before my wife. Actually, I’m awake before the rest of France. Jet lag has me screwed up. It’s 3 in the morning here but 8 p.m. in Alabama.

Thus, I am locked away in our inn’s bathroom, door closed, sitting on a latrine, playing my fiddle, with a brass mute affixed to the instrument’s bridge.

4:10 a.m.—Jamie is still sleeping. I’m still fiddling.

5:37 a.m.—I am now sitting in the inn’s garden, fiddling. Sleeping Beauty still hasn’t budged.

There is an older woman in the cottage next door, listening to me play through an open window as she works in her kitchen. She pauses to lean out the window and give light applause when I finish playing “Over the Waves.” I’m not sure whether she is applauding because she liked the song or because I am no longer playing.

6:24 a.m.—I am watching a calico cat creep along terracotta rooftops in the dark distance. He carefully leaps from one roofline to the next. I think he hears my fiddle and is looking for his

wounded sibling.

7:28 a.m.—The sun rises in San-Jean-Pie-de-Port, slowly ascending behind the small French hamlet, nestled in the Pyrenees. Silver mist clings to the mountainsides like a damp dishrag. Distant sheep graze on swatches of green farmland quilting the rocky hillsides. It is my great hope that my wife wakes up someday soon.

8:32 a.m.—Jamie is awake. We eat a breakfast of muesli, which is cereal. Our innkeeper tells us muesli will help us go to the bathroom. The French woman doesn’t speak English, so instead of saying “bathroom,” she uses hand gestures to pantomime “severe gastrointestinal distress.” Then she laughs. The French are wonderful.

10:00 am—We are at the supermarket, buying food for our upcoming walk. There is evidently no peanut butter in this store, or in all of France.

They sell items I've never heard of. Tiny octopuses in a jar.…

Tomorrow morning, my wife will become pilgrims.

We will walk the breadth of Spain, upwards of 500 miles, over Pyrenees Mountains, on foot, to visit the remains of the apostle James.

I’ve never been a pilgrim before. I’ve never thought of myself as a pilgrim. What even IS a pilgrim?

Contrary to American thought, a pilgrim is not someone who wears a hat shaped like a traffic cone. A pilgrim is someone who journeys for spiritual reasons. Someone who wanders through a foreign land, looking to be changed.

That’s me, I guess. I’m seeking. Although I’m not sure what for.

Maybe I’m seeking to be something different. A stronger version of myself. A healed version.

I’ve been trying to heal ever since I was 11. I grew up under the weight of suicide, domestic abuse, and gun violence. My dad’s last night was spent in a homicidal rage wherein he tried to kill his family.

On his final night, my father was holding my

sister and I hostage. My mother escaped and ran for help. The sheriff deputies bursted into our home with riot guns. Dad was arrested. That was the last time I ever saw him. He was dead the next day, shortly after being released on bail.

But my reason for a pilgrimage is more than that. I was raised in fundamentalist household. We were a cult, really. The cult of Puritanical American Evangelicalism, which is a shallow religion.

We were not taught to look for healing. We were taught bullet points. I come from people who told you, upfront, that God loved you no matter who you were and then gave you a long list of exceptions.

Mainly, I was taught that beer was evil, to shun rock ‘n’ roll, and heedeth not the wicked ways of “I Dream of Jeannie.”

But the older I get, the more…

There were ghosts everywhere. That’s what I kept thinking, while standing on Shiloh battlefield. Ghosts.

You could feel them. You could almost hear their fraternal laughter. You could smell their gunpowder.

A ghost is merely a soul who doesn’t want to be forgotten. Beneath our feet, at Shiloh National Military Park; beneath 163 years of gravel and grit, were tens of thousands of forgotten souls.

They were long forgotten boys in uniforms. Men who had families. Who never saw their wives again. Who nevermore kissed their mothers again, or shook hands with their old men, or bounced babies on their laps.

They were just children, really. Boys who once engaged in a great civil war, testing whether their nation, or any nation conceived and so dedicated, could long endure. Fighting for something they believed in.

My friend Bobby and I were playing music for a funeral directly on the battlefield. The funeral was held for the former National Park superintendent, Woody Harrell.

Woody was

the man who made the Shiloh park great. A man who dedicated his life to preserving the sacred ground of the oft forgotten. A man who was recognized on the floor of the U.S. senate for his work here.

There were park rangers galore, attending the service. It looked like a ranger convention. Stetsons everywhere.

I met one ranger who looked like Teddy Roosevelt. He wore a table-flat brimmed hat and green suit, pressed sharply enough to slice tomatoes.

“McDougall’s brigade would have been fighting on this spot where we stand,” he said. “Would’ve been one heck of a fight on this ground.”

We weren’t all that far from Bloody Pond. A country pond where dying and wounded soldiers sought water during the battle. Wounded men would’ve crawled on their bellies toward the water.

The pond became the hub of death. The remains of young men…