At the end of the Camino Finistere, when you literally can’t go any further, there is a small monument to Pilgrims where land meets sea. While I saw many authentic cast off boots placed in obvious spots of significance to someone that left them, I was not prepared for this one.
There was something about this sculpture which made me meditate upon the significance of gear to hikers. Like many people, I form a special bond with my gear over a hike. Some stuff annoys me while other gear becomes like an old friend. There is something about hiking many miles, especially alone, through varied terrain and extremes of weather that are bonding. You also hike in silence contemplating existence, wondering about your purpose, revisiting old regrets, weighing remorseful against joyful memories. All the while there is only one companion sharing your thoughts and experiences: Your gear. This has the ability to transform commercially mass produced products into something else entirely. It becomes more talisman than gear. Specifically, I imbue almost supernatural qualities to my boots. After all, they carried me over the high mountains of Corsica, through the deep winter cold of Dolly Sods, WV, across the high hot plains of Spain’s Mesata. They alone enabled me to achieve heroic feats that I could not have done otherwise. Didn’t they?
In leaving behind a boot in memorial, however, I realize that maybe a hiker is acknowledging a spiritual transcendence. We mere humans are imbued with the supernatural abilities if we can only recognize it. After all, my inner strength was the only essential element that, in the end, made the difference. The boots are merely examples of the material vessel our eternal spirits inhabit briefly in time. Like a snakeskin shed at season’s end, it is only the cast off memory of the entity that passed this way. A transformation has occurred, the boot has outlived its usefulness. The entity goes on. The exciting part for me is to think about who inhabits the spiritual trail.
In the end, when we leave gear as mementos, memorials or simply discarded junk, we are acknowledging our superiority to the material. Conscious or not, it is an affirmation we are made of a different mold.