Chasing Arrows

He came from Florida, though I forgot which part as soon as he said it. Definitely not Miami. His skin was a fierce pink and he wore a turquoise Marlins baseball cap on backwards, a loose-fitting tank top, and board shorts. Pudgy, thirty-something, and reeking of booze. Something about the guy I liked. He had a big drunk laugh and seemed unstable in a refreshing way.

That afternoon in Puerto Vallarta was golden and sweaty. Tourists stumbled down the buckled sidewalk, blinking into shadowy knickknack shops. Local children worked the crowd with gap-toothed smiles and distended bellies, hawking gum and wilted roses. I’d ducked into a tattoo parlor to soak up the air conditioning and browse the wall. The designs were neither good nor bad. Your standard-issue skulls with serpents threading through vacant eye sockets. Over-complicated, uninteresting tattoos.

“R’you gonna get one too?” Florida slurred.

“Just browsing,” I answered flatly, in no mood for a drunken come-on.

“Bet your ass I’m getting my first tat today.” He squinted up at the designs on the wall. “Help me pick it.”

I laughed, feeling myself get reeled in. “You have to choose your own tattoo. Unwritten rule.”

“But what looks badass?”

I pointed to a full back piece depicting the Grim Reaper riding a skeleton horse through a winter forest, scythe swinging. It was awful.

“Okay, bro,” he said, lips pursed, a game-for-anything face. “What one are you getting?”

“Not today.”

“Scared?”

I shook my head. “Broke.”

“No way!” he boomed, pointing a booze-swollen finger at me. “No fucking way, bro. If I’m getting tatted, you’re getting tatted.” He waved blearily at the wall. “Want the Reaper? I’m buying.”

From the start, our connection was shifty, nonsensical. I remember liking that he called me bro, even though that kind of compulsive nicknaming usually annoyed me. He seemed sincere about it. Like he really needed a bro—in my case, a female bro.

Any other time in my life, I would’ve brushed him off, but Florida caught me in an unusual state of mind. I’d been traveling for almost a year. I was still crazy with road magic, overdosed on freedom. No order, no rules, zero plan. Open to suggestions.

In February of 2000, ten months earlier, I’d sold everything that wouldn’t fit into a backpack and left for Spain with a one-way ticket. It wasn’t a calm decision. Since graduating high school, I’d been acutely aware of my future pressing in on me, the options dizzying. I’d gotten a dull office job and watched five years zoom past, while I agonized over my directionlessness from the confines of a cubicle—so afraid of choosing the wrong path that I went nowhere. At twenty-two, I felt trapped inside a version of myself I didn’t respect. Spain was my emergency ejection seat.

Several months into my trip, I read a sidebar in a travel guide about the Camino de Santiago, a 790-kilometer pilgrimage across Iberia—from the French Pyrenees to the Atlantic Ocean. I felt compelled. Catholicism didn’t interest me, but the idea of a destination did. I began the long walk confident that I would find myself along the way.

The trail toward Santiago de Compostela is marked by golden arrows. Embedded in cobblestones, spray-painted on tree trunks, carved into walls. Whenever I began to worry that I’d gone astray, I’d spot an arrow and relax. Following was a kind of bliss, the sensation of being led, an ecstasy all its own. Through mountain ranges, medieval villages, booming metropolises, swaths of farmland, deserts and suburbs, no matter what unfolded around or inside me, my directive remained simple: walk forward.

The arrows silenced my anxiety. In this new quiet, the world around me came alive, like that moment where Dorothy steps into Oz and sees color for the first time. I’d expected to spend the pilgrimage figuring out my future; instead I learned to inhabit the present.

The pilgrimage technically ended at a...