Years after Don Navor retired from his 21-year military career, he and his wife, Kathleen, decided to walk El Camino — the 500-mile pilgrimage draws those hungry for clarity, or a sense of meditative purposefulness, particularly as you write down your ‘porque’ at the beginning of the trek — the reason or purpose for which you pilgrim.
For as long as he could remember, the purpose which pushed him through his life was more easily discernible. One way or another he was committed to standing with and protecting those in his charge. His initial reason to join the military was to provide for his younger siblings after his father passed away, this protective nature bleeding into his career as each year brought new recruits; 17 or 18-year-old kids sent to him straight from their parent’s arms. The weight of that responsibility fell hard and square on his shoulders. He’d found an aim worthy of building a life on — of building a self around.
“I have a PhD in being in the weeds,” he says, admitting he never had an interest in being anywhere else. For over two decades, Don welcomed, fought alongside, and said goodbye to those kids, his boots grounded firmly alongside theirs. Don’s responsibilities included giving final farewell remarks to the soldiers being sent home, which he sums up generally as: “thank you for your service, don’t lose your plane ticket, goodbye.” He always felt he should do more to prepare them, to assist in the work of healing the moral wounds he knew they suffered. But his focus needed always to pivot to the new recruits coming in, and the lives he was freshly responsible for. Still, he heard the stories, the effect that returning home had on so many veterans.
It wasn’t until his own retirement that he realized how much more they needed to know at that moment, when the stakes of their lives were so drastically altered; when conflict, once external, turned so silently inward. It became a part of him too, that conflict, turning to an anger that swallowed his nature and obfuscated his personality.
Don is not a superstitious man. He says this again and again, a warning that suggests any image one might hold of him is not the whole picture. That neither who he was before, during, or after the military is a full picture of himself. He gives this warning when he describes meeting Mary Gauthier after a show near his house; how he approached with a flippant joviality and soon found himself pinned by her stare, rattled by her insistence that he needed to talk to someone at SW:S. That he needed to tell his story. After being introduced to Mary Judd, SW:S co-founder, and through a series of apparent coincidences, Don and Kathleen found themselves in Colorado the weekend of one of SW:S’ retreats.
The song Don wrote that weekend with his songwriter was named for El Camino, that great march that had recently brought him and Kathleen to Spain. Though he had not come to this place for expressly religious purposes, while considering his ‘porque,’ an old spiritual curiosity began grinding its wheels once again. He recalled a man who frequented his father’s grocery store when Don was a child, telling him how every day when he woke God told him what to do. Perplexed, 8-year-old Don began making secret visits to any and all places of worship around his town, seeking some proof one might be that holy dispatch he’d been seeking. Carefully tipping the dishes of his own obscured spirituality so he might catch the correct signal. All those years later, on the Spanish soil with which he was about to become expertly familiar, Don placed his paper in the provided envelope, enclosing these words in white folds of paper, edges crisp with lingering hope: ‘This is God’s last opportunity to talk to me.’ With little surprise from Don, the envelope returned to him as an unsubstantiated wish at the culmination of their journey.
Returned from Spain, his divine invitation left unanswered, Don found himself relaying the story with disappointment to two of the more religious people in his life, including a practicing minister. He described the final ceremony at San Sebastian Cathedral, where before the final mass had begun, before his wife who had just lost her mother had lain a bouquet across the altar, before he could understand the source from which this feeling welled, he found himself in tears, unable to muster his usual practiced composure. He could not seem to find the end of the short leash on which he had so doggedly kept his emotions all these years. He was suddenly subjected to some unabridged version of himself, he relayed to his friend the minister. “Don,” the minister stopped him. “You think you didn’t hear from God? That was God, my friend. He was speaking to you.”
Don admits writing the song was in no way a cure-all. After the retreat, he would return to the song 29 times before he says it really sunk in; before the anger and the nightmares began to retreat. But it was that initial act of extending himself, of sharing his experience with these willing strangers, which pushed him forward through this new chapter of his life. In the military they were taught to overtrain – if the preparation was as hard as possible, the mission itself would come easier. At that retreat in Colorado, he was doing the same thing. Rejecting his urge to turn away, instead taking the hands of those around him, guiding them through his life, listening to himself, and the voice of God which had sounded there.
El Camino
Don Navor / Michael Bradford
I am my father’s son
I’m not the only one
There’s a million more like me
We do what we have to do
With no one asking you
We take responsibility
But the world has other plans
And fate steps in to tie our hands
The picture that we painted
Blows away like grains of sand
100 miles down the El Camino
Sure didn’t look like rain
I heard the voice of the campesino
I still can’t explain
I was trapped inside a dream
High above the fields of green
But it’s all a game
I gotta crash this plane
In the field of reality
So I’ll be free
Every night I go
To the same old movie show
I get the same seat every time
The show I want to see
Is not what’s on the screen
It’s the nightmare of a life
The projector’s locked away
The program’s got to change today
I’m gonna burn this theatre down
There’s no future in this town
100 miles down the El Camino…
Sure didn’t look like rain
I heard the voice of the campesino
I still can’t explain
I was trapped inside a dream
High above the fields of green
But it’s all a game
I gotta crash this plane
In the field of reality
So I’ll be free
Who’s to know what might have been
While carrying the whole world’s sin
The man inside the glass
Is the one you cheat at last
And I’m 100 miles down the El Camino Sure didn’t look like rain
I heard the voice of the campesino
I still can’t explain
I was trapped inside a dream
High above the fields of green
But it’s all a game
I gotta crash this plane
In the field of reality
So I’ll be free
© 2018 SongwritingWith:Soldiers Music (ASCAP) / Chunky Style Music (ASCAP)