Why '80s star Andrew McCarthy walked 800km across Spain with his 19-year-old son
Camino de Santiago gave McCarthy a luxury: time with his adult son.
Originally published on May 08, 2023.
Writer and '80s movie star Andrew McCarthy wanted to find a way to bond with his 19-year-old son Sam, so he decided they should walk 800 kilometres along Spain's Camino de Santiago.
The journey got off to a bumpy start.
"On the second day Sam said to me, 'What's the point of this effing walk?'" said McCarthy, who became a travel writer after starring in '80s hits like Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire.
McCarthy had hoped the walk would be a way to re-examine their evolving relationship, as Sam was "just cusping his own manhood."
"You can have these grand sort of illusions and ideas of what things are going to be — and then you're still you ... and your relationships are what they are," McCarthy laughed, in an interview with The Current.
The Camino de Santiago is an 800-km walking route across northern Spain, which began as a Catholic pilgrimage in honour of St. James in the 8th century. An estimated 300,000 people still walk the Camino each year — some as an act of faith, others for personal reasons, or the opportunity for reflection.
For McCarthy it was a chance to spend time with Sam, and perhaps avoid repeating the history he had with his own father.
"My relationship with my dad ended pretty much when I left home at 17 years old and never looked back. It just dissolved, and I didn't want that to happen with my kids," McCarthy said.
"I wanted to get to know my son. Not just in the parent-child, dominant-submissive or rebellious roles, but as adults, as equals, as peers," he said.
"The Camino … gave me the greatest luxury you have with adult children — which is time."
McCarthy wrote about their journey in his new book Walking with Sam: A Father, A Son, and 500 Miles Across Spain.
Breaking down into a sobbing fit
McCarthy walked the Camino once before, in the 1990s. His movie stardom was fading, and he says he was looking to his future.
The walk itself doesn't require much more than "getting a good pair of walking shoes and going to Spain," he said. "There are yellow arrows painted on the ground, painted on trees, on rocks that guide you across the entire country."
But the solitude and reflection of the walk was a life-changing experience for him.
"In a moment of clarity, in the middle of a field of wheat, halfway into it … I broke down into this sobbing fit. And it was a revelation to me how much fear had dominated my life," he said.
McCarthy traces that fear back to ever-present anxieties that began during his childhood. It was on the Camino that those anxieties faded, and he finally felt what it is to not be afraid.
"Once something's been identified like that, it can never have that blind hold on you that it did before," McCarthy said.
"That really liberated me in a great way, and it changed my life … I became a travel writer simply because of that moment, really, because I felt so like myself for an instant there."
'The only 10 out of 10 thing I've ever done'
McCarthy had felt bombarded by his fame in his youth, and worked hard to shield his own children from it.
But when Sam was eight or nine years old, an excited fan in a Wyoming diner changed all that.
"The waitress came up and said, 'Oh, my God, you're that guy in Mannequin and Pretty in Pink.' And she wanted to take photos and call all her friends over … all that kind of embarrassing stuff," McCarthy said.
When the hubbub died down, McCarthy asked Sam how he felt about it.
"He said, 'Oh, Dad, I'm so proud,' — [and] I realized in that instant that I really had done everything wrong," McCarthy said.
"Since that moment, it's all been fair game … whatever you want to talk about."
As McCarthy hoped, walking the Camino gave him even more opportunities to be open and vulnerable with his son, even discussing his divorce from Sam's mother.
"My son is the kind of guy you sit him down for a chat, you're not going to get much out of him," McCarthy said.
"Get him moving, and it all starts to pour out."
They completed the trek in about a month, walking about 24 kilometres a day.
"On the last day, as we arrived in Santiago, [Sam] said, 'That's the only 10 out of 10 thing I've ever done in my life,'" McCarthy said.
It was a big turnaround from their second day, when Sam asked what the point was. McCarthy thinks his son found the walk to be "self-legitimizing," and an act of strength.
"You don't even have to prove it to anybody. You don't have to push it in anybody's face who didn't believe in you. You just go, 'I did that and it's mine and you can't take it,'" he said.
"And I think he knew that."
Audio produced by Alison Masemann.
