My niece and I were on my annual pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayo when I got us lost looking for the “shortcut” between Pojoaque and Chimayo. It’s not unusual for me to find myself looking around for anything familiar. My thoughts wander and I lose focus very easily, even around my own home. So easily, in fact that if a weird bug captures my attention I’ll follow it and forget where I was going before I saw the weird bug. My niece was fourteen (14) at the time and although I didn’t see any weird bugs, I was probably bugging her with another lecture about why boys are stupid and why she should never, ever, hang out with stupid boys. I’m an expert at lecturing her on all the stupid things of which she should be aware: drugs, explicit music, and bad socks. On a pilgrimage, socks make all the difference and I wanted her to understand that the socks she was wearing were stupid. Socks and boys would be her downfall if she allowed herself to fall prey to their charms, or so went my lecture.

After lecturing for several miles, we found ourselves somehow on dirt trail in the middle of Nambe village. Although I’ve made the pilgrimage dozens of times, I had never seen this particular dirt trail before and I really didn’t know how to get back to the main road. Somehow in my intelligent discourse, I took a wrong turn and like Bruce Springsteen, I kept on going.

At first, she was patient but as we walked, turned around, walked again, and then turned around again, her patience waned. “Uhh,” she said. “Are we lost?” Her expression indicated that she already knew the answer.

“Of course not,” I said. “We are where we are supposed to be.”

“You would say something like that,” she said and shook her head.

The truth was that, while I knew that we were in Nambe village and that we were walking to the Santuario de Chimayo, I had no clue how to get back to the road that led there. I stopped and gathered my bearings and noticed a figure in the distance that I hadn’t noticed before. “Come on,” I told her. “Let’s see if that dude can help us.”

“He looks like a hobo,” she said as her mood soured.

“Maybe so, but hobos know how to get around.”

Luckily, the hobo walked at a far slower pace than we did and we had no trouble catching him. My niece was right, he probably was a hobo. He carried a bunch of stuff wrapped in a blanket and walked with a large walking stick. His beard was older that both my niece and I combined. Accounting for when his facial hair started growing, that made him around 72 years old or so. “Excuse me, sir,” I said as respectfully as I could. “Can you direct us to the main road?”

My niece rolled her eyes. “I knew you got us lost.”

The hobo’s raspy’s voice indicated to me that he probably smoked a great many years. But when he said, “yes, I can. I’m headed that way myself,” relief washed through my entire existence and he sounded like a choir of angels.

My niece just shook her head.

We walked along a trail until it connected to a bigger road. Then we walked on that road until it met up with a bigger road still. While we walked, the hobo talked with us about how he walks to Santa Fe from Nambe, and back, twice a week and about how it keeps him young.

My niece looked at me as if to say, “Maybe he doesn’t know what young means anymore.”

I frowned as if to tell her, “Shhh, be nice, he’s saving our lives.”

As he spoke about his journeys to and from the city of holy faith, I couldn’t help but notice that he was keeping up with our pace. He didn’t even seem to be exerting any more than when we found him. Also, his once raspy voice cleared and when I saw that his eyes shone with a growing intensity, I knew he wasn’t just another hobo.

“So you do this miserable walk for fun?” My niece was about done with the pilgrimage. Her patience was gone and she appeared to have grown tired as we headed to the main road. I was sure it was because of her stupid socks.

“Not for fun,” he said. “But because I have to.”

Not long after we found him, he guided us to the main road. When we joined the other pilgrims, he told us to go ahead because he, “just couldn’t keep up anymore.” We thanked him profusely and walked ahead. After several minutes, I told my niece to look back and see where he was.

“I don’t see him,” she said. “He totally disappeared! What the hell?!”

I shook my head at her use of a totally inappropriate expletive for a pilgrimage, but I was glad that she was impacted.

The hobo was no hobo.

We walked forward in silence. Her pace slowed as her legs and feet wore out. “I think I need to stop,” she said. “Call auntie to pick me up.”

“I told you that your socks were stupid.”

“No,” she said. “I got tired because you got us lost. If it wasn’t for that hobo, we would still be wandering around.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But do you really think that was just a hobo?”