The “Walk to Mary” is an organized pilgrimage walk that starts at the National Shrine of St. Joseph on the campus of St. Norbert’s College in DePere, Wisconsin, to the Shrine of our Lady of Good Help in Champion Wisconsin. The distance is 21 miles. In 2022, almost 3,500 people made the walk.
The “official” photo library of the Walk can be viewed here.
A group of 4 of us from Madison traveled up to the Green Bay area in two cars on Friday night, April 30, 2022, and stayed at a facility run by the Norbertines over night.
The next morning, Saturday, May 1, we assembled outside the Shrine of St. Joseph for the pre-walk prayer service, and the start of the walk. Our group met a number of other people, including the B-Boys from Madison, and Ethel from the Milwaukee area.
Once the bell was rung, we started the walk, which starts off by leaving the St. Norbert’s campus, crossing a bridge across the Fox River, and then walking for a few miles along the bank on the south side of the river, toward Green Bay.
After a couple of miles, Luxuli, who was walking beside me at that point, said, “Rich! You are walking differently all of a sudden.” I looked down and saw that my right foot was indeed pronating severely! I sat down on a nearby bench, and was making ready to remove my shoe, thinking that something had gone wrong with my support inserts. It turned out that half of my shoe heal was missing! The shoes I was wearing were running shoes I had had for some time, and I had no idea that the heals were in bad shape. I was a bit mystified.
Of course, I could not possibly make the walk with half of one shoe heal missing without making a big mess of my knees, so I started looking for something to stuff into the heal to take up the empty volume. Luxuli had a spare plastic bag, so I tried stuffing that into the void. That seemed to work, but I needed a way to keep it in place. A little further down the path, I stopped by a first aid station to see if they had any bandaging tape. To my surprise, they had none. The best they had was Bandaids, or the equivalent.
So we did the best we could with those, and continued. I knew, from having done the walk once before, pre-pandemic, that there was a major stop at the 7-mile mark, at the parish of Sts. Peter and Paul, where there would be sandwiches and other things for the pilgrims, in addition to water and portable toilets.
We got there, now toward the end of the population of pilgrims (it is still a mystery how we wound up at the rear of the pack, as we were making pretty good time). I was hoping to find some duck or strapping tape to reinforce the repair job on my shoe. I approached one of the women who was volunteering, and asked if she could find out where on the parish campus I could find some duck tape, showing her my shoe, and explaining my predicament.
She immediately brought me to her husband who was nearby. He indicated that he had some tape in his truck, which was parked nearby. He then asked my shoe size. I replied “11-1/2”. He then said that he also has some running shoes of that size in his truck, which shoes he was planning to replace anyway. So he brought me to his truck and produced a pair of running shoes.
They fit just about perfectly.
I transferred my arch-support inserts to those shoes and put them on, continuing to be amazed that someone just happened to have a pair of running shoes that fit me just about perfectly.
I removed my shoes, and gave a thought to repairing them, until I looked at them. The soles were falling apart, suddenly, on both shoes. I’ve never seen soles and heals fracture on running shoes that way before. Then it dawned on me that the shoes — New Balance running shoes — were about 30 years old. They were not all *that* worn, but the synthetic material had failed from aging.
So, thanks to a small miracle at the hands of our Lady and our Lord, and by the kind offices and generosity of a parishioner of St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Green Bay, I was able to successfully complete the walk.
Let us be thankful for the small miracles, as well as the larger ones!
Richard Bonomo
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