Off the Road
Authors: Jack Hitt
First published in
Great Britain
1994 by Aurum Press
Limited,
25 Bedford Avenue,
London WC1B 3AT
Copyright © Jack Hitt
1994
The extract from
The
Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela
by Annie
Shaver-Crandell, Paula Gerson and Alison Stones is reproduced by kind
permission of Harvey Miller Publishers.
All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
Aurum Press Limited.
A catalogue record for
this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN I 85410 306 7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1998 1997 1996 1995
1994
First published in the
USA by Simon & Schuster
Printed in Great
Britain by Hartnolls Ltd, Bodmin
[email protected]
v1.0
27.01.2014
CONTENTS
For Lisa
OFF THE ROAD
L
ike many my age, I effortles
sly cast off the religion of my parents as if stepping out of a pair
of worn trousers. It happened sometime a
round college back in the 1970s and
therefore was done with the casual arrogance and glibness famous to that time.
I remember lounging in the last row of my required religion class. Professor
Cassidy was making some relevant point, and I popped off that I would happily
sum up the closed book of Western religion: The Jews invented god, the
Catholics brought him to earth, and the Protestants made him our friend. Then
god suffered the fate of all tiresome houseguests. Familiarity breeds contempt.
With that, we dragged him into the twentieth century to die.
Afterward, the other
sophomores and I ran off for the woods, read aloud the poetry of Arthur
Rimbaud, and lit one another’s cigarettes with our Zippos.
Let me say that my general
attitude about religion has mellowed since then into a courteous indifference.
On most days I side with the churches and synagogues in the everyday political
battles that are called “religious” by the papers. My libertarian bent tilts
enough against government that I don’t get too excited about people who want to
pray in schools or erect crèches or Stars of David in front of City Hall. And
yet, if I’m angry or have been drinking, I am quick to say that when it comes
to goodwill on earth, religion has been as helpful as a dead dog in a ditch,
and that in this century it’s been little more than a repository of empty
ritual and a cheap cover for dim-witted bigotries.
So, imagine the reaction of
many of my friends and relatives when I announced that I was going on a
pilgrimage. And not some secular skip up the Appalachian Trail, but an ancient
and traditional one. I intended to retrace the famous medieval route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Tucked into the northwestern panhandle of Spain on the Atlantic, Santiago is a few miles inland from Europe’s westernmost spit of land,
Finisterre. As its name implies, it was the end of the world until 1492. The
road began in
a.d.
814 when a
hermit in the area stumbled upon the body of Saint James the Apostle. Since
then, the road has been walked every year—in the Middle Ages by zealous
millions; in more recent times by curious thousands.
For most of the late
twentieth century, pilgrims to Santiago followed the shoulder of a blacktop
highway paved by Generalissimo Franco. Then in the early 1980s scholars based
in Estella, Spain, reacted to public concern after at least four pilgrims had
been run over by trucks. Using old maps and ancient pilgrim accounts, the
historians recovered vast sections of the original footpath still serving as
mule or cart routes between the hundreds of poor villages along the way.
Sections of the road were also intact in France, but once a modern pilgrim crossed
the Pyrenees into Spain, there it was: a slightly wrinkled beeline of eight
hundred authentic kilometers due west, following the setting sun by day and the
streak of the Milky Way by night—over the craggy hills of the Spanish Basque
territory, into the wine valleys of Rioja, across the plains of Castille,
through the wheat fields of León, over the alpine mountains of Galicia, and
finally into the comfort of the valley of Santiago. Depending on where I
started, the walk could take two months, maybe more. Since pilgrims are
supposed to arrive in town just before James’s feast day on July 25, the idea I
had in mind could not have been more simple and appealing. I would fly to Europe and spend the belly of the summer walking to the end of the world.
Despite my many, obvious
disqualifications for being a pilgrim, I have long had an interest in the
tradition of walking the road. After all, one could dress it up with all kinds
of rationales and ritual, but stripped down, a pilgrim was a guy out for some
cosmically serious fresh air. So in the beginning, it was the very simplicity
of the idea of pilgrimage as a long walk that attracted me. Little did I know.
The medieval argument for
pilgrimage held that the hectic routine of daily life—with its business obligations,
social entanglements, and petty quarrels—was simply too confusing a pace for
sustained thought. The idea was to slacken that pace to the natural rhythm of
walking. The pilgrim would be exiled from numbing familiarity and plunged into
continual change. The splendid anarchy of the walk was said to create a sense
of being erased, a dusting of the tabula rasa, so that the pilgrim could
consider a variety of incoming ideas with a clean slate. If escaping life’s
hectic repetition made sense in the Middle Ages, when time was measured by the
passing of day and night, then it seemed to me reasonable to reconsider this
old remedy now that we schedule our lives by the flash of blinking diodes.
This idea was a lot more
than a Saturday hike or weekend outing. A pilgrimage would mean subletting my New York apartment, quitting my job, and resigning from my generous health plan. I would
live on foot, out of a backpack, among old pueblos—some unwired for
electricity, others abandoned centuries ago to become stone ghost towns. My
long-set routines would be shattered, and my daily responsibilities would
evaporate. I’d walk out of the pop-culture waters in which I had spent a
lifetime treading and onto a strange dry land. I’d be far, far away from the AM
hits that leak from cars and malls and dorms. I’d be at a blissful remove from
CNN headlines and last night’s news. I wouldn’t have an opinion on whether the
wife was justified in shooting her husband or whether the cop thought the
ghetto kid was reaching for a knife or whether the woman had consented before
the rape or whether the nanny had accidentally dropped the baby from the
window... because I wouldn’t know a single fact. My mind and attention would be
cleansed of all that, and I could discover what topics they turned to when so
generously unoccupied. A long walk. A
season
of walking. As it happened,
I had just reached the Dantean age of thirty-five. What better way to serve out
my coming midlife crisis than on a pilgrimage?
I quickly found, though,
that one cannot discharge a word like “pilgrimage” into everyday conversation
and long remain innocent of the connotations that drag in its wake. I had spent
the last decade working as a magazine writer and then as an editor at
Harper’s
Magazine.
When I began to speak of my idea to associates throughout the
media, I sometimes encountered polite interest. More often, I’d hear a bad
joke. “Yo, Jack Quixote.” A famous New York agent told me that if I found god,
to tell him he owed her a phone call.
Those who were interested
enough to keep talking would sometimes pinch their eyes as if to get a better
view. Their lips crinkled in apprehension. Their fear, of course, was that I
might return from Spain with an improved posture, a damp smile, and a lilac in
my hand.
As a Western practice,
pilgrimage is not merely out of fashion, it’s dead. It last flourished in the
days of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and it was one of the first practices Martin
Luther felt comfortable denouncing without so much as a hedge. “All pilgrimages
should be abolished,” were his exact words. As something to do, the road to Santiago has been in a serious state of decline, technically speaking, since 1200.
The problem with pilgrimage
is that, like so much of the vocabulary of religion, it is part of an exhausted
and mummified idiom. We know this because that vocabulary thrives in the
dead-end landfill of language, political journalism. Senators make pilgrimages
to the White House. The tax cut that raises revenue is the Holy Grail of
politics. Clean-cut do-gooders such as Bill Bradley and John Danforth are
saints. The homes of dead presidents are shrines. Any threesome in politics is
a trinity. Mario Cuomo doesn’t speak, he delivers sermons or homilies. Dense
thinking is Talmudic or Jesuitical. Devoted assistants are apostles.
The connotations of what I
was doing hadn’t deterred me because, before I went public, I had decided to
walk the road on my own vague terms. I didn’t foresee how much the implications
of this word would overwhelm my own sense and use of it. In America, for whatever reason, any discussion of Christianity eventually gets snagged on an
old nail. As a Christian, you are forced to answer one single question: Do you
or do you not believe that Jesus the man was god the divine? If you can’t
answer that question easily, then you’ll have to leave the room.
It is strange—and I say this
without cynicism or bitterness— how
little
that question interests me,
especially as a pilgrim. In fact, the weighty topics of theology intrigue me no
more today than they did in Professor Cassidy’s class. I realize it is apostasy
as a pilgrim to admit this. But all those ten-pound questions— Does god exist?
Is faith in the modern age possible? Is there meaning without orthodoxy?—bore
me. The reason they wound up as running gags in Woody Allen’s movies is
precisely their hilarious irrelevance to the lives of many of us.
I think one reason religion
has become so contentious when it is expressed as politics (abortion, death
penalty, prayer in school, etc.) is that the answers to those Big Questions
can’t keep any of us awake. Thus, we turn to the hot-button questions about how
other people should live their lives. Religion has become a kind of nonstop PBS
seminar on ethics, conducted in a shout.
The result is that other
unarticulated notions and yearnings once associated with religion have become
intensely private. And that is why I wanted to walk to Santiago. At times it
seems that the average American feels more comfortable discussing the quality
of his or her orgasm on live television than talking about religion. I
wondered: What are these hankerings that are so intimate they cause widespread
embarrassment among my peers?
For me religion was always
bound up with a lot more than graduate school theology and those incessant
Protestant demands to believe in the supernatural. I grew up Episcopalian in Charleston, South Carolina. My family attended St. Philip’s Church, the oldest and most
prestigious church in a town that prides itself on being old and prestigious. I
served eight years there earning my perfect attendance pin in Sunday School.
And every time I walked through St. Philip’s twelve-foot mahogany doors, I
passed the same ten full-length marble sepulchers. Those nineteenth-century
vaults contain my great-great-grandparents. Inside the church, our family
always occupied the same pew and has, according to lore, since those folks in
the white graves sat there. Fixed beside the altar is a brass ornament honoring
a Charlestonian who died for his country. That man’s name is my name.
So, overthrowing the
religion of my parents was not merely a theological affair. It was tangled up
with my own ideas about the transmission of tradition, about honoring past
communities, and about forging new ones. I began to wonder just what else went
into the drink when I so handily gave religion the heave-ho. Now that I was
thirty-five, the vagaries of religion didn’t seem quite so irrelevant as they
did while I was refilling my Zippo with lighter fluid. More than anything else,
I needed to take a long walk.
Since I was troubled about
overthrowing the past, my long study of the even older tradition of Santiago seized my attention. The road had an Old World sense of discipline that I liked.
A pilgrimage is a form of travel alien to the American temperament. We
colonists like to think of ourselves as explorers, path blazers, frontiersmen
always on the lam and living off the cuff. Our history is an unchartered
odyssey, a haphazard trip down the Mississippi, or unscheduled stops along the
blue highways. When Americans are on the road, we don’t really want to know
just where we are going. We’re lighting out for the territories.
But a pilgrimage doesn’t put
up with that kind of breezy liberty. It is a marked route with a known
destination. The pilgrim must find his surprises elsewhere. I hadn’t the
slightest idea what this would eventually mean, but I liked the idea of
searching out adventure in the unlikely place of a well-trod road. There was
even a sense of gratitude in that to keep my days interesting, I would be
relieved of the usual devices of wacky coincidence or deadpan encounters with
the locals.
I also came to realize that
my word was offputting precisely because it retained a grubby literalism. A
pilgrimage was about sweating and walking and participating in something. The
word still had enough of its medieval flavor to suggest that one was submitting
to a regime, a task, an idea whose ultimate end would be discovery, even
transformation. “Pilgrimage”—those gravelly Anglo-Saxon consonants rolled
around in the mouth and came out ancient. It was evocative, imaginative, and
suggestive, I think, precisely because it was something so definable. For
example, if I had announced that my intention was to sweep through Europe to “study heaven,” no one would assume I had in mind a distinct piece of real
estate. But once upon a time, people did. The medieval worldview held that the
blue sky above us was a plasmatic skin literally separating us from heaven. The
engineers of the tower of Babel had nearly climbed up to it and were punished.
Today, the word has lost all but its symbolic meaning. Heaven is a spent
metaphor.