Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain

Book by Hitt Jack

CHAPTER ONE: SAINT-JEAN PIED DE PORT

Where does the road to Santiago begin? It was a question my medieval predecessors never had to consider. In those days, a pilgrim simply stepped out of his hut and declared his intention. Then he might report to a cloister and receive a signed letter to serve as proof of intent. Afterward, the pilgrim walked west until he picked up any of the established routes in Europe. From the east and south, the pilgrim followed any of four established roads that fanned like fingers across France and converged at the palm of Spain. A few miles inside the Pyrenees, they formed a single unified road shooting straight across the breadth of the country.

I lived a few doors off Washington Square Park in New York City and an ocean away from my destination. I couldn't just walk out my door. For reasons of symmetry and authenticity, this bothered me. I thought I would toss a coin onto a map of France and proceed from there, but this seemed too haphazard. It felt wrong to begin this trip with such an American sense of abandon. I studied a map of France to see if any of the cities had a personal significance. I checked my family's records to see if any ancestors a few centuries back might have had some interaction in this part of Europe, but according to all available information, one branch was too busy fleeing Prussian law while the other was stuffing a sheep's stomach for a weekend of haggis. Arles, Montpellier, Carcasonne, and Toulouse were not likely vacation spots for Teutonic horse thieves or Scottish presbyters.

One Saturday I happened upon a brochure that offered a solution. Not only could I walk out my front door, I could take the New York subway. I boarded the A train, immortalized by Duke Ellington, and took it almost to the end, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art maintains a branch called the Cloisters. The museum is an assemblage of ruins from four medieval cloisters, dating from the Romanesque and Gothic periods, and once located on the road to Santiago. I resolved to spend a quiet afternoon among the weathered columns and begin there.

The most beautiful -- the cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert -- is covered by a plastic dome. Fat gobs of New York City rain fell the afternoon I visited, making a bass-drum thump that left me feeling strangely dry. Instead of the customary central garden, there is a marble floor, giving the space the linoleum acoustics of a grade school cafeteria. My attempt at meaningful silence was carefully monitored by a suspicious security guard who understood museum policy and the slight reach of his power only too well. At one point he chased a camera-toting teenager in a ludicrous race around the columns after a disagreement over competing interpretations of the flash-attachment policy. Packs of schoolchildren snickered and laughed at the often lewd capital carvings, and the guard's echoing shouts of "Quiet!" were louder still. In a moment of pure museum irony, a man who had been there quite a while was asked to leave because he was loitering.

After the rain broke, I went out back where a stone porch opened to a view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. It all fell into place: I would begin here, fly to Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in France, visit the original site, and take up the walk from there.

The cloister is, like a pilgrimage, the literal representation of the same idea. On a pilgrimage and in a cloister, the longer journey of three score and ten is reduced symbolically to something much smaller -- a few months of walking or a stroll around the cloister's four-sided garden. Both have a beginning, middle, and end. Both force upon the visitor a number of encounters -- on the road, these are random events; in the cloister, these are sculpture. And both offer a finale of redemption. On the road, it is the physical exhilaration of arrival. At the cloister, it's the walk into the direct center, a place the monks called paradeisos. So I thought a visit to a monastery cloister would be appropriate.

The idea of a monastery grew out of the thinking of a hermit named Benedict who lived in the sixth century during the declining days of the Roman Empire. He had committed himself to the reigning idea of his day -- a life of utter solitude in the wilderness. This idea had been imported from the Holy Land, where hermits pursued different fashions of isolation. The stylites sat on the top of a pole. The dendrites carved a hole in a tree and lived inside. For his effort, Benedict isolated himself in Italy at the mouth of a cave not far from Nero's summer house. He clothed himself in animal skins, which his biographer reports frightened the local shepherds. He ate berries.

But the call of the hermit's life was not attracting too many Europeans. It was a bad time to be alone in the woods. The sixth century saw the continuing collapse of Roman order, opening the door to the invading Huns, Visigoths, and Longobards. From time to time, the barbarians would drop down to cut the tongues from women and disembowel the men. This was the era when the famously airy architecture of Roman atriums and columned porticoes closed up. Castles were built, moats were dug, drawbridges were engineered. It would not be long before the religious orders sought a similar kind of protection. Benedict is credited with solving these problems. His innovation offered isolated monks a sliver of companionship and physical protection: a monastery.

Like all good ideas, Benedict's was not immediately embraced. His first collective of monks didn't appreciate his harsh rules and tried to murder him. But others liked the idea, and eventually Benedict wrote a strict code of monastic living called Benedict's Rule, which is still observed today. Reading Benedict's Rule, though, one can sense a yearning for utter solitude -- not the minimal society of the monastery, but the pure singularity of the desert, far from the corruption of man, alone in nature. To stand in a cloister, even skylighted in plastic and teeming with riotous schoolchildren, is to feel the architectural memory of Benedict's original idea. The cloister is a patch of that wilderness, imported and modified to the demands of society. It is a bit of desert, open directly to the original skyward view of the hermit, secreted away in the center of the monastery. The cloister is not the perfection of an idea, but rather a constant reminder of its compromise. The cloister is nostalgia. It is an original plan fallen short, a vestige of an older and purer sense of purpose. Like my own effort, the cloister is somewhat corrupt, an acknowledgment of failure.

As I began to read up on these particular cloisters in New York, I marveled at how perfect they were for my beginning. The reason they're in Manhattan and not on the road to Santiago is because of a desperate American sculptor. At the turn of the century, Robert Barnard made his rent money by buying medieval artworks from guileless French rustics and selling them for impressive profits. He began with small statues but eventually was buying entire monasteries. When the French government found out that the nation's patrimony was being shipped off to serve as lawn ornaments in the front yards of American millionaires, a huzzah went up in Paris. Just days before December 31, 1913 -- when the French parliament outlawed Barnard's hobby -- he packed 116 crates of his precious cargo, each numbered and cataloged, and sailed for New York on the next boat.

For a while, Barnard ran his own museum in Manhattan, but when money problems arose again, he offered to sell his medieval cloisters to some Californians for use in an amusement park. A cry went up among the Fifth Avenue set in New York, and the call for a white knight was heard.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was a curious savior from West Coast tastelessness. Among his architectural achievements, he had spent millions erecting his idea of "colonial America" in Williamsburg, Virginia, where women in Betsy Ross dresses and men in breeches escorted tourists to the town stockades for a wry photo opportunity.

With his new cloisters, Rockefeller ran through a number of plans. At one point he wanted to create a feeling of lost grandeur he associated with abandoned castles and King Arthur, but the most sophisticated architects of the day cautiously explained the logistical difficulty of using religious carvings from France to construct a secular castle from England. Rockefeller caught on and soon realized that what he had purchased was the emblem of the solitary search, that desire for monkish isolation, Benedict's idea. Rockefeller grew obsessed with the Cloisters and demanded daily briefings. He had notions of his own.

Across the Hudson River, seen from the parapet of the Cloisters, are the vast cliffs known as the New Jersey Palisades. This state park extends from the George Washington Bridge all the way upriver to the state border. One might assume that this preservation was the result of some antidevelopment politician. Actually John D. Rockefeller bought that thirteen-mile stretch. He wanted to preserve the quiet contemplation of his Cloisters -- to carve out of the thickest clot of American urbanity a bit of nature that straddled a river and gave almost no hint of the presence of man. Rockefeller understood the idea of the cloister. He imported that ancient yearning for the desert, via Benedict, into New York City. I had found my place in America to begin.

The only duty remaining was what to wear. I am not being coy. Pilgrim fashion is not a glib subject. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the clothes a pilgrim wore became a style as widely known in its symbolism as a king's crown. Parliaments met and debated pilgrim's clothes. Their sale was licensed and regulated by bureaucracies. Underground markets for certain pilgrim items flourished at times. Kings corresponded on the subject. Some legal scholars argue that pilgrim fashion created its own brand of law. Any person -- peasant or noble -- wearing the official pilgrim's garb was exempt from the laws of the country through which he was passing and was judged instead under a special collection of statutes written expressly for pilgrims -- the first international law.

This outfit became so recognized that pilgrims en route to Santiago had to wear it if they expected to receive the benefits of the road -- free lodging, food, and respect. Obviously, with such perks available, the clothing had to be regulated. Four popes issued decrees, backed up by excommunication, outlining the rules and regulations for the sale of the pilgrim's outfit and even its duplication in souvenirs. In 1590 King Philip II issued a decree restricting the donning of this apparel in Spain to a narrow corridor running the length of the road from the Pyrenees to Santiago.

A pilgrim wore a dashing full-length black cape to serve as protection from wind by day and to provide a blanket by night. On his feet were strong boots. To block the sun and rain, he wore on his head a fetching broad-brimmed black hat. He carried a staff for protection and tied to it a gourd for carrying water. At the waist was a small satchel called a crip for carrying money, a knife, and toiletries. On the cape or hat, or hanging around the neck, or fastened almost anywhere, was at least one scallop shell, the symbol of the Santiago pilgrim.

Once I got familiar with this classic image, it began to appear everywhere, even in New York. Walking to the Spanish embassy one day, I passed Saint Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. A giant stone Saint James, fully dressed, stands beside the front entrance. As I did my homework, I discovered the pilgrim in the paintings of Bosch, El Greco, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo, and Raphael. Either as the main subject or in the background, the wayfaring pilgrim in trademark apparel can be seen drifting through centuries of European landscapes.

By the late Middle Ages the Catholic missal included a "prayer for the walking stick," which stated that as the pilgrim's third leg, the staff represented the trinity. There was also a "blessing of the backpack," which taught that the "backpack is made of the rawhide of a dead beast" because "the pilgrim ought to torment his own depraved and lusting flesh with hunger and thirst, with great abstinence, with cold and destitution, with punishment and hard labor."

The thought of dressing up this way and tormenting my own depraved, lusting flesh didn't really fit in with my plans. I grew up Episcopalian after all. Yet wouldn't it be a more authentic experience if I were to wear the clothes described in the medieval documents?

Then I asked myself, Did the pilgrims take along a staff because they wanted that three-legged symbolism? Or did they carry a sturdy piece of oak to beat wild dogs in the head? Did they tote the rucksack because they wanted something abrasive to give them blisters and rashes? Or did they originally carry their food in it? Wasn't all this gear -- the hat to block the sun, the cape for warmth at night -- originally meant to reduce suffering? These other meanings were imposed. Which came first: the backpack as a device to ease portage or the backpack as a tormentor of depraved and lusting flesh? I set off immediately to a shop called EMS: The Outdoor Specialists.

The manager quickly discerned that I was not a rock-climbing hound who'd come to learn the latest advance in titanium carabiners. He knew what he saw: a gold-card-carrying desk jockey with a head full of distant vistas. He signaled a scattered pack of wilderness consultants, and they surrounded me.

When I was a teenager, camping gear was sold at the Army-Navy store. The place was located uptown, in a marginal neighborhood, and was operated by a chunky old man with thick glasses and a consumptive cough who dreamed of one day opening a gun shop. I still have in a closet at home an old green rucksack with U.S. ARMY stamped on it and long straps pinched with metal tips. I have my felt-covered canteen with a chain to hold the cap, now missing. The mess kit is in a plastic bag, blackened by its first and last use over a campfire. My bowie knife, in its handsome tooled-leather sheath, is in a drawer. As a boy I used to carry it on camp-outs, but it was soon retired since it was too big to use around a campfire and too small for the woods. A bowie knife is best for wrestling gators and killing nightstalkers, problems that never came up.

I briefly considered gathering up my old goods and flying to Europe. If it was authenticity I wanted, there was something exceedingly real, in my imagination, about this equipment. But my wilderness consultants knew better. By the time I left the store, I owned

· Lycra boots, "not waterproofed because you want your feet to breathe and not sweat."

· two-ply hiking socks, with thin tubing up the ankle to create a "capillary effect" for "chiropodic aspiration."

· a backpack with an interior frame bent into a "parabolic twist" to fit my spine.

· a sleeping bag that weighed about a pound.

· a tent, about two pounds, with magic poles connected by thin shock cords. Unfurl, shake a little, and the tent practically snapped into position in one minute. Neat.

· a poncho the size of a fist that nearly floated in air.

· an air mattress that self-inflated.

· a toilet bag, "a state-of-the-art advance over the old shaving kit," that unzipped and tumbled open to a three-tier set of tidy pouches and a dangling mesh net pocket to keep a toothbrush aerated.

· a Swiss Army knife, with a sharp saw that cut down trees (and it does).

I bought it all, of course, and tossed in a green rubber snake-bite kit and a tube of something ...