Tag: Pilgrimage

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Days Four, Five, and Six: Estella

It was lucky and maybe surprising that I liked Estella so much, given that this was my view of it for most of the time I was there:

But Estella is lovely. Imagine the shell of a soft boiled egg once you’ve knocked the top off, leaving the sides jagged and craggy, and after you’ve eaten the egg out of it. Now imagine a town nestled in the bottom of the shell, with a river twisting through it.

In the Middle Ages, there were castles on many of these hills, protecting the town, which was founded in 1090 by King Sancho Ram irez of Navarre by annexing the fortified Basque settlement of Lizarra. The king’s plan was to move the main road, which is also the pilgrimage road to Compostela, out of the difficult hills above, so it could run more easily down through the flat. He encouraged settlers from France and also Jews to come live there, and they did, settling in what became three adjacent walled communities, and creating an important trading hub.

I got a strong sense of that medieval city, especially on the side of the river where my albergue was, right on the pilgrimage road, underneath the old Jewish quarter, pressed up against the hill. In the photo above, the Camino is the street that runs behind those two cars. The ground floors of many of the buildings that run along it are very old, even medieval, as you can see from the two behind those cars. To the right is the palace of the Navarrese kings, whose first floor dates to the late twelfth century, a rare example of civic Romanesque architecture. More on that soon. In the background to the right, the tall tower you can see belongs to the church of San Pedro de la Rua. Above it, on the hill, was one of the castles I mentioned, and when it was destroyed by the Castilians in 1572 in their war against Navarre, it fell on the twelfth-century cloister of the church, destroying half of it. I wasn’t able to get into the church or cloister (hello, Spain, and churches that are not open when they say they will be) but I did use some of my strength to climb the many steps up to the facade. It was worth it.

You can see it is as much fortress as church. Estella has been on one frontier or another during most of its existence, most recently in the nineteenth century, during the Carlist Wars.

I think when most of us look at a building like this, we think things like “Gothic” “French” “European”. Maybe that polylobed arch gives some of us pause. Pilgrims will have seen one very like it walking through Cirauqui earlier that day, but others might think more of buildings that look like this:

This is the Tin Mal mosque, in Morocco, built to commemorate the Almohad leader Ibn Tumart in 1156, four years before Notre Dame was started in Paris and a few decades before San Pedro de la Rua was constructed. The Almohad Empire extended from Africa through the southern half of Spain at this time.

Look closer at some of the figures on the portal, like these two facing griffins. See the detail still preserved on their wings, and what looks like maybe traces of paint.

Compare it to this silk roundel originally wrapped around the relics of Saint Siviard and now in the treasury of Sens.

Imagine what it would have looked like if the portal had all been painted. Not the somewhat austere, stern, pure stone we see today but a riot of colour, more like a series of silk textile borders. I also like the little stone guys on thrones. I’ve never seen that before.

It’s not a church, but the Romanesque palace has some interesting sculpture too.

This capital shows Roland fighting against the giant Ferragut, part of the tale of Charlemagne in Spain found in the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle. Their battle supposedly took place outside Nájera, a few days further on the pilgrimage road.

I love the detail you can see here on their shields and their chainmail.

Here is Ferragut himself. Evidently he and Roland paused their fight many times, to discuss the finer points of their theological differences.

But I had other reasons to be interested in Estella. This town, like many others on the pilgrimage road to Compostela, had an important Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages, and when I wrote Pilgrimage, my historical novel about the twelfth-century Camino, I set an important scene among the Jews of Estella. If you have read the novel, it is the moment when Gebirga is travelling with Yusuf, a Mozarabic Christian, and two Jewish traders. They stay with a Jewish family in Estella over Shabbat, much to Gebirga’s discomfort. That evening, their prayers are interrupted by news that their slaughterhouse, down by the river, was on fire. They confront a Christian mob, whose leader tells them a story of seeing a Jew throw a crucifix into the river. At that very moment, he says, the Jewish slaughterhouse caught on fire. When asked who it was he saw, the ringleader points to Yusuf who takes to his heels. Half the mob follows him, and a brawl erupts between the other half and the Jews. It ends in a draw, but Yusuf remains missing.

When I came to Estella, I wanted to see how well what I had invented matched what was there. I based many features of this episode on stories about the Jews of Estella, including a story that the Jewish women of Estella had their own synagogue, and the anti-Semitic legend of the Jew throwing a crucifix in the river. My source for a lot of my knowledge about Jewish communities along the Camino is David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson’s wonderful The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook

The Jews of Estella were moved around during the four hundred years they lived in Estella, but when Gebirga would have stayed with them, around 1120, their community was on the hillside above the pilgrimage road and the river, up behind the albergue where I was staying. You can see a few house here in the photo, but much of the area is open, and occupied by a bypass highway, just out of sight beyond these houses. Its emptiness makes it easier to remember and imagine the lost community, easier for me than in Toledo or Barcelona.

The church of Santa Maria, here, was built on the site of the synagogue where the men would have prayed in Gebirga’s day. It was taken from by the king and given to the bishop of Pamplona to build this church in 1144.

To the left, and facing where the Jewish community would have been, was this big pile, now an old folks home, but originally a Dominican monastery, built in 1258. Those who study relations between Christians and Jews in Spain know that in the thirteenth century, Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers,” gained the right to be able to force Jews to listen to them preach. In this community, evidently they also taught Arabic. I have read about this and known about it for years; in Estella for the first time I could feel what it would have been like to have this Dominican presence imposed on your community.

This church has been locked since the late nineteenth century so all you can see is its facade. It sits right on the pilgrimage road into town, opposite the river. It is the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was originally built on the site where the Jew was supposed to have thrown the crucifix into the river. This facade dates from the fourteenth century, but as you’ll be able to see, its creators had their minds very firmly on the Jewish community that surrounded it even then.

The tympanum at the centre shows scenes from Holy Week — the Last Supper on the bottom; the Crucifixion at the top, the cross flanked by Mary and John; and in the middle, the harrowing of Hell, the women at the tomb, and Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene. But look at the figures holding up the tympanum.

They’re Jews. It’s a disquieting image and there are many ways to interpret the two figures. They hold up the Crucifixion and Resurrection the way what Christians call the Old Testament holds up the New. Perhaps Jewish taxes paid for the church — given the location of the church this would not be surprising. It may not even be an entirely negative depiction. At a time when Jews were increasingly being marginalized in Spain, their physical presence here makes a case for them to have a place, however fraught and marginalized, in Christendom.

Estella has had a troubling and difficult history, only a small part of which I have talked about here. It is also beautiful, only a small part of which I have shown you here.

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Day Three: Puente la Reina to Estella

I’ll begin at the end. I’m not in Spain any more. I’m in Chicago. This post explains why.

When I wrote my last post, sitting on a bunkbed in an albergue in Puente la Reina, I was already sick, though I didn’t know it. In fact, I’d been sick for a while. While walking up the Alto de Perdon the previous day, all of a sudden I felt a massive pain in my gut, just under my ribcage, so bad I had to sit down. I thought it was reflux, maybe from too large a coffee at breakfast. I was able to continue eventually, but the pain never went away. I stopped a lot and people started to ask me if I was okay. I’m fine, I said. I just need to rest. I figured it was my first day, the hill was high, of course I was struggling a bit. One guy was worried enough to offer me chocolate or a power bar, and I think what made me reach the summit after turning him down, was the hope he’d still be there at the top when I got there so I could take him up on the offer. He was (thanks, Victor from Singapore, wherever you are now!).

But the rest of the walk went okay, even though I couldn’t eat my lunch after I ordered it, and I couldn’t choke down more than half the power bar. I had two Fanta limon (why can’t we get that here?) and a Magnum. When I got to the albergue, the guy took one look at me and put me in a semi-private room instead of the dorm (thanks, Albergue Jakue!). I had dinner with the very nice Italian race walker who ended up in my room, by which I mean I forced myself to choke down something. By then I had decided my problem was dehydration, and that had caused the reflux, so I drank masses of water and ate a banana. I was in a lot of pain that night, not from my feet or legs or hips or shoulders but from my gut and I was beginning to experience other, um, biological manifestations. But I was good to go the next morning.

The reason the photo above shows a view of the lovely eponymous moon bridge of Puente la Reina rather than a view from it is that instead of crossing it with the rest of the pilgrims, I took a detour to a pharmacy to get something for the “reflux.” I struggled up the first hill that morning in a way disproportionate to its difficulty, but apart from that, most of that day was a magical walk, as if the Camino knew I was only going to have that one more day and wanted to give me its best. Here’s the only photo of me I have:

I walked on a Roman road:

I talked to a man my age from Poland whose father under Communism used to go often to serve as a doctor in a sanatorium in Nachod, the town in Czechia near where my grandfather’s factory was. I sat under a stone portico at the top of the medieval village of Cirauqui and rested my feet. I walked through landscapes like this:

And I rested at places like this, where I saw again a nice young woman from Belgium who had been one of those the previous day to kindly ask me if I was doing okay. (She didn’t have a white dog though, only a tall boyfriend(?). It wasn’t until Estella that I saw the blind pilgrim):

I stopped for lunch in Lorca, where King Garcia Ramirez, the grandson of the Cid, died (no, I didn’t know that before either). I forced myself to choke down a tortilla and I had another Fanta limon and I sat in the sun with a nice woman from Hungary who I had also seen the previous day in Uterga. She had stopped there for the night and had shipped her pack ahead. We both wanted to make it to Estella:

I only had about 8km of easy walking left to do. It should have been fine. But it wasn’t. The abdominal pain I had been experiencing since I started got worse and worse. As the kilometres pounded on, I started to feel dizzy and light headed, By the time I got to Villatuerta, I knew I was not going to make it. The albergue was closed but the guy there directed me to a bar across the street. I asked for a mineral water and for them to call a taxi. It was going to take an hour. It didn’t matter. It could have taken six hours There was no way I could leave that bar under my own locomotion. And then I was violently, violently ill all over the nice bartender’s bathroom.

I am going to draw a bit of a veil over the next bit. The taxi came, I went to the albergue, they put me in an empty dorm so I could have a bottom bunk (thank, Albergue Municipal de Estella!), another taxi to the Centro de Salud (which deserves a whole post on its own about different medical systems) where I got a diagnosis of gastroenteritis and a sheet of instructions, another taxi to a shop where I could get some bottles of water for the rehydration solution the doctor gave me when it became clear to him I was not going to be able to squeeze lemons and mix them with soda and salt etc. (thanks, doctor, and thanks especially to taxi driver #3 who *saw* me vomiting in the gutter outside the Centro and still picked me up *and* gave me his card in case I needed more taxis). I walked over the bridge back to the albergue, did the best I could do to wash some clothing, and collapsed in bed.

The next morning, I realized that this was not going to be a 24 or 48 hour and done thing. Recovery was going to be slow. I was not going to be sending my bag ahead, I was not going to be walking half or quarter stages. I was going home. I changed my flight. I spent two more nights in Estella, three nights in Madrid, and now I am back in Chicago. If you ask me how I’m doing, the answer is better each day but not okay, not yet. I listened to my body. It was the right decision. For that reason, it was not difficult to make.

I am going to do one more post, about Estella, probably tomorrow.

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There and Back Again

That’s the plan.

Today I fly to Pamplona via Madrid and on Monday I begin my first stage on the Camino Francés. I’ll be walking for thirty days, trying to reach Santiago de Compostela, where I will give the Apostle a big hug and then come home.

Why am I doing it? Maybe the real question is, what took me so long? I’m a historian of medieval Spain, but my interest in the Camino has always been more personal than professional. I first learned about it when my mother gave me (I think it was a loan, but I never gave it back, ha ha) Laurie Dennett’s A Hug for the Apostle when I was in graduate school. My doctoral adviser was more bemused by my Camino interests than approving, but when he retired, he have me his copy of Gerogiana Goddard King’s three-volume The Way of Saint James. When I began teaching at Chicago, one of my first classes was on pilgrimage across religious traditions, and I also taught classes on medieval pilgrimage, using Nancy Frey’s wonderful Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. I even published a historical novel about the twelfth-century pilgrimage that used the creation of the well-known Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela as part of its frame.

I think that was part of the problem. I know too much about the history of this pilgrimage to be moved by druids and grails and magical swords. I know all about rites of passage and liminoid phenomena and communitas and what happens when you abandon your old structures and social bonds. Was I going to be the grumpy pilgrim in the corner rolling my eyes when people get a bit new age for my tastes and resisting camino families, angels etc? (Probably) Who wants that? Another reason was that there was so much in Spain that I wanted to visit, and see, and think about. I couldn’t bear the thought of being on the Camino 2km away from somewhere I wanted visit and being too tired to walk there and back. And, well, I’m okay now but I used to get really homesick.

So why now? I finally have the time. It was telling that the first moment I had time to do this, this was the first thing I thought of doing. I have two goals in mind. First is that I want to see if I can do it, if I can walk that far. It will be about 700 km. Second and more important is that I want to see what it feels like to move through this landscape at foot pace. What do I see? What do I learn?

I don’t know if I will keep posting when I am on my journey or if this will be it, but you can follow me on Instagram where I will probably/possibly post some photos at least. or not. How about a couple of photos now? Here’s pretty much everything I plan to bring. (Except the cat. I am not bringing the cat.)

“Yadda Yadda, you’re pack is too big, yadda yadda, you’ve got too much stuff.” La la la I can’t hear you. Here’s the full pack.

I’ll watch out for trolls.

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Thoughts on “Medieval Imaginings”: Medieval History and Historical Fiction at Northwestern University

MedievalImaginings
The books have been signed, the taxis boarded for O’Hare, but before we all move on to the next adventure, I wanted to write about few of the things I learned and lessons I valued from yesterday’s conference, “Medieval Imaginings: A Celebration of Historical Fiction.” Organized by Barbara Newman as one of the last events sponsored by a Mellon grant that has brought so many exciting ways to think of the Middle Ages, not only to Northwestern University, but to all of us in the Chicago area, the day gathered together students and teachers, historians and literary scholars and writers, as well as a few people who were all of the above.

Cecelia Holland, last but not least, was my favourite part of the day. She read a few passages to us from her 1997 novel about the Templars, Jerusalem, and every time she stopped, I wanted to shout, “No! Keep reading! I have to know what happens next.” But even more than that, she talked about how, when you write about the past, the past must connect to the present. The past is gone; we are here, and it is for us that we are writing. Before she started reading, she spoke about the place she was in when she began the book, about teaching prisoners how to write, about how she loved them and how they were desperate and hardened, hopeless and full of longing, and how writing gave them the chance to be themselves again. We could see those prisoners in the Templars she described, Rannulf and Mouse the rest.

I learned other things too. From a thoughtful discussion of sources and the uses we make of them between Paul Strohm and Bruce Holsinger (whose Invention of Fire we eagerly await), I discovered that I am more fearful of the claims made by historical biography than historical fiction. I know this comes from reading Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone as an impressionable youth. Its twin story lines of biographer and subject force us to recognize all that the biographer can never know. I learned that my own initial stirrings of an idea to write a novel about the medieval pilgrimage to Compostela must have begun very close to my reading of Sharan Newman’s novel with the same theme, Strong as Death.

We spent a little too much time talking about Dan Brown. We don’t get upset when someone writes something wrong about the Middle Ages that sinks like a stone; we get upset when it sells a lot of copies and makes a lot of money. My own explanation, not voiced at the conference, for the popularity of The DaVinci Code (and 50 Shades, and Harry Potter) is that they are easy to read, their themes and claims are big, and they satisfy a longing we have for a shared text, now that the Bible no longer fills that space. One question that came up over and over again was whether we are doing the right thing, drawing on the past for the needs of the present, slicing it up and making stories out of it with beginnings, middles, and ends; with character arcs and conflict resolved. What if people read what we write and…believe us? And what if we’re wrong? As we are, as we all are because, remember what Cecelia Holland said: the past is gone. My serious answer to this question is that I would not put my name on any piece of writing I was not prepared to stand behind, with all of its longing, and failure, to hear and convey a voice that is not my own. This is as true of my historical as my fictional writing. My flippant answer (But felt no less strongly. Maybe felt more strongly.) is that, who cares if it is wrong and they believe it? The only problem would be if, “and they believe it,” meant, “and so they stopped telling stories of their own.” Of course it is wrong. I read a history and I tell a history, then you read it and out of that your own history emerges, and together a great chain of stories continues to grow, connecting us and allowing us to share in each other while becoming more thoroughly our selves. Long live stories, and the people with the courage to tell them, and believe them.

I think the writer at the conference may have been the best historian in the room.

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The Back of the Polyptych

A lot of my readers know that image on the cover of my novel, Pilgrimage, is a detail from a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a polyptych (that is to say, a panel painting that folds up) that had once been an altarpiece. The altarpiece as a whole is quite incredible, and shows scenes from the life (and death) of Saint Godeleva; in my novel, the mother of my heroine, Gebirga. The panel even includes images of the blind daughter who inspired Gebirga, so I was delighted to be able to use a part of it for the cover. Here it is in all its glory:
MasterofGodelieve

Well, not quite all its glory, as I discovered this evening. As an altarpiece, this polyptych would have hung behind and above the altar of a church. Polyptychs were designed to fold closed during Lent and other times of penance, concealing their beauty from the congregation. The closed doors of the polyptych would often have different painted scenes on their backs. You can see how this works in this link to the Ghent Altarpiece, which shows how it looks both open and closed.

It wasn’t until tonight that I discovered what was on the back of the doors of the Godeleva altarpiece. When closed, the four panels each show a different saint, with kneeling donor portraits in front of the saints on the far left and far right. Here is how it looks:
JamesNicholas
It was the two saints on the left who immediately caught my eye. I recognized them right away. The bishop in mitre and cope, holding his crook and a book was obviously Saint Nicholas, rescuing the three boys who had been chopped up and put in a barrel. Saint Nicholas, or at least his relics, play an important role in my novel. In their silver reliquary, they are Gebirga’s prized possession, carried with her on her journey until she relinquishes them so they can travel back to the Low Countries from Spain by boat. And as all Dutch children know, every year Saint Nicholas sails again from Spain around this time to reward them with treats. And the saint on the far left? The saint with staff, and pilgrim’s purse and hat, his neck ringed with scallop shells?

That is none other than Saint James, Sint Jaakob, Santiago himself.

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Gebirga’s Dog

shutterstock_96854167 copyAn author may think she knows what her book is about, but she only really discovers what it’s about when it moves into the hands of her readers. I have always had the most terrible time distilling my novel into a “pitch” sentence, but thanks to my friend Kyle I can tell you now that it is a book about a girl and a dog who go on an adventure.

And what a dog she is. Her name is Liisa, and after Gebirga, she was the second character to populate my novel. If I were going to send Gebirga out into the world blind, I reasoned, the least thing I could do is give her a dog. Of course, the formal origin of the seeing-eye dog was not until after World War I, when they began training dogs to work with soldiers who has lost their sight during the war. But centuries before that, children’s alphabets had “B is a Blind Man, led by his Dog,” and so I felt it was fair to use a wise dog in my novel. But what kind? The breeds we know now were largely fixed in the last century or so, though many have medieval origins. We know most about medieval hunting dogs, because a good deal was written about them. We also know about medieval lap dogs, and both hunting and lap dogs appear in illuminations. We know rather less about what other kinds of working dogs would have looked like, though we know they existed. Dogs guarded sheep and property long before the Middle Ages, and sheep dogs would have been common in sheep-rich Flanders. So I chose to make Liisa the long-ago ancestor of the Belgian sheep dogs we know today, in the slightly rarer white version. This photograph is a remarkably good likeness of Liisa, considering she lived long before colour photography.

So that is what she looks like, and her instinct to protect Gebirga is built into her bones. I grew up around working dogs. My father and grandfather hunted, and my grandfather always had a dog, a yellow or black Laborador retriever. Remembering the bond between my grandfather and his dogs, like they were one person in two bodies when it came time to work, helped me think of the connection between Gebirga and Liisa. So Liisa is a little bit Nena, a little bit Sally, a little bit Tricky, a little bit Taffy. But mostly Sally.

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PIlgrimage, History, and Historical Fiction

When I would tell fellow academics I was writing a historical novel about my period, their eyes would widen and the questions and comments would come, always friendly and supportive, maybe a little wistful:

–Really?
–Is it hard?
–I could never do that; I don’t have enough imagination.
–How do you find the time?

(Answer: you make the time)
Reading historical fiction as a child (Rosemary Sutcliff, Jean Plaidy, Georgette Heyer…) was a huge part of why I became interested in history, so the link between historical writing and fiction was there from the beginning. Now my friend David Perry (another medieval historian who pushes his own writing beyond the confines of the academy) has written a thoughtful essay on fiction and scholarship that discusses my novel, Pilgrimage and Bruce Holsinger’s A Burnable Book:

Fictionalizing Your Scholarship: Writing a novel is hard to do well, but it can serve as a powerful way to share your research with a wider audience

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Reading the Medieval Camino

Fromista
Fromista
I thought a word about the sources in English that I used for my historical novel, PILGRIMAGE might be interesting both for readers, and also for modern pilgrims who have tackled (or dream of tackling) the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. One of the wonders of the Camino Frances is not only that it is such an old track, but that there has been so much written about it over the centuries. I think knowing something of the history that created the road only enhances the journey. And it is not a history primarily of dates and politics, but one of art and architecture and real people with hopes and dreams and fears tracking off into the unknown (to them) world. My own heroine takes a roundabout route before joining the road through France via Arles and Toulouse. She takes the Camino Aragones before joining — after a few plot-required detours — the Camino Frances.

The first source pilgrims who are interested in the history and origins of the route usually encounter is the engaging and wonderful twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela. I link to the Italica Press translation by William Melczer, which is also available in a Kindle edition, for those pilgrims who would like to carry it en route. I would not suggest you replace your modern guidebook with it, however. Let’s just say that Aimery Picaud was a little optimistic when he described the length of each stage…

The Miracles of St. James accompanies the Pilgrim’s Guide in manuscripts, and is now available in its own translation. The gem of this book is its translation of the medieval sermon “Veneranda dies.” If you want an idea of how they thought of the Camino in the twelfth-century, and the origin of traditions (and complaints) that are still relevant today, this is the place to look. Exerienced pilgrims will discover many differences, of course, but I think you will be surprised to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If your primary interest in the Camino is its art and architecture, and if you want to know more about what you might see along all the main roads in France and Spain, you might like Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Gazeteer by Paula Gerson and Annie Shaver-Crandell. I found it an invaluable resource for imagining my heroine’s journey.

A resources designed more for the modern pilgrim, because it describes what you will see stage by stage, is David Gitlitz and Mary-Jane Davidson’s The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook. It doesn’t provide trail directions or the addresses of albergues but it is an excellent source for explaining what it is you will actually see on the road and what it all means. I returned to it over and over again while writing.

If you would like to know more about the history of medieval Spain during the time when the pilgrimage road to Compostela was becoming popular across Europe, you could take a look at Bernard Reilly’s The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain: 1031 – 1157. And last but not least, if you prefer some pictures while you are reading, and want to delve deeper into relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the peninsula, check out The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture.

Happy reading and happy walking!

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Beach Reads

So this happened, over on Bustle in a nice column written by Tori Telfer:

11 MOVING BEACH READS THAT’LL HAVE YOU WEEPING INTO YOUR PINA COLADA

Check out #10. I’ll give you a hint: PILGRIMAGE!

I was pretty thrilled, as was just about everyone else I know (because I sure didn’t keep the news to myself) except for a couple of men who seemed to feel that somehow my novel had been sullied by being called a beach read. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Beach reads are important. Beach reads are special. Beach reads are the books you can take time with, the ones you don’ have to read in fifteen minute snatches on the metro, or as long as you can prop your eyes open before crashing at night. Beach reads are planned, chosen, anticipated, savoured. They are ones you can allow yourself to fall into and be swallowed up by knowing that nothing more pressing will pull you away from them.

What makes a perfect beach read? For me, it has to be long. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy long. Really long. You don’t want to finish it too soon. They have to have paper covers, because hardbacks make red dents in your chest when you read them lying down on a deck chair. They have to transport me somewhere I’ve never been before — or return me to an old, long-loved place. I often re-read old children’s books when I am home for the summer. If they take me somewhere new, it can be a beautiful magical place, or a hard, difficult place.

Okay, now where’s my piña colada?

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Walking the Camino

MV5BMTU4ODIyNTc4Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTg0ODM3MDE@._V1_SX214_AL_I saw this documentary, “Walking the Camino” last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I think what moved me more than anything, beyond the beautiful scenery which I am already familiar with for the most part, was the way the faces of the pilgrims were transformed as their journey progressed. They all radiated a kind of peace and clarity you hadn’t known they were missing when they left. It is the advantage of watching a documentary with real pilgrims, rather than a movie like “The Way.” You can’t perform that kind of internal change; it must come from within. The film is on for one more night in Chicago, so catch it before it leaves. It is also showing elsewhere in a number of Canadian and American cities.

I have been interested in the Camino since by chance I read Laurie Dennett’s A Hug for the Apostle back in the 80s. She did her walk before Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage and other popularizing accounts transformed it from an almost forgotten walk known to enthusiasts and Spaniards into the huge phenomenon it is today. I loved the book, read everything I could about the road, medieval and modern, and dreamed about doing the walk some day.

But I haven’t done it yet (this is the first question people ask me when they discover I have written a historical novel about the medieval Camino so I might as well get it off the table) and I don’t know if I will. It is not the physical challenge that scares me; that I welcome (though I may be deluding myself). There is the problem of fitting it into an academic schedule of course. Once, it was the fear of the frustration of missing some medieval gem a few kilometres off the road because I am tired and have to get to Pamplona or Ponferrada by nightfall. But I return often enough now, that should not be an issue. I have criss-crossed the road numerous times in different places on research trips to Spain, reading medieval manuscripts in towns where medieval pilgrims once walked and modern ones trace their footsteps. I was going to add “and as a tourist” but if I want to be honest, I am never just a tourist in Spain. Everywhere I go, I am thinking about the country’s past, learning its history from its geography. And that, I think, is the real problem. I fear I know the land too well, that I won’t be able to bring to the Camino the open heart I need, ready to learn all it has to teach. I’ll be the annoying one in the albergue, debunking the myths. I worry that to be a true pilgrim, I need to go to Japan or Mexico or somewhere less freighted for me.

But it still calls to me. I still want to do it. And one day, maybe I will.