Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  Next come two walkers chatting amiably in German, moving almost as fast as the horsemen: two fifty-ish athletes, built like greyhounds and as thin as whipcord, power-walking at a pace far beyond my dreams. They stop for a quick break and chat. They have already walked thirty-three kilometres today, all the way from Mérida. We are to meet again this evening in the Residencia, where one of them, a friendly Englishman living in Berlin, Bill Attwood, gives me the secret to overcoming my chronic blisters. Throw away your heavy wool outer socks, he said. Always wear two pairs of lightweight walking socks, the expensive kinds like Coolmax or Bridgestone — worth every cent. Keep your feet as dry as possible: stop halfway through the walking-day, take your boots and socks off, dry your feet well and rest them for half an hour, propped high up on a bench or on your backpack, to cool them and ease the swelling. Then talcum-powder them well before you put on two pairs of clean socks and your boots, which by now should be marginally drier. Bill’s advice, which I followed exactly, worked wonders. A week later, my blisters were healing fast, and the soles and heels of my feet were at last hardening up. After Salamanca, there would be no more blisters.

  Another group of walkers go by me, five fit young Germans (whom I had met last night at Aljucén), moving effortlessly with light day-packs — for they also have a back-up car. They started two hours after me. I had better get moving; it is depressing to be passed by so many fitter people. I pack up my breakfast remains, hoist the pack onto my extended knee, swing it smoothly over my shoulders, cinch up the waist-belt as tight as it will go to get the weight off my shoulders and down onto my hipbones, clip the chest-strap tightly to stop the pack bouncing around on my shoulders, grab my trusty wooden pilgrim’s staff, and away we go again. After a while, with a well-packed and well-adjusted rucksack, you can forget you are carrying anything — until the end of the day, when soreness under the shoulder straps starts to remind you again.

  Up into the last range of low hills, small farms start to appear in the scrub along the track: there are fences, olives, grapes, a few cows and sheep, modest farmhouses. Over the crest and it is greener now, more cultivated. I have entered an irrigated mixed-farming area of small fields, vegetable and cereals plots, orchards, vineyards. The path slopes gradually downwards into a shallow valley, looking ahead to a village up a slope on the horizon. It must be Alcuéscar. Distances to villages are deceptive: you can see a church-tower from up to ten kilometres away, but I had learned that only when you can distinguish the windows in the church-tower will the village be less than two kilometres away. As we get closer, I see a very large isolated building over to the left on its own, surrounded by wheatfields and vineyards and orchards. This must be the Residencia of the Brothers, and so I turn my steps towards it.

  A few minutes later I am showing my pilgrim passport to a welcoming doorkeeper brother who escorts me upstairs to the albergue por los peregrinos: a self-contained pilgrim hostel area on the third floor of the Residencia, with a common room, a few small individual bedrooms, a large dormitory tightly packed with steel bunks, and a communal bathroom with lots of hot showers and clean toilets. It is all unisex and it is all free, though there is a discreet donations box on the wall — I dropped in a five-euro note. Because there were not many pilgrims that day, I scored a single room. It was spartan — a bed, a desk, and a chair were all it contained — but it offered all I needed. Looking out the window, writing, I saw a group of Africans, singing as they hoed and weeded vegetable gardens. Later I learned that these were penniless boat people who had come into Spain without papers, by cayuco (canoe) from Senegal to the nearby Spanish Canary Islands. They were being cared for by the brothers, learning Spanish and preparing for entry into the general community.

  This order of brothers has quite a recent history. It was founded in 1939, just as the fratricidal Spanish Civil War was drawing to its bitter close, by a charismatic and visionary parish priest in Alcuéscar named Leocadio Galán Barrena. Father Leocadio started this charitable order of brothers, seeing the urgent need to address the terrible poverty and neglect of children in this part of Spain, after years of depression and civil war. There were so many orphans and homeless children — many, I suspect from the photographs I saw of the early years of the order, being the traumatised and orphaned children of civil war victims: they gaze out with hurt and anger in their dark-shadowed eyes. They are not smiling.

  The order started with no resources, but gradually built up its numbers and properties over six decades. Now it has houses across Spain, and the central Residencia is a handsome, imposing, three-storey brick building, with chapel and gardens and dining room and a museum of the order’s history. It has an impressive sense of solidity and permanence about it, reminding me of my old Jesuit boarding school in Sydney, Saint Ignatius’ College.

  I have a refreshing shower, change my clothes, and then walk slowly up the hill to the village, trying not to raise a sweat again. I find there a welcoming bar-restaurant, Casa Alexandro. It is already 3.00 pm, but the dining room is still full of diners enjoying a leisurely late lunch. Then coffee and a chat with some locals at the bar, before drifting back down the hill to the Residencia for a couple of hours siesta. Already, the rigours of the morning seem long ago and far away — has it really been just a few hours ago on this same day that I walked twenty-two kilometres in thirty-five-degree heat?

  This is the most wonderful quality of pilgrimage — how it slows down and separates time into discrete bundles. The walking and resting parts of the day are so sharply distinct that they almost feel like separate existences. Maybe farmers and manual workers experience this same soothing separation between their arduous working hours and their precious free hours of rest afterwards. In modern white-collar society, most of us have lost that happy capacity to put the working day behind us once it has ended. We carry our workplace worries and stresses home with us, and they never really leave us, even in sleep.

  But on pilgrimage, once the day’s work of walking is done, it is as if it had never happened. Having done your daily work of walking, you enter a different world of human civility and comfort and clean clothes, of good food and drink and leisurely conversation. Yes, the hard work of pilgrimage walking will start again at dawn the next day, but tomorrow seems a long time away. I feel something of Homer’s Odyssey today, those remembered accounts of a dusty and travel-weary Odysseus arriving in a fine palace, to be welcomed, bathed, given clean clothes, and then wined and dined by generous and gracious hosts. Pilgrimage walking, with its daily renewals of the spirit, is a kind of Odyssey.

  The brothers had a final welcome surprise in store. Waking from my nap in the early evening, I found that we had all been invited to dine in a special pilgrims’ dining room. There were cold cuts of ham and chorizo sausage with home-baked bread, platters of fried rice, fruit, chocolates even, washed down with carafes of good house-red wine. It was the usual Residencia hospitality to pilgrims, and it was served by a brother with a matter-of-fact grace and generosity. For these brothers, helping travellers is just part of the day’s job — be they pilgrims or penniless African immigrants without papers. ‘This is normal for us, this is what we are here to do’ was the brothers’ unspoken message. As we finished our meal, the attendant brother gave us little prayer cards, with this inscription (in my rough translation):

  Welcome, brother: because your visit honours us; because we can share knowledge with you; because we consider you as our brothers, sons of the same Father; because this house has room for all who come here; because we promised Him to extend peace and friendship towards all; because Christ sends rebirth to us with His open arms, and as we would welcome Him here; because our faith and our vocation requires us to offer kindness and hospitality; and because your visit allows us to practise the charity between brothers which is the essence of our holy servitude. Thank you!

  As I looked at the faces of the happily chatting men and women pilgrims around me — English, Germans, S
panish, Dutch, Canadians, Japanese — I began to feel the spirit of the Santiago pilgrimage starting to enter quietly into my soul. There was fellowship here, human solidarity, and generosity of spirit. It wasn’t just about endurance walking and blisters on hot, dry roads: there was something more happening here.

  chapter two

  The Idea of Pilgrimage

  I stumbled across the pilgrimage to Santiago accidentally a couple of years ago, happening to hear a public radio documentary on it. It caught my interest — an Australian radio journalist was out on the Camino Frances with a microphone, talking with pilgrim walkers at random, asking what they were doing there. As people replied, I could hear the steady crunch-crunch of their boots on the gravel paths. It was quite hypnotic just to listen to that background noise, and to try to imagine what kinds of landscapes they were walking through.

  What people said was interestingly diverse. People of no professed religious belief said they were doing this simply because of the physical challenge of a very long walk, or because it was ‘the best walk in the world’. In contrast, people of strong religious belief argued firmly that the walk would have no meaning for them unless as it were a religiously inspired endeavour; that it was far more than just a long scenic walk (and often, one walker suggested, not particularly scenic anyway). People also debated the Santiago foundation miracle myth: was it true or just superstition, and did it matter whether it was true? Some people said they looked forward to the welcoming rituals in Santiago Cathedral as part of the rich fabric of European and Spanish history. Others felt less comfortable with what they saw as the underlying sectarian triumphalism of Santiago: did they really want to celebrate Spanish Christians’ bloody military victories over Spanish Moors, when we all understood now how cruel the consequences of the Christian reconquest had been for Spain’s Muslims and Jews? Would arrival in Santiago mean very much, or was it the walk itself that mattered more than the destination? Was it better to walk alone or in groups? How easy was it to make friends on the way? In all this good-humoured diversity of views, everyone agreed on one thing: they would rather be here doing this walk than almost anything else, and it was a memorable and significant event in their lives.

  I filed the program away in the back of my mind and didn’t much think about it again, until in 2005 I won an unexpected and financially generous ‘ACT Book of the Year’ award from the government of my home city, Canberra. The prize was for a book I had written in 2004, A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X, which controversially investigated what was known about the unexplained sinking of a small asylum-seeker boat in October 2001, criminally overloaded by a people smuggler. The victims were mostly Iraqi Shia Muslim refugees from Saddam Hussein’s regime, and mostly women and children whose husbands and fathers had preceded them to Australia. The boat sank in the Indian Ocean on its way from Indonesia to Australia’s nearby Christmas Island. In this huge maritime tragedy on Australia’s doorstep, 353 people drowned and only 45 people survived.My book (and my prior public questioning to an Australian Senate investigative committee about the circumstances of the tragedy) had raised disturbing issues about what Australian border-protection authorities, and Australian police agencies, who were conducting a covert people-smuggling disruption program in Indonesia at the time, might have known about this doomed voyage and whether they had clean hands.

  These were polarising questions, going to the integrity of Australian government ministers and senior national security agencies, and my work therefore aroused a flurry of bitter controversy in Australia. Government supporters scorned my questions (questions the government had refused to answer, claiming national security and other reasons), while some human rights and civil liberties advocacy groups accepted the seriousness of the issue and took it up. By 2005 I was pretty burnt out, disillusioned at how my country’s national security institutions, on whose basic honour and professionalism I had hitherto relied, had so cynically shrugged off their public-accountability obligations.

  I had also come to understood how the disturbing public history of this nameless, sunken boat that I had named SIEV X (‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, Unknown’) was symptomatic of a much larger trend, a disturbing collapse in previously assumed public standards of truth in government and respect for the human rights of all in the community. In these matters, Australia’s experience in recent years has paralleled that of the United States and Britain. More and more, the English-speaking democracies — the cradles of modern, representative, constitutional government — seemed to be losing the plot. More and more, our nations’ civic discourse seemed to be swamped in moral panic, heartlessness, xenophobia, and artificially fostered ‘new realities’ promoted by governments now in the business of promulgating the politics of fear and spin against people they define as ‘the other’. More and more, our governments’ basic operating rules seemed to have become: ‘Whatever we do is alright, as long as we are not found out; and, through our management of the news agenda and public information, we will seek to ensure that we are never found out’.

  My sense of distress that defenceless groups of homeless people were being gravely abused by my national government, but that the majority of my fellow citizens just didn’t seem to know or care about such injustices, or to see the dangers in these trends to their own personal freedoms and security, was curdling inside me. I was becoming bitter, harshly judgmental, retreating from old friendships, sleeping badly, eating and drinking too much. I knew that I needed to break out of what was becoming a self-destructive cycle. I tried to stand back from politics, to walk and garden more, to spend more time with my young children, to change the rhythm and priorities of my life, but nothing seemed to work well enough. I remained at risk of sliding back into the same negative-feedback cycle of corrosive anger. I needed something dramatic, a circuit-breaker.

  It came to me one day in December 2005, shortly before Christmas, that maybe I should spend some of my book prize windfall to make the pilgrimage to Santiago. Yes, it would be selfish to leave my family for so long, but maybe I had earned it? I started to research the topic on the Internet. It did not take me long to decide that this was for me. My wife, Sina, wisely understanding the need, generously gave me a three-month leave pass from parental duties (we have three young children). I bought my air tickets and started organising the journey. Almost immediately, I was more focussed, happier. Even in anticipation, the pilgrimage was working a beneficent magic.

  ***

  Jonathan Sumption, a brilliant English barrister and, in his spare time, a first-class historian of the medieval period in Europe, cut his teeth as a history writer in 1975 with a fine book, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion. I read his book a few weeks before I went to Spain to try to fill out my understanding of the curt dictionary definition of pilgrimage: ‘a journey, often long and arduous, undertaken for primarily religious reasons’.

  Sumption details how pilgrimage in the medieval period, a time when rulers and ruled alike took religious belief and obligations intensely and literally, was primarily motivated by three aims: seeking forgiveness of sins and guarantees of eternal salvation through proximity to especially holy relics; seeking cures and better health in this earthly life by the same means; and, simply, getting away from the boredom and restraints of life at home. Going on pilgrimage was a way to see the world in a legally sanctioned way, no matter how poor or obligation-bound your station in life. As long as you were able to walk, you could get permission to set out on pilgrimage, and if necessary beg for food and shelter on the way. For rich and poor alike, pilgrimage was the medieval version of a holiday abroad.

  Around these three ideas, in an age when most people were firmly tied to their place of residence by service obligations to their local lord or bishop, and when running away from these obligations was a serious crime, a rich tradition of Christian pilgrimage grew up and flourished for hundreds of years, from about 800 A.D. until the Reformation era
. In the Dark Ages, the practice of pilgrimage cast a ray of warm light that persisted until the Renaissance. Then the growing rationalism and scepticism of the European Enlightenment discredited the notion of pilgrimage as nothing more than a superstitious medieval relic. It faded away.

  Yet the idea of pilgrimage had never been exclusively Christian or European. The sense of a quest or epic journey with spiritual elements is embedded in pre-Christian pagan sagas, and has been a constant thread running through the world’s great literature. The story of humanity’s urge to travel and engage with a larger world is as old as time, from the first stories of tribesmen who went to explore what was over the next hill. Think of Gilgamesh, the Icelandic and Norse sagas, Polynesian and Vedic sagas, Hiawatha’s journeys, Australian aboriginal legends of spiritual journeys through the Dreaming, Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, the voyages of Odysseus and of Sinbad the sailor, the Christian-era epics of a search for the Holy Grail, the Buddhist monk Tripitaka’s journeys across the Himalayas to bring back the sacred books, and the travels of Marco Polo. In imagining Bilbo Baggins’ journeys and Frodo’s quest to return the Ring to its maker, Tolkien taps into such rich universal themes: Bilbo and Frodo are both pilgrims as well as explorers.

  The idea of an arduous but sacred journey far from home strikes chords in many religions and cultures, even in the more contemplative and cerebral ones. Hinduism and Buddhism are full of the imagery of holy mountains which one had to climb, and holy rivers where one had to go and bathe, in order to earn spiritual merit. Think of all those devout swimmers in the River Ganges at Benares; all those well-trodden ancient pilgrim trails up into the heart of the Himalayas through the mountain passes of Nepal, Kashmir, and Yunnan; those steep paths and steps up to myriad hilltops with their crowning shrines and monasteries throughout Buddhist Asia; and the great temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, symbolising in the very architecture of its towers and steep-sided staircases the mighty Himalayas themselves.