In going on pilgrimage, one has left behind the complications of one’s place in the world—family, attachments, rank, duties—and become a walker among walkers, for there is no aristocracy among pilgrims save that of achievement and dedication. The Turners talk about pilgrimage as a liminal state—a state of being between one’s past and future identities and thus outside the established order, in a state of possibility. Liminality comes from the Latin limin, a threshold, and a pilgrim has both symbolically and physically stepped over such a line: “Liminars are stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a homogeneous social state through discipline and ordeal. Their secular powerlessness may be compensated for by a sacred power, however—the power of the weak, derived on the one hand from the resurgence of nature when structural power is removed, and on the other from the reception of sacred knowledge. Much of what has been bound by social structure is liberated, notably the sense of comradeship and communion, or communitas.”
We started easily enough, on a flat wooden bridge across a stream that watered the banks around it into rare lushness, then up through Greg and MaLin’s dogleg cornfield bordered by oaks. From there we went over an irrigation ditch and through the fence that divided their land from the Nambe reservation, the first of many fences we would crawl under, scramble over, or unlatch a wire-fastened gate and pass through. On the Nambe reservation, we passed Nambe Falls, which we could hear roaring in its gorge but not quite see. I liked its invisibility as a reminder that we were not on a scenic walk or the territory of people imbued with the mainstream European tradition of such walks. We could hear it as we approached and, by going to a promontory point and craning, could see part of it, but the only possible clear view on our route would be the quick one during the plummet from the cliff into the deep channel below. So we glimpsed the foaming white edges and lower streambed and went on. We all kept pace with each other for the first half of the expedition, and though the way utterly failed to resemble the route that had looked so coherent when Greg had shown it to us on the topographical maps, the roads and irrigation ditches and landmarks made it clear enough to him.
“Wherever you go, there you are,” he said whenever someone asked him if we were lost yet. We had a cheerful morning of it. Sue said that she had expected us to proceed in somber silence, but everyone told stories and made observations. We ate a first snack under a roadside cottonwood tree past the San Juan Reservoir on the Nambe reservation, which adjoins Greg’s land, then walked through the outskirts of the reservation town with its horses, fruit trees, sweat lodge, buffalo pasture, and many scattered houses. For the whole length of that road into Nambe, Meridel told us about her first New Age experience in Santa Fe, having her aura balanced in the 1970s, and we variously inquired and wisecracked about the notion. Sue taught us the acronym AFGO, “another fucking growth opportunity,” for the plethora of spiritual opportunities (and opportunists) in Santa Fe. Three in our party had had Christian upbringings, and I had come out partly to help Meridel celebrate her fiftieth birthday with a revisionist Passover dinner the day after our walk (she was raised as a nonreligious Jew, and I was raised as nothing in particular by a lapsed Catholic and a nonpracticing Jew). Since the Last Supper was a Passover seder, even Good Friday and Easter are overlaid on the Jewish holiday celebrating the flight from Egypt, and this pilgrimage was built on top of all those layers of meeting, suffering, moving, dying.
We began to drift apart north of the Nambe settlement when we reached the rough sandstone expanse of the badlands, with wind-carved pillars of red stone studding a hot, airless expanse of sand and gravel and ruddy dirt stretching to the red cliffs in the distance. The two other women began to trail, and the two men I didn’t know went on ahead. We all met up at the windmill, which marked a turn in terrain and in direction, and lounged around the shade of its waterless tank. Afterward, Greg and Sue decided to go around a hill the rest of us were going to go straight over, because she was wearing out. The badlands had given way to more of that intricate terrain of hillocks so hard to navigate in, and rather than going over the single hill I had expected, we found ourselves surmounting and descending innumerable tree-studded red-soil rises. We shouted, but we couldn’t find them, so we kept walking. One of the other men had gone on far ahead; the other was walking faster than Meridel could. She is an athletic woman, but she is small and had pulled something in her knee, and her steps had grown short.
This drifting apart was dispiriting. When I think about what we were doing, it seems as if it ought to have been an experience of paradise attained—dear friends and amiable new acquaintances moving across a varied landscape toward a remarkable goal under an azure sky. But, alas, we had various bodies and various styles. I had been frustrated for the last few hours by the pace. Someone would stop to pull out binoculars or to confer, and everyone would come to a halt that would grow protracted. Standing or wandering slowly makes my feet hurt; it’s why museums and malls are more painful than mountains. And if the devil is in the details, mine was in the heavy-duty boots I thought I had broken in but which had begun to break my feet in all over again. So I oscillated between the man ahead and the woman behind until we finally reached the open grassland. Three of us arrived at the road on the far side of the grassland together. A steady stream of walkers and cars was going by—the former all uphill, the latter in both directions—and Meridel and I joined it. We were now part of the much larger community spread out for dozens of miles along the highway that is the main pilgrimage route. The trail of empty water bottles and orange peels bore evidence to the volunteers farther down the road, people who came every year and set up tables bearing slices of oranges, water, soft drinks, cookies, and occasionally Easter candy that everyone was welcome to take. This was one of the most moving parts of the pilgrimage to me, these people who were out not to earn their own salvation but to support others doing so.
On Good Friday of the year before, I had been struck by how little preparation most of the pilgrims seemed to have made for a long walk. Their everyday clothes had been something of a rebuke to me that this was not a hike, and many stout people who looked as if they never walked much otherwise persevered. This year the day was much warmer, and everything seemed different: with our aching feet and our packs, we looked more serious, more dogged, than the jaunty young pilgrims in their colorful shorts and jeans and T-shirts (though Meridel’s husband Jerry told us when he met us in Chimayó that he had seen a woman from a very small town walking in a fancy white dress—“the kind of dress you would get married in, or buried in”—and two days earlier and thirty miles west I had seen two men in fatigues walking eastward, one of them carrying a large cross). Both times I joined this pilgrimage I had the strange sense that I was walking alongside people in another world, the world of believers, people for whom the Santuario up ahead contained a definite power in a cosmos organized around the Trinity, the mother of God, the saints, and the geography of churches, shrines, altars, and sacraments. But I had suffered like a pilgrim; my feet were killing me.
Pilgrimages are not athletic events, not only because they often punish the body but because they are so often gone on by those who are seeking the restoration of their own or a loved one’s health. They are for the least equipped rather than the most. Greg told me, when I called him up to ask if I could join in, that when he had leukemia he made a deal with the gods. Framed in the same easy-going humor he brought to other subjects, the deal’s terms were flexible: that if he lived, he would try to go on the pilgrimage when he could. This was his third year of walking it, and it got easier every year. Four years before, when he was deathly ill, Jerry and Meridel walked for him and brought him back some dirt from the Santuario.
This Easter week in which we were walking to Chimayó, a similar pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres would be taking place again, and far larger crowds of Christians would be gathering in Rome and Jerusalem. In the last half century or so, a
wide variety of secular and nontraditional pilgrimages have evolved that extend the notion of the pilgrimage into political and economic spheres. Not long before I had set out, a march in San Francisco commemorated the farmworker organizer César Chávez’s birthday with a crosstown “Walk for Justice”; and in Memphis, Tennessee, civil rights activists commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination there with another march. In the southwest in April, I could have instead joined the Franciscan-led Nevada Desert Experience on their annual peace walk from Las Vegas to the Nevada Test Site (akin to another pilgrimage route from Chimayó to Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, thirty miles west). Then there was the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual walkathon on the first week of April and the March of Dimes’s WalkAmerica the last weekend of that month. I had come across a flyer in Gallup, New Mexico, for “Native Americans for Community Action, Inc. 15th Annual Sacred Mountain 10k Prayer Run and 2k Fun Run/Walk” to be held in Flagstaff in June, which sounded like the Spirit Runs held by the five tribes fighting the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste dump in southeastern California, and I knew that the annual breast cancer and AIDS walks were coming up in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and other locations around the country. And no doubt somewhere somebody was walking across the continent for some other good cause. All these were outgrowths of the pilgrimage, or adaptations of its terms.
Imagine all those revisionist versions of pilgrimage as a mighty river of walkers flowing from many sources. The first small trickle comes, like March ice melt from a high glacier, from a single woman almost half a century ago. On January 1, 1953, a woman known to the world only as Peace Pilgrim set out, vowing “to remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace.” She had found her vocation years before when she walked all night through the woods and felt, in her words, “a complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to God and to service,” and she prepared for her vocation by walking 2,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail. Raised on a farm and active in peace politics before she abandoned her name and began her pilgrimage, she was a peculiarly American figure, plainspoken and confident that the simplicity of life and thought that worked for her could work for everyone. Her cheery accounts of her long years of walking the roads and talking to the people she met are unburdened by complexity, dogma, or doubt and rife with exclamation marks.
She started her pilgrimage by joining the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, and something about setting out on her long odyssey from this corny festivity recalls Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, with her own farmgirl can-do determination, starting down the Yellow Brick Road amid dancing munchkins. Peace Pilgrim kept walking for twenty-eight years through all kinds of weather and every state and Canadian province as well as parts of Mexico. An older woman at the time she first set out, she wore navy blue pants and shirt, tennis shoes, and a navy blue tunic whose front was stenciled with the words “Peace Pilgrim” and whose back text changed over the years from “walking coast to coast for peace” to “walking 10,000 miles for world disarmament” to “25,000 miles on foot for peace.” Something of her brisk, practical piety comes across in her explanation of the choice of dark blue—“it doesn’t show dirt,” she wrote, and “does represent peace and spirituality.” Though she attributes her extraordinary health and stamina to her spirituality, it is hard not to wonder if it was the other way around. She continued her pilgrimage in her simple outfit through snowstorms, rain, a harsh dust storm, and heat, sleeping in cemeteries, in Grand Central Station, on floors, and on an endless succession of the couches of new acquaintances.
Though most of her writings are nonpartisan, she took a strong stand on national and global politics, arguing against the Korean War, the cold war, the arms race, and war in general. The war in Korea was still going on when she set out from Pasadena, as was Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist intimidation. It was one of the bleakest periods in American history, with fear of nuclear war and communism driving most Americans into the bunkers of conformity and repression. Even to argue for peace took heroic courage. To set out, as Peace Pilgrim did on the first day of 1953, with nothing more than her single outfit, whose pockets contained “a comb, a folding toothbrush, a ballpoint pen, copies of her message and her current correspondence,” was astonishing. While the economy was booming and capitalism was becoming enshrined as a sacrament of freedom, she had dropped out of the money economy—she never carried or used money for the rest of her life. She says of her lack of material possessions, “Think of how free I am! If I want to travel, I just stand up and walk away. There is nothing to tie me down.” Though her models were largely Christian, her pilgrimage seems to have arisen from the same 1950s crisis of culture and spirituality that pushed John Cage, Gary Snyder, and many other artists and poets into investigations of Zen Buddhism and other nonwestern traditions and sent Martin Luther King to India to study Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence and satyagraha, or soul-force.
Most people who diverge from the mainstream withdraw from its spaces, but Peace Pilgrim had withdrawn from the former to enter the latter, where she would be most required to mediate the gap between her beliefs and national ideology—she was as much an evangelist as a pilgrim. She had set out to walk 25,000 miles for peace, and it took her nine years to do so. Afterward, she continued walking for peace but stopped counting the miles. As she put it, “I walk until given shelter, fast until given food. I don’t ask—it’s given without asking. Aren’t people good! . . . I usually average twenty-five miles a day walking, depending on how many people stop to talk to me along the way. I have gone up to fifty miles in one day to keep an appointment or because there was no shelter available. On very cold nights I walk through the night to keep warm. Like the birds, I migrate north in the summer and south in the winter.” Later she became a widely recognized public speaker and occasionally accepted a ride to get her to her speaking engagements. She died, ironically, in a head-on car crash in July 1981.
Like a pilgrim, she had entered the liminal condition the Turners would later describe, leaving behind an ordinary identity and the goods and circumstances that bolster such identities to achieve that state of anonymous simplicity and clear purpose Tolstoy’s Princess Marya longed for. Her walking became a testament to the strength of her convictions and suggests several things. One is that the world was in such trouble that she herself had to drop her ordinary name and ordinary life to try to heal it. Another is that if she could break with the ordinary and go forth unprotected by money, by buildings, and by a place in the world, then perhaps profound change and profound trust were possible on a larger scale. A third is that of the carrier: like Christ taking on the sins of all his followers or the Hebrew scapegoat driven out into the wilderness, burdened with the sins of the community, she had taken personal responsibility for the state of the world, and her life was testimony and expiation as well as example. But what makes her unorthodox is that she adapted a religious form, the pilgrimage, to carry political content. The pilgrimage traditionally dealt with disease and healing of self or loved ones, but she had taken on war, violence, and hate as plagues ravaging the world. The political content that motivated her and the way in which she endeavored to achieve change through influencing her fellow human beings rather than through divine intervention make her the first of a horde of modern political pilgrims.
She foreshadowed this shift in the nature of the pilgrimage, from appealing for divine intervention or holy miracle to demanding political change, making the audience no longer God or the gods, but the public. Perhaps the postwar era marked the end of belief that divine intervention alone was adequate; God had failed to prevent the Jewish Holocaust, and the Jews had seized their promised land through political and military means. African Americans, who had long used metaphors of the Promised Land, stopped waiting too. At the height of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King said that he was going to Birmingham to lead demonstrations until “Pharaoh lets God’s people go.” The collect
ive walk brings together the iconography of the pilgrimage with that of the military march and the labor strike and demonstration: it is a show of strength as well as conviction, and an appeal to temporal rather than spiritual powers—or perhaps, in the case of the civil rights movement, both.
Because of the involvement of so many ministers, the practice of nonviolence, and the language of religious redemption and, occasionally, martyrdom, the civil rights movement was more saturated with the temperament and imagery of pilgrimage than most struggles. It was in large part about the rights of access of black people, and it was first fought on the contested sites: sitting down in and then boycotting buses, bringing children into schools, sitting in at lunch counters. But it found its momentum in events that united the protest or the strike with the pilgrimage: the march from Selma to Montgomery to petition for voting rights, the many marches in Birmingham and throughout the country, the culminating March on Washington. In fact, the first major event organized by the newly founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was the “prayer pilgrimage” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 1957, the third anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of desegregating schools. It was so called to make it sound less threatening; a pilgrimage makes an appeal while a march makes a demand. King was profoundly influenced by the writings and actions of Mahatma Gandhi, and he adapted from Gandhi both the general principle of nonviolence and the specifics of marches and boycotts that had hastened India’s liberation from British rule. Perhaps Gandhi was the founder of the political pilgrimage with his famous 200-mile-long Salt March in 1930, in which he and many people living inland walked to the sea to make their own salt in violation of British law and British taxes. Nonviolence means that activists are asking their oppressors for change rather than forcing it, and it can be an extraordinary tool for the less powerful to wring change out of the more powerful.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 8
