Читать книгу Walking to the End of the World - Beth Jusino - Страница 11

The train followed a valley as it climbed into the Massif Central, the rolling high country in the middle of southern France. We left modern suburbs and then sprawling farms behind as the land grew wooded and steep.

Just across a river, on top of a hill, was a crumbling stone castle. Most of our train car companions ignored it, but Eric and I couldn’t look away. You don’t see many castles in the States.

We stopped in a few shabby-looking towns, where most of the people not wearing backpacks got off. There were just half a dozen of us left to hear the garbled announcement that we were arriving in Le Puy-en-Velay.

This was it. From here, we would walk.

Eric and I gathered our packs, adjusted straps that still felt awkward, and stepped into the chilly April air two thousand feet—or six hundred meters, since I had to start thinking in metric—above sea level. We exited the station onto a modern-looking street and looked blankly around.

Based on everything I’d read about Le Puy, I’d been expecting towering cathedrals and cobblestone streets. Instead, I faced a parking lot and a featureless white apartment building. I hadn’t prepared for this.

Every year, a quarter of a million people follow some part of the Way of Saint James. They travel by foot, bicycle, or horseback toward the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, about sixteen hundred kilometers from where we currently stood. They come from around the world, and for a multitude of reasons. It’s not uncommon for complete strangers to ask, “Why are you walking the Way?”

I never had a good answer. I certainly wasn’t there for sport. In the spring of 2015, at thirty-eight years old, I didn’t look like someone who could—let alone would—walk a thousand miles. I wasn’t the “outdoors type.” I didn’t run marathons, climb mountains, or even exercise regularly. Sure, I walked almost everywhere in my urban neighborhood, but I’d never been backpacking. My idea of a hike was a three-mile stroll through well-tended, preferably flat, city parks.

Nor did I go to France looking for a miracle or pursuing an existential spiritual quest. Even the word “pilgrimage,” with its religious undertones, made me uncomfortable. I’d grown up in a traditional Baptist church and was educated from kindergarten through college in Christian schools, but my relationship with the church had changed over time. Over the past decade we’d amicably gone our separate ways, and I wasn’t interested in revisiting the relationship.

And no, I wasn’t seeking the answer to some important question, grieving a loss, or looking for a radical change to my everyday life. Eric and I both did meaningful work that fit our personalities and passions. We had good friends, a healthy extended family, and hobbies galore. We were childless by choice, so there was no drama there. We lived in a city I loved, in a corner of the world I thought was just about perfect. But yet here I was, in a remote corner of France few Americans had ever heard of, with a plan to walk all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Why was I here?

Well, because twenty years of postmodern adulting had burned me to a crisp. My life, like that of most of those in my generation, was controlled by the relentless demands of screens. I ran a publishing consulting business and spent my days, and too many nights, hunched over a laptop. Though I controlled my schedule, I had trouble believing that I could take a day off and still pay the rent. I had four separate email inboxes, all of them filled with demands on my attention. My electronic calendar was a rainbow of appointments, commitments, deadlines, and tasks—all overlapping. My social media habits had accelerated with the rest of my life’s demands. I constantly checked my smartphone. Some days I couldn’t get from my apartment to my car without opening Facebook. What if I missed something?

What I was missing was a life that felt real. I was here because the Camino, with its thousand years of history, felt real.

I first heard the phrase Camino de Santiago in 2010 from a fellow writer who blogged about her one-week trek along a medieval trail. She described endless rain and mud, steep climbs, physical pain, and blisters. Nothing she said should have appealed to me, sheltered and sedentary in my comfortable urban cocoon, with a cat purring on my lap. And yet, something drew me to look into it further.

I knew the wilderness called to Eric. When he was a teenager, his church youth group took him on backpacking and canoe trips through a Canadian national park. He loved it so much he went back as a college student and became a trip leader. For as long as I’d known him, he’d talked about walking the Appalachian Trail someday. For just as long, I’d told him he’d have to go alone. I don’t sleep in tents, and I don’t eat freeze-dried food for weeks on end.

But the way my writer friend described this Camino thing seemed different. A long trail that didn’t follow a steep mountain range, but instead wound through pastoral towns and countryside? A well-marked path dotted with hostels offering affordable beds and showers and wine every evening? A historic journey that didn’t require smartphones, or email, or the latest app? The Camino called to me.

I did what any self-respecting book lover would do. I went to the library and checked out everything with the words “Camino de Santiago.” The first book I read set the course for everything that followed.

Conrad Rudolph’s Pilgrimage to the End of the World is a slim memoir with grainy photographs and an emphasis on art and history. To be honest, it’s not the most informative book available, but it cemented in my mind that Le Puy-en-Velay, France, was where a person went to begin their walk to Santiago de Compostela.

It would be months more before I understood that Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, eight hundred kilometers closer to the holy city, was the more common starting point for modern journeyers to Santiago. Of the fifteen thousand Americans who arrived at the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago in 2015, fewer than two percent started in Le Puy-en-Velay. But for me, “the Camino” was already established as a three-month, two-country, thousand-mile journey that went not just to Santiago, but all the way to the Atlantic Ocean at Finisterre.

Instinctively, I knew that a thirty-day trip wasn’t enough for the extended, intense sabbatical I desperately needed.

The next question was how I could convince my husband to fly off to Europe for a quarter of a year. It’s not that he’s put off by new places. Between us, Eric and I have sold our belongings, packed our cars, and moved across the country half a dozen times, often without jobs or housing lined up. We’ve lived in every time zone in the continental United States, but international travel had never been part of our shared experience or vocabulary. Neither of us grew up in families that traveled far, and we’d both been too responsible (or cash-strapped) for gap-year adventures before or after college.

Once we were tied to traditional jobs and the ubiquitous two-week American vacation, Eric repeatedly claimed he had no interest in long plane rides followed by running from tourist site to tourist site. On top of that, the Camino de Santiago has Christian roots, and Eric’s divorce from his fundamentalist church upbringing had left some strong feelings about religion. I wasn’t sure how he would react to spending three months under the sign of the cross.

Still, the first time I floated the idea of a long walk along a historically Catholic path in Europe, he was on board. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who needed a radical change in daily life.

After that, though, the conversation stalled. It was easy to say we wanted to do this, but the logistics were daunting. How could we take three months off in our “prime career” years? We both had jobs that we didn’t want to quit. And bills. And family obligations. And an aging, high-maintenance cat.

And yet. We had a bit of money tucked away, the last remnant of a pre–Great Recession nest egg. We were responsibly saving it for that oft-predicted rainy day. Jetting off to Europe wasn’t responsible.

And yet. Our daily lives continued to feel stifling and unexplored. Years passed. The Camino kept coming up. I kept bringing it up. I watched Martin Sheen in The Way. I read more Camino books. My computer screens kept filling faster than I could empty them. Projects and people flickered across my overcommitted life like social media streams, taking time but barely leaving ripples in my memory.

It wasn’t until I started dreaming about running away from everything that I finally jumped. Late one September night, after a rough week and without much discussion, I bought two nonrefundable plane tickets for a date seven months in the future.

We were going to do this.

Offering plenty of notice and cashing in all of the goodwill he’d stocked up over years of hard work, Eric arranged for a leave of absence from his job. I stopped taking new projects and rearranged deadlines with my regular clients. My sister, fresh out of college and underemployed, agreed to move to Seattle and house-sit/cater to the difficult cat.

That’s when the panic kicked in. What was I doing? I didn’t know anything about backpacking. I’d never slept in a hostel. I didn’t even own a sleeping bag!

I threw myself into overpreparation to make up for what I didn’t know. I obsessed over my packing list, haunting Camino Facebook groups and sporting goods stores. I spent a fortune on just the right hiking shirt (and then, at the last minute, tossed in a “backup” shirt I’d owned for years, which I ended up wearing every day). I collected every suggested thing we might need, including bags of safety pins (good idea), wet wipes (bad idea), and four hundred adhesive bandages (we used three).

As the fall turned to winter and the winter to spring, I worked seven days a week to meet my obligations, arrange our absence, and make sure there were no surprises. Eric gamely ignored me. We both accept that I’m the planner in our partnership and he’s the improviser. A week before we left, he made one trip to REI, came home with two merino wool T-shirts and a raincoat, and declared himself ready to go. I couldn’t decide whether to be mad or jealous.

I filled the smallest cracks of time with last-minute tasks. When I had trouble sleeping because of the stress, I reminded myself that as soon as we got to Le Puy, everything would be okay. I would turn off my phone and bury it in my backpack, to be used only in dire emergencies. I would pay attention only to the trail in front of me. Surely, then, all of my anxiety would go away. I would let go, and as I’d heard time after time, the Camino would provide.

But clearly, this Le Puy train station was too early to let go. Where were the cobblestone streets? Where was the cathedral? Where were our beds?

I had the name of a pilgrim’s hostel, a gîte de pèlerin, recommended by someone on some website, but without Google Maps, I had no idea how to find it. And I wasn’t going to break my own “no phone” rule in the first five minutes. Surely we could figure this out.

I didn’t see any scallop shells, the traditional symbol of the Camino, or the red-and-white–striped markers of the Chemin du Puy, the French part of the Way of Saint James as it wound from Le Puy to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. And of course, I had no idea how to ask anyone.

As I stood there, not quite panicking, Eric pointed out Jean Claude’s tall form striding away. He’d saved us once already, and he looked like he knew where he was going. Trying not to be obvious, we trailed him across a busy street and then up a hill. The buildings grew older, the streets grew narrower, and finally the pavement under our feet turned to cobblestone. This felt like the right direction.

At one point our guide looked back and waved, then pointed ahead and said something in French. So much for not being obvious. He led us up more steep streets until I was sweating and breathless. If I found walking in a hilly town this hard, what would happen when I got to the Pyrenees?

I distracted myself by looking around. This part of Le Puy-en-Velay felt like a movie set. Crooked houses made of black volcanic rock leaned over streets barely wide enough for the occasional car to pass. Old women in long dresses sat in doorways and watched us. I wanted to stop and soak it in but couldn’t risk losing Jean Claude.

Finally, our guide turned again and waited for us to catch up. He asked, in broken Spanish, where we were going. I pointed to the name on our paper, not brave enough to try the words out loud: Gîte de pèlerin de Les Amis de Saint Jacques, 28 rue Cardinal de Polignac.

The Frenchman nodded and pointed down an angled street, then strode off in a different direction. Left on our own, Eric and I wandered up and down the narrow street three times before we noticed the engraved number 28 on a thick wooden door that led to a courtyard. Two plastic patio chairs sat incongruously against the stone walls, and a small sign on the door announced, as far as we could tell, that the gîte opened at 3:00. It was only 2:30, but we weren’t sure we could find our way back if we ventured too far. We settled in to wait, feeling awkward and excited and mesmerized.

Precisely at 3:00, an older man ambled into the courtyard and unlocked the door, cheerily waving us inside. His name was Isidore, and we discovered he spoke only about ten words of English. When he realized that we spoke even less French, his smile faltered, but only for a second. It was becoming clear that our lack of basic skills in the local language was going to be a problem, yet our French host welcomed us to his country anyway. Anyone who believes the stereotype that the French are all aloof and judgmental has never met Isidore.

The gîte was run by the Amis de Saint Jacques, the Friends of Saint James, an organization of volunteers like Isidore that ran several gîtes de pèlerins, including the one where we now sat, for pilgrims walking the Way of Saint James in France. They provided beds, showers, breakfasts, and guidance for free, although guests were invited to give donations of whatever they could afford.

Isidore was joined by a second volunteer, a woman who spoke even less English than him, and together they plowed ahead to settle the unprepared American enfants. The woman, whose name I never caught, told us in simple words and pantomime that we were the first Americans to stay in their gîte this year. That made me a little nervous until I remembered they’d just opened for the season a few days before. Many French facilities along the Camino close from October to Easter, since winter storms in the high country can be dangerous for hikers.

Still, it was a taste of the reaction we would get almost daily for the entire time we were in France. You are American? Here? I did not think Americans knew about the Chemin! But here we were.

Isidore gave us a sheet printed in English with the house rules. We were to leave our backpacks in lockers in a separate room, far from our beds, out of concern for bedbugs. There was a welcome session for all new pilgrims that afternoon at 5:30. We were to be back inside the gîte before they locked the doors at 10:00. Breakfast would be at 6:00 the next morning, and there was a pilgrim mass in the cathedral at 7:00.

6:00 a.m.? I knew, in theory, that pilgrims started early, but my night-owl self still shuddered.

Isidore pulled out his ink pad and carefully placed the first stamp in our credentials, basically our pilgrimage passports. The Camino credential is a multipaneled cardboard sheet that’s stamped each day by a hostel or pilgrim office in order to prove that a person is a pilgrim moving forward. The donativo gîtes like this one and municipally run hostels only accept guests with credentials, to prevent tourists from taking advantage of the free or well-below-market rates. Many churches and even restaurants add their own stamps, and as weeks pass, a Camino credential becomes a memento and visual story of a person’s unique trip. Most pilgrims consider their tattered, colorful credentials the most important souvenirs of their experience, and so it was a big deal when Isidore signed his own name to verify our acceptance to the Way of Saint James.

Most gîtes let pilgrims stay for only one night. However, Isidore explained/pantomimed that since we had traveled so far and were still probably jet-lagged, Eric and I could spend two nights here with them.

I met Eric’s eye and tried to read his mind. We weren’t in a hurry. Our return flight to Seattle was three months away, which gave us more than enough time to reach the Atlantic. But we’d been anticipating this for, literally, years. And now we were here.

Eric shook his head, just a tiny bit, at the same time I did. After almost fourteen years of marriage, we did stuff like that. “Non, merci,” he told our hosts. We would begin our Camino the next morning.

Isidore nodded, his expression unreadable. His partner led us up three flights of stairs, where she assigned us each to a small cubicle in the dortoir, the dormitory. The Friends of Saint Jacques eased us into communal living by giving each person a partially walled area with a cot, a chair, a lamp, and a wooden cupboard. The entrances were even covered with curtains.

Eric and I unpacked and spent the next two hours wandering through Le Puy, taking in its steep angles and red roofs and black rock. Our meandering path brought us eventually to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy.

The church was unlocked, dark, and mostly empty in the quiet of midafternoon. We tiptoed through the echoing stone sanctuary and studied the elaborate altar, where the small face of the cathedral’s Black Virgin looked out from above a stiff, conical robe of gold brocade. There were ebony statues like this of Mary and the Christ Child scattered across central Europe. Most dated to medieval times—the Black Virgin in Le Puy is a replica of one given to the church by Louis IX as he returned from a Crusade in 1254—but the symbolism behind their appearance has been lost to history.

We stopped in the cathedral gift shop to get our second credential stamps, and Eric picked out a French-language guidebook with detailed information about gîtes and other services along GR65, the French Grande Randonnée hiking route for the Way of Saint James between Le Puy and Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. That book, Miam Miam Dodo (which translates to something like baby talk for “yum-yum sleep-sleep”), became our primary reference all the way to the Spanish border, despite its silly name.

From the cathedral, we climbed toward the most visually familiar icon of Le Puy, the chapel of Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe. The tenth-century structure rises improbably out of an almost vertical needle of volcanic rock three hundred feet—I mean, eighty meters—high. At the base of the 268-step climb, a ticket collector warned us that the site would close in fifteen minutes. We could probably make the climb to the top, he said, but we wouldn’t be able to linger. And yes, we’d have to pay full price for the tickets.

Eric and I thanked him, but decided to pass, a decision I’ve regretted ever since. Instead, figuring we needed all the help we could get on this adventure, we wound back to the pilgrim welcome center, just across the street from the cathedral, in time for the daily information session.

We found about a dozen people already there, sitting in an awkward circle in front of a fireplace. The volunteer hosts, who of course spoke only French, asked a question that set off a round of what seemed to be introductions.

When I told the group that my name was Beth, I saw a lot of furrowed brows. “Bett?” The host’s mouth twisted, as if he couldn’t quite get the syllable out. I remembered that Isidore, too, had trouble with my name.

“Elizabeth?” I offered.

Everyone relaxed and smiled. “Ah! Elisabet!” And just like that, I changed my name. For the next thirty-five days I was Elizabeth, a name no one but my immediate family had ever used before.

Introductions over, Eric and I smiled blankly and watched the room while others chatted. My first impression was that everyone was older than us by at least a decade. About half the group seemed to be traveling together, and one of their members, a friendly woman named Michelle, spoke enough English to introduce herself.

She asked where we were staying the next night and seemed surprised that we didn’t have reservations. I was surprised that she did. The Camino literature I’d read never mentioned reservations. A person could just walk into town and trust that there would be a place to stay. Traveling with a large group must be different, I thought.

The conversation lulled, and I was starting to get antsy when a new person came in. The volunteers greeted him, and after a few seconds I saw them light up. “Canada!” I heard, and then they pointed to us: “American!” We were from the same hemisphere, so therefore they assumed we would have things to talk about.

The Canadian, who looked about our age, made his way over warily. “Hello, I am Remi.” His words were hesitant, his accent strong. Remi was from a small town in Quebec, and French was his native tongue. He rarely spoke English.

Rarely was better than never, though, and we pieced together our stories. This was the first time Remi had ever left Quebec. A devout Catholic, he always dreamed of walking the pilgrimage of Saint Jacques. He’d been planning to come in five years, when his children were older and his job was more stable. He patted his belly. “And when I have time to lose this.”

But then, the week before, something happened. Remi didn’t go into detail, but the upshot was that he suddenly had a month off work. His wife told him it was a sign from God to begin his pilgrimage. So he bought a plane ticket and a bunch of trekking gear, and he flew to Paris.

I’d been planning this trip for years, I realized, and this man didn’t know he was coming until eight days ago.

We asked if he was going to the pilgrims’ mass the next morning. Remi sighed and touched his cheek. He’d cracked a tooth and had to get it fixed before he could begin walking. There were no dentists open this late in the afternoon, so he would deal with it tomorrow and start on Thursday. As we said our goodbyes, I hoped he would be a fast walker and catch up with us, but he never did.

Back on the street, Eric and I set out to find dinner. It was too early for most restaurants to be open, but we found a cheerful cafe that seemed to cater to Camino walkers. Michelle’s group was already settling into a big table up front, and I also recognized the two thin, serious-looking men at the other occupied table. They’d been on our train from Lyon, and I’d spent a fair amount of time covertly studying them.

They were enigmatic. They wore jeans rather than hiking pants but carried top-of-the-line backpacks and walking sticks. Obviously traveling together, from what I observed they barely spoke or even made eye contact with each other.

“They’re brothers,” I told Eric.

“They look nothing alike,” he disagreed. Eric is generally more observant about physical traits than I am. He can recognize a family resemblance in the turn of a nose, and he often describes someone by the shape of their feet or the way they walk. So if he said the two men didn’t look alike, he was probably right. But I’m good at watching how people interact with each other, and these two men didn’t act like friends. Yet they were traveling together, so I assumed they must be related.

We continued the debate as we ate a simple dinner of lentils and sausage, the specialty of the region, filled out with fresh bread and a bottle of thick, dry local wine. When we left the restaurant, the streets were dark and quiet. We were back in the gîte well before curfew, and I fell onto my single cot in the darkness. When was the last time I’d gone to bed before 10:00?

I was asleep before I answered the question.