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Walking to the End of the World. Beth Jusino
Читать онлайн.Название Walking to the End of the World
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781680512045
Автор произведения Beth Jusino
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Saint Roch, I later learned, was a French nobleman who lived in the early fourteenth century. Both his parents died when he was twenty, and the pious Roch gave up his inheritance, sold all of his possessions, and set out on a pilgrimage to Rome. This being the Middle Ages, there were plagues and mysterious illnesses afflicting the Italian towns along the way. Roch stopped often and cared for the sick and dying, frequently healing them miraculously either by touch or the sign of the cross.
But hanging around contagious people has its price. Eventually Roch contracted the plague himself, and he went to the woods to die. He built a shelter of branches, and a spring rose miraculously from the ground to provide him with a steady supply of fresh water. Then a local nobleman’s hunting dog brought him bread and licked his plague wounds, which began to heal. Well, that explained the paintings and statues. He’s not flashing us; he’s showing off a plague wound.
Miraculously cured, Roch returned home to France. His uncle, failing to recognize him, arrested him and accused him of being a spy. Roch did not reveal his identity because he did not want to glorify himself. He died in prison five years later. I’m not sure what the takeaway of that last part is supposed to be, but I was becoming quite loyal to Saint Roch, the patron saint of dogs and knee problems.
After a long, quiet time in the church, I meandered to an outdoor cafe, where I sipped a Leffe beer and half-heartedly caught up on my journal while watching the people go by.
“C’est bon?” the Brothers Grim asked, when they paused by my table to say hello.
Oui. C’est bon indeed.
When dinnertime approached, I went back to the city wall and my home for the night. A small group of pilgrims gathered at a long wooden table to share a simple curry dinner with Sylvain and his wife, Sabine. The couple had met on the Camino ten years ago, Sylvain explained, and walked to Santiago together. He moved from Canada to France to marry Sabine, and now they ran this gîte for the city while saving money to open a pilgrim house of their own.
As the wine flowed, Sylvain described what he’d learned from his time as a pilgrim. “It is a monastic life,” he said. “You wake up, you walk. When you arrive, you take care of your feet, you take care of your basic needs, and you eat. Do it day after day, and it becomes a meditation.”
He’d hit on one of the things that had been scratching at my mind all week. We walk, we eat, we sleep. Is this it?
According to Sylvain, yes. And the way he said it, it was enough.
In spring, the mist on GR65 can be as thick as rain.
NOS AMIS
I tried to take Sylvain’s advice the next day, to find a peaceful rhythm of walking, but my body wasn’t ready to let my mind settle into monasticism.
We left Saint-Côme-d’Olt and navigated the outskirts of Espalion, where the ruins of a castle guarded a bustling town that blended modern (and open!) retail with turreted manor homes lining the river. We bought oranges and sipped midmorning espressos at an outdoor cafe, and I thought about how much I loved France.
Four hours later, as I approached Estaing, I thought about how much I hated France. I was limping, swearing, sweating, and generally making a scene along a sunbaked commercial road, braving blind curves and speeding trucks.
If you talk to two pilgrims who have walked any part of the Way of Saint James, you’ll get three different opinions about what the path is like.
“The Camino is all busy roads and hard pavement. There is no nature!”
“The Camino is all mountains and rocks and mud. There is no smooth path!”
“The Camino trails are so soft and easy that you could do it in slippers!”
Reality, as it usually does, lies somewhere between the extremes. The Camino that Eric and I walked in France and Spain was a mixture of paved roads—usually remote country lanes, where cars were infrequent—and natural paths of gravel or dirt, wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Of course there were exceptions: entering larger towns or cities meant pounding the pavement through busy and not-so-picturesque suburbs. There were some stretches in France where we walked on roads with narrow shoulders, dodging moderate traffic, for a few hundred meters at a time. There were plenty of sections in both countries that were steep, rocky, muddy, and slippery.
The only consistent thing I can say about Camino paths is that every day, and sometimes every hour, brought something different.
My traffic-clogged walk into Estaing was not the fault of the GR65 planners, though. The official path had veered off the road and uphill a kilometer behind me to follow a protected path through the woods. But I was tired and footsore, and I refused to follow the sadistic red and white stripes up another hill when, according to the map, following the road would be a more direct route to the city.
Eric, being sensible, took the marked path, so I was alone in my ill-considered shortcut. Once again, I obsessed on a single thought. My feet hurt.
By this point I’d seen pilgrims with terrible blisters. I’d seen people younger than me hobbling sideways down hills because of knee injuries. I’d heard about walkers who had to go home early. I had none of those problems.
But man, my feet really hurt. Was I just a wimp?
The internal doubt weighed me down as much as my pack, and the hot pavement pushed back against my swollen feet. When I came around a corner to find Eric—who had walked the hillier, longer, harder path—already waiting for me, I lost it.
The next ten minutes weren’t pretty, but eventually I followed him, grudgingly, into Estaing, past the beautifully restored riverfront and down crooked streets where gray stone buildings seemed to be held up by sagging doors and broken windows.
Eric stopped in front of one of the weathered doors and rang the bell. This was the donativo gîte run by the Catholic Order of Saint Jacques. A middle-aged woman wearing normal, middle-aged clothes welcomed us. Only later did I realize she was a nun.
I was still in a haze of pain as the sister checked us in and showed us the simple dorm where men and couples slept. Women traveling alone or with other women slept in a separate room for privacy.
As we settled in, the Brothers Grim arrived. Though we never talked to them about their travel plans—or anything, given the language barrier—we’d seen them every day and often stayed in the same gîtes. They always greeted us, and we made as much small talk as we could manage. (“C’est bon?” “Oui, c’est bon.”) Yet I still rarely saw them talk to each other.
I distracted myself by pondering their mystery as I limped through the daily chores. There was a lovely yard where I hung my laundry next to a chicken coop, and I sat there with my journal for an hour as the sun slowly revived me.
I eventually found Eric in the library, a creaky-floored room full of books in French about the lives of saints and missionaries. The place was cool and soothing, as was the cheerfulness of the two nuns who stopped in to check on us. They moved silently through the echoing residence, a relic of the time the diocese attracted more than two nuns and a single priest, and apologized for not speaking better English, as if we weren’t the interlopers in their world.
After our communal dinner, we all helped to clean up, and there was a bit of a production while the priest stamped our credentials and recorded our information. Then the pilgrims were invited to join