‘Pilgrim How You Journey’

An ill wind, not just metaphorically but literally, has been blowing these last few years – a wind that has disrupted travel, and turned the clinical acronym, COVID, into a household word. In addition, the minuscule particle of the world, that takes up most of Yours Truly’s attention, has been focussed on another C word.

Now that all that’s been sorted with a few rounds of chemo and antidotes and potions, for the convalescent, the doctor and the Romantic poet alike have prescribed daily walks and fresh air.

‘Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.’

So writes Walter Whitman, the great grand-daddy of American poetry.

However, as far as we know, Walt never did walk the thousand kilometres of GR 145, across the north-east border of France to the Great St Bernard’s pass in Switzerland. Nor did he have to deal with my meticulous Walking Buddy (WB aka ‘Co-Pilot’), who is prone to brandishing his 29 column spreadsheet detailing weights, dimensions, pros and cons of every piece of hiking equipment ever invented.

So, as I struggle to decide which backpack is best for this precise trip and which sleeping bag has the ideal weight to warmth ratio, (for the record, I have landed on Osprey Lumina pack and a Spark-I sleeping bag), most of that light-hearted free-footing open road still sounds like a distant fantasy.

But by all accounts a ‘long brown path’ does indeed loom ahead of us, which my mobile weather app says is likely to be woefully wet and monstrously muddy when we take off on foot from Canterbury on Easter Monday.

Given the coincidence of Christianity’s holy place and holy day at the start of our hike, you would think that we are on a pilgrimage. And given that there is not a single religious bone in my body, I too have been wondering about my fascination with the pilgrim walks of Europe.

Part of the answer lies in the relative ease of these walks. Unlike what the Americans call ‘through hikes’ in the vast wilderness of the American or Australian continents, Europe’s pilgrim walks have been curated over a thousand or more years for travellers, traders and armies and are being refurbished now for the walking-tourists. On the Via Francigena (see map above), as far as we can tell from books, maps and apps, you can more or less plan to reach some source of food and shelter at the end of each day’s walk.

Of course you need more than the convenience of lousy hotels and average food to keep you on track day after day! And, somehow, at least for me, the idea of a pilgrimage, that is, the certain knowledge that many, many people, over more than a thousand years of recorded history, have found joy and imagined salvation on these very roads, helps to keep a certain focus, to keep one going.

But this isn’t really a good time to get all spiritual when the prospect of hot-footing 1300 kms (give or take – wait for a later blog about the malleability of this road) seems a little daunting and even unreal while I weigh and spray my ultralight gear and deal with practicalities of contemporary travel: the COVID certs and credit cards and so on.

I know, too, from reading the works of those who have gone before me on this road, especially the classic 1903 travelogue by Hilaire Belloc , how easy it is to lose your way and break your vows on this particular pilgrimage. Belloc broke most of the promises he had made within the first week of his walk. Admittedly, he was carrying half a bottle of alcohol which I am not, and his sack would have weighed a ton compared to my feather weight uber-modern gear.

Belloc did however reach his end goal – he got to Rome, having walked 750 miles. Along the way, he kind of worked out the importance of letting go of the small promises in order to walk on.

So, perhaps we define the pilgrim by the how rather than the where and why of the walk. On foot and carrying all you need for the day; with a determination to reach a destination but knowing also that plans and promises are necessarily provisional.

‘Pilgrim, how you journey
On the road you chose
To find out why the winds die
And where the stories go’

For now this song by the Irish singer , Enya, resonates.

I hope some of you will come along for the read (not really a ride, is it?) while I try to walk and inscribe the Grande Randonnée (GR) 145, or Via Francigena, a long road by any name.