Off the Road (6 page)

At Saint Michel, near a
bridge, I see a small paved road that lurches straight up and out of the
village. How did I miss it? And there is a yellow arrow painted on a post—the
flecha
amarilla.
The yellow arrows are said to be painted especially for pilgrims
at every small intersection between here and Santiago. Seeing my first arrow
summons a child’s pleasure of joining some secret guild. People in cars
wouldn’t even notice these crude glyphs of yellow paint—three quick splashes on
a fence post or tree or the back of a road sign. They awaken a warm intimacy
with the hundreds of millions of pilgrims who have walked this road in the last
millennium or so. Surely these yellow arrows would come to mean something
powerful to a pilgrim. I jot down in my notebook, “Yellow arrows and metaphor?”
and walk on.

When the arrows cease to
appear, even momentarily, a dismay settles in. And the longer they refuse to
appear, the more impending feels the doom. Not far up this hill, fear and
ignorance compel me into the driveway of a rural cheese farm. The drizzle has
temporarily stopped. My leaping pup is with me. A cheese-maker and his daughter
approach, both of whom have happily squished their way out front in their
yogurt-stomping boots. From behind their legs, a dog the size of a grizzly bear
gallops out. His eyes are blazing straight for my puppy. The farmer yells out
in French, something along the lines of “actually very friendly, loves
children.”

I drop my pack and begin the
stutter step of a guard blocking for his quarterback. The bear blows me aside
like a bug and dives into the yin-yang tumble of a dogfight. The cheesemaker’s
dog sinks his teeth into the hip of my pup. And again—crunch —into her neck.
From the blur of confusion, I can see my little dog, her eyes wide with fear
and, so it seems to me, betrayal. Seconds later the victor saunters off, wagging
his butt with a bully’s confidence. In the distance the cheesemaker waves and
says something to the effect of “wouldn’t hurt a flea, bark worse than his
bite.” My pup bolts into nearby woods. I call after her. My whistles are
carried off by a slight, humid breeze.

I envision a shady oak
beneath which the little pup finally drops, licking her wounds, cursing her
stupidity for leaving her territory, until death overtakes her. But just who is
outside his territory if not me? Only a few hours into the pilgrimage, here is
another fabulous incident brimming with significance. I reach for my notebook.

This is the problem with the
road. Despite its literalness, the idea of the pilgrim’s journey is a metaphor
bonanza. Everything that happens on the road seems to translate itself
instantaneously from what it
is
to what it
means.
I get lost!
Yellow arrows! Fleeing dogs! Metaphor? Friend, I’m slogging through it. The
road itself
is
the West’s most worn-out palimpsest and among our oldest
tropes. The obvious metaphors click by. The high road and the low, the long and
winding, lonesome, royal, open, private, the road to hell, tobacco, crooked,
straight and narrow. There is the road stretching into infinity, bordered by
lacy mists, favored by sentimental poets. There is the more dignified road of
Mr. Frost. There is, every four years, the road to the White House. There is
the right road. And then there is the road that concerns me most today, the
wrong road.

This wealth of cliché was
one of my motivations as well. The world I left behind is obsessed with new
metaphors, new ideas, new vocabularies. I took up the pilgrimage because of its
contrarian possibilities. I wanted to traipse through one of the oldest junk
yards of Western metaphor.

Then again, maybe I should
calm down. Instead of trying to tickle meanings out of every curve (it’s only
noon of my first [true] day), maybe I should adopt a more conservative
attitude. Maybe a dogfight near a cheese farm should remain a dogfight near a
cheese farm. So I close my notebook and head up the hill in the direction the
cheesemaker sends me.

Almost two hours after I
leave the cheesemaker, it’s the middle of the afternoon. The yellow arrows have
completely disappeared, and I am plunged into despair. According to the sketchy
map drawn by the cheesemaker on the back of a crumpled envelope, I should
continue on this narrow paved road until I hit Spain. Around a curve the towers
of a town rise into view. My guidebook says this town could be a Basque village
called Untto, cut into the side of the mountain, or possibly Erreculuch.
Whichever, the place is certainly flourishing, having overgrown its mountain
slope and surrounded a river. I spot an old farmer hoeing a few rows of corn in
his side yard.

“Greetings, sir,” I say
expansively. “I am a pilgrim to Santiago. Can you tell me the name of this
town?”

“That one?” he says,
pointing.

“Well, yes,” I say, looking
around at the otherwise undisturbed forests surrounding us.

“That’s Saint-Jean Pied de
Port, a famous town on the road to Santiago.”

What can I say? Suddenly I
can make out the crenellated walls of the old fortress. There is Madame
Debril’s street. From this slope, I can see that I am about twenty minutes from
the burnt wood sign at the edge of town. My eyes water, and the farmer seems
amused at the funny dance and high-pitched noises made by his visiting pilgrim.

An hour or so later I have
reclimbed the mountain to a simple intersection where the cheesemaker’s map had
indicated a right turn. Of course, there is a yellow arrow on a rock, pointing
to the left, as obvious as the one at Saint Michel. How could I have missed it?
I take some comfort in knowing that the turkey on his post in the valley is no
witness to my afternoon’s effort.

From the top of the peak,
the work of my first morning comes into focus. I have traced a rambling circle
from Saint-Jean Pied de Port to the Basque farmhouse, back up and over a
mountain, and again to Saint-Jean—a bowed triangle of walking. I am tempted to
bring out my notebook and jot down a sublime note or two. If I am in search of
Big Meaningful metaphors, here’s a beauty. I am going in circles. But it is
late afternoon and I have the Pyrenees ahead of me and, after that, the entire
breadth of Spain. My first day out I have circumscribed a huge loop. This is
often the gist of the last chapter of travel books—ending where one starts. Now
that I have that out of the way, I am ready to begin.

All maps distort the land
they describe. Most of us learn this in grade school when the teacher explains
that Greenland is really shaped not like a fat arrowhead, but more like a
pointed lozenge. For a pilgrim, a map is a constant disappointment. Over and
over again, I learn that maps were invented for people in vehicles. Regardless
of the era—ancient ships, modern cars—maps are for those who can engulf vast
distances. A wrong turn in a car just means spinning around and heading back.
It’s just a few minutes. The same mistake on foot can cost you an afternoon or
a meal.

Villages that should be far
away suddenly appear. And landmarks allegedly close at hand show up late,
unexpectedly, or not at all. A map is a reduction in scale, and a pilgrimage is
about just the opposite, a sort of airing things out to an original measure. A
map takes the rambunctious chaos of man’s roads and nature’s formations and
then straightens it all into an efficient line that fits on a page. I bought
mine near Madame Debril’s house, and it is more about convenience than
accuracy. My pilgrimage has been crammed onto pages measuring four by sixteen inches,
made to fit my back pocket. On each tall page, a red line worms up from the
bottom—wriggling a bit to retain the look of “roadness”—past ruined castles,
small villages, and peculiar outcroppings. Each page takes about a day to walk.
So I’ll be arriving in Santiago, including the preface, by page seventy-three.

Much to my relief, the
yellow arrows are now appearing with warm regularity. It is this other map
splashed in secret places at every intersection on which I will primarily
depend. I pull the book out for color commentary on the pilgrimage. The pages
tell me, for example, that just now I will ascend a peak known to the Basques
as Itchasheguy, then one called Hostateguy, and then Urdenarri. But I am guided
by the arrows, and I’ve gotten better at spotting them. If the road turns near
a pole or diverges by a misshapen boulder or splits at a fence, I anticipate
the comforting confirmation of the arrow. I am beginning to think like an arrow
painter and have a sense of where to look before I get there.

Compared with earlier
pilgrims, I have it easy. In the late Middle Ages, there were no maps. Each
intersection was marked by a small pyramid of stones called a
montjoie.
A 1425 English itinerary noted: “Here beginneth the way that is marked and made
with Mont Joiez from the land of Engelond unto Sent Jamez.” Half a century
later, a French pilgrim walked this part of the road and explained in his diary
a difficulty I can only imagine: “We used to stab our staffs repeatedly in the
snow in order to see if there were any montjoies; when we didn’t find any, we
recommended ourselves to God and we continued walking; when we heard that our
stick had hit, we were more at ease because we had found a montjoie.”

Deep into the Pyrenees, the
road narrows into a rugged single lane of worn macadam, no more than six feet
across, just enough to fit the buzzing Citroens of the Basque shepherds who
speed by en route to a flock. At this height and distance in the mountains, I
am far from any village, far from a simple house. At Untto (six houses and a
water spigot), the map says, “You will not find another inhabited dwelling
until Spain.”

To my right, there is
nothing but meadows slanting upward. To the left is a fatal drop so acute the
trees grow nearly parallel to the ground in their stretch toward the sun. From
time to time I tiptoe through a herd of cows plopped on the road who follow me
with blank sad stares, or I approach a flock of sheep who scatter amid a
cacophony of ludicrous bleats. At last I am on the very path cut through the
mountains by proto-Spaniards, the Celtiberians. Later the Romans improved it to
accommodate their strip-mining of precious metals in Spain. This is the same
road taken by Charlemagne to avenge the murder of his nephew Roland, a homicide
that inspired the French national epic. And this is the road that millions of
pilgrims have followed into Spain.

But is it really? I wonder
if I am on the
true
road. Did the Celtiberians, the Romans, Charlemagne,
and the pilgrims really walk on this very dirt, through these same meadows, or
have I been hoodwinked by my long thin guidebook, local folk brimming with
color, and their confederate, history?

Only yesterday it wouldn’t
have mattered. I didn’t expect to ask these questions. Is this the
true
road? But my conversation with Madame Debril has preyed on my mind. I have
spent the day reliving every line, every assertion, every blank silence, and
every awkward pause. This tape loop plays over and over. By late afternoon I
have reentered Madame Debril’s door a thousand times. In one fantasy, I argue
with the brevity and wit of Socrates. In another, I swagger through her foyer
in full pilgrim drag, cape and floppy hat, mugging like José Ferrer. In yet
another, I stumble to the door, covered in sweat, my visage the very stamp of
pilgrim suffering.

My encounter with Madame
Debril has left me rethinking the beginning of this pilgrimage. And let me say
that if I had to do it all over again, I’d do everything differently. I’d
contact the proper authorities. I’d find a monastery deep inside France and perhaps contact a group. I’d look into broad-brimmed hat sales. My entire effort
feels corrupt, maybe ruined. All those oh-so-arch schemes, ranging from the
Cloisters to the taxi, don’t really sit well with purists like Madame Debril.
Or me.

By late afternoon I am
heaving up the Pyrenees, sweating in a poncho. The thunderheads still squirt
fine rain, blasted into nettlesome pellets by a mountain gust. I haven’t eaten
all day because I never did find a store that was open. I fear to touch the few
provisions in my bag. A strange lightness cushions my brain. I occasionally
burst into laughter for no reason. The steep defile always on my left
advertises a warm lush valley far, far below. How quickly I could get there if
I wanted.

I mull over the origin of
the word I have adopted. “Pilgrim” comes from the Latin phrase
per agrum,
or “through the fields.”
Peregrinus
was used by Romans in more or less
the sense we use “alien” or “stranger.” To be a
peregrinus
was to be the
fool who left the security of the village and wandered off, literally through
the fields, into the wilderness.

Yet even here, on the windy
edge of the Pyrenees, the road doesn’t seem to lead me away from civilization.
My medieval predecessors were in a much more frightening wilderness. They
walked a road literally built for walking. They were days away from the next
town, the next meal, first aid, the warmth of a fire.

Today’s road is different.
This thin macadam strip doesn’t lead me into the wilderness. Every half hour or
so, a Basque shepherd or a truck or a tourist passes by, reminding me that
modern roads
are
civilization. They are corridors of culture connecting
one town to another. I am always a short jaunt from help, and I am always
connected to the world I left. This morning’s breakfast in Saint-Jean was
bought with my American Express credit card.