Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James Read Online Free PDF

gods of spring? Had the Druids made human sacrifices here? Had Narcissus been mesmerized and fallen into his own reflection here? Here, this very spot? What a luxury it was to speculate. If that’s what pilgrimages were about, then I was all for them.
    On the way out, we asked the custodian if he knew of a shortcut back to the pilgrims’ trail that would keep us off the asphalt and away from today’s Gallic road warriors. He pointed northwest toward a place called Valbeton, as if we were familiar with the place-name.
    A path ran uphill to a dirt road—another ancient road, he said. It was, the custodian added, the way Roland, Charlemagne, and Girart de Roussillon had traveled to Spain. Girart de Roussillon was the founder of Vézelay, he reminded us. “Of course you’ve read the Song of Roland and know that Roland was killed near Roncevaux abbey, where The Way of Saint James crosses the Pyrenees and turns into the Camino de Santiago?”
    “Of course,” said Alison.
    Well, I added, even though we were ignoramuses from the other side of the Atlantic, we were familiar with the personage of Roland and had even at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.read the poem. I couldn’t quote it to the over-educated ticket-taker, but I had read parts of the Song of Roland , an epic in late 11th-century French that sings the adventures of Charlemagne and his “right-hand man” Roland, Duke of the Marches of Brittany. It was the French equivalent of the Arthurian cycle, but older, bloodier, and less romantic. When I read it those many years ago, I’d skipped to the massacre scene near Roncevaux, where Roland blows his horn in extremis, in a Pyrenees pass. That’s where we would be crossing the mountains in a few months, if all went to plan.
    Yes, there was a plan. I checked my watch and compared it to the clock on my pedometer, realizing it was high time to hike south in haste. We had about ten miles to go before we’d reach our first overnight at a village called Domecy-sur-Cure, and it was already late morning. The lunch bell would soon be ringing in my belly, and if we didn’t pick up the pace, darkness would enfold us, possibly in the middle of a fearsome forest where lions, tigers, and bears awaited.
    GALLOPING SCALLOPS
    As we bounded toward Spain like bee-stung hares full of hope and expectation, a mere month’s walk from Cluny and our first major goal, I realized that for several years, Alison and I had been living in a kind of enclosed porch, like the one at the basilica of Mary Magdalene, a pre-pilgrimage Limbo built onto the façade of our lives. We were finally crossing into the nave, so to speak, and it felt good. It felt wonderful, liberating, exhilarating.
    We were not alone in our excitement. Climbing the grade on GR-13, the secular hiking trail we’d selected, we spied a pair of telescopic walking sticks flailing ahead of us and heard their click on the rocky road. As we neared, I sensed the heavy breathing of an unhappy camper. Uphill crept what looked like a giant snail but was in reality a human of surprising proportions. She was large, as pneumatic as a truck tire, and wore a bulky backpack. As we came abreast, I also noticed her jack-o’-lantern smile. Not much older than we, she’d somehow lost most of her teeth. Was she on a pilgrimage to beseech Saint James for dental assistance? Or was her journey about weight loss? She caught her breath long enough to wheeze bonjour . We encouraged her with hand signals and smiles, and climbed past, feeling like guilty hares leaving the tortoise behind.
    The mixed metaphors struck me as uncharitable, especially given our Saint Jamesian surroundings. I didn’t mean to make fun of a fellow pilgrim, though I’d rarely seen a human so like a snail and a Halloween pumpkin combined. Now that I thought of it, she looked an awful lot like a tortoise, too. My knees ached at the memory of carrying an extra fifty pounds around my waistline, the pounds I’d managed to lose