“Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one’s body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
“If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.”
— Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
“Would you like a drink to take to your room?”
I have just hiked 21 sun-stroked miles along the cliffs, coves and hedgerow-lined lanes of north Wales, from the small village of Abersoch to the smaller village of Aberdaron, and even though the pub and dining room at the Ship Hotel are overflowing with boisterous fishermen, farmers and English families on holiday, proprietor Alun Harrison can read the look in my eyes. He pulls a pint of ale, cask conditioned at a brewery less than an hour away, and leads me through the Saturday supper-hour hubbub to a room upstairs, where my luggage is waiting. The carpet is slightly shabby and the floor a little slanted, but my window swings open to the crash of waves and the brine of ocean. It’s my first day of walking on an ancient pilgrimage route, a land’s end where old customs and modern indulgences share the trail. I take a sip and step into the shower. A guy could get used to traditions like this.
I am on the Llŷn Peninsula, the 30-mile-long “arm” of Wales, which reaches west into the Irish Sea just south of the Isle of Anglesey. A travel magazine has asked me to sample a short section of the Wales Coast Path, and to pace out the peninsula’s walksheds, the distance one can cover on foot in a day. But in my mind, it’s a more lofty mission: a stab at existential clarity in a place where walking is woven into the DNA. A place veined with well-worn paths, heavenly vistas and welcoming villages. A place where the biggest impediment to epiphany might be the local vernacular, which is confounding enough to dislocate your jaw.
The Welsh refer to themselves as Cymry. On the Llŷn — properly pronounced by pushing your tongue against your upper front teeth and making a lispy clhh sound (Clhh-lynn) — most Cymry speak Cymraeg. Children learn their mother tongue before English at home and school, and the signage is bilingual, which adds to the feeling that you are somewhere truly foreign. Although London is only five hours away, the pace here is much slower and more intimate — a shift akin to the contrast between Ottawa and Atikamekw territory. And in both of these geographically close but culturally distant lands, everybody is croeso (welcome) to experience the hud, hanes a harddwch (enchantment, history and beauty). This is best done on the Llŷn by cerdded (walking). Cymraeg and cerdded have endured because of the peninsula’s isolation, which has also kept small-scale farming and fishing, and an anachronistic zeal for poetry, very much alive.
My feet are in the hands of outfitter Peter Hewlett, who owns a tour company called of Edge of Wales Walk. He is ferrying my gear from stop to stop. All I have to do is amble along with a light daypack. At least until it’s time for the choppy sea crossing.
Pilgrims have been travelling to tiny Bardsey Island, two miles off the tip of the Llŷn, since the early days of Christianity, seeking redemption for their sins. Ynys Enlli is said to be the burial site of 20,000 saints. Three visits equalled one journey to Rome. Today, the ruins of Bardsey’s 13th-century Augustinian abbey stand on the site of a 6th-century Celtic monastery. When King Henry VIII cracked down on convents, friaries and other ecclesiastic outposts in the mid-1500s, busting them up and taking their money, the island became a base for pirates and smugglers. Three hundred years later, a small farming and fishing community found purchase.
Sheep and cattle are still raised in the stone-walled pastures of Bardsey, and there are lobster, mackerel and other tasty animals in the surrounding waters. Only a handful of people hunker down in the island’s slate-roofed cottages year-round. But the pilgrims, they keep on coming. Over dinner at the Ship, an inn since the 1600s, where I eat crab caught by the owner’s brother, Hewlett tells me that some still walk the length of the Llŷn and make the passage to Bardsey for religious reasons. Most of his clients, however, are like me: seeking ecstasy and eternity in a good, long hike.
My route today began beside the harbour in the resort village of Abersoch. The trail climbed through flowering purple heather and yellow gorse to a single track that clings to the edge of the Cilan headland. Every field was fenced, but Wales Coast Path insignias bade me through gates and over stiles, and onto private land. Sheep grazed lazily, kestrels hovered in the offshore breeze and sailboats bobbed in the blue down below. Stopping to rest in a field of rye, watching the golden blades ripple in the wind, I felt it, already — that swelling of body, mind and spirit. Also, stirring in my muscles, rolling through my stomach, tingling my temples and throat, there was something else … something more visceral. Thirst.
At home, I usually walk with enough water to douse a campfire, and food to last a fortnight. Maybe the luxury of the luggage shuttle made me lightheaded, but I had brought less than a litre to drink, and a couple packets of cookies pinched from hotel rooms. After five hours under the hot sun, I rebooted with a swim at sprawling Hell’s Mouth beach, and filled my bottle in the washroom of an Elizabethan estate now run as a museum, nabbing an apple from a tree in the garden before leaving. Descending into the postcard visage of Aberdaron, a cluster of whitewashed buildings above a sandy beach, green hills stretching to the horizon, the forbidden-fruit symbolism made me smile.
The next morning, encouraged by Hewlett, hungover, I go to church.
St. Hywyn’s, a double-naved stone-and-timber structure originally built nearly 1,000 years ago on the bones of a Celtic oratory, is across the street from the Ship, just above the pounding surf. “It’s nice,” says Rev. Susan Blagden, looking out over the congregation, augmented this Sunday by vacationers, “that we’re able to welcome occasional churchgoers.” I sit in the rear pews, shielded by a young couple with a baby, and scan a history pamphlet as Blagden leads the prayers. St. Hywyn’s has served as a sanctuary for centuries. Like the Hebrew cities of refuge, it offered fugitives an opportunity to sit tight and reach an understanding with their adversaries. This came in handy if your adversary was a malicious tribal chieftain. It also helps rebuff more insidious threats.
Blagden has just returned to the Llŷn from attending a retreat, and her sermon today is about the need to declutter our busy lives. “What power does your smartphone have?” she asks. “Only the power that you give it.” My ears perk up; I put down the pamphlet. “In today’s Western culture, we find it very difficult to know what’s enough.” Of course, it’s not always possible to go away on retreat, she adds, advising parishioners to take time each day to be still in their heads and hearts.
“Amen,” I whisper, offering the affirmation without irony for the first time in my life.
One of Blagden’s predecessors at St. Hywyn’s, Vicar R.S. Thomas, the second most famous poet with this surname in Wales, was a notoriously Spartan man. He believed that local peasants were simple folk, and thus the closest people on earth to god. His canon was no Child’s Christmas in Wales. “The rain and wind are hard masters,” R.S. wrote in one of his poems, “Too Late.” “I have known you to wince under their lash.”
I sneak away from church when the mother slips outside with her crying baby. Within seconds, it starts to rain.
Today’s hike takes me around Llŷn’s end and back to Aberdaron, and I don’t mind getting wet, knowing there’s another ale-and-shower combo at the end of the trail. My first stop is St. Mary’s Well, a sacred spring that pilgrims have been drinking out of for hundreds of years, their last blessing before the perilous rowboat trip to Bardsey. I shuffle down a slippery, natural-stone staircase deep into a jagged cleft and follow a narrow black-rock catwalk to the mossy, triangular pool. Perched above the roiling tide — suspended, as D.S. wrote, between sea and sky — I cup my hands and take a few sips of the cool, sweet water, then head back up into the mist.
Some people ooze inner calm. They know themselves. They may not have figured out the meaning of life, but they have puzzled together a decent understanding of their own lives. Even if it’s an act, I’m jealous. That convergent feeling I get while walking — it seldom lasts long.
Most of us are a little lost and confused, at least some of the time. Which is why, when not preoccupied with basic needs, when drifting and drooling off to sleep, or daydreaming at the desk, we wonder. We worry. We yearn. For something. Humans are uniquely curious creatures. An evolutionary quirk called neoteny left us with juvenile characteristics well into maturity. Unlike other mammals, we remain inquisitive as adults. And so when the stars line up, when opportunity arises, we grant ourselves a sabbatical — an hour, a long weekend, an open ticket — and heed the elemental urge to go stumbling down the trapline of the soul.
A pilgrimage is a journey to a special place. Journey, special, place: these words are entirely subjective. Whether sacred or secular, it is a quest for salvation, inspiration, guidance or some combination thereof. An outward effort to balance our inner lives. Muslims go to Mecca. Hindus bathe in the Ganges. Jews push prayers into cracks in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. A Vietnam War veteran might press his palm against the black granite memorial in Washington, D.C. A baseball fanatic buys the Field of Dreams audiobook and takes a road trip to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Stanley Vollant leads communal expeditions from reserve to reserve. I hoof it to the family cottage. Or try to, anyway.
With all those unoccupied hours to ruminate, we look inward while wayfaring, and we don’t always recognize what — or who — we see. Anthropologists Edith and Victor Turner believe pilgrims are in a liminal state, between past and future identities, awash in possibility. There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival, writes Rebecca Solnit, and a “delicate line between the spiritual and the material.” We cross a threshold into an ethereal geography and, awed by the enormity of our questions, proceed the same way our ancestors explored. With two feet and a heartbeat.
Buddhist monks can attain enlightenment through walking meditation. They pace back and forth on paths no more than 30 to 60 feet long, sometimes for a full day. The two ends provide a structure, and sharpen awareness. The physical activity engages and relaxes the mind at the same time, providing the energy to focus on every step. If you manage to apply such mindfulness to daily life, former Buddhist monk John Cianciosi writes in Yoga Journal, your consciousness will remain alert and alive, “transforming ordinary life into a continuous practice of meditation, and transforming the mundane into the spiritual.” Having “nothing else to do and nowhere to go,” he adds, “can be truly liberating.”
Few of us are this disciplined. We follow the crowd.
El Camino de Santiago, one of the oldest continuously walked pilgrimages on the planet, is actually a web of trails. On a map, they resemble tributaries flowing into the main branch of a river. The 500-mile Camino Francés, the route completed by Vollant (and by the grieving father played by Martin Sheen in The Way), is the most popular. Starting in St. Jean Pied-de-Port, France, it crosses the Pyrenees into Spain and, shadowing Roman trade tracks, heads west through farmland, forest, mountains, village and cities, on or near paved roads roughly half of the time.
Francis Tapon, a globetrotting Californian who has walked across the United States four times and trekked throughout Africa, Central America and Europe, calls the Camino the most overrated long-distance trail on earth. “About 95 percent of the time, car traffic is within earshot,” he wrote after completing the journey. “With endless bars, restaurants, hotels, vending machines, tour groups, you’re hardly removed from the ‘real world.’” While Tapon admires the mental toughness required to finish the Camino, his criticisms are widely lambasted by commenters for whom the walk was life-altering.
After about a month on the trail, pilgrims pass through the doors of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where the bones of St. James the Great, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, were “discovered” in 813 AD. Some continue an additional 60 miles to the tip of Cape Finisterre, an important edge of the world to ancient Celts. Like the journey to Bardsey, the Camino appropriates the paths of those who came before.
The Codex Calixtinus, an illustrated 12th-century manuscript put together by a French friar, offered advice on reaching Santiago. Europe’s first guidebook sent flocks of walkers across Spain. Millions attempted the Camino in the Middle Ages — the largest movement of people in Europe at the time. It was a convenient destination, easier to reach than Jerusalem, and for some, depending on their starting point, more attainable than Rome. Medieval wars and plagues interrupted the flow, as have modern conflicts. But despite the erosion of Christian piety in much of the Western world, numbers have been climbing in recent years, spurred by cheap travel, and by the publication of books such as Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage in 1987 — the novel that spoke to Vollant from his bedside table. (British travel writer Tim Moore’s account of doing the walk with a donkey might not have inspired hordes of copycats, but actor Shirley MacLaine’s Camino memoir surely tilted the ratio of New Agers to Catholics toward the crystal set.) More than 215,000 people made it to the shrine of St. James in 2013, three times as many as a decade earlier.
Roughly 3 million people do the Hajj in Mecca each year. Every able-bodied Muslim is supposed to visit the holy Saudi Arabian city at least once in their lifetime. It is an act of Islamic solidarity, and submission to god. Most take planes, trains and automobiles to get there (a few trek thousands of miles on foot), but the heart of the ritual consists of walking seven counterclockwise laps around the Kaaba, the cuboid building at the centre of the Al-Masjid al-Haram mosque. Photographs invariably show an ocean of people clad in simple white garments, regardless of their wealth or status. The circumambulation represents oneness and unity, each lap a different phase of our lives, and replicates the natural order of the universe: planets circling the sun, electrons around a nucleus.
Mecca’s attendance is eclipsed by the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu dip in a sacred river, which rotates between four locations in northern India. The 2013 pilgrimage, at Allahabad, where the waters of the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet, drew more than 100 million people. Roughly 30 million people bathed on a single day, the largest gathering anywhere on the planet — ever. A tent city forms during the Kumbh Mela. At night, the temperature can fall to just above freezing. Waste disposal and sanitation facilities are rudimentary. Diseases such as cholera and meningitis spread. The noise, around 85 decibels on an average day, is loud enough to cause hearing damage. Three dozen people died in a stampede at Allahabad’s train station in 2013, a regular risk, even in years when a mere 10 million people show up.
From the outside, the atmosphere at the Kumbh Mela sounds dangerous or, at a minimum, stressful. Twenty thousand people were separated from their friends and relatives on the day of the world’s biggest baptism. It can take three hours to push a mile through the crowds. Yet pilgrims typically depart feeling serene and blissful, according to Stephen Reicher, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who led a six-year research project on the Kumbh Mela. Participants develop a shared identity and report smoother and more rewarding social relations than Hindus who stayed home.
Though it’s the opposite of meditation, congregating generally makes people feel good. We experience mutual trust, respect and cooperation. Support from others helps us become more resilient. In spite of the conditions at the Kumbh Mela, pilgrims reported improved physical health after it finished. Mind over matter may be a factor, but Reicher’s research also demonstrates “the power of collective experience in transforming everyday life,” he wrote in a dispatch for the Guardian. “It shows how a sense of shared identity provides the underpinning for that sense of community and civility about which so much is spoken.”
Compared to the crush of the Kumbh Mela and the Hajj, the Camino is a walk in the clouds. It may not remove you from the world of billboards, electricity transmission towers and industrial parks, but proximity to cities and towns, and an ample network of albergues and refugios with cheap meals and beds, eliminate the need to carry a heavy load. They also provide youth hostel–style camaraderie, if you can handle the dorm-room snoring. You might fall into friendly conversation, share a meal, maybe form a pack with convivial strangers — or take off on your own, depending on the rhythm you feel. Unless you’re seeking a solo path to enlightenment, these amenities are a big draw. It’s a lot harder to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, or to walk across America.
“In this space you can achieve a direct human interaction that doesn’t take into account hierarchies, so people become intimate very quickly,” Ellen Badone, an anthropology and religious studies professor at McMaster University, writes about the Camino in her book Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. “Stepping into this extraordinary sphere leads to extraordinary interactions.”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus decided to do the Camino while on a drunken bender in Estonia. The friend he was visiting, American author Tom Bissell, was researching the tombs of the 12 apostles, and Lewis-Kraus (a restless writer in his late 20s who had moved from San Francisco to freewheeling Berlin in a preemptive strike against future regret) agreed to tag along. At overnight stops and on the trail in the Pyrenees, the pair hang out with and informally interview dozens of pilgrims, most of them young and from Europe or North America. Few are motivated by religion. Few, including Lewis-Kraus, the son of two rabbis, can articulate why they are walking. Still, the experience was moving enough to send him on a deeper journey.
In A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, Lewis-Kraus writes about crossing Spain, his ensuing 750-mile circular walk between 88 Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and a visit to the Ukrainian city of Uman with his brother and father during the annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the grave of a Hassidic mystic. The book, philosophical treatise meets travelogue, captures the joy and pain of the Camino and the colder, lonelier Shikoku circuit, and provides a forum for Lewis-Kraus to probe his troubled relationship with his father, who came out of the closet in his mid-40s and abandoned the family to make up for lost years. All of this is funnelled into a meditation on the nature of the pilgrimage.
Academic literature views these journeys as “ritual experiences that represent breaks from the ordered configuration of everyday life,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “The pilgrim could step outside of all roles and just be a person, someone without responsibilities or expectations or constraints besides continuous forward movement to a distant goal.” Cynics see the contemporary Camino as a cheap backpacking jaunt, but he argues that the appeal is “ritual continuity,” that the mode of travel itself matters. If the divine model is sin, penance and redemption, the corresponding lay path leads from anxiety to austerity to forgiveness. In the end, although he and Bissell and their travel mates cry and hug in an emotional daze upon entering the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Lewis-Kraus is left with a question: “Five hundred miles, and now what?”
Some pilgrims never stop. On New Year’s Day, 1953, 44-year-old Mildred Ryder set out on foot for New York from Pasadena, California. The U.S. was mired in the Korean War, the Cold War and McCarthyism. Ryder, who wore a blue tunic with “Peace Pilgrim” written in white capital letters on the front, wanted to rouse people from apathy. “Humanity, with fearful, faltering steps, walks a knife-edge between abysmal chaos and a new renaissance, while strong forces push toward chaos,” she wrote. “Yet there is hope.”
A series of revelations had initiated Ryder’s metamorphosis into the Peace Pilgrim. After growing up poor and outside the church on her parents’ poultry farm in New Jersey, she took secretarial jobs and married a businessman. In 1938, discomfited by her relative prosperity during the Great Depression, she went for an all-night walk in the woods and prayed for guidance. A profound peace came over her. She would dedicate her life to giving, not getting.
Ryder’s husband was drafted into the army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and she refused to accompany him to training camp. They drifted farther apart when he was overseas and soon divorced. She simplified her life by reducing her wardrobe to two dresses, forsaking meat and embarking on wilderness treks. In 1952, Ryder became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail in one season. On a hill overlooking rural New England, she had a vision: “I saw a map of the United States with the large cities marked — and it was as though someone had taken a colored crayon and marked a zigzag line across, coast to coast and border to border… . I knew what I was to do. I will talk to everyone who will listen to me about the way to peace.”
Ryder departed Pasadena penniless. She planned to fast until given food, and not to stop until given shelter. Over the next 28 years, the slender, five-foot-two woman with white hair crisscrossed the country seven times, migrating north in summer and south in winter, venturing into Canada and Mexico. When nobody offered her a bed, she slept in fields and under bridges, in drainage pipes and beside the road, in cemeteries and New York’s Grand Central Station. She gave presentations in community centres, churches, schools and private homes, introducing herself during these talks and to strangers beside the highway as a pilgrim “walking not to a place but for an idea,” writes biographer Marta Daniels. “Her definition of peace included peace among nations, among people and individuals, and the most important peace — within oneself — for only with inner peace, she believed, can the other kinds be achieved.” Ryder said that people needed two things to lead a meaningful life: a calling or “path of service”; and something, religion or art or nature, that would “awaken their higher nature.”
The Peace Pilgrim stopped counting her miles at 25,000 in 1964. By Daniels’ estimate — 29 pairs of sneakers averaging 1,500 miles per pair — she had covered 43,500 miles by 1981. That year, in demand as a speaker and increasingly accepting drives to reach events on time, a car she was riding in was hit head-on by another vehicle outside Knox, Indiana. She died just after impact.
Mildred Ryder’s peripatetic proselytizing was ahead of its time. She foreshadowed a shift from pilgrimage as an appeal for divine intervention to pilgrimage as a demand for political change, writes Solnit. Although she came after Gandhi, she predated the civil-rights era and the birth of charity walkathons, and the continued fusion of personal marathons with protest marches, all calls for a world not as it is but as it should be.
We can’t all stride ceaselessly toward harmony. Even people on epic pilgrimages usually have a goal line. In his mid-40s, confronting a mid-life crisis, Jean Béliveau — a Montrealer but not the hockey legend — closed his neon-sign business and packed a three-wheeled running stroller with food, clothing, a tent and a sleeping bag. On August 18, 2000, he kissed his wife and grown children and left the city for an around-the-world walk dedicated to raising awareness about the violence afflicting children throughout the planet. (Sounds fanciful, but the first decade of the 2000s was the United Nations’ International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World. Also, his wife flew to meet up with him from time to time.) Béliveau came close to quitting in Ethiopia, had an emergency prostate operation in Algeria, met Nelson Mandela and three other Nobel Peace Prize laureates, and absorbed lessons from the peasants he spent time with in impoverished countries such as Peru and Mozambique. “They have a sustainable way of life,” he told one interviewer. “Who are we to teach them? We are destroying our planet, putting so much stress on our society. It’s time to learn from them.”
Do not follow my footsteps, Béliveau said upon returning to Montreal, 11 years and 46,000 miles later. Make your own.
Paul Salopek is on a journalistic pilgrimage. In 2013, the National Geographic writer started a seven-year, 21,000-mile walk from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego, “retracing on foot the global migration of our ancestors.” His Out of Eden project aims to address the major stories of the Anthropocene, from climate change to technological evolution and cultural survival. Among his first stops were the West Bank (during the Israeli attack on Gaza) and the divided island of Cyprus. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a veteran foreign correspondent, he has come to believe that parachuting into a war zone to cover a conflict limits your perspective. Instead, by “inching slowly across the surface of the earth,” he hopes to discover “links between stories … that are covered in a really granular, segmented way by the media.
“Maybe the most important thing that people might find extreme,” says Salopek, “is the capacity to wait, which the global north seems to find increasingly incomprehensible. The ability to sit under a tree and wait for something to happen — it’s a way of perceiving the world that is getting rarer as the world becomes more wired.”
Salopek acknowledges that he may not last seven years on the road, that he might have to abandon the walk at some point. Pilgrimages don’t always work out as planned. You can get sick, or injured, or assaulted. Or realize you are heading in the wrong direction.
For every Jean Béliveau, there are dozens of Daryl Watsons. The young American playwright was desperate for a “mission statement.” A devout Christian as a teenager, he had left the Church. For a year, he wrestled with fear and doubt, dreaming fitfully every night about his purpose on earth. So in 2009, he adopted a new name, Peace Pilgrim, and departed Delaware on a six-month walk to San Francisco, in search of a renewed connection to god.
Like his namesake, Watson shed his possessions. He sealed all of his money inside an envelope, wrote “For Charity” on it and dropped the cash into a mailbox. “Why aren’t more people giving away everything that they own and walking across the country?” he says in an episode of NPR’s This American Life, rationalizing his impulsive decision. “When you live in this world, as crazy as it is, this is what you do.”
On the first night of his journey, Watson slept on the cold concrete outside a Catholic church; on night two, in the dugout of a college-town baseball diamond, wrapped up in a piece of Astroturf. Three days after beginning, cold and tired and sore and hungry, he gave up. Watson sobbed his story to the night manager of a highway-side Best Western, then phoned his mother, who paid for a room. Sitting in a hot bath, he realized that the paralyzing questions that had been tormenting him were no longer urgent. “Being so exhausted … I didn’t care anymore if I had the answer,” he says. “It just wasn’t important.”
I have more in common with the new Peace Pilgrim than the original one. My eyes are bigger than my guts. That aborted walk to the cottage, remember, was not without precedent.
At dawn on my 35th birthday, while living in Edmonton, I stepped off our front porch into an August thunderstorm to attempt a seven-day circumnavigation of the 200-mile Waskahegan Trail. The loop traverses parkland, boreal forest and, thanks to handshake deals with landowners, private meadows and pastures. It follows marshy lakeshores and grassy river valleys, and intersects the occasional town. More mundane than majestic, it’s a flat swath of central Alberta that thousands of people drive through daily. But to me, at the time, with twin toddlers at home and a start-up magazine to pilot at the office, it sounded like paradise: a childless, cheap and safe adventure. (That last criteria was crucial. If I got badly hurt doing something so ill-conceived, Lisa would have killed me.)
It took me three hours to reach the city’s southern boundary. At an on-ramp for the main highway to Calgary, I stuck out my thumb. A cabbie named Gall picked me up and drove me 10 miles to a range road that led to the first official trailhead. “You should do the West Coast Trail instead,” he said, describing his bear and cougar encounters in the Pacific Rim rainforest. “That’s wilderness.”
Yet once I turned off the pavement and started walking along the shore of one of those sloughy, skinny bodies of water that prairie folk call a lake, I saw pelicans flapping in formation overhead and ducks erupting from the water’s edge. A grey heron begrudgingly took flight. Hawks shrieked. Deer darted. A pileated woodpecker pecked. Windmilling through nettles above my head and stutter-stepping over cow shit, I stopped to smell the sage and ate the season’s last raspberries.
That night, after hiking more than 30 miles, I stayed with a farm family whose land the trail passes through. Lloyd Schnick plucked me from his neighbour’s barley field — we had talked on the phone a few days earlier; he said to drop by — and his wife, Charlene, served up a meal of chicken with beets, potatoes and peas from their garden. She showed me to a spare room in the basement, put my soaked clothes in the dryer and, in the morning, after a bacon-and-egg breakfast, slipped me a baggie of peanut butter cookies. The Schnicks accompanied me down to the lake at the foot of their property and waved goodbye from a point jutting out into the water as I climbed over a stile onto the next farmer’s land.
Buoyed by their generosity, I was in that liminal state described by Edith and Victor Turner. I felt kinship, connection — and, soon, pain. Within an hour, my right knee began to hurt. Bad. My back and shoulders, bearing a needlessly hefty pack (two novels? two hardcover novels?), were not doing much better. The deadfall on the path from a recent tornado was nearly impenetrable, and my aging boots were waterlogged. By noon, I was popping ibuprofen. At 3 p.m., I discovered I had made a mathematical error: Camrose, the small city where I had intended to overnight, was still 25 miles away.
What’s the point of pushing on, I asked myself, if I’m miserable? I thought back to something one of the trail’s founders had told me when I pried him for route details: “Sure, you could do the whole thing in one go, but I prefer to take my time and, well, enjoy it.”
Defeated, I called Lisa and asked for a ride home. And though I completed the Waskahegan in stages over the next three months, any lessons I learned were soon forgotten.
Mapping out the route to my parents’ cottage, I budgeted four days for 114 miles. I pictured myself strolling in the resplendent autumn leaves, chewing a sprig of straw, napping under the canopies of oaks and elms. In addition to this delusion, I made other mistakes: too much gear, too much food, too-new boots. By day two, wrong turns had notched up the mileage, and my blisters had blisters. I stubbornly ate my squished peanut butter sandwiches while passing farm stands and chip trucks. There were traces of bliss — whenever I stopped walking. For instance, during the two boat rides I had arranged in advance. An 84-year-old marina owner motored me across Balsam Lake after I joined him and the staff for coffee and tall tales in their scuttlebutt shed. Early the next morning, a teenaged lodge handyman took me up the misty Gull River into the town of Minden, where I disembarked on the public dock beside the downtown bridge and began the final stretch.
Limping north, sliding toward my decision to surrender, I realized I had again planned to go too far, too fast. Regardless of the metaphysical potential of a journey, it’s difficult to meditate on the meaning of anything if you are fixated on counting miles and the looming darkness.
Ultimately, it was Lisa, meeting me at the cottage with our daughters, who supplied a saving grace: she had brought my slippers, the only footwear my pulpy feet could handle.
George Mallory tried to reach the top of Mount Everest because it was there. He was fixated on the summit — and died on his third attempt. The Camino, or the far shore of a vast country, or any long-distance, soul-seeking journey, holds a similar attraction. It is there. I am here. Something will be revealed along the way. Solvitur ambulando.
In his book The Road Is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage Through Nature, Desire and Soul, naturalist Trevor Herriot chronicles a pilgrimage of modest distance but ambitious scope. He sets out from his house in Regina on a 40-mile, three-day hike to the land east of the city where his family has a small cabin and a large garden. Much of Herriot’s writing explores the rich layers of life that endure in the cropped-over grasslands and riverine coulees that the rest of us tend to neglect, eyes drawn to the bold mountains farther west or the oceans that bookend the nation. This walk is a return to familiar terrain, the subtle wildness in his native Saskatchewan, only now, in his early 50s, Herriot’s focus is internal. Recovering from a bone-breaking misstep off a ladder, cranky about the destruction of nature and community at the hands of profit-hungry government and corporate minders, he wants to discover what’s wrong with himself: “It was as though my years as the know-it-all naturalist had rendered me deaf to the very spirits that might be able to help me grow up or heal or whatever it is I am supposed to do at this stage of life.”
It could be a manifestation of my own obsessions with walking and environmental Armageddon, but pilgrimage lit appears to be trending. When things get tough, the lost go looking. Mourning and heartbroken, Cheryl Strayed found herself on the Pacific Crest Trail in the bestseller Wild. Milquetoast Harold Fry, British novelist Rachel Joyce’s unlikely protagonist, left his home in England and, instead of mailing a letter to a deathly ill friend, personally delivered it to her bedside, more than 600 miles away (a fictional trek echoing filmmaker Werner Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris to visit the ailing critic Lotte Eisner). Mirroring the early 20th-century American poet Vachel Lindsay, who traded poetry for food and lodging on several inter-state hikes (Illinois to New Mexico, New York to Ohio), British poet Simon Armitage hiked the 268-mile Pennine Way, exchanging nightly readings for beer and bed and breakfast. “In many ways,” he writes in Walking Home, “the Pennine Way is a pointless exercise, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular, via no particular route, for no particular reason. But to embark on the walk is to surrender to its lore and to submit to its logic, and to take up a challenge against the self.”
Herriot roots around for metaphor and meaning in the ditches and pastures that line the route to his cabin, gazing up at the constellations as his sandals sink into the mud at the bottom of a slough. He finds symbiotic beauty in biological processes, in the microscopic minutiae of pollination, in the networking capabilities of mycorrhizal fungi. Before beginning his walk, Herriot camped on a hill by himself and fasted, as directed by an Aboriginal friend. After three days and three nights of “boredom and misery punctuated by moments of dread and anxiety,” a question had arisen: how does one stop “wandering around in mid-life adolescence … how do I finally grow up in my relationships?” And he knew where to look for answers. Friends of his had travelled to Nepal and Machu Picchu, but he wondered whether we can “separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place… .
“If it’s good to eat locally,” asks Herriot, “isn’t it just as good to heal and feed our souls locally?”
I finish reading Herriot’s book on a grey spring morning in Ottawa. For weeks, I have been deskbound, absorbed by adventures in Spain and other far-flung locales. I lace up my hiking boots. There is a greenbelt around the corner from my house, a string of parks and marshes that might eventually be bulldozed into a road. It is a weekday, and I see only one dog walker when I pass through a thicket of willows and sit on a picnic table on a low ridge, serenaded by twittering red-winged blackbirds in courtship. There’s that feeling again.
I cross the busy street that borders the green space and enter a low-income townhouse and apartment community called Heron Gate Village. The sidewalks abound with women wearing colourful burkas and mothers pushing babies in the strollers, unlike the deserted white Pleasantville of my own residential enclave. Behind and between the towers and low-rises, I find a lattice of wooded paths linking the curvy roads to the area’s parks, schools and shopping strips. It is five minutes by foot from my house, and I have never been on these walkways before.
Like Herriot, I am steered in a proximal direction. My sights, I have come to understand, are set next door. I’m more interested in Matt Green’s daily walks in New York than his cross-country trek. I’m not infatuated with one summit. I walk because something is everywhere. Every day can be a pilgrimage, if the goal is a deeper sense of your small role in the revolving world.
Forgiveness and healing may be elusive targets, but honesty is still within range. Walking exposes us to the immediate physical reality. And though our brains distort and deceive, though we have more confidence than competence, though self-delusion steers us toward flattering conclusions, when we walk, our thoughts become more clear as the body and mind align. Pace and mood modulate into cadence. Observations and ideas merge and furnish our best bet at truth. Or, as the Welsh say, gwirionedd.
On the Llŷn, after I drink from St. Mary’s Well, I’m on another vertiginous single track. The 500-foot granite cliffs on the eastern flank of Bardsey Island rise from the sea to my left. Today’s route hugs the rim of the peninsula’s headland, then cuts across its neck back to Aberdaron. An easy 13-mile loop. I have enough water and food. My boots are worked in and waterproof. My rain gear keeps me dry. Bleating sheep keep me company. The wildflowers and craggy shoreline look stunning. Yet each step feels heavy, ponderous. It’s not a physical weariness or discomfort. It’s a nagging sensation. I have been away from home for two weeks now. It is a holiday weekend in Canada. I’m not sure what Lisa and the girls are doing, only that I am not with them, and that summer is slipping away. Christians and their Celtic forebears may find answers on this path, but maybe I should be looking closer to home.
It is still raining the next morning. Rob Jones, who works for the Welsh national tourism bureau, meets me in the Ship’s dining room for breakfast. We’re supposed to travel to Bardsey together, but a hard wind is blowing. The boatman has advised us to check with him in a couple hours.
We hop into Thomas’s car and drive up the hill from the hotel to outfitter Peter Hewlett’s house for tea. On the wall of his den hangs a colourful poster titled “The Broad and Narrow Way,” originally made in Germany around 1850. Conveying an evangelical Christian perspective, the illustration depicts the two paths we all must choose between: virtuous living or worldly pleasure. The narrow route on the right side of the poster leads past green trees and shrubs and Christ on the cross to a mountain that is surrounded by winged angels and bathed in golden light. The wide road on the left is lined by a ballroom, a gambling hall, a tavern and “Sunday trains.” Dotted with men whipping donkeys and fighting, it culminates at a dark castle where panicked stick figures are consumed by flames. Named and numbered verses from the Bible are scattered throughout. “Dan 5:27” is in the top-left corner, just above the fires of hell. Hewlett takes a Bible off his bookshelf and finds the verse with my name: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”
Thomas and I still have some time on our hands, so we visit Felin Uchaf, an educational centre devoted to breathing new life into traditional Welsh skills. Three miles from Aberdaron, on what was once a bare, windswept parcel of land, volunteers have planted thousands of trees and bountiful organic gardens, and fashioned eco-friendly buildings using local stone, earth, thatch and timber. Among the workshops taught at the centre are sessions on straw-bale construction, earth and cob walling, thatching and timber framing. Volunteers come from around the world. As they learn, the facility grows. There is an energy-efficient barn, a boat-building shed and several medieval-style roundhouses. Water reeds cut from nearby marshes are used for roofing. Sheep’s wool is batted together and put into the walls for insulation.
Dafydd Davies-Hughes, the soft-spoken project manager with a beatific smile, leads Thomas and me into a roundhouse, whose base is dug into the earth. Its design is styled after an Iron Age meeting house. There are benches and bunks built into the mud walls and a hearth in the middle. In addition to providing accommodation for workers, students and travellers, Felin Uchaf hosts storytelling events, fireside gatherings where performers enthrall audiences with nothing more than their voice. “People come to the Llŷn on a pilgrimage, seeking something, but not everybody makes it to Bardsey,” says Davies-Hughes, an accomplished storyteller himself, but also a renaissance man with experience as a biologist, teacher, farmer and builder. “So this is a stopping place, to celebrate all of the cultures that have passed through here, the churning of stories that is Europe. It is still a frontier. The elements you meet here — the wind, the rain, the sun — they’re very strong, compared to the warmer valleys inland. People like the rawness of that. Everything is tamed now in our world.
“There’s an archetype here,” he continues, speaking more broadly about the Llŷn, just as Rory Stewart read the Lune as more than a river. “There’s a stretching out to the west. People have long looked at this journey as an echo of what human beings go through in their lives. They pass though the mainland and come out on this little pinnacle of land. The water that separates us from Bardsey, people see it as the Sea of Forgetfulness, or the River Styx. A stepping stone to heaven. The peninsula is a route toward that. It’s a meeting place, a threshold, the edge of the known world. Though it might be symbolic, you come to the edge of a life, and what goes on beyond here is unknown.”
Thomas’s cellphone rings. Our ship sails in 15 minutes.
Porth Meudwy — Port of the Hermits, in English — is the only place to launch a boat on the turbulent coastline beyond Aberdaron. A muddy road descends through a deep cleft in the cliffs to a narrow rocky beach with a cracked concrete slipway. Skipper Colin Evans tells us to climb into his bright yellow 30-foot catamaran, which sits on land atop a trailer that is hooked up to a tractor. “I’m sorry, lads, it’s a bit wet today,” he shouts above the roaring wind. “I’d like you to wear lifejackets.”
With a fuzzy brown beard and massive forearms, Evans looks like the type of person only a fool would ignore, even on a calm day. He is wearing a yellow rain slicker over a blue sweater, and a pair of bibbed grey-green rubberized fishing pants rise to his chest. Another man sits at the wheel of the tractor and reverses into the surf, which lifts the boat off the trailer. Evans has made this crossing around 10,000 times, completing his first solo sailing at age 16. He guns the throttle. We pull away from the inlet and start bucking wildly in the waves.
“This is only half as bad as it gets,” Evans tells me as the boat pitches up and over swells, spray crashing onto the deck, “and we’ll travel in twice as bad as this — if we have to.” Storms and fierce currents in these waters have claimed more than 70 ships. In 2000, a gale stranded 17 visitors on the island for two weeks.
We round the cliffs that I saw during my walk yesterday, and the sea flattens. A red-and-white lighthouse presides over Bardsey’s patchwork of green fields. Owned and managed by a charitable trust, about a mile and a half long from north to south and half a mile wide, the island is a national nature reserve, a sanctuary for migratory birds and rare plants. This makes it a destination not only for the devout, and hikers, but also for scientists, who come to Bardsey’s bird observatory to do research on species such as the Manx shearwater, a daredevil flyer that can live more than 50 years. Only 2,000 day visitors are allowed each year. “But it’s still a working island,” Evans says. There are about 370 sheep and a couple dozen cows and bulls. “It’s not just about conservation. Well, it is, really, in a way. It’s about the conservation of an old way of life.”
Evans’s family has been farming and fishing here since at least the 1700s, maybe longer. His father worked the lobster traps and was a lighthouse keeper. His mother is an acclaimed poet. Colin, too, has a way with words. “This crossing,” he says, “represents the continuation of an old tradition. My whole life is built around perpetuating old traditions, because they’re sustainable. They represent a way forward. The past is the future.”
We putter toward the beach at the southern end of Bardsey, where another tractor pulls us onto land. This harbour is protected from the prevailing winds. It’s a better landing place than any other port in the area, which means that sailors have always kept their boats on the island, not the mainland, and that the seafaring skills have stayed here too.
Evans wonders whether there will be anything to keep his children on Bardsey when they grow up. There are possibilities: crab processing, sausage making, fish smoking, kayak tours. But the island has had a “wobbly” few decades; economic development has stalled. Still, he says, it feels natural to balance farming and fishing with conservation, research and tourism. Because there are families with a historical attachment to the island, there are people here to care for it.
The Celtic and Christian pilgrimages to Bardsey are a relatively recent phenomenon, Evans says, now in tour-guide mode. Mesolithic flint found on the island indicates that it was inhabited 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. There is also evidence of Bronze Age cremation sites. There was a spiritual pull long before any church.
Thomas and I walk away from the water on a rutted dirt road, inspecting the ruins of the abbey and peeking over stone walls at the cottages available for summer rental. We enter the tiny chapel, and he sits at the organ and plays. I give Thomas a nod and leave him to his hymn.
I wander around alone for a couple of hours. Although 20 people live on the island in the summer, and there are a couple dozen scientists and visitors here today, Evans’s words during the crossing prove prophetic: Bardsey has a mysterious ability to swallow people. I don’t see another soul.
As I climb a sheep trail to the island’s highpoint, the sun re-emerges for the first time in two days. Travelling the length of the Llŷn was once a journey of penance. Now, I realize, it is simply a way to get perspective on the rest of the world.
“The mountain conveniently hides the mainland, as though it was placed there on purpose,” Evans had told me down below. “You can forget about the mainland when you’re here, and you might do. In bad weather, you might as well be 1,000 miles away.
“I think that this island fosters independent thought. It’s close — but far. The hubbub of life is just a little while away, but you might not be able to get to it. That makes you feel different. The only thing you can see is a distant goal.”