“We have at least as complicated a
relationship with ourselves
as
we do with the rest of the environment.”
Pilgrimages in literature involve
storytelling—The Canterbury Tales and Pilgrim’s Progress. I woke on the third day of my pilgrimage
wondering whether I could discern a story without imposing one on my walk. There were knots in my life that I was hoping
walking would untie—the loss of Mom, the lacks in my marriage; and, although I
didn’t place these problems in the front of my mind—I just walked—I wondered if
I would wend my way to a solution.
I walked through the tiny village of
Kirk Yetholm on the lane, heading east, past the cottage where the last gypsy
king was “crowned” in 1898. It was an
unassuming white house with black shutters.
(There’s a story here.) The road went along up and down for a couple
of miles next to farms. As I passed a
field, I greeted a black and white horse, who responded by walking to the fence
to meet me.
I stroked his white nose and
picked bunches of wet green grass and clover.
He moved his flesh-colored lips, nuzzling my cupped palms, and the
grasses disappeared quickly. Contact of
such a sensuous kind—movement of mouth tickling palms—was rare in my life. I was aware of liking it and of needing
it. When I prepared to go, the horse
followed me along the fence. It was as
if he was offering to go along with me. For
a moment, I wondered what it would be like to mount him and take the hills by
storm, up and down, letting his animal knowledge of the land shapes guide me. And sheep were everywhere on the third day of
the pilgrimage. Lambs in August are
nearly the size of ewes, yet they still want to suckle, and pull hard on the
teats. The ewes looked annoyed or tired,
yet I saw one that rested her head on the back of her “baby” while she eyed me
suspiciously. They retained their places
if I kept moving but leapt away if I stopped to look at them. Shy or wild.
Perhaps shyness, even in humans, is an effort to preserve wildness. I shared that quality with the sheep I “met”
just as I was sharing with them the narrow paths made through upland hills and
moors by hooves and boots. “On foot
everything stays connected” and “one lives in the whole world rather than in
interiors built up against it.” When the going got rough or lonely, I would
pick up a piece of wool and smell it, fondle it, and pray a few lines of the 23rd
psalm which seemed to come to life here more than it ever had when I heard it
inside a church.
The Lord is
my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me
lie down in green pastures
He leads me
beside still waters,
He restores
my soul
He leads me
in the right paths
Today of all
days, I needed leading and I needed to be able to lean on the Lord. The guidebook noted that Day 3 was the
toughest day with boggy and “indistinct” sections and tiny paths nearly
overgrown by the blooming heather—bell heather (pink/orange blossoms) and the
“regular” heather with the purple flowers.
Losing the way (when the description in the book no longer made sense),
I would feel afraid and pray, look for footprints, clutch my sheep’s wool, and
hope against hope that I would see the circular waymark with the Cuthbert cross
on the next gate or stile. Usually, I
did.
“Take the lane uphill, signed
Halterburn Penial Revival Centre. It
climbs steeply, then descends to Halter Burn glen. At the valley floor, bear left along the
fence to cross a footbridge with a tall signpost.” What was a burn? What was gorse? What does it mean to “sign” and to “bear”? The lay of the land and its features told me
what such words meant. But an expression
as simple as valley “floor” set my mind working. If the valley has a floor, then this place is
a house or a temple, and as I worked my way up the hill, scattering sheep and
flushing red grouse whose wings drummed and voices trebled with “laughter,” I
saw the pile of stones on a distant hill that the book called Eccles
cairn. The stones mark either the site
of a very old church (Eccles for ecclesia) or the burial site of a prehistoric
chieftain. Sources, like paths, are
indistinct. I left the way despite
gathering dark clouds and climbed the naked hill for the view and for the
ecstatic feeling I’d had on Wide Open Hill the day before. When I arrived at the stone pile, I was
thinking about Jacob and the dream he had after sleeping on a stone. He saw a ladder with angels going up and
down, and God hovered over him, reassuring him that he would be with him and
guide him on the way out and back. When
Jacob wakes up, he is in awe and afraid
How fearsome
is this place!
This can be but the house of God,
And this is the gate of
heaven
Jacob set up
the stone he’d slept on as a pillar and poured oil over its top, and he called
the place Bethel. Jacob had many knots
in his life and was going into exile because his brother was murderously angry
that he’d stolen his paternal blessing.
Jacob is a cunning strategist, but his exilic pilgrimage is about
learning a new way, about relying on the Lord:
“And Jacob made a vow, saying, “If the Lord God be with me and guard me
on this way that I am going and give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and
I return safely to my father’s house, then the Lord will be my God.” He cuts a deal. He requires God to insure his trip before he
is willing to commit fully. What
chutzpah!
The dream, the cairn, the
conversation with the divine—all of these things raised Jacob’s spirits and he
sets off—“lifted his feet and went on to the land of the Easterners” where he
promptly falls passionately in love with the first lovely shepherdess he
sees. Jacob’s covenant led directly into
a love story—the first love story in the Bible: “And Jacob kissed Rachel and lifted his voice
and wept.” “And Jacob served seven years
for Rachel, and they seemed in his eyes but a few days in his love for her.” Sitting at Eccles Cairn, taking in the views
of the Cheviots and the rolling hills of the Scottish borders misty in the
distance, I didn’t remember that, for Jacob, love of God seemed to express
itself laterally in human love almost immediately. To say that I was falling in love with
Cuthbert and God makes me sound a bit too much like a monk. But when at home, I live like one studying
and sleeping in a tiny cell and inhabiting an absolutely chaste marriage. Still, I have desires I don’t know what to do
with and, therefore, can say with the Japanese traveler and poet, Basho, that I
have one foot in the dust of the human world.
It was somewhere after Hethpool, after
the rain came and went, when I followed two English super walkers that had
blown by me on the road alongside a red castle.
While I was stumbling up a bank, trying not to get cut with barbed wire
for a view of the ruin, they were utterly disinterested. Far ahead of me, I saw that they were holding
hands as they walked. It was after that
that the unexpected happened: I began to meet people. “Shepherd me, Oh God, beyond my wants, beyond
my fears from death into life.” I
thought I wanted to be completely solitary.
I thought that was my way, but, as a priest back in Michigan says, “dear
people, we often don’t know what we are praying for, but God sees the whole
picture.” I was climbing again, and the
sun was lighting up one hill after another.
I felt very happy and light.
An
enormous black slug appeared. I
remembered seeing a medieval stone basin at Dryburgh Abbey that was carved with
lizards. The blurb, written by some
scholar, speculated that lizards, in the serpent-dragon category of creatures,
were “evil,” and perhaps the mason sought the symbolic contrast between evil of
the lizard and the purity of the water.
Seeing the black slug, I thought how wrong that was. My slug wasn’t a lizard, but I found it
beautiful anyway. It comes out after
rain when the world is wet. The mason
was probably just making art of things from his own experiences. Higher yet, the breeze kicked up and began
drying things out. The bunched clouds were
broken by paths of blue to match the green ways I was following. I spotted an old stone sheep enclosure. It was the perfect place to stop for a
rest. But by this time, there were two
women in purple and pink windbreakers walking behind me. Should I walk faster or slow down and let
them pass. At this point, I did not want
human company. Soon enough though there
was another group of men. Where did they
come from? I felt nothing but annoyance,
wishing to be alone. The women were
Swedes, friends who walk pilgrimage routes together every summer. “Have you done the Camino?” they asked. As for the men: there were four of them. Three were three bright eyed and gray-haired but
there was a younger man who seemed to be leading them—tall, lanky, dark-haired,
with an almost oriental cast to his eyes. In the few minutes we walked together, I
learned that he was trying to read Middle English and finding it difficult,
that he quit dentistry to write fiction, that his tutor told him he needed more
of a “story” in the historical fantasies he crafted in the vein of the Hobbit,
and that he was teaching an online class for Oxford in creative writing. When he shook my hand—his hands were large
and soft—I laughed, and I heard my laugh like the voice of grouse scattering in
flight. After a bit of talk, I bounded
away, footsteps thudding like a frightened calf, but the soft hands and the adorable
admissions of his struggle with Chaucer’s English took me by surprise.
That evening in the town of Wooler,
I’d had dinner in the Black Bull pub—the same one I’d sheltered in after coming
down from the high places in the rain to have a relaxing lager while Mom (invisible
but by my side) had her relaxing cigarette.
When I first came in from the rain hill, people looked scared of me, and
I remembered that Moses had to veil his face after being on the mountain. Dinnertime rolled around, and I returned to
the pub with hair combed and settled at a table in the corner to make notes and
wrap myself in solitude. The Swedes came
in but chose not to sit with me.
Afterward I took a short walk around the town, feeling
lonelier than I’d felt all day. I talked
to myself: Why can’t I face the fact
that I, too, want a human story? All the
heroines of novels I love and who walk long distances have love stories even
when, like Dinah in Adam Bede, they
also have vocations. And for
Shakespeare’s Rosalind (the heroine of As
You Like It) falling in love is the sport that is the emotional equivalent
to going to the forest of Arden. I
thought of the handshake and blushed inwardly at how quickly I could spin a
fantasy around this strange man if I wanted to.
Just as I was thinking these things, he appeared, down the street,
standing outside of a hotel. What was
his name? Robin! Good. I
walked right up to him, and he said, “Didn’t I meet you today on the
hill?” I learned more of his story. Dentist.
Revolutionized implants.
Colleagues. Palle, Kai,
Edward. “I hate coming down from the
high places to the town,” I confided, testing the waters. “It breaks the spell, doesn’t it?” Yes. Exactly. I will not write a romance, I told my heart. Yet there was something irresistibly
appealing about having had an experience together and sharing feelings about it.
Simple and profound. I instantly understood Rosalind’s nervousness
when she discovers that Orlando is in the forest, but she’s dressed as a man,
“Oh, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?”
But, at the same time, I held onto the sprouting thought that a human
connection made while walking might lead somewhere other than a romantic entanglement.
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