The Road to Santiago by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2003-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Walker is born two months later in New York, where we give him a name neither of us consciously connects with the idea of pilgrimage. In fact, though our son is blessed, and equally burdened, with a religious temperament, he doesn’t much like to walk. He avoids what he considers inefficient forms of transport.

As for me, infected by my accidental discovery of the road west to Santiago, I promise myself that I will return, and I do.

PART THREE: 1999

One

Sunday, March 21, 1999. 9:00 a.m. Oviedo.

After seven years—seven, that magical cycle: seven days for a stone boat to cross the seas—I come back to Spain, leapfrogging ahead on the path, to the province of León. It is March of 1999. Having been ill and only recently recovered, my health seems newly valuable, precious if no longer precarious. It is not the moment, one might judge, to test it, and Colin is anxious about my insistence on this trip. What do I want from it, he wants to know. I can’t answer very well. Trying to explain, I allude to the opening scene of Peter Pan, when Peter implores Wendy to sew his shadow back onto his feet. “That’s what I want—to walk with myself and cast a shadow, to walk my way back into my body.”

But I don’t know, yet, what this means. I’ve followed only the merest middle fraction of the road west of Burgos, infinitesimal, but enough, like a dormant germ, to lie in wait and then, abruptly, burgeon and take hold.

So here I am in an airport in Oviedo, carrying too many maps, too many history books, a surfeit of guides. Not enough socks, a rucksack that fits poorly, and one weak knee, but these are discoveries I’ve yet to make.

At Oviedo’s bus station bar, I’m drinking café con leche as I wait for my bus to Astorga, the point at which I’ll begin the 283 kilometers that will deliver me to Santiago. Overhead, an outsized television plays nine channels at once, its screen divided like a game of tic-tac-toe: newsreel footage of World War II; a golf tournament; a nature program—predator and prey; an aerobics class; a documentary on ancient Chinese burial practices; CNN, etc. There is no linear time, the animate eye of the TV insists; it’s all happening at once. Patrons drink, smoke, wait to depart. Next to me at the bar, a woman plays a handheld computer game of solitaire, her legs crossed, one foot swinging. Exhausted by the loss of a night’s sleep and agitated by the electronic blips of the solitaire, I feel a shiver of disorientation. It’s as if a trapdoor has opened under my bar stool and, in the manner of a cartoon character, I’m suspended in space, conscious that I am about to plummet.

By the time I get to Astorga I’m more optimistic, reassured by the discovery that the road is marked far more clearly than I had imagined, or even hoped. Yellow scallop shells and arrows make losing one’s way seem impossible.

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