The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago

Prologue

prologue Pilgrimsarepersonsinmotion—passing through territories not their own —seeking something we might call completion. —richard r. niebuhr, “pilgrims and pioneers” I couldn’t see my son. He was somewhere ahead of me on the mountain , but I’d lost sight of him as I labored up the muddy, leaf-slippery slope, following the trail as it wound through a copse of mist-shrouded oak and beech trees. We had started out together, Daniel and I, two hours earlier, leaving Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to take the Napoleon Route across the mountains to Roncesvalles on the Spanish side of the border. It was still dark, but the trek to Roncesvalles would take eight or nine hours and even longer if we ran into bad weather or inadvertently took the wrong trail. Before we left Saint-Jean we had a quick, out-of-the-backpack breakfast of ham, cheese, and bread that we’d purchased the previous day. It had rained during the night, and we’d sat on a wet wooden bench beneath the dripping awning of the Brasserie Zuharpeta. The restaurant was dark and the windows shuttered. We’d made baguette sandwiches by the light of a street lamp across the road and eaten them in silence, looking out on the shiny wet asphalt. I’d felt oddly disoriented. Eight years earlier, I had paused for a solitary predawn breakfast at the same shuttered café before embarking on my first pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the Way of St. James, one of the most famous pilgrim routes in the Christian world. Now I was here SIBLEY, The Way of the Stars.indd 1 SIBLEY, The Way of the Stars.indd 1 7/25/12 9:19 AM 7/25/12 9:19 AM  the way of the stars with my son,fulfilling a commitment I’d made to him when I was about to head off on that first trek. He was in high school then, and I’d promised that if he finished school and got a university degree, I would pay for both of us to walk the Camino after his graduation. He had kept his part of the bargain. I was about to keep mine.Yet I wasn’t sure my heart was in it. I had fond memories of my previous journey, but I also knew how hard it could be. As we ate I looked down Rue de Zuharpeta toward the town center and the long stone wall that enclosed the Parc des Remparts. On the far side of the park was the Hôtel des Remparts, also dark in the early hour.A gust of wind rippled the skin of rain on the road and rattled the awning,showering us with cold drops.I heard Daniel say,“Are we going to sit here forever?” Ismiledto myself.At twenty-four,hewantedto move.At fifty-seven, I wanted a nice warm bed. “Patience, my son. I was just remembering the last time I was here.” Staring into the street I saw myself nearly a decade earlier trudging past, knapsack on my back, walking stick tapping the road, rain poncho flapping in the wind. As my younger self passed through my memory I asked him, “Why were you doing this? What were you thinking? Sure,you were excited,but weren’t you a little scared, too, wondering why on earth anyone would go on a religious pilgrimage nowadays?” “Come on, Dad,” Daniel said. “You’re always remembering something . Let’s go.” My son was right. I was procrastinating, but not only because I wanted to delay confronting what I knew lay ahead.I was at an age when memories claimed more and more of my waking thoughts. I tended to savor those fragments of my life that memory had shored against my eventual oblivion. Still, the urgency of youth will have its way. We cleared away our breakfast fixings, shouldered our packs, and followed the curve of Rue de Zuharpeta to Chemin de Saint-Jacques. I felt a rush of pleasure walking the empty streets in the cool damp darkness before dawn, moving in and out of one circle of street light after another, gazing at the darkened windows of the houses while imagining the lives inside, and hearing the echo of our hiking sticks as we tapped along the narrow road between rows of buildings. You’re a pilgrim again, I told myself. SIBLEY...