Off the Road (3 page)

I don’t hold myself out as
much of a pilgrim, what with my cloudy motives and facile past. But even as I
sat reading at my desk in New York, my failings became encouragement. Among the
ancient documents that survive are reports that during the Middle Ages many
“others” walked the road, including Moors, then the very stamp of libidinal
mustachioed infidel. A twelfth-century document from the pilgrims’ shelter in Roncesvalles declares: “Its doors are open to all, well and ill, not only to Catholics, but
to pagans, jews and heretics, the idler and the vagabond and, to put it
shortly, the good and the wicked.” I believe I can find myself in that list
somewhere.

W
here does the road to Santiago begin? It was a question my med
ieval predecessors never had to
consider. In those days, a pilgrim simply stepped out of his hut and declared
his
intention. Then he might report to a cloister and receive a signed letter to
serve as proof of intent. Afterward, the pilgrim walked west until he picked up
any of the established routes in Europe. From the east and south, the pilgrim
followed any of four established roads that fanned like fingers across France and converged at the palm of Spain. A few miles inside the Pyrenees, they formed a single
unified road shooting straight across the breadth of the country.

I lived a few doors off Washington Square Park in New York City and an ocean away from my destination. I couldn’t just
walk out my door. For reasons of symmetry and authenticity, this bothered me. I
thought I would toss a coin onto a map of France and proceed from there, but
this seemed too haphazard. It felt wrong to begin this trip with such an
American sense of abandon. I studied a map of France to see if any of the
cities had a personal significance. I checked my family’s records to see if any
ancestors a few centuries back might have had some interaction in this part of Europe, but according to all available information, one branch was too busy fleeing
Prussian law while the other was stuffing a sheep’s stomach for a weekend of
haggis. Arles, Montpellier, Carcasonne, and Toulouse were not likely vacation
spots for Teutonic horse thieves or Scottish presbyters.

One Saturday I happened upon
a brochure that offered a solution. Not only could I walk out my front door, I
could take the New York subway. I boarded the A train, immortalized by Duke
Ellington, and took it almost to the end, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art
maintains a branch called the Cloisters. The museum is an assemblage of ruins
from four medieval cloisters, dating from the Romanesque and Gothic periods,
and once located on the road to Santiago. I resolved to spend a quiet afternoon
among the weathered columns and begin there.

The most beautiful—the
cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert —is covered by a plastic dome. Fat gobs of New York City rain fell the afternoon I visited, making a bass-drum thump that left me
feeling strangely dry. Instead of the customary central garden, there is a
marble floor, giving the space the linoleum acoustics of a grade school
cafeteria. My attempt at meaningful silence was carefully monitored by a
suspicious security guard who understood museum policy and the slight reach of
his power only too well. At one point he chased a camera-toting teenager in a
ludicrous race around the columns after a disagreement over competing
interpretations of the flash-attachment policy. Packs of schoolchildren
snickered and laughed at the often lewd capital carvings, and the guard’s
echoing shouts of “Quiet!” were louder still. In a moment of pure museum irony,
a man who had been there quite a while was asked to leave because he was
loitering.

After the rain broke, I went
out back where a stone porch opened to a view of the Hudson River and the New
Jersey Palisades. It all fell into place: I would begin here, fly to
Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in France, visit the original site, and take up the
walk from there.

The cloister is, like a
pilgrimage, the literal representation of the same idea. On a pilgrimage and in
a cloister, the longer journey of three score and ten is reduced symbolically
to something much smaller—a few months of walking or a stroll around the
cloister’s four-sided garden. Both have a beginning, middle, and end. Both
force upon the visitor a number of encounters— on the road, these are random
events; in the cloister, these are sculpture. And both offer a finale of
redemption. On the road, it is the physical exhilaration of arrival. At the
cloister, it’s the walk into the direct center, a place the monks called
paradeisos.
So I thought a visit to a monastery cloister would be appropriate.

The idea of a monastery grew
out of the thinking of a hermit named Benedict who lived in the sixth century
during the declining days of the Roman Empire. He had committed himself to the
reigning idea of his day—a life of utter solitude in the wilderness. This idea
had been imported from the Holy Land, where hermits pursued different fashions
of isolation. The stylites sat on the top of a pole. The dendrites carved a
hole in a tree and lived inside. For his effort, Benedict isolated himself in Italy at the mouth of a cave not far from Nero’s summer house. He clothed himself in animal
skins, which his biographer reports frightened the local shepherds. He ate
berries.

But the call of the hermit’s
life was not attracting too many Europeans. It was a bad time to be alone in the
woods. The sixth century saw the continuing collapse of Roman order, opening
the door to the invading Huns, Visigoths, and Longobards. From time to time,
the barbarians would drop down to cut the tongues from women and disembowel the
men. This was the era when the famously airy architecture of Roman atriums and
columned porticoes closed up. Castles were built, moats were dug, drawbridges
were engineered. It would not be long before the religious orders sought a
similar kind of protection. Benedict is credited with solving these problems.
His innovation offered isolated monks a sliver of companionship and physical
protection: a monastery.

Like all good ideas,
Benedict’s was not immediately embraced. His first collective of monks didn’t
appreciate his harsh rules and tried to murder him. But others liked the idea,
and eventually Benedict wrote a strict code of monastic living called
Benedict’s
Rule,
which is still observed today. Reading
Benedict’s Rule,
though, one can sense a yearning for utter solitude—not the minimal society of
the monastery, but the pure singularity of the desert, far from the corruption
of man, alone in nature. To stand in a cloister, even skylighted in plastic and
teeming with riotous schoolchildren, is to feel the architectural memory of
Benedict’s original idea. The cloister is a patch of that wilderness, imported
and modified to the demands of society. It is a bit of desert, open directly to
the original skyward view of the hermit, secreted away in the center of the
monastery. The cloister is not the perfection of an idea, but rather a constant
reminder of its compromise. The cloister is nostalgia. It is an original plan
fallen short, a vestige of an older and purer sense of purpose. Like my own
effort, the cloister is somewhat corrupt, an acknowledgment of failure.

As I began to read up on
these particular cloisters in New York, I marveled at how perfect they were for
my beginning. The reason they’re in Manhattan and not on the road to Santiago is because of a desperate American sculptor. At the turn of the century, Robert
Barnard made his rent money by buying medieval artworks from guileless French
rustics and selling them for impressive profits. He began with small statues
but eventually was buying entire monasteries. When the French government found
out that the nation’s patrimony was being shipped off to serve as lawn
ornaments in the front yards of American millionaires, a huzzah went up in Paris. Just days before December 31, 1913—when the French parliament outlawed Barnard’s
hobby —he packed 116 crates of his precious cargo, each numbered and cataloged,
and sailed for New York on the next boat.

For a while, Barnard ran his
own museum in Manhattan, but when money problems arose again, he offered to
sell his medieval cloisters to some Californians for use in an amusement park.
A cry went up among the Fifth Avenue set in New York, and the call for a white
knight was heard.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. was
a curious savior from West Coast tastelessness. Among his architectural
achievements, he had spent millions erecting his idea of “colonial America” in Williamsburg, Virginia, where women in Betsy Ross dresses and men in breeches escorted
tourists to the town stockades for a wry photo opportunity.

With his new cloisters,
Rockefeller ran through a number of plans. At one point he wanted to create a
feeling of lost grandeur he associated with abandoned castles and King Arthur,
but the most sophisticated architects of the day cautiously explained the
logistical
difficulty
of using religious carvings from France to construct a secular castle from England. Rockefeller caught on and soon realized that what
he had purchased was the emblem of the solitary search, that desire for monkish
isolation, Benedict’s idea. Rockefeller grew obsessed with the Cloisters and
demanded daily briefings. He had notions of his own.

Across the Fludson River, seen from the parapet of the Cloisters, are the vast cliffs known as the New
Jersey Palisades. This state park extends from the George Washington Bridge all the way upriver to the state border. One might assume that this preservation was the
result of some antidevelopment politician. Actually John D. Rockefeller bought
that thirteen-mile stretch. He wanted to preserve the quiet contemplation of
his Cloisters —to carve out of the thickest clot of American urbanity a bit of
nature that straddled a river and gave almost no hint of the presence of man.
Rockefeller understood the idea of the cloister. He imported that ancient
yearning for the desert, via Benedict, into New York City. I had found my place
in America to begin.

The only duty remaining was
what to wear. I am not being coy. Pilgrim fashion is not a glib subject.
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the clothes a pilgrim wore became a
style as widely known in its symbolism as a king’s crown. Parliaments met and
debated pilgrim’s clothes. Their sale was licensed and regulated by
bureaucracies. Underground markets for certain pilgrim items flourished at
times. Kings corresponded on the subject. Some legal scholars argue that
pilgrim fashion created its own brand of law. Any person—peasant or
noble—wearing the official pilgrim’s garb was exempt from the laws of the
country through which he was passing and was judged instead under a special
collection of statutes written expressly for pilgrims— the first international
law.

This outfit became so
recognized that pilgrims en route to Santiago had to wear it if they expected
to receive the benefits of the road—free lodging, food, and respect. Obviously,
with such perks available, the clothing had to be regulated. Four popes issued
decrees, backed up by excommunication, outlining the rules and regulations for
the sale of the pilgrim’s outfit and even its duplication in souvenirs. In 1590
King Philip II issued a decree restricting the donning of this apparel in Spain to a narrow corridor running the length of the road from the Pyrenees to Santiago.

A pilgrim wore a dashing
full-length black cape to serve as protection from wind by day and to provide a
blanket by night. On his feet were strong boots. To block the sun and rain, he
wore on his head a fetching broad-brimmed black hat. He carried a staff for
protection and tied to it a gourd for carrying water. At the waist was a small
satchel called a crip for carrying money, a knife, and toiletries. On the cape
or hat, or hanging around the neck, or fastened almost anywhere, was at least
one scallop shell, the symbol of the Santiago pilgrim.

Once I got familiar with
this classic image, it began to appear everywhere, even in New York. Walking to
the Spanish embassy one day, I passed Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. A giant stone Saint James, fully dressed, stands beside the front entrance. As
I did my homework, I discovered the pilgrim in the paintings of Bosch, El Greco,
Rubens, Ribera, Murillo, and Raphael. Either as the main subject or in the
background, the wayfaring pilgrim in trademark apparel can be seen drifting
through centuries of European landscapes.

By the late Middle Ages the
Catholic missal included a “prayer for the walking stick,” which stated that as
the pilgrim’s third leg, the staff represented the trinity. There was also a
“blessing of the backpack,” which taught that the “backpack is made of the
rawhide of a dead beast” because “the pilgrim ought to torment his own depraved
and lusting flesh with hunger and thirst, with great abstinence, with cold and
destitution, with punishment and hard labor.”

The thought of dressing up
this way and tormenting my own depraved, lusting flesh didn’t really fit in with
my plans. I grew up Episcopalian after all. Yet wouldn’t it be a more authentic
experience if I were to wear the clothes described in the medieval documents?

Then I asked myself, Did the
pilgrims take along a staff because they wanted that three-legged symbolism? Or
did they carry a sturdy piece of oak to beat wild dogs in the head? Did they
tote the rucksack because they wanted something abrasive to give them blisters
and rashes? Or did they originally carry their food in it? Wasn’t all this
gear—the hat to block the sun, the cape for warmth at night—originally meant to
reduce suffering? These other meanings were imposed. Which came first: the
backpack as a device to ease portage or the backpack as a tormentor of depraved
and lusting flesh? I set off immediately to a shop called EMS: The Outdoor
Specialists.