Last minute preparations

Well I might meet a familiar face along the Camino after all.  A friend of mine will be walking the pilgrimage route at roughly the same time I do, and our walks may overlap at Salceda and Santiago.  She will be doing a more deluxe Camino staying in "charming Galician manors," and her tour will include most meals, baggage transfer, and a guide, but will be walking longer distances as she will be walking 6 days to my more leisurely 9.  As she will be flying to Paris afterward, we should be able to at least catch up there.

I now hear Oprah is interested in the Camino.  According to the free Santiago de Compostela newspaper, Santiagosiete, her crew was recently on site in the city filming for a serial documentary to be called Believe, if I managed to translate the Spanish correctly, which is to be shown on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).  While the film The Way managed to expose a goodly number in the English-speaking world to the Pilgrimage, this series is certainly going to reach an even greater number of Americans that might have missed that film!  And I understand from the Pilgrim Office in Santiago that American pilgrims have grown a whopping 41% in the month of August over last year's statistics, from 4514 to 6787!   If that doesn't speak for the influence of the film (released in 2011 in the US), I don't know what does!  As I commented on the APOC* Facebook blog recently---"I'm glad I'm going now!"

I've managed to pick up a couple more titles from the Rockville library, including Off the Road, by Jack Hitt.  The author is extremely witty, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of his outlandish juxtapositions, but ultimately he comes off a bit smug and uninspiring.  From the offset it is obvious that he not a religious person, and he is extremely good at pointing out some of the absurdities of history, including many odd and unfortunate practices of the Catholic Church through the years.  To his credit, Hitt walks the entire Spanish Camino Frances, interacts with his fellow travelers, and meets a cast of colorful characters along the way.  But this is no Pilgrim's Progress, as Hitt manages to make it from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago virtually unchanged.  Although he denigrates the Frenchwoman he meets at his offset, who dares to challenge him with "you are not a true pilgrim. Why do you come here?," she is correct in her assessment. 

The second title, The Road to Santiago, by Kathryn Harrison,  reflectively recounts the author's three separate experiences walking the Camino Frances in three non-chronological sections. The pregnant Kathryn accidently starts out on her first journey from the Spanish city of Burgos in 1992, while doing historical research for her writing, starts again in Astorga in 1999, makes it to Santiago de Compostela, and then attempts the walk a third time with her 12-year-old daughter in tow, from the French border town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, at the foot of the Pyrenees, to the town of Logroño in northern Spain.  At 150 pages, I easily finished it in an afternoon, a slender tome, intensely personal, but elegantly written.


Pilgrim Route (The Discoveries... Spain series) shown below is a somewhat dated DVD that I borrowed from the library.  As might be expected from the title, this is really about the Pilgrim Route from a touristic point of view.  A fair amount of footage is devoted to wine growing in La Rioja and fly fishing near León, methods both ancient and modern--not exactly useful for my trip. There was some material of interest about the Camino, though.  One Spanish travel commentator compared the Way of Saint James to the Internet of its time, as it linked cultures and allowed them to communicate with each other.  This was also alluded to in some of the earlier works I cited, which discussed the influence and movement of architectural styles and sculpture from one place to another, as the pilgrims, craftsman and tradesmen traveled the route.

I likewise learned from an Australian Camino pilgrim, interviewed in the film, that Shirley MacLaine's 2001 book, The Camino: A Journey of Spirit, was probably the first vehicle to interest the English-speaking world in the pilgrimage route in recent years.  I'm not particularly interested in walking a New-Age Camino, or reading about Ms. MacLaine channeling St. James, so think I'll skip this title.  On the other hand, I have put Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage on hold at the Rockville Library, but it has another reserve ahead of mine so I probably won't see it before I leave.  Apparently walking his 500+ mile Camino was a spiritual awakening and turning point for the Brazilian author, and the work is, thus, autobiographical,written scarcely a year before his international blockbuster, The Alchemist.

The video also mentioned that Saint Francis of Assisi walked the Camino, which was mentioned in at least one of the earlier sources I read. But there is no agreement among scholars that Francis even went to Spain.  Legend has it that Brother Francis and another monk, Brother Bernard, also originally from Assisi and belonging to same order Francis had founded, the Order of Friars Minor, took a mission to Spain in 1213-1214.  While there, the future Saint Francis allegedly walked the Camino de Santiago, barefoot. Many legends surround the life of this popular Saint, and according to one French website, his earliest biographers did not mention this pilgrimage, so it might actually be more fiction than fact.

http://www.saint-jacques.info/francois.htm

 *American Pilgrims on the Camino