Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

  Those in other disciplines who speculate about walking speculate about what meanings it can be invested with—how it can be made an instrument of contemplation, of prayer, of competition. What makes these scientists, for all their squabbles, significant is their attempt to discuss what meanings are intrinsic to walking—not what we make it but how it made us. Walking is an odd fulcrum in human evolutionary theory. It is the anatomical transformation that propelled us out of the animal kingdom to eventually occupy our own solitary position of dominion over the earth. Now it remains as a limitation, no longer leading us into a fantastic future but linking us to an ancient past as the same gait of a hundred thousand or a million, or if you go with Lovejoy, three million years ago. It may have made possible the work of the hands and the expansion of the mind, but it remains as something not particularly powerful or fast. If it once separated us from the rest of the animals, it now—like sex and birth, like breathing and eating—connects us to the limits of the biological.

  The morning before I left I went walking in the national park, starting out from the rocks where Pat was teaching climbing, pacing myself to stay cool and hydrated. His father had told him, and he had told me, that the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you’ll see coming back. It’s good advice for this confusing landscape. I started amid a big cluster of rocks, an archipelago or a neighborhood of rock piles each the size of a huge building; like buildings they cut off views, so you have to know the lay of the land and local landmarks rather than counting on distant sights to steer by as in other deserts. With the morning sun at my left, I went south along a path that crossed a road to become a fainter road itself, with tufts of grass in the center; it curved along to the southwest and ended in another, much-used road. Small lizards darted into the bushes as I went by, and a faint flush of tender green grass was everywhere in the shade, spears an inch or two high from the downpour a few weeks ago. Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time. My road reached the dead end of a private property boundary, so I circled around, guessing I could find another path back to the rock cluster, flirting with being lost. Mountain ranges appeared and disappeared on the horizon as I rotated around the plain and returned to the rocks. Eventually I met the point where my trail crossed the disused road, found my own footprints going the other way, printed crisply atop the softer footprints of people who’d passed this way on previous days, and followed that trace of my own passing an hour or so ago back to where I started.

  Chapter 4

  THE UPHILL ROAD TO GRACE:

  Some Pilgrimages

  Walking came from Africa, from evolution, and from necessity, and it went everywhere, usually looking for something. The pilgrimage is one of the basic modes of walking, walking in search of something intangible, and we were on pilgrimage. The red earth between the piñon and juniper trees was covered with a shining mix of quartz pebbles, chips of mica, and the cast-off skins of cicadas who had gone underground again for another seventeen years. It was a strange pavement to be walking on, both lavish and impoverished, like much of New Mexico. We were walking to Chimayó, and it was Good Friday. I was the youngest of the six people setting out cross country for Chimayó that day, and the only nonlocal. The group had coalesced a few days before, when various characters, myself included, asked Greg if he would mind company. Two of the others were members of Greg’s cancer survivors’ group, a surveyor and a nurse, and my friend Meridel had brought her neighbor David, a carpenter.

  Although we were on our own route—or rather Greg’s route—we had joined the great annual pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayó and thus were walking as pilgrims. Pilgrimage is one of the fundamental structures a journey can take—the quest in search of something, if only one’s own transformation, the journey toward a goal—and for pilgrims, walking is work. Secular walking is often imagined as play, however competitive and rigorous that play, and uses gear and techniques to make the body more comfortable and more efficient. Pilgrims, on the other hand, often try to make their journey harder, recalling the origin of the word travel in travail, which also means work, suffering, and the pangs of childbirth. Since the Middle Ages, some pilgrims have traveled barefoot or with stones in their shoes, or fasting, or in special penitential garments. Irish pilgrims at Croagh Patrick still climb that stony mountain barefoot on the last Sunday of every July, and pilgrims in other places finish the journey on their knees. An early Everest mountaineer noted a still more arduous mode of pilgrimage in Tibet. “These devout and simple people travel sometimes two thousand miles, from China and Mongolia, and cover every inch of the way by measuring their length on the ground,” wrote Captain John Noel. “They prostrate themselves on their faces, marking the soil with their fingers a little beyond their heads, arise and bring their toes to the mark they have made and fall again, stretched full length on the ground, their arms extended, muttering an already million-times-repeated prayer.”

  In Chimayó, a few pilgrims every year come carrying crosses, from lightweight and relatively portable models to huge ones that must be dragged step by weary step. Inside the chapel that is their destination one such cross is preserved to the right of the altar, and a small metal plaque by its carrier declares, “This cross is a symbol in thanking God for the safe return of my son Ronald E. Cabrera from combat duty in Viet-Nam. I Ralph A. Cabrera promised to make a pilgrimage, which consisted of walking 150 miles from Grants New Mexico to Chimayó. This pilgrimage was finished on the 28th day of November 1986.” Cabrera’s plaque and knobby wooden crucifix, about six feet high with a folkloric carved Christ attached to it, make it clear that a pilgrimage is work, or rather labor in a spiritual economy in which effort and privation are rewarded. Nobody has ever quite articulated whether this economy is one in which benefits are incurred for labor expended or the self is refined into something more worthy of such benefit—and nobody needs to; pilgrimage is almost universally embedded in human culture as a literal means of spiritual journey, and asceticism and physical exertion are almost universally understood as means of spiritual development.

  Some pilgrimages, such as that to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, are entirely on foot from beginning to end; the pilgrimage begins with the first step, and the journey itself is the most important part. Others, such as the Islamic hajj in Mecca or various denominations’ visits to Jerusalem, nowadays are as likely to begin with airplanes, and the walking only begins upon arrival (though West African Muslims may spend a lifetime or generations slowly walking toward Saudi Arabia, and a whole culture of nomads has grown up whose eventual goal is Mecca). Chimayó is still a walking pilgrimage, though most walkers have a driver who dropped them off and will pick them up. It’s a pilgrimage in an intensely automotive culture, alongside the highway north from Santa Fe and then on the shoulder of the smaller road northeast to Chimayó. The roadside for the last several miles is studded with cars whose drivers are keeping track of family or friends, and in town the air can be noxious with carbon monoxide from the traffic jam; from Santa Fe onward, it’s also studded with signs to drive slowly and watch for pilgrims.

  Greg’s route began about twelve miles north of Santa Fe and cut across country to join up with the rest of the pilgrims only a few miles from Chimayó. We had arrived at eight in the morning at the land Greg and his wife MaLin had bought long ago, and for him the walk tied their land to the holy land due north some sixteen or so miles. It made sense for the rest of us too; none of us were Catholics or even Christians, and walking cross-country let us be in that nonbeliever’s paradise, nature, before we arrived at this most traditional of religious destinations. I kept having to remind myself it wasn’t a hike and get over my desire to move at my own speed and make good time. As it turned out, it was slowness that would make this walk hard.

  Like much of northern New Mexico, the town of Chimayó exudes a sense
of ancientness that sets it apart from the rest of the forgetful United States. The Indians here embedded the landscape with stone buildings, potsherds, and petroglyphs, and Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi people have remained a very visible portion of the population. The Hispanic population is also large and old, and their ancestors established Santa Fe as the first European-inhabited town in what would become the United States. Neither of these peoples has been forgotten or eradicated as they have in other parts of the country; nobody imagines that this landscape was uninhabited wilderness before the Yankees came. And in fact the Yankees who come tend to borrow and revel in the cultures, becoming connoisseurs of adobe architecture and Indian silver work, of Pueblo dances and Hispanic crafts and everyone’s customs, including the pilgrimage.

  Before the Conquistadors came, Chimayó had been inhabited by ancestors of the contemporary Tewa Pueblo people, and they named the hill above the Santuario Tsi Mayo, “the place of good flaking stone.” Records of Spanish settlement in the Chimayó valley date back to 1714, and the plaza at the north end of this narrow, well-watered agricultural valley is said to be one of the best remaining examples of colonial architecture in the region. Like much of New Mexico, it is insular; one of its children, Don Usner, says in his history of the place that those of the plaza didn’t intermarry with people at the Potrero in the southern end of the valley. In colonial times the Spanish settlers were forbidden to travel without permission, and an extremely local, land-based identity evolved. In another northern New Mexico village I had lived in the year before this pilgrimage, someone once tartly remarked of a neighbor, “They’re not from here. We remember when their great-grandfather moved here.” The Spanish spoken here is old-fashioned, and it is often noted that the culture derives from pre-Enlightenment Spain. In its strong agricultural and local ties and traditions, its widespread poverty, its conservative social views, and its devout, magical Catholicism, this culture often seems like a last outpost of the Middle Ages.

  The Santuario is in the southern end of Chimayó, on its own little unpaved plaza past a street of crumbling adobe houses and shops with hand-lettered signs and chile ristras. Graves fill the courtyard of this small, sturdily built adobe church. Inside it’s covered in faded murals depicting the saints and Christ hung on a green cross in a style reminiscent of both Byzantine and Pennsylvania Dutch painting. The northern chapels are what make the church exceptional, though. The first is full of pictures of Jesus, Mary, and the saints brought in by devotees, and hand-painted images mingle with 3D and decoupage icons, a silver-glitter Virgin of Guadalupe, and a printed, varnished, cracked Last Supper. The outer wall of this chapel is covered with crucifixes, in front of which hang a solid row of crutches, their silvery aluminum forming a surface as regular as prison bars through which many Christs peer. Through a low doorway to the west is the most important part of the church, a little chapel where the hole in the unpaved floor yields up the dirt pilgrims take home. This year it had in it a small green plastic scoop from a detergent carton with which to take up the moistly crumbling sandy earth. People used to drink this earth dissolved in water, and they still collect it to apply to diseased and injured areas and write to the church of miraculous cures. The crutches here testify, as they do in many pilgrimage sites, to cures of lameness.

  When I first came here several years before, I had heard of many holy wells of water, but I was astonished to find a holy well of dirt. The Catholic church doesn’t generally consider dirt much of a medium for holiness, but the dirt well in Chimayó is exceptional. The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner use the term “baptizing the customs” to describe how the Catholic church assimilated local practices as it spread across Europe and the Americas—which is why, for example, so many of Ireland’s holy wells were holy before they were Christian. It is now thought that the Tewa considered the earth here sacred or at least of medicinal virtue before the Spanish came, and that in the smallpox plague of the 1780s the Spanish women acquired some of their customs. To consider earth holy is to connect the lowest and most material to the most high and ethereal, to close the breach between matter and spirit. It subversively suggests that the whole world might potentially be holy and that the sacred can be underfoot rather than above. On earlier visits, I was given to understand that the well was supposed to replenish itself magically, and such inexhaustibility has been the stuff of miracles since the bottomless drinking horns of Celtic literature and Jesus’ own multiplying loaves and fishes. Certainly the hole in the dirt floor of the chapel is still only about the size of a bucket after nearly two centuries of devotees scooping out soil to take home. But the religious literature I bought next door made it clear that the priests add earth from elsewhere that has been blessed, and on Good Friday a large box of such earth rests on the altar.

  The story goes that during Holy Week early in the nineteenth century a local landowner, Don Bernardo Abeyta, was performing the customary penances of his religious society in the hills. He saw a light shining from a hole in the ground and found in it a silver crucifix that, when brought to other churches, would be found again in the hole in Chimayó. After the crucifix returned to the hole three times, Don Bernardo understood that the miracle was tied to the site, and he built a private chapel there in 1814–16. The curative properties of the earth were already known in 1813—a pinch of it in the fire was said to abate storms. The miracle story fits the pattern for many pilgrimage sites, notably the medieval “cycle of the shepherds” in which a cowherd, shepherd, or farmer discovers a holy image in the earth or some other humble place amid miraculous light or music or homage by the beasts, an image that cannot be relocated, for the miracle and the place are one. The Turners write of Christian pilgrimage, “All sites of pilgrimage have this in common: they are believed to be places where miracles once happened, still happen, and may happen again.”

  Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. Pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and the material in its emphasis on the story and its setting: though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in terms of the most material details—of where the Buddha was born or where Christ died, where the relics are or the holy water flows. Or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrimage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul. Pilgrimage unites belief with action, thinking with doing, and it makes sense that this harmony is achieved when the sacred has material presence and location. Protestants, as well as the occasional Buddhist and Jew, have objected to pilgrimages as a kind of icon worship and asserted that the spiritual should be sought within as something wholly immaterial, rather than out in the world.

  There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage, as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one’s body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the body and the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. In pilgrimage, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her own and in this way too becomes part of the religion made up of stories of travel and transformation.

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bsp; Tolstoy captures this in a longing that comes to Princess Marya in War and Peace as she feeds the myriad Russian pilgrims that pass by her home: “Often as she listened to the pilgrims’ tales she was so fired by their simple speech, natural to them but to her full of deep meaning, that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself dressed in coarse rags and with her wallet and staff, walking along a dusty road.” She has imagined her life of genteel seclusion become clear, sparse, and intense with a purpose she can move toward. Walking expresses both the simplicity and the purposefulness of the pilgrim. As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, “When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape. . . . A young German man expressed it this way: ‘In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can’t escape yourself.’ ”