Today’s walk felt like a rebuttal from the Katy Trail. “Don’t like all those shady trails, huh? How about you try walking on the nearly-non-existent shoulders of well-traveled roads for the better part of 27 miles, with only one chance at a break?” After one car whipped past with about a foot of space between us, I scowled briefly and then started laughing. It’s probably a bad look to complain about this, after everything I said about Missouri!
The most notable aspect of this walk was the return of hills, gentle as they may have been. My body was confused! As strong as I am at this point, I have definitely lost some edge when it comes to ascents, and that makes me leery of the last part of this walk, in Colorado. And also excited.
The night was spent at an airbnb in Eudora, Kansas, which definitely felt quintessentially American. As I strolled over to the supermarket, “Heartland Foods,” I walked past a bunch of kids heading home from school, sometimes joined by parents who were debriefing the day. Near the store, cars pulled in to Sonic for afternoon snacks. Other people walked their dogs through the shady residential streets, lined with houses that seemed to be single-story, though if my airbnb is any indication, most of them probably have basements. The compact old Main Street had the thrift stores, historical societies, and post office I’m accustomed to seeing at this point, but also a new upscale coffee shop and a yoga studio. It was all very pleasant.
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Early on in this walk, a student who had been in my Spain group this year asked me if this was a pilgrimage as well. No, I wrote at the time, definitely not. While I felt clear in that response, it was also premature to offer any sort of judgment. Now that I’m past the halfway point of this installment, I want to wrestle with that question in a bit more detail.
First, I should probably address my perception of what pilgrimage is. I come to the world of long-distance walking from that background, having spent the better part of the last two decades walking hundreds of miles of pilgrimages annually. The most famous of these is Spain’s Camino de Santiago, and more specifically the “Camino Francés,” which draws a quarter-million walkers a year, some covering 100km, some 800km, and a few considerably more. The camino is a medieval Catholic pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain, to where the faithful believed the apostle James’s (Santiago) relics had been miraculously transported following his martyrdom.
Now, most modern pilgrims aren’t especially religious, and the majority of people who have actually looked into the stories surrounding the relics don’t believe that Santiago’s physical remains are situated there. Count me in both groups. Nonetheless, I would generally characterize my walks to Santiago as pilgrimages, for a few reasons. First, I am quite literally walking to Santiago, a sacred destination, with every day in that process oriented towards that target. There is explicit intent. Second, and more importantly, the historic nature of the pilgrimage has shaped many aspects of the walk. The very roads I follow, even hundreds of miles out, bear Compostela’s name and have been trodden by pilgrims for a millennium. The churches were built by artisans drawn to the pilgrimage, with their architectural techniques spread along the way. The people offering shelter to pilgrims have been drawn to the work by the spirit of the road. So many aspects of the experience have been shaped by that shared belief that, even if one doesn’t ascribe to the belief, it is impossible to operate completely outside of it. It is in the very air one breathes. Third, that dynamic creates a certain set of self-reflective prompts, on the nature of belief, that are recycled in my mind and in conversations along the way. The route shapes a particular mindset that becomes the lens through which the experiences are processed.
By contrast, it’s easy to argue that this route offers none of those elements. Now, a coast-to-coast approach has a much tidier narrative frame, and maybe I’ll feel that more fully when I take that on, but it’s hard to portray a walk between Cincinnati and Denver as anything other than arbitrary, even acknowledging the ADT’s route. While some contemporary walkers have preceded me here, and I familiarize myself with their experiences on Trail Journals, there’s no collective imprint on this walk. Each of us is little more than a snowflake on a windshield, pretty for a moment with no lasting imprint. (Originally I used “bug” as a metaphor, but decided to go a different way, as it can be damn hard to get some of these juicy critters washed off.)
That said, once I cleared Indiana and Illinois, I have found myself increasingly on well-traveled ground, first syncing up with Lewis & Clark on the Missouri River and now overlapping with many of the wagon trails that manifested destiny all the way to the Pacific. And maybe that will offer a tighter lens through which to process these experiences, a unifying frame on the construction of America. Out of many fragmented narratives, one emerges.
I don’t know. It’s a whole different process, shifting from a route in which you’re inserting yourself into a well-established narrative, to instead almost starting from scratch. I suppose it is, authentically, a process of discovery, as the route promises. In exchange for clarity comes the freedom of choice, with bonus muddling.
So, to this point, my original take stands–not a pilgrimage. As for what it is, though, I’m still sorting that out.
