In hindsight, it’s fair to say I was naïve. Perhaps a little foolish. Maybe a lot.
I knew that the walk from Montecasale to La Verna would be challenging, even under serene conditions. The elevation gain/loss on the docket was among the highest of the trip, and services along the way were limited to a single town nearly 30km in. Conditions, however, were abysmal. At least two inches of rain had fallen over the past 24 hours, and the trail had already been sloppy in my ascent to the hermitage.
In preparation, I cleared my exit strategy with Friar Francesco, who told me it would be fine to depart through the church, unbolting each of the exit doors–not an experience I’ve had before! While daylight is generally breaking through by 6am, I emerged into a deep gloom, the whole mountainside ensconced in clouds, a persistent drizzle that soon gave way to a steady rain. I immediately set out in the wrong direction.
I turned it around quickly enough and settled into a solid rhythm. I cracked a smile as I clung tightly to the sides of my poncho; all of that dwelling the night before, all those dreary expectations. Truly, the anticipation is always the worst part.
And then I hit the river. I’ve never seen anything like it on pilgrimage, where the worst encounters with swollen streams generally just result in wet feet and a few grumbles. This was surging, angry, bursting well beyond its traditional embankments. I tried walking upstream, but saw little cause for optimism. Downstream was a waterfall. I stared. I paced. I walked back upstream. Maybe… just maybe, I thought, there was a section where the river flattened out briefly, didn’t look quite so choppy. I took two tentative steps in, clinging to a tree branch, and quickly had water up to my mid-thigh. I bailed out as fast as possible. I shuffled back to the trail, half my body now soaking. I stared at the gps. If I couldn’t cross this river, I simply couldn’t continue. Less than an hour into the morning, I’d be conceding the day, something I’ve never had to do on pilgrimage.
Eventually, I spotted a road on the gps, probably 2km south and 100-150m in elevation downward. And maybe a road would mean a bridge. I started scrambling down the hillside, and before long I stumbled across a game trail–narrow and inconsistent, but generally moving in the right direction. Heartened, I pushed on, clinging tightly to the hillside when it narrowed down to a foot in clearance, and then relaxing as it opened back up, slowly but surely advancing on that road. But then I took a quick glance at the gps and did a double-take; it suggested that I had somehow crossed the road. I backtracked, zoomed in, shook my phone around in the air a few times for good measure, but nothing changed the fact that I was standing in the middle of the digital road, which had no equivalent in reality. Fortunately, there were no other pilgrims out on this miserable morning, because I swore. Loudly.
In for a dime, in for a dollar. I might as well still descend to the river. This much farther downstream, perhaps it would have flattened out, cooled off a bit. And once again, at a moment of despair, fortune offered an olive branch–another game trail, moving in exactly the right direction. Sure enough, it delivered me to the river… where there was still zero reasonable chance of making a crossing. In disbelief, I paced back along the river, when I stumbled at last into a possibility, an opportunity. A tree had fallen across the river, covered in vines–big, stable, and totally viable. I didn’t even take a moment to think about it; I really should have taken a moment to remove my poncho, which proved to be the biggest threat in the crossing, grabbing onto every misplaced branch. Nonetheless, the tree was the ideal bridge, with impeccable footing and sufficient branches to hold onto for additional balance. I was through!
I looked at the clock. In two hours and fifteen minutes, I had covered five kilometers of the official route. Damn.
I staggered through the village of Montagna, psyching myself back up. I’d accomplished the impossible; I had found the one viable crossing of the river of doom. I pulled a sandwich out of my pack, the leftovers of last night’s dinner, and munched mechanically as the rain soaked the stale bread. A steady ascent followed, well timed to generate some heat as my wet clothes clung to my body. I settled back into a flow, built up some steam, restored a sense of belief in my ability to manage this day.
And then I reached another out-of-control river. No. Not again. That’s just not fair. I couldn’t believe it, despite the fact that there was every reason to expect that this phenomenon would recur. I repeated the same process, exploring up and downstream, determining that there was no great workaround. This time, though, it seemed like the river wasn’t quite so deep, and that there was a flatter segment across which I might be able to maneuver with care. I broke a branch off a tree, wedging it at an angle into the riverbed, and began baby-stepping my way across. My assessment proved to be accurate enough; the water never moved much above my knees, and the stick kept me stable throughout the crossing. Once I was within a meter, I lunged for a tree on the opposite embankment and hugged my way back to solid ground.
My shoes squished as I set back off down the trail, feeling encouraged by the success. The delay hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as the previous encounter, and the level of peril hadn’t been quite as worrying.
And then I reached another swollen stream. A small Via di Francesco sign stood nearby, alerting pilgrims that they are not allowed to cross when the water level is high. I stared agape, not sure whether to laugh or rage against the sign. While this stream wasn’t as wide as the previous two, it was filled with jagged rocks and cascading water–a total blender. The most terrifying moment of the day occurred as I turned back from the stream to walk back up the trail a bit, only to feel my feet sliding in the slick mud, back down to the churn. What an ignominious end, to be sunk by poor traction. Somehow, though, my shoes dug in and halted their descent, and I gingerly, so damn gingerly, inched my way back up. After all that drama, I was able to circumvent the river easily enough, by cutting 50m downstream, through brambles, to a flatter stretch where I splashed through.
Only one other river would require the demi-immersion experience, with a tree branch employed as a stabilizer. I lost track, though, of the number of smaller streams that I just stomped through, or the trails-turned-riverbeds, which kept my feet fully pruned all day long.
Whatever relief I felt about clearing the last of the overpowered rivers was soon displaced by anxiety about the descent–700 meters’ worth of muck and roll. I think I wiped out three times in all, though one was a stunning near-save, near-disaster, when my foot shot out from beneath me, I flew backwards, and somehow managed to over-correct mid-air, to the point that my body actually flung forward, with my right shin making contact with the muddy downhill as my left foot managed to catch my full body weight and keep me upright. Poetry in motion.
Near the bottom, I passed the Eremo di Cerbaiolo, where I ran into the only two pilgrims I saw all day. I warned them–really, I think the expression on my face warned them far more than my words did–but they indicated they were only going a handful of kilometers to a B&B, as they had been advised not to go any further. That’s some good advice they got.
I staggered into Pieve Santo Stefano, like a shipwrecked sailor heaving his way onto shore. Fortunately, the persistent rain had washed most of the mud off my poncho and the most visible parts of my pants, so I didn’t raise too many eyebrows when I raided the supermarket. I was feeling that odd mixture of adrenaline at having accomplished such a challenging hike and raggedness that comes from having run the engine at full throttle for so long, and I was grappling with what still lay ahead–15km of constant uphill, climbing 850m to La Verna. It was already 2pm. There would be no shame in a taxi.
No glory, either.
I turned into a bar and ordered a doppio–a double shot of espresso. I popped three imitation Lindt chocolates. And then I cinched down my straps and hit that mountain at full steam, never pausing, never yielding, only slowing when the muck returned in full force near the top, including a particularly dicey descent alongside a barbed wire fence. It didn’t matter. Nothing could stop me. I had already taken the worst that the day could throw at me.
Finally, I turned onto a paved road, the final approach to La Verna, the site where Saint Francis experienced the stigmata. My mind was churning like the morning rivers, a flurry of activity, competing signals of triumph and despair and excitement and befuddlement. Outside, though, was total peace and calm. Fog settled upon the wooded hillside, tall trees reaching upward into the gray, as my shoes fell softly upon the asphalt. For all I knew, I was the only human here at this moment; there was no movement, no sound, not even any rain. After everything I had endured, this was my reward–the great shrine left to me, alone.
I saw a sign for the foresteria, where I had a bed waiting, a hot shower, dry clothes. I disregarded it and passed through the arch, looping around the back into the sanctuary. A large cross stood at the edge of a small piazza, promising what must at other times be a remarkable view. I turned away and entered the church, passing the small display of relics and approaching the altar.
800 years ago–ok, if we want to be precise, it was 801 years ago, in 1224–Francis was praying here, in this most secluded of places, when he had a vision of Jesus being embraced by a seraph. When he emerged from the vision, he was discovered to have wounds in all the same places as the crucified Christ, the stigmata. Unlike Padre Pio, though, this doesn’t seem to have raised a great deal of controversy or consternation; on the contrary, it was more of a coronation, reinforcing the Francis-Jesus parallels that had already been a subject of much discussion at the time.
I’ve never really understood the point of the stigmata. Why would this be a desirable feat, to replicate the injuries of the tortured messiah? I can see where the criticism of Padre Pio’s story comes from, as it seems like a callous and self-flattering way to connect oneself to Jesus. I’ve been reading Carla Salvati’s dissertation on the relics of the stigmata, though, and I was struck by the example she spotlighted of Bonaventure comparing the stigmata in Francis’s case to “the impression left by a seal,” a process by which “Christ’s wounds were impressed on Francis’s flesh, made malleable by the ardour of his soul.” She then cites a story told by Bernardino of Siena, of a merchant who saw Jesus at the altar of Siena’s duomo, his footprints visible in ashes on the ground. While generations of saints had tried to follow in Jesus’s footprints, Bernardino explains, it was only “the little poor Francis, who placed his feet precisely where Christ had placed his… because he showed himself to be so close a follower of God that there could be found no one who had followed in the footprints of Christ so much as he.”
Inside the foresteria, I found a group of pilgrims, who like me have been following Francis’s footprints for days or weeks. Many opted for a rest day today, and they had the look of people who had been sitting for hours in the same little room, cooped up by the weather. I wasn’t quite ready to reintegrate into humanity, though, so I set off to the pilgrim dorm, peeled off my clothes, and took a very long shower.
It was like I woke in an entirely different place the following morning. While the sun hadn’t completely reclaimed supremacy, the rain was gone, and the world had reopened around La Verna. The upside of an 8am breakfast time was that it afforded me ample opportunity to pay a more complete visit to the shrine. And then I proceeded to cram at least a thousand calories down my gullet, while chatting with two Americans who I was excited to learn are remarkably accomplished hikers. The husband is a double triple-crowner, having completed the PCT, CDT, and AT twice each, while his wife was the third woman ever to complete the PCT. Every time you start to think you’re pretty badass, there’s someone waiting around the corner to remind you–in the most polite and generous way–that you’re just one of many.
The day after one of the most remarkable hiking days of my life was doomed to fail in comparison, and it still suffered from some of the same challenges as the previous excursion, including one challenging river crossing that had water back up to my lower thighs. I knew that I needed to operate with urgency, as I needed to reach the one town, Badia Prataglia, before the mid-day closures kicked in, and there was also a thunderstorm risk for the afternoon. With that mission accomplished, I had one more challenging ascent followed eventually by a knee-jarring drop into Camaldoli, the site of the Camaldolese Congregation, a branch of the Benedictine order. The town, such as it is, is pretty much just the monastery and a long building with a hotel and a couple of restaurants, surrounded by woods. There are worse places to spend a night.
So ends my time on the Via di Francesco. While that route carries onto Florence, I turn northward onto the Cammino di Sant’Antonio now. And it begins with the most challenging day in terms of elevation gain/loss.
