The path often taken.

The Road to Santiago

Kathryn Harrison 

National Geographic Directions, $20, 150 pp.

I walked through the Middle Ages last summer. Not some medieval fair, with jousting, damsels in cone-shaped hats, and Harleys crowding the parking lot. This was a pilgrimage on cow paths and mountain trails, village to village, from one bell-towered square to the next. I saw people washing clothes in a stream and elderly women tossing hay with pitchforks. I heard Benedictine monks chant vespers in Latin in a church the Templars built. I stumbled along dung-spotted stone roads and bridges the Romans built. And I learned what it meant to travel solely on foot, following a hundred-mile section of a path that leads five times that distance across northern Spain to the traditional tomb of St. James, son of Zebedee.

The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, has transported travelers on this pilgrimage for more than a thousand years. For nearly as long, pilgrims with a bent for writing have felt compelled to set down what they experienced. Early accounts were basically travelogues, indicating where the water was bad, the wolves were fierce, or the wine was good. Nowadays, a steady flow of books provides the history and legends of the camino, the how-to and anecdotal treatments. Academic studies use the camino as a window on the Middle Ages.

The experience is difficult to put into words. Superficially, it involves blisters, sore calves, and enduring the heavy weight of carrying all your belongings, all day. Beyond that, it focuses pilgrims on basics: the feet, the ankles, the knees, the slope of the land, the shade, the next drink of water, the next place to sleep. In The Road to Santiago, novelist Kathryn Harrison describes it as "living in real time--not writing time or brain time or screen time, but footstep time, hunger time, and body time."

The particular grace of Harrison's recounting is that it finds the elusive words to explain how the pilgrims' step-by-step tedium turns to transcendence. "Why do I like this road? Why do I love it?" she asks. "Each day I tire myself to the point that I am indifferent to what tourists seek, shops and sights and restaurants and galleries, morsels of an alien culture, toothsome and purchasable. All I want is what my feet deliver: simultaneous communion with those dead and those yet to be."

Harrison brings to this well-worn path a poet's eye for detail and a novelist's knack for narrating a journey that is more interior than geographic, as a pilgrimage should be. She has worked this terrain before.

Although she is the author of five novels, her best-known work is the memoir The Kiss (Random House, 1997), the spellbinding, disturbing story of the sexual relationship she had with her father when she was twenty. That book demonstrated Harrison's amazing ability to analyze her own turbulent emotions with frightening clarity and distance. She does not refer to her father here, a minister of sorts, but does continue to examine herself with the same honesty and concision. It is inevitable that she would describe her mixed feelings about religion as she pursues the pilgrimage.

As the title of her more recent memoir, Seeking Rapture (Random House, 2003), implies, Harrison is a "seeker." In that sense, she is like some of the pilgrims I met on the camino. Many were looking for something--often they were at turning points in their lives--but had no strong connection to organized religion. Harrison, who quotes herself as saying, "At least I'm more Catholic than I am anything else," is not sure of her religious affiliation. She became a Catholic at the age of ten after her mother converted from Christian Science, but reports that a priest told her in confession she had excommunicated herself by marrying a Quaker (writer Colin Harrison) and not having their two children baptized. This does not stop her from weeping when she receives the Eucharist during a long day on the trail.

The camino is a strange sort of contemplative retreat, drenched more in sweat than in holy water. Lovely country churches dot the trail's haunting, quiet villages, but they are almost always closed. Nonetheless, pilgrims of whatever religious belief often find the hike to be one of the most spiritually meaningful events of their lives.

One reason is that despite all the pitfalls--the exhaustion, the uncertainty of where you will stay the next night, or even the fabled wolves--it somehow works out. As Harrison explains, this does not seem to be mere coincidence. "Only one room left, and it is mine," she writes of her late arrival at a refugio, an inexpensive pilgrims' hostel in a remote village. "How often will this be true, my luck that feels like grace, like God was there all along, holding off the wolves and saving my bed?"

Harrison draws her account from three separate trips on the camino, the most recent with her twelve-year-old daughter, who dubbed it their "not-exactly-avacation." While Harrison is sure-footed on the terrain of her interior journey and her relationship with her daughter, hers is not the book to read if you want to know about the camino's history or how to make the pilgrimage. For starters, she herself packs too much, bringing along the manuscript of a novel-in-progress--heavy reading, no matter how well written, after she has carried it a mere twenty miles. She starts too late in the morning and walks through the afternoon heat into the evening, exhausting herself. She misses a lot by being aloof from the other pilgrims.

The book's focus on the personal tends to downplay other dimensions of the camino, such as the history or politics (legend holds, anachronistically, that St. James killed thousands of Moors in battle, one reason for the pilgrimage's popularity in the Middle Ages). But historical data can be found elsewhere. Harrison concentrates on her descriptive and reflective strengths, making this a welcome addition to a thousand years of literature on the camino.

Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY.