Off The Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain

CHAPTER ONE: SAINT-JEAN PIED DE PORT

Where does the road to Santiago begin? It was a question my medieval predecessors never had to consider. In those days, a pilgrim simply stepped out of his hut and declared his intention. Then he might report to a cloister and receive a signed letter to serve as proof of intent. Afterward, the pilgrim walked west until he picked up any of the established routes in Europe. From the east and south, the pilgrim followed any of four established roads that fanned like fingers across France and converged at the palm of Spain. A few miles inside the Pyrenees, they formed a single unified road shooting straight across the breadth of the country.

I lived a few doors off Washington Square Park in New York City and an ocean away from my destination. I couldn't just walk out my door. For reasons of symmetry and authenticity, this bothered me. I thought I would toss a coin onto a map of France and proceed from there, but this seemed too haphazard. It felt wrong to begin this trip with such an American sense of abandon. I studied a map of France to see if any of the cities had a personal significance. I checked my family's records to see if any ancestors a few centuries back might have had some interaction in this part of Europe, but according to all available information, one branch was too busy fleeing Prussian law while the other was stuffing a sheep's stomach for a weekend of haggis. Arles, Montpellier, Carcasonne, and Toulouse were not likely vacation spots for Teutonic horse thieves or Scottish presbyters.

One Saturday I happened upon a brochure that offered a solution. Not only could I walk out my front door, I could take the New York subway. I boarded the A train, immortalized by Duke Ellington, and took it almost to the end, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art maintains a branch called the Cloisters. The museum is an assemblage of ruins from four medieval cloisters, dating from the Romanesque and Gothic periods, and once located on the road to Santiago. I resolved to spend a quiet afternoon among the weathered columns and begin there.

The most beautiful -- the cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Dýsert -- is covered by a plastic dome. Fat gobs of New York City rain fell the afternoon I visited, making a bass-drum thump that left me feeling strangely dry. Instead of the customary central garden, there is a marble floor, giving the space the linoleum acoustics of a grade school cafeteria. My attempt at meaningful silence was carefully monitored by a suspicious security guard who understood museum policy and the slight reach of his power only too well. At one point he chased a camera-toting teenager in a ludicrous race around the columns after a disagreement over competing interpretations of the flash-attachment policy. Packs of schoolchildren snickered and laughed at the often lewd capital carvings, and the guard's echoing shouts of "Quiet!" were louder still. In a moment of pure museum irony, a man who had been there quite a while was asked to leave because he was loitering.