Off the Road Read Online Free

in New York, my failings became encouragement. Among the
ancient documents that survive are reports that during the Middle Ages many
“others” walked the road, including Moors, then the very stamp of libidinal
mustachioed infidel. A twelfth-century document from the pilgrims’ shelter in Roncesvalles declares: “Its doors are open to all, well and ill, not only to Catholics, but
to pagans, jews and heretics, the idler and the vagabond and, to put it
shortly, the good and the wicked.” I believe I can find myself in that list
somewhere.

 
    W here does the road to Santiago begin? It was a question my med ieval 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-Desert —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.
    After the rain broke, I went
out back where a stone porch opened to a view of the Hudson River and the New
Jersey Palisades. It all fell into place: I would begin here, fly to
Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in France, visit the original site, and take up the
walk from there.
    The cloister is, like a
pilgrimage, the literal representation of the same idea. On a pilgrimage and in
a cloister, the longer journey of