INTROIBO AD PEREGRINATIO IACOBI

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
--Genesis 12:1

On the Way: St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, the Terminus a Quo

Following the example of Abraham, our pilgrim father in faith, I left my land and home, and all that I knew and all those who are dear to me, and I traveled to the place to which I had been called. But there the similarity to the great Patriarch ceased, for I was not called out of Ur of the Chaldeans to the Land of Canaan. I was called to the small border town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. It was at St. Jean-Pied-de Port that, with all my needments on my back (and a lot of surplussage I was later to jetison), I intended to don the office of pilgrim and begin my pilgrimage to Compostela. I had to leave the New World to get to the Old. To get to the Old World I took a plane to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and from the airport a taxi to the Montparnasse railroad station. I then caught the high-speed train to Bayonne, via Poitier, Bourdeaux, Angoulême, and Daix. At Bayonne I caught a small train to the French border town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.

The train to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port clanked slowly, rhythmically through the French countryside as it headed toward the foothills of the Pyrenees. The air turned balmy and moist; the land verdant, pastoral. The clank and whir of the train spooked the long-haired sheep, which darted with alacrity away from the track. But they entranced a Basque boy with a red-striped shirt, legs astride his bike and arms akimbo, who dreamily watched the train bearing pilgrims go by. The train passed by countless white homes, roofed with red brick tiles, outlined in rough-edged stone quoins, and bearing wood shutters painted a dark rust red. By the homes were always to be found well-tended vegetable patches. I noticed a whirl of white, aromatic smoke, which came from a fire in a valley well-concealed by the surrounding hills covered in eucalyptus and poplars. A man was fishing on the Nive river, by rocks which tore through the smooth surface of the running water and left quickly-healing scars of white foam.

I saw these things as Richard slept on the train. Richard was a fellow pilgrim from my home town. He is a traditionalist Catholic, but he did not look it. Richard had long, curly and unkempt hair, and a week’s growth of beard on his face. He is a devoted family man, with six children, and he is rabidly conservative. But asleep on the train he looked like a wild hippy, an anarchist, or perhaps an aging disciple of Abby Hoffman.

I had originally planned to go on the pilgrimage alone, but a little more than a month before I left, my wife and I saw Richard at the grocery store. My wife told him about my plans to go on a walking pilgrimage to Compostela, and I expanded on the theme.

“You do all the fun things,” he said in response, using words he was later to rue and we were later to laugh about, for a pilgrimage is not fun in any traditional sense.

“Why don’t you go along?” my wife invited him.

I was surprised by her spontaneous invitation. Perhaps, I thought, she feared I needed a chaperone or perhaps she thought it would be safer with companion. It was a baseless fear in either event. There is no safer thing than being a pilgrim in Spain in the 20th century. But whatever the reason, Richard considered and later accepted the invitation.

• • •

Richard and I met our first pilgrim on the train: a woman from Denmark in her mid-30s. Her name was Randi. She was a biologist and worked in Copenhagen for a large pharmaceutical firm developing some coagulatory agent. Randi had auburn, frizzy hair. She spoke excellent English, and so we talked. She was an independently-minded woman and was easily humored, but her nervous laugh gave away a certain diffidence. She was single, and was on pilgrimage alone.

“Why did you decide to go on pilgrimage to Compostela?” I asked.

“I felt I had to,” she answered vaguely.

We talked a little more about our reasons and our planned schedules, and. They were very similar. I discovered, however, that she was not a member of any church. She was (as she put it) “nothing” when it came to denominations. She was not hostile to any church but one.

“Certainly not Catholic,” she said brusquely.
“I certainly am,” I retorted.

• • •

The train lurched to a stop at the station. St. Jean-Pied-de-Port is nestled at the foot of the Pyrenees in the Pays Basque region of France. The Basques call the town Donibarre-Garazi, and so it was stenciled with black spray-paint by a Basque nationalist under the French name of the town at the town’s railroad station. But to me, and to most of us, if we know it at all, it is known as St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.

St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, formerly the sixth Merindad of the kingdom of Navarre, and for a while part of Spain, became part of France under the Treaty of the Pyrenees on November 7, 1659. It is therefore not wholly French; it is preponderantly, but not wholly, Basque. The town has age, many of its structures medieval, and boasts friendly houses of white walls, stone quoins, and slate roofs with steep pitch.

Incipit Iter Sancti Iacobi

The terminus
a quo

Santi Iohannis Pedis Portum


On the way to Santiago de Compostela, there are two main ways to enter Spain from France: the camino de Navarro, through Basque Navarre, and the camino Aragonés, which travels through lands of Aragon. I found myself in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port because I had decided many months earlier to go through Navarre, rather than Aragon. I chose the path through Navarre because I wanted to pass by the famous town of Roncesvalles. In practical terms, this meant I would cross the Pyrennes at the Port de Cize pass, and not through the Somport route pass south of here. The Port de Cize Route follows the ancient Roman road—the Trajan road—which went from Bordeaux to the gold mines at Astorga.

A French medieval cleric named Aymeric Picaud wrote about the pilgrimage to Compostela in his Intinerarium or Pilgrim’s Guide. Of this region across the Port de Cize he warned that the “impious Navarrese and the Basques used not merely to rob the pilgrims going to St. James, but also to ride them as if they were asses and before long to slay them.”[i] For a book that is regarded as a medieval propaganda promoting Compostela, this warning chills any appeal of the pilgrimage. This must have been a significant problem at one time, for Georgiana Goddard King, in her The Way of St. James, tells us that Richard the Lion Heart was forced to undertake a punitive expedition here to keep the Navaresse and Basques bands from violating the pilgrims.[ii] This is how things were before the civilizing influence of the Gospel and the Church, and this is likely how things may become if we (I mean Europe and the West) continue to try to build our life without them. But I had great reason at that time and place, with the road to Basque Navarre before me, to be thankful that the Gospel had borne fruit in the regions of the Basques and that that fruit has not yet been wholly wiped out.

peregri- nos ad sanctum Iacobum pergentes, no solum depredari, verum etiam ut asinas equitare et perimere solebant

Once disembarked of the train, we looked for clues for where we ought to go, and without doubt looked flummoxed. We had read we should seek out a Madame Debrille, the Grande Dame of pilgrims in this border town. I am glad we did not do so, for I later learned that she had died. Instead, we were greated by an old man with a pack on his back.

“Follow me,” the man said. I thought of the words of Jesus in the Gospel.

Not knowing any better alternative than to follow this unknown guide, we did. We later learned he was the hospitaller at a refugio or pilgrim’s inn in town. The hospitaller infallibly led us to the pilgrim’s office in town, where we received our pilgrim credentials and advice on where we ought to spend the night. It was the eve of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, patron of the town. Richard and I did not however celebrate with the denizens of the town, for we suffered from jet lag which had not been helped by the train ride. We had tired bodies that were unaccustomed to the time zone, and we planned to rise early. Instead we went to bed.

Sequere me!
k
[i] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 93.
[ii] King, I. 108.