October 15, 2004

• I've been reading a little bit about pilgrimages and holy sites. It all started a few days ago when I saw a travel show, where a young woman walked across northwestern Spain on a well-traveled pilgrimage.

  Since my mind wants to obsess about a single thing, rather than a single topic that has lots of things, I ended up reading way too much about a famous pilgrimage in Japan: The 900-mile trek around Shikoku Island, visiting the 88 shrines. I think I was attracted to it because of my Buddhism background, and the image in my mind of wandering alone through semi-rural Japan for three months wearing white clothes and a straw hat and carrying only a staff and a few changes of socks has a certain I'm-much-much-more-spiritual-than-you mystical macho quality. I mean, you go to Mecca and you spend maybe a month at most. The St. James pilgrimage I saw on TV was 550 miles. But three months climbing Japanese mountain passes and navigating city streets...

  Anyway. Here in the states we have things like the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails to keep us walking for months at a time. Maybe as a culture we've internalized Thoreau and Whitman enough to realize that the walking is more important than the shrine at the other end, so we've done away with the shrine altogether. Or maybe we just want to be that much more macho. After all, why hike from Georgia to Maine? Because you CAN!

  I've also been reading a little bit about the Oregon Trail. There are all kinds of historical markers along it, mostly where it's easily accessible to highway travel. Imagine being able to go back in time, hang out at South Pass, Wyoming, and tell the travelers there that in less than a hundred years, there'll be a two-lane road made of cement following this path, and on that road, hundreds of thousands of people will travel north to Yellowstone, in covered wagons that go 70 mph, for *leisure activities.*

  • 12:23 am
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