Peter Coffman website

Just a quick update to let everyone know that Peter Coffman's long-awaited website is finally up! Aaaaaaand it was worth waiting for. Peter, of course, is the talented fellow who walked to Santiago with his friend, the late, lamented Oliver Schroer, and provided the award-winning photography for Oliver's Camino album. At petercoffman.com, you'll find Peter's classy black-and-white Camino shots (disclaimer: I have a great big copy of "Route Napoleon," the cover photo of Camino, hanging in my living room), as well as a gallery of architectural beauties, ranging from Delphi to the Robarts Library. Feast your eyes!

Oops! Stop the presses. I just paid a visit to Oliver Schroer's site looking for the Camino cover photo and discovered a whole new gallery of photos by Angela Browne from Oliver Schroer's final concert, performed at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church, Toronto, June 8th -- including this one of Peter Coffman.

luisa rubines - de oca a oca

Speaking of talented photographers, I was pleasantly surprised last week to discover a Luisa Rubines website up and running.

I met Luisa on my 2003 Camino. In All the Good Pilgrims, I described her as "a tornado with ringlets, an angular, intense young Galician woman, always halfway to somewhere." At that time, she was taking pictures for an exhibition on the theme of the esoteric Camino; more specifically, on el juego de la oca, "the Goose Game," the popular European children's board game (ancestor of our Snakes and Ladders) with roots in the Renaissance, which many see as an allegory for the pilgrimage to Santiago. Fittingly, we first met up in Logrono, where each of us was conducting our own inquiry into the life-size Goose Game that is laid down in stone in the plaza of the church of Santiago. We kept bumping into each other (it might be more accurate to say, "Luisa kept whizzing by me") all the way to Castrojeriz, where I hung up my walking shoes for that year.

When I reached Santiago in October 2004, Luisa's exhibition - De oca a oca polo Camino de Santiago - was on at the Museum of Pilgrimages. The 63 photos, displayed back-lit in the darkened gallery, presented the Camino as a magical and mystical journey of personal transformation. In the penultimate photo, just before the pilgrim/goose is reborn as a swan, the pilgrim/photographer leaves behind the bonfire of her old self and wades naked into the ocean at Finisterre to be born again. Leavening the seriousness of the theme were the king-size dice and the spiralling labyrinth of el juego de la oca on the gallery floor, which extended a playful invitation to the viewer to join the game.

The exhibition was a joy. I looked forward to following the trajectory of Luisa's career, even if from across an ocean. Yet when I started writing my book and went looking for her on the Web, I found that her old site was out of service. All the matches turned up by my Google searches turned into dead ends. (Ah, our wanderings in the labyrinth of the Internet!) From time to time, over the past three years, I have sent out Google search parties, but never with any results.

And then last week, I decided to give her one more Google and opa! There she was! With only 8 Camino photos, her website is not as generously illustrated as one would hope. But there is a capture of Luisa's complete juego de la oca gameboard, as well as samples of her other work - colourful images of Cuba, dire photos of the homeless children of Mexico's slums, and a black-and-white gallery entitled Galicia profunda - "deepest, darkest Galicia"...

I'll send this to Luisa. With luck she'll get back to me with some explanation of where she's been hiding - and what's coming up next.

small is beautiful: the camino as seen through a pinhole

Here's a project for a brave photographer: shooting pilgrims' feet.
That's what Canadian visual artist Melinda Mollineaux did when she reached the end of the Camino this May. The results were on display recently at Ottawa's La Petite Mort gallery.

Mollineaux says:

"I photographed the soles of pilgrims' feet in the Plaza de Obradoiro as we arrived in Santiago, the final destination of the pilgrimage. These photos were very special to take; they were like prayers as I knelt in front of each person, with a kind of joy, waiting as the light reflected off their feet into my camera. I spent those few seconds in awe of the fullness of a life's journey in each person - beautiful, tired and radiant - in front of me. If only we would daily approach everyone we meet like that."

What makes Mollineaux's images of the Camino unlike any you have seen before is that they are pinhole images shot with used and discarded cameras
(Pinhole cameras? takes me back to junior high physics class!) The colour images are painterly, the black-and-whites spectral, seeming to recall a lost time. I've taken the liberty of reproducing a couple of them here. There are lots more on Melinda's blog, Beauty is really good. Just look under the entry for September 8th and click on the "Small is Beautiful" slide show. There are some lovely "conventional" pictures of the Camino as well.

oliver schroer 1956-2008

July 3rd saw the passing of Oliver Schroer, the admired Canadian musician and composer whose unique gift back to Saint James' Way was the stunning Camino CD, a collection of original compositions recorded in churches along the way to Santiago, and mixed in with the ambient sounds of the pilgrimage. I was very fortunate to see Oliver's last show June 6th, four weeks before his death. Performed at Toronto's Trinity Saint Paul's Church and billed (with characteristically mordant humour) "Oliver's Last Concert on his Tour of this Planet," it was a generous two-and-a-half hours of music, mostly solo, a remarkable feat of bravura and stamina for a man near the end of a protracted fight with leukemia - really the show of a lifetime.

Oliver was a tremendous catalyst in Canadian music, as the "Olifiddle" benefit concerts held for him at Hugh's Room during the past year made evident. I attended two of the evenings last summer, where musicians from all over Canada delivered their testimonials to the influence Oliver had had on their lives, careers and musical styles. There was every sort of musician present, but above all, the evenings belonged to the fiddlers. I would never have guessed the wealth of fiddle talent that exists in this country.

And the fiddlers were in evidence at Oliver's final show as well, not only on stage but in the audience. During the first encore, "A Song for All Seasons" from his Hymns and Hers album (recorded during his sickness), a dozen or so of Oliver's students who had flown in from BC went strolling through the auditorium, serenading the audience as they accompanied Oliver. Even when the concert was over, it wasn't over. My wife and I lingered another fifteen minutes at the doors of the church to hear a lively impromptu concert (in Oliver's coined term, "a random act of violins") delivered by these same young artists. It wrapped up a deeply sad and joyous evening.

Oliver's memory is not fading anytime soon. His youth corps, The Twisted String, are forging ahead under the management of Oliver protegees Emilyn Stam and Chelsea Sleep (not to mention terrorizing the Toronto subway system - see the YouTube video), as is Oliver's old band, the Stewed Tomatoes, with Jaron Freeman-Fox - whose sly and sprited duet with Oliver was one of the sensations of the concert - taking over the fiddle duties from the master.

And on the Camino side of things, Peter Coffman, Oliver's walking companion, who was on hand for the original recordings and took the powerful black-and-white photographs used in the CD booklet, has a book of his Camino photography coming out next year with Ottawa publisher Novalis. Perfect material, along with Oliver's music and a glass or two of tinto, to stir memories of the long walk to the west that binds us all together.

Photo credit: Peter Coffman (whose website has now been under construction for nearly as long as Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.)

ward on the street!

So just in case you thought I was bluffing, here I am at my "stall" at last Sunday's Festival on Bloor. Yes, I'll do anything to sell a book or two - which was approximately how many I did sell that day - but it was well worth it to spend a few summery hours chatting up passersby with sexy pick-up lines like, "Can I interest you in a book about a long walk?"

Of those who didn't just pass by but stopped to talk, five had done the Camino and a good many others had an aunt/ friend/ co-worker/ significant other who was about to do it / had just done it / was doing it right now. Oh yes, Camino fever is spreading.

And maybe even getting out of hand. Reports from Spain indicate record pilgrim numbers this spring and a lot of unseemly sparring for beds in refuges. Much of the pilgrim deluge seems to originate in Germany, where popular comedian Hape Kerkeling's account of walking the Camino topped the bestseller lists last year.

"Hmmmmmm," I muse. "Maybe with a few more efforts like my Festival on Bloor appearance, the next great torrent of pilgrims will be Canadians, every one of them with a copy of All the Good Pilgrims in their hands." Or maybe I've just been in the sun too long...

rhythm number three: the rhythm of solitude and society

"Its doors (are) open to sick and well, to Catholics as well as to pagans, Jews, heretics, beggars, and the indigent, and it embraces all like brothers."

The words of the 12th century hymn (quoted here from Gitlitz and Davidson's masterly cultural handbook) refer to the Hospital of Roncesvalles, but they could equally be applied to the Camino today. For while the Camino gives us wonderful opportunities to be alone, the chances it offers us to meet people are unparalleled. The pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago are women and men, very young and very old and every age in between, of every nationality, profession and culture. They run the religious spectrum from devout Catholics to committed atheists with a generous sprinkling of pagans, Jews and heretics.

Many of these people, if we passed them on the street or sat next to them on the subway, we would never talk to. Our thought would be, "We have nothing in common." But on the Camino, you do have something in common. You are walking in the same direction, on the same road, to the same destination, sharing the same bars and shade trees and shelters along the way. And because you are walking, there is plenty of time to talk.

On a perfect day on the Camino, the three rhythms come together. There is the gentle, constant rhythm of walking, the solitude of the between-spaces, and then a reunion and a celebration as we reach the next town with its bar or fountain, where already pilgrims are meeting and laughing over the usual talk of distances, heat and blisters. We can pass through with a smile, or stay to enjoy the company, and maybe leave with a new walking partner. On the Camino, we are only as alone as we want to be. It lets us measure out and balance our desire for solitude with our desire that our journey be shared.

rhythm number two: the rhythm of human settlement

I'm back from the west coast to grey old Toronto, where the snow is still mounded up on the lawns and the streetsides. BC was very good to me. The pilgrim gatherings were wonderful and more than 200 people turned out for my three public library readings. (My sister was pretty good to me too, driving me all over town.) I just wish I could have brought home some of those daffodils and cherry blossoms.


The second vital rhythm of the Camino de Santiago is the rhythm of human settlement. There is little continuous settlement on the Camino, or in most of Spain. Instead, there is a village, a town, a city, surrounded by a great emptiness. Human settlements, especially in the early parts of the Camino, are like pearls loosely strung on a necklace.

This rhythm of habitation and emptiness derives in part from Spain's history. In the old days of chronic warfare and raiding, people sought safety in numbers, going out to their fields by day, huddling together at night. It is also a natural consequence of Spain's dryness: where there is a well, people congregate. The resulting landscape impacts strongly upon the walker's experience of the Camino.

Why? Because of course the places I have described as "emptinesses" are nothing of the sort. They are full of space and sky and wind and wheat. They are places that invite the mind and spirit to expand and soar; or, conversely, to feel their meagerness in the face of nature (or "creation" for those who see it that way). They are wonderful places to be alone, places where you can set your eyes on a distant horizon, fall into the rhythm of your walk and let your thoughts run free. (I think of the walk from Puente la Reina, or the Sierra de Atapuerca before Burgos, or between Rabe de las Calzadas and Castrojeriz, or over the Paramo de Leon to Villar de Mazarife...)

And at intervals along this lonely, peaceful way there are human settlements. Compact little boroughs where life is lived in the streets, and the plaza with its fountain is the community living room and the pilgrim rendezvous point.

Which brings me to the third rhythm of the Camino...