There are pilgrimages and there are pilgrimages. Some are vast, religion or state-supported affairs that draw tides of humanity. Others are quiet, personal voyages. The pilgrimage of Canadian sisters and authors Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski is of the latter sort, a journey into letters, archives, and family memories in search of the lives of their grandparents' and their father's generations in the years leading up to and during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Rich yet scrupulous in detail, The Occupied Garden recovers the life of an ordinary family living in extraordinary times, times when feeding a family was a struggle, and living by precepts of integrity and human decency required daily acts of heroism. Like any true pilgrimage, it is both a return to the familiar and a discovery of things new and strange, as the iconic figures of opa and oma (grandpa and grandma) become again what they once were: young lovers and, later, parents with huge decisions to make.
I had the pleasure of hearing Kristen speak about her book this fall at a fund-raiser organized by Toronto-area editor and writer Allyson Latta, who happened to be one of the early readers of All the Good Pilgrims. Allyson leads memoir-writing worshops, so it was fitting that all proceeds went to Alzheimer's research; the evening was devoted in every way to the preservation of memory.
For anyone looking to write about their Camino experience, a writers' workshop is not a bad place to start. To learn more about Allyson's, go to daysroadwriters.blogspot.com.
People ask me - often in solicitous tones - why I keep coming back to the Camino de Santiago, or more precisely, to the Camino Frances, the great pilgrim trunk-road that runs from the Spanish Pyrenees west across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. "You're in a rut," the questioners seem to imply. "It's a big world, there are other experiences to be had, other roads to walk. Why this one... again?"
What do I tell them? Follow this link to find out...
http://travelwithachallenge.com/Rhythms-of-the-Camino.html
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
