Pilgrimage: We Don't Have To Go To Spain

I have been reading American Places: A Writer's Pilgrimage to Sixteen of This Country's Most Visited and Cherished Sites, by the wonderful author, William Zinsser.  Zinsser, who wrote perhaps my favorite book about the craft of writing, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, takes us to places like Abilene, Kansas (population per the 2020 census - 6,460), where Dwight Eisenhower grew up and was formed into the person who would become the supreme commander of allied armies in WWII and President of the United States. Zinsser picked this unassuming town "because it symbolizes for me an idea that is at the heart of the American dream: that no place is too small or too isolated to produce great men and women in every field--and, in fact, that the smallness of the place is often the source of the values that made them great" (p. 128).

In 1990, Zinsser observed that American families had begun to "hit the road, going in search of the founding ideals they felt the country had lost" (p. 2).  "I like," he said, "the idea of pilgrimages, and I decided to make a pilgrimage of my own." He then visited 15 places, such as Abilene, The Alamo, Lexington and Concord, Chautauqua, Montgomery, and then later added Omaha Beach. His essays are short and meaningful and I find his sentences and paragraphs a delight to read.  Typical of Zinsser, he doesn't follow the typical route, interviewing tourists for their reactions to the sites.  Instead, he "decided to go to the custodians of those places--park rangers, curators, librarians, town historians, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, ladies of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association," and asked them why they thought so many people came each year.  He wanted to learn how our national character was formed, he wrote, "and they did" (p. 5).

Zinsser's treks to these tourist attractions re-emphasized to me what Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred, saying he believes, "...in pilgrimage as a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler" (p. xxix). With the right focus, preparation, and attention, he goes on to say, "...it is possible to transform even the most ordinary trip into a sacred journey, a pilgrimage" (p. xxix).

In other words, we don't have to wait until we are able to go to the well-known pilgrimage experiences around the world, like the Camino de Santiago or Mecca or Rome or the Wailing Wall, but we can, as Cousineau says, "embark upon a meaningful journey...of pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred place" perhaps as close as the next state, or even the next town or the next mountain range over.  He gives examples of a young couple who loved literature, traveling to the poet Robinson Jeffers' house in Carmel, California; Emily Dickinson, he said, "made daily pilgrimages to sacred places in her imagination" (p. 17); or even to a bookstore like the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris (which, it turns out Shane and I made sure we visited when returning from our pilgrimage to the Camino de Santiago. For book lovers like Shane and me, the astonishing Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon is always on the agenda when I'm visiting him in Portland.