Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
-Langston Hughes
I’ve always considered myself a godless bastard (given that my parents were unmarried when I was born)—so I never thought I would ever find myself on a pilgrimage, let alone one in southern Europe. But for one week, my partner and I embarked on the Chemin de St. Jacques (Way of Saint James or Camino de Santiago), hoping we would have an alluring and relaxing holiday in France. During the ninth century, the Chemin de St. Jacques was established for Catholics who wanted to visit the shrine of the apostle Saint James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. For most people, the journey begins at home, but in our case, it all started in a working-class neighbourhood of the 18th arrondissement in Paris, bordering the edge of the city and on a boisterous bus ride to Aumont Aubrac. For the pilgrims, their goal is to get closer to their saint. For the irreverent, their goal is to get closer to nature.
When we began our journey, the scene was picturesque: I found myself on the edge of a verdant plateau and breathless. Here, the clouds gliding steadily across the sky appeared so low that I felt like I could reach out and touch them. After several days of hiking and camping in this southern French landscape, my days had become more similar, rising before dusk, drinking unfavourable instant coffee, and drowning in my sweat from the prolonged heatwave. If lucky, my early afternoons were coloured by a panoply of pine trees that could provide some reprieve from the ascending heat wave. But as my partner and I hiked across this landscape, we encountered a drought, an arid landscape of disconnected French towns with a vivid display of dust overlaid with gristly foliage. With each step, I grew accustomed to the curviness of the French countryside, the farm creatures jettisoning from the tawny carpet of the dust, waiting to be slaughtered. Although I was not alone, I was reminded that the terrain was alive when I heard the sounds of leaves or the sonic palette of cows expressing their discontent with the invasion of city slickers. As I walked from one village to the next, I was overcome with breathlessness from the hot and muggy air and arrested by the commanding salty smell of my sweat.
I walked along the Chemin de St. Jacques, in the open, beyond the hustle of city life, and instead, filled with the delicate intimate spaces of nature. This has been a change to lumber into a peaceful area, which is foliage-strewn, seemingly frozen in time, allowing me to step outside of myself, all while being disconnected from a warm bed and the internet—two things that I cherish even more than before. During our seven-day hike, my partner and I moved through the crest of the plateaus and the troughs of the valleys. We celebrated, with little excitement, when we were shielded from the sunrays by towering trees. At the same time, the expansive, mysterious space bewitched me, especially in moments during an arduous climb. Nature is where I found some reprieve: full-bodied, organic, healing. Forests are bewitching spaces to unpack, digest, and sit with the world. I find that the forest gives me the freedom to face my history while surrounded by a wild landscape, to be captivated with unapologetic wonder while calling into question what it means to be a steward of the Earth.
Our assumptions, it seems, were slightly erroneous, given that backpacking in our mid-thirties had a different toll on our body than in our youth—let alone of the worst European heat waves in recent times. Nevertheless, nature (and anthropogenic global warming) was not kind to us; instead, we walked over 25 kilometres a day, slept on the floor, and exposed ourselves to scorching sun rays. (My partner, prone to excruciating blisters and mild melodrama, uttered “that was dangerous” after we hiked 34 kilometres during peak afternoon temperatures of the week-long heatwave. In contrast, I did not develop a single blister and I am far more tolerant to extreme heat than my partner.) Every day, we discussed where to place our tents each day, how much water to carry when to take our breaks, and what we would eat. We were not on a religious pilgrimage, but our actions ran parallel to the miserly practices of the pious. By exercising material prudence, we were depriving ourselves of bodily indulgences, mainly because we were hiking by carrying everything we needed on our backs. Each step reminded us of what we needed to get through the world and what we were missing. When we camped alongside various riverbanks and forests, we fed each other, not just through food, but by finding the language to think about the mountains, forests, and trees as an extension of our humanity. More than that, I wanted to understand how pushing my body could lead to transcendence—would I reach a higher state of consciousness if I felt the pain throbbing through my knees?
As a hiker, I tried to reflect on how we relate to each other, even if we take the same path, albeit for different reasons. But more than anything, as we passed through the French countryside in the searing heat, I wondered what we owe the Earth so that in the future, anyone can trek the 150 kilometres I did over the past seven days under tenable conditions. The pressing issue of our generation is to stall the climate crisis before it continues to wreak havoc. By the time we finished our journey, we were exhausted and feeling the aches from our gruelling muscle sores, and yet, we were more affirmed in our conviction that global warming should be the prescient and central concern for everyone to solve, whether they are saintly or impious.