Haiku Moments On the Camino: France to Finisterre

By Harvey Jenkins

Both recently retired, my wife and I borrowed backpacks from friends and set out on the camino francés, an 800 km walk across the northwestern part of Spain. For thirty-nine days, we experienced life as pilgrims and I recorded our journey in haiku, prose and pictures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvey Jenkins
• Release date: Jun 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301908011

Harvey Jenkins

Harvey Jenkins is a Vancouver Island writer of haiku, poetry and prose. Over the years, his work has appeared in numerous print anthologies and online sites. In early 2013, Harvey released a book of haiku and prose titled, Haiku Moments on the Camino: France to Finisterre. He is a member of the Haiku Canada, BC Federation of Writers and a board member of WordStorm Society of the Arts.

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Author’s Note

The journey from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

This is one person’s record of a journey that many thousands have taken over hundreds of years. It is my story, in poetry and prose, of the camino francés, an 800 km pilgrimage from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain and then onto Finisterre.

There are many previous accounts written about the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, accounts that give an excellent history of this journey. My focus will be a personal one providing day to day accounts of the journey my wife Sharron and I made in the summer of 2010.

I’m not sure when I first thought about walking the camino. It had been at the back of my mind for many years. It intrigued me but seemed impossible because of time and cost. In the 1980s, Sharron and I were raising our two girls in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Not much time for traveling. We would get a few weeks holiday each year and then be back at work.

Eventually, the children were launched on their own lives. Sharron and I moved to the West Coast in the 1990s. Our holidays would be a trek back to Winnipeg to visit family and friends. The camino faded from my consciousness.

I read Shirley MacLaine’s account of this pilgrimage soon after her book was released in 2000. From her description, it was a very long and arduous journey on foot. Other books talked about terrible rain storms, cold mountain passes and wild dogs lying in wait for weary pilgrims, apparently, a rather grim undertaking. Sometime later, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a documentary on the walk. I remember watching an older white-haired man who had been approached by the filmmaker on an unidentified path. He stopped, talked briefly, and then headed back to the trail with a jaunty step, a smile on his lips and a walking stick in his hand. Later, the travel author, Rick Steves, did a brief half- hour television show in which the camino was highlighted. The final scene showed the magnificent cathedral in the central square of Santiago de Compostela.

In 2007, good friends walked the camino. We listened to their stories both positive and negative. It reawakened my interest in the experience in this journey. Sharron enthusiastically agreed. As a poet, the haiku, a form of Japanese poetry, seemed to suit my desire to explore moments during our walk.

I read an account of Matsuo Bashõ (1644-94) in the 1966 book The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches translated from the Japanese by Nobuyuki Yuasa. Bashõ is recognized as one of the greatest Japanese haiku poets and, some say, the father of haiku. In Yuasa’s account, Bashõ left Tokyo to travel and write about the places and people he met on three journeys to the north country of Japan. Bashõ’s style was to write haibun (prose mixed with haiku) and sometimes, just haiku isolated from the prose. I thought, in my own small way, that this was my chance to try and capture some of Bashõ’s style. I would try to stay mindful and write my impressions of this journey across Spain while writing haiku, a moment in time captured in short seventeen syllable poems.

In 2010, the time seemed right. Sharron and I were both retired, and with retirement came a wonderful sense of freedom from job constraints. We finally had the time to do this pilgrimage. Walking the camino would be a good transition to this new phase in our lives.

Author in a pine forest before Trinidad de Arre, Spain

thousand year old trek

a series of miracles

informed the faithful

the bones of St. James

discovered by a hermit

and soon sanctified

Introduction

The cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain is said to hold the headless body of the apostle St. James. There is an interesting story about how these bones arrived in the northwestern part of Spain. Herod Agrippa beheaded the apostle in Jerusalem in a.d. 44. St. James’s friends smuggled his headless body from under Herod’s nose. They put it into a stone boat that, miraculously, without oars, sails or crew, made a week-long journey from Jerusalem to the coast of Spain. His body was buried inland in Compostela, the field of stars; a remote hillside in Galicia. This burial site was then forgotten for centuries. It was not until a.d. 813 that the bones were discovered by a hermit in what is now the city of Santiago de Compostela.

The King of Spain, Alfonso II, built a chapel there and declared St. James (Santiago) the patron saint of Spain. Pilgrims, often with great hardship, began to make their way to the chapel. Santiago de Compostela was declared a Holy City in 1189 by Pope Alexander III.

Now declared a World Heritage site, modern day pilgrims come from all over the world to walk the Way of St. James. My wife and I would take the camino francés, from St-Jean- Pied-de-Port in the Pyrenees mountains of France to Santiago, an 800 kilometer walk west over three mountain ranges, across the Spanish plains and through numerous towns and villages steeped in Roman and Spanish history.

Two thousand ten was a Holy Year. Pilgrim numbers on the camino traditionally double during these years. A Holy or Jubilee Year occurs whenever the Apostle of St. James’s Day falls on a Sunday. The last Holy Year was 2004 and the next would not occur again until 2021. We planned to be in Santiago de Compostela Sunday, July 25th,