First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday - The Pilgimage

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where readers share the first paragraph or (a few) of a book. 

Here is my contribution...the opening page of The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho:

Arrival
The customs agent spent more time than usual examining the sword that my wife had brought into the country and then asked what we intended to do with it. I said that a friend of ours was going to assess its value so that we could sell it at auction.  This lie worked: the agent gave us a declaration stating that we had entered the country with the sword at the Bajadas airport, and he told us that if we had any problems trying to leave the country with it, we need only show the declaration to the customs officials.

 We went to the car rental agency and confirmed our two vehicles.  Armed with the rental documents, we had a bite together at the airport restaurant prior to going our separate ways.

We had spent a sleepless night on the plane--the result of both a fear of flying and a sense of apprehension about what was going to happen once we arrived--but now we were excited and wide awake.

 "Not to worry," she said for the thousandth time.  "Your're supposed to go to France and, at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, seek out Mme Lourdes.  She is going to put you in touch with someone who will guide you along the Road to Santiago."

I think this best-seller, along with the movie The Way, has brought the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrim's route across Spain, to the level of popularity it now enjoys, its highest since medieval times, I believe.  I am planning to walk the Camino in 2015, if I can get my plantar fasciitis under control.  Anyway, The Pilgrimage is on my TBR Pile Challenge list and I'm thinking that it will be the next book I start.  I especially want to read it before going to one of the screenings for the new movie, Six Ways to Santiago. 

A Walk in the Woods and The Way

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a neighbor about favorite hikes in Boulder County and Rocky Mt. National Park and he told me about The Way, a 2010 movie starring Martin Sheen.  Sheen plays a stick-in-the-mud doctor who goes to Spain to retrieve the body of his estranged son after he dies just as he begins to walk El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, also known in English as The Way of St James, in the French Pyrenees.  The father, struggling with grief and guilt, decides to make the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain on foot. 

For the most part, The Way is a quiet movie, with the main characters often walking in silence or talking about, or trying to talk about, what has driven them to make the pilgrimage.  Some of the reasons are spiritual, some physical, some emotional, some undefineable.  I found myself thinking about this movie for days afterward, longing to go on pilgrimage myself.

Since that really isn't practical right now, I did the next best thing.  I reread Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, about his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail and which resulted in a wonderfully funny, interesting, and inspiring book.  I read it many years ago, shortly after if first came out and was my first Bryson.  Like most firsts, it remains my favorite of his books.

The big difference between reading it now and reading it a decade or more ago is that I now hike regularly, though I am not a backpacker and am still awed by thru hikers or go for days, weeks, or even months, hiking the AT and mostly camping along the way. 

Bryson's stories about his fellow hikers make for fun reading, and his history of the AT is interesting, though I think he unjustly gives the National Forest Service a bad rap. 

I was pretty excited to find talk of a movie, to be directed by Robert Redford, based on A Walk in the Woods.  The talk has been going on for a few years, but I think it would make a terrific movie and would be a nice point-counterpoint to The Way.