Walking and Following

Outside the Hazelhatch train station, the road extends north and south out of sight. Celbridge was two kilometers north along the road shadowed by bare gray trees. I led the way across the road to the sidewalk, my father and grandfather behind me. We began walking along the Irish backroad.

It was the walking which I remember more than the Kildare scenery of that walk into the village. And not my walking, but my grandfather’s. However quick he is with a joke, in his seventies he keeps a slower pace. We rested here and there, wherever the stone fence offered a surface low enough to sit. Every step grew accusing. Walking at age twenty-one is not the same as walking at age seventy-one, and I had forgotten to minimize it where I could. Of course, Celbridge eventually appeared across a curved stone bridge over the River Liffey (far, far upstream of Dublin). We sat in barstools together, propped our worn shoes on the raised brass ring at the base of most bar. In the stillness, I started to think of the motion which I had inadvertently forced my grandfather to undergo, the motion that I undergo intentionally any chance that I get.

Walking is not exactly a recent discovery, but the amount I walk here makes me think that I’ve been doing it wrong. American institutions are partially to blame (if I can sound college-age). Back home, we like our cars and our roads and our sitting to enjoy a good view—much of what Americans own is designed accordingly. Sitting to take it all in has merit. But so does lacing up hiking boots for puddled pavement, soggy leaves, damp grass, and gritty mud. To take one step after another, until you’ve reached wherever you’ve chosen to go, or maybe passed wherever you’d thought you should be, cuts the world down to size. What land you can see becomes accessible to you by foot, and whatever land you haven’t seen yet can also be made accessible by foot. As a slower means of getting around, walking helps wherever you are to unfold around you.

A few hours of walking might also inform your idea of faith. For one thing, you have to trust that no part of you will give out before you can find a place to stop. Additionally, you trust that the skies will not open with a vengeance, nor strafe you with wind. Occasionally, one or all of these things happen. Not to worry; if your faith is unrewarded, you get to work on your perseverance. God is funny that way.

This relationship between walking, faith, and God first hit me as I nearly crawled up the side of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holy mountain out west in County Mayo. After getting along nicely on Diamond Hill down in Connemara, I had expected Patrick to be as scenic and pleasant. I did not anticipate the lack of an actual trail, the sudden inclines, or the cloud which covers most of the mountain. From the base of the mountain, there are patches of dirt here and there, bisected by gurgling mountain streams. But beyond the first fifteen minutes of the hike, rocks replace everything in sight. Boulders to both sides, cliffs ahead, and smaller, loosened rocks underfoot, all while the hike stiffens to maybe a fifty- or sixty-degree incline. And once I reached the first ridge, where the climb leveled off somewhat, I encountered the obscuring cloud which I had underestimated from the ground. Ahead, behind, right, and left—only milky grayness. Being allowed only twenty feet of visibility from a mountainside set me on edge; walking along, I felt unmoored. Winds buffeted the exposed ridges, bearing the wet layers of the cloud so that my face grew wet without rain, down to tiny droplets on my eyelashes. Only when I heard strangers’ voices from ahead of me could I be sure that the trail existed, and that I was on it.

Croagh Patrick, a pilgrimage site for Catholics, sees hikers far older than me complete the trail, occasionally without their shoes. Reek Sunday (the last Sunday of July) brings thousands of pilgrims to the disorienting mountainside to honor the A.D. 441 pilgrimage which St. Patrick himself made to the summit. The legend says that he remained there for forty days of fasting and prayer. A rectangular space, holding piled rocks to raise it from the surrounding ground, is labeled “St. Patrick’s Bed.” Offerings of rosaries and soaked candles peppered the crannies between the stones, commemorating those who had come before me to this place where sight, will, and faith are tested. As I am not a Catholic, I saw the climb mostly as a physical test. But faith certainly featured as I peered into the blanketing fog.

It was because I was moving into an alien space, literally into a higher, foreign plane. That’s where the steps brought me, and the way up was entirely uncertain. Being glad to hear voices over the wind, voices from somewhere ahead of you, voices belonging to someone you cannot see, put my walking into a new perspective. Rather, “walking” was not the word for Croagh Patrick. “Following,” or “being led.” Until the hundred-year old chapel loomed silently from the whipped mist at the summit, no part of me knew for certain that I hadn’t lost my way. But every bit of me was certainly following with little more than hope and careful footsteps.

And lest anyone think that the summit rewarded me for my trouble, the cloud did not lift. No view of Mayo, of the sea and countryside, emerged from behind it. The chapel was locked shut, with only a tiny outdoor alcove covered against the wind. The walk did not pay off in the aesthetic sense that I had expected, that we all tend to expect from mountains. Still, picking my way down the mountain warmed me. Slowly, and intermittently, but warmly. A few men, hiking upwards with only thin jackets and fragile cigarettes, met me just before the second, steeper climb. “How far off are we?” one of them asked.

Coated with mist and huffing out steaming breath, I didn’t exactly have to answer. But I said, “Just behind me. Twenty feet.”

They couldn’t see twenty feet behind me, but they knew the truth. We shared a laugh then. We all knew the truth, somehow. They hadn’t even seen it yet.