Tine and Rubob's Pilgrimage
Tine and Rubob ventured beyond the borders of their village today, to walk around Little Pond in Litchfield. Tine can't visit Litchfield without thinking of Julia Cowles, a girl who lived in Farmington Village in the late 1700s and kept a diary from age 12 to 17, when she died. Julia rode by carriage to Miss Sally Pierce's school in Litchfield, with which she "was at that time much pleased."
Julia's house, called Oldgate, is on the corner of the village's main thoroughfare and Meadow Road, on the route Rubob likes to take out of town on the way to Litchfield.
The gate of the house is always left partly open, as a symbol of peace and hospitality, and Tine looked at it as they approached the traffic light at Meadow Road.
"Litchfield is a handsome, pleasant town," Julia wrote -- "the Society agreeable, and tho' not remarkably gay, yet sufficiently so to catch the attention and raise ambition in the heart of a child, or rather of a giddy young girl whose expectations were raised by ev'ry new face or object ...."
"The Diaries of Julia Cowles."
At the same time, though, Julia didn't like leaving home in Farmington:
She wrote of spending her days "merrily": taking long carriage rides with her friends Betsey, Anna and Mary; walking in the morning "down in the meadows after some lillies"; "tarrying in Hartford" with her uncle; sailing with cousin Horace and visiting his store; playing "button"; attending "Dance School" and taking "musick lessons."
She became ill at about age 14, suffering from headaches, colds and fevers, and seemed always aware of how fleeting life is:
At age 17, her writing became increasingly solemn:
"Julia riding in her carriage to Litchfield, Rubob," Tine said.
Tine thought how cold and windy it was -- in the low teens. "The morning was blustering and cool,"Julia had written one day in her diary. Rubob was fiddling with the heat controls on the dashboard.
Tine thought of the movie she and Rubob had watched the night before, about a young man, Reda, who drives his Moroccan father on a pilgrimage from France to Mecca.
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
In some ways, Tine thought, the road through Serbia in the film resembles the flat, open road by the Meadows.
"Le Grand Voyage."
"If it was such a grand pilgrimage, Rubob, what exactly do they gain from it?" Tine asked Rubob.
Meadow Road.
"I suppose the son learned a respect for his father, who he hadn't understood before," Rubob said. "And he learned of his father's love for him, the depth of his love."
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
At one point in the film, Reda, fed up with the trip, asks his father, "Why didn't you fly to Mecca? It's a lot simpler."
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
"When the waters of the ocean rise to the heavens, they lose their bitterness to become pure again," the patriarch replies.
"What?" Reda asks.
His father says,
"She is a ghostly, almost spectral apparition," the director, Ismael Ferroukhi, says in an interview. "For me she embodies a permanent threat that is looming on this journey. She is also part of that journey. There is a surreal side to her that makes her close to the father's spiritual world."
"If you went on a pilgrimage, Tine, where would you like to go?" Rubob asked.
"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said, and then, after reflecting a bit, she said, "I've been on my pilgrimages. I walked from Winchester to Canterbury on the Pilgrim's Way. I've carried my pilgrim's staff and cockleshell. And I walked the Pennine Way. Also, I walked the length of the river I grew up by, from its source to the estuary."
"How's the Pennine Way a pilgrimage, Tine?" Rubob asked.
"The Pilgrim's Way was for the mind and spirit; the Pennine Way, a long slog over the backbone of England and Scotland, was for the body; and the walk along the river was for the heart," Tine said. "I can't think of any other pilgrimages I'd like to go on. Where would you go?"
"I'm not spiritually minded, Tine," Rubob said. "I can't think of any pilgrimages I'd want to take."
"Maybe you're content being where you are, Rubob. Your feet are planted firmly in your home soil."
Tine and Rubob were quiet for much of the way to Litchfield. Tine was lost in her thoughts about the movie and pilgrimages. Rubob's thoughts weren't, in fact, rooted in the earth; they were tossed about in a sea of questions about his tax return.
"Thinking about deductions, Rubob?" Tine asked.
"I'm trying to figure out how much we're entitled to deduct for the sailboat," he said, referring to their doughty sloop Puffin.
"Calculative thinking," Tine said, referring to her old friend Heidegger's essay, "Discourse on Thinking." "It certainly has its uses, doesn't it?"
She thought to herself of something Julia had written in her diary: "Days, weeks, months, and years move along in fast succession, and we make no account thereof."
When they arrived at the trail leading to Little Pond in the woods outside Litchfield, Rubob busied himself searching in the back seat for his "stocking cap," as he calls his ski hat, and Tine put on her fleece hat and neck warmer.
"'Chucking filly' your mother-in-law would call it, Rubob," Tine said, referring to her mother. "Your mother didn't use words like that, did she?"
"No, she didn't," Rubob replied, chuckling.
"With the wind chill, it must be about 10 below," Tine said. "Are you sure we're up for this?"
"Sure we are," Rubob said, walking over to the map at the side of the trail, which he invariably examines before walking at White Memorial.
Little Pond hadn't moved since the last time Rubob and Tine had walked there. It was still in the upper right corner of the map.
Tine dashed off into the woods, in an effort to warm up -- or not even to warm up, which was impossible, but to avoid turning instantly into a lump of solid ice.
Tine thought of the splinters of the smashed mirror in "The Snow Queen," which can turn a person's heart into a lump of ice. If the splinters get into one's eye, as they did with the boy Kai, only the dark, ugly side of things can be seen.
Tine looked back on the trail for Rubob, who seemed to have vanished, but he soon emerged from behind a tree.
The trail darkened as it led deeper into the woods, and it seemed obscured in parts by snow and fallen branches. Tine kept on the path by following the trail blazes on the trees.
The blaze, a black square within a white one, reminded Tine of the views of the Kaaba in Mecca in the film "Le Grand Voyage." Masses of pilgrims, dressed in white, pray in concentric circles around the black granite cube of the Kaaba, which is said in the Koran to be the oldest house of worship in the world. The eastern cornerstone is said to be the remnant of a meteorite.
The Kaaba, Mecca. Photo from:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/beardsley/250/mecca.htm
In the movie, Reda's father goes off to worship at the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba, and he doesn't return. Reda searches frantically for him, but he can't manage to push through the crowd to get near the Kaaba.
The trail blaze also reminded Tine of the mysterious black monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- a symbol of our quest for knowledge, even enlightenment, in the dark unknown, she thought.
"2001: A Space Odyssey." Photo from:
http://www.palantir.net/2001/gallery/dawn.html
When Rubob caught up with Tine on the trail, she said to him, "If I went on a pilgrimage, I think I'd rather go somewhere wild, somewhere without hordes of people -- maybe somewhere I don't know about, somewhere undiscovered. I'd prefer the desert to the city -- a hermit's pilgrimage."
"Perhaps to St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai," Tine reflected, thinking she'd like to see the Burning Bush "that burned with fire, and was not consumed."
Photo from: http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/29303.html
"What you said about wild places makes me think of Tuva, where that Nobel Prize-winning scientist wanted to go, Tine," Rubob said. "He researched the Challenger space shuttle accident. What was his name?"
"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said.
"He dunked material from the O-rings in ice water and found that it no longer functioned properly," Rubob said. "He was one of those rare scientists who are able to make science understandable to the ordinary reader. Richard Feynman -- that's it."
"Never heard of him," Tine said.
"Anyway, he was unusual, a nonconformist, an individualist, and it was always his dream to travel to Tannu-Tuva, a remote region on the border of Siberia and Mongolia," Rubob said.
"Never heard of it," Tine said. But she was most intrigued.
"He viewed it as an earthly paradise," Rubob said. "He'd collected triangular stamps from Tuva when he was a boy, and he was fascinated with it. It was a mountainous land with yaks, camels and nomads, and its own language and culture."
"I had some triangular stamps when I was in third grade," Tine said. "I wonder whether they were from Tuva."
"I don't think so, Tine -- but maybe," Rubob said. "So he and his friend, Ralph Leighton, a drummer -- a fellow drummer, in fact, because Feynman was a drummer, too -- set about planning how to get to Tuva, cajoling Soviet bureaucrats to get the required travel papers, learning the language -- even learning Tuvan throat singing."
"Throat singing?" Tine asked.
"I don't know what it is, Tine," Rubob said -- "something to do with singing two melodies at once, I think."
"So did he make it to Tuva?" Tine asked.
"Sadly, he died before seeing it," Rubob said. "But his friend Leighton did, and he wrote a book about it, 'Tuva or Bust.' It's all about his pilgrimage there, and about his remarkable friend Feynman."
"I'd like to read it, Rubob," Tine said.
The two reached the stones that marked the entrance to the trail by the pond, and Tine thought of the meteorite at the base of the Kaaba.
The path opened out to a view of an icy Little Pond.
"Keep moving," Rubob said. "We can't stop. It's too cold."
Tine hurried along the path and reached the boardwalk that leads around the pond.
On the boardwalk in the exposed marshes, the wind blew straight into Tine and Rubob's faces.
"It's my legs that are freezing," Rubob said. "Are yours cold, too?"
"No, Rubob. You should have worn jeans, not corduroys," Tine said, chuckling. Rubob had advised Tine to change from jeans into corduroys before they left home, but Tine hadn't heeded his advice. Nevertheless, her legs weren't cold.
"It's my nose and cheeks that are cold," Tine said, burying her face in her neck warmer. "The wind's blowing right on the bow."
With her head down, Tine noticed the trail blaze on the boardwalk.
Tine recalled the acorn waymarks on the Pennine Way.
She was reminded, too, of the boardwalks over the bogs in the lowlands on the Way.
Pennine Way. Photo from:
http://www.gdn08.dial.pipex.com/pennine/daybyday/Day16/walk/index.htm
"Images from pilgrimages stay with us forever," Tine thought. "Maybe our minds are somehow more receptive on such purposeful journeys, on great adventures."
"I can't believe we skiied along this boardwalk last winter, Tine," Rubob said. "Have you noticed all the nails sticking out of the boards?"
"No, Rubob," Tine said, thinking of the winter adventures they had together.
"You've missed a terrific series on the Travel Channel the past few weeks," she said.
"What's that?" Rubob asked.
"A group of climbers have been endeavoring to reach the summit of Everest. The scenes of the mountain and the climbers' camps are spectacular. But best of all is the story of Annabelle. She's a British socialite, the daughter of the head of some corporation. She's the least experienced of the group when it comes to mountaineering, but she has tremendous determination and stamina. She's a runner who completed a grueling 63-mile marathon in Hong Kong."
"While the other members of the expedition, including the leader, are waylaid by all sorts of health problems, Annabelle strides on in her oversized boots -- literally oversized, because she ordered the wrong ones. She's filled with a youthful energy and enthusiasm -- and occasionally preoccupied with her appearance, her outfits, her makeup. She seems almost out of place in the group -- too bubbly, too naive and inexperienced -- but she might just wind up being the one to make the summit."
"I don't know whether she makes it to the top," Tine continued, "because the VCR quit taping right before that point. Of course it would, wouldn't it? The last I saw of her, she was trying to make it to Camp 3, and her strength seemed to be flagging for the first time. Her fingers were frostbitten, and she was having trouble clipping to the fixed lines. She couldn't move her fingers. I wonder whether she made it, Rubob."
"I doubt it," Rubob said.
"I wouldn't be so sure," Tine said. "She's a plucky thing. Her fingers were in a bad way, but I just wouldn't be so certain, Rubob."
Tine and Rubob continued silently along the boardwalk for a ways, and then Rubob said, "In Hitler's last days, in the bunker below the Reichstag, his coterie tried to persuade him to retreat to his Bavarian redoubt, the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden."
"Hitler?" Tine asked. What made you think of Hitler?"
"Mountaintops," Rubob said. "The Eagle's Nest was his 'teahouse eyrie.'"
The Eagle's Nest, Kehlstein Mountain, Berchtesgaden.
Photo from: http://www.warfoto.com/berchesg.htm
"The anti-pilgrimage, to the Eagle's Nest," Tine thought -- "like Dante's journey into the Inferno."
"We look at Hitler's last days now and think that of course he was going to kill himself," Rubob said. "You'd think that those around him would have realized that finally the nightmare was over. But no, they still held out the hope that there'd be a last stand at Hitler's mountain redoubt. Instead, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in the bunker. "
"Eva Braun's sister had tried to persuade her not to fly to the bunker, but Eva had insisted on being with the Fuhrer, and of course they got married," Rubob continued. "Magda Goebbels made it known that when her husband was about to kill himself, they'd first kill the children. Hitler's advisers spoke out against this, and on this Hitler agreed. In what may be his one spasm of humanity just before he killed himself, he implored Magda not to kill her six children. But she prevailed, and killed them with cyanide pills."
"Hitler had an almost mystical attraction to mountains," Rubob said, "but the funny thing was that he was afraid of heights. In the end, the Nazis' Wagnerian vision of Gotterdammerung wasn't realized at the Eagle's Nest."
"We can find satisfaction in that at least," Tine said.
The Eagles Nest. Photo from:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Kehlsteinhaus/EagleNest04.html
The bitter wind was picking up, and Tine hastened ahead, leaving Rubob behind with his grim thoughts of the Chancellery bunker. She thought she'd make a break for the tall marsh grass across a bridge.
But despite the cold and wind, Tine couldn't resist stopping on the bridge and looking down at the frozen stream.
"Even when everything is frozen, there always seems to be some open water," Rubob said.
"Maybe that's what pilgrimages are all about, Rubob -- finding the open water."
"How's that, Tine?" Rubob asked.
"The living water of faith, of life -- or some such thing," Tine said. "It's just a thought."
The wind nipped at Tine's nose and cheeks, and she dashed for cover in the marsh grass.
The lenses of Tine's glasses became very dark in the sunny patches on the path, and stayed that way as the trail led away from the pond, back into the woods. Tine thought the lenses might be affected by the extreme cold.
She thought back to the start of the walk, when she was thinking of "The Snow Queen" and Kai's seeing only the dark side of things. "Maybe I have one of the broken mirror's splinters in my eye," Tine thought.
She had a hard time finding the path, and wandered off it at one point. Rubob caught up to her, and they retraced their route and found the trail blaze.
"We need Gerda from 'The Snow Queen,'" Tine thought. "Her tears wash away the splinters in the eye and the lumps of ice in the heart."
"Look, Rubob, two blazes on one tree," Tine said. "A path for two -- maybe even a pilgrimage for two."
When Tine reached the vehicle, as Rubob called it, her most pressing concern was the lump of ice in her right glove -- her index finger. She thought briefly that she might have gotten frostbite like Annabelle, and she wouldn't be able to open the car door. But Rubob opened the door, and while he did so, Tine noticed the bumper sticker on the car in front of theirs.
When she got in the vehicle, Rubob turned up the heat, and feeling returned to Tine's finger.
"It was a dark story, your tale about Hitler and his mountain redoubt, Rubob," Tine said.
"I suppose," Rubob said, "but it shows a vestige of humanity in even the coldest of hearts, the most evil of men."
Rubob stopped at the store on the way home, and Tine waited in the car and listened to Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion."
In his story from Lake Wobegone, Keillor talked about a preacher giving a sermon on heretics. The homily was on how "heretic" didn't originally mean someone who espoused the wrong dogma, but someone who created divisiveness in the church -- someone who produced faction, caused dissension.
"Of course, a lot of people feel themselves more completely when they're in opposition to others," Keillor said. And Midwesterners -- well, they're largely people who've moved to the Midwest, or from families who moved there, precisely because they wanted to get away from people whose views they opposed.
One such Midwesterner, Keillor said, was Edgar Møller, an independent-minded man who was the last Swede in Lake Wobegone to keep the "ø" with the slash through it. He ran a moviehouse in town, and one of the last films he showed there was "The Sheik of Iowa," starring an actor who later changed his name to Rudolph Valentino.
The films Møller chose to show were so bad, Keillor said, that he had to offer gifts to coax people into his theater. He gave away free glassware, and unfortunately, as it happened, cartons of eggs. During a particularly vile movie, all hell broke loose and the moviegoers hurled their eggs at the screen, at each other and at Møller. Edgar, who frequently found himself in opposition to his fellow townspeople, decided at this point to leave Lake Wobegone for good.
He set out on the road and soon ran into a musical group named Jelly Glass Morton and His Six Spicy Pickles. Edgar joined up with the group, finding his new calling as a band manager. His journey, which was full of adventures, amounted to the pilgrimage of a Lake Wobegone "heretic," Keillor suggested.
"A heretic's pilgrimage," Tine thought. "Yes, that's what I'd like, one that took me to the wild places of the world, one where I wouldn't have to push my way through the crowds. But Little Pond was wild -- and cold -- enough for me. I don't need to go far for my pilgrimage. And I don't think I'd enjoy wandering out into the desert like a hermit. Maybe I'm content where I am, like Rubob."
Tine thought of a quote from Heidegger that she'd read in enowning's blog: “We don’t want to get anywhere, we just want to get to where we already are.”
She remembered the lines from Eliot's "Four Quartets" that a friend had read to her at the end of her walk along the Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury:
"What are you thinking about, Tine?" he asked on the way home.
"You, Rubob," Tine said, munching on her chocolate. "The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started." She gave Rubob a piece of chocolate.
Tine thought again of what Julia Cowles had written in her diary:
"I am so strongly attached to my native place that it is not without some regret that I leave it. From these calm scenes of pleasure, into a busy crowd of extravagant people."
When she got home, Tine opened Julia's diary and read at the end:
Tine also searched the Internet to see whether Annabelle had reached the summit of Everest : http://www.annabellebond.com/ and http://www.everestnews2004.com/everestnews3/anna2004dis19.htm.
Reflecting on her afternoon, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."
Julia's house, called Oldgate, is on the corner of the village's main thoroughfare and Meadow Road, on the route Rubob likes to take out of town on the way to Litchfield.
The gate of the house is always left partly open, as a symbol of peace and hospitality, and Tine looked at it as they approached the traffic light at Meadow Road.
"Litchfield is a handsome, pleasant town," Julia wrote -- "the Society agreeable, and tho' not remarkably gay, yet sufficiently so to catch the attention and raise ambition in the heart of a child, or rather of a giddy young girl whose expectations were raised by ev'ry new face or object ...."
"The Diaries of Julia Cowles."
At the same time, though, Julia didn't like leaving home in Farmington:
"I am so strongly attached to my native place that it is not without some regret that I leave it. From these calm scenes of pleasure, into a busy crowd of extravagant people."Julia was a serious girl with a devout turn of mind; she seemed to have a premonition of her early death. But she had a love of life, too -- of her village, her family and her friends.
She wrote of spending her days "merrily": taking long carriage rides with her friends Betsey, Anna and Mary; walking in the morning "down in the meadows after some lillies"; "tarrying in Hartford" with her uncle; sailing with cousin Horace and visiting his store; playing "button"; attending "Dance School" and taking "musick lessons."
She became ill at about age 14, suffering from headaches, colds and fevers, and seemed always aware of how fleeting life is:
"How surprizingly has the last month slipt away. We see the rapidity of time but decline making the proper use of it. Years, months, and days are swiftly passing away; each one brings us nearer and nearer to the shores of eternal bliss or ruin. This solemn [thought] is often repeated to us; we know it from Scripture, from our own observation, and these late and frequent tolls of mortality which are sounding in our ears remind us of the uncertainty of life and of all earthly enjoyments."
At age 17, her writing became increasingly solemn:
"In my former journals, much of that valuable time which my Creator has mercifully given me has been too much spent in pursuit of vain pleasures of this world, as has been recorded. A desire of happiness is the first propensity of our natures; it is predominant in the heart of man; few seek it in the right way, few that enter in at the strait gate, but many go down the broad road to destruction.""What are you thinking about, Tine?" Rubob asked as they headed down Meadow Road.
"Julia riding in her carriage to Litchfield, Rubob," Tine said.
Tine thought how cold and windy it was -- in the low teens. "The morning was blustering and cool,"Julia had written one day in her diary. Rubob was fiddling with the heat controls on the dashboard.
Tine thought of the movie she and Rubob had watched the night before, about a young man, Reda, who drives his Moroccan father on a pilgrimage from France to Mecca.
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
In some ways, Tine thought, the road through Serbia in the film resembles the flat, open road by the Meadows.
"Le Grand Voyage."
"If it was such a grand pilgrimage, Rubob, what exactly do they gain from it?" Tine asked Rubob.
Meadow Road.
"I suppose the son learned a respect for his father, who he hadn't understood before," Rubob said. "And he learned of his father's love for him, the depth of his love."
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
At one point in the film, Reda, fed up with the trip, asks his father, "Why didn't you fly to Mecca? It's a lot simpler."
"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html
"When the waters of the ocean rise to the heavens, they lose their bitterness to become pure again," the patriarch replies.
"What?" Reda asks.
His father says,
"The ocean waters evaporate as they rise to the clouds. And as they evaporate, they become fresh. That's why it's better to go on your pilgrimage on foot than on horseback, and better on horseback than by car, and better by car than by boat, and better by boat than by plane."
Like Julia Cowles, Reda's father had a premonition of his death, and he wanted to make his pilgrimage to Mecca before he died. To some extent, death is personified in a strange old woman, garbed in black, whom they meet on the road."When I was a child, my father -- God rest his soul -- set out on a mule. I'll never forget that day. He was a courageous man. Every day, I'd climb to the top of a hill from where I could see the horizon. I wanted to be the first to see him come home. I would stay up there until nightfall. Sometimes I would even fall asleep up there until your grandmother came looking for me."
"She is a ghostly, almost spectral apparition," the director, Ismael Ferroukhi, says in an interview. "For me she embodies a permanent threat that is looming on this journey. She is also part of that journey. There is a surreal side to her that makes her close to the father's spiritual world."
"If you went on a pilgrimage, Tine, where would you like to go?" Rubob asked.
"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said, and then, after reflecting a bit, she said, "I've been on my pilgrimages. I walked from Winchester to Canterbury on the Pilgrim's Way. I've carried my pilgrim's staff and cockleshell. And I walked the Pennine Way. Also, I walked the length of the river I grew up by, from its source to the estuary."
"How's the Pennine Way a pilgrimage, Tine?" Rubob asked.
"The Pilgrim's Way was for the mind and spirit; the Pennine Way, a long slog over the backbone of England and Scotland, was for the body; and the walk along the river was for the heart," Tine said. "I can't think of any other pilgrimages I'd like to go on. Where would you go?"
"I'm not spiritually minded, Tine," Rubob said. "I can't think of any pilgrimages I'd want to take."
"Maybe you're content being where you are, Rubob. Your feet are planted firmly in your home soil."
Tine and Rubob were quiet for much of the way to Litchfield. Tine was lost in her thoughts about the movie and pilgrimages. Rubob's thoughts weren't, in fact, rooted in the earth; they were tossed about in a sea of questions about his tax return.
"Thinking about deductions, Rubob?" Tine asked.
"I'm trying to figure out how much we're entitled to deduct for the sailboat," he said, referring to their doughty sloop Puffin.
"Calculative thinking," Tine said, referring to her old friend Heidegger's essay, "Discourse on Thinking." "It certainly has its uses, doesn't it?"
She thought to herself of something Julia had written in her diary: "Days, weeks, months, and years move along in fast succession, and we make no account thereof."
When they arrived at the trail leading to Little Pond in the woods outside Litchfield, Rubob busied himself searching in the back seat for his "stocking cap," as he calls his ski hat, and Tine put on her fleece hat and neck warmer.
"'Chucking filly' your mother-in-law would call it, Rubob," Tine said, referring to her mother. "Your mother didn't use words like that, did she?"
"No, she didn't," Rubob replied, chuckling.
"With the wind chill, it must be about 10 below," Tine said. "Are you sure we're up for this?"
"Sure we are," Rubob said, walking over to the map at the side of the trail, which he invariably examines before walking at White Memorial.
Little Pond hadn't moved since the last time Rubob and Tine had walked there. It was still in the upper right corner of the map.
Tine dashed off into the woods, in an effort to warm up -- or not even to warm up, which was impossible, but to avoid turning instantly into a lump of solid ice.
Tine thought of the splinters of the smashed mirror in "The Snow Queen," which can turn a person's heart into a lump of ice. If the splinters get into one's eye, as they did with the boy Kai, only the dark, ugly side of things can be seen.
Tine looked back on the trail for Rubob, who seemed to have vanished, but he soon emerged from behind a tree.
The trail darkened as it led deeper into the woods, and it seemed obscured in parts by snow and fallen branches. Tine kept on the path by following the trail blazes on the trees.
The blaze, a black square within a white one, reminded Tine of the views of the Kaaba in Mecca in the film "Le Grand Voyage." Masses of pilgrims, dressed in white, pray in concentric circles around the black granite cube of the Kaaba, which is said in the Koran to be the oldest house of worship in the world. The eastern cornerstone is said to be the remnant of a meteorite.
The Kaaba, Mecca. Photo from:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/beardsley/250/mecca.htm
In the movie, Reda's father goes off to worship at the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba, and he doesn't return. Reda searches frantically for him, but he can't manage to push through the crowd to get near the Kaaba.
The trail blaze also reminded Tine of the mysterious black monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- a symbol of our quest for knowledge, even enlightenment, in the dark unknown, she thought.
"2001: A Space Odyssey." Photo from:
http://www.palantir.net/2001/gallery/dawn.html
When Rubob caught up with Tine on the trail, she said to him, "If I went on a pilgrimage, I think I'd rather go somewhere wild, somewhere without hordes of people -- maybe somewhere I don't know about, somewhere undiscovered. I'd prefer the desert to the city -- a hermit's pilgrimage."
"Perhaps to St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai," Tine reflected, thinking she'd like to see the Burning Bush "that burned with fire, and was not consumed."
Photo from: http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/29303.html
"What you said about wild places makes me think of Tuva, where that Nobel Prize-winning scientist wanted to go, Tine," Rubob said. "He researched the Challenger space shuttle accident. What was his name?"
"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said.
"He dunked material from the O-rings in ice water and found that it no longer functioned properly," Rubob said. "He was one of those rare scientists who are able to make science understandable to the ordinary reader. Richard Feynman -- that's it."
"Never heard of him," Tine said.
"Anyway, he was unusual, a nonconformist, an individualist, and it was always his dream to travel to Tannu-Tuva, a remote region on the border of Siberia and Mongolia," Rubob said.
"Never heard of it," Tine said. But she was most intrigued.
"He viewed it as an earthly paradise," Rubob said. "He'd collected triangular stamps from Tuva when he was a boy, and he was fascinated with it. It was a mountainous land with yaks, camels and nomads, and its own language and culture."
"I had some triangular stamps when I was in third grade," Tine said. "I wonder whether they were from Tuva."
"I don't think so, Tine -- but maybe," Rubob said. "So he and his friend, Ralph Leighton, a drummer -- a fellow drummer, in fact, because Feynman was a drummer, too -- set about planning how to get to Tuva, cajoling Soviet bureaucrats to get the required travel papers, learning the language -- even learning Tuvan throat singing."
"Throat singing?" Tine asked.
"I don't know what it is, Tine," Rubob said -- "something to do with singing two melodies at once, I think."
"So did he make it to Tuva?" Tine asked.
"Sadly, he died before seeing it," Rubob said. "But his friend Leighton did, and he wrote a book about it, 'Tuva or Bust.' It's all about his pilgrimage there, and about his remarkable friend Feynman."
"I'd like to read it, Rubob," Tine said.
The two reached the stones that marked the entrance to the trail by the pond, and Tine thought of the meteorite at the base of the Kaaba.
The path opened out to a view of an icy Little Pond.
"Keep moving," Rubob said. "We can't stop. It's too cold."
Tine hurried along the path and reached the boardwalk that leads around the pond.
On the boardwalk in the exposed marshes, the wind blew straight into Tine and Rubob's faces.
"It's my legs that are freezing," Rubob said. "Are yours cold, too?"
"No, Rubob. You should have worn jeans, not corduroys," Tine said, chuckling. Rubob had advised Tine to change from jeans into corduroys before they left home, but Tine hadn't heeded his advice. Nevertheless, her legs weren't cold.
"It's my nose and cheeks that are cold," Tine said, burying her face in her neck warmer. "The wind's blowing right on the bow."
With her head down, Tine noticed the trail blaze on the boardwalk.
Tine recalled the acorn waymarks on the Pennine Way.
She was reminded, too, of the boardwalks over the bogs in the lowlands on the Way.
Pennine Way. Photo from:
http://www.gdn08.dial.pipex.com/pennine/daybyday/Day16/walk/index.htm
"Images from pilgrimages stay with us forever," Tine thought. "Maybe our minds are somehow more receptive on such purposeful journeys, on great adventures."
"I can't believe we skiied along this boardwalk last winter, Tine," Rubob said. "Have you noticed all the nails sticking out of the boards?"
"No, Rubob," Tine said, thinking of the winter adventures they had together.
"You've missed a terrific series on the Travel Channel the past few weeks," she said.
"What's that?" Rubob asked.
"A group of climbers have been endeavoring to reach the summit of Everest. The scenes of the mountain and the climbers' camps are spectacular. But best of all is the story of Annabelle. She's a British socialite, the daughter of the head of some corporation. She's the least experienced of the group when it comes to mountaineering, but she has tremendous determination and stamina. She's a runner who completed a grueling 63-mile marathon in Hong Kong."
"While the other members of the expedition, including the leader, are waylaid by all sorts of health problems, Annabelle strides on in her oversized boots -- literally oversized, because she ordered the wrong ones. She's filled with a youthful energy and enthusiasm -- and occasionally preoccupied with her appearance, her outfits, her makeup. She seems almost out of place in the group -- too bubbly, too naive and inexperienced -- but she might just wind up being the one to make the summit."
"I don't know whether she makes it to the top," Tine continued, "because the VCR quit taping right before that point. Of course it would, wouldn't it? The last I saw of her, she was trying to make it to Camp 3, and her strength seemed to be flagging for the first time. Her fingers were frostbitten, and she was having trouble clipping to the fixed lines. She couldn't move her fingers. I wonder whether she made it, Rubob."
"I doubt it," Rubob said.
"I wouldn't be so sure," Tine said. "She's a plucky thing. Her fingers were in a bad way, but I just wouldn't be so certain, Rubob."
Tine and Rubob continued silently along the boardwalk for a ways, and then Rubob said, "In Hitler's last days, in the bunker below the Reichstag, his coterie tried to persuade him to retreat to his Bavarian redoubt, the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden."
"Hitler?" Tine asked. What made you think of Hitler?"
"Mountaintops," Rubob said. "The Eagle's Nest was his 'teahouse eyrie.'"
The Eagle's Nest, Kehlstein Mountain, Berchtesgaden.
Photo from: http://www.warfoto.com/berchesg.htm
"The anti-pilgrimage, to the Eagle's Nest," Tine thought -- "like Dante's journey into the Inferno."
"We look at Hitler's last days now and think that of course he was going to kill himself," Rubob said. "You'd think that those around him would have realized that finally the nightmare was over. But no, they still held out the hope that there'd be a last stand at Hitler's mountain redoubt. Instead, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in the bunker. "
"Eva Braun's sister had tried to persuade her not to fly to the bunker, but Eva had insisted on being with the Fuhrer, and of course they got married," Rubob continued. "Magda Goebbels made it known that when her husband was about to kill himself, they'd first kill the children. Hitler's advisers spoke out against this, and on this Hitler agreed. In what may be his one spasm of humanity just before he killed himself, he implored Magda not to kill her six children. But she prevailed, and killed them with cyanide pills."
"Hitler had an almost mystical attraction to mountains," Rubob said, "but the funny thing was that he was afraid of heights. In the end, the Nazis' Wagnerian vision of Gotterdammerung wasn't realized at the Eagle's Nest."
"We can find satisfaction in that at least," Tine said.
The Eagles Nest. Photo from:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Kehlsteinhaus/EagleNest04.html
The bitter wind was picking up, and Tine hastened ahead, leaving Rubob behind with his grim thoughts of the Chancellery bunker. She thought she'd make a break for the tall marsh grass across a bridge.
But despite the cold and wind, Tine couldn't resist stopping on the bridge and looking down at the frozen stream.
"Even when everything is frozen, there always seems to be some open water," Rubob said.
"Maybe that's what pilgrimages are all about, Rubob -- finding the open water."
"How's that, Tine?" Rubob asked.
"The living water of faith, of life -- or some such thing," Tine said. "It's just a thought."
The wind nipped at Tine's nose and cheeks, and she dashed for cover in the marsh grass.
.jpg)
The lenses of Tine's glasses became very dark in the sunny patches on the path, and stayed that way as the trail led away from the pond, back into the woods. Tine thought the lenses might be affected by the extreme cold.
She thought back to the start of the walk, when she was thinking of "The Snow Queen" and Kai's seeing only the dark side of things. "Maybe I have one of the broken mirror's splinters in my eye," Tine thought.
She had a hard time finding the path, and wandered off it at one point. Rubob caught up to her, and they retraced their route and found the trail blaze.
"We need Gerda from 'The Snow Queen,'" Tine thought. "Her tears wash away the splinters in the eye and the lumps of ice in the heart."
"Look, Rubob, two blazes on one tree," Tine said. "A path for two -- maybe even a pilgrimage for two."
When Tine reached the vehicle, as Rubob called it, her most pressing concern was the lump of ice in her right glove -- her index finger. She thought briefly that she might have gotten frostbite like Annabelle, and she wouldn't be able to open the car door. But Rubob opened the door, and while he did so, Tine noticed the bumper sticker on the car in front of theirs.
When she got in the vehicle, Rubob turned up the heat, and feeling returned to Tine's finger.
"It was a dark story, your tale about Hitler and his mountain redoubt, Rubob," Tine said.
"I suppose," Rubob said, "but it shows a vestige of humanity in even the coldest of hearts, the most evil of men."
Rubob stopped at the store on the way home, and Tine waited in the car and listened to Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion."
In his story from Lake Wobegone, Keillor talked about a preacher giving a sermon on heretics. The homily was on how "heretic" didn't originally mean someone who espoused the wrong dogma, but someone who created divisiveness in the church -- someone who produced faction, caused dissension.
"Of course, a lot of people feel themselves more completely when they're in opposition to others," Keillor said. And Midwesterners -- well, they're largely people who've moved to the Midwest, or from families who moved there, precisely because they wanted to get away from people whose views they opposed.
One such Midwesterner, Keillor said, was Edgar Møller, an independent-minded man who was the last Swede in Lake Wobegone to keep the "ø" with the slash through it. He ran a moviehouse in town, and one of the last films he showed there was "The Sheik of Iowa," starring an actor who later changed his name to Rudolph Valentino.
The films Møller chose to show were so bad, Keillor said, that he had to offer gifts to coax people into his theater. He gave away free glassware, and unfortunately, as it happened, cartons of eggs. During a particularly vile movie, all hell broke loose and the moviegoers hurled their eggs at the screen, at each other and at Møller. Edgar, who frequently found himself in opposition to his fellow townspeople, decided at this point to leave Lake Wobegone for good.
He set out on the road and soon ran into a musical group named Jelly Glass Morton and His Six Spicy Pickles. Edgar joined up with the group, finding his new calling as a band manager. His journey, which was full of adventures, amounted to the pilgrimage of a Lake Wobegone "heretic," Keillor suggested.
"A heretic's pilgrimage," Tine thought. "Yes, that's what I'd like, one that took me to the wild places of the world, one where I wouldn't have to push my way through the crowds. But Little Pond was wild -- and cold -- enough for me. I don't need to go far for my pilgrimage. And I don't think I'd enjoy wandering out into the desert like a hermit. Maybe I'm content where I am, like Rubob."
Tine thought of a quote from Heidegger that she'd read in enowning's blog: “We don’t want to get anywhere, we just want to get to where we already are.”
She remembered the lines from Eliot's "Four Quartets" that a friend had read to her at the end of her walk along the Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury:
"We shall not cease from explorationRubob returned to the car with his groceries. "Here, Tine," he said, and he gave her a Cadbury chocolate bar.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."
"What are you thinking about, Tine?" he asked on the way home.
"You, Rubob," Tine said, munching on her chocolate. "The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started." She gave Rubob a piece of chocolate.
Tine thought again of what Julia Cowles had written in her diary:
"I am so strongly attached to my native place that it is not without some regret that I leave it. From these calm scenes of pleasure, into a busy crowd of extravagant people."
When she got home, Tine opened Julia's diary and read at the end:
"This day I feel quite unwell. After tea I lay down and gave myself up to serious reflections. I do indeed hope that I am not lost to every spark of gratitude for the blessings I have received, and that I am not so hardened but that seriousness and sobriety will ever be welcomed, and that my views of divine dispensations are not heathenish, neither are they atheistical.""But a tad heretical -- that would be permissable," Tine thought -- "like Edgar Møller and his Six Spicy Pickles."
Tine also searched the Internet to see whether Annabelle had reached the summit of Everest : http://www.annabellebond.com/ and http://www.everestnews2004.com/everestnews3/anna2004dis19.htm.
Reflecting on her afternoon, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."
posted by Tine at 7:36 PM
