On Pilgrimage to Wellington: The Road to and from the Shire

Imagine a park high above the city of Wellington, New Zealand, a hemisphere and two seasons away from home.  There was a place where you stand on a woodland trail and look over and up through a canopy of trees into gray December light—it was gray that day, even if the season in the Southern Hemisphere was late spring. 

Wellington slopes as steeply as any city I have visited.  The incline leads from a kind of windy pinnacle (at least in the area where we stayed), the home of colleges and hospitals, down to a bright blue harbor and museums and level ground.  Your legs ached from walking the long journey, and the way back to where we stayed was strenuous as most mountain hikes.

Mount Victoria was our principal hike when my Tolkien students and I visited Wellington.  Small by mountain standards, it lies well in walking distance from the city, and upon its slopes lay the spot where, early in the Jackson movie, Frodo looks down the path, sees the air buckle and blur, and urges his companions to get off the road.  It was a moment in the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, and consequently, a moment on that hill took me back to another occasion, many years before and much closer to home.

A moment that, like so many good moments, had begun with a gift.  Bed fast for a summer because of a baseball back injury, I was lucky to have a pair of cousins, both wiser and more hip than I could hope to be; they set before me a copy of  Lord of the Rings—a long book, they told me, to shorten the summer boredom.  And shorten the boredom it did: I read the trilogy three times that summer.  But during that first reading, there was an instant of awareness that sealed a summer’s (and a lifetime’s) devotion to that book, to fantasy literature, and to reading itself.

In chapter 3 of the Fellowship, at perhaps the first iconic moment in the trilogy, the hobbits are leaving the Shire on a mission that none of them truly understand yet.  They encounter the first of the Black Riders, the reconnaissance of the Dark Lord of Mordor.  That moment I remember distinctly, as the hobbits slide off the road into cover, as the Rider paces above them, sniffing for them in country forever transformed for them.

And for me.

My eyes lifted from the page, and I emerged from that world knowing that this story meant business.  It was not the first serious story I had ever read, I am certain; however, it was the first time I had understood the seriousness of a story.  All of a sudden, the elements of the fantastic that had offered escape in the other books I had read no longer offered the same refuges.  They were no longer a departure from reality—not even merely a commentary on reality—but a reality unto themselves, thresholds to a way of apprehending things that transformed me forever and entirely. 

I gave myself to that story at that moment.  To fantasy fiction.  To story in general.  It was life-changing, and I hope all of you have or have had a moment like it, the start of an adventure that tells you who you are.

Thirty-five years later, I would find out some interesting things about that scene.  In a 1938 letter to his publisher, Tolkien maintained that in this very chapter, the story had “taken an unpremeditated turn”.  I can’t imagine that the turn did not lie in this moment,  that it surprised him just as much as it surprised me.  Just as much as it surprised and drew in two of our New Zealand guides—Colin Bleasdale from Flat Earth New Zealand Enterprises, and Hammond Peek who had both worked on the movie (Peek won an Oscar® for sound mixing on Return of the King).  Both told us that this was the moment in the film that sold the story to them,  that drew them into Jackson’s world and Tolkien’s behind it.

Of course, the place was really decades and continents away for me.  A summer, sunstruck and tedious, when it hurt to move and when the only real joy felt like Middle Earth.  It struck me in Wellington how the act of pilgrimage was simply the wedding of yearning and place, that the shrine could be Jerusalem or Canterbury or a tree-hooded road in a park you had never imagined when the journey began.  The journey was always one of soul and heart; yes, it was the travel more than the destination, as wise pilgrims are fond of saying, but there needs to be a place where soul and heart can rest and take sustenance, where they look back in wonder and tell you how far you have come.

We did the obligatory pictures.  I huddled with my students at the spot where Elijah Wood and Sean Astin had eluded Jackson’s Dark Riders, and comedy crept into the journey.  I was reminded that part of the wonder of the stopping place was how things beckoned you not to take the destination seriously, that its greatest importance was, like all other places, as a signpost for where you have been and where you are going.  ©2014 Michael Williams

Of New Zealand, Tolkien, and Pilgrimage

The act of pilgrimage takes a number of turns across a lifetime.  Sometimes you embark with the destination in mind, as medieval pilgrims did to Jerusalem or Rome or Canterbury, and sometimes you find out (as I imagine some of those medieval pilgrims did) that the meaning of the journey lay in the process, in what you encountered along the way. 

We have all heard versions of that simple (and simplistic) “either/or”; it’s not much more profound to say that every pilgrimage is a combination of both the planned and the accidental, the destination and the getting-there.  What interests me today, though, is a different take on pilgrimage—one that arises from both these categories and yet veers away from being comfortably either or both.

Sometimes you are on a pilgrimage, and you don’t notice until you get there.

It’s been eight years since Rhonda and I made the journey to New Zealand, along with several colleagues and a handful of remarkable students from the University of Louisville’s Honors Program.  It was a journey to be envied, if you asked a number of my writer friends: a Tolkien seminar that included The Lord of the Rings, then Peter Jackson’s movie treatment of the great novels, would be followed by two weeks among the film sites in New Zealand.  We carefully selected these students, guided (at least in my case) by their love of the books.  We passed over worthy candidates in a search for those whose application essays showed a respect, a curiosity, and an affection for Tolkien’s work, so in some cases the almighty GPA was less a factor (though these were Honors students with excellent grades) than a passion for the subject. 

It was a good standard to apply.  We chose excellent company—bright and creative, irreverent and intellectually engaged.  I don’t remember what the grades were (A’s and B’s, no doubt), but I remember the people and their work with fondness, as the class evolved into a mutual labor of love.

The trip was, as you might imagine, a kind of crown to the experience.  Yes, they were supposed to work in New Zealand, but I kept assignments feather-light, the idea being to leave them to their resources, to let them become a Fellowship.  All disciplinary matters were in the capable hands of my colleagues, John Richardson and Luke Buckman, and to this day I have no idea whether any student was upbraided or even corrected.

The travel experience was not uniform.  There was pleasant and funny testament to this (one young woman boarded an airplane for the first time, and her exuberant whoop when it lifted off the ground kept me smiling from Louisville to Chicago on the first short leg of the journey), and there were circumstances more perilous and accidental: my passport was “inquired into,” as my name is not the most uncommon in the world, and one young man implied, loudly and teasingly and in the middle of LAX airport, that the inquiry had to do with “alleged connections to the IRA”.  Those connections were so deeply alleged that he had made them up on the spot, but the post 9/11 discomfort in an international airport was, believe me, very real. 

Despite my close brush with cavity search, the rest of the trip to our destination went according to plan.  And here we return to the subject at hand, because it was on a hilly little farm near Matamata on New Zealand’s North Island that it became clear to me how I had been a pilgrim all along.

Some of you may know this story, but when I was fourteen, a baseball injury placed me on my back, more or less, for an entire summer.  It turned out that the problem rose from my having a mild and undetected spina bifida, apparently more common in our region than was known at that time, mostly (oddly enough) in males of Welsh descent.  While I was laid up, my cousins Tom and Gary (two other males of Welsh descent) introduced me to the trilogy in the hopes that a long book could tide me over in a long, inactive summer. 

It did just that.  And in addition, it redefined me, as epiphanies are supposed to do. 

The revelation came for me, as I will tell in the next entry, in the third chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring.   For now, it is better to consider where it led me.  For after having read the trilogy, I knew that my story would center on stories, on reading them and telling them.  I would discover in the years to come that stories were my principal way of understanding the world, of vesting it with meanings both evident and veiled, both communal and deeply private.  Myths were stories, after all, and through telling tales we brush the edge of myth, even now in a world where the most simplistic among us pride themselves in being myth-free. 

It was a lesson I took with me, through college and graduate school, to my stay in publishing and on into writing, through my conflicts with fellow academics who considered the trilogy a “children’s book” without having read the trilogy (or, I would guess, much children’s literature), and who considered me (verbatim) “not a real writer” for embracing Tolkien, heroic fantasy, speculative fiction in all its shapes and forms.  Things have changed with the academicians, and with me as well, because it took me a while to realize that my journey and its branching, resultant conflicts were all pilgrimage as well.

On the Matamata farm it hit me.  This was a place Jackson had negotiated with a sheep farmer, who refused to speak to the eminent director until a contested televised rugby game was complete.  This was the place that housed the movie’s version of Bilbo’s Party Oak and the opening scenes set in the Shire.  Green slopes tumbled down to a fence row and a small, weedy pond not much bigger than the one in my grandfather’s east field, visible from the house in which I had read much of Two Towers.  The smell rose in the warm December air, fragrant and fresh, though there were sheep turds underfoot you’d have to watch for.  One of the students sat on the slope above what had once been Bag End, which was now a white oval framework bedded in the bright green of the hill, and he leaned on his knees, quiet and teary, on the edge of being overwhelmed by his emotions, fixed to this spot he was no doubt coloring and peopling in his memory and imagination. 

I sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulders.  Cautioned him that, if he started to cry, I would, too.  We looked off to the west, at the tree and the pond, each imagining a different Shire that was our mutual destination and home.  One of the young women produced a recorder and began to play the soft, solitary theme song of Jackson’s trilogy, and it never sounded so good and so lonely and so transformingly communal. 

It was, indeed, the stuff of pilgrimage.  The search for meaning and healing, in which the destination is less the goal than the place you set down the things you carry.   ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Pont d'Aël and the Colossal Wreck of Time

It was 40◦ C in Aosta that afternoon.  I was afraid to do the computations, and I wasn’t yet aware that this would be the night I spent in a lawn chair on the balcony of the flat, hopeful for breezes and night air. 

After helping grade the examinations in what would be my last duty of the term, I took off up into the Alps with my colleagues and friends, Anna Anselmo and Rosie Crawford.  We were headed toward the bridge at Pont d'Aël, the largest and most formidable of the bridges in the region. 

 I was assured that at that height the temperatures would be more forgiving, and Rosie drove us smoothly over the narrow, winding roads, pointing out the occasional sites of stories that were what I would call “Italian Gothic”—tales of child-murder and isolation, strewn with public and private tragedy.  We stopped for a drink part of the way to the site, as Rosie parked the car with magnificent disregard for traffic laws and we headed to a little pub equipped with good beer, a friendly Corgi, an overlook of Alpine meadows, and a cool late afternoon that gave respite from the heat in the town.

We were hastened, not rushed.  Most Italians are not rushed.  But if we were to meet our colleagues for dinner at Taverna di Gargantua (which was, by the way, a remarkable little restaurant back on the outskirts of Aosta), we would have only a small space at Pont d'Aël.

It was to be an exalted space. 

We walked out over the bridge (which had served as an aqueduct in the first century of the Christian era).  It spanned the rapid current of the Torrente Grand Eyvia, a stream or creek full worthy of the name Torrente.  The Grand Eyvia rushed south under the bridge, its roar audible even from the great height of the  Pont d'Aël as it was lost in the narrowing tunnel of bluff and pine and bright deciduous green.  Again I thought of Shelley’s brush with the sublime at the foot of Mont Blanc, not an hour from where I stood:

                                Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness…

It was Anna, more compassionate than I, who speculated as to how had many lost their lives in the building of this structure.  She was right, of course, but it was a thought lost to me in the huge sublime of history.

This bridge, like all Roman structures, was built as a show of imperium.  Of course it provided transport and water—I’m not denying that—but the idea of it all was more than pragmatic: it was a footprint, a sign or presence and dominance, and as I thought that, Anna’s observation resonated in melancholy and irony. The inscription on the bridge attributes its making to a Caius Avillius Caimus, who, along with Augustus himself, are the names commemorated on the structure, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, labored in anonymity on a span that is nearly lost now, the roads to it obscure and narrow and winding, the woods encroaching to claim it.  The Pont d'Aël, Rosie told us, is relatively unknown even by the neighboring school children, though efforts have been made to acquaint them with the history of the region. 

I thought of Shelley again, a line from another famous poem: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.  We took a selfie atop a 2000 year old effort at permanence, at the longevity of names and images.  I think we were aware of the ironies.  At least Rosie, who knew the valley the best, mugged amusingly as the day slid into evening for us all.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Roman Bridge in Aosta

Next to the other two bridges I consider in this triad of entries, the little Roman Bridge in Aosta is smaller, more sunlit, more wed to the business and architecture of the town that grew up around it.  Small enough to be considered charming, lined with 17^th century shops and dwellings, it is domesticated unlike the bridges at Pont d’Aël or Pont St. Martin. 

And yet a message survives in its making, its orientation—difficult to translate at this late date, but still apparent if you simply follow your gaze west through the town.

The little bridge empties on its western side at a spot where you can look across a leisurely circle of road, neither compact nor businesslike enough to be called a roundabout.  The circle hedges in the great Augustan Arch of the town, and standing at the foot of the bridge, looking through the arch, you can catch a glimpse of further structures—the Praetorian Gates, and to the right of them, scarcely visible above the rooftops, the ruinous scaenae of the Roman theatre.  It is a rhetoric of arrivals, far smaller and less intimidating that the paths to the Fora in Rome, but a formidable approach nevertheless.

The terms under which you make the journey have changed in two millennia: time was when you were to be awed by Roman power, here at a far-flung outpost where the builders would no doubt have been insulted to hear their bridge described as “charming”.  Instead, they would have thought in terms of imperium, that quality, according to Cicero, sine quo res militaris administrari, teneri exercitus, bellum geri non potest (which, if my Latin is not far more ruinous than the bridge, translates to something close to “without which military matters cannot be governed, the army cannot be held together, and war cannot be waged”). These days imperium is masked by the layers of years, but a straight arrow shot by an archer more powerful than we could imagine could carry through two arches toward the far end of Aosta, where Mussolini’s wolves, symbols of two imperial visions layered atop each other, would mark the end of the line.

This is not an elegy about Time’s erosions.  Things have worn away, indeed, but what interests me is what is still there.  Imperium remains by implication.  You have to look for it in a latter day, removed from the time in which it towered in front of you in confrontation. Instead there is the loud daily life of the town, giving the impression of variety and scarcely guided chaos, as the souvenir shops clamor for your attention in the streets and you have to look and dig, intuit and guess, before you can see the direction of it all, the map that underlies generations of maps, the history that still shapes us as we travel unaware.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Bridges #1

They figure largely in the stories I know and love, from the Billy Goats Gruff through Horatius at the Sublician Bridge.  Concord, Kwai, Remagen, and Khazad-Dum.  Almost always at a moment of reckoning, in a crucial juncture in some history. 

Of course, we wouldn’t know these bridges were it not for what happened on or across them.  But they are a transitional structure, liminal and also rhetorical in their insistence that they are the one and only way across a stream, a river, a gorge or chasm.  Perhaps we make them beautiful because they embody a language of connection—of links between what we know and what we have yet to discover.

Among its Roman ruins, the Aosta Valley contains three notable bridges: the Pont de Pierre in the town of Aosta itself, the Pont-Saint-Martin, and the Pont d'Aël.  All are remarkably preserved—the Pont de Pierre a bit occluded and domesticated by the late medieval buildings that surround it—but each suggests at more than a simple overpass or viaduct.  They are part of the Roman language of conquest, if you look at them carefully and consider what you see.

Of the three bridges, the Pont-Saint-Martin (built probably sometime in the 1^st century BCE) is the most famous.  A medieval legend has attached itself, and it goes something like this: Saint Martin, the Bishop of Tours, was returning to France, but found his way blocked by the river Lys, which had swept away the only crossing passage during a flood.  The resourceful saint cuts a deal with the Devil, who promises to build a bridge over the river in exchange for the soul of the first one to cross it.  Martin accepts the proposal, but in a nice reversal of the “devil in the details” stories we all have heard, triumphs on a technicality: he throws a piece of bread across the river, enticing a hungry dog to cross, thereby foiling (and infuriating) the devil, who vanishes in the river with a sulfurous explosion, leaving the bridge behind.  The carnival at Pont-Saint-Martin celebrates this confrontation, and concludes by burning an effigy of the devil under the bridge.

A fanciful story, its rhetoric evident.  The Romans and their culture translated into devils and demons, the bridge baptized in a display of Christian ingenuity.  Christ supplants Caesar in the clear-cut dynamic of good and evil, the burning effigy a fire ignited early, not long after the great transition of Constantine and Rome’s official embrace of the Faith (both Constantine and St. Martin are 4^th century figures).  The Pont-Saint-Martin spans an historical era, the passage from one world to the next.  Of the three bridges, this one has the clearest argument: you have to look closer to read the others.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Visiting and Staying: A Reflection

Everyone recognizes that our style of living when we travel is much different than when we stay at home.  The anonymity of the hotel room, the level of observation when sights and sites that are everyday to a resident are things that we, as visitors or vacationers, see for the first (and possibly the only) time.  Understandably, there’s a tolerance (especially in tourist areas) toward the blunders and misdirection of strangers: despite American tourists’ return to the States with horror stories about our mistreatment at the hands of resentful locals, I’ve received far ruder treatment from my countrymen than I ever do from people I meet abroad (though I’m sure the Italians have their share of inhospitality, you’re not very likely to find it in a tourist area, where livelihood depends on courtesy to strangers, and sometimes even the most discourteous ones).

So it’s different when you travel from when you stay.  But when have you ceased to tour and begun to take up residence?  I think I have a domestic streak that finds myself at home readily—a lucky quality to have as a traveler.  When I return to lodgings after only several days, there is a sense of gaining my bearings, as though some interior sense of balance is restored in the play where I am staying, the vestibular system signaling my acclimation, the road anxiety kicking back into my recesses.  The flat in Aosta with its long corridor, bulky, almost monumental furniture, and glimpse of the Alps over the rooftop (I've inserted pictures of both), became home within the week, and the neighborhood became my neighborhood (after one irritating and hot afternoon of getting lost only a block or two from the place).  I adjust easily: as habitual as the old man I am becoming, my first trepidation at any change falls away quickly, and I find the routine in the strange and set my feet there.

But how does the transition go?  When do we stop visiting and start staying? 

You begin to stay, I think, when domestic tasks return to your daily patterns.  You cook at home, clean the apartment, shop for groceries and for little, temporary items (a paring knife, a cheap alarm clock) unavailable in the place you are staying. The curiosity of Italian supermarkets—handling the fruit and vegetables with plastic gloves, large butcher shops and a dearth of pre-packaged meats, the glory of an extensive wine aisle—becomes customary eventually, and you adopt a version of the pattern you had at home.

You begin to stay when you learn your neighbors.  When you have neighbors, actually. The woman at the laundry who knows no English and negotiates task and cost through signs and pantomime, the brilliance of her invention a source of marvel to you at first, but customary as you return.  The barber who slyly compliments your virtually non-existent Italian, and reveals on the second visit that he was a jazz drummer back in the day, in Greenwich Village, showing you his CD, where his own able compositions are fitted among popular standards like “Over the Rainbow” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”.  The lovely green-haired young woman behind the counter in the bakery, who begins to use your visits as an opportunity to learn English and progresses remarkably as the weeks unfold, her learning curve a product of intelligence and youth, but also an intense curiosity about the world around her.

You begin to stay, oddly enough, once the wanderlust returns.  When there’s a part of the town or the region that provokes another curiosity, sets your steps away from the neighborhood—your neighborhood by now—toward a new street, a new stop on the rail or bus line, toward a land you have heard of.  You begin to stay when you become restless, and in that sense, staying is a prelude to wandering once again.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Owning Up

I’ve told my travel writing students to check facts.  It’s not simply a matter of honesty, though.  Very often questions of courtesy arise out of the impulses of responsibility, and the issue is not only one of truth but of an even wider integrity.

Which is why, today, I am owning up about my Ljubljana entry late last month.  That it was an honest error I hope you’ll believe.  But I stand here corrected nonetheless, and in a way I hope will enlighten some of you as it did me.

A while after I posted the article about our Slovenian trip, I received an email from my friend Vlado, who corrected—with his typical graciousness and good humor—a mistake I made in the chronicling.  Let him speak for himself, in the words of his amiable letter:

by the way - got a phone call from Slovenian president (it is a small country!) and some "anonymous threatening letters" (probably nationalists) about that "jeans matter”

Typical of his humor—sly and playful—but he goes on to make a point about a situation that at some time I had known, but had conveniently shed the knowledge as I wrote my entry on Ljubljana:

former Yugoslavia had quite open borders and also all same/similar consumer goods as in Italy/Austria and rest of the Europe (of course there were some import restrictions as well, but only for very special goods or quantity limits for personal import)... so - no typical "border bribes" in form of jeans.   I'd been talking about Czechoslovakia and Russia (Soviet bloc - no jeans or jeans factories there) - former Yugoslavia was not in the same bloc.

Yes, I’d known about Yugoslavia’s non-alignment under Tito and after, known that the more open borders and the dramatically varied terrain had served as locations for U.S. and Western films as varied as Kelly’s Heroes to portions of Fiddler on the Roof.  But one border story—Vlado’s about crossing into Czechoslovakia in the old days—had dispelled my previous knowledge and pushed me back onto the stereotype of my American raising: how everything behind (or even remotely around) the “Iron Curtain” was barbed wire and statues of Stalin, tinted in relentless grayscale and sunless because we chose to see it that way.

And Vlado, gently but with a focused wisdom, pointed to the heart of the error:

seems in the rule, "the big one" or isolated countries don't have much or correct information about the rest of the world (or perhaps even about real situation in their own country - who knows)... on other side small nations/countries collect all possible information and learn as much as they can about big countries - what do you think?

Well, Vlado, I think you may be right.  Bargaining and traveling from a tradition of economic and global privilege that has lasted my life, my countrymen are too ready to assume that the world is the way we see it, forgetting that we bring the vision, the outline, the colors of the country with us on our journey.  We characterize others according to the images we have nurtured and often distorted for generations (and I believe other countries more economically powerful do this as well—particularly Russia and China at the moment) and are surprised when others don’t match our assumptions.  And yes, smaller countries do this as well—it’s all part of what Richard Pryor used to characterize as “a lot of people getting together to not understand each other,” and therefore part of a human condition.  But maybe people in power tend to misunderstand more because the margin of error is greater. 

What to do about this?  Listen, read, and be willing to stand corrected—all difficult activities for most Americans I know, and I trust the resistance can be found in  other countries as well. But you can still be who you are, stand in integrity, and do those things.  Some of our biggest mistakes come when we think we can’t.  ©2014 Michael Williams