Elvis Grave Finding Your Rhythm on the
Pilgrimage
Road

(April/May 2001)
by Antonio Lopez

"If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism."
-Anthropologist Victor W. Turner

Like all things American, we have found a way to accelerate and economize spirituality. Take the idea of pilgrimage, for example, which is as much a part of American life-in its own peculiar way-as it has been for Christians, Buddhists, and other ancient sects for a millennia. But instead of undertaking a methodical ascetic journey, we simply tune in, turn on, and drop out. For Americans, rock & roll, blues, and jazz have for decades provided a spiritual refuge, a place to get lost, a land of spontaneity and vitality. Such spirited escapism often manifests itself in that most American of pilgrimages: The Road Trip.

Countless people flee home turf to visit an assortment of music-related sites: Graceland, Kurt Cobain's suicide scene, the Church of Jimi Hendrix, the Mississippi Delta. Even a trip to Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco's former hippie paradise, can be viewed as a pilgrimage to the shrine of rock & roll, piqued by the wistful hope of obtaining the neo-religious experience of a Dead concert or an acid trip. The desire to make a pilgrimage is rarely rational. Anyone who has been called will tell you, they simply had to go.

Oddly, most of these music-related journeys are associated with tragic figures, not dissimilar to pilgrimages Medieval European Christians undertook to touch the relics of martyred saints or apostles. Back then, and perhaps even now, the belief was that stroking such relics would imbue the seeker with wisdom or power. Historical sites have always compelled us to tune into something deep and intangible within ourselves. A pilgrimage can be a catalyst for quitting your job, getting divorced, making a big change in your life. Travel alone can be a kind of therapy that eases the burden of modern life, shakes things up, or simply gives us an overdue excuse to screw off.

Rock and blues, which have fulfilled a quasi-religious need for decades, are like church to some. Experiencing the "roots" of either genre-journeying to Mississippi to hear "real" blues, for example-is like tapping into the source, drinking from the Holy Grail.

Because the essential mode of transport in North America is the automobile, rock and blues pilgrimages differ from their spiritual equivalents around the globe. In Spain, for instance, Europeans, Brazilians, and some North Americans walk more than 500 miles to visit the remains of St. James at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. There, the pilgrim embarks on a solitary journey involving sacrifice and physical discomfort. Despite the goal to visit the cathedral, it is the journey, not the destination, that compels the pilgrim.

I have done both types of pilgrimage, the American auto road trip and the walking-through-the-internal-labyrinth kind. I won't judge which is better, but I will say there is a marked difference between the two. In the case of the road trip, you experience the dark, delirious culture of the U.S. highway-crazy Route 66-type joints, Las Vegas debauchery, close encounters of the biker kind, greasy-spoon coffee shits. Yet, for the most part, you're enclosed in a steel cage with your favorite tunes blasting and maybe a reefer or two, blowing smoke in the wind.

Walking pilgrimage puts you in a different space. You are in the landscape, not zipping through it. Your sense of time becomes one with the natural rhythm of your own body and the methodical, meditative process of taking one step after another. Your mind chews and ponders, spits and digests. This type of walking is not to be confused with the Walkman- and cell phone-toting trekkers removed from the landscape, maintaining their addictions to the technology the walking pilgrim seeks to leave behind. Strolling sojourners have a romantic desire for the Medieval experience. They want to slow down.

Perhaps the best benefit of walking long distances is finding your own rhythm, feeling your heartbeat, tasting sweat on your upper lip. You walk and walk and walk, and at some point you feel like a precision drummer, discordant thoughts whining in your head like a Coltrane sax solo. You know when your blood sugar will take a dive; you sense the rhythm of your body's energy. You discover that time is elastic; you have a day or even a week to reach point X. The hour of the day is irrelevant. You want to stop and explore a strange factory site or linger in an old café, so be it. Time is yours. Time is no longer money, it's art.

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Unfortunately, North America is so car-crazed, walking journeys of the sort that take you across northern Spain are few. Native Americans, of course, have long practiced pilgrimage, since before Europeans invaded the continent. But often these routes and traditions are passed on only to initiated members of secret societies, and the meaning of such spiritual journeys is probably beyond the ken of the average American consumer. In New Mexico, many local Catholics walk 26 miles to a santuario, or holy church, as a form of penance or reverence, just as their Old-World ancestors did.

It is perhaps this division-the Old World versus the New-that defines the modern pilgrim. In Europe, the weight of history prevails. Cities may offer modern conveniences such as subways and paved roads, yet many have been continually occupied for a millennium. The holy shrines, cathedrals, and churches are associated with miracles, visions, and saints. Modern America lacks such holy places and our cities are young. What we have are fallen pop stars. Religion to us is fame; TV, the altar at which we pray; the automobile, our ticket to the sublime.

It could be argued that some road-trip pilgrims are merely consuming experience-that is, taking the journey more for the sake of saying they did it than for a desire to move into a liminal or altered space. The hype and growth of Woodstock revival festivals is a perfect example. Ironically, the recent exploitative effort to mold nostalgic concert-goers into mere consumers backfired: The event turned into a tribal, albeit base, riot that indeed pushed people into a temporary altered state of consciousness.

No matter. Whether done for religion, adventure, or sport, travel can benefit the sojourner's psyche, for it takes you to unfamiliar surroundings, far from the comfort zone. For once, god forbid, you have only yourself to contend with, and whatever external obstacles you face can't be clicked away with the channel changer. Within that space, it's possible to find your own rhythm on the road of life.