only as far as Troutdale

I checked out of the Portland Super 8 a little after noon yesterday; the motel's shuttle bus driver saw me and exclaimed when he saw the size of my backpack. "How much does it weigh?" he asked. I told him it was about fifty pounds, and he said, "I remember back when I was a Marine, and we had to march thirty-five miles with seventy-five pounds on our backs." I told him I didn't envy him. I don't.

Front-desk staffers started to involve themselves in the conversation, asking what I was doing, and what my walk was all about. I told them I was visiting various homes and religious centers to talk with people about interreligious issues, and one staffer, also named Kevin, asked, "So are you trying to find your own religion?"

"Nah, I know who I am," I said with a smile. "This is more about finding out where other people stand."

I've discussed before my hesitancy in using the word "pilgrimage" to describe what I'm doing, and as time goes on, the more right I think I am. You see, a religious pilgrimage is a focused act of devotion, not a willy-nilly exploration. Perhaps the term can be used in a whimsically metaphorical way to describe any long trek done on foot (are there biking or driving pilgrimages? how about sailing pilgrimages? how relevant are the seafaring pilgrims, who landed in the New World purportedly in search of the freedom to practice their religions, to this discussion?), but in the strictest sense of the phrase, I'm not dropping everything to walk an immense distance to a specific point in order to venerate an object of worship and/or participate in some sort of ceremony that caps off the journey. That, I think, would be a true pilgrimage in the religious sense, distinct from other forms of pilgrimage, and distinct from what I'm doing.

So I left the motel and started the next leg of my non-pilgrimage, starting off on Airport Way and walking east along Marine, the riverside drive.

I didn't get far, though. I called the only hotel in Corbett, the one whose address I had used to plot my MapQuest route, and made a rude discovery: the hotel was a bed and breakfast that would have cost me a whopping $350 a night. So I changed plans then and there: it was around 5 o'clock and my knee wasn't feeling so hot, so I decided to stop in the town of Troutdale, where I found a Motel 6 ($45/night before tax) and opted to hole up for two nights while I figured out how best to proceed. I'm typing this entry from a surprisingly comfortable bed.

For the time being, it appears I'm going to have to take it easy on the knee, keeping my walks to ten miles or less. What's funny is that my manager Alan had privately recommended exactly this strategy a while back, and I'd said no. Well, Alan, it looks as though you were right all along. Lessons in humility never cease. Guess I need more of them than the average person.

So where do we go from here? Alan wrote up a 19-day itinerary to get me to Lewiston, Idaho, and I'm going to try to follow it, but I'm also going to have to listen to my body and stop each day before any problems become too severe. I suspect the itinerary will stretch to at least a month.

I'm going to slap Alan's proposed route up on the blog, and in subsequent posts I hope to give everyone a clearer idea of the overall path this walk will take. Several people have, over the past two months, written in to volunteer their homes; I hope to plot those points and use them as markers for the larger itinerary. I further hope this will make it easier for readers of this blog to anticipate where I'll be and to help us figure out how to "fill in" the huge spaces between those points (as always, I strongly recommend that you click on the "How Can I Help?" link on the sidebar).

More in a bit.


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