At the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina, pilgrims gathered. It was the beginning of April 2022, and in the way of that country, the days were warm and the nights were cool, and the morning fog that blanketed the valley below glowed blue. The camp conjured certain romantic and suspect associations, with its historic lodges wrapped in wide porches, their tall, white pillars smudged with the traces of a century of wear. An amalgam of cultural products signaling “the South” seemed to float in on the fog: corsets and crumbling antebellum mansions, or whatever.
The occasion at hand was tradition of an altogether different phylum: The Annual Gathering of American Pilgrims on the Camino—as in the Camino de Santiago, an ancient network of paths taken by pilgrims that ends in Galicia. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims make the journey each year, departing from various locations in Europe, following big yellow arrows through the north of Spain to the tomb of St. James, and some onward to the coast. The website of the American Pilgrims on the Camino says that the gathering gives Camino veterans and aspirants alike the opportunity to “share experiences” and to “learn more.” But I had not come to trade intelligence on headlamps or blister care. I had come to meet the pilgrims. Really, I’d come to meet a particular pilgrim. Ann Sieben went on her first pilgrimage over fifteen years ago, and has been walking ever since. She abandoned a lucrative engineering career in nuclear remediation and gave away all her belongings, devoting herself to the life of the pilgrim.
Ann is not one to follow big yellow arrows, and she feels the Camino has largely become a “touristic” venture, in which one is nudged along a track like an “economic widget.” But she is a devoted servant of her God (Catholic), and part of her God-given task on earth is to teach the world about the virtues of pilgrimage. Since her friend Christine insisted on paying for her to attend the gathering, she has decided to use this opportunity to test-drive a set of six inspirational tales from her travels in front of a sympathetic audience.
On the second night of the conference, about a dozen people had congregated near the hearth in the main lodge to hear her speak. We’d just come from a performance of a one-woman show titled “Crying on the Camino,” written and performed by a retired speech pathologist. An hour and a half of bawdy jokes, musical numbers, and a recurrent direct address—“Blessed are you, pilgrim”—culminated in a tearful audience and a standing ovation. But just now, everyone looked sleepy. One silver-haired gentleman slackened in his chair, snoring.
Ann was standing before the hearth with her hands folded, monkish. She is small, just over five feet tall. Her hair is a short, white floof, buoyant as dandelion down, her eyes a blue so pale they shine like ice. She was dressed in her pilgrim best: leather walking boots, a hiking skirt, and a black, medieval-looking tunic she refers to as “the hoodie.” When she’s on a pilgrimage, this uniform is supplemented by a small backpack and a Day-Glo green top of some technical material. I learned that the tunic was patterned, in part, on a Lord of the Rings costume, and was “evening wear” reserved for places of rest such as monasteries, or dinner parties hosted by village mayors.
Ann introduced herself as a consecrated pilgrim who had renounced worldly possessions. “I travel with no money,” she said, “which means, every night when I get to my destination . . . I ask people for hospitality.” Throughout fifteen years, fifty-six different countries, and more than forty-five thousand miles, she told us, “I have never not found hospitality.”
Ann’s talk wove together some of her greatest hits, subdivided into related “couplets.” A story about two men who leveled rifles at her in the Western Desert of Egypt was paired with one about a crew of men who appeared to be narco-traffickers confronting her with machine guns while she “hoofed it” through the Chihuahuan Desert.
In the first case, Ann was walking across North Africa to Jerusalem, on a pilgrimage dedicated to “J.C. and the Boys.” She was the stranger in that story, the enemy “invader of their peaceful oasis.” She defused the situation by asking the men for water. By expressing an elemental need, she explains, the stranger made herself familiar.
The alleged narco-traffickers confronted her while she walked from Denver to Mexico City. “I am a pilgrim headed to Guadalupe,” she told their ringleader. “My pilgrimage will either end there, at the Basilica, or in Heaven with God. For me, it’s equal. You decide.” In her telling, the men lowered their weapons. Some crossed themselves and wrote down prayers for their grandmothers and children, which Ann promised to deliver to “Our Lady.” In this case, the men were the strangers, and their love of family taught Ann to love, in turn, “thy enemy.”
Every encounter with the stranger is an opportunity to create rapport. Ann’s raison d’être is building trust, because trust is the foundation of peace. Though she walks alone, pilgrimage is paradoxically a social project. “It is personal,” Ann told the crowd. “But it is not private.”
And a pilgrim never knows what gifts her needs will bestow upon her host. Take, for example, a snowy night in Romania, when an elderly peasant couple insisted that Ann sleep in their bed while they bunked with the goats. She spent the night tossing and turning with guilt. But in the morning, the couple emerged from the goathouse as flushed and giddy as naughty teenagers. The moral? “More pilgrims, more love.”
Someone must have tapped the dreaming man on the shoulder. By the time Ann finished the second couplet, the whole audience had leaned in, roused by allusion to eros and automatic weapons. Later I asked how she thought it went. Did she get much feedback?
“Just all the wows,” she replied. “With the silence afterwards . . . Spellbound. Speechless. Digesting.”
It's a good story, and a reminder that there are good folks in the world, here on Easter Sunday.
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