Read Pilgrim's Road for Free Online

especially with a stranger, overcame barriers, and they told me that Dirk was suffering from a virulent form of osteoporosis and had not long to live. The illness had been brought on by drugs prescribed, he said, for a completely different and far less serious condition, and he had been fighting the effects for a year or so, during which time his stature had been shrinking dramatically. He was determined now to use what time he had left to the full, which was why they were making this trip through the French countryside which he and Ilse had always loved. They couldn’t wait for warmer weather, because already Dirk was finding it very tiring to drive far, or indeed to move about much at all, and they had been forced to exchange their more manoeuvrable motor home for a caravan in order to provide greater comfort for him. I could see he was not the sort of man who would give up any activity without a struggle, and that poor Use would have to watch and be unable to intervene or help in any way until he allowed her to, and I thought the ordeal they were living through was probably far more heart-breaking for her than for Dirk himself.
    I learnt that he was a highly successful man financially, and owned an international computer concern which he ran with his son. But since his illness his ideas had altered and his priorities had changed, he said. Now he wished his son would explore life a little more while he was still young, and think of money and responsibilities a little less. I asked him jokingly if he would prefer a son like mine, who was much the same age as his, but who was a confirmed wanderer; a young man who spent his life sailing the seas single-handed, owning nothing other than the small boat he lived in, and working only when he needed to top up his bank balance. I expected him to reply in the same vein, with something like ‘perhaps an amalgam of the two young men might be a good thing’. Instead, Dirk said solemnly that I should be happy to have raised such a child, at which I had to confess that whatever the world thought about it, I found very little to complain of in the way my son had chosen to live his life. ‘I should think not indeed,’ laughed Ilse. ‘What sort of example does his mother set him?’ And suddenly all three of us were laughing, gratefully, spinning it out, because humour was so wonderfully refreshing after all this dark serious talk of death. They had wanted to ask me in, confided Ilse before I left them, because with my bicycle and the dumpy little tent I summed up for Dirk the sense of freedom that sometimes pierced him like a knife when he remembered the long summers of his youth, riding or hiking through the German countryside with the whole of his life still before him.
    I asked them where they would be heading for after this, but they said they didn’t know, they just wanted to keep on moving as long as possible. They had reached the stage where they could no longer anticipate anything, even the next day, with any great certainty, but had to live each moment as it came — which, as I suddenly remembered, is what many religious disciplines consider to be the only way to live. Not that Ilse and Dirk had professed any religion; they were simply on a journey, as I was. Our paths had crossed, we had told each other our stories, and were ready to go our separate ways. When I struck camp the following morning, breakfasting on a cup of coffee and a slightly wrinkled orange, which was all I had left, their van was still shuttered and silent, so there were no farewells, but I thought about them often in the next few days, and although they hadn’t asked it of me, I added them to the growing list of those to pray for in Compostela.
     

3
     
    Soft Southern Lands
     
    T HE intimate countryside of the Bergerac wines made me realise afresh just how lucky I was to have discovered the bicycle as a means of long-distance travel. The close little valleys with their winding narrow roads and