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Following the Sun:
A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Hebrides
by John Hanson Mitchell
Counterpoint, 2002; xxii plus 280 pages.
Reviewed by Barbara Mary Johnson
“I’m trying to lead a healthy life, ride my bicycle every day; eat good food each night, worship the sun every day,” says John Hanson Mitchell.
His interest in sun worship began when an astronomy teacher called the sun “the source of all life on earth, the nearest any of us will ever come to experiencing a creator.” Indeed, Following the Sun begins with a collection of diverse invocations, prayers, and poems to the sun, from Egyptian, Catholic, and Zuni sources, to mention a few, and from Chaucer and Keats, among others. Then a winter spent in Florida sealed Mitchell’s solar devotion. During his northward trip home from Florida, he planned his 1500-mile bicycle pilgrimage from Spain, leaving on the Vernal Equinox in March, arriving in Scotland’s Hebrides for the Summer Solstice.
Mitchell calls ancient pilgrimages “the most universal of spiritual quests,” but notes that records never show how the pilgrims got back. And as for the sun, he writes, “For all our science and craft, we are but parasites of the sun. . . . [I]n its magnitude, its veritable power, in its measureless, unknowable inner heart, the sun is very like a god.”
His inherited Peugeot bicycle seemed appropriate vehicle for pilgrimage: “a heavy old horse by modern standards, all black, with low-slung handlebars, ten gears with two ranges of five changes each, and a small rack over the rear wheel.” The writer/pilgrim begins his journey March 21, but doesn’t tell us what year or how old he was; he alludes to college days within the past decade.
A “happy wayfarer, out on a splendid sojourn” that first day, Mitchell listened to birdsong, watched country women work in the fields, and enjoyed nearly-empty roads. He vowed to keep his plans flexible.
The author adds nostalgic, historical, philosophical, and spiritual accounts, such as tracking bees whose dance patterns use the sun like a meridian and whirling bats in Madrid that foretell fair weather. He tells us that an obsidian blade plunged into the chest of a sacrificial human, then withdrawn with a throbbing heart raised on dagger point toward the sun, was a needed action, Aztecs believed, to keep the solar system in motion.
As a cyclist, I was dismayed to see this sun worshipper quit biking that first day after only ten miles. I was likewise disappointed when he traveled by rail, boat, and automobile. But, Mitchell explains, he was not out to “test himself,” so perhaps these lapses can be forgiven.
Days and days of rain see him visiting with longtime friends and acquaintances in Madrid and Paris. One of his best chapters (despite the lack of cycling) covers his stay with friends in the “gloomy sanctity of Seville” during Holy Week. Mitchell views a parade of penitents, hooded and masked, following elaborate floats carried on the gouged shoulders of sweating, bleeding men -- “The true penitentes.” Pearl teardrops graced the Virgin figure on the float, rubies depicted Christ’s blood, and coronet-playing marchers blasted Moorish tunes. Calling himself a solar fanatic, Mitchell notes that Mary’s halo “glinted and gleamed” in the sun.
Finally back on his bike, Mitchell is again stopped by the weather -- “Birds fell from the sky with the rains, traffic died on the roads. For all I knew the seas were rising over the lands to envelope the earth” -- and returns to Madrid for wild rounds with an old friend, Timothy Griggs, amidst the “Old Spanish energy of the tapas bars.”
But the overweight, non-athletic Griggs decides to join Mitchell’s pilgrimage, at least partway. So when the weather clears the two of them set out, Mitchell on his Peugeot and Griggs on an old three-speed, but a flat tire sends them back to Madrid, where a new plan develops. Griggs wants to drive, and proves to be as wild at the wheel as in the bars of Madrid. “I have never been so terrified on a road,” Mitchell writes, “as I was with Griggs in the Sierras of northern Spain.”
Surviving the mountains, Griggs once again becomes Mitchell’s biking companion. Griggs dawdles on his old three-speed, with basket in front, for about four or five miles before inquiring if his friend wasn’t “tired from all that riding,” and suggests an early lunch.
Mitchell, surprisingly, begins to enjoy the slow pace. Griggs, “stiff and bobbling,” pushes on with his friend. They take time out to climb a mountain and Griggs has a “spiritual awakening”: “By God, you seem to have taken the right path in life. This is marvelous. Health-giving. Just what I need. We should climb on till nightfall, scale that peak ahead. Feed on chocolate in the true mountaineer fashion. . . . I’m going to quit smoking.”
The closer Mitchell rides toward Scotland, the more people question his sanity in visiting such a wild and cold place. A woman innkeeper in England predicts he would “be speared and eaten” by the Scots, but he finds friendly Scots willing to debate with him over whether seals worship the sun, and if Selkies (seal people) really exist. On the evening of the Summer Solstice, he joins a gathering of worshippers on Scotland’s western coast of Lewis, near the stones of Callanish (similar to Stonehenge, which he had visited earlier in England).
One member of the group uses a chronometer to measure angles of the sun, but others seem simply awed by the holiness of the place. A small band wear Druid hoods. Everyone grows quiet, or speaks in whispers, as a dark dragon-shaped cloud grotesquely twists while the sun drops into the sea. Mitchell’s pilgrimage is over; true to the form of the genre, he doesn’t say how or if he returned home.
Despite his characterization of this book as a pilgrimage, Mitchell does not reveal his innermost spiritual beliefs, except somewhat in the preface. The son of an Episcopal priest, he calls himself irreligious. Yet his obsession with the sun, light, and being outdoors whenever possible “began to coalesce into a more conscious spiritual devotion to the sun.” He dislikes eating lunch at restaurants without outdoor seating (which brings back arguments I have had when a lovely patio is deemed too hot, cold, windy, or inconvenient for waiters).
But Mitchell offers fascinating details on sun worship and celebrates its variety, depth and wonder. He says the goal of his pilgrimage is “to make a more conscious union with this deity” -- the sun. As much as I have loved sunshiny days, I had never before considered that the sun might actually be our provident God. This idea opens up a million questions about all the universe’s suns: Is each a deity among millions of deities in each galaxy? Are all these sun deities equal? Are all separate, or part of a confederated God? And so on. Good questions to ponder on my own next two-wheeled pilgrimage under the sun.
Barbara Mary Johnson, a former journalism instructor and editor, is a poet and author of four books. They include Pilgrim on a Bicycle: Coast to Coast in Search of Community and Cycling to the Source of the Mississippi River.She lives in California.
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