James Joseph: Image and Pilgrimage (2)

Turner states in his book that "Pilgrimages, like so many other leisure-time activities, have been organized, bureaucratized, and subjected to the influence of the modern forms of mass transportation and communication, mediated by full-time travel agencies". This passage makes me wonder what pilgrimages would be like before the day of constantly turning everything bureaucratic, and having travel agencies mediate the whole process. I actually find myself longing for a chance to take a pilgrimage with no assistance from any modern means of transportation as well as any help from a travel agency. Imagine what it would be like to have to travel from say, a state like Ohio, on foot, all the way over to where the Appalachian Trail is on the east coast. And then from there, hiking and traversing the whole AP trail on foot. It might take a larger stretch of the imagination to conjure this idea up, but what if we had the chance to travel these trails and pilgrimages before they became popularly overcome by modern agencies and corporation, maybe even before they were trails. This idea reflects on me in many ways, and opens many doors of thought that I never would have conceived of thinking before. This class and the books we have read really makes me yearn for the ability to somehow travel back in time, before we were a nation (or even before the Europeans arrived here), and to merely admire all this great piece of land had to offer before our human institutions had a chance to mask it up: To be able to experience nature in the nude (more or less).