Family Pilgrimages and Primitive Ways: An Interview with Landon Roussel

The Camino de Santiago, a collection of pilgrimage routes to the shrine of St. James the Great in northwestern Spain, offers itself to anyone with perseverance and the ability to make good plans. Its travelers include backpacking aficionados and tourists as well as the devoutly religious. When Landon Roussel—Cambridge resident and primary care doctor at Mount Auburn hospital—undertook the trip for the third time, however, the road became a complex spiritual journey of reconciliation with his estranged brother, Cory. Soon after hiking the Camino, Cory died for reasons related to his drug addiction, prompting his older brother to chronicle their journey in his first book, “On the Primitive Way.”

The Harvard Crimson: What made you decide to write “On the Primitive Way?”

Landon Roussel: I think the idea came to me maybe a week or two after I found out that my brother was killed. He was killed in October of ’14, and as soon as I was writing his eulogy and trying to capture my memory of him—my memory of us, really—I realized that our story was too deep, too rich to just get down in a few pages. So the next logical thing would be to put it down in a book. Not only for our sake, for capturing our story, but for capturing the process that many people go through of trying to reconnect with their loved ones who they might have gotten separated from or estranged from or distanced from for whatever reasons. Be it addiction, be it prison, be it family drama… whatever it is.

THC: Was writing the book partly a form of therapy?

LR: It was extremely therapeutic to go back and relive not only the happy memories that we had but also the difficult ones as well. It forces me to make sense of not only the past but make it relevant to the present by writing about it.

THC: Do you think that over the course of the trip your relationship with your brother changed?

LR: Oh, it did, definitely. We had hardly spoken. Our relationship was very, very stretched for a number of reasons, the main of which were drug abuse and prison. We just sort of getting hits and hits to our relationship. Afterwards, it wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was a sort of mutual understanding that we were going to commit to understanding each other.

C: What was your favorite part of the trip?

L: When we were walking to a town called Melide—and people who have walked the Camino de Santiago, at least the last hundred kilometers, will know this town, because it’s famous throughout all of Spain for its octopus—we had just had a disagreement that was tough. Not because of the disagreement itself but because of our past. Emotional memories of us disagreeing were, for me, very difficult because of experiences of his anger related to drug abuse. So as we were walking to Melide we had a disagreement that we were able to resolve peacefully and civilly, as many adult brothers who disagree should, and I just sort of felt a weight off my back. I remember my backpacking almost feeling lighter, as I had my wet clothes that I had pinned on the outside of my backpack earlier in the day to dry—I could almost feel the water evaporating off the clothes and feeling that was sort of an allegory for the weight which I had shed from our past together and the hurt that we endured.

C: Did your work as a doctor influence the writing of “On the Primitive Way?”

L: I remember having patients who were on the brink of death—or who have died—and that made it tough to deal with. Being with family members as their loved ones were dying while I was trying to grieve the loss of my own loved one. But it also gave me an added sympathy for them. Also, I still have patients who are dealing with addiction, and it really speaks to them when I tell them that my own brother dealt with it and was eventually killed in relation to it. It builds an incredible rapport. I feel like I understand where they’re coming from because I’ve dealt with it myself.

—Staff writer Charlotte L.R. Anrig can be reached at charlotte.anrig@thecrimson.com.