Seeking a deeper connection

I admit it: I'm hooked on visiting house museums, especially ones that belonged to authors I idolize. This penchant for tracing famous writers to their lairs started early -- at birth, if not before.

I blame my mother. She named me after Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of "Wuthering Heights," her favorite book.

It was inevitable that someday I'd go looking for the author. When I did, my mother went along. We traveled to the north of England, to the humble parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire, where Emily Bronte and her writer-sisters Charlotte ("Jane Eyre") and Anne ("The Tenant of Wildfell Hall") spent nearly all of their short lives.

The day we were there was cold and cloudy. Black rooks were cawing above the tilted headstones in the graveyard in front of the house, and rough, dark waves of moorland crowded close in back. All it took was one look out the parsonage windows to understand the Bronte sisters' longing for passion and drama in their lives.

Imagination gave them what life in their small, cramped dwelling could not. And that, in a nutshell, is the appeal of a cultural pilgrimage - the jolt of insight you can get from a place that was important to someone who was important to you.

You'd think that heroic deeds would be all we'd need from our heroes. But cultural pilgrims want more: We want to get close to them -- closer than their writing or painting or music or politics can bring us.

We want to see who they were when they weren't being famous, when they were off duty, when they were being ordinary. Nothing I know does it as well as visiting the places they called home.

It's true for every cultural hero. Thomas Jefferson's letters reveal his mind -- but it takes Monticello to make him come alive. Gauguin's shack in Tahiti, Georgia O' Keeffe's houses in New Mexico, Mozart's Salzburg, the Beatles' Liverpool, Abraham Lincoln's place in Springfield, Ill., Robert Louis Stevenson's final home in Samoa: They all do the same thing.

My Bronte pilgrimage wasn't very complicated. The Brontes, after all, stayed home. Literary pilgrimages get a lot more demanding when you're worshipping a hero who traveled. The more rootless the hero, the more difficult the quest.

My earliest writer-hero was Richard Halliburton, who popularized world travel for average Americans in the 1920s and '30s. I wanted to follow in his footsteps and write a book about it. Working title: "After You, Dick."

I took a good run at it -- crossing the stormy North Atlantic by ship, climbing the Great Pyramid, hanging out inside the Taj Mahal on the night of a full moon. And while I didn't swim the Panama Canal or the Hellespont or dive into the sacrificial well at Chichen Itza, as Halliburton had, I saw them, at least. I also realized that he'd been so many places that I was never going to catch up.

I've done better by Ernest Hemingway. I've visited his family homes in Oak Park, outside Chicago. Seen every place he lived in Paris, from Rue Cardinal Lemoine to the Hotel Ritz. Toured his villa in Key West. Marveled at the hills of East Africa, where he hunted (they really do look like white elephants).

The place that touched me the most, though, was Hemingway's home in Cuba: Finca Vigia, carefully preserved by the government of Fidel Castro. It stands in an overgrown garden in a Havana suburb, looking not much different from other old stucco houses in the neighborhood.

What makes it matter are the same things that matter in literature itself: details and the emotions they evoke. There were bushels of details in Hemingway's house, right down to the cheap plastic drink glasses and dried-up bottles of Coke on the table by his armchair, exactly where they were when he touched them for the last time in 1960.

It's the very ordinariness of these details that makes them evocative. I had expected to see Hemingway's well-used typewriter and the trophy heads of big-game animals he shot. I hadn't expected to see his loafers. But there they were, on the shoe rack in his bedroom, ready and waiting in case he needed them.

It was those brown, broken-in shoes that made the great writer seem human, down-to-earth, accessible -- exactly the kind of connection that this literary pilgrim hoped for.

Catherine Watson is a former Star Tribune travel editor and the author of "Roads Less Traveled: Dispatches From the Ends of the Earth" (Syren Books, 2005).