Following the Sun (16 page)

After he returned to this country, my father maintained his connections with China and Japan, and when I was growing up Chinese and Japanese visitors would sometimes stay with us. I can remember learning a few words from these seemingly exotic figures. I have vague memories of one of them telling me of a Shinto morning greeting of the sun. Upon rising, according to Lafcadio Hearn, who collected the traditions of Japan, “the worshipper washes his face and rinses his mouth, and then turns to the sun, claps his hands, bows, and pays obeisance—‘Hail to thee this day August One.'

This morning ritual has uncounted parallels, not only in other religions of the world, but also in the animal kingdom. According to the Malagasy, the lemurs of Madagascar also worship the sun. Lemurs gather in clear sections of the forest, or on exposed tree branches, face the sun, lower their arms, and twist their palms outward to receive the rays of the first light each dawn. They also loll their heads from side to side, and squint toward the sun. The local tribespeople say they are worshiping, and that lemurs are the ancestors of the Malagasy.

Female sun deities are not common in historical mythologies, but they may have been more common in the early Paleolithic and Neolithic cults, and vestiges of a female solar goddess endured in some traditions even into the nineteenth century. Often they are associated with mountain caves. In Ireland, just before the advance of Christianity, there was a Celtic goddess known as Brighde, who was a bringer of warmth, fire, and summer and was associated with the sun. Every year, in winter, she was imprisoned inside an icy mountain by a one-eyed hag. Even underground, however, her warmth spread and Brighde was believed to be the source of thermal springs. Christianity subsumed the myth of Brighde and changed her into St. Bridget. There are also stories of female sun goddesses in Siberia, and among Native American people, and, curiously, the German word for sun,
die Sonne
, is feminine—it is masculine in most other languages.

During the 1920s and into the 1930s there was a theory among mythologists and folklorists that many of the European folktales, those that appear in
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, for example, were in fact metaphors or allegories for the solar transit and the cycles of the seasons. One example is the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

In spring, the young virgin Red Riding Hood sets out through the dark wood to deliver wine and cake to her ailing grandmother. The wolf spots her and then proceeds to the grandmother's house, eats her up, dons her clothes, and lies in bed to wait for his next meal. After the now well-known exchange (“What a big mouth you have grandmother,” little Red Riding Hood says, “All the better to eat you up with,” says the wolf), Red Riding Hood is consumed. The wolf promptly falls asleep and begins snoring. A passing hunter hears the unusually loud snores, becomes suspicious, figures out what has happened, and cuts open the wolf, freeing Red Riding Hood and the grandmother.

Images of the sun and light and seasons are suggested throughout the story. The young virgin sun travels through the dark wood collecting flowers to bring to the moribund crone, but is consumed and imprisoned in the darkness of the wolfs belly—“It was so dark in the wolf's belly,” Red Riding Hood says to the hunter after she was freed. The virgin spring is reborn from the belly of the dark winter wolf.

According to mythologists, there are other ancient story cycles in which a solar goddess is trapped inside a dark cave, and there is an interesting cycle of folktales associated with bears that may have some relationship to the solar cave story.

Bears have appeared in the folktales and legends among virtually all cultures that live in the Northern Hemisphere, and in some areas, among Siberian tribal people, for example, and North American Indians, they are worshipped as gods. They even appear in folktales as far south as Greece.

The bear, like the sun, disappears each year in winter and emerges in spring, and like Amaterasu and Brighde, he enters a cave for his winter hibernation. When the bear comes out in spring, light spreads over the land, the days lengthen, and the world comes alive. Bears, of all the animals, the North American Indians say, are the most godlike, and also the most human: They are plantigrade walkers, that is, they walk flatfooted like a human being; they can walk on two legs; and they are even said to revere the sun.

The Swedish ethnologist Ake Hultkranz collected a story from a Shoshone elder who claimed he was hunting one day in the spring and at sunrise came upon the tracks of many bears, which he followed. He found the bears gathered around a tree, performing, he said, a sun dance. They had made a great circle around the tree and they were taking four steps forward, four steps backward, and singing in their growling way. The Shoshone man told Hultkranz that the bears were praying for their children. The Pawnee say that when bears dance they stand on two legs, face the sun, and lift their paws toward it. In this way, they say, bears gain their power.

Well into my mountain reveries I realized I was getting hungry, and although I did not have a watch, I judged it was well past Griggs's lunchtime so I wandered back to the entrance to the cable car, bought a ticket, and, like one of the mountain choughs, ascended the steep slopes to meet my friend for lunch.

I found him, as I knew I would, sitting outside on a terrace of the restaurant, enjoying an aperitif, regarding the tribe of skiers that traipsed to and fro among the tables in their shiny high-tech gear. They were wearing, in my view at least, truly ugly clothes, had covered their eyes with wraparound dark glasses, covered their heads with ski hats, and had smeared white patches of zinc on their lips and noses to keep the sun at bay.

I greeted my old companion.

“Thank God you're here,” he said. “I'm starving, but I have to tell you this is a profoundly boring menu here, there's literally nothing to eat. You might try the crêpe, and there's an
omelette au nature
that might be passable, although I doubt it, steak and
frites
, as usual, and no wine to speak of, and furthermore this is a snotty bunch up here too. All sports. No sensibility. No taste for the finer things in life. We should go down to Biarritz and find a reasonable place.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“
Moi?
” he asked incredulously.

It wasn't the drink that was flushing his cheeks. Griggs was looking horribly burned now, and I was considering worrying about him. The sun at these altitudes can be truly damaging and he was a fair-skinned type, what with his English Mum and his father of mixed northern European stock, he was particularly susceptible. The air was genuinely thin up here, and the sun off the snowfields was blindingly bright.

Sun damage is a known danger for climbers in higher altitudes, but in our time the situation has gotten considerably worse because of the thinning of the ozone layer. The ultraviolet radiation streaming toward earth off of the sun, as well as the deadly X rays, are either reflected or absorbed by a protective layer of ozone that encircles the globe about six miles above the earth. Normally, the ozone layer is constantly created, destroyed, and remade over the course of a year, but in the 1980s scientists began accumulating evidence that this thin shield in the stratosphere was being depleted by certain chemicals used on earth.

I ordered an omelette and a green salad and a glass of white wine and settled back to watch the promenade of skiers and diners. It was not an evocatively poetic site, although the open air of the terrace added a certain spice to the otherwise plain food. Alpine choughs were soaring across the slopes below the restaurant in dark, roving flocks. Some of them had collected on the roof of the restaurant and were scrounging around on the slopes behind the buildings. The skiers and diners seemed to be in near constant motion, not unlike the choughs. It was an oddly busy place given the fact that we were now as high as we would get in the Pyrénées.

Up here in this glacial wilderness, there were no green plants visible; we were stuck between black rock, white snow, and blue sky. I began to long for the green misty pastures of the lower grounds, sheep, the fostering earth, and the bands of staff-bearing pilgrims singing as they ascended the slopes to St.Jean-Pied-de-Port, their jangling bells mixing with the gong of sheep bells. Griggs was restless too.

“Let's go,” he said, even before his requisite coffee. “Let's leave here and drive up to Paris. Let's get drunk and go up to Pigalle with the Italian tourists and we'll get rolled by Algerians and fight back and get stabbed and end up in bad hospitals and get stitched up. Anything but this. We must descend into lowlands and squalor. It's too healthy up here.”

I think I had left him alone in the bar longer than I realized, poor fellow.

Seven

Sun Song

On the following Monday, having bid farewell to my old friend, who was having such a good time that he vowed to rejoin me, I set out once more on my northern pilgrimage, following the same road I had taken out of St.-Jean-de-Luz the week before. The weather had improved, it was now warm and humid, and the back roads smelled of rich pine woods and sea air, and once more there was no wind, so the riding was easy. There was no traffic to speak of either, and I began weaving to and fro across the flat road, singing and pedaling, pedaling and singing, and thinking of Bordeaux and wine and food and half wishing old Griggsy would be there when I arrived to find good restaurants and take care of the wine orders. I did know a similar type in Bordeaux, an expatriate Englishman, but he was a poverty-stricken aspiring writer, and there would be no high living as long as I was around him. He had offered me a bed though.

Near Cap Breton I stopped in a field of clover, hid my bicycle, and walked away from the road with my usual lunch of bread, onion, sardines, and tomatoes, and found a little grove beyond the field. Butterflies were rising and settling in the clover, the hot smell of earth rose around me, and I settled down to eat and drink. No rush, no responsibilities, nowhere to go, and nothing to do but ride and eat and eat and ride. The open road, as Griggsy might say. Freedom.

After lunch I fell asleep, and when I woke up, a little old man in a beret and blue coveralls was staring at me, leaning on a cane.

“You are not of here, Monsieur?” he said in formal French.

“No, I am passing through on my way to Bordeaux actually.”

“Bordeaux,” he said disparagingly, indicating that Bordeaux was not a good place to go.

“In fact, I'm headed for Scotland,” I added.

“Scotland!” he shouted. “Why on earth would anyone want to go to Scotland. Do they have food there?”

I presumed that since the people of Scotland had been successfully breeding for more than ten centuries, they must also be feeding. I said as much, politely, in so many words, and he shook his head incredulously.

“Scotland is a long way from here. Are you on the right road?”

I was not by any means on the right road for Scotland. But I explained that I actually preferred France, so I wanted to take my time getting to Scotland. This satisfied him and he made to leave. Then he asked me if I had been in the war.

“Never,” I said. I'm not sure what war he meant, though.

“
Eh, bien
,” he said, and saluted me and made to leave once more. Then he came back.

“This bicycle in the bushes. It is yours?”

I said it was.

He looked back at the place where my bike was hidden.

“I had a bicycle like that once,” he said, sadly. “But times change.”

“This is true,” I said.

“It was a good bicycle.”

“So is this one; I've ridden a long way on this bicycle. All through southern Spain.”

He didn't respond to this. I believe he was reliving better times on his old Peugeot. He snapped his head to the side and clucked. I was waiting for a good story. How he arranged to meet his lover by moonlight by the canal I had passed and had ridden through the pines under the brindled moonshadows of the branches, but had a flat and couldn't make it and had walked the rest of the way, arriving at dawn to find her asleep in the woods. They had consummated their love as the sun rose above the clover fields to the east.

I waited.

Perhaps he was in the underground—he was about the right age. Perhaps he was selected by his village to carry an important message to de Gaulle's forces who had landed nearby, blackfaced at Hossegor. He rode through the pines at midnight, slipping past the Vichy guards. Some became suspicious and gave chase, but he pulled off and hid in the shrubbery until they passed, then resumed his mission.

I waited.

“Was a good bicycle, mine,” he said.

“How so?”

“Just good.”

Silence.

“Every day I ride to the bakery and get the bread.”

“Hmm.”

“Now I am too old to ride.”

“Were there any Nazis down here?” I asked. It was a dangerous question; he could have been a Vichy collaborator for all I knew.

“No. No Nazis, not here.”

He stared in the direction of the bicycle.

I offered him some cheese and a sip of wine, but he said he must be off. So I collected my things and walked back across the pasture with him to the bicycle, hoping he would begin talking. But he only stared down at me as I packed everything up.

“Where are you headed, though?” he asked.

“Scotland.”

“
Ah, oui
, Scotland. That cold country.”

Leaning on his cane, he watched me ride off. I hate missing stories, I'm sure he had one, but I had to get to Scotland.

For the next two or three days I rode on along the coast, passed Vieux-Boucau and on to St.-Julien-en-Born, where I spent the night. This was a flat country of endless pines, with occasional lumbering operations and sections of forest where the locals were tapping the trees for turpentine. Little sulphur butterflies, pearl crescents, and coppers were fluttering at the roadside, and there were periodic clearings where I could rest in the sun, sedated by the hot smell of pine. There was still no traffic at all and I resumed entertaining myself by weaving to and fro on the empty road and singing loudly. Once, thinking myself alone, riding on in this manner, no-handed, declaiming and shouting and weaving, I glanced over into the woods and saw a group of timber cutters resting on the ground, smoking, white handkerchiefs tied on their heads like bathing caps. They stared at me incredulously.