Following the Sun (21 page)

“It is nothing.”

“No, it is very nice.”

“It is the custom,” she said. “This is the first of May.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, not realizing at the time that on the first of May in this part of France it is the custom to collect the
muguet
from the forest and give them to strangers.

“Well goodbye again,” she said, clearly trying to get away. She walked around the back of the château and made her way down through the overgrown pastures toward the road.

I couldn't help but think of the fairy tale “Brier Rose” and the old brier-strewn château, the winding drive, the young princess, awakened. This image of her was encouraged by the fact that I knew someplace around here, a little farther north in the Loire Valley, there was a château that had served as the model for the story of Sleeping Beauty.

The old folktale begins with a curse from a witch who declares that the beautiful virgin princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. A wise woman intervenes and alters the curse. The virgin will not die but only sleep. The king, hearing the curse, has all the spinning wheels banished from the castle. But sure enough, on her fifteenth birthday, the beautiful princess makes her way to a small tower room high in the château and there meets an old withered crone, who is working at a spinning wheel. True to the curse, the princess pricks her finger on the spindle and falls asleep. So does the whole castle. The chickens go to roost, the pigeons tuck their heads beneath their wings, the scullery maids and the cooks drift off, nodding, the horses sleep at the carriage harnesses, and the king and queen of the kingdom fall asleep on their thrones. Their whole world enters into a period of cold dormancy. A brier hedge grows over the castle and the legend of a sleeping beauty within spreads over the land. Many brave knights attempt to get through the hedge but fail. Then finally a prince arrives at the hedge. The briers flower for the first time; the hero cuts his way through and places a kiss on the lips of the sleeping princess. She awakens. And then, one by one the entire castle awakens. The hens flutter and fluff themselves up, the pigeons fly from their roosts, the scullery maids and the cooks and the king and queen arise from their deep sleep.

In short, winter is over; the sun prince has returned to the land and awakened the virgin spring.

Back on the road I encountered more people out for their May Day stroll. There were many bands of noisy young students who were clearly more intent on holiday making than
muguet
gathering, and a few gentle middle-aged folks who still believed in the old traditions. I hailed a kindly looking older couple who were emerging from the woods beside the road with bunches of flowers and asked them about the château. They knew nothing.

“Deserted for years,” the man said. “The whole of our lives, anyway.”

I told him about the young girl. This begat a discussion between the two of them, in short staccato patois, to no effect. They couldn't place her, even though they seemed to know many people in the town. So I thanked them and pedaled on, thinking about this old much ghosted landscape and the legends and the rich possibilities of this strange encounter. Maybe she did come out from the spirit world.

Traveling alone as I was, sometimes pedaling for hours at a stretch with no one to talk to, I had many opportunities to allow my thoughts to ramble, sometimes off into wild unchecked theories, such as my idea that depression, neurosis, and introspection are phenomena of sunless northern cultures whereas ecstatic, ill-considered hedonism comes out of sunny southern climates. My theory
du jour
was that the desert extremes of bright, hot, cloudless days, followed by black, cloudless, cold nights, month after month, year in year out, would naturally beget the concept of a singular, all-powerful deity among desert people such as the Israelites. Cultures of the forest and variable seasons and a diversity of plant and animal life, according to my theory, would develop religions that involve multiple deities.

As I pedaled along toward the town of Richelieu, the air warmed, the fresh earth was redolent with spring perfumes, and the chaffinches and sparrows were twittering by the roadside. I stopped often, just for the sake of enjoying the French countryside—the distant islands of woods where cuckoos called, the fresh-turned fields, the rolling hills of yellow mustard and red poppies, and the long straight roads lined with Lombardy poplars and dappled shadows.

When I lived in New England, every year, sometime in mid February, I would begin to hope for the end to winter, and every year, true to form, rather than a general warming toward spring, the weather would worsen, and I would begin to have long long thoughts of the South. By the end of the month these thoughts would coalesce into a genuine obsession, and I would begin to have dreams of the sun and green landscapes. Waking to the reality of February was always a disappointment.

This phenomenon of cabin fever, a term invented, I believe, by the Alaskan pioneers from the lower forty-eight, may be a fairly recent development in the human story. According to a friend of mine who has spent years in circumpolar regions, it is not a phenomenon that affects the Inuit of North America, or the Saami of Finland, or other long-suffering northern native tribal peoples. Having skirted on my journeying the well-known cave-dwelling regions of northern Spain and southern France, I could not help but think of our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, who endured a season of ice that lasted for generation after generation, with hardly a summer of relief. They and their conspecifics, the Neanderthals, migrated north or south following the advances and retreats of the past three glaciations that swept over Europe, Asia, and North America. Even in the more benign later eras, they were living on the heels of the retreating ice.

We are very fortunate indeed to be living in an interglacial period, a time in which the earth has been slowly warming as a result of the retreat of the last glacier, and an era (perhaps not incidentally) characterized as well by the rise of civilizations. In the past hundred years, however, this natural global warming has been speeded up dramatically because of industrialization. Whatever our own effect on climate may be, periodic warming and cooling trends that either melt or expand the amount of ice over the earth have been affecting the planet for more than 3.5 billion years. What is less clear is why.

The most popular theory is that the long-term fluctuations in the volume of ice are caused by slight changes in the past of the earth's orbit around the sun, which cause, in turn, a redistribution of the solar radiation that strikes various regions of the earth. One theory for the cause of these changes suggests that the earth's orbit alters every 100,000 years or so because of the gravitational pull by other planets. This pushes the orbit from an ellipse into a more circular shape, thereby changing the areas of the earth that receive the sun's direct rays.

Another theory holds that the inclination of the earth to the sun changes. The earth is now tilted at an angle, but that angle changes slowly over a period of about 41,000 years so that eventually the duration of winter at the poles lasts longer. Furthermore, as the earth circles the sun, its path wobbles slightly because of the pull of the moon and the sun, which means that the poles will be tilted toward the sun at different positions in the orbit, altering the seasons. Because of these differing angles, winters could be decidedly warmer—or cooler.

Any of these slight changes could trigger the expansion of the ice sheets. The length of winter increases, snows are heavier each season, and then finally there is no longer any summer melting, the weight of the snows increases, and with nowhere else to go, the pressure forces the ice southward. Slowly, year by year, decade by decade, millennium by millennium, the wall of ice creeps outward around the poles. Plants alter their ranges as the cold increases, birds and mammals that feed at the edge of the snowy regions migrate southward toward open areas of grazing, and on their heels the little bands of fur-clad, spear-bearing Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hunters, our direct ancestors, followed.

The art and artifacts of these people offer a record of the changes. Warm weather species now found only in tropical regions, such as lions and rhinos, are depicted on cave walls in southern France during one period. Then images of cold-tolerant mammals, such as the woolly mammoths and reindeer, begin to appear. About eleven thousand years ago, the climate began to warm once more in southern France, the glacier retreated northward and upward to the high peaks of the Alps, and the benign deciduous forest returned to Anjou and Touraine and the landscape through which I was now so contently pedaling.

These winter dreams were soon supplanted by more immediate concerns, so I retired to a fine roadside pasture, sliced my
tomates
, onions, and sardines, tore off a
tranche
of bread, and uncorked a bottle of Sancerre I had bought to celebrate the first of May. Here, in the warming sun, I sat cross-legged, admiring the cows in a pasture on the other side of the road, and watching intently the sparse traffic pass.

Working over the wildflowers in the pasture were many honeybees. They would dash frenetically from blossom to blossom, drinking up nectar and packing the pollen baskets on their hind legs as they did so, and then fly off in a straight line, apparently with a clear purpose. I tried to follow the line or the angle at which they were coming and going. They seemed to be moving up the pasture from a low swale to my left, at the bottom of the hill and slightly behind me. Years ago I had learned to track bees like a native hunter. You follow their bee line, place a stone at the spot where you lose track of an individual bee, wait for another to fly past and follow that one, placing stones along the route. In this manner eventually you will come to their hive.

How the bees manage to find these flowers, return to their hive, and then communicate the location of those flowers that were filled with nectar was long a mystery to insect watchers. The problem was solved in the 1950s by the entomologist Karl von Frisch, who made a study of the strange tail-waggling “dance” as it was called that bees do whenever they return to the hive. A returning bee, having found a rewarding cache of flowers, will execute her dance while other bees gather round in a circle, watching. Then the watchers fly off and somehow find the flower patch and return with nectar and pollen. It occurred to von Frisch that the dance must have something to do with directions to the source. After years of observation, he noticed that bees are not as lively on cloudy days. In fact beekeepers will warn you that their bees are more likely to sting when it's cloudy. Von Frisch calculated that the dance must have something to do with the sun. He learned through measurements and observation that the bees were using the position of the sun above the horizon as a fixed point or meridian. The dance was essentially a communication of the coordinates of the flower patch based on the angle of the sun above the horizon and the meridian line.

Below me on the road, speedy little Fiats and Renaults wailed past. Then I saw an old lumbering farm truck drive by with a few workers rocking in the bed, and then, headed southward, in a scene more reminiscent of one of the old French fairy tales, or medieval
venta
tales from la Mancha, I saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat clomp by on an old gray nag. He was dressed in brown corduroy and had a duffel bag slung over the horse's rump. On top of the bag, swaying with the gait of the horse, a small, shaggy white dog was perched. I spotted the horseman immediately for a Santiago pilgrim, and dug into my pack for my binoculars to see if I could spot the characteristic scallop shell. But by the time I managed to focus on him, all I could see was his back. He swayed on by at an easy pace, slouched over slightly, his loyal companion balancing bravely on top of his equipage, periodically sniffing the air. I was sorry to have missed him.

This seemed to be a period of missed stories. First the reluctant storyteller, then the ghost of Sleeping Beauty, now the Santiago pilgrim. As I watched him plod off I began to feel a little lonely for the first time on my journey. I was headed for England where I had friends. But England was a long way off, and here I was, perched on a hillside in a French pasture with no one to share my Sancerre. I began to think of Paris and the Rue St. Jacques, where all the Santiago pilgrimages of the thirteenth century began. And then I began to think about all the other ancient streets on the Left Bank, and then I thought of my old friends there and the good times we used to have, drinking and carousing and ending up at dawn at Les Halles to drink one more glass at the zinc bars where butchers in bloodied aprons and late-night opera goers in evening dress all mixed together to eat onion soup. I could almost smell the cold dank air of the market and the musky odor of vegetables and see the old, now moribund heart of Paris. How sad it all was. Then it struck me that they must still be there, my friends, some of them at least. I could look them up. Paris: The City of Light. The Sun King, and all that dappled, broken light of the French Impressionists. One after another, fantasies of Paris crowded in until, feeling sad and rather
nostalgique
, I limped down to my bicycle and slowly pedaled off to look for coffee to improve my mood.

Late that evening, having dawdled along all day, I entered Richelieu and after some sniffing around found a place to stay. I then went out for a good country
boeuf Bourguignon
with a hearty Côtes du Rhône, followed by a fresh green salad and then, at the patron's insistence, a plate of select cheeses. I had a coffee and, again at the patron's insistence, a cognac, and after that a little chat with him about the old days and how much better it used to be in these parts. Then, feeling aged and overweight, I went out for a walk. There was a quarter moon rising between the spires of the churches of Richelieu, and the streets were dark and lined with plane trees, which, for once, had been allowed to stretch their limbs over the streets—unlike most small French towns whose good burghers generally decree that all limbs be pollarded each winter.