Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (18 page)

Finally he and his father, brother, sister, and several diners took turns telling us to cross the highway, making sure we weren’t run over because “the cars make shepherd’s pie out of hikers around here.” On the far side of the highway, we would find another, better, more beautiful hiking trail than the one we’d originally meant to take.

“Which is why you’re not lost,” he said. “You’re lucky. You’ve strayed onto the right path. It follows the Canche River Gorge, the most beautiful river in France!”

Only somewhat skeptical, we crossed the highway and walked on the shoulder for about a hundred yards, Alison crabbing to hide her underwear. The cars were not many, but they hurtled by us like Gallic chariots bent on playing Coliseum Chicken. The waiter, his family, and several diners stood outside to watch. Either they w at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.anted to make sure we found the trailhead safely, or hoped to see shepherd’s pie.

This was our day for serendipitous discoveries. The trail coiled down into the gorge, crossed the foaming white waters of the Canche, and followed the creek’s east bank. The scenery was as lovely as its Cure counterpart but more dramatic, a kind of mini-Yosemite. The presence of a small power plant and a large steel pipe creeping like a caterpillar across the mountainside didn’t subtract from the spot’s beauty, possibly because it reminded me of the abandoned Gold Rush mining works of my beloved Sierra Nevada mountains. Our friends from the restaurant appeared to have spoken the truth.

Once beyond the jumbo pipe, the trail paralleled the creek, crossing back and forth. Striated mossy cliffs were cut by cascades. Lichen-frosted boulders and bearded trees rose up, and the mesmerizing chant of water rushing over stone, wood, and sand led us deeper into the canyon. The trouble was, the trail petered out after a mile and a half. Unused to hikers’ boots, the hillside gave underfoot as we tried to scramble up it, and over I went, with a clack of the knee and a click of the back.

“Nothing serious,” I lied, picking myself up. “I can get an artificial knee at the B&B.” I had promised myself to keep blisters, heat, pebbles in shoes, aching knees, and other impediments to Enlightenment out of mind and off the page. But, as I hauled myself along, silently singing
I think I can I think I can I think I can
, I knew this was the beginning of my very own martyrdom in D minor.

LIMP ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES

By dint of clawing, we made it up to the curlicue paved road atop the gorge and headed in what we hoped was the right direction. Neither one of us had a compass. If we were fortunate enough to run into anyone, we could ask for La Croisette, Le Haut Folin or Mont Beuvray—and triangulate from these points of reference to our B&B. Not that we were likely to run into anyone, which suited Alison fine, since her pants had torn open another six inches, exposing her long, shapely thighs.

“We’ve been walking how long now?” I asked rhetorically, through gritted teeth. “About six days? And have you noticed anything?”

“Several hundred things,” Alison said. “You’re limping and wincing, for one.”

“Not that. I mean, two things in particular have dawned on me today. First of all, we haven’t seen a single other pilgrim. Not a one. I thought I’d be flashing my scallop shell like a badge. Second, the people no longer run away from us when we enter villages. They seem friendlier or, put it this way, less unfriendly.”

“You’re no longer thrusting your water bottles at them or begging for food,” Alison said. “But I agree. I think we’ve crossed into the Saône-et-Loire.”

She was referring to the administrative
département
of southernmost Burgundy, which runs south from Anost to Mâcon, and happens to be one of the country’s largest and least populated districts. Funnily, the Saône-et-Loire corresponds to the medieval region called Le Charolais, land of the big white cows we’d seen everywhere. Le Charolais also corresponds almost exactly to the territory of the ancient Aedui tribe of Gaul. According to Caesar, the citadel of Bibracte, the “Lost City” atop Mont Beuvray, was among the Aedui’s most important fortified strongholds. As the arrow flies, it was probably fifteen miles south of where we stood. But for modern pilgrims such as we on the secular and serpentine GR want to light a candle9HCh route, Bibracte still lay south a day and a half of tortuous trekking.

ONE NIGHT A TRAVELER

Disinformation is the specialty of many governments, including our very own. We wondered which—French or Nazi—had been responsible for the signs pointing to mirages with place-names such as “Maquis Maurice”—an elusive Résistance encampment—and “Bois du Roi”—of which there seemed to be two, separated by several miles, two ridges, and a valley. Perhaps the signage was Maurice’s joke? The Maurice of the Maquis Maurice? Was this a wartime leftover designed to misdirect the occupiers?

We hiked past a solitary sequoia looking very much out of place at La Croisette, an empty, shuttered mountain refuge at a crossroads. The hamlet of Crot Morin and therefore our
chambre d’hôtes
was sign-posted by the wayside as being somewhere down a curving paved road. “Paved” was the key word. We preferred not to take the road, given the state of our joints and vertebrae, and the danger posed by road warriors. Asphalt seems particularly rude after ten miles on springy dirt trails, especially if you’ve twisted your knee and thrown out your back as I had in the Gorges de la Canche. I could barely walk.

The sun was starting to dip. We put our confidence in a well-worn farm road. It seemed scenic and old and in the Roman style, with the occasional pile of mossy slabs that had probably been paving stones. Pastures and woodland on steep hillsides surrounded us, distracting me from growing discomfort. At the bottom of the valley we shuffled into Crot Morin and immediately sensed great antiquity. The rutted road, stone houses and woodland setting seemed straight out of
The Conquest of Gaul
—not that Caesar indulged in descriptive travel writing. To the west rose the Morvan’s highest granite peak, Haut Folin. Other forested mountains with rounded, mammary silhouettes were arrayed south-by-southwest and formed a bowl. Long lost Bibracte, where Caesar dictated the book we’d been reading, was out there somewhere. I blinked into the twilight. Why had I thought of “mammary silhouettes”? Simple: Bibractis the Beaver Goddess seemed to be stretched out naked on the ridge, belly and breasts to the orange western sky.

If any living humans were in Crot Morin, they’d scattered at our approach. The same disinformation officers who’d been at work earlier hiding Maquis Maurice had apparently passed through, removing signs as they went. We walked down the leafy valley in thickening darkness and were glad to spot a pair of hikers coming from the opposite direction.

“Hail good fellows well met,” I said as loud as I could, in English. The couple seemed about our age and similarly hot and sweaty, torn around the pants and hobbled by worn joints. I thrust out my hand and asked if they knew where the B&B was.

“We were about to ask you the same thing,” the man said, a wry expression on his tired, lean, but handsome face.

We introduced ourselves, finished shaking hands with Georges and Bernadette, and unanimously decided that one of us should be delegated to knock on a villager’s door. Alison indicated her shredded pants, so Bernadette volunteered. A woman would be less threatening to fearful locals.

The tactic worked. A puzzled antique farmer appeared, lifted his stained cap, and thrust an index finger out of his cottage before slamming the door.

Once pointed in the right direction, we found the Gîte des Fleurs—La Rivière, our flop for the night. The property looked like the French answer to a Swiss chalet. As the name want to light a candle9HCh suggested, it was a B&B in a cut-flower nursery and sat near a riverbank. The river proved to be small but lively. As you might expect of nurserymen, the B&B’s garden was orderly. The house squeaked with cleanliness, and the young lady who greeted us spoke in a timid soprano. We left our boots in a mud room, and Alison snuck upstairs to change her pants before anyone spotted the Kmart underwear.

Our hosts Olivier and Florence, Crot Morin natives, were polite but retiring in the extreme. Unlike other residents, innkeepers are not allowed to run away at the sight of strangers. With some coaxing, they acknowledged that they’d been childhood sweethearts—the girl and boy next door—and were carrying on the family businesses. Talking didn’t come easy to either. I guessed they didn’t want to pry, and were weary of telling their life story to musty travelers. When the opportunity presented itself, Olivier disappeared and Florence went off to baste the roast, leaving their house guests to get to know each other. Dinner would be served at 7:30 P.M. sharp.

As we poked around the garden, we were joined by another forty-something guest named Denis, who identified himself as a Parisian, not necessarily a descendent of Vercingétorix or Caesar, and a musician by profession. Denis was on his own, wandering the Morvan without any particular itinerary and no maps, a thoughtful, wistful man. Georges and Bernadette described themselves as agricultural engineers, and were proud to hail from a small town in northern Burgundy. They’d worked in Asia and Africa, and were avid trekkers, despite Bernadette’s debilitating physical handicaps caused by a car crash. She had no strength at all in one arm and shoulder, and had a delicate back.

“You travel the world and then discover your own backyard is as beautiful as Nepal or Ethiopia,” Georges said, sighing with pleasure.

“And just as full of magic,” Bernadette added.

We spoke briefly about Bibracte and Caesar and the layered history of the area, and how it attracted a mixed bag of bona fide historians and strange, New Age, often extreme rightwing Druid worshipers. All three hikers were readers of Astérix comic books and were game to say “Vercingétorix” into my digital recorder. “But I would never go to an Astérix movie,” Georges hastened to add. “The comic books are intelligent, irreverent, with a sense of humor: the authors were a Ukrainian-Pole and an Italian, and anything but neo-fascist. The movies are populist garbage.”

“You have to be quick on your feet to see a good French movie,” remarked Denis with irony. “The average run is two weeks. You can view populist garbage movies and Hollywood blockbusters at your leisure. They run and run.”

We limped in to dinner and soon were deep in conversation—about pessimism,
passéisme
and demagogic, dumbed-down populism, America, Caesar, Iraq and Afghanistan, coffee and tea rituals, Époisse cheese, and the gilded horse-head sculptures that once had marked horse-meat butcher shops in Paris. Words whisked us crosscountry as we enjoyed roast pork, salad, and homemade pie. Rarely had the ancient Roman saying seemed more appropriate: “Around the dinner table you never grow old.” Time had somehow lodged in aspic, like our pig-tongue picnic earlier that day.

There are moments in life when the urgency of an exchange seems extreme, when you feel you have much to say and no time to say it, for the spell will be broken and you may never meet the person again. One-night stands, summer romances, and, apparently, unexpected encounters at isolated at 1,700 feet above sea level st said. French B&Bs share a similar intensity.

From Georges we received a concise history of Burgundy’s sublime, smelly Époisse, a cheese with an orangish crust, its ancient origins, decline, and recent rebirth. He had just published a reference book on the subject.

Bernadette told us that in Ethiopia the shells of coffee beans are not wasted. Locals boil them with milk and salt to make a potent elixir. Japan had its tea ceremony, said Georges, but the coffee ritual in Ethiopian homes has four stages and lasts half an hour.

It seemed odd to be talking of Ethiopia and Nepal as we savored homemade rabbit terrine and drank delicious Burgundy reds from vineyards in the nearby Côte Chalonnaise. So Denis told us about traditional French vocal music and then dissected the byzantine mechanisms by which French composers, singers, and songwriters gain access to grants. Funding is getting scarcer, he noted. French government support for the arts had peaked under François Mitterrand. The former president may have had a checkered past, but he’d done much for French culture. A series of blows had been delivered recently by the European Union’s strictures on subsidies. And of course there were globalization and dwindling royalties because of piracy and the Internet. Denis admitted that his next move might be out of his music studio, currently located in a reconverted foundry where once upon a time horse-head sculptures were electro-plated with gold.

I couldn’t help thinking how horses and buggies had given way to cars, and horse-meat to hamburgers. The Dutchman at the Chalet du Montal who’d spent his career collecting and distributing royalty payments to authors and artists had retired at the right time. Past certainties were gone, as dead as Vercingétorix and Caesar. Perhaps they’d never been certainties at all.

I waited for a lull in the conversation. “Do you think our walk is a pointless meander?” I asked. “When you go out and hike, what do you think about? Why do you do it?”

Denis shifted in his seat and poured himself another glass of wine. He looked uncomfortable. “It’s late,” he said. “I’ll be leaving before breakfast.” We shook hands and said good-bye, not ships but pilgrims passing in the night.

When he’d gone, Bernadette and Georges said that they felt happy when they hiked, that it kept them in tune with nature and the universe, and helped them keep fit. “I’d never say it was pointless,” Bernadette confided. “You can find a spiritual dimension in your life in a million different ways. Some people meditate or pray. We hike. Whatever works.…”

TALKING THE WALK

That night Alison plumped the pillows and read aloud from
The Conquest of Gaul
. We’d reached a crucial point in the book, and it coincided eerily with our geographical position. The Gallic tribes involved in the rebellion against Caesar, Alison reminded me, were required to send hostages to Vercingétorix. Hostage-taking was common throughout the ancient world.