Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (22 page)

THE ORIGINAL SEE-FOREVER VIEW

The megalomaniacal President François Mitterrand may have had a few flaws, but he also had good taste. He’d bought the rounded crown of Mont Beuvray, and as we walked past the sylvan site where he’d hoped to be buried, we couldn’t help admiring his chutzpah. On a sloping lawn in a clearing stood a
table d’orientation
, a table marked with the cardinal points, distances, and a hand-painted panorama. Last time we’d experienced this view from this site, I’d been unaware that I had hepatitis. I had had feverish visions, convinced I was seeing the Pyrenees and that I had to hike over them. It was here that I’d made my vow to change my life and walk across the country. Now I could verify that what I’d actually seen were gentle mountains on the Morvan’s southern edge. There were corkscrew roads and church spires, but no snowy Pyrenees peaks or gloomy Spanish abbey where Charlemagne and Roland battled the Moors.

“I was delirious,” I said. “I was a mess.”

“But you were right to make this happen,” Alison murmured.

Up to now, we’d been following the GR-13 crosscountry hiking route, a section of the trans-European E-4 trail to Spain—one of the many official Ways of Saint James. From here, the trail continued south by southwest. Our maverick way lay instead to the southeast on another trail, GR-131. It ran through Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray and Autun, then east to the great vineyards of the Côte d’Or and Côte Chalonnaise, before dipping south and reaching Cluny. Though Autun and Cluny had long been pilgrimage sites on the ancient Roman road from Mâcon to Paris, somehow they’d fallen off the main branch of the modern Saint James itinerary. We didn’t care. Like Frank Sinatra, we were doing this walk my way—our way, since Alison had finally gi important stopover or starting point on fa nven the venture her blessing.

“Only another two months to go,” I quipped. “Ready?”

Alison signalled us on. We crossed a trail marking Bibracte’s imaginary southern ramparts, climbed down through a fir forest into pastures, and doubled back north on a fibula-shaped detour to a narrow river valley. Here the ancient Gallic-Roman road paralleled a clear, tuneful stream. So enchanting was the setting that we floated for about four miles in an Iron Age dream and only returned to earth on the edge of sleepy Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray. A milk-white calf on wobbly legs stared at us, attempting a moo.

“You’ve taken the wrong road,” said Lucie, the elder of two pre-teen farm girls, when we asked her where to find the Hôtel du Morvan. She marched up carrying an old bottle of Cremant de Bourgogne, the region’s answer to champagne. It contained milk. Leaning on the wooden paddock as she spoke, she told us the calf’s name was Alexandre, and suggested we turn around and take the main road into the village. “Alexandre’s mother died while giving birth,” remarked Julie, the other girl. She turned the bottle upside down and slipped it into the calf’s mouth. “He thinks we’re his mothers.”

Another bottle of Cremant de Bourgogne, this one chilled and swarming with bubbles, stood on the worn bar of the Hôtel du Morvan. With mud on our boots and our backpacks slung to one side, we watched the proprietor fill two fluted glasses with the bubbly and carry them across the old-fashioned café, which doubled as a lobby, to a pair of guests in the equally old-fashioned dining room. “Old-fashioned” seemed to apply to everything. It was precisely 7:15 P.M., aperitif time for most Frenchmen. For us, it was time for showers and a change into slightly less gamy attire.

Lovingly restored with limited means, Hôtel du Morvan turned out to be another study in time travel—not all the way to Bibracte, but far enough. A late-1800s vacationer would feel at home climbing the winding wooden staircase and making the waxed-plank floor creak. A wooden armoire and desk filled our room. Its single, wide window overlooked the weathered village’s triangular-shaped main square.

“Narcoleptic.”

“I can barely stay awake.”

“I meant the village.”

Luckily, like many of the inns along our route, the dining room had recently been declared nonsmoking. The affable, dark-haired owner, Éric Mazière, looked like a well-fed Roman patrician, more Seneca than Julius Caesar. As he and his wife Laurette led us through potted palms to our white-draped table, he told us they’d had to fight to enforce the anti-cigarette rule. No sooner had we settled in than Éric accosted a brittle female and asked her to extinguish her Gauloise or smoke outside. Contorting from a nicotine fit, the woman let fly a quiver of barbs about puritanical prohibitionism and Draconian joylessness. Éric countered with black lungs, cancer from passive-smoking, and respect for fellow diners. Eventually the puffing grasshopper hopped angrily outside. Meanwhile, the bar area, still not off-limits to smokers, filled with acrid plumes, demonstrating how locals would vote if asked.

As it transpired, a Gallo-Roman food specialist from the Bibracte museum had helped Éric and Laurette create a menu featuring the delicacies eaten around the time of Caesar—nothing was known of what Vercingétorix preferred. These delicacies sounded like the forefathers of several French classics. “Bring on the ancients,” I said, huntext-align: justify; } p.indentedogry enough to eat a sandal, even though shoe leather wasn’t on the Gallo-Roman menu. We savored the plump
helixes
, alias escargots. They were served with “macerated cabbage.” We decided that snails and sauerkraut weren’t bad, especially if you were a hedgehog or hungry centurion, or had hiked about ten hours as we had. The tender, slow-cooked stew made with beef, lamb, and pork tasted a lot like Alsatian
baekkeoffe
of the kind we’d had near Strasbourg, another Roman city. The fresh goat’s cheese sprinkled with minced chives was straight out of the manuals of the Latin writer Columella, having graced tables descended from Rome for at least the last two thousand years. For good reason: it was delicious. Ditto the walnut cake. If the recipe isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

I couldn’t resist asking the mild-mannered Éric where he came from. His round, benevolent face beamed. “Rome?” he laughed, shaking his jowls. “No, try the outskirts of Paris. Life was just too crazy there.” He shrugged when I asked if he and Laurette had integrated with the locals. “Takes about seven years, we figure. They’re private and conservative. We’ve got another two years to go.”

VINTAGE RALLIES AND CARBON FOOTPRINTS

Dawn drizzle highlighted the slumping tile roofs and winding streets of soulful Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray, one of those once-upon-a-time places. Gallic, Roman, and medieval pilgrim roads had traversed its main square, and still did, though they were now covered with asphalt. In the mid and late 1800s, Second Empire and Belle Époque vacationers had come for the clean air and gone with the wind. End of story?

We bought supplies at the local grocery, counted the names of dead soldiers on the war memorial, and stood in silence in the many-times rebuilt church, gazing at a remarkable cross. It was sculpted with grapevine and tree-of-life motifs, and spoke of earlier times of faith, ignorance, and poverty. Incongruously, the rumble of powerful engines shook the stained-glass windows.

We’d seen posters advertising the crosscountry vintage car rally that was to pass through the village en route to Mont Beuvray. Up the Gallo-Roman highway roared the antique Maseratis, slaloming amid Ferraris, Triumphs, Austin-Martins, and Morgans, the leather belts over their hoods rattling. I wondered how many chickens had been run over so far. Local boozers in the main square swilled wine from a shared bottle and shouted at the drivers. We were about to dart across the road when I sighted a 1966 Mustang convertible. It was white inside and out. Mine had been black on black. Otherwise the cars were identical. I recognized the chirping of the tires—early Mustangs were overpowered, the body weight badly distributed. They didn’t hold the road. For a moment my skin prickled. I was a teenager again, sun-bleached and mindless, life an open road. But that was a willing misrepresentation. If memory served, fog was more abundant than sunshine in the San Francisco of my youth, the minds I’d known had been sharp, often brilliant, and traffic had long clogged the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, and most of the scenic roads on the coast. California Dreaming was precisely that, even in the 1960s and ’70s, a time now shrouded in the rosy fog of nostalgia.

“You used to collect cars like these, didn’t you?” Alison asked. “Can you explain to me what the attraction is?” I know she didn’t mean to sound judgmental. As someone who suffers car sickness, and prefers nature to the automobile, she was quite simply baffled by the sight of grown men and women playing with toy cars.

I shook my head. I couldn’t explain it. Not any mo want to light a candle9HChre. The utter vapidness of the exercise made me smile. Some people dance, I said to myself, others drive on the deck of the Titanic. Granted, walking across France was a pretty silly, selfish thing to do too, but at least it was quiet and pollution-free. “Some people grow sideways,” I said, lost in my thoughts, “like those trees back on Mont Beuvray.”

Ghosts in platform shoes and bell-bottoms walked with me past a herd of cows gorging on dandelions, under a grove of blossoming apple trees, and sang 1970s tunes in my ears. Perhaps that’s why we lost our way and turned due south down a dirt road. It was marked Voie Celte—the Celtic Way, not the Roman Way—and appeared, from the signage, to lead to a town called Arroux.

“Arroux? Isn’t that where Caesar’s army fought the Helvetii?” Alison asked. She paused to take out
The Conquest of Gaul
. “Six Roman legions,” she announced, reading a footnote, pleased to have remembered. “That makes about 30,000 men, against 370,000 Helvetii—including the supply train and families. In the Arroux River Valley. The massacre took place near here.”

You had to marvel. Some people enjoy car rallies; others spot trains, or trace out ancient roads, tacking up improbable signs along the way. This road apparently ran from Bibracte to the battleground where the contemporary town of Toulon-sur-Arroux stands. It indicated that the locals were either serious about history or obsessed with the Celts and Romans. “Enough with the
passéisme
,” I said. “It’s past time for a picnic.”

OLD CHESTNUTS, BUM STEERS, AND MONKEY MEAT

Alison brushed the sappy fir bark off her pants and pointed southeast. “I say it’s that-a-way.” We’d wolfed our sandwiches under cover of my windbreaker, sitting on Alison’s poncho, spread imperfectly over a freshly sawn log. The glorious Celtic Way had somehow turned into a trashed logging road whose muddy ruts shimmered with spring rain. One particularly tall pile of trunks in a clearing proved marginally less wet, perhaps because the sap was waterproof.

“Okay,” I said, skeptical but no longer starving, “that-a-way.”

Logging had destroyed signage and added extra roads. From our survey map I could see things were going to be complicated. We were aiming for an isolated farmhouse B&B, Ferme de la Chassagne, and there was no direct way to it once you strayed from the GR-131, which we’d managed to do. An hour and several miles later, we were stung to attention by bees swarming from hives in the woods. “This path must lead somewhere,” I said with the obtuseness of panic, running while batting away belligerent bees. “I mean, the beekeeper comes from somewhere, right?”

“To paraphrase Philippe back in Marigny l’Eglise,” Alison joked, “everything comes from somewhere, something can’t spring from nothing.”

I was about to ask her how she knew what Philippe had said, if she’d been in the kitchen, but we both stopped dead, despite the bees still pursuing us. Even Mr. Magoo couldn’t avoid seeing the majestic trunk and boughs rising before us. “Saint Martin’s tree,” I said, only half joking. Still leafless, an old chestnut even bigger than those at Château de Bazoches towered over spindly firs, its roots twined around crumbling stone walls. Caesar’s chariot had probably grazed them in passing. California has its redwoods, I reflected, spreading my arms in a futile attempt to embrace this great-grandfather tree. Italy and Greece have their olives. But France h important stopover or starting point on fa nas the most astonishing chestnuts known to man—or bee. I swatted a drone that was attempting to sting me through my rain gear. Unsure why, I’d felt an instantaneous and deep kinship with this giant tree, and leaned my head against its damp, rough bark. How much had this chestnut seen, I wondered aloud, feeling myself fall into a well of timelessness. What would it say if it could speak?

“You’ve become a tree-hugger,” Alison laughed. “Like those Earth-Firsters! we met in the redwoods. Next you’ll be living on a platform up in the branches, and worshipping Pan.”

“It could be worse,” I said, stung by the reference to my mother and the recollection of our time spent with a group of earnest Earth-Firsters!, who were battling to save old-growth redwoods in the Headwaters Reserve of Humboldt County, California. At the time, I’d admired their courage but thought them extremist crazies. Now I was beginning to understand their desperate conviction, though I’d still never condone spiking trees or other forms of lethal sabotage. Piano wire wouldn’t stop the motocross set any more than steel spikes would stop Georgia-Pacific or Weyerhauser from cutting down trees. The battle had to be fought elsewhere, in courtrooms, on the streets, in schools, and in the hearts and minds of consumers lining up at the big-box stores.

Lost but not hopeless, we lingered under the chestnut before hiking west on a looping, mossy trail, past a hidden millpond and up a hill to clustered stone houses, one freshly and expensively restored. If I was reading my map correctly, the village was named Boudédé. The usual dogs barked. Smoke curled from a single chimney. We shouted.

“Yes, you’re in Boudédé,” said the short but handsome man who strode into his yard, scratching his stubbly cheeks as he peered suspiciously at us. “How did you get here? From the main road?”

We couldn’t explain which way we’d come, other than to indicate the beehives and giant chestnut.

“There’s an even bigger tree,” he said, pointing west with a throw-away gesture. He looked and moved like James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
. “They’re registered landmarks,” Dean added, made even more suspicious by my stares. I realized he thought we were militant environmentalists. “No one can cut them down,” he added. The trees were at least five hundred years old, the lookalike claimed. But that was nothing. Five hundred years? Boudédé and Bibracte were ancient beyond words, he said, swelling like Astérix in Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay.