Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (28 page)

“There aren’t enough local snails to satisfy demand,” Aurélie admitted, returning to our table with more bread. It proved a fine sponge for mopping up our garlicky snail butter.

Demand and limited supply explained why there were specialized snail farms in the Morvan, Aurélie added, and in the Jura region to the east, and elsewhere in France, too. Most of the farms were actually in Eastern Europe, she explained, and they were doing good business.

“It’s like the plumbers,” Aurélie said without irony. “The snails and frogs’ legs come from Poland too.”

The days of wild Burgundian snails were over. “Snail’s pace” still seemed appropriate when describing local eating habits, exception made when a Dutchman was behind the stove. We waited another half hour for our main courses, knowing that in the kitchens at l’Hôtel du Centre the
coq au vin
and
boeuf bourguignon
simmered throughout the afternoon. That is what Aurélie claimed, in any case. “The trick is to use beef shanks,” she whispered, motioning to her own sturdy legs once she’d set down our dishes. “The butcher saves them for us. Unquestionably, the best
boeuf bourguignon
is made with shanks, and cooks for three hours.”

JANUS AND THE GLOBAL VINEYARD

The meteorological conditions as we packed our picnic and medical supplies, massaged joints, and sterilized Alison’s broken tooth were sunny, breezy, and—according to the pharmacy’s outdoor thermometer—11 degrees Centigrade. It was precisely 9:30 A.M., a Sunday morning. Our sense of time had quietly disappeared. Days and dates blurred, a further step, perhaps, toward Enlightenment? I wondered.

We scaled the Rat’s Leap following a winegrower’s path. On it, another vineyard had been de-vined and planted with wheat. The stalks shimmered emerald green, a hue travel writers see everywhere and in reality find almost nowhere. Halfway up the grade, a ruined chapel lay across our path. Adjacent to it slumped a 19th-century garden folly—a mock Romantic ruin. Now it was authentic. The chapel and folly sat atop a murky spring, possibly the fountainhead, I reflected, that had once fed Gallo-Roman Meursault. That would make sense. The view was spectacular. I couldn’t help turning my head to look back over the town and Saône Valley, feeling like a modern-day Janus. If only we could all look backwards and forwards at one and the same time.

Friable limestone littered the shortest cut through the vines. As elsewhere, not a blade of grass or a single weed sullied the slopes. Our survey map showed the telltale straight dashes of a Roman road lying atop a series of false ridges. To dispel any lingering doubts, a symbol and the words “Roman encampment” marked the section directly ahead. Boxwood grew thick and slow to about eight feet, but hadn’t obliterated the ancient roadway, or the piles of cracked limestone that had once encircled the military camp. We crossed GR-76 and followed the deeply rutted Roman road to a pile of boulders and cliff. Wind rattled the shrubbery. For a moment I felt my lumbar region tingle. Either my knees and back were about to lock up or the spirits of to someone at the mayort said. long-dead centurions were sending me messages.

“Gorgeous,” I muttered, trying to bat away the unwelcome messengers of pain.

“It must’ve been utter misery,” Alison said, startling me. “Imagine being stationed up here, fighting Gauls and brigands, with nothing but wild boars and bears in the woods, the wind whistling. In winter, the snow must have been waist-deep.”

“You paint a pretty picture.” I shivered despite the brilliant sunshine. We could see its rays above the musty, sweet-smelling boxwood. Misery was right. Why was it easy to recognize the misery of the past yet be par-blind to the awfulness of the present? How many tens of thousands of contemporary centurions were freezing or roasting in godforsaken places, wondering why they’d been sent into battle? “In retrospect,” I started to say and then stopped short. My frontal lobe throbbed. “Janus,” I murmured. “Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.”

Before Alison could respond, we heard the sound of a car approaching on an unseen road. Doors slammed. Dogs barked. “Shall we think about moving on?” she asked rhetorically. “This place gives me—”

“The creeps,” I cut in.

We marched as if Julius Caesar himself were behind us, cracking the whip, and within an hour had emerged from the boxwood tangle and scrambled downhill into Gamay.

MONKING AROUND

The medieval château of Gamay rose in isolation among the vines. If you turned your head and plugged your ears, you wouldn’t see or hear the RN6 Expressway running along the southern edge of what had once been a handsome valley. You could ignore visual and even audio blight. But what would you do if your red Burgundy wine was made not from Gamay grapes, but from Pinot Noir, and your village was called “Gamay,” a name older than your grape variety? You would probably ask officials at the
Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée
bureau—the AOC—in Paris to loan you a neighboring AOC name. The village abutting Gamay is Saint Alban, and so, with a sleight of the paper-pusher’s hand, the vineyards of Gamay produce Pinot Noir labelled Saint Alban AOC. It is good. Very good. But not before lunch.

Saint Alban looked startlingly like Pommard, Volnay, Auxey-Duresses and Meursault, not to mention Gamay, though Saint Alban’s squat medieval church was decorated with an unusual
rocaille
consisting of artistically arranged, gnarled fieldstones. We hadn’t encountered this type of décor elsewhere in Burgundy. In spirit it reminded me of the masterpieces of sculpted redwood sold along Highway One in California and in better beach motels.

Another feature of this charm village was a fountain with a sculpture of the Virgin and Baby Jesus, whose tiny fingers clutched an orb. A plaque informed thirsty passersby that the fountain’s water had been supplied since Gallo-Roman times by an aqueduct the height of a man. Unfortunately only a dribble of water seeped out of the aqueduct, which explained the large “Unsafe for Drinking” sign. Like most of the villages we’d crossed since leaving Beaune, Saint Alban had no cafés, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, or drinking fountains. We hiked on.

One of the more challenging moments so far faced us. The trail continued on the south side of the RN6 Expressway. There was no underpass or overpass. We waited for several minutes and then dashed between speeding cars and trucks. On the south side of the highway, a service station advertised unleaded 98 octane gasolin while studying Political Science at 9HChe for 1.38 euros a liter. A quick calculation revealed that to be about $10.00 per gallon, a good reason to walk, leaving behind a balletic carbon footprint. We might as well get used to tiptoeing through life, I told myself. Living without cars or potable water looked like our common future, one already shared by about four billion worldwide.

The gas station was closed for lunch and the water spigots had no handles: they’d been removed to make sure no thirsty pilgrims got a drop for free. Cars swooshed by us at what I reckoned was close to 100 mph heading to lunch. Our throats were dry.

“Did you notice that our trail is now called la Route des Moines?” Alison croaked.

“I thought we’d been on the monk’s road since Beaune? The GR76?” We took turns nursing the last drops from our water bottle. It didn’t matter what the trail was called or numbered. One man’s wine route is another’s Grand Cru or Way of Saint James, and none offered water to the pilgrim.

We climbed switchbacks out of the valley, over a ridge and down the other side, pausing en route for a slender, dry picnic. The zigzag descent made me think of a feather freefalling, and that summoned a pair of related metaphors, the zigzags of life, and the apparently pointless meander we were on. The time for reinvention was long overdue. Like a falling feather, first I had to zigzag to earth. Granted, the metaphors were imperfect. Weren’t they always? For some, the zigzag road to reinvention meant visits to a psychiatrist or a course of pharmaceuticals. For others, it might take the form of a zigzag pilgrimage, a seemingly pointless meander. Ours seemed to be about many things, few of them directly relating to Saint James, but maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places. I counted the days we’d been walking, and wondered whether I’d progressed yet from the physicality of tired muscles—the legs of the pilgrim’s first week—into the second week of the mind.

Chassagne-Montrachet lay below us, its steeple and wine-makers’ houses ranged on coiling streets. I laughed inwardly thinking of the price of even a mediocre bottle of local wine, and looked forward to mineral water, preferably sparkling. I glanced around and was about to say something. But Alison had disappeared. She reappeared in time to steer me down an inauspicious alleyway. “Look,” she said excitedly. Folded onto the side of a gate was a long plastic bag with a handwritten note attached to it.

Bien cuit SVP!

“Well cooked, please?”

“Bread,” Alison said. “They deliver bread and hang it on the gate. She wants it thoroughly baked.”

“That’s quaint. It means there’s no bakery in town. Which probably means there’s no café or anything else, and no water either.”

“We can rest in the church.”

“And drink the holy water?”

The church was locked. Everything in the village was bolted shut. How could I have forgotten again? Time had disappeared. It was Sunday. “Aren’t churches open on Sunday, or is this another
exception française?”
I asked.

“What I’d like to know is, are we really on a pilgrimage route?”

The village looked remarkably like Saint Alban, Gamay, Meursault, Auxey-Duresses, Volnay, and Pommard. I couldn’t help reversing the order this time to test my memory. The silence in the streets vibrated. Then it exploded into a thumping, grinding, howl important stopover or starting point on ate was ing techno beat. Alison’s eyes met mine.

“A funfair,” she trilled, her expression transfigured. She bounded off, cameras swinging, before I could react or stop her.

Funfairs aren’t much fun when there’s no one around having fun. The remarkable thing about this funfair was the total absence of paying customers. The glum operators sat smoking cigarettes, distractedly spinning their wheels of fortune. Techno rap blasted from a stack of loudspeakers, the notes physically striking our faces as we plugged our ears and walked by. I realized the rapper was singing in Italian.
Surreale
was the only word I could make out. We hurried through, unable to think and astonished not to find a single booth selling food or water. Though dying of thirst, we were glad to find our way back into the vineyards.

A POLE, MOUNT ROME, AND A CLEAN SLATE

Eva Fage spoke such flawless French that I would never have guessed she was a Pole. She had slipped under the Iron Curtain in 1960 as a teenager, and arrived unprepared for a new life in France. What gave her away was her relentlessly smiling, wide oval face, her sincere enthusiasm and love of life. Eva showed us around her modern tract home in the outskirts of Remigny, about an hour south on foot from Chassagne-Montrachet. It wasn’t the B&B we’d expected, in part because we had no expectations, but also because every other
chambre d’hôtes
we’d seen was in an old stone farmhouse or vintage village building. “I didn’t want
vieilles pierres
,” Eva explained, using a term, “old stones,” commonly employed by lovers of antique properties. She preferred modern creature comforts, she said.

While we drank coffee from outsized mugs and snacked on waffle-shaped cookies in the warm, glassed-in patio, Eva told us she’d recently retired after a career at the Kodak plant in nearby Chalon-sur-Saône. “Digital photography has changed everything,” she admitted. A few years ago, the plant employed 12,000. It was being dismantled, providing former employees with “an opportunity to try something new,” she said brightly. “I’m an unflagging optimist.”

The slow-flowing Canal du Centre curved above and behind Eva’s house. I glanced up at it from where we sat below, in the garden. Someone leaned on a ship’s rail, sailing effortlessly through the sky. That word, surreal, came back to me from the funfair. It seemed to capture the essence of what we’d experienced since leaving Vézelay.

“But you’re not driving, you’re hiking,” Eva said suddenly, clapping her hands. “You’ll miss so many wonderful things around here. Please allow me to show you a few sights by car.”

Disarmed by her enthusiasm, our pulses racing because of the caffeine and sugar, we piled into her late-model compact and drove west. The banks of the Canal du Centre looked different from the perspective of a passenger seat. I was no longer used to viewing scenery in motion. Walking was like still photography—deep, slow, and meditative. Riding in a car was a movie.

In the time it would’ve taken us to walk a mile, we covered twenty, rolling through a series of handsome canalside villages. One was called Saint-Sernin du Plain, and had a tall belltower built of granite slabs. That much I had time to notice. Beyond it, we shot uphill, parked, and followed Eva on foot up a gravel path to a hilltop amphitheater. “Mount Rome,” she said; “it’s my favorite spot around here.”

Rome again? If this were a novel, readers would rightls head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edoy exclaim “oh, sure.”

We sat in silence, cupped by the amphitheater atop Mount Rome, and watched the sky veil itself. I was deeply happy, and couldn’t help wondering about the Roman fortress that had given the hill its name. But I was also too tired to scramble through the fenced pastures to the summit. I closed my tired eyes and thought of Rome, but instead of seeing the Coliseum or Circus Maximus I saw motorscooters on busy streets, platters of grilled lamb, and Caesar’s clay nose being pinched by my adolescent fingers. The same dream again. Alison shook my shoulder. I awoke and followed her back down the hill to Eva’s car.

Santenay lay several miles below us. It’s the southernmost winegrowing village of the Côte de Beaune astride gentle hills north of the Canal du Centre. The streets were dark by the time we arrived. Eva deposited us at a restaurant called L’Ouillette on the main square and said she’d come back and pick us up later. The place turned out to be the archetypal French country restaurant, where serious eaters take to their comfortable armchairs amid old buffets and armoirs, and devote hours to savoring rich, generously served classics of French cuisine.