Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (11 page)

Alison turned away, pouring wine for another guest. I was slightly taken aback by the woman’s mercantilist nature, but didn’t want to be impolite. I remembered a saying a pilgrim in Paris had taught me. It ran something like, “You need three weeks to get into a pilgrimage, the first for your legs, the second for your mind, the third for your spirit.” We’d only been hiking a few days. I’d already shared my innermost secrets with the two Philippes, and didn’t feel like being interrogated by this angular Swiss woman. “I’m not sure we’re expecting to get anything; we’re hoping to be pleasantly surprised,” I said at last, more defensively than I’d meant to. “Just having the time and space to think, and get back in shape, would be enough for me; so if anything else comes in the bargain, that’ll be great.”text-align: justify; } p.indentedo

With dainty fingers flying, the French computer genius said he was happy to be a materialist, a scientist, and a believer in technology. “It’s the only thing we can truly hope will save us from the messes we’ve made.” He steered us away from Compostela and, his cheeks flushed with wine, gave us a disquisition on the labor issues behind recurrent French strikes. His wife from Taipei provided a potted history of Taiwan. It sounded strangely similar in points to the history of France, with tensions between First Nation activists and waves of mainland Chinese “invaders.” It was the Gauls and Romans, and the Franks and Germans, all over again, on the other side of the world. What terrified the Taiwanese nation, she said, was the prospect of rule from Beijing, which appeared to be increasingly the de facto reality.

Eventually, when our fellow diners had established their intellectual credentials and sent the children to play in the living room, they turned to us again. Their vigorous curiosity could not be ignored. We contributed a few anodyne anecdotes about freelance life in Paris, and ran through our maverick hiking itinerary, which threw all of them off course, and reignited the question of religion and science. It would’ve been easier to hike with everyone else on the mainline route, I agreed, but that wasn’t what we were after. The Frenchman heartily endorsed non-religious walking, and for a moment waxed philosophical. “Admittedly, technology isn’t always the answer. The car, for instance, appears to have given us freedom,” he said. “But it has destroyed sociability. It has left villages like this one empty and ruined the small, provincial merchant class. Everyone drives to a shopping mall on the outskirts of town.”

“Just wait until Wal-Mart gets up to speed,” said the Swiss man snippily. “We lived in America for two years. Plenty of giant churches and tele-evangelists, but no more unions, no more holidays, and taxpayers subsidize the corporations.”

The evangelization and Wal-Mart-ification of the world provided plenty to hash over, and however much I sympathized with our fellow guests’ points of view, I refused to go down that road. It wasn’t just my profound desire to remain positive, or the negative, preachy tone the Swiss man had adopted. The walking, wining, dining, and talking was making my head spin. When the apple pie arrived, I saw pillows as the happy aftermath. Alas, our tablemates had no intention of letting off their captive American audience, who must be made to reckon for the failings of the American Dream. The philosophical Frenchman turned twinkling eyes upon me. “And how did you wind up in France, if I may ask?”

“You may,” I said, “but it’s a long story, and past our bedtime.” The tale threatened to add a Wikipedia-style coda to what was already a long day.

“Oh, we’re in no rush,” he insisted. “It’s early. We won’t let you go until you tell us something about yourselves; it’s a tradition at
chambres d’hôtes.
”

Since Alison routinely balks at the inevitable question of roots, and since they weren’t letting us go, I dove in, explaining that I was a native of San Francisco, had lived in Rome as a child, and, having finished political science and Italian literature degrees at UC Berkeley and Brown, in the early 1980s had moved back to Rome and from there to Milan. After two years and a failed marriage, I’d headed north to Paris to start over again. That’s when I’d met Alison. I’d stayed on, an accidental Parisian. “The rest is mystery,” I concluded.

“And y important stopover or starting point on fa nou?” asked the pink-cheeked Swiss, turning to Alison. I couldn’t help thinking of the Helvetii and the pope’s Swiss guards. The Swiss couple may well have been descendants of survivors of that horrific battle and so, perhaps, were we all.

Alison remained silent, suffering as she always did when the center of attention. A child of the foreign service, she had happened to be born in Paris and brought up there—plus Ankara, Karachi, Washington, D.C., and Rome, then Paris again. You never knew which origin myth she’d choose. Sometimes she came from Little Rock, her father’s birthplace. Sometimes from Montreal, her mother’s. And sometimes from San Francisco. Never from Paris. That’s because, despite her French citizenship and passport, and decades lived in France, the French consider her a foreigner. Wisely, she prefers to view herself as an individual without national affiliations.

“I’m from Arkansas,” she said at last, and then skillfully changed the subject to beddy-bye.

THERE OTTA BE A LAW

Crottefou is the name of a hamlet in the Cure River Valley, our first stop a few miles south of Marigny. The name means “mad dung” or “crazy droppings”—presumably of horse, cow, or mad dog. Happily the restored houses we admired held little resemblance to the place-name. Chainsaws whined in the distance. They approached and were, of course, not chainsaws but dirt bikes. Several flew past at breakneck speed. I silently hoped the riders would indeed break their necks, pronto. It was not a charitable, pilgrim-like thought.

Tacked upon the village billboard was a petition. The locals demanded that the Prefect of the Département ban off-road vehicles such as dirt bikes on GR-13, our secular pilgrimage trail. Said vehicles had allegedly been trashing the trail and terrorizing residents for several years.

South of the two-lane highway dividing the hamlet we found another billboard. On it was the Prefect’s reply: to wit, the people’s will had been done. In the Crottefou
commune
off-road vehicles were heretofore banned.

The elation I felt was disproportional to the problem at hand. But my loathing of noisy, smelly, brutal, and pointless off-road vehicles is visceral, especially when riders choose to destroy historic hiking trails in parklands, as opposed to, say, riding around reclaimed dumps or toxic waste sites, battlegrounds scattered with cluster bombs, and abandoned coal mines—ideal settings for motorsports.

On the south bank of a lovely creek, the star-shaped flowers familiar from previous days spread around budding saplings, ancient oaks, and extravagantly mossy boulders—the kind favored by Rip van Winkle. The site’s beauty was distressing. I blinked at it, trying to fix it in my mind’s eye.

Before we left Paris, a photographer friend had e-mailed me with his secret technique for visually embedding scenery. I’d printed out Russ’s words and pasted them in my pocket diary. I reread them now. “At particularly beautiful spots,” he wrote, “I practice an exercise which cements the scene in my brain. Look at the view, close your eyes, and try to reconstruct it. You’ll find lots of gaps in your mind’s eye. Open your eyes again and learn what you missed … little things, like where the horizon intercepts the barn, what’s in the foreground … keep doing so until you could sketch the scene in a closed room. You’ll have it forever. I can still see a view from a hotel balcony in New Zealand, and a street corner in Prague.”

Standing in the magical grove, I tried to embed the moss and ttext-align: justify; } p.indentedorees and morning light playing on the old winding road. It was a tough exercise. Luckily, I remembered Russ’s suggested alternative. “Have Alison take a picture.”

There was no need to “have her” take a picture. Wild motorbikes, let alone wild horses, couldn’t stop her from taking thousands of pictures. And anyway, she famously never responded to obligation.

Further upstream, the trail turned into a road named rue des Maquisards. It crossed an island at a putative village called Les Iles Menéfrier-La Chaume aux Renards, where a roadside memorial to the French Résistance bore a plaque: “Here 2,000 patriots of the Maquis Verneuil fought for freedom, 1944.”

Bushels of history hid underneath that single, straightforward line of prose. During the war, each Résistance unit had been identified as a “Maquis-something.” Often the something was the codename of its leader, or a secret location. The fighters called each other “maquisards,” a reference to the Corsican outback—
le maquis
—where the French equivalents of Robin Hood or Billy the Kid hid out in thick, Mediterranean scrub.

There was no sunny scrub here. This was Druid-land—dark and wet and moody—and, perversely, I found the Druids almost as fascinating as the ancient Romans. Was that because they had somehow managed to create a sophisticated quasi-religious dogma, set themselves up as mediators between men and the gods, and keep the other social classes in subjection and fear? They seemed a fine illustration of the power of negativity, the strength of superstition, the fruitfulness of scare-mongering and so, like Caesar, were uncannily modern once you scraped away the primitive surface. Their creepy presence could still be felt, clinging to the waterlogged timbers in the creek, the mossy trees and the boulders cloaked by lichen-frosted shrubbery. I shivered. I simply couldn’t grasp how anyone in the 21st century could embrace the revived cult of Druidism and propose to be a “neo-Druid.” Yet there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of apprentice Druids all over France—and the rest of the former Celtic world. There were Druid festivals, and Druid summer camps, Druid sing-alongs and probably Druid barbecues. The phenomenon suggested to me the desperate search for “spiritual” communion with God or the gods, the profound need to find an explanation, a solution, a reason for being. Perhaps that was our common trait, what ultimately distinguished us from other animals. We had to find an explanation, no matter how imperfect or ridiculous.

La Chaume aux Renards, where Gauls had once bowed under the Druidic wand, where maquisards had once hidden from Nazis, turned out to be a less-than-spectacular youth hostel today. Worse, its café was closed. Somehow we hadn’t expected to get a cup of coffee. Druids never drank the stuff.

Opposite the hostel, a sign on the trail stated that dirt bikes and Quads were not allowed on this section of GR-13. The chains blocking the trail reinforced the words. Again we heard the distant whine of two-stroke engines. As in Crottefou, battle had been joined. I couldn’t help feeling elated.

In a feisty, Druidic mood now, as we worked our way uphill, I began pulling deadwood onto the trail to slow the next pack of illegal dirt bikers. My hands turned black with mud, and my palms prickled from slivers. At the top of the rise, I looked back with satisfaction. It was almost as good as Druids’ work, or, better yet, beavers’ work. Branches and fallen trees now clogged the trail. I imagined the bikers having to slow, stop, dismount, and clear a path, making them think for at least one precious moment about the ecological madness they rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and were indulging in. I winced with satisfaction. But my temples throbbed and my eyes ached more than usual. I’d been full of righteous wrath, of anger at the bikers, and anger made me very unhappy and unwell.

“Less coffee and less anger,” I said to myself, hurrying to catch up with Alison, “and less Druidic nonsense.” She seemed blissful, taking her still-lifes of moss and lichen. She glanced back and down at my handiwork and, much to my surprise, gave her approval.

We hiked diligently onward, with another five or six miles to go before we reached the Pont du Montal, our destination for the night where I’d reserved a room. But first we had to get across another valley and make it to Le Vieux Dun.

THE PAST IS PRESENT

According to our
Topo Guide
, Le Vieux Dun, a hilltop hamlet, was already very
vieux
when Caesar rode through. Its reclusive inhabitants appear to have preserved an atavistic memory of the invasion. Village dogs barked. Bearish villagers barricaded themselves. Shutters and doors closed before we could reach them. Was this the essence of Burgundy? I couldn’t hide my disappointment. We’d been expecting something very different. Perhaps, I told Alison, trying to lighten our mood, perhaps the water engineer at Marigny was wrong, there really was a drought, and thus they didn’t want to refill our water bottles. Happily, I’d brought along an extra bottle from the B&B plus fruit juices. We would not die of thirst because of the unfriendly locals, though we might suffer for several hours.

Some commentators ascribe the fearful, distrustful nature of the French and their pathological attachment to the past to regicide—the murder of divine-right king Louis XVI. By killing God’s representative on Earth, and destroying the church and aristocracy with a slice of the guillotine’s blade, the French, the theory goes, lost their grounding. They cut their own tap root. The return to kings and emperors Napoléon I and III in the 19th century, and the creation of paternal Statist governance thereafter, are merely incomplete attempts at re-rooting.

That could be. Pop psychology sometimes hits the mark. The source of widespread French fearfulness and the petty aggressiveness or morbid shyness that springs from it may, however, go back to the chieftain Vercingétorix and the resounding military defeats at Bibracte and Alésia, or perhaps to gallant Roland’s slaughter at the hands of the Basques—an event later blamed (for political and religious motives) on the Moors, who were innocent. It seemed to me after over two decades in the country that whatever the origin of this unpleasant French trait, what the French themselves now recognize and describe as negative
passéisme
—the obsession with the past and fear of the future—was here to stay. The homely village of Dun seemed like
passéisme
incarnate.

“Dun” is one of those Indo-European root words that crops up in both Latin and Celtic, and usually means hill or fortified heights or, an easier guess, “dune” as in sand dune. There are dozens of place-names in France with “dun” in them, the most famous being Verdun.