Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (40 page)

By now, we had realized the exactitude of certain clichés. The Frenchmen we’d met on our way to the Pyrenees were right: the Basques
are
different. Everything about them is different, from the pizza-sized berets they wear and the wild
Pottök
ponies they eat to their region’s topography, art, architecture, spicy cooking, and especially their language.

Village names had gone from being merely difficult in the Béarnaise Region to becoming unpronounceable in Basque Country. Bouhaben, a hamlet, led to Aroue-Ithorots-Olhaïby. The scenery also morphed: wonderful became actively sublime as we crept south from the hot, dry, delicious southwest of France, crossed the pleasing Béarn and reached the land of mountains, myth, and magic. Dreamy broadleaf forests waved rainbow leaves as fall advanced before our kaleidoscope eyes. Sheep ranged in meadows too green to be real. Here was the emerald we travel writers are forever searching to find. Outsized whitewashed, half-timbered houses with red shutters stood shoulder to shoulder in sturdy, neat-freak villages where nary a crumb of gravel was out of place.

Nearing the town of Aroue we’d caught first sight of the Pyrenees, a formidable barrier between us and Roncesvalles Abbey, our goal in Spain. We’d devoured Caesar’s
Conquest of Gaul
in Burgundy in the spring;
The Song of Roland
had been our bedtime reading for the last few weeks. By now we knew a thing or three about these man-eating mountains. True, Hannibal had made it over them. But defended by Basque insurgents, the 5,000-foot-high Col de Bentarte—the pass we needed to traverse—had defeated Charlemagne’s rearguard in 778 AD. It has claimed many an army and pilgrim since. I’d gulped at this realization, and wondered more than once if we would make it over. The sawtooth peaks ahead were the real deal, nothing like anything we’d scaled in the past 750 miles since we started walking in Vézelay.

Sparsely populated and windswept, the Pyrenees notionally separate France from Spain. Basque Country straddles the mountain chain, enjoying enough political autonomy on both sides to keep most Basques from advocating separatism—or being actively unpleasant to outsiders. The Basque language is not Indo-European and resembles neither Spanish nor French—nor anything else, including ancient Gallic. Happily, the Gauls didn’t take this route or take root here: the last we’d seen of Vercingétorix was a portrait of his surrender to Caesar hanging in a museum in the Auvergne Region. There was no blessed Gallic or the relics of Mary Magdalene { font-size: 0.88rem; margin-top: ic, and French heritage to tussle over. Hardy Basque locals staked their claims before newcomer Romans showed up speaking Latin—and failed to subdue the wily natives, who may have arrived about the time the prehistoric caves were painted. Luckily, most Basques we met weren’t overly fierce and most also spoke several tongues, sometimes simultaneously.

One of the owners of the pilgrim’s hostel shuffled up to us and identified himself in three languages as Frère Ourtiague, a retired priest. Ruddy-faced and unsteady on his pins, he seemed pleased to be able to stamp our pilgrims’ passports, documents issued to us by the Catholic Church, which by now were covered page after page with scores of colorful seals, stamps, signatures, and a variety of other marks evoking the locales where we’d lodged since starting our journey again in Le Puy-en-Velay in late August. Yes, we had resigned ourselves to carrying the passports on this second leg of our journey: we needed them to gain access to pilgrims’ hostels along the way. I was also feeling less antagonistic about the church, having profited from the shelter of several hundred sanctuaries as we walked. If for no other reason, the institution needed to survive simply to maintain the architectural heritage of the centuries. And if people of faith also found comfort under the Catholic umbrella, so be it. As long as they respected the religions or lack of religion of others, and didn’t brainwash their children, that was fine by me.

Brother Ourtiague’s cough brought me back to reality. He glanced at the calendar, licked his plump index finger, and paused before finishing the job of stamping our passports. His pink cheeks paled.

“Today is October 17 … the 18th is Saint Luke’s Day.
Jour de Saint Luc, jour du Grand Truc
!” he exclaimed cryptically. “You’re planning to cross the Col de Bentarte into Spain tomorrow?”

We nodded, cheerful if somewhat tired: we’d covered nearly twenty roller-coaster miles starting at dawn, climbing the picture-postcard foothills in frisky, high winds, then tackling the first slippery slopes of the Pyrenees.

“Snow is expected the day after tomorrow,” I remarked, feeling the wind-burn on my own unusually lean, unusually pink cheeks. “The pass might be closed. So either we climb through the windstorm tomorrow or we don’t get to Spain until spring, unless you have skis to loan us.”

The priest did not laugh. Huntto and the hostel looked pretty swell, I added. But the attractions might be somewhat limited. Six months of waiting up here wasn’t on the cards, despite our new and improved relationship with time.

Brother Ourtiague’s eyes rolled heavenward, a sincere, unscripted expression of concern. “The Lord Protect you,” he uttered.

“Thank you,” Alison said.

“What kind of festival is Saint Luke’s Day?” I asked.

Brother Ourtiague shook his jowly head at my ignorance. “Saint Luke’s is not a festival; it’s the biggest pigeon-hunting day in Basque Country.
Le jour du grand truc
. That’s what it means: the big deal with shotguns.” He raised his arm and pulled a pretend trigger. “Hundreds of hunters will be out there. They do not like it when pilgrims appear.”

MEMORY LANE

On the way to our see-forever bunk on an upstairs floor, I borrowed a pair of camouflage hunting binoculars from a coat rack in the dining area. We might very well be eating our last supper here tonight, I reflected, suddenly nostalgic for l millennia oic, and ife and sorry to have dragged my wife into peril among the migratory pigeons. The woeful feeling didn’t last. The tranquility I’d discovered in recent weeks stifled it and calmed any panic. Gazing from the windows of Ferme Ithuburia was something I could get used to, I thought, putting aside images of the trigger-happy Basques preparing the battlefield outside. On a clear afternoon like this, the views swept north into France for tens, perhaps hundreds, of miles. If only I had access to Google. I’d be able to find out just how far the eye can see at 1,700 feet above sea level with no impediments.

Perhaps, after all, god was an algorithm. Google would come up with the equation that not only demystified life on Earth, but also unraveled the secrets of the universe, black holes, and the heretofore unanswerable. That probably would not put out of business a skillful pope and other adaptable spiritual leaders: the algorithm came from somewhere. I sighed with pleasure. The most important and enjoyable revelation of all I’d had so far was: pilgrimages weren’t really about finding an answer. More vitally, they were about asking questions—an infinity of questions. Paradoxically, the quest itself was both the question and the answer. And it had to continue, it would continue, but only after a nap.

Showered and rested, I awoke to find Alison studying the landscape through the binoculars. Her pilgrim’s passport and a map were spread open nearby. “I need reading glasses,” she said. “I can’t see close up anymore.”

“I’m useful at last,” I chortled. As long as something is squarely before my good eye, at a range of a foot or less, I can focus on it better than Alison. “Can you see back to Le Puy-en-Velay?”

“Why not ask me to look for the Eiffel Tower?”

“Good idea. Raise your aim,” I encouraged her. “Look just below the cloud line. We’re up pretty high here. Maybe you can see the cathedral of Le Puy where they issued us these passports?”

Alison sighed and ranged widely with the binoculars while I focused on the
Crédenciel
—the origin of our word “credentials,” I suddenly realized, a word itself derived from credo. I had to admit that “credo” had not been part of the pilgrimage algorithm, not for me, anyway. In three months of trekking, we’d had plenty of micro-epiphanies about ourselves and the world, past, present, and potential. But no great revelation had driven us into the arms of the Mother Church, or united us invisibly to the often garrulous, self-styled spiritual seekers we’d usually wound up trying to avoid on the trail. Utterly unlike our solitary trek across Burgundy, we’d seen thousands of other pilgrims since Le Puy-en-Velay, and all they seemed to want to do was yak, gab, chat, eat, drink, sleep, compare blisters, race each other, and plan their next vacation.

After a couple of months of physiotherapy and rest, we’d left Paris by train for Le Puy-en-Velay, where we pig-headedly picked up the trail again, determined to make it to the Pyrenees. An unusual town, Le Puy lies about two hundred miles south of our stopping point at the Roche de Solutré near Cluny and Mâcon. Why leave from Le Puy? For the simple reason that this spectacular site clinging to the southern edge of the inhospitable, volcanic Massif Central is France’s main pilgrimage trailhead on the so-called Via Podiensis. The modern-day GR-65 hiking trail retraces the original, ancient route. From Le Puy’s airborne cathedral, it’s 800 kilometers or 500 miles to Roncesvalles Abbey, and 1,600 kilometers or 1,000 miles to Santiago de Compostela. We’d opted for the closerwww.openroadmedia.com/newslettersedo destination. The reasons were many.

Like Vézelay, Le Puy-en-Velay is a pilgrimage site in its own right, famed for a Black Virgin and a medieval chapel poised atop a volcanic spur. Current estimates are thirty-five thousand walkers set out from the Black Virgin’s shrine each year, though no more than ten percent make it to Santiago.

Luckily, that meant nine in ten of our fellow travelers would not be zealots, and, as it turned out, few were walking for more than a week or two at a time. You could easily pick out the remaining one-in-ten heading for Saint Jacques’s putative resting place in Compostela. It was clear from the look in their eyes, the purpose in their stride and, usually, their remarkable lack of mirth. Most were French, earnest and young—in their twenties. They were also distinctive in appearance, likely to be covered with scallop shells, draped with crucifixes, dressed in pre-modern garb, and, like most French, highly competitive. This meant that they often elbowed others—people they referred to as “tourists”—out of the way on what was in places a narrow and dangerous trail.

But France was only a foretaste, we knew from first-hand reports, and from having driven along sections of the pilgrim’s route in Spain ourselves in years past. The mainstream of tourists and hardcore believers flowed on the south side of the Pyrenees, 200,000 of them per year on the Camino de Santiago, where the jamboree has become as institutionalized as the running of the bulls in Pamplona, and about as inspiring or enticing.

“Can you see that forested spot on top of the Massif Central?” I asked Alison while studying the passport. “That chapel where we met the wild-eyed nut with worn shoes and a broken pack? Remember, he’d walked three thousand miles from Switzerland to Spain, then to Jerusalem and back to wherever we were.”

Alison lowered the binoculars to inspect me. “I thought his story was moving,” she said, “and inspiring. What incredible hardship, and he had a great spirit.”

“Ummm,” I agreed, wondering whether he’d made it home to a numbered bank account in Geneva. “Can you see Aubrac?”

Soon after meeting the wild-eyed pilgrim, we’d been herded along by the local long-horned cattle. They’d nudged us across the boulder-strewn plateaus and peaks to the medieval town of Aubrac. Once it had been the sole pilgrim’s refuge in a windswept wilderness. Now it was a quaint mountain resort. Thinking back to it, a tinkling came to my mind’s ears. We’d awakened in Aubrac before dawn to a symphony of a thousand cowbells, as shepherds moved their herds to high pastures.

I closed my eyes and clicked back to mid-September and the Southwest—a place of ducks, drakes, and dangerous quantities of foie gras: eating it made me feel like a cannibal. After perched Golignac on the serpentine Lot River, the steep, rough descent to Conques had turned my knees into rubber, and I’d been forced to stop at the nearest sports emporium to buy telescopic walking sticks. Without them, I wouldn’t have made it another step.

But Conques had meant much more to me than being humbled by wobbly knees. Behind the apse of Sainte-Foy Abbey, a semicircle of Merovingian-era stone caskets had seemed to be gazing up at our windows night and day. We’d spent two nights in Conques, sleeping in a Spartan hostel run by the Premontrian Brotherhood in charge of the thousand-year-old site. The golden mask of Sainte-Foy, displayed in the abbey museum, proved as haunting as the huge, sonorous abbey bells rung by the head priest, Brother Jean-Regis, or the organ music played by the abbey of Berzé-le-Chatel fa n’s four other Premontrian monks.

“You wouldn’t be able to see Conques, would you,” I asked Alison.

“It was in a valley,” she replied, lowering the binoculars again and sitting next to me on the bed. “It was so beautiful when they climbed the belfry and turned to listen for that other little bell in the ruined chapel. It rang out from across the ravine.…”

I felt a shiver. The monk had thrown his weight onto the rope with childlike glee, and the abbey’s ponderous bells had replied to the little bell, thundering farewell to the pilgrims who’d made it up the hill across the way, en route to Compostela.

“They ring when they reach the chapel,” Jean-Regis had explained to us in a singsong tenor. “They ring when returning, and we try to ring back.”

The monk had also said something that had made great sense to me, and lodged in my brain’s leathery convolutions. “The only thing all pilgrims have in common is an interior necessity—
I must go, I don’t know why
.…”

Perhaps I still didn’t know why. But finally it no longer mattered.

It seemed to me that of all the things we’d seen, perhaps the one that had marked me most was also the most unexpected: a timeless treasure in a grotto near the riverside village of Cabrerets on the intoxicatingly gorgeous Célé River. That’s where, in the stalactite-encrusted caverns of Pech Merle, we filtered out the presence of other visitors and were paralyzed by the magic of the 25,000-year-old cave drawings. An outline of a young man’s hand, a hand exactly like mine or Alison’s, forced me to rethink everything I’d ever thought about art, history, and superstition.