Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (4 page)

I trailed after her into the Musée Archéologique Régional, a dusty repository of local history. My eyes widened when I saw the man at the ticket counter. He seemed to be the reincarnation of Astérix without a horned helmet. The long, disheveled hair and thick, drooping mustache were lifted from a comic book or movie about the Gallic warrior. Astérix, as celebrated at the Astérix amusement park north of Paris, is an ambiguous character. Because he’s based on the fierce Vercingétorix, the real-life Gallic rebel who stood up to Julius Caesar, he has gradually acquired a right-wing political cast. He’s often perceived as a
Résistant
or freedom fighter, and portrayed as an anarchist battling the corrupt mainstream of world politics. On the macro level, he’s the French David versus the global Goliath, a Gauloise-smoking Native Frenchman making his last stand dressed, nowadays, in denim and leather.

With tobacco-stained fingers the Astérix lookalike gently detached a museum entrance ticket, also valid for Fontaines Salées, an archeological site and natural salt springs, he said. With tobacco-stained teeth he smiled an unexpected smile. “Are you hikers?” he asked. He seemed suspiciously friendly. “Or pilgrims?”

Ignoring the distinction implied by the question—that hikers came a dime a dozen, and pilgrims were a more valuable commodity—we sketched out our plan to walk across Burgundy, and the rest of France, provided we survived, and said we were going to break in our boots on the Roman roads running south. We’d heard about the Via Agrippa, which ran somewhere nearby.

“The Via Agrippa?” he interrupted, excited. He ran his thick fingers across a survey map, showing us where to find sections of the Roman road, plus ancient ruins and a sacred spring. He seemed to know the area astonishingly well. Did he perhaps boast ancient ancestry, I asked? Astérix doubled in stature—to a full five foot-six. He said his forebears had been in this part of Burgundy since “time immemorial.” He was, in a nutshell, a bona fide descM">passéisme incarnate.dChendant of Vercingétorix—or another valiant chieftain with an unpronounceable name. Or so he thought.

We shed our packs and with Astérix at our elbows exuding nicotine, had a quick look at the display cases stuffed with broken statuary and rusted nails. Then we scuttled off to buy croissants and
pains au chocolat
before at long last hitting the road.

Following Astérix’s instructions, we found the ancient Roman Via Agrippa on the east side of the clear, rushing Cure River. It was an auspicious start—a friendly Gaul and a Roman road south.

THE ROMAN WAY

Why was it people always thought in terms of
the
Roman road, I wondered, as if there had only been one in a given part of the Empire? The truth, of course, is more complicated. Wherever the Romans colonized, they built many roads, often atop older roads, the way we do. “Street” and the Latin word for roadway—
strada
—derive from strata. In Burgundy, the pre-existing road network was Gallic. It linked hilltop towns the Romans called Oppida—or so claimed the book we’d brought along. And we had no reason to doubt its accuracy.

We found a bench on the riverbank and as we enjoyed our flaky, buttery pastries, Alison read aloud from the book. It was the subversively light, read-anywhere paperback entertainment we’d decided to carry with us: Julius Caesar’s
The Conquest of Gaul
.

I’d read snippets of this masterpiece in Latin class back in high school, and had picked it up again while studying Political Science at UC Berkeley. But by now I remembered little, other than the fact that it is among the earliest reliable accounts of ancient warfare and of Gallic and Germanic history, religion, social structures, and lifestyle. Contrary to expectations, it also proved to be a page-turner. Already it was holding up our progress.

The introduction to Caesar’s opus explained that the fast-moving military genius was highly appreciative of Gaul’s fine roads and prosperous Oppida. In fact, without the pre-existing road network, how would Caesar have been able to march so quickly into Gaul? The Celtic tribes in Caesar’s day already had been transformed by contact with Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, and had an advanced if brutal civilization. They were less “barbarian,” for example, than the hardcore Germans or the savages holed up in what’s now Switzerland. The Gauls could no longer defend themselves against the Swiss-Germans and, taking Caesar at his word, it was these overly civilized Gauls who called upon Rome to save them from the future makers of the world’s best chocolate and keepers of secret, numbered bank accounts.

The Gallic request for Roman aid fitted nicely with Caesar’s long-term goal of “Romanizing” northwestern Europe as a bulwark against Teutonic hordes. So up he swept from the Forum, to fight for Gaul and, it turned out, to stay. And stay. The tale sounded like a warmup to the last few centuries’ conflicts pitting France against Germany, with England and America—the New Romans—stepping in to save the day.

The day was long, but not long enough to spend it entirely with Caesar. Full of bounce and unfamiliar optimism, we headed south on the Roman-pilgrim’s trail, following a bright yellow scallop-shell signpost. Though it made me feel unkind, I could not help thinking the road looked like any other rutted, muddy farm road. But as we trekked forward full of glee, the realization that centurions and perhaps Julius Caesar himself had ridden down it somehow gave the scenery a disconcerting, jackbooted gravitas.

TIME TUNNELS AND WISHING WELLS

We hadn’t hiked more than a mile when we spotted our first famous landmark—the Fontaines Salées archeological site and salt springs.

“Do we have time for a visit?” I asked, checking my pedometer and watch.

“About three months,” Alison reminded me. “Who’s keeping track, other than you?”

Inside the ticket booth, a lean man sat reading a newspaper. “The Roman road ran by here,” he said unprompted, as we showed him the tickets Astérix had sold us. “Part of it is underneath the paved road you just walked on. But the Romans were newcomers,” he added with an air of mystery. “The Celts started using the salt springs around 200 BC.” He sounded like an oracle, or an actor used to reciting the same lines. “It’s older than that, though, much older.” He raised a finger, wiggled it significantly, and returned to his newspaper.

A pattern of stone ruins hugged a lush, green hollow near the river. Walls a few feet high revealed what was, we learned, the Gauls’ circular temple to the gods of this mineral springs. The Romans had remodeled and expanded it. Enough had withstood the centuries to evoke the salacious rituals of old.

Frogs croaked in marshy pools as Alison read aloud from the site brochure. I couldn’t help concurring that the Romans and Celts were Johnny-come-latelies. Archeologists had discovered nineteen wooden wellheads at Fontaines Salées, all fashioned from felled trees hollowed out with fire. Dendrochronology and carbon-14 revealed one sample to have been cut in the spring of 2238 BC.

2238 BC?

I repeated the date silently, counting backwards. That was 4,246 years ago, the end of the Stone Age or Neolithic. Here?

We wandered through the ruins, seeing them with new eyes. I was filled again with disconcerting enthusiasm. Salty water welled through the rubble. I peered into one of the submerged wooden casings. The bark was still on the tree. How had Neolithic peoples learned to glean and use salt to preserve food? Perhaps they weren’t so primitive after all. Tadpoles swam among lazy bubbles. I couldn’t help feeling lost in the bottomlessness of 4,246 years. It made Saint James seem a beardless youth. Was this where the wishing-well myth had originated? Had the pre-Celtic salt-harvesters invoked the spring’s gods and the gods of spring? Had the Druids made human sacrifices here? Had Narcissus been mesmerized and fallen into his own reflection here? Here, this very spot? What a luxury it was to speculate. If that’s what pilgrimages were about, then I was all for them.

On the way out, we asked the custodian if he knew of a shortcut back to the pilgrims’ trail that would keep us off the asphalt and away from today’s Gallic road warriors. He pointed northwest toward a place called Valbeton, as if we were familiar with the place-name.

A path ran uphill to a dirt road—another ancient road, he said. It was, the custodian added, the way Roland, Charlemagne, and Girart de Roussillon had traveled to Spain. Girart de Roussillon was the founder of Vézelay, he reminded us. “Of course you’ve read the
Song of Roland
and know that Roland was killed near Roncevaux abbey, where The Way of Saint James crosses the Pyrenees and turns into the Camino de Santiago?”

“Of course,” said Alison.

Well, I added, even though we were ignoramuses from the other side of the Atlantic, we were familiar with the personage of Roland and had even at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.read the poem. I couldn’t quote it to the over-educated ticket-taker, but I had read parts of the
Song of Roland
, an epic in late 11th-century French that sings the adventures of Charlemagne and his “right-hand man” Roland, Duke of the Marches of Brittany. It was the French equivalent of the Arthurian cycle, but older, bloodier, and less romantic. When I read it those many years ago, I’d skipped to the massacre scene near Roncevaux, where Roland blows his horn in extremis, in a Pyrenees pass. That’s where we would be crossing the mountains in a few months, if all went to plan.

Yes, there was a plan. I checked my watch and compared it to the clock on my pedometer, realizing it was high time to hike south in haste. We had about ten miles to go before we’d reach our first overnight at a village called Domecy-sur-Cure, and it was already late morning. The lunch bell would soon be ringing in my belly, and if we didn’t pick up the pace, darkness would enfold us, possibly in the middle of a fearsome forest where lions, tigers, and bears awaited.

GALLOPING SCALLOPS

As we bounded toward Spain like bee-stung hares full of hope and expectation, a mere month’s walk from Cluny and our first major goal, I realized that for several years, Alison and I had been living in a kind of enclosed porch, like the one at the basilica of Mary Magdalene, a pre-pilgrimage Limbo built onto the façade of our lives. We were finally crossing into the nave, so to speak, and it felt good. It felt wonderful, liberating, exhilarating.

We were not alone in our excitement. Climbing the grade on GR-13, the secular hiking trail we’d selected, we spied a pair of telescopic walking sticks flailing ahead of us and heard their click on the rocky road. As we neared, I sensed the heavy breathing of an unhappy camper. Uphill crept what looked like a giant snail but was in reality a human of surprising proportions. She was large, as pneumatic as a truck tire, and wore a bulky backpack. As we came abreast, I also noticed her jack-o’-lantern smile. Not much older than we, she’d somehow lost most of her teeth. Was she on a pilgrimage to beseech Saint James for dental assistance? Or was her journey about weight loss? She caught her breath long enough to wheeze
bonjour
. We encouraged her with hand signals and smiles, and climbed past, feeling like guilty hares leaving the tortoise behind.

The mixed metaphors struck me as uncharitable, especially given our Saint Jamesian surroundings. I didn’t mean to make fun of a fellow pilgrim, though I’d rarely seen a human so like a snail and a Halloween pumpkin combined. Now that I thought of it, she looked an awful lot like a tortoise, too. My knees ached at the memory of carrying an extra fifty pounds around my waistline, the pounds I’d managed to lose since catching hepatitis and starving myself toward health. My heart went out to her, furthering my misgivings about my mental metaphors. I couldn’t help wondering if there was some way to share the Good News with her—that if a seemingly hopeless case like me could slim down, perk up, and stride out, maybe she could too. All she had to do was eat less, eat right, detox from the prescription drugs, change her attitude, and get lots of exercise, without viewing any of the above as a “sacrifice.” Because if sacrifice was perceived, then failure was guaranteed. The real trick, as she clearly knew, seeing as she was out here, obviously suffering but with a smile on her face, was harnessing will power and self-awareness and.…

“Who are you talking to?” Alison asked.

“Was I talking?”

“It was either you or a ghost,” she said. important stopover or starting point on fa n

“Caesar’s ghost, maybe,” I retorted. “Or Charlemagne’s.”

Charlemagne! The famous Valbeton lay ahead of us, pushing other thoughts out of my head. The dirt road turned into a trail that tipped up and ran over loose rocks. In my mind’s ear I heard the hooves of Charlemagne’s cavalry, but I failed to hear the blast of Roland’s horn. At the crest, among swaying pine trees, we turned to cast farewell glances at Vézelay and the determined tortoise far below.

In the opposite direction, to the southeast stretched five ridges cloaked with fir forests and leafing deciduous trees surrounded by fields, pastures, and vineyards—and not a single paved road. Paradise!

The unassuming bowl beneath us turned out to be Valbeton. In theory it had been the scene of knights tilting on Charlemagne’s round trip from Aachen, Germany, to Spain. Vineyards flanked the trail. Grapevines mossy with age grew on grassy slopes. The vineyards looked to be organic, a hopeful sign. In the distance, grape-growers burned cuttings and passed around a bottle of clear liquid, the contents of which they tipped into their mouths. We were on the section of trail we’d spotted earlier from Fontaines Salées. Thinking again of Roland, I looked down at my boots and, thunderstruck, stooped to pick up an old cow’s horn.

“Roland’s horn?” I asked, turning it over. The pattern of Alison’s lips indicated to me that this wasn’t the famous Oliphant. A bone, then? And not from an animal. “A human tibia, perhaps?”

Alison recoiled. “Roland died on the Spanish border and was buried in Aix,” she said, shaking her head.

“Roland died on the Spanish border and was buried in what the French call Aix-la-Chapelle,” I retorted. “That’s Aachen, in Germany, Charlemagne’s capital. They brought his body back to Aachen on this trail. Don’t you see?”