Post Travel Tristesse
Tristesse translates into "sadness" in English, and maybe that can sum up what I'm feeling this morning. The trip was just too short; I left my guy over there when it only makes sense for us to be together; the kitchen--having been occupied by Raf--needed an hour of rehab before I could make coffee; there is admin work that now cannot be put off another day...oh, and what the hell am I doing with my life, anyway?
It could be rightly pointed out that walking every day for several hours, even for just a week, tends to turn one's perception of life upside down. I already know the part about the freedom of having almost nothing for long periods of time-- one change of clothes, no makeup, just a few toiletries, a couple pairs of socks and underwear that you wash out every other day or so.
I was less familiar with the constant attention to my body and its various parts. I know the feeling somewhat, having spent the last couple of years doing yoga regularly, because it is true that for that hour or so a day, you have nothing to think about but your psoas and your hamstrings. Still on the Compostela, at least for me, I was continually aware of how my feet were feeling, how my knees were working, what was happening with my shoulders, my upper arms and my lower back. It turns out that the backpack I used, one that has been around the world, that was on my daughter's college semester in Europe, that has been in the family for decades-- actually supported my back rather than in any way pulled on it. The one day we spent walking without packs, at the end of the day, my back felt WORSE than it did the rest of the trip with a snug wide padded belt supporting it.
I spent quite a bit of time working with the various mantras of the Deepak Chopra meditation series, particularly the one for the Action Chakra of the solar plexis and the Detachment one where you let go of the results of your actions and just put one foot in front of the other. I like the idea of having a mantra for the day, and going through the seven laws of spiritual success one by one. I spent hours in a meditative state, walking, being aware of my body in the present moment, just observing the scenery, just breathing and repeating my daily mantra. Part of the rationale was just not to THINK, not to cogitate and analyze, simply to BE.
I loved the whole historical aspect of the walk. The symbols-- the scallop shell everywhere, the crosses and churches (though we did not, as others did, make it a point to visit every historical church.) The visit to the Pilgrim's hostel at Villeret-sur-Apchier was a high point because the hosts had made the whole pilgrimage in the spirit of their Catholicism and came back enlightened and willing to share. They were particularly into the concept of Welcoming (Accueil in French), and how people need to feel welcome, how they need to be given comfort and sustenance as they travel. That's the place where there were two massage machines as our disposal-- one for the feet and one for the back. What a grand pleasure that was! They also got everyone singing the traditional song of the pilgrimage and explained "Ultreya," which is a kind of watchword or password meaning, Go Farther and has a companion expression that means "Go Higher," but I couldn't find that one with a cursory Google Search.
At one point, Jean-Francois talked for at least an hour, maybe more -- we were walking, so no track of time-- about how the Compostela of Santiago trail figures into the history of Europe, how it was used for political purposes by Charlemagne and over several centuries to encourage the Spanish to rise up against the "Moors" (who were quite settled in) and to take the country back for themselves and Christendom. There are temptations to make parallels to modern times, and while we discussed how these comparisons can be made, we agreed that today's situation is more complicated. It is true, however, that France is in the midst of its own "immigration crisis," and like most peoples of the world, when the percentage of foreigners reaches a certain level, the locals turn ugly for awhile. Assimilation is always slower than public opinion and people do tend to hate change, especially cultural change.
Nowadays, there are aspects that make the pilgrimage more of a modern experience. The presence of the wonderful red-and-white trail blazes is one. We found that the first several days were particularly well-marked, with x marks for routes that should not be taken and funny little turn signs for those that were going in a different direction. They were so reassuring, so ever-present, so much of a touchstone for me. Every time you pass one, there is this great feeling of being on the right road. When we left the trail one night to go to a hostel that had been recommended (and where JF and I both probably acquired our bedbugs), I almost cried the next day when we came back to our red-and-white blazes. You wander off, but it's is so comforting to return to the path.
There are also services that will transport your luggage to your next hostel every day of your trip, if you choose. It's about $10 a day and of course you need reservations at your stops. We chose to do the trip without reservations, and we had no trouble finding rooms and beds in dormitories. On the one day we decided to try the system, it worked perfectly. You leave your bags with the money in an envelope on top and head out for the day. When you arrive at your destination, there they are. For people who can't manage to reduce their backpack weight to 10% of their body weight (we were told that is the optimum weight to carry for long distances), this is perfect. All you take with you is your daypack with water and lunch and camera. And raingear!...if there is rain in the forecast.
We had about four or five days of rain, biting cold, fog, and even hail. The trail was muddy, slippery and often treacherous. At Sauges (pronounced Sowg), one of our fellow diners bitched about how disappointed he was not to have been able to see the scenery because of the low clouds and rain. Nobody reprimanded him but I'm sure others, like me, thought that a pilgrimage is NOT about, or at least not primarily about the scenery.
So here is the routine: You rise in the morning fairly early (it is a vacation, so you might fantasize about sleeping in...but no...) for a traditional French breakfast downstairs in the communal dining hall: crusty baguettes, butter, jam (often homemade by the hosts) and coffee with milk. There were some variations-- our BEST hostel had four kinds of cake, juice, cereal, homemade yogurt along with the regular "petit dej." You tie your shoes, hoist your backpack and head for the trail. You might stop at a village for some lunch-- I once had a great mushroom omlette at one of the little roadside snack places, or you might break out the provisions you've brought. For us, that was often sausage and bread with some chocolate for dessert. You walk. You take pictures. You chat with the people zooming by you in the fast lane (we were always in the SLOW lane!) You take a bio break, a water break. You walk.
At some point in the afternoon, we usually got an idea of how far we could go that day, so we would sometimes call ahead to see if they still had room. Sometimes, we just showed up. We'd leave our shoes at the door, deposit our packs where they told us, and hang out waiting for dinner. Folks would filter in over the course of the early evening until about 7-8-ish, which would usually be the beginning of the communal evening meal. Dinner was alway at a long table with everyone around it-- no little individual tables for the French! And it was not a menu affair, either. You were served the stately and sumptious succession of French courses one after another-- maybe you'd start with a salad, maybe a soup, then you'd move to the protein (sausages, chunks of meat in sauce, lamb) and vegetable dishes, then invariably to the cheese course, and then dessert or fruit. Often at the end an herb tea. There was no choice, exactly, though a couple of places the cheese tray way so amazingly stocked with different cheeses that you HAD to choose, you couldn't taste them all.
The conversation around the dinner table was animated, friendly and warm. The French, unlike us'ns, have absolutely no trouble with an hour and a half evening meal, and no prob keeping up a running combination of jokes, teasings, passionate declarations, and general reflections on life, the universe and everything. The microphone bounces from one to another. Side conversations split off and then re-converge. I think it will be sort of sad when we get to Spain and we won't be able to have this cachophany of dinnertable talk as fluently as we do in French.
After dinner, everybody heads for the bed, also fairly early. Beds can be either in regular hotel-like rooms or in dormitories with up to 19 or 20 beds in a room. This is also one of those conventions that are not much in our American experience. When was the last time we slept in a room with 10 or more people? At Scout camp? Certainly not as adults. Nobody on the trail seems to find this a great inconvenience, though the next morning, the snorers are apt to be teased. Few people have real trouble sleeping with a snorer or two in the room. Which is great for us, since both JF and I snore, apparently.
We invariably begin to define just what a pilgrimage can be for a modern hiker. It is NOT a week's worth of just hiking. It isn't a vacation, either, not really. You do vacate your mind of the normal workday world, but you ain't sitting on a beach by any means. There is just no way to escape yourself, your running mental stories, your self-doubts and anxieties except by simply walking on and on. It is the combination of the long stretches of daily silence, solitude and physical effort with the evenings in happy conviviality around solid, homemade, garden-fresh food that makes so much of this pilgrimage a magical experience.
We came back with two great recipes from the trip. One is from the land where we walked and is called "l'Aligot." What I love about French food is that quite often they have the most commonplace recipes-- scalloped potatoes, for instance, around which they have created a whole mythology-- what its regional origins are, when it is supposed to be eaten, what particular ingredients are essential, what is supposed to go with it and what is so out of place it must be rejected. JF and I had one collossal argument once because I wanted to make Spoon Bread to go with the Cassoulet (a pork and beans dish). He was adamant that Spoon Bread does NOT go with Cassoulet. Aligot is a mashed potatoes and cheese dish, typically (I was told several times) a winter dish, served with fat sausages. As per usual, there is a whole THANG around this dish. Everyone knows it comes from the region around Aumont-Aubrac and that there is a particular cheese, the Thom of the region, that is used and another, Cantal, that can be substituted if you don't have access to the regional thom. In order to be successful, the mixture needs to be so well mixed that you can lift a spoon of it up a yard, and the string of the cheese doesn't break. There is a certain way to beat the potatoes and cheese that one of our local informants explained in detail.
.
The other recipe we tasted in Marseille and it is part of the "new" cuisine, where all these innovative chefs come up with wild new ideas of foods that are riffs on the traditional foods. It's a quiche, only there is a layer of MINT at the bottom, just on top of the pastry, and you use goat cheese in place of the usual cow's cheese. Of course, in France, the kind of cheese that is "usual" is still very specific-- I think there are two kinds that are supposed to be used in tandem, but this new recipe breaks from the tradition and the result is transcendant.
We stopped walking a couple of days "early," as we had projected a 10-day walk and ended up with only 8. One of the main reasons was that we want to start from our last place next year and so the place needed to have access from the outside world-- train or bus, so we can easily GET to our new starting point. But the defining reason was that I had fallen into a vat of bedbugs at our last stop and was covered with angry itching scary bites-- 27 bites that JF counted. They were hot, surrounded with a kind of yellowish ring, and one of them had a blister that seemed to be getting bigger. I had some cortisone anti-itch cream that I'd thrown in for mosquito bites that was incredibly handy for just taking the edge off the crazy-making itching. My discomfort was one thing, but more important was the feeling of responsibility to other travelers not to be bringing any of these unwanted little travelers along with me. You can never be SURE whether they are in your bag, in your clothes or just in the bed you vacated unless you can see them, and until they grow up to adulthood, they are damnably difficult to see.
While these nasty critters are a part of many international traveling experiences, they are NOT part of the American experience much (though JF tells me that he read a piece about their resurgence, especially on the East Coast.) We associate them with low-life, dirt, nastiness, and foreigners. Many folks I know, just with the POSSIBILITY of bedbugs, would cross off the trip from their options. So it's important, I think, to put them in their place-- not minor, but not the most important part of the trip.
I had all sorts of emotional reactions to my plight-- our plight, really. I didn't want to feel like a failure. I didn't want to feel as though I were a plague vector. I didn't want to abandon our plans. I wanted to get on the first plane home to America. I wanted to take the first bus/train out of town to Marseille (which is what we did end up doing.) JF had an amusing reaction. As we were pondering what to do, he said, "I'd like to go on, but only if you can do 20 kms today." We had never done that many. Our maximum distance was 16 k, roughly 10 miles, at the end of which one of us was totally exhausted. I was adamant that I would not be able to do that. So we decided to go back to Marseille, to hot water washeterias where we could stuff even our backpacks in the machine. After, I said, "Why did you come up with that 20 k thing? You knew I couldn't do that." "To allow you to save face," he replied. For some reason I have yet to fathom, projecting an impossible goal and declaring it such, so as to facilitate the decision to cut the trip short was supposed to sooth my misgivings about quitting. Go figure.
I have another post in the works for the WHOLE bedbug story, along with history, links to other sites, etc. But that is really the jist of it for our purposes here today. We came, we acquired, we quit...and did the laundry.
And meanwhile, we walked and walked and walked.
It could be rightly pointed out that walking every day for several hours, even for just a week, tends to turn one's perception of life upside down. I already know the part about the freedom of having almost nothing for long periods of time-- one change of clothes, no makeup, just a few toiletries, a couple pairs of socks and underwear that you wash out every other day or so.
I was less familiar with the constant attention to my body and its various parts. I know the feeling somewhat, having spent the last couple of years doing yoga regularly, because it is true that for that hour or so a day, you have nothing to think about but your psoas and your hamstrings. Still on the Compostela, at least for me, I was continually aware of how my feet were feeling, how my knees were working, what was happening with my shoulders, my upper arms and my lower back. It turns out that the backpack I used, one that has been around the world, that was on my daughter's college semester in Europe, that has been in the family for decades-- actually supported my back rather than in any way pulled on it. The one day we spent walking without packs, at the end of the day, my back felt WORSE than it did the rest of the trip with a snug wide padded belt supporting it.
I spent quite a bit of time working with the various mantras of the Deepak Chopra meditation series, particularly the one for the Action Chakra of the solar plexis and the Detachment one where you let go of the results of your actions and just put one foot in front of the other. I like the idea of having a mantra for the day, and going through the seven laws of spiritual success one by one. I spent hours in a meditative state, walking, being aware of my body in the present moment, just observing the scenery, just breathing and repeating my daily mantra. Part of the rationale was just not to THINK, not to cogitate and analyze, simply to BE.
I loved the whole historical aspect of the walk. The symbols-- the scallop shell everywhere, the crosses and churches (though we did not, as others did, make it a point to visit every historical church.) The visit to the Pilgrim's hostel at Villeret-sur-Apchier was a high point because the hosts had made the whole pilgrimage in the spirit of their Catholicism and came back enlightened and willing to share. They were particularly into the concept of Welcoming (Accueil in French), and how people need to feel welcome, how they need to be given comfort and sustenance as they travel. That's the place where there were two massage machines as our disposal-- one for the feet and one for the back. What a grand pleasure that was! They also got everyone singing the traditional song of the pilgrimage and explained "Ultreya," which is a kind of watchword or password meaning, Go Farther and has a companion expression that means "Go Higher," but I couldn't find that one with a cursory Google Search.
At one point, Jean-Francois talked for at least an hour, maybe more -- we were walking, so no track of time-- about how the Compostela of Santiago trail figures into the history of Europe, how it was used for political purposes by Charlemagne and over several centuries to encourage the Spanish to rise up against the "Moors" (who were quite settled in) and to take the country back for themselves and Christendom. There are temptations to make parallels to modern times, and while we discussed how these comparisons can be made, we agreed that today's situation is more complicated. It is true, however, that France is in the midst of its own "immigration crisis," and like most peoples of the world, when the percentage of foreigners reaches a certain level, the locals turn ugly for awhile. Assimilation is always slower than public opinion and people do tend to hate change, especially cultural change.
Nowadays, there are aspects that make the pilgrimage more of a modern experience. The presence of the wonderful red-and-white trail blazes is one. We found that the first several days were particularly well-marked, with x marks for routes that should not be taken and funny little turn signs for those that were going in a different direction. They were so reassuring, so ever-present, so much of a touchstone for me. Every time you pass one, there is this great feeling of being on the right road. When we left the trail one night to go to a hostel that had been recommended (and where JF and I both probably acquired our bedbugs), I almost cried the next day when we came back to our red-and-white blazes. You wander off, but it's is so comforting to return to the path.
There are also services that will transport your luggage to your next hostel every day of your trip, if you choose. It's about $10 a day and of course you need reservations at your stops. We chose to do the trip without reservations, and we had no trouble finding rooms and beds in dormitories. On the one day we decided to try the system, it worked perfectly. You leave your bags with the money in an envelope on top and head out for the day. When you arrive at your destination, there they are. For people who can't manage to reduce their backpack weight to 10% of their body weight (we were told that is the optimum weight to carry for long distances), this is perfect. All you take with you is your daypack with water and lunch and camera. And raingear!...if there is rain in the forecast.
We had about four or five days of rain, biting cold, fog, and even hail. The trail was muddy, slippery and often treacherous. At Sauges (pronounced Sowg), one of our fellow diners bitched about how disappointed he was not to have been able to see the scenery because of the low clouds and rain. Nobody reprimanded him but I'm sure others, like me, thought that a pilgrimage is NOT about, or at least not primarily about the scenery.
So here is the routine: You rise in the morning fairly early (it is a vacation, so you might fantasize about sleeping in...but no...) for a traditional French breakfast downstairs in the communal dining hall: crusty baguettes, butter, jam (often homemade by the hosts) and coffee with milk. There were some variations-- our BEST hostel had four kinds of cake, juice, cereal, homemade yogurt along with the regular "petit dej." You tie your shoes, hoist your backpack and head for the trail. You might stop at a village for some lunch-- I once had a great mushroom omlette at one of the little roadside snack places, or you might break out the provisions you've brought. For us, that was often sausage and bread with some chocolate for dessert. You walk. You take pictures. You chat with the people zooming by you in the fast lane (we were always in the SLOW lane!) You take a bio break, a water break. You walk.
At some point in the afternoon, we usually got an idea of how far we could go that day, so we would sometimes call ahead to see if they still had room. Sometimes, we just showed up. We'd leave our shoes at the door, deposit our packs where they told us, and hang out waiting for dinner. Folks would filter in over the course of the early evening until about 7-8-ish, which would usually be the beginning of the communal evening meal. Dinner was alway at a long table with everyone around it-- no little individual tables for the French! And it was not a menu affair, either. You were served the stately and sumptious succession of French courses one after another-- maybe you'd start with a salad, maybe a soup, then you'd move to the protein (sausages, chunks of meat in sauce, lamb) and vegetable dishes, then invariably to the cheese course, and then dessert or fruit. Often at the end an herb tea. There was no choice, exactly, though a couple of places the cheese tray way so amazingly stocked with different cheeses that you HAD to choose, you couldn't taste them all.
The conversation around the dinner table was animated, friendly and warm. The French, unlike us'ns, have absolutely no trouble with an hour and a half evening meal, and no prob keeping up a running combination of jokes, teasings, passionate declarations, and general reflections on life, the universe and everything. The microphone bounces from one to another. Side conversations split off and then re-converge. I think it will be sort of sad when we get to Spain and we won't be able to have this cachophany of dinnertable talk as fluently as we do in French.
After dinner, everybody heads for the bed, also fairly early. Beds can be either in regular hotel-like rooms or in dormitories with up to 19 or 20 beds in a room. This is also one of those conventions that are not much in our American experience. When was the last time we slept in a room with 10 or more people? At Scout camp? Certainly not as adults. Nobody on the trail seems to find this a great inconvenience, though the next morning, the snorers are apt to be teased. Few people have real trouble sleeping with a snorer or two in the room. Which is great for us, since both JF and I snore, apparently.
We invariably begin to define just what a pilgrimage can be for a modern hiker. It is NOT a week's worth of just hiking. It isn't a vacation, either, not really. You do vacate your mind of the normal workday world, but you ain't sitting on a beach by any means. There is just no way to escape yourself, your running mental stories, your self-doubts and anxieties except by simply walking on and on. It is the combination of the long stretches of daily silence, solitude and physical effort with the evenings in happy conviviality around solid, homemade, garden-fresh food that makes so much of this pilgrimage a magical experience.
We came back with two great recipes from the trip. One is from the land where we walked and is called "l'Aligot." What I love about French food is that quite often they have the most commonplace recipes-- scalloped potatoes, for instance, around which they have created a whole mythology-- what its regional origins are, when it is supposed to be eaten, what particular ingredients are essential, what is supposed to go with it and what is so out of place it must be rejected. JF and I had one collossal argument once because I wanted to make Spoon Bread to go with the Cassoulet (a pork and beans dish). He was adamant that Spoon Bread does NOT go with Cassoulet. Aligot is a mashed potatoes and cheese dish, typically (I was told several times) a winter dish, served with fat sausages. As per usual, there is a whole THANG around this dish. Everyone knows it comes from the region around Aumont-Aubrac and that there is a particular cheese, the Thom of the region, that is used and another, Cantal, that can be substituted if you don't have access to the regional thom. In order to be successful, the mixture needs to be so well mixed that you can lift a spoon of it up a yard, and the string of the cheese doesn't break. There is a certain way to beat the potatoes and cheese that one of our local informants explained in detail.
.
The other recipe we tasted in Marseille and it is part of the "new" cuisine, where all these innovative chefs come up with wild new ideas of foods that are riffs on the traditional foods. It's a quiche, only there is a layer of MINT at the bottom, just on top of the pastry, and you use goat cheese in place of the usual cow's cheese. Of course, in France, the kind of cheese that is "usual" is still very specific-- I think there are two kinds that are supposed to be used in tandem, but this new recipe breaks from the tradition and the result is transcendant.
We stopped walking a couple of days "early," as we had projected a 10-day walk and ended up with only 8. One of the main reasons was that we want to start from our last place next year and so the place needed to have access from the outside world-- train or bus, so we can easily GET to our new starting point. But the defining reason was that I had fallen into a vat of bedbugs at our last stop and was covered with angry itching scary bites-- 27 bites that JF counted. They were hot, surrounded with a kind of yellowish ring, and one of them had a blister that seemed to be getting bigger. I had some cortisone anti-itch cream that I'd thrown in for mosquito bites that was incredibly handy for just taking the edge off the crazy-making itching. My discomfort was one thing, but more important was the feeling of responsibility to other travelers not to be bringing any of these unwanted little travelers along with me. You can never be SURE whether they are in your bag, in your clothes or just in the bed you vacated unless you can see them, and until they grow up to adulthood, they are damnably difficult to see.
While these nasty critters are a part of many international traveling experiences, they are NOT part of the American experience much (though JF tells me that he read a piece about their resurgence, especially on the East Coast.) We associate them with low-life, dirt, nastiness, and foreigners. Many folks I know, just with the POSSIBILITY of bedbugs, would cross off the trip from their options. So it's important, I think, to put them in their place-- not minor, but not the most important part of the trip.
I had all sorts of emotional reactions to my plight-- our plight, really. I didn't want to feel like a failure. I didn't want to feel as though I were a plague vector. I didn't want to abandon our plans. I wanted to get on the first plane home to America. I wanted to take the first bus/train out of town to Marseille (which is what we did end up doing.) JF had an amusing reaction. As we were pondering what to do, he said, "I'd like to go on, but only if you can do 20 kms today." We had never done that many. Our maximum distance was 16 k, roughly 10 miles, at the end of which one of us was totally exhausted. I was adamant that I would not be able to do that. So we decided to go back to Marseille, to hot water washeterias where we could stuff even our backpacks in the machine. After, I said, "Why did you come up with that 20 k thing? You knew I couldn't do that." "To allow you to save face," he replied. For some reason I have yet to fathom, projecting an impossible goal and declaring it such, so as to facilitate the decision to cut the trip short was supposed to sooth my misgivings about quitting. Go figure.
I have another post in the works for the WHOLE bedbug story, along with history, links to other sites, etc. But that is really the jist of it for our purposes here today. We came, we acquired, we quit...and did the laundry.
And meanwhile, we walked and walked and walked.