Home from vacation... (long)

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

And about to post my vacation story from last year. It's a long one. Wait for it all, or don't.
 
Going to the airport to pick up one boy, just off the phone with the other, the one we moved into his first apartment. The cares of last year seem so far away now, but I did promise that I'd write about it. And so I did.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Round. Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel…
 
 
One Tuesday evening in late April we sat on a park bench by the banks of an Amsterdam canal somewhere between the Rijksmuseum and The Heineken Experience, remarking on the fine line we were walking between one form of art and another. It was a chilly afternoon despite the sun, but we needed to get out of the Youth Hostel and make an attempt to distract ourselves from thoughts of volcanos, ash clouds and cancelled flights. We were tourist refugees, stranded like thousands of other erstwhile travelers across Europe.
 
My eye was caught by the sunlight on the water, fragmenting into countless points of light, ever shifting, ever changing. The scene brought to mind lyrics from a Bruce Cockburn song, “All the Diamonds”:
 
All the diamonds in this world
That mean anything to me
Are conjured up
By wind and sunlight
Sparkling on the sea.
 
The song continues: “I ran aground in a harbour town…”, and I laughed at how apt those words were for our situation, stranded as we were in this town of harbours.
 
As I reflect on our vacation, a great deal of it was tied for me in some way to music or song, and not just by association to a particular location. Not moments before measuring my time by sun glints on the water I had been singing a tune by Joni Mitchell, the words reflecting my desire to be home: “I wish I had a river I could skate away on”. Would that the canals had frozen over and that we could have laced skates for that journey across the sea.
 
But I start my story at its end. Less than a day afterwards we were on our way home, leaving all songs behind at the security checkpoint as dangerous and unwelcome items to carry on board. If I am to tell this story I think I should start it with the proper beginning, even though I know that this will in no way be a linear narrative of our journey.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning…
 
The beginning. We were caught in the mad rush to get “there”, whether “there” was the airport or the gate or our seats on the plane or train, or the hostel. The rush was akin to discordant notes that catch your attention for the briefest of moments before the tumult of the music seizes you again in its swirling dervish ride. 
 
In removing a backpack at an airport my hearing aid was knocked loose and cracked on the airport floor – It still worked – we moved on.
 
Schiphol airport in The Netherlands, a place with perhaps more English than O’Hare. “This IS Holland, right?” The relief I felt in knowing that I didn’t have to translate in order to figure out where we were heading was tempered by a nagging doubt as to whether an entire nation had sold its culture down the canal. People mover conveyor belts cheerfully chirped their warnings “Mind your step!” in perfectly accented Brit-speak, and the firm but friendly voice reminding all to watch their luggage at all times sounded like he might have just left the surfing beaches of California. Welcome to the new Europe, foreign in its familiarity.
 
It was comforting in some respects to arrive in Paris and find its familiar foreignness, the persistence of French. There is no mistaking Charles De Gaulle airport as anything but a Gallic port of call… And there, the inevitable, having to deal with a missing piece of baggage, as Natalie’s backpack had decided to stay on the tarmac at Schiphol. There was none of the famous stereotypical French indifference though, we were treated with courtesy and efficiency and left with the promise that the bag would track us down in the south of France and might even get there before we did. 
 
Missing baggage, frayed nerves, temporal dissonance, these are the things one deals with in order to get from “here” to “there”, they don’t generally count as part of the vacation, really, they are steps to be endured in order to get to the enjoyment.. And yet we were able to almost relax on our high-speed train trip from Paris to the south. 
 
The train does fly at an incredible speed, but it isn’t hidden behind trees and embankments, and we were afforded some rather beautiful vistas of farm fields and ancient villages, castles standing guard on hills, and the Alps in the distance lining the horizon much like our beloved Rockies frame the limits of our little world at home.
 
Lyon was another matter. A fairly modern city, fairly non-descript, a typical European mix of old and new spattered with graffiti and served up to train travelers in increasingly narrow glimpses of the margins of the community, the things seldom seen from the other side of the embankments, bridges or tunnels.. Trains are trains the world over, and offer a perspective that can either distort the reality of a city or bring it into sharp focus. Unfortunately the speed of the train did not support much contemplation of what we saw flickering past us. What could have been a shanty town or perhaps an ill-kept collection of garden sheds on the edge of a park passed by in the time that perhaps some in Lyon spend worrying about those on the margins.
 
The glimpse of the shanty town was so unexpected, juxtaposed between high end apartment buildings and city parks jarred my construct of what France should be. This was to become a common theme on our journeys, the strange co-mingling of the fairy tale, the romantic, the real, the old and not-so old, the ugly and the beautiful, the hidden past and the jarring present. I found myself being confronted with layers of meaning and possibility, and challenged to examine my own pre-suppositions of France, of history, of meaning.
 
The shanty towns were indeed real, and we saw several of them, both open to the eyes of the world and hidden from view in the most unexpected of places, just beyond the sea shore.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Voyez
Près des étangs
Ces grands roseaux mouillés
Voyez
Ces oiseaux blancs
Et ces maisons rouillées
 
 La mer…
 
You know the tune if not the words. Think Bobby Darrin and “Beyond the Sea”, and you’ll have one interpretation. The original, in French is by Charles Trenet and these words are from one of the later verses in his sung poem.
 
 See
 Close by the tidal ponds
 These tall wet rushes
 See
 These white birds
 And the rust coloured houses…
 
 The sea…
 
The sea. Our vacation truly began there by the beautiful Mediterranean. But amid the tall rushes and cane breaks were tucked away hobbit homes of cardboard and corrugated iron. Amongst the marshes lived people in stark destitution, just over the hill from the opulence of the coastal resorts and around the bend from French suburbia.
 
But if abject poverty was an unexpected presence, so too was the beauty of the city of Montpellier. Home to 380,000 residents, a good fifth of who are students at the University, the oldest in France, Montpellier was for us a primer in the life and culture of Languedoc. It is home to a bustling and thriving old city whose narrow lanes are a confusing maze of bars and shops, homes, schools and student night-life. Montpelier also is a city of large plazas and parks where the theatre of daily city life can be enjoyed, medieval architecture mixed with fin-de-siècle confections. Poor districts set beside an amazing vast new section of town in which the principles of ancient architecture have been used to turn modern governmental buildings and office complexes into livable spaces, works of art that give a nod to the past and a hopeful eye to the future. Montpellier believes in public transportation, tramways, busses, rental bikes, pedestrian walkways and bike paths, a city teeming with people and businesses and yet clearly infused with that Gallic sense that one works to live and not vice-versa.
 
We stayed at a youth hostel for a couple of days, enough for us to know that it wasn’t nearly enough. We spent Good Friday on bicycle traveling to the coast and exploring the contrasts of suburbia, industrial canals, kitschy resort towns and vast stretches of flamingo-strewn marsh and wind-swept dunes. Our destination was one of the oldest churches in Catholicism outside of Italy in Maguelone, a cathedral that was abandoned when war and piracy forced believers to flee to the safety of higher ground. It was a very tranquil setting, but as one of my sons remarked we started off this vacation much as we had left our last one in France, visiting ruins and ancient buildings. We’d called that last trip to France our “Rock Tour” because, as he pointed out, we visited piles of rock. We agreed that we were on another such tour, but that perhaps this one might have more of a nuance to it. Sure enough, we headed for the beach, the Mediterranean, and spent some time with rocks, picking them up and looking for interesting ones, and watching our sons join in that activity that boys the world over seem to enjoy, pitching rocks into the ocean looking for just the right “Splonk” sound. Rock and la mer, indeed.
 
The territory we had decided to visit is roughly rectangular, stretching from the east on the Mediterranean coast, south to the Spanish border, west to Andorra and north through the Pyrenean foothills to Foix and Carcassonne, a land that has been peopled since pre-history, a land that has had and still possesses many names. Pays des Cathars, Catalan, Langued’oc, it is terrain that has been fought over likely for as long as it has been peopled. The spiritual heart of the Catalan people lies not in Spain but in France, the Pic du Canigou, a mountain massif that dominates the horizon from the Mediterranean coast through to the heights of Andorra and is the sacred ground for a people who have ignored the border between France and Spain for centuries.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Like a circle in a spiral… like a wheel within a wheel…
 
Sacred or not, the land has been altered by human toil. At L’Oppidum D’Enserune, a hill fort overlooking fertile valleys near Béziers, the artifice of human engineering throughout a wide swath of history is plain. First, a circle in a spiral, in the valley of Montady where once there had been a fetid swamp, medieval engineers drilled a tunnel through a hill and into the depths of the swamp, draining it and allowing the land to be apportioned in great slices radiating out from the hub of the drain. This feature is visible from space, an oddity that attracts more attention than the hill fort itself which dates from pre-history through to Roman times. The Romans occupied the fort to guard their proud Via Domitia, traces of which are still visible, as is the broad ribbon of the Canal du Midi, another engineering marvel which is now a route for pleasure craft. On the hills climbing to the Pyrenees are windmills and radar towers
 
While the bones of past civilizations and the relics of other cultures are easy to encounter, this is a land that is alive in the here and now, not some museum set piece or a Disneyland for those with a passion for history, archaeology or New Age mysticism. Graffiti exhort people to speak Catalan and remind all comers that this is Catalan country. “Yobs!” one of our hosts sniffed, “just bored kids with nothing to do but stir up trouble.” There’s the sense that this is just the latest in the ancient history of this land of stirred up trouble. It is and always has been a crossroads from then end of the last ice age, through pre-historic migrations, Roman roads and sea-faring trade, religious wars and nation-building, trails for pilgrims bound for Santiago, a toe-hold for refugees. 
 
The land is large enough to hold many languages, French and Occitan as well as the Catalan that the “Yobs” would have everyone speak. It is a land of stories, most forgotten, some lying just around a corner almost as if they were in wait. 
 
We stayed in youth hostels for the most part, but on occasion we visited B&B’s, and one of them was at the heart of Olette, what seemed to us to be an abandoned and shuttered village in the dark Tech river valley of the Pyrenean foothills. In the light of the morning the village came to life, shutters opened and the square became a market. 
Our hosts laughingly suggested that we not take anything at face value, a lesson we learned again and again on our travels. 
 The terrors of war and revolution have made it almost impossible to trace title to any piece of land in France, but through luck our hosts know some of the history of their B&B. They bought it as a faded and dying hotel, itself a renovation of the guest house of a convent which had at first been the farm hand’s house built by the spring at the center of town. “And of course there’s the Roman foundations.” Of course. We had to see those and we were led on a tour of the bones of the building from the windy rafters where the previous owner’s kids had slept, though to the basement and the spring and, true to his word, the owner showed us the roman arch that had once framed the door to the original building. And if the Romans had lived there, attracted no doubt to the spring at the heart of the town, who else had been there earlier? 
 
Our ancestors considered springs to be sacred, liminal spaces where this world of the living is caressed by the unseen. No wonder that the church and the convent had been built so close to the waters. The convent is truly abandoned, the nuns just up and left one day in the 60’s, leaving the remains of their last meal sitting on the tables, beds unmade and weaving still on the great broad loom in the basement. Our host covets that loom, but the mayor of the town wants things left as they are: “It’s a part of our heritage; I can’t go and sell it piece by piece.” And so it sits as it has for 45 years, its shuttles still, waiting for an expert’s hands. Nothing moves fast here, nothing really has to, where histories are not measured in mere decades but in spirals of ages. I did find it strange that such a non-descript bit of heritage as a loom would hold such sway in a land where Roman basements and other such secrets of the past are given a Gallic shrug.
 
There is no tidy division between the old and the new, the heritage piece and the inherited, the preserved and the used. It is a land where a building nearly a thousand years old can appear to be in better shape than a home built after the Second World War. This isn’t just a French phenomenon; examples can be seen throughout Europe and the Middle East. We North American visitors, used to quaint “old town” neighbourhoods rarely older than a couple of hundred years can be overwhelmed by the abundance of the ancient. Here a pre-historic standing stone, there a roman road, a Cathar castle, an Aragonian sea fort, a Frankish tower. The peoples of this region have made a pact with their inheritance, unless told otherwise they will reuse and recycle what they have been given by generations past.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

If an abbey is ruined by the Revolution, let’s a winery of it! If Alfred Nobel’s dynamite works are abandoned, turn the buildings into ateliers and the industrial yards into gardens. If a ruined Frankish watch tower is on your land and you need a barn, allezy-y!
 
In our Western parlance the words “reuse” and “recycle” are accompanied by a third “r”, “reduce”, and perhaps a reduction of sorts is at play in the French psyche. Reduction can mean a simplification or a focus on the essential element in an equation, to separate something into orderly components. The French reduction of history seems to take for granted that there is much beauty here in the bones of our civilization, but there has been much wickedness and sadness as well. 
 
On the sea wall of the fortress of Collioure one can look out onto the lovely palm-lined bay and across at the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here was one of the busiest sea ports of the Medieval Mediterranean, Rousillon’s window on the world, and a center of trade and culture. And yet it was from here that the last Jews were expelled in the 13th century on the heels of the plague. 
 
At Montsegur there is a lovely field beneath the ruined fortress, a picnicker’s delight with a view of the mountains, a place to linger and laze in the warmth of the sun. It is a place where nearly 300 Cathars were burned at the stake. 
 
At Vallemagne Abbey, where vineyards have been tended since the days of Rome, a fine wine is served, aged in the cellars that used to be the chapels of the abbey church. The Revolution ended the monastery, but such a place of peace had known worse conflict. During the “Religious Wars” of the Reformation the abbot abandoned his flock, left and returned at the head of an army and butchered all of his former brothers. The wine does run red here.
 
The people of this land can separate these items, can hold them and examine them and in some way compartmentalize them, acknowledging some, ignoring others. Such is life, such is our history, and such is the human condition. But to this musician on his travels it was at times hard to discern a coherent melody above the cacophony of the voices of the past. 
 As we climbed to the summit of yet another castle crag we were reminded of the history of the place from pre-history through Rome, from Frankish chieftains to Aragonian kings, from Cathar refugees through Spanish occupations. Every few steps another couple hundred years of history, another layer deposit of the remains of strife. At the summit though – silence. But that’s not quite true, each summit has wind and stone and grass and the music they make is what endures. Somehow the music of the wind is the only appropriate offering on these heights.
 
At times on our Rock Tour it seemed as if the stones were thirsty for music. At Fontfroide Abbey, another monastery forcefully closed during the Revolution, and now yet another modern winery, we toured the restored abbey church. Stark in its simplicity, unadorned stone with minimalist religious adornment, it provided us with a temptation to sing, and amazed us with the richness of the echoing reply. We stayed for a concert of Gregorian chant, and it seemed to me that the very walls of the church were straining to catch the sound before reflecting it back to us in chords, overtones and undertones. Were these abbeys built for the chants, or were the chants developed because of the sound that these walls shaped? 
 
We toured quite a few abbeys, cathedrals and simple churches on our travels and never failed to try out the acoustics. Some churches were restored and as bare as Fontfroide, others were cluttered with the relics and symbols of religious piety of the past 10 centuries. I remarked to one custodian that I tended to appreciate the simplicity of the modern restorations. He chastised me for appreciating a “modern romantic” view of the past and reminded me that each era had a contribution that one had to acknowledge. I certainly don’t have a modern romantic view of the past, just a sense of the heaviness of the ages as the patina of the years has dimmed the light that used to live in these buildings. One particular curator seemed to agree. A little card describing the contents of a chapel listed as a footnote: “Plaster statues dating from the 17th century. Common. Of little value.” Not all that glitters is gold, not all that is old is dazzling. Beneath the clutter, underneath the at-times tawdry renovations of the ages, the bare bones might show through. Here and there were bits of the original frescos, arches and windows that hadn’t been closed up or plastered over. The French might be able to “reduce” and acknowledge all of the elements, but that doesn’t mean that all elements have to be appreciated.
 
The song we chose to sing in our impromptu tests of the reflexes of these tired buildings was something incongruous: “Es Ist Ein Ros’ Entsprungen” by Michael Praetorius, better known perhaps to some by its English name, “Lo How A Rose”. A Christmas Carol in springtime Languedoc! And whether it was motivated by a modern romantic view or not, at times words seemed an intrusion and all that seemed appropriate was a shapeless note, left to escape in a vain attempt to fill the spaces between the stones, to fill the spaces between the silences. We were rewarded from time to time with replies in echoes and undertones and overtones, chords and the sense that in their echoing reply the rocks and stones recalled what they had been set there for.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own… Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone…
 
It wasn’t a modern romantic view that impelled us into the cave system at Niaux, yet another venue on our Rock Tour. My interest in seeing pre-historic paintings was tempered with a newly re-discovered fear, not of the dark, but of being followed in tunnels. Twice on our meanders we had found ourselves climbing enclosed staircases to reach fortifications. At Prats-de-Mollo the stair was lit by windows cut into the hill side at regular intervals. At Villerouge where the stair climbs from the walled city to a fort overlooking three valleys, the stair over 800 steps in length, was totally enclosed. I found myself regularly looking over my shoulder on long pitches with the certain knowledge that we were being followed. A fear is not chased away with the knowledge that it is not only irrational but laughably so. I could smile at it and still be consumed with the compulsion to creep back at every turn to check. For the record, Gollum never showed up.
 
Niaux is a cavern system that extends for kilometers into the mountains high above the village of the same name, not far from the small city of Tarascon. A new entrance has been excavated in what had once been the front porch of the cave system, a tunnel with steel doors locked at either end. There are no signs that this system was continuously inhabited, rather it may have been a way point for nomadic hunter/gatherers at the end of the last ice age. We were eight visitors, including the guide, all equipped with bright flashlights and suitably reminded not to touch anything. Our trek was a long one, following a passage that remained for the most part narrow enough to discern both walls, although at times it widened appreciably or narrowed into tight crannies that forced us to bend or contort for a few metres. I was not beset with any thought that we were being followed, but did remark on the fact that despite our powerful flashlights we hardly pushed the dark back more than a few metres, and that seemed begrudgingly granted. This was the home of a darkness that has never been chased by the light of the sun. 
 
Here and there were signs that others had passed, graffiti from explorers in the 17th century, names and dates of past travelers for whom this had been more than a morning’s outing. We stopped from time to time to look at these sign posts, and reflect on the human need to be known. As we continued our journey into the heart of the mountain I wondered at how our most ancient of ancestors could have made the journey inwards with simple tallow torches to brush aside the dark with no obvious signs to guide them onwards.
 
We were asked to linger by a non- descript spur of the wall. There our guide pointed to some faint scratches that we would have passed by without notice: a circle with a line through it. Its meaning isn’t clear, but it is obviously a symbol, a sign, an abstract representation that held importance for someone. Around the spur there are more, painted onto the rock, along with other symbols, dashes and dots. The guide told us that these date from the Magdalenian period, some 12 to 15 thousand years ago and are seen throughout caverns visited by that particular culture. The cleft circle or claviform symbol and its companions indicate that whoever had painted them there possessed ability for abstract thought, for using symbols as representations beyond just the literal. 
 
It is said that Australian aborigines can read the land, making sense out of what seems to be a random landscape to orient them. Perhaps it was the same for our ancestors, and perhaps there are symbols and signs locked in the stone that we cannot read or understand. What signs and symbols do we take for granted that will be meaningless to others a few centuries hence, let alone millennia?
 
We eventually came to a vast cavern, a “Carrefour” or crossroads from which several passages branch away. I found it dizzying and disorienting, and after a few steps I was unsure of which passage was the one we had came from. We pressed on uphill into a grotto that offered no indication of its special contents. We arrived at a banister and were asked to extinguish our flashlights and to leave them in a pile to protect the drawings from light. Our guide led us on with a special filtered LED lamp and would ask us from time to time to stop and wait while she ducked beneath the banister. There were moments when all would be dark and I felt adrift, but then the light would shine on a portion of the wall and I would be anchored again.
 
Photographs do not do any justice to these drawings. For one they cannot illustrate how the artists made use of the contours of the rock to create their art. Photographs also cannot convey the context, the depth of the dark in which these paintings are buried, the stillness. The guide would reveal and describe each set of drawings to us, and then lead us to the next station; the light would go out for a moment and then broaden to reveal the wonder of a new grouping. 
 
Our ancestors came here repeatedly, making the long journey by guttering torch light, to paint bison, horses, ibex, deer. The paintings are all in perspective, all in fine detail, but for a purpose we cannot really divine. Was it for prayer, was it for celebration, was it some shamanistic ritual? How many times did they make this trip, and did they come like us to view the drawings?
 
As we completed our circuit of the cavern our guide beckoned us to the middle of the cave. “We may not know why they painted, but we know why they painted here, why they chose THIS place in particular. I don’t do this with larger groups, but I would like you to trust me here. Look up.” She shone her light and illuminated the walls climbing into a void. “You can’t see the top, and our ancestors couldn’t either. It is higher than a cathedral. I am going to turn the light off, and I’d ask if one of you would sing…” I translated her request for Natalie and as the light went out she said, “I don’t know what to sing…” but sing she did. One note then two then many more, wordless, rising out of the depths of the dark to be caught by the surprised walls of the cavern. High overhead the notes floated and returned as echoes, overtones, undertones, chords. Our ancestors had chosen this place because it was and remains an acoustic wonder, a place of magic. We stood for a moment in the echoing silent dark, and then started our long journey back to the daylight.
 
We brought up the rear, Natalie and I, singing our hearts out, but nowhere were we joined by a choir as we had been in that grotto. At one point Nicolas dropped back and asked me to extinguish my light, to feel again the pressure of the darkness, but it wasn’t a fearsome moment for me. The words of the hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing” filled the spaces in my heart:
 
Through all the tumult and the strife 
I hear it's music ringing, 
It sounds an echo in my soul. 
How can I keep from singing? 
While though the tempest loudly roars, 
I hear the truth, it liveth. 
And though the darkness 'round me close, 
Songs in the night it giveth.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

We almost hadn’t made it to the caves, we’d missed our first booked tour due to a mishap that resulted in my needing stitches in my right hand. We’d been ascending the Tech river valley, traversing the various passes taken by Charlemagne into Andorra, gazing down from snow blanketed peaks into that mountain domain, and wending our way through deep valleys and Spa towns to reach ancient Tarascon where we thought we’d booked a hostel room for the night. It turns out that there is more than one Tarascon in France, which set us to grumbling until we realized that France is not alone in its paucity of names, Sydney Nova Scotia and Sydney BC come to mind as Canadian examples.
 
The accident and the mix-up added to the spice of the journey, as did French labour disputes. We traveled during a rail strike, something that we mostly ignored on our initial journey to the south, but which really played havoc with our plans for the return journey. Strikes form part and parcel of French civil society, as French seem to view public demonstrations as a responsibility of citizenry in their democracy. While we were in the south of France we missed demonstrations in support of cheese farmers, one demonstration against the release of bears into the Pyrenees, protests against government austerity measures, Angry motorcyclists protested against new planned laws restricting their ability to scare the willies out of foreign drivers by lane splitting and weaving in and out of traffic. There was also one that I am sorry I missed, angry young women clad in bikinis and burqa veils protested the new French anti-burqa laws. No, I am not making this up.
 
We passed through the hamlet of Joncet which has declared war on France. The citizens are alternately up in arms at the traffic of the regional highway that passes through town, want a bypass, or are horrified that the bypass will destroy a species of butterfly and a species of lizard. They have blacked out all route signs and have renamed their town alternately the Grand Duchy or Butterflies and Lizards. No, I am not making this up.
 
Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
 
The words and melody of La Marseillaise paid me an earworm visit every day. I’d catch myself striking up a verse or two when confronted with yet another monument to Charles de Gaulle, or when angered by the inconvenience of some closure due to “action publique”, sympathy strikes for some cause or another…
 
Arise children of the fatherland 
The day of glory has arrived 
Against us tyranny's 
Bloody standard is raised 
Listen to the sound in the fields 
The howling of fearsome soldiers 
They are coming into our midst 
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts!
 
The French are nothing if not dramatic. For every monument to de Gaulle and his being the savior of the French, there are countless other small plaques, name plates, road signs that attest to the scars that the French still bear over what happened in World War 2. 
In Olette there is a public school named in honour of Leon Blum, the first Jew and first socialist ever elected Prime Minister of France. Born in the region, he was an object both of public adulation and hatred in the days before the war. He survived Buchenwald and Dachau, and was briefly PM after the war. 
 
You will also find mention of Jean Moulin, a man from Beziers who led a resistance cell and who was killed by Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon”. 
 
Aux armes, citoyens!
 
To arms citizens!
Form your battalions March! March! Let impure blood Water our furrows!
 
In the sleepy market town of Pézenas, once the seat of the governors of Languedoc there is preserved much of the old town center which dates back to the 11th century and has ruins from Pre-Roman fortifications at the top of the hill. There is a plaque commemorating the medieval Jewish ghetto, one commenting on the Templars, another on the Hospitalers of St. John who succeeded them. Narrow streets leading from one to another of over 100 buildings of historic merit. It was there that I was reminded yet again that too much blood, impure or otherwise had been spilled on French soil.
 
At the Templar’s building across from the medieval church I was admiring an ancient door when my son approached me with an elderly gentleman at his elbow. “He wants to say something about the door…” And so began a story, not of the blood shed by ancient Templars, but of something far more recent.
 
“That door saved a young man’s life you know. He shouldn’t have been out, he was running for cover and the Germans fired on him, but he wasn’t behind that door, no, the stairs they go to the right and he was saved. See the bullet holes? The Germans fired from that alley by the church. Bam! Bam! Bam! See? True story. He wasn’t supposed to be out, but he was caught. That door saved his life, it did.”
 
I asked him if he knew the boy, wanting to encourage more from him and wondering if he was perhaps speaking in the third person. He paused. “I would say so, yes. Yes. I knew that boy once a long time ago.” He winked at me. “He hid just on the other side of that wall, right there. True story.”
 
We chatted for a while, and we asked about the resistance and the end of the war. “We let them go, you know, the Nazis. I was just a boy mind you, but we let them go. Told them that we’d turn the other way and not bother them if they just left. Some of the lads were upset at that, but who needed more blood?” He wandered off down the alley, “They just up and left…” 
 
Allons enfants, le jour de gloire est arrivé! 
 
Above the cacophony of voices clamouring to tell their true stories, the melody does persist. There are reasons why some stories are left untold, hidden behind guardian doors.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

Pictures hanging in a hallway… And a fragment of this song… Half remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?
 
There’s a museum in the fortress of the city of Carcasonne. Among other things it contains the flotsam and jetsam of the ages. Here a room of medieval tombstones collected from the region, there a collection of statuary saved from the ravages of some war or another. It is odd seeing them out of context, penned like exotic animals in some stone zoo. 
 
In a sense Carcasonne is both the zoo and the exhibit. It is a fairy-tale city of castles and towers and walls enclosing a fantasy world populated by tourists. The walls of the city date from before the Romans built their first towers, and the city grew and changed with the tidal drift of civilizations. It was fated for abandonment and ruin in the 19th century but for the enthusiastic efforts of the mayor and antiquary of the town who commissioned the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to restore the walls and towers. He got it mostly right, the pitched towers are out of place, from a land where it snows, but they add a romantic touch, one that is most certainly exploited in the search for tourists and their money.
 
We stayed at a hostel in the center of the old town and witnessed how the place transformed with the sun from a sleepy enclave of less than 200 people to a mad bazaar of tourists, school kids and Kate Moss (“Labyrinth”) besotted New Age geeks and/or popular history buffs.
 
Despite its popularization in fantasy and the hucksterism that exploits the history of the place, the true stories themselves remain mostly unscathed, awaiting visitors who are searching for more than the gate that Kevin Costner rode out of in Robin Hood.
 
Carcasonne fell to the crusaders, but unlike Béziers its citizens and refugees were not slaughtered but left to leave naked. It was from here that the 20 year war against the Cathars was led; it was from here that St. Dominic preached, and here that the first traces of the Inquisition can be discerned. The fairy tale towers and walls are a pretty wrapper for a horrid tale.
 
Down below in the lower city, itself once walled and buttressed the heritage buildings haven’t been as lovingly preserved. A 13th century church stands locked up, no sign to indicate that it is ever used, stone and mortar crumbling. I asked a passer-by if the church has been closed. “No, no, there’s still Mass on Sunday, they can’t afford to have someone inside all the time to make sure that things aren’t stolen by the tourists.” Ouch. Elsewhere are signs warning about certain prosecution for people who insist on conducting impromptu archeological digs. This isn’t just a phenomenon in Carcasonne, apparently all of the Cathar sites are targets for people hunting for the mythical Holy Grail and the treasure of the Templars or Cathars or countless other Dan Brown inspired secret gold. The secret gold of Carcasonne is much more mundane than that, it is found in sleepy pathways by the Canal du Midi, in squares lined with cafés and restaurants, in beautiful bridges crossing the river Aude. 
 
I will confess to one particular illicit expedition of discovery in Carcasonne’s lower town. I found a McDonald’s and entered to determine if, in fact, Cheeseburgers are known as “Royales” and whether beer and wine are served. Considering that I haven’t been to a McD’s in eons this was a true adventure. So as not to ruin a potential discovery for my readers I will refrain on reporting my findings.
 
It can be quite a challenge for vegetarians to find much variety of menu items in France. In fact in some locations, Carcasonne particularly, there seems to be a perverse reversal of an inverse square law. The more restaurants that are present the less choice overall that there is. Of what appears to be over 700 restaurants in the walled city, 695 serve Cassoulet in each and every one of its many (well, okay three) variations. That is not to say that there aren’t interesting places to eat, there are wonderful gastronomic discoveries to be made, it is just that these discoveries take some leg work. There are gallettes prepared by Breton chefs who migrated south for warmer climes. There are pastas, of course, the universal ubiquitous comfort food, and bien sur there are salads and more varieties of cheese than one could ever imagine existing in such a small corner of the world.
 
Here there are terroirs for grapes and wine where the distance of a kilometer can make a world of difference in the subtleties of taste for a varietal. I think that the same can be said for the cheese. True, there are always the “big names”, even Cheddars to be had, but we were consistently surprised by the wonderful flavours to be found sampling cheeses “from just up the valley”. 
 
The French have one advantage over most of North America, despite the incursion of the supermarket there are still the stalwart redoubts of true slow food, the boulangeries, the patisseries, the fromageries, and in the larger towns the daily markets that have formed part of the fabric of life here for millennia.
 
“Les Halles”, the market of Sête was a revelation. An indoor market open daily until noon where just about every sort of produce from seafood to horse meat, vegetables and fruit, cheeses and condiments are available. Here and at countless other markets like it across France you can feel the rhythm of daily life here and begin to perhaps appreciate the difference between it and our own.
 
Buying local, buying just what you need for the day turns a commercial transaction into a daily conversation. The boys witnessed an older man asking a baker for a baguette, and the baker cut him half of another loaf as well saying “Your wife will be wanting this too.” The older man shrugged and laughed his goodbyes. In Tarascon I waited patiently behind an older woman for my turn at the market stall of a cheese vendor. “I’ll have some of what you sold me last time, it was good.” 
“Was it this one?” the vendor asked, slicing a piece for her.
“No, but that one’s tasty.”
The sampling contined, a journey through most of his wares until in a “Eureka!” moment the woman declared “That’s it! That’s the one! Can you remember that for me?” 
“But of course madame!” The vendor turned and winked at me and I realized that this exchange was a game of sorts and a regular one between them.
 
I ended up purchasing the same cheese from the vendor and at first could not reconcile the woman’s praises with the sharp tingling the cheese induced on my tongue and palate. It was only when we sipped some wine while sampling the cheese that the full meaning and flavour of both the wine and the cheese were conveyed. This Epiphany occurred at some trail head, guzzling wine from a travel mug and ripping hunks of cheese with our fingers from a paper-wrapped wedge. We may not be gourmets, but I doubt that I will ever view the anemic North American Brie and Bubbly “Wine and Cheese” affairs as anything but a pale imitation of the possible. There is something that is fundamentally good for the spirit in being able to buy fresh food from a market and then enjoy it in an impromptu picnic in the sun – even if it is in a car park.

Grizzly · May 2, 2011

<pre>
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes on its face… 
</pre>
 
I mentioned Sête earlier, it is a sea port which despite its gritty working harbour town feel held some intriguing and at times incomprehensible dimensions. It is a city of canals, not surprising since much of Languedoc and Rousillon is riddled with waterways. Crossing one canal we witnessed a group of sourpusses in a large dory out for a row and pulling hard. We weren’t sure where they were bound to or from, but they seemed to be in an awful hurry. 
 
We chose to travel on our own schedule, to visit our own choice of locations, to stay in hostels and gites (B&B’s) to try and experience a bit of the real Languedoc, whatever that is, unmitigated by the tour bus phenomenon. But it remained clear to us that there were some things that we could never really understand or appreciate unless, or perhaps even were we to live in France for an extended period of time. It was enough that we fell in love, intrigued by the charms and quirks of this beautiful land, haunted by its history, beguiled by the promise of its future.
 
Time was just something that we did not have enough of. We hastened our departure from Carcasonne in order to ensure that we got the proper train. We made a local train to Montpellier and snatched the last high speed train to Paris, arriving late at night, almost too tired to sleep. 
 
We awoke to a surreal scene – an empty Charles de Gaulle with departures boards flashing red. 
 
“Qu’est ce qui se passe?” I asked a Gendarme what is happening. 
“C’est le volcan Monsieur!” Volcano? France has a volcano? He looked at my puzzlement with stereotypical Parisian disdain. “En Island!” Iceland.
 
And so it began, we had fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole into a surreal world of lineups in Airports and Pay telephones. 
 
We grew accustomed to the kindness of strangers, to jumping on trains without tickets, and never being asked to pay (!), to caging nights in 5 star hotels while looking out for the last hostel spot open in Amsterdam. IBM opened its doors to me and gave me an office so that I could stay connected and find a flight home. Worry, fear, absurd plans from work(Train to Turkey, plane to Australia, then home…). A son who was to compete in the National debate tournament and had to be home by Thursday in order to get there. Nerves on edge, money running out, hotels and hostels filling up.
 We had fallen down that rabbit hole, the other end of which found us sitting on the bank of a canal in Amsterdam, waiting for the ocean to freeze over so that we could skate home.
 
<pre>
When you knew that it was over, were you suddenly aware…
</pre>
 
And so we end where we began. With family, with the realization that we live in a world that is battered and abused and lovely, with the understanding that technology can both shrink our world and that its absence can make it enormous again.
 
A year later I am left with the echoes from a deep cavern and the lament of the wind in the grasses in hilltop ruins. I recall the light glancing off ancient walls and pavement and glinting at me from canals and the ocean.
 
And in the end, the hope that some day we can return.

Mrtambalynman · May 3, 2011

Hi Grizz. Welcome back.

Buxtehude · May 5, 2011

Floridaboiler · May 5, 2011

That story is going to take a few days to read!
 
Cool!

Grizzly · May 7, 2011

Tamb: Thanks. Not great to be back.
Bux: Nice song.
FB: Took a while to write. Ended it early with stuff left to write about. Needs editing.

Home from vacation... (long)

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