‘We learn a place and how to visualise spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place, and the scale of place, must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities’ (Gary Snyder, Blue Mountains Constantly Walking).
It’s the hottest day of the year in Hendaye (33 degrees), a prelude to a thunderstorm of Pyrenéean proportions. A good day then to start the GR10.
To the question of why I would want to walk 866km over the
Pyrenées there is the usual reason of finding out things about yourself you
would never discover sitting on a beach. Like how something happens when I pull
on a pair of trek pants, and I go from being compulsive about cleanliness to
becoming very relaxed about collecting increasing amounts of assorted dirt and stains. Those same pants wont get changed until they can
stand up by themselves – usually after a week or so. I also discovered that I
feel perhaps a touch too much schadenfreude when getting into the gîte before a
downpour and watching the late-comers arriving sodden and bedraggled.
There is experiencing the joy of having all worldly
possessions in a 50 litre backpack that I can get down to 12 kilos. So familiar
is it to me that I can find anything in it, in the dark, at three in the
morning (important when suddenly feeling the urge to pee and needing to find a
torch).
There is the simplicity of a routine (get up, dress,
breakfast, clean teeth, finish packing, walk, lunch, walk, find gîte, shower,
wash socks/undies/t-shirt, sit in bar with cup of tea or beer and greet others as they arrive, check route for next day, read/knit/chat, dinner, sleep), but a routine
that never tires as each start and end point and route in-between is a
different world to the one yesterday and the one that will be tomorrow.
There is the development of patience and managing unpredictability.
The guidebooks offer a basic steer but the trail changes through the season:
avalanches, flash floods, forestry and road works all demand their toll. Shops may not open, gîtes may be closed, the weather could do its
own thing. And then there are people. Despite possible signs of misanthropy it
is necessary to develop a certain degree of tolerance and respect. I may not
like hearing the surplus resonance of Daft Punk emanating from other walker’s
earphones but if it helps get them up the side of an escarpment then I can hum
along for the few moments it takes to pass.
There is the time and space to think profound thoughts or think nothing at all. The latter is incredibly easy to do most of the time, which produced occasional moments of anxiety when waking from a moving daydream and not being 100 percent certain of where I was. But the route in the initial stages is well marked and as long as I could see the familiar red and white ballisage painted on rocks, trees, signposts, telegraph poles, or barns every five minutes or so I figured I was on the right path.
If I was attempting a profound moment of thought it was
mostly about borders as the trail weaves in and out of France and Spain. Praise
be to the border dwellers who slip between languages and ignore frontiers. There
is a surreal moment on Day 1 when the path opens out into a tarmac’ed world of
restaurants and ventas (duty free shops). These are to the French what the
hypermarchés of Calais are to the British, and similarly they flock to them for
the cheaper booze and cosmetics.
And then there is just the joy of feeling the world pass at
the speed of walk. It takes five days before the Atlantic can no longer be seen. Small green
rolling hills and farmland become big hills become escarpments become
mountains. The route shifts from path to mule track, single track through
closed, humid valleys, blinking forests, corn and sheep fields, to long
traverses around mountain sides, prairies and ‘guess at which way to go’ paths,
way-finding over karst rocks, along ravines, across cols and open peaks above
the snow line.
Some mornings are a damp rise through the mist, upwards through clouds coming at me from both sides, hitting the wall of mountain and rising to meet at the crest, engulfing first distant walkers then finally me. Skirting crops and boulders, traversing heather, peat and fern raked tightly against legs and poles. And then downwards in knee crushing descents into chocolate box villages. There must be a general edict in Pays Basque that decrees that all houses must be whitewashed the night before I arrive, while the afternoon light turns the rest of the landscape shades of teal. But as I walk east, and the villages become more rocky and even more chocolate box, like Lescun, held within a circumference of peaks in the Aspe Valley, the more empty they seem to be.
This spatial distortion of walking is one of life’s great
mysteries, as is my ability to climb a pass with maximum inelegance; a pair of
awkward hands and feet entangled in a bit of cabling. Mostly I’m mystified by the
question of where the troupeaux of sheep come from. They cross the Pyrenees, grazing
with such concentration, their patou keeping
a watchful eye, knowing they have complete impunity and right of way in the pastoral
areas (they’re not so stupid). Even a fully constructed ski station that almost
generates a sense of violence when it appears from behind a hill seemingly in
the middle of nowhere, poses no obstacle. So much concrete and modernity,
D’Arrette (Day 10) had the look and feel of hell about it as diggers realigned
rocks for the next ski season. The sheep ignore it and on some hidden signal,
all walk back the way they came, disappearing into the folds of the mountain.
‘Tu traverse’?
‘Oui, je traverse’.
There is some chat about trail or gear or the weather, then a slow separation.
My watch was fixed with a new battery in St Jean but I only look at it at the start and finish of my day. As long as there is light, I can walk. Moving at this speed means watching clouds lift, rearrange themselves a bit and settle back over the peaks. From my picnic spot on the col above Etsaut I looked up and saw the contrail of a plane high over the mountain in front. At my feet the detail of the earth continued. A beetle wrestled with the tuna that fell out of my sandwich. The chunk was several times the size of the beetle but still it crawls over and under it, finding traction, rolling it, pulling bits off. I wondered what broad images those in the plane would have of the landscape passing underneath them, but even though I’m moving at the speed of walk my memories are also fleeting. I know I’ve been happy, humbled, delighted, silent, dirty, tired, hot, cold. I recall solid, crumbling, high, blue light. I recall the tin pan alley of animal bells, and the stink of sheep pens (shit, piss and lanolin). I want to burn them in, these memories: of mountains and forests and rivers and canyons and sounds and smells and long, slow traverses into storms and clouds and silence. But they are no more or less real, no more or less solid, than those from 10,000 metres and 1000km an hour. It can only be in that very present, on the ground, among the mountains, in my dirty trousers, with my cheese sandwich and a beetle, that the journey and the place I journey through makes sense.
