Life at the speed of walk

‘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.

There is the joy of feeling like the only person on the mountain that day and the silence that comes with it: so quiet that it is possible to hear the sound of the wind over vulture wings as they ride the thermals close overhead. Other days, however, were surprisingly loud as thousands of bells attached to sheep, goats, horses and cattle on high pastures simultaneously rang out and rebounded off canyon walls. The rivers roared as their blood was up after a night’s storm. The vultures screeched in Jurassic chorus as they stood possessively over a carcass. There is the constant white noise of invisible crickets, the tapping of my poles and the crunch of my boots on stony ground. The singing from a funeral in a 12^th century church mixed with the wind that became increasingly cold as days passed, but under a still hot sun making for a hazy, late summer reverie.

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.

After some time I can’t recall details about scenery. I just go up and down, up and down again. It gets hot, cool, light and shade. By Day 8 the High Pyrenées are my constant companions, with Pic d’Anie appearing first as a tip of a peak on the horizon, and over time becoming a monolith directly in front. The thing with mountains is that looking at them straight on is daunting. It’s like ‘how the feck am I going to get up that’. But once you start and get into them you don’t see the whole, the giant. You just see the steps directly in front. And eventually, one after the other, you get up and over.

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.

Getting used to the speed of walk is most noticeable when contrasted with other forms of transport that occasionally overtake: mountain bikes and assorted vehicles speed past near larger villages and towns. Walking on the other hand ensures that the random encounter cannot be avoided. The approach takes time, followed by a ‘bonjour’ and the chance for conversational French.

‘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.