Going South, Part II: Sweet Home, Alabama

Birmingham, Tuesday 21 June, 2022

Not for the USA a high-speed rail network with punctuality. 90 minutes late departing Atlanta, I take this to be part of the country’s glorious exceptionalism: trains will run slow and behind schedule. We trundle through Georgia then Alabama, sitting in icy AC while outside climate change rushes past in a heat wave hitting 40 degrees. Cleaved between the jagged edges of forested ravines and peri-urban industrial parks, the slowness reveals frontier style main streets of small town southern America; grand homesteads, porches and chairs, shacks with little porches and one chair (southern hospitality, there is always a chair). White, weather board Baptist church steeples compete for congregations. Deer meander in fields, turtles sunbake on creek-bound logs, and an eagle settles into a tree.

I chat with the young man in the opposite seat: 28 years old and this his first trip outside California where he was born. He is part of post-Covid mobility in the USA; changing jobs, working online, looking to move to a state where it’s cheaper to live or where there are more appealing medical, abortion and/or tax regulations. He has been travelling 50 days, staying for stints in New York, Savannah (GA), and now on his way to New Orleans, trying different cities before he decides where to settle.

As we creep eventually into a shimmering Birmingham, one hour late and in a new time zone, I’m starting to suspect that the strange smell following me around was coming from the cardigan I had picked up off the pavement in Atlanta. Clearly the light dusting I had given it was not enough. 

A short walk from the station there is an actual functioning bus service, hourly, mostly empty, handily dropping me right to the hotel on the edge of the city near the airport. The location is a food desert and while my cardigan dries after a good beating in the sink, a taxi gets me to the nearest strip mall for supplies. I did think about walking but the usual configuration of expressway splitting cities into two or more pieces prevents any urban meanders. The white driver, maybe late 30s, early 40s, is polite and chatty but warns me to ‘be careful’ as it’s ‘not a nice area’. I push him to say why: is it poor? Not exactly. In fact one of Birmingham’s wealthiest neighbourhoods is nearby. It’s not violent, exactly. But he feels the people there might steal something.

After some time in the USA the codes for things not said begin to emerge. ‘Not a nice area’ is code for ‘people of colour’. ‘It’s the South’, with an eye roll and a shrug, means someone’s being racist. While the legacy of slavery is not confined to the South, nor to the USA, those states of the Deep South that had been most dependent on an enslaved plantation economy (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are still marked by high levels of poverty, inequality and racial discrimination.

Valerie, a middle-aged black woman, is my taxi driver for the return drive back to the hotel. Another migrant from California’s high cost of living, she has a day job she loves in health care but drives taxis between shifts because she likes meeting folk. She knows that there are people in Birmingham who ‘think differently’ (code: racist). She knows that many are ‘sincerely friendly’, but ‘It’s the South’ (eye roll). Acknowledging ongoing constraints, such as being the only woman, and only one of three black members on a corporate board, all her ideas (e.g. the city providing public transport or setting up employee buses to help get people to work) are ignored, although the latter may also be rejected because they are distinctly ‘socialist’ in the lexicon of American individualism. 

Montgomery, Wednesday, 22 June 2022

I am sweaty at 7am having had to run back twice to the hotel for sunglasses and then a USB cable, but in time for the hourly bus. The driver helps me use the bus system's ‘change card’. ‘I got you’, she says. It’s a phrase I hear often: from restaurant servers, drivers, my Texan family in Atlanta, my Spanish hiking companions in the Pyrenees last year, my friends. They got me.

The driver is familiar with her passengers, and there’s a lot of chat about ‘love’ with a man sitting near her. A few people get on and off along the back streets of Birmingham but there is never more than six. I am, again, the only white person on public transport. Dropped off 20 min from the Hertz pick up point in a very industrial part of town the other side of the tracks, I jog to the yard to arrive only 10 minutes late but it was a pointless expenditure of energy. Hertz refused to rent me a car despite my booking. My international credit card that I’ve used around the world and all across the USA with other companies, doesn’t have a US zip code attached to it and is therefore unacceptable to Hertz. That’s some extreme exceptionalism even by USA standards. Ten minutes of remonstrating gets nowhere so I run thirty minutes to the next two rental yards before finding an available car (thank you, Enterprise).

I am now dripping in sweat. While waiting for my pick up, an older woman returning her vehicle is asked by the young agent, wearing her sun hat indoors, if she has left her gun in the car. She hasn’t but this is a question they are now required to ask all customers as a matter of course: over 20 guns a week have been getting left behind. The agents can’t touch the gun and the car is out of use until police come to take the weapon away. Firstly, I say in my imaginary arguments with the gun lobby, if your gun is in the glove box where you will eventually forget about it, how is it going to defend you should you actually find yourself in a gun fight? Secondly, if they mean so much to you, why are you forgetting about them and leaving them behind!

Finally, getting a car at 0930, 90 minutes late, just like Amtrak, I take off to Montgomery, driving through thick forest and past a Big Peach (nice to see it’s not just Australia). The capital of Alabama, with no train connections, is the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in the USA. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, and her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, co-organised by a young pastor in the city, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs Parks (and I have learnt not to be an informal Australian in the South and to address people properly) has her own dedicated Museum with multi-media and static displays. But it is the Equality and Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum that encapsulates the breadth of the struggle and its continuing impact: drawing out the links between a slave society, with its engrained racialised hierarchies and creation of a threatening black imaginary, to today’s experiences of racism for Black Americans, including police shootings and the highest incarceration rate of industrialised countries.

A mix of archival material, video, artwork and interactive holograms highlight the numbers: more than 12 million kidnapped into slavery, more than two million died at sea, more than 4000 murdered/lynched, and many, many more unknown and uncounted. It is too easy for these statistics to become incomprehensible in their magnitude and repetition, so the Museum has created a space where the numbers become a thing felt within the body: starting from the small opening room where projected dark waves and the noise of a storm threaten to submerge the viewer into the fear that someone in the belly of a slave ship must have felt. By the time I got to the section on lynching I was close to tears. 

The Museum, situated in a warehouse space, has thousands of visitors a week, from across the USA and internationally, and by the afternoon it’s heaving with young and old. In contrast, the EJI has also created the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, to remember those lynched in racial violence well into the 20th century; mostly men but women and children as well. This is a sacred space. It’s quiet: an expanse of lawn left empty through which a path winds up to a covered structure, open on all sides, with rust coloured boxes listing counties and the names of those known to have been murdered in each one. 

This literal counting of the dead signifies that these deaths must count for something: hope, perhaps, that humanity does better in the future. The walkway gently descends so that the metal boxes begin to hang over the spectator. A wall fountain at the deepest point honours the many 1000s more whose names are unknown. Outside there are sculptures honouring activists, past and present, and highlighting ongoing violence such as police shootings that for some are an extension of the lynchings of the past.

The museum and memorial are part of the EJI’s wider call for justice in the form of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process so that the trauma of slavery and its legacies can be healed. They have already established a process of ‘community reckoning’ where the descendants of those murdered can gather soil at lynching sites that is then stored in large jars at the museum.

While much of contemporary Conservative and Republican politics rails against the idea of looking back in order to move forward, clearly there is a need for some kind of reckoning with this past. The desire for segregation and denigration and walls and keeping the other in their place isn’t going anywhere. Which might go some way to explaining the level of security and metal detectors at the entrances to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. 

I’m guessing the city of Montgomery was attempting an act of reconciliation when it noted on the city seal both its role as ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ and ‘Birthplace of the civil rights movement’. The secession convention, forming the Southern Republic, was held from January to March 1861 in the city, and the first White House of the Confederacy was established here. There’s still a Confederate Memorial Day in some Southern states, and it's an official state holiday on the 4th Monday in April in Alabama. Just to wind people up further, Alabama also has a Robert E. Lee day on the same day as Martin Luther King Day (the 3rd Monday in January). Local councils require permission from state authorities (Republican since 2003) should anyone want to remove a confederate statue (the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, 2017) of which there are many more than I thought there would be in my naivete.

Driving back to Birmingham, about 20 minutes or so from Montgomery, on a high cutting on the left of the highway, in full view of the world, a large confederate flag flies above a memorial for the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans. The League of the South are based just an hour north of Birmingham, still advocating for secession and hosting well known antisemitic, white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, as a guest speaker at their 2022 annual conference. 

Calhoun County Confederate Memorial, Janney Furnace Park, O’Hatchee, Thursday, 23 June 2022

It doesn’t take much desk research to find the nearest Confederate memorial: a museum tucked away down a country road with no signage except to Janney Furnace Park. The ‘furnace’ is a ruined forge used in the civil war and later destroyed by Union forces, but the main memorial is a three piece black granite wall engraved with the names of those from the County who volunteered for the Confederate army. Between the lists of names is an etched likeness of Robert E. Lee on one side, and local hero, John Pelham, on the other. The five flags of the confederacy are flown behind the memorial, and a stacked row of seats is set in front. A metal box for visitors includes a sheet of ‘True facts you will never hear or see in the classroom’ about the Civil War.

Next to the memorial is a small, one room county museum presenting in display cases and wall galleries a local history of the area. It includes indigenous artefacts but also, inexplicably, a lot of knives from a range of eras and countries. Mostly it is Civil War memorabilia and an interpretation of how this 20 mile area in remote Alabama became connected to global conflicts: the British-American fighting in 1813 that entangled First Nation communities, and then, as its called here, 'the war of rebellion' or 'the war for Southern independence'.

The museum is only open a few days a week and at 10am on a Thursday morning I was the only person there. The docent, a genial veteran in his late 60s, gives me a personal tour for almost two hours. The civil war takes on an heroic narrative with women invisible or in their usual war time role of cradling the hero on his return. Origin stories take a turn away from slavery towards victimhood in a conflict redressing the injustice of an unfair economic relationship between a wealthier south subsidising the north. A painting at the entrance to the museum, one of the first to be seen, is the image of an enslaved man who, the story has it, on hearing his ‘Master’ was killed, joined the Confederacy in his honour. And so it goes: the battle over ‘truth’ and ‘history’ and ‘representation’, the defence of heritage and nation, continues. 

In late March, early April, the surrounding park is used for re-enactments of local Civil War battles by members of the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans (although you don’t have to be an actual son/daughter of a confederate veteran to take part). They also had a medieval re-enactment society, jousting with watermelons or soft weapons. It was shut down for being too dangerous in what I’m guessing some local people thought was another example of political correctness gone mad.

Driving away from the park, the violence this small county has seen is muted by the serenity of the landscape through which history passed. As always taking the long way home, I crossed lush countryside, wooded hills, corn and vegetable fields. Rivers became lakes dotted with boat houses and decks shaded by old tree canopies. Homesteads are tucked behind trees, shaded from the heat, but the occasional dirt track reveals run down, off grid, trailers as well.

In need of a sugar hit, I stop at a Trading Post emblazoned with ‘God Bless America’. The shopkeeper, a grizzly middle-aged man, also had a large knife collection including samurai swords and a Game of Thrones replica for sale, as well as Amish pickles, jams and assorted sweets. I made a joke about how the knives were a nice change from guns. He said he kept his gun in his car so he can calm down before he gets it but he had a baton under the counter, which didn’t make me feel any safer. He argued a better strategy was to get close enough to an attacker to bite their ear off as a way of deterring further violence. I couldn’t work out if he was being serious but he discounted my chocolate so that was nice.

Going South, Part I: A Midnight Train to Georgia

 

 

There are many things about the USA that I love but its rail network is not one of them. If we were to measure greatness by public transport then America is most definitely not ‘the greatest country ever in the history of the world’ (as is often suggested by some in National Conservative/MAGA circles). But the responsibilities of being a grown up in recent years had led me to thinking how much I missed the freedom of my backpacking days, and so with all the optimism of my 25 year old self, I bought an Amtrak USA Rail Pass (ten journeys in one month) and planned to go South.

In fairness, Amtrak in the summer of 2022 was still not up to full speed post-Covid19. Fewer trains were operating and the ‘daily’ Crescent from New York to New Orleans was more like ‘every few days’. When it did appear on the schedule it became fully booked very quickly. On the upside, this would indicate a desire for train travel in the USA despite the best efforts of the airline and car industries to run it into the ground. On the downside, what became increasingly clear as I journeyed south, north and east over the next two weeks, was that no one in government cares enough to invest in it.

I eventually managed to work out how to get to New Orleans via Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, returning to New York the very long way around via Memphis and Chicago. And so it was, clutching my pass and my roller bag, that I departed a hot New York City on time … and shunted straight into trouble. Progress involved movement at the speed of crawl interspersed with stuttering to a grinding halt as our train became entangled with other east coast lines in a state of chaos after a signalling failure. Stray passengers were pushed onto any available train going their way, including the Crescent which was then also delayed by the same signal failure creating a bottle neck and a 90 minute wait for another train to pass because it’s a single track system throughout much of the network. Delays are exacerbated by freight companies owning the tracks and passenger trains always having to give way.

At least we could rest in what are the widest, most comfortable train seats I’ve ever had my butt on: at last something the MAGA folk can truly claim is great. The footrests are still too far away to be any use to me, but the full leg recliners and deep backwards inclination make up for it. Sadly for the romantic train traveller, there’s no longer any dining car unless you’re in ‘bougie’ class (those who can afford the extortionate rates of the sleeper cabins, at about $600 a leg), but there’s diner seating where food from the café can be eaten, and some trains still have the glass enclosed observation cars.

Unfortunately, the spacious seating was increasingly encroached on by, firstly, the middle aged man next to me lovingly yelling at his daughter on the phone, then someone’s sports match, the latest tiktok dance, and the young couple in the morning playing the same song over and over and over again.

The spacious seating was also not enough to make up for the raging air conditioning. I added two more layers in the night to the T-shirt but wondered if any of the seasoned travellers with thick blankets and sweats on would mind if I snuggled up next to them. Instead, I managed to twist into various pretzel shapes and got some sleep, interspersed with regular horn blasts to keep wildlife and people off the tracks, while dreaming of punitive measures for those that refuse to wear earpods. Missing much of Virginia and North Carolina, time passed with people and scenery coming and going as we picked up speed in the night and made Atlanta in the morning only an hour late.

24 hours in Atlanta (20th June)

Given that I was supposed to be emulating my backpacking youth, I had chosen Motel 6 for my first flop house; a chain that ranks 358th on aggregated hotel booking sites and is priced accordingly. It was too early to get my room but the receptionist let me stow my bag, and wash and change in the staff toilet while slowly letting my nostalgia for backpacking resolve itself into reality. I had to remind myself of past travelling rules that accommodation should be cheap and the food good, so a quick check of the interweb and it was off to the famous Atlanta Breakfast Club.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked the interweb to find out if Georgia has a Juneteenth public holiday (which it does), and the crowds from the morning celebrations commemorating the end of slavery in the USA were now queueing at Atlanta’s best breakfast venue. I clutched my ‘75th in line’ ticket and waited outside in the 35 degree heat with dozens of others under marquees and other scraps of shade. A DJ kept us entertained with old school and contemporary R&B, Soul and Blues, interacting with the crowd, giving a shout out ‘to the woman in the cowboy hat’ (that would be me and it’s not a cowboy hat). A mimosa bar is handy for the parched.

My place in line ticks down over the course of two hours but then seems to stall at 30. At this point I start to suspect that being a solo traveller has some disadvantages in the South as families and groups of friends are seated ahead of me. As the sun creeps ever closer to burning my legs, I am joined on my bench by a Texan family on their way to Florida for holidays. We start to chat and when they get the call for a table ahead of me (I’m still at number 30) they insist I join them: mum, dad, sister, two daughters, two cousins, and a musty backpacker.

The Dad, in real estate, leads the questions as we wait for our order: how is the UK different; are there black folk there; what about the royals; what about music? I ask questions in turn: are they worried about school shootings? They’re not. They’re from Houston and urban schools have enough security. He’s a hunter from his childhood and his wife also shoots, mostly tin cans these days. He also loves his BBQ and proudly shows me pictures of a two metre long pit where he smokes and cooks his own meat.

When the food comes it is various combinations of southern comfort: fried chicken, eggs, bacon, waffles and pancakes, fried green tomatoes on biscuits for me. At this stage I have to ponder the question: exactly how many chickens get fried in the USA each day? I order a side of fruit to feel a bit better about the carnage. Before we eat, Dad gestures that there will be grace, and we link hands around the table. He thanks God for the food, his family and being able to meet Miss Melissa today (and it will be only south of the Carolinas that anyone is EVER allowed to call me ‘Miss’ or ‘baby girl’). I thank the universe for their generosity, kindness and curiosity. Amen. With mouths full the questions continue. ‘Do Americans eat a lot?’ I hesitate out of politeness; they laugh. I can only say ‘yes’. Then comes 'What do British people think of Trump?' That’s a long answer, and then I want to know ‘why is there so much religion in US politics’, which is another long answer. It’s cash only at the end and as I only had a card the Dad takes the bill. We tussle but he insists. It is Southern hospitality. Amen to that.

Walking off brunch that became a late lunch, I wandered past the CocaCola museum and CNN headquarters, towards the Sweet Auburn Street historic district, through a neighbourhood populated by despair. In the 1950s and 60s, Sweet Auburn Street was a centre for black businesses, churches, and civil rights organising with Martin Luther King Jr’s Ebenezer Baptist church and the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference still present. A National Historical Park charting the history of the movement sits opposite the King Centre where Dr King and Coretta are buried. Murals on building and park walls commemorate other civil rights leaders including John Lewis, Ella Baker and Evelyn Lowery. But step back behind the façade and it is derelict and deprived.

In the Historical Park Visitor’s Centre the story of the civil rights movement includes the familiar footage of opposition to school desegregation, with KKK leaders and white folk using the ‘n’ word. A Black mum with two young kids, maybe 5-7 years old, looks uncomfortable, as was I, hearing these words in a room of mostly Black visitors and reflecting on the capacity of humans to be so afraid and so cruel as a result. She steers her children out of the room saying ‘I don’t think this is suitable for my babies’, but I do wonder how we teach this to kids. As we walk away, me a little in front, I overhear her explaining ‘there was a time in the past when these things happened and there are still some things like that today, but education is what’s important’.

And yet, the USA, and the UK, is in the throes of a culture war that wants to remove an education that might make white folk uncomfortable in coming face to face with our ancestors’ complicity in violence and cruelty towards people of colour, and even worse, in coming face to face with our own complicity today in the legacies of that violence and cruelty.

I potter back to the Motel 6 to shower and sleep, picking up an abandoned cardigan lying on the pavement near the hotel that will save me having to find a new one tomorrow to stave off the Amtrak AC.

Returning to Happy Places (Reflections on Familiarity and Time)

 

The force of tectonic plates crashing into each other at the speed of deep time, rounded out by several thousand years of grinding glaciers, created not only the Pyrénéen chain but the great gash valleys that run up to its wall. From Luz Saint Sauveur, one winding gouge abruptly ends at the Cirque de Gavarnie, a majestic amphitheatre of granite and limestone layers that buckle and fold around each other.

I am returning to this happy place, its familiar grooves and peaks, largely because I haven’t had time to plot out and prepare a new route this year. But then mountains are like that Zen river no one ever steps in twice. Turn left instead of right, go up a little higher, at a different time of day, with different weather, and it’s somewhere you’ve never been before. By the time I’m at the base of the Cirque’s largest cascade, with dozens of other walkers, thunder is repeating itself rapid fire, echoing around the concave wall, followed immediately by lightening. Then it’s a race, storm versus human, and we run, in hiking boots, to the nearest shelter as wind, heavy rain then hail arrives. 

This Cirque, at this moment in time, is a landscape I’ve never met before: dark and moody and crashing turbulence overhead. A few hardy souls continue to go forward but I wait it out with a large hot chocolate. In an hour it’s over and I wander down, slightly damp, through humid forest and pasture, the river, well beyond Zen reflection, now a torrent to my left.

The rest of the week is unsettled, skirting squalls and thunder, and requiring the additional effort of on and off and on and off again rain jacket. But the clouds bring light and shadow into the valley, and rise and fall over the Cirque so that its outline shifts each day. When it clears a little I decide I should have a crack at Pic du Péméne, le petit if not le grand summit. It is the usual sharp incline from valley floor to estive plateau and then long lacets up to a ridge, a drop down the other side to skirt the small pic and rise to the ridge again, this time facing a steep rocky bulge to the top. 

I stare at it, decide against it as it’s hard to see where the path goes and if there is any scrambling or severe drop offs, and have a picnic instead as vultures and eagles soar past at the same level. I walk back to the foot of the bulge once more, without backpack and poles to see if lightness helps, but still decide against it. I have figured out that my fear is not so much the drop off but getting half-way up and not being able to get down again, which would be excruciatingly embarrassing.

But then, as always, someone appears, running up (really, running!); a local out for a stretch who has the advantage of growing up in this magical kingdom. I follow his lead, crawling up for the first few metres safe in the knowledge that he’s too far ahead to see me, but then eventually talking myself into standing. Catching up with him at the penultimate cairn, I decline the last 50 metres as the short crest ends in a sharp scramble with jelly leg inducing exposure. The view is the same.

Before he disappeared down the mountain my guide pointed across the valley to a notch in the skyline above the Cirque and recommended I walk up there. I thought I had misunderstood as the Cirque is 1500m (ish) at its highest, and from where we were standing, very much the vertical wall. But on the map this notch has a name, Brèche de Roland. It is legendary as a 100m high ‘door’ between France and Spain that can be accessed behind the Cirque following the contours of classic mountain terrain: long lacets through steep estives, then plateau, shorter lacets over steep rocky trails, plateau, then even shorter lacets across steeper scree shoved to the side by thawing torrents. Throw in fording a few gushing glacial streams powering their way down to the valley floor and it’s a fun day out. 

Initially following the lead of other hikers was a bad idea as it turned out they were 20-somethings who had been raised by Isards. I eventually found my own way following cairns, more or less, and after four hours, crossing a final ridge, the world as I had known it was now inverted: above the height of the main cascade on the other side of the Cirque; above the clouds that rolled up the valley; looking down on minute others looking up from where I’d been two days before in a storm. The upper layers of the Cirque, the tucks and folds of ancient rock, were in full view. An elegant refuge sat in an impossible position hanging onto the mountain side at the base of a steep moraine mass that people ascended and descended up to the brèche, to and from Spain. It is beyond words, beyond spectacular.

Despite the sense of deep time such places generate, at the scale of the human I only had 30 minutes to linger with rain predicted for 2pm. I asked the refuge guardian how difficult the descent straight down into the Cirque was and his response was pragmatic: ‘there is an immediate drop off the other side which you have to climb down and if you slip you’ll die’. So I’ll be going back the way I came then! Even with the best of maps, the unfamiliar is always a challenge; a metaphor, if you want to stretch it, for much of human angst. 

Returning to the recently familiar but now in reverse, the boulders, roaring streams, steep moraine and lacets must be approached differently with gravity pulling downwards into clouds and out again. I disappear and am thankful for my GPS that continues to ping out a route. However, the predicted thunderstorm doesn’t appear apart from a few drops and one desultory rumble and I emerged into Plateau de Bellevue above the village in warm sunshine. 

After the usual routine of washing me and clothes I wander up to the world’s most beautiful bar, facing the Cirque by the stream, just outside the village, for tea and tarte de myrtille. Slowly all the walkers and riverside sitters thin out and dissipate as clouds thicken and time approaches evening. I sit and ponder nothing for an hour or two. It's a strange pastime, to hike to the top of things, sit for 30 minutes or so and then hike back down again. I notice the difference between through-hiking, when you need to get somewhere as justification for the effort, and up and back for no reason other than seeing something. In the meantime, the cloud finally comes down completely, and the Cirque, and pondering minds, begin to sleep.

Familiarity can of course be a very useful thing, particularly when not carrying a map. Having already walked the section from Gavarnie to Refuge Baysellance three years before, a section that is basically the walkers equivalent of an A Road, there were some vague landmarks imprinted in memory … a statue of Mary, a refuge … that gave a general sense of confidence I was walking in the right direction until hitting the familiar red and white balisage of the GR10. The walk along the valley and upwards was as beautiful as I remembered it: early morning cloud eventually cleared from the contours of a valley; reaching Barrage Ossoue and its familiar river plateau; and the knackering long lacets and rocky corniches with precipitous drops into valleys below.

But then, passing the familiar grottos carved into the hillside, with the refuge almost in sight, for some inexplicable reason other than just tiredness, I missed the clearly signed intersection and started following unfamiliar cairns towards the Vignemale glacier. Not seeing anyone behind me still didn’t register a warning and instead I dug in deeper until an additional hour of faffing about on scree slopes finally got me backtracking to the right turning. Arriving late at the refuge, tea and chocolate cake were required to ease the pain and indignity of stupidity but there was still enough light left to watch groups going up and down Petite Vignemale before sunset. 

As usual, the refuge was rammed (it’s one of the last Saturdays of the season) and a wall of noise. Two young women sit next to me and start teaching the group of older men in the corner how to play ‘pick up sticks’. Two Spanish on the other side play chess. There are card games, chatter, beer, coffee, beer. I knit socks. Dinner is in two shifts and I’m at a table of mostly Spanish who politely chat in English for my benefit. 

In the morning the wind is cold and strong and I worry about the Spanish who are climbing Vignemale today. Walking with my back to her north face feels a bit rude, but I am on unfamiliar trail again, over a boulder field towards col d’Arraille, well in sight at 2583m. Boulder fields require care, intense concentration, and ideally long legs, to avoid turning an ankle or sliding with loose rock into a ravine. The stream of narrative in the head has to quieten for a few hours and focus: three points on the ground, testing for movement, transfer weight, three points on the ground, and so it goes downwards over rocks, moraine, and lacets, lacets, lacets. Marmots occasionally startle me but they are fat and lazy from summer grazing and can’t be arsed doing any more than peeping a few times and loping away.

With my GPS strap broken, time was tucked away in a pocket and no longer readily accessible, but reaching Refuge d’Estom, beautifully positioned next to a lac at the foot of Pic de la Sède, I know I’m hungry and an omelette is inhaled along with the last of the cheese. Time then stretched out the walk down this final gash valley to Cauteret, with its racing cascades and soft forest; the sun roasting trail, becoming path becoming road, and the now familiar routine for finishing in a happy place: hotel, washing, a spa treatment at the Thermes, a glass of rosé, and reflection on having so little time despite the evidence of millions of years around me. 

 

(Gavarnie to Cauteret, September 2022)

 

Meeting the (Dutch) von Trapps

Cirque de Gavarnie is a natural wonder: 3000 metres at its widest, up to 1500 metres from its base, a 422m waterfall to round out its list of attractions, this natural amphitheatre has been carved out by the movement of the earth over millions of years. With just a 90 minute easy walk or donkey ride from the village to the foot of the cascade, it is unsurprising that in the summer season hundreds arrive daily to see this astonishing colosseum: bus loads of French, Spanish, British, and other assorted world travellers, scouts and school trips.

Among this maelstrom of humanity, let's meet the Dutch von Trapp family; a collective of four adults and six children ranging from three years old to tweenies, in all their tall, blonde glory (and yes, I know the von Trapps were actually Austrian but go with me on this one). 

I truly admire the effort of parents that want to bring their kids into nature, to march them up to a plateau to admire the view, even when the kids may not actually want to be marched to the top, are not that impressed when they get there, and can't wait to get back down because that's where the ice cream is.  

I appreciate that they might not have been used to so much ascent, even if it is Walking 101, but the von Trapp seniors were not put off by their children's lack of enthusiasm ... bless them. As I passed them on the way to Plateau Bellevue, they cheerfully ploughed on, accompanied by what I imagined was a Dutch rendition of 'These are a few of my favourite things'. 

I passed them again later that day, bundled into the nooks and crannies of shade next to a river, trying to manage their small humans' hunger, fatigue and the call of nature, which involved holding the smallest human over the stream so they could free flow their pee into it. 

At this point, just a gentle reminder of outdoor etiquette ... while I appreciate that Cirque de Gavarnie is a relatively easy stroll, with a hotel and three course meal at the end, giving it the appearance of an extension of 'home space', please don't let your kids pee in the pristine glacial streams that run past the camp site and through the village, that people bath in and drink from. It's public commons, not your own private toilet. The same goes for the man who's job it is to sweep up the crap left on the path by the donkeys ferrying people up to the Cirque. 'What a great idea', I thought to myself, 'collecting all the crap to put on someone's garden'. Mais non! His job is to shovel it straight into the same pristine glacial stream that, to emphasise the disgust, people drink from and bath in. 

Two days later I was really impressed to meet the Dutch Von Trapps again at Refuge Baysellance, a solid three hours for adults of upward hiking, along narrow, rocky paths with some steep drop offs. The three year old had been in a carrier but all the other kids had managed it under their own power. While missing their matching clothes made out of curtains, their infectious energy nevertheless took over the refuge, and children and noise bounced off the walls.   

I was less impressed that, due to a miscalculation by the refuge guardians of how many Von Trapps there actually were, I was relegated out of a comfortable bed in a room they now commandeered to the worst spot in the refuge: top bunk, under the slanting roof with only a handful of centimetres between head and hard surface, on the far side of a snoring man between me and the ladder down, with his wife and child's head on the opposite side meeting mine in the middle. Boxed in, there was no getting down to pee until everyone else was up in the morning, so I tried not to dream of pristine glacial streams. At breakfast, snoring man finds me, not to apologise for keeping me and everyone else in the dorm up all night, but to ask if his son can have his refuge slippers back that'd I'd accidentally put on in the dark, despite there being dozens of other identical pairs lying around that he could have used.

The Dutch von Trapps, on the other hand, having slept soundly in their own room, were gleefully up, packed, and ready to descend with what I imagined was a rendition of 'So long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye' carried on the wind and fading out as they disappeared into sunlight and mountains sprinkled with saccharin.

[Note to self: to avoid the appearance of misanthropy best to wait till after a good night's sleep before writing notes, or think of a few of my favourite things 😇]

Finding a Home in Lourdes for an Oversized Candle

Backpack on and heading for France, I sat near four women from the Irish Traveller community on the London Overground. The youngest, noticing my backpack, asked where I was off to. ‘Hiking in the south of France, in the Pyrénées’. She recalled how beautiful it was in Lourdes when she was there, so I mention I’m passing through on the way to Gavarnie. And in that moment of connection, in the space of minutes in a public transit carriage in east London, a story of loss and violence and love and faith unfolds.

Could I put a flower in the river and say a prayer for a daughter, B. Could I say a prayer and light a candle for a 21 y.o. son murdered five years ago, as the family still fights for justice. A copy of his funeral service and photo is placed in my hand. Could I say a prayer for R., for the S. family, the D. family, for all Travellers. I’m given £10 for the candles. I refuse. It’s stuffed into my bag. Then another £5.

They ask me if I’m not afraid on my own and for some reason I say: ‘My god is with me’. As an agnostic I appreciate faith but I have a difficult relationship with the idea of god so I have no idea where that came from. The train pulled into my stop, it was hugs and kisses all around and we were away in different directions.

And so I found myself, the next day, jogging down to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, between my night train pulling in and the 90 minutes before my bus to Gavarnie. Having passed through the city many times and never looked inside, I have long been curious about the power of this place and its ability to pull towards it the collection of humanity always waiting at the station: pilgrims and religious orders, the ill and infirm, the desperate and thankful, all hoping for a miracle.

I arrived just as the complex was opening at 8am and having done no preparation I realised I had no idea where I was going. With the river Pau running on the right, the almost empty promenade at this time of the morning was dominated at its end by the gothic structure of the Basilica Notre Dame du Rosaire. Going by past visits to Cathedrals I figured the candles would be in that general direction and sure enough, in an excellent demonstration of how cultural reproduction works and the lasting power of catechism classes, underneath a vaulted walkway to the Basilica were self-service candle stands with honesty boxes for the money.

I like lighting a candle when I’m visiting a church but at most I’ll stick a euro in a tin and buy a tea light. This being Lourdes, £10’s worth of candle was about 60cm long (I donated the remaining £5 although it did cross my mind that the Catholic church was already raking it in charging £10 for candles and didn’t need any more … note ‘difficult relationship with God’). Carrying my cargo into the Basilica I found the usual tealight altar but nothing that resembled a place for a two foot long candle.

Back out again I could hear singing further down the complex so wandered around the Basilica, bolstered by seeing a few other people carrying giant candles in that general direction. And it is here, not in the grandiose church, that I stumbled on the actual grotto where Bernadette Soubirous saw the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858. The rough hewn cave set a few metres above the ground now holds a more solid statue of Mary, while the lower alcove houses a small altar for priests to conduct outdoor services to the hundred or so mostly elderly pilgrims seated in serried semi-circles in front (in this instance, an Italian tour group).

Set below the statue of Mary was a metal ‘tree’ with oversized candles. This, I thought, must be where my candle goes, so I join the queue, inching my way forward. As I got to the front I held out my candle as an offering to the priest who looked somewhat bemused as he held out a bread wafer as an offering to me. Realising I had just gate crashed the Italians holy communion service I took the wafer and moved to the side still clutching my candle, and remembering the admonishments of a past boyfriend’s mother that as a Protestant I should NOT be taking the body and blood of a Catholic God (note ‘difficult relationship with God’). Too late now.

Spotting the Italian’s tour guide I asked if he knew what I should do with my candle. He quietly took me aside and pointed to some half dome sheds across the river, wishing me ‘bon camino’ in the process (I still had my backpack on at this point so he thinks I’m on my way to Santiago de Compostela, the famous Way of St James pilgrimage from France to Spain).

Across the footbridge, the candle sheds held hundreds of lights, hopes, and wishes. The Sanctuary has that feeling of places where people have prayed again and again, thousands of times, for uncountable years, for relief, more than happiness I’m guessing, from the suffering of this mortal coil, and heaven knows it’s been a shit few years. Facing death or illness or trauma or grief, wanting to die peacefully looking into the face of a god, take comfort where you can. If it’s believing that a virgin mother of a Jewish radical called Jesus appeared in a grotto in southern France and that she will help, so be it.

For the women on the train, my task is done. In the half an hour or so I’d been floundering around the Sanctuary the number of pilgrims had now swelled to hundreds and soon would be thousands as tour buses began to appear at the front gate. I find a quiet place for the candle. I find wild flowers and place them in the river, with H.’s funeral service left under a stone so he’ll always be carried by the water. For B., for R., for H., for the S. family, the D. family, and all the Travellers, may you be safe, may you be well, may you be at peace.

May the road rise to meet you,

may the wind be always at your back,

may the sun shine warm upon your face,

the rains fall soft upon your fields,

and until we meet again

may [whichever God or Universe you choose to believe in] hold you in the palm of [their] hand.

Don't be using bouillon cubes in Louisiana

No city better encapsulates how food tells us everything we need to know about cultural change and the human capacity to adapt than the living smorgasbord that is New Orleans (NOLA for those of us that like to think we're now honorary locals).

NOLA's food, as much as its music, is marked by entanglements of movement, of enslavement and colonisation, and a geography of bayou, river and sea, and rather than reading its history I'd much rather eat it. So having already spent a day grazing through beignets and muffuletta, I found  myself first in line at the New Orleans Cooking School to take a class in Cajun cuisine. In terms of cultural differences I've noticed that being first in line means nothing in the Southern parts of the USA. Whether it's the queue for a table at the Atlanta Breakfast Club, a seat on a train in Birmingham, or the best tables in a NOLA cooking school, groups will get called out first and the singles just have to fit themselves around them. This sort of makes sense in the tetris school of seating arrangements, but I find my innate sense of 'don't even think about jumping the queue that I've been in since first thing this morning' fairness is hard to quell.

As the seating gods would have it I am finally allowed in and find space on a table with the two Texans I'd been chatting to in the queue and a couple of additional Tennesseens. The round table is crowded with spices and sauces to sample with the food as well as jugs of iced tea and water. There is fresh lemonade and coffee at a side table, and fresh biscuits (that's scones in America, not cookies) soon land on the table even before the cooking has begun, to be eaten with the ever present jug of corn syrup.

Ms Vivienne was our teacher, bringing a world of experience from working with chefs in Louisiana, West Africa and Europe. She also set up the now defunct (sadly) New Orleans Jazz Cafe in West London. Ms Vivienne demonstrated just how much she can multi-task by not only teaching us to cook a four course meal, with some capitalised, not shouting but definitely insistent, instruction, throwing in the history and culture of NOLA through its two main cooking styles, Creole and Cajun, while also illustrating how much the British and French empires have to answer for.

Creole food and the culture it stems from may be thought of by some as a bit 'boujie' (posh, bourgeois), coming as it does out of French colonisation from the 18th century and the idea that the Creole community were the 'first born' in the settlement. On the other hand, the Cajun community have the reputation of being as rough as the swamps they live in. But it's a complicated history of human mobility that has created these approximations of complex communities, running something like the following (which may not be 100% accurate so do your own research):

The First Nations people were violently displaced, then there were a few waves of European settlers from the 17th century. Louisiana was officially a French colony from 1699 and NOLA officially a French city from 1718, and with the Europeans came enslaved people from Africa. There were some German settlers also hanging out there. Louisiana became a Spanish colony in 1763 after France had lost a seven year war in Europe and needed some money, but Spain had rather carelessly lost Florida at this stage as well. 

The French and German settlers weren't happy about the Spanish so Napoleon re-bought Louisiana in 1800 and it became a French colony again, but then Bonney needed money for his crack at European domination so sold it to the USA using a British bank to transfer the money that he would then use to try to invade Britain (the famous Louisiana Purchase that involved a lot more land than the current Louisiana). The British later had a crack at occupying NOLA in 1815, because they were at war with America again. They lost, again. So Louisiana and NOLA have been part of the USA ever since. Meanwhile, Acadian exiles from Nova Scotia wanted to maintain their Catholic heritage rather than join the British empire as it took over Canada, so they migrated south in 1765 (ish) to French Louisiana. They preferred to live out of the city so were given land in the Bayou, and came to be known as Cajuns. 

NOLA today is still about 40% Catholic, with 'parishes' instead of counties, and a Catholic influence in cooking including the staple ingredients of onion, celery and green bell peppers referred to as 'The Trinity', garlic as 'The Pope', and the green onion garnish as 'The Blessing'. French language is now an encouraged part of the culture (when in the past it was beaten out of children), with growing numbers of bi-lingual and immersive classes in Louisiana schools. The French-based Louisiana creole and Louisiana French (they're different), with their inflections of African and European languages, are still spoken although the former in particular is declining with fewer than 10,000 speakers now.

The most important thing to know in terms of differences, however, between the Cajun and Creole communities, is that creole cooking uses a tomato sauce base while Cajun food is underpinned by a dark roux that handily disguises whatever meat you may be adding from the Bayou. Take, for example, the classic Gumbo we made (strictly speaking, Ms Vivienne made it; we watched and then ate it). Sausage and chicken is typical today, with duck and seafood also acceptable. Muskrat is a possibility if you fancy cooking a semi-aquatic rodent but it will be nicely coated by the sauce so noone will ever know ... it tastes like chicken.

We are under strict instructions to NOT use olive oil in the roux (nothing wrong with a bit of lard) and to COMMIT to its making: 45 minutes of stirring on slow to medium heat until the colour changes from blond to peanut to dark brown. Stock is added but NEVER, EVER bouillon cubes in Louisiana. I'm not sure what would happen if I tried but Ms Vivienne looked pretty stern about it so I'll do what I'm told. The stock should be based on bone and go easy on the salt, then the lovely sounding sassafras (or filé) is used to thicken the sauce if needed.       

Given the diversity of the USA, it's not only Louisiana that has cuisine marked by a history of mobility (just ask a Texan about the difference between TexMex, Southwest TexMex and actual Mexican food, and don't get them started on whether beans should go in chilli). But it is perhaps a sign of the polarised times that even suggested accompaniments to our Gumbo cause division around the table: the Texans are having none of the idea that it could ever be eaten with cold Potato Salad but the Tennesseens and I beg to differ.

Jambalaya (ham and rice) is next up, as is a local beer to help wash it down, and as the alcohol kicks in so does the conversation at our table which inevitably turns to the state of America. The Texans, from Hispanic heritage, are on the liberal side of the spectrum; the Tennesseens I wasn't sure about but Mrs TN managed federal government infrastructure and expressed the sentiment I had after spending hours sitting on an Amtrak train in a siding waiting for a freight train to pass and noone had any idea when that might be: America is falling apart at the seams. We talk guns, and immigration, and the number of vacancies around the country. There is the old trope offered that people won't work when they can get government handouts. I counter with the complications and that the Covid payments are now finished so something else is going on, but what that is disappears into a sugar induced haze as dessert production begins. 

Louisiana has its own version of bread pudding and today it's getting white chocolate added and a layer of 'Sweet Treat' topping (a ready mix of cinnamon and icing sugar) because a cup of cane sugar in the initial bake just isn't sweet enough. One of the reasons NOLA was so important to European empire was its trading port at the mouth of the Mississippi and the Gulf, bringing goods north to south and back again across the USA, as well as from the Caribbean to Europe. It was one of the busiest ports in the world in the 19th century and still generates an estimated $100 million annually, including freight and cruise liners (in some years over a million cruise passengers have docked there). One in five jobs in Louisiana is still related to the Port. 

Sugar cane was one of the first crops grown in Louisiana, produced by enslaved labour, turned into molasses and exported to make rum. A lot of sugar now gets turned into the local speciality prahline (don't say prayline unless you want a lot of eyerolling from Ms Vivienne), that the cruise ship and other tourists buy in bulk. This is another recipe that requires commitment and a lot of stirring specifically from the centre. The chemistry of cooking is not something I've ever really engaged with, so I have no idea why stirring must be done from the centre. A physicist will also have to explain to me why, because NOLA is mostly below sea level, it's too moist for accurate temperature measurements. I did wonder if this was somehow connected to the feeling of torpor when walking outside drenched in sweat as the wet bulb temperature reached its upper limits of human endurance. NOLA's weather in June has been unseasonably hot, like the rest of the world. In lieu of a thermometer, a spoon of mixture has to be dunked in cold water to see if it forms a soft ball (bit like me on entering a craft brewery after a few hours walking in a NOLA summer). If it does, then it's good to go. 

Like the food, and the communities that produced it, my recipe notes are all a bit mixed up after two and a half hours, but fully loaded and finishing on a sugar high we roll out of the kitchen into the store to buy our spices and ready mixes and recipe books. Ms Vivienne leaves us with what seems a lovely offer to contact her if we have any problems with our cooking when we get home. 'Seriously?' someone asks. Bien sur. Louisiana food is the pride of the state and they take it seriously ... don't even think about cocking it up. I have this feeling that if I try to throw in a bouillon cube Ms Vivienne is going to pop up in my kitchen in East London with some choice French creole.

From the sublime to the ridiculous and you can decide which is which ...

 

Two shows this week in Manhattan. First, the mighty Hamlet, directed by Robert Icke, at the legendary Armory on Park Avenue, $84 for a seat in the gods. Second, the slightly more lowly Rise & Fall, then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of his Wikipedia Page a Month Earlier, for $30 in a little loft above an halal restaurant (with 'Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Arabian, African AND American' food) on W. 29th, Chelsea. 

I don't know if it's a case of 'you can take the girl out of Bega ...' but apparently I'd rather spend an hour in the company of two dudes playing out a version of the life of Jean Claude Van Damme using a plyboard desk and puppets, than I would watching what is billed as one of the greatest productions of Hamlet ever. 

I know Hamlet is a great piece of literature; it's physically demanding for the actors, with Hamlet  having about 1400 lines to learn in iambic pentameter, and I know any production that takes it on is probably wracked by anxiety over how to make 'to be or not to be' sound fresh, but dressing the cast in suits, using CCTV video (and who's not these days in the theatre), and playing a bit of Bob Dylan in the interstitials just didn't do it for me. Sadly, the three and a half hours couldn't go fast enough. The Armory is a spectacular space though, so possibly worth the sparkling wine in plastic cup for that alone.

The Rise and Fall of JCVD on the other hand, once all the funny one-liners are over, has a bitter sweet soliloquy spoken by an actor who requires a lot of imagination to morph his slight 5'2" frame into JCVD's musculature, and while lashing his body with baby oil, recounts wasted moments and lost dreams, accepting the caricature that he has now become in semi-fictionalised film versions of himself. To be or not to be, Jean Claude van Damme.