I couldn’t help but notice that Amandine used saltier language when talking to me than she did when conversing with the older market-goers, whom she never failed to favor with a dazzling smile and the politesse typical of rural French merchants. As I slowly got to know her, I took this as a sign either that she had grown especially comfortable with me or, perhaps, that she considered me a transient foreigner on whom such niceties would be wasted. Whatever the case, it seemed to me that Amandine didn’t fit the Gascon mold. She was reticent, guarded, a little caustic, and so I felt a certain satisfaction that she’d warmed to me enough that I could sustain a Gascon-length market-day chat with her. I had an ulterior motive, too, for getting to know her: I was hoping that she might invite me to ride along on one of her day-trips to the mountains so that I could meet her cheese makers.
As it happened, Amandine did me one better.
After a particularly long period of deprivation, I made my weekly trip to the market one crisp morning and discovered, to my delight, that Amandine was carrying Marcel’s cheese again. A gnarly wheel of it was sitting in her case, guarded by sheep figurines.
Amandine said Marcel’s longer-than-usual disappearance owed to the fact that he’d been busy getting ready to herd his animals down to the lowlands for the season. He spent his summers, she said, at a high mountain refuge, in intimate communion with a thousand sheep.
I asked Amandine if she’d ever visited him en haut.
“It’s 8,000 feet up,” she said. “No road. No way for me to get the goods back down the mountain.”
“How does Marcel do it?”
“Donkey,” Amandine replied. “Or so he says.”
She stepped on the cigarette she’d been smoking. “The crazy fucking Basque.”
Transhumance was something I’d always wanted to witness. The very word seemed to connote a peaceful communion of mankind with nature. Deciding to push my luck, I asked Amandine if there was any chance she might be willing to take me to meet Marcel.
Amandine rested a hand on her hip and squinted at me in a way that seemed to say either you’re an idiot or that’s not a bad idea.
She pulled an old flip-phone out of her pocket. She let it ring for an incredibly long time, then walked over by her van and talked animatedly for several minutes before snapping the phone shut.
“It’s your lucky day,” Amandine said. “Marcel is bringing the flock down next week. He says we can come up and help.”
I offered to pay for gas and food.
Amandine looked down at my sneakers.
“You might want to get some hiking shoes.”
BEFORE THE TRIP, I DECIDED to brush up on the Basques. From what I could glean, they and the Gascons were once essentially the same people. The words Gascogne and Basque are both believed to be corruptions of Vasconie, the name of a vaguely bordered trans-Pyrenean duchy that in the early Middle Ages split apart to become Basque Country and Gascony. The two peoples’ shared ancestors, the Vascons, spoke a strange language that predated the arrival of Indo-European tongues. Eventually the Vascons on the north side of the Pyrenees, tired of fighting off the Franks, began to hew to what would become France, content to allow their language to be Romanized into a local dialect of Occitan. Meanwhile, their beleaguered Vascon brethren closer to the mountains, beset by the Visigoths and then the Muslims and then the warring kingdoms of Spain, retreated ever further into their enclaves with their curious language and folkways, forming a sort of Vascon rump state and becoming the Basques, emerging into the world in modern times to display a penchant for pelota, nationalism, and experimental cuisine.
I’d heard Gascons refer to Basques variously as têtu (stubborn), fou (crazy), and fêtard (hard-partying), which sounded to me like Gascons on steroids. My few previous experiences with Basques, at least on the French side of the border, had borne this out. On an earlier trip to the Pyrenees, Michele and I had found ourselves in a remote village in the Pays Basque called Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry. When we asked some locals to direct us to the nearest restaurant, they invited us to a communal lunch in the salle des fêtes instead. The meal lasted five hours and included six courses, many bottles of Irouléguy wine, and shots of a sloe-infused liqueur that tasted like a cinnamon stick wrapped in a licorice whip. Children ran around the table, poking the grown-ups in the back with wooden spoons. A young Basque with a scraggly beard and a Thin Lizzy T-shirt insisted we stay the night with him and his wife. We said that we’d already paid for a hotel room nearby. At this, his friend—a chain-smoking playwright who’d told us that a Basque theater troupe had just performed one of his plays in Chino, California—waved a bunch of euros in the air. “How much?” he bellowed. “I’ll pay the cost of the hotel! How much?” We straggled out of there well after dark. Michele and I still get e-mails from the Thin Lizzy guy: “When are you coming back?”
According to Amandine, Marcel was a more complex character—têtu, yes, and a little crazy, too, but also somber and moody. She was telling me this as we rattled out of Plaisance in the direction of Pau in her cheese van, an aptly named Citroën Jumpy. After Pau, we were going to bear southwest, making for a wrinkle in the mountains called the Vallée d’Aspe. Somewhere deep in that valley, close to the border, was a village called Lescun. Once there, according to the instructions that had been conveyed to Amandine, all we had to do was ask the first stranger we saw how to find Marcel Etcheberry, and we would be pointed to the trailhead.
A word about direction-giving: It’s not that the people of rural southwestern France have an aversion to GPS, but if you live on an unnamed farm road with no numbered address—or, as the case may be, in a mountain hut—Google Maps won’t do visitors much good. This circumstance has resulted in an anachronistic flair for dispensing directions that can stray into the realm of the poetic. Here’s part of an e-mail sent to me by a Gascon winemaker I wanted to visit: “Upon leaving the route of Madiran, at the end of the great, descending way, you will find a lane on your left, opposite a small barn. Take it, and soon you will see our home: a square house of an orangish color. Next to the house will be a paddock and, in it, a donkey who answers to the name of Pencil.”
Sliding around in the back of Amandine’s van were our two backpacks, each containing a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, and provisions. Amandine had insisted on taking care of the victuals, as she knew a farmer outside Plaisance who gave her a commerçant discount on ham and pâté. I’d been taken aback by how much food she had purchased for an overnight excursion: two baguettes, two cans of pâté, another of boudin, two aller-retours of dry-cured sausage, and a small ham, plus a bottle of Armagnac and three liters of water.
“We’re never going to get through all this,” I’d said as she stuffed half of the supplies into my pack.
“You get hungry in the mountains” was her response.
As we made our way along the Tarbes trunk road, I tried to get Amandine to tell me a little about herself. She said she worked at several outdoor markets around the Val d’Adour, getting up at four o’clock in the morning to load her cheese cart and its wares into her van, which she’d bought from the old man who’d sold her his vendor’s license. On non-market days, Amandine drove into the Pyrenees to buy fresh product. About her family and her childhood, I was able to extract only the following information: She was born twenty-three years ago outside of Maubourguet, not far from Plaisance, and had a Spanish father, last name Belmonte. When I tried to inquire further, she changed the subject.
After twenty miles or so, we made a stop in a run-down village called Lahitte-Toupière.
“This’ll just take a minute,” said Amandine as we pulled up in front of a squat, flat-roofed dwelling protected by a chain-link fence. “You can stay in the van.”
A middle-aged woman came to the door. A large dog was straining to get outside; the woman held it by the collar. Amandine walked up and gave the dog a kiss. Then she cheek-pecked the woman, handed her what looked like a wad of cash, and came back to the van.
“When was that?”
“When I was twelve.” She wriggled a Marlboro out of a pack on the dashboard.
An awkward silence ensued as we drove on toward Pau. We skirted the city via a seemingly endless series of roundabouts and got on the route toward Oloron-Sainte-Marie. The Pyrenees heaved up on our left, now starkly close, ranks of gunmetal peaks melting into lush green foothills peppered with farms and settlements.
Amandine popped a Bob Marley CD into the player.
I groaned.
She looked at me sideways through aviator sunglasses. “What.”
“Why does every French person under thirty think Bob Marley is le top?”
Amandine gave a slightly sinister smile. “It’s going to be a long drive for you, my friend.”
IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON WHEN WE got to Lescun, an end-of-the-road hamlet of shingle-roofed houses clinging to the wall of a green valley just inside the French border. I got out and did as we’d been instructed, asking the first person I saw—an old lady sweeping the steps of a chambre d’hôte—if she knew where we might find Monsieur Etcheberry, the cheese maker. Without hesitation, she raised a bony arm and pointed at a quartet of needle-like peaks. “Up there.”
I pressed further, eliciting a series of hand gestures and instructions for getting to the trailhead. It took us a half hour to find it. Amandine locked the van, and we hoisted our packs and started up a muddy switchback that climbed through a forest. With twenty pounds of preserved meats on our backs, the going was slow. I hadn’t heeded Amandine’s advice about footwear, and soon mud had worked its way over the edges of my shoes.
Amandine stopped to lean against a tree, panting, probably regretting the cigarettes she’d smoked in the van.
After a while, the trees parted and the trail crossed a natural amphitheater, vast and grassy, lorded over by granite summits. We put our packs down and gazed around us, too winded to speak, though in the face of such an awesome panorama I don’t think I could have found words. I was a native of the flatlands, and being near mountains never failed to destroy utterly and exhilaratingly my sense of scale. Being in the mountains, as we now were, made me feel as if I’d left my home planet altogether.
An hour and a half later, as the sun was sinking into a saddle of gray rock above us, we emerged, bedraggled, in a boulder-strewn clearing. Before us, the terrain swooped up toward the four barren spires the old lady had pointed to earlier. Hundreds of sheep were spread out across a near-vertical slope some indiscernible distance beyond, looking like flecks of dandruff. Cottony bits of cloud drifted below the summits. Behind us, a V of two mountain walls parted to reveal ranks of smaller peaks below.
At the center of the clearing stood a steep-roofed cabin with mortared-stone walls, two tiny windows, and two wood doors. It was the most forlorn dwelling I’d ever seen. We set our packs on a table next to a stone cistern that stuck out from the cabin.
“Is this the place?” I asked.
“Has to be,” said Amandine.
Marcel was nowhere to be seen. He had told Amandine that a couple of other acquaintances of his were coming up to help herd the flock, too, but there was no sign of them, either.
I tried one of the doors. It opened to reveal a pristine cheese-making kitchen with a stainless-steel basin for curdling the milk, and a long stainless-steel table covered with circular plastic molds. Everything had been battened down for the season.
I opened the second door. The room behind it was of a different type altogether. It called to mind a frontier homestead with a touch of Unabomber thrown in. A sawhorse table was cluttered with empty wine bottles and tins of various foodstuffs. Rusted tools and cans of solvent and paint thinner blocked the steps of a wood-plank ladder leading to a pitch-dark attic. More boxes of food lined sagging shelves in a kitchenette lit by a fluorescent ring.
Back outside, I took a seat at the table across from Amandine. The sun had disappeared behind the ridge, causing the temperature to fall so fast that it felt as if the warmth were being vacuumed right out of the air. I dug around in my pack for my sweatshirt and jacket, wondering where we were going to sleep.
Presently a sound made itself heard from the trail below. It started as a distant mewl, then rose to a whine, and now became a roar. An olive-drab 4x4 burst from the trees into the clearing, kicking mud from beneath its tires and bouncing over boulders like some kind of adrenalized moon rover.
Amandine stood up. “This’ll be Marcel.”
“I guess he traded in his donkey,” I said.
The vehicle lurched to a stop next to us. Three lean dogs bounded from the flatbed. A man unfolded himself from the driver’s seat. His face was a map of creased, wind-toughened leather, with a horseshoe mustache affixed to the front and muttonchops on the sides. A mane of thick pewter-and-black hair peeked from beneath a beret. The man’s body, or at least what was discernible of it underneath the dirty beige parka he was wearing, seemed to consist entirely of sinew.
Marcel nodded a perfunctory hello to Amandine and looked at me, his eyes dark pinpricks.
“Your American made it up the mountain in one piece,” he said to Amandine.
“He did all right for a city guy,” said Amandine.
I pointed to the 4x4. “It would have been easier with one of those.”
Marcel smoothed his mustache and turned to regard the machine as if for the first time. “Eh bien, four wheels are faster than four hooves,” he said.
“Where are the others?” Amandine asked.
“They’ll be up tomorrow,” said Marcel.
He whistled to his dogs. “Let’s take a ride.”
Before I could politely decline, we were crammed elbow to elbow in Marcel’s vehicle, tearing along a—it couldn’t be called a road, or even a path. It was more of a vague horizontal tendency scratched into the wall of the mountain. Marcel’s dogs were sprinting in front of us, their tails inches from the front tires. The noise of the engine and of rocks slamming against the undercarriage made it impossible to talk. I gripped the roll bar and braced my knee against the inside of the wheel well in order to keep from being thrown into the void. Marcel didn’t seem to have a specific destination in mind, and, to my relief, before long we were approaching the cabin again, but from the opposite direction. In the time we’d been gone, hundreds of shaggy-haired ewes—presumably the ones I’d seen on the distant slope earlier—had descended into the clearing. They scattered before us as we pulled up to the cabin. Marcel killed the engine. Suddenly there was nothing to be heard but the dull clanking of sheep’s bells and an eerie, toneless chorus of maaa’s.
“Again!” Amandine said as we got out. Thankfully, it was getting dark.
We took a seat at the outdoor table and drank Ricard from chipped glasses that Marcel had rinsed in the cistern. I knocked my drink back quickly, hoping to fend off the chill and unknot my muscles. Marcel rolled a cigarette and talked with Amandine for a while about the cheese business—government regulations, supply and demand, elderly ladies who liked to taste but not buy. Amandine matched the Basque’s droopy-eyed world-weariness shrug for shrug, drag for drag. Then, Marcel’s appetite for conversation apparently sated, we sat wordlessly as the sheep, one by one, lay down for the night. I was shivering now, and increasingly haunted by the feeling that we were at the end of the earth, or the top of it, irreversibly cut off from humanity.
Finally, Marcel invited us inside. He built a fire and flipped on a clock radio, filling the room with staticky pop music. Amandine got out the food we’d brought and started carving thick slabs of ham with a fearsome Walther hunting knife she’d pulled from her pack. I was asked to open a can of pâté with my Swiss Army knife. Marcel laid the ham slices into a skillet and started frying them. Then he cracked a half dozen eggs over the ham, let them cook for a few minutes, and brought the skillet to the table along with a wedge of his brébis. W
e ate ravenously, arms darting across the table to tear off hunks of bread.
When we were finished, Marcel opened the bottle of Armagnac we’d brought and poured a round. We sat hunched over our glasses, bathed in firelight as darkness engulfed the mountain.
Marcel asked me if there was good cheese in America. I told him there was.
“I want to see the Rockies,” said Amandine, gazing into her glass, “and Nevada. Buy an old RV and drive around for a year.”
A log threw an ember onto the floor; it skittered over by an open can of mineral spirits. Marcel and Amandine took no notice.
I asked Marcel where he grew up. He thrust his chin in a northwesterly direction. “In the foothills. My older brother got the farm, and I went to the mountains. That’s how it is in Basque families.”
He poured another round of Armagnac and got up to stoke the fire.
Amandine took a sip and pushed her glass away.
“I think I want to get out of the cheese business,” she said after a while. “Sell the van and just move around with the seasons, picking crops.”
Apropos of nothing, Marcel told us he had a daughter.
“Oh, really?” I said.
“She’ll be twenty this year.”
“Does she ever visit you up here?”
Marcel scratched at some candle wax on the table with the tip of a switchblade.
“Haven’t seen her since she was thirteen.”
“Ah merde,” said Amandine softly.
Marcel flipped the knife closed and sat back in his chair. “What can you do?”
With that, he got up and said he was turning in.
“You two can sleep upstairs,” he said, pointing at the black maw in the ceiling. Then he disappeared behind a door on the far side of the room.
Amandine and I cleared away some of the junk from the ladder steps, and up we went. The frigid garret contained a bare lightbulb hanging from the center beam and two rusty metal bed frames, one next to the other. Pock-marked foam pads had been laid over the springs. We unrolled our sleeping bags and got into them wearing our clothes. I sat up and pulled the light chain. We were enveloped in blackness.
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