I ordered an omelette and a green salad and a glass of white wine and settled back to watch the promenade of skiers and diners. It was not an evocatively poetic site, although the open air of the terrace added a certain spice to the otherwise plain food. Alpine choughs were soaring across the slopes below the restaurant in dark, roving flocks. Some of them had collected on the roof of the restaurant and were scrounging around on the slopes behind the buildings. The skiers and diners seemed to be in near constant motion, not unlike the choughs. It was an oddly busy place given the fact that we were now as high as we would get in the Pyrénées.
Up here in this glacial wilderness, there were no green plants visible; we were stuck between black rock, white snow, and blue sky. I began to long for the green misty pastures of the lower grounds, sheep, the fostering earth, and the bands of staff-bearing pilgrims singing as they ascended the slopes to St.Jean-Pied-de-Port, their jangling bells mixing with the gong of sheep bells. Griggs was restless too.
“Let’s go,” he said, even before his requisite coffee. “Let’s leave here and drive up to Paris. Let’s get drunk and go up to Pigalle with the Italian tourists and we’ll get rolled by Algerians and fight back and get stabbed and end up in bad hospitals and get stitched up. Anything but this. We must descend into lowlands and squalor. It’s too healthy up here.”
I think I had left him alone in the bar longer than I realized, poor fellow.
Seven
Sun Song
On the following Monday, having bid farewell to my old friend, who was having such a good time that he vowed to rejoin me, I set out once more on my northern pilgrimage, following the same road I had taken out of St.-Jean-de-Luz the week before. The weather had improved, it was now warm and humid, and the back roads smelled of rich pine woods and sea air, and once more there was no wind, so the riding was easy. There was no traffic to speak of either, and I began weaving to and fro across the flat road, singing and pedaling, pedaling and singing, and thinking of Bordeaux and wine and food and half wishing old Griggsy would be there when I arrived to find good restaurants and take care of the wine orders. I did know a similar type in Bordeaux, an expatriate Englishman, but he was a poverty-stricken aspiring writer, and there would be no high living as long as I was around him. He had offered me a bed though.
Near Cap Breton I stopped in a field of clover, hid my bicycle, and walked away from the road with my usual lunch of bread, onion, sardines, and tomatoes, and found a little grove beyond the field. Butterflies were rising and settling in the clover, the hot smell of earth rose around me, and I settled down to eat and drink. No rush, no responsibilities, nowhere to go, and nothing to do but ride and eat and eat and ride. The open road, as Griggsy might say. Freedom.
After lunch I fell asleep, and when I woke up, a little old man in a beret and blue coveralls was staring at me, leaning on a cane.
“You are not of here, Monsieur?” he said in formal French.
“No, I am passing through on my way to Bordeaux actually.”
“Bordeaux,” he said disparagingly, indicating that Bordeaux was not a good place to go.
“In fact, I’m headed for Scotland,” I added.
“Scotland!” he shouted. “Why on earth would anyone want to go to Scotland. Do they have food there?”
I presumed that since the people of Scotland had been successfully breeding for more than ten centuries, they must also be feeding. I said as much, politely, in so many words, and he shook his head incredulously.
“Scotland is a long way from here. Are you on the right road?”
I was not by any means on the right road for Scotland. But I explained that I actually preferred France, so I wanted to take my time getting to Scotland. This satisfied him and he made to leave. Then he asked me if I had been in the war.
“Never,” I said. I’m not sure what war he meant, though.
“Eh, bien,” he said, and saluted me and made to leave once more. Then he came back.
“This bicycle in the bushes. It is yours?”
I said it was.
He looked back at the place where my bike was hidden.
“I had a bicycle like that once,” he said, sadly. “But times change.”
“This is true,” I said.
“It was a good bicycle.”
“So is this one; I’ve ridden a long way on this bicycle. All through southern Spain.”
He didn’t respond to this. I believe he was reliving better times on his old Peugeot. He snapped his head to the side and clucked. I was waiting for a good story. How he arranged to meet his lover by moonlight by the canal I had passed and had ridden through the pines under the brindled moonshadows of the branches, but had a flat and couldn’t make it and had walked the rest of the way, arriving at dawn to find her asleep in the woods. They had consummated their love as the sun rose above the clover fields to the east.
I waited.
Perhaps he was in the underground—he was about the right age. Perhaps he was selected by his village to carry an important message to de Gaulle’s forces who had landed nearby, blackfaced at Hossegor. He rode through the pines at midnight, slipping past the Vichy guards. Some became suspicious and gave chase, but he pulled off and hid in the shrubbery until they passed, then resumed his mission.
I waited.
“Was a good bicycle, mine,” he said.
“How so?”
“Just good.”
Silence.
“Every day I ride to the bakery and get the bread.”
“Hmm.”
“Now I am too old to ride.”
“Were there any Nazis down here?” I asked. It was a dangerous question; he could have been a Vichy collaborator for all I knew.
“No. No Nazis, not here.”
He stared in the direction of the bicycle.
I offered him some cheese and a sip of wine, but he said he must be off. So I collected my things and walked back across the pasture with him to the bicycle, hoping he would begin talking. But he only stared down at me as I packed everything up.
“Where are you headed, though?” he asked.
“Scotland.”
“Ah, oui, Scotland. That cold country.”
Leaning on his cane, he watched me ride off. I hate missing stories, I’m sure he had one, but I had to get to Scotland.
For the next two or three days I rode on along the coast, passed Vieux-Boucau and on to St.-Julien-en-Born, where I spent the night. This was a flat country of endless pines, with occasional lumbering operations and sections of forest where the locals were tapping the trees for turpentine. Little sulphur butterflies, pearl crescents, and coppers were fluttering at the roadside, and there were periodic clearings where I could rest in the sun, sedated by the hot smell of pine. There was still no traffic at all and I resumed entertaining myself by weaving to and fro on the empty road and singing loudly. Once, thinking myself alone, riding on in this manner, no-handed, declaiming and shouting and weaving, I glanced over into the woods and saw a group of timber cutters resting on the ground, smoking, white handkerchiefs tied on their heads like bathing caps. They stared at me incredulously.
I grabbed the bars and rode on, subdued.
At St.-Julien-en-Born I found a small pension with a tiny courtyard and a private entrance to my room. The night was warm and sultry, there was a crescent moon between the tree limbs, the crickets were singing, and a periodic breath of wind rolled into the little room carrying the odor of the night fields and raising the lace curtains sensuously. I fell asleep to the sounds of the countryside and dreamt I was home on a little porch bedroom where I used to sleep in the summers at my family’s place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Around twelve or one in the morning I was awakened by a beautiful warbling song just outside my window. The song consisted of a series of sultry trills and eerie, fluted whistles that bubbled along, built to a crescendo, halted briefly, and then started all over again. It was a song I had read about all my life, but had never actua
lly heard—the long sad complaint of the fabled nightingale. This bird would sing softly for a while, then stop, then start again, and as I listened a phrase came to me: “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.…” I lay awake trying to remember who wrote the lines. I attempted to summon up Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” but all I could come up with was “already with thee, tender is the night” and “O for a beaker full of the warm south,” and something about light-winged dryads of the trees. Quandaries of this sort can keep one up all night if you let them and I was soon swept into a wakeful review of world literature involving nightingales, beginning with the sad story of Procne and Philomela, two beautiful sisters who ended up as birds, Procne as a swallow and Philomela as the nightingale.
I thought of Juliet and Romeo arguing over the birdsongs at the end of their fateful night together, the harmonious madness of Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s drowsy owls and nightingale, swan song’s, and gull mew, and Anglo-Saxon gannet cries, and on and on into the night.
It was a fine night for no sleep, however. The warm air, the smell of the vegetation, and the languorous song of the literary nightingale were entrancing, but I realized I’d be awake all night if this kept up and tried to banish Keats and the dryads, and all of the warm south. Every time I would start to drift off, the nightingale would start up again, I would wake, and my reveries would continue.
There are not many birds that sing by night—the loon of North American lakes, the mockingbird, and of course owls. In Europe the nightingale is the most famous nightsinger, although the sedge warblers and even the skylark will sound off periodically. Unfortunately, this beautiful singer is rarely found anymore in England, except in the south.
The disappearance of the legendary singers, such as the loon and the nightingale, and the decline of the full-throated dawn choruses of North America and Europe are some of the saddest losses brought on by the multifarious environmental ills that beset the modern world. Birds still try to sing at dawn, of course, but any older person who has lived in the country or well-aged suburbs will tell you that they don’t sing as fully as they used to. And yet birdsong was once the essence of poetry. The nightingale alone could fill pages of critical analysis.
Birds don’t think of poetry when they sing, of course. They are thinking nasty thoughts, like “War” or “Territory” or “Sex.” But if indeed they are considering the matter at all, they are also thinking “Light.”
Although birds call and make noise throughout the year, most do not sing in winter. They reserve the organized combination of notes they produce to attract mates, identify and broadcast their territorial boundaries, and advertise themselves as good mates for spring, the mating season. And in the birdly mind (actually in the birdly gonads), spring begins on their winter grounds with the increasing sunlight, as early as February.
Ornithologists have conducted elaborate and detailed studies of the role of light in the inducement of song, one of them undertaken by the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold, who, using a sensitive photometer, measured the relationship between morning song and light intensity. He uncovered some interesting but logical facts about birdsong. For example, a cloudy dark dawn will delay the onset of singing, and a bright moon will start birds singing sooner. Other naturalists have documented the fact that different species begin singing at different times as the dawn light increases, a fact that was well known to those in the past who lived closer to nature than we do. Even in so crowded a place as sixteenth-century Verona the residents were familiar enough with the different hours at which birds would begin singing to tell time by the song. We know this, or can guess at it, because Romeo and Juliet knew by means of birdsong when their night together was coming to an end. Romeo thinks he hears the lark and dawn is breaking. Juliet says it was the nightingale, and that it is not yet day. Romeo persists, and then they see the streaks of light lacing the clouds in the east. The song of the nightingale has ended. The lark begins to sing and their night of love has come to an end.
(They also knew a thing or two about resounding metaphors: “It is the east,” Romeo opines, “and Juliet is the sun!”)
There is a schedule, more or less, of birdsong, even after the first light. Robins start off the dawn chorus in North America; they begin singing as soon as they wake up. European robins delay their singing by a few minutes. The European blackbirds wait even longer, and the chaffinches longer still. It all reverses at dusk, and some of the most beautiful songs, such as those of the wood thrush and the veery, emerge from the mystery of the North American eastern forests long after the sun has set.
If ever there is any question as to the role of light in birdsong, one has but to spend time in the field during an eclipse. The year before I left on my solar transit, there was a full eclipse of the sun around three in the afternoon. I went out as the light began to fade and noticed all around me the onset of bird calling, chirping robins, cardinals whistling sadly, titmice sounding off, and the little “phoebe” whistles of the chickadees. The calling and singing continued as the moon crossed the sun and the darkness increased. Then, for about eleven minutes, the woods were quiet as night. As the sun slowly reappeared, the calling began again.
It was an eerie event, the first time I had ever been in a full eclipse, and it was not only the birdsong that created the bizarre natural environment but also the strange, ghostly light hanging over the woods and fields, a haunted coppery dusk at three in the afternoon.
Up to that time, all I knew about eclipses was a scene from some old racist jungle movie in which the captive white explorer, who is about to be burned at the stake and eaten by the restless natives, knows that an eclipse is about to occur and orders the sun to disappear just before the fires are lit. Terrified, the natives free him. He then commands the sun to return and is declared a god.
Experiencing the real thing, I could understand why so rare an event as the disappearance of the sun, or even the moon, would cause consternation among preliterate people. Many elaborate rituals evolved during eclipses to encourage the sun to return. In North America, the Ojibway people used to shoot flaming arrows at the sun to rekindle it, and one of the northwest tribes, the Chilcotin, would desert their huts, pack up for a long journey, and then circle the village as if traveling, thus encouraging the sun on its passage through the eclipse.
In the past, much of the magic and the sky observation and the development of astrology and, later, astronomy began as a means of predicting eclipses. In the earliest eras of civilization, astronomers in both China and the Near East had worked out the astronomical schedules by which eclipses occurred and were able through their record keeping to announce the event. Part of the power of the priestly classes sprang from this nearly incomprehensible ability.
The next day I rose late, took a café au lait with a few hunks of buttered bread with jam, and then rode at a leisurely pace through the pines toward Arcachon. By late afternoon I came to the Dune of Pilat, a vast mountain of sand, much dominated by tourists, but relatively clear at the time since it was still off-season. I climbed the dune, sat there watching the sea, scanning Cap Ferret on the other side of the bay, and decided to push on, feeling more and more crowded by summer houses and tourist shops and roads. It was clouding up now, and a little colder, and by the time I got to Arcachon it was raining, so I found a small hotel, docked my bike, and made the best of it, although there is nothing sadder than a summer resort area, off-season, in a cold rain. I went to a restaurant and tried to drown my sorrows with Arcachon oysters and hot fish soup, but it didn’t work. I needed Griggsy and his long drunken discourses.
It was still raining the next day, but I set out through the now seemingly dreary pines for Pyla, pedaling along amidst the whir of passing cars and trucks. By the time I got to the town it was sheeting down and I stopped in a café to warm up. There was no apparent rural road to Bordeaux on the map, and I knew from previous experience that the land between the coast and the city was flat and tedious and
that approach to the city itself was a hideous termite nest of ugly roads. So, taking a cue from my Madrid experience, I called my friend and told him I was taking the train to town that afternoon. He gave me directions from the station and said he would try to prepare an evening meal.
When I had first come to Europe as a young and innocent student, I had spent a few months in Nice and had fallen in with a crowd of fellow student vagabonds from various parts of the globe who would collect every day in a small café on a back street and eat each night in a cheap restaurant run by a fat man with a pet rabbit named Doudoule, who ranged freely among the tables begging salads. Derek was one of the group, a rather lost fellow who was working on his novel (nothing rare about that, it should be said, everyone was working on a novel, including me). Sad soul that he was, this Derek had somehow attracted his opposite, a lively, blue-eyed girlfriend from Paris named Geneviève, who accompanied him everywhere. They were forever splitting up and then getting back together, and when Geneviève moved to Bordeaux, Derek, like a loyal dog, had followed. She commanded him to live apart, however, and found new company.
Derek’s quarters in Bordeaux were actually far better than those he had had in Nice. It was a narrow, somewhat dark little spot with a courtyard and a tiny kitchen, but a warren of small bedrooms upstairs, where I was escorted by the shuffling Derek, who greeted me wearing slippers and a bathrobe, even though it was four in the afternoon.
“Sleep here,” he commanded, pointing to a narrow palette on the floor.
Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides Page 13