Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  It’s a failure that, perversely, could be a harbinger of potential success.

  ‘Whether it works in the grand scheme … we don’t know. We know that’s what the plan was, and what we thought the outcome of the plan for the first phase was gonna be … Well, that was accurate.’

  And so now Joe is sitting up here in the Parador honing his endurance form, burning off a bit of excess weight and doing, well, nothing. Apart from the intensive riding and the team-building, the other beneficial part of altitude training is the focus, something Joe thinks is often underestimated: ‘It’s the intangible part of altitude training,’ he says. ‘You can look at the physiological impact, or what you can do on the bike – you can get a lot of climbing done, or whatever. But also, how much of the improvement comes because you’re somewhere where there’s nothing else to do but ride your bike? You’re not utilising any energy towards anything else, it’s just riding.’ Eat well, sleep well, rest well. Follow your plan to the letter, don’t even go to the shops, pay any bills, lift a finger to do the washing-up like everybody has to at home. In bed by 9.30 and then up for another day’s dedication. It’s a spot of time – a well of tranquillity, focus and belief that can be drawn upon in the struggles to come. I do not mention the grandstand finish on Bonette for my book because, while everything is relaxed, the atmosphere is intense and serious. There is something monk-like still in pro cyclists’ pilgrimage to Teide.

  I wake up the next day and, not having a bike, go for an early morning run. Outside, the air is cold and the sun is not quite up and Astana are lined up next to the hotel doing calisthenics in the blue dawn. I set off as they are finishing their star jumps and stride past them with purpose, hoping to make an athletic impression. Quickly this collapses. The sound of my breathing increases, takes over, becomes ragged, and before I’m out of sight what I am doing is visibly less of a run than a slow jog. Ten minutes later, on a slight incline on the trail I am following, I think about stopping. Five minutes after that, I stop for a breather. I am gasping. It’s easy to underestimate the altitude effect because few of us get the chance to stay in places like this. Usually when I’m riding my bike at these lofty heights I’ve had to ascend from the valley below, so when I get to 2,000 metres I have, say, 10 kilometres uphill already under my belt and it’s natural to be out of breath, which masks the altitude’s effect. But when you start at 2,150 metres you can tell straight away that altitude is no joke. It increases my admiration for the guys currently showering or at the breakfast buffet. Doing anything up here is extremely hard. For those of us not used to it, even a slow shuffling jog is a smashfest. It gives me maybe a tiny glimpse of the form that is needed to race up here.

  On that long straight road in the half dark the mountain is an echo chamber that amplifies and clarifies thought, and I think of the efforts all these riders are making – in the gym over the winter and here on Teide – and that old quote from Muhammad Ali comes to mind: ‘The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.’

  The Parador experience has been slightly boring and strangely compelling and enlightening all at once, but the isolation is getting a bit much. My final day is Joe’s rest day, and we had planned to take the cable car to the top of the volcano, like tourists. Though it doesn’t take you right to the top of the cone, it would certainly be higher than the Cime de la Bonette’s summit at 2,860 metres, and therefore definitely would be the highest place I have ever been. But Joe has been stranded on the island above the clouds for more than 10 days, and doesn’t feel the need to get higher. So we decide to go down instead to a bodega in a local town, where we eat tapas – tuna-stuffed pickled peppers, chickpea and potato stew and thinly sliced local pork – and watch normal people, Spaniards, tourists, doing normal things in the sun. Then it’s time for me to go, and I drive him back up to complete his altitude work. A mystic science that is oddly suited to this harsh, otherworldly desert. An act of faith that may only be repaid, weeks later, in the crucible of a Grand Tour ascent.

  Chapter 9

  COUNTING SHEEP

  Or, mules and helicopters, thinking like a mountain and the still point of the turning world

  I went to the top of the Bonette once to watch the sun go down, taking a hunk of bread and a large ripe tomato, which, having no knife, I ate like a peach, leaning forward so the juices did not fall on my jersey; plus some saucisson and Comté cheese, all bought at the tiny shop in the village. I went up there towards the end of summer, as the seasons were shifting and the days shortening, just to watch the light stealing from the world. A week hence it would be 10 minutes earlier, and so decline until the equinox, the perfect balancing of day and night. And then it would not be long until the snows came. At 2,800 metres the snow does not disappear until very late in the year, and a little can persist year-round in pockets and hollows on the northernmost faces.fn1 At those altitudes time is elastic, the summer is compressed and the seasons are out of sync, always being pulled forward or back to midwinter. Spring tarries, is held back, back, back and then is propelled in a shining rush through summer headlong into autumn; no sooner has the snow cleared than winter storms back in.

  It is quiet at the top of the Cime when I arrive, and perfectly bare of snow, only a young couple there who soon leave. And then nobody, the odd solitary car far below, announced from afar by its headlights winding slowly up through the gathering gloom and then slowly winding down again. There is a clear view through 360º at the summit, and I sit on the painted panorama table that names the peaks and eat, and write, and watch the day end. There are no trees this high up, only sparse Alpine pastures and, where the land steepens, scree slopes that parabola into vertical rock faces. The clouds are soft as watercolours and are turning the colour of bruises, pink into purple into dark blue, final shafts of sunlight arrowing through the cracks. Soft, soft light touching the flanks of the mountains, a painted background to a Technicolor film. Distant reliefs fade, become silhouettes, and the pale concrete of the Second World War bunkers that litter the desolate ridges starts to shine. The silver thread of a stream picked out in the last rays. As the sun disappears it takes with it first the reds, then the pinks and yellows, leaving cold greens, dark blues, grey. Below, a van draws up and an old man gets out. He stands at the side of the road, surveying a flock of sheep in the steep bowl of the valley beneath the road, appears to talk a moment or two with the last of the travellers passing by. Marmot whistles float across the depths. The land darkens still, but where I am sitting, suspended between heavens and earth, shares the light of the sky, as if you have almost left the world behind and become celestial. It is incredibly peaceful. No shouting in the night but a vertigo, an unravelling of self in the face of the gigantic presence of the mountains below and the capacious vacuum all around. I think of a line from the British landscape writer Edward Thomas: ‘The earth is like an exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the great act in the sky.’

  Low baaing and the gentle tinkle of bells interrupt the silence. There are in fact, two herds, one of sheep, one of sheep mixed in with goats, being driven down opposite sides of the col into the gloaming. The Bonette is a watershed: on the south side the Tinée falls into the Var and heads for the sea directly south at Nice, while water to the north heads almost to Gap, then into the Rhône and doesn’t reach the Mediterranean before the salt marshes of the Camargue, the other side of Marseille. The flocks may as well be descending into different worlds. I leave my perch and climb down the mound to try to talk to the shepherd, but by the time I get there he is gone. Only the distant sound of bells and sheep droppings on the road remain. It is too cold now to stay high, and as I descend the earthly darkness accretes around me. Soon it is almost black, but underneath the abandoned barracks of the Camp des Fourches I see another shepherd. Rarely do you see them in the day, but now the tourists and cyclists have left, it is as if the old ways are reclaiming the mountain.
He is guiding his sheep across the road, directing two small black dogs with a series of whistles. The sheep have passed, and taken water from, a series of log-hewn troughs, timeworn conduits for a small mountain stream made just for that purpose, which would be almost invisible if you didn’t know what you were looking for. This I see as I have stopped my descent once again, leaving the car in the middle of the road, and take off on foot behind him, walking across an ancient landscape that is melting into the night.

  When you leave the road you realise how narrow the experience is upon it. A road is a cut across the contours, a routing via the easiest passages to the top and over, and that is what we cyclists fix on. But the mountain is not linear, and – unlike cyclists – the shepherds’ goal is not to overcome but to live on, and with, the mountain. And it may seem to be stating the obvious but you realise too that those spaces between the wet spaghetti of the tarmac aren’t just ‘there’. Almost all bear the imprints of people, and animals, and people and animals. The terraces stepping up the sides of the valleys, now mostly overgrown but formerly planted with kitchen gardens or chestnut trees; those moss-covered stones, the remnants of a wall, the once seemingly featureless slopes actually criss-crossed by irrigations and divagations, streams, troughs and animal paths. However wild they look, there is little that has not been touched in these wildernesses we cycle through.

  I missed my shepherd that day. The sheep and dogs were moving quickly and my feet were not as sure as his, and I did not want to surprise him out of the night at this, the last testing moment of his day. I also felt out of place, and was wary of setting off on foot through the high mountain meadows, even though the road was shining in the moonlight and the hamlet of Bousiéyas twinkled security below. The shepherd melted into the night and was gone.

  It was also at dusk, the dusk of an early summer in a previous year, that I first encountered the shepherds of the Bonette. I was driving over the top in a rented car and was feeling apprehensive that the road, not long open, would be dangerous or frosty at its highest extremity, when I hit a large and improbable traffic jam. This was good in one sense. A solo drive up a cold mountain at dusk is disquieting, and at least now I was assured of companions on this road less travelled. It was also annoying. The evening rush hour brought to a standstill on a lonely mountain. Soon the cause became clear: a vast flock of sheep being herded up the road. It was the transhumances,fn2 the age-old movement of livestock from the valleys and plains where they pass the winter to the mountainside pastures where they spend the summer.

  Probably, if you’ve cycled in the Alps or the Pyrenees, you’ve encountered some of these flocks wandering over the roads too. Raising livestock has been one of the main ways of life in the mountains for centuries, and in most of the southern Alps and Provence, where much of the land is unsuitable for cows, this has principally meant sheep. Cheese and milk from those less nomadic flocks; and wool and, latterly, meat, for those that undertake the transhumances.fn3 Alpine pastures and the fast-growing, seasonal grasses that thrive there can have as much nutritional goodness as the finest fields on the plains; they are a huge resource available for only a few months a year, and it has long been the shepherd’s job to seek out the best pastures, to make the fattest, healthiest sheep – and the most money – wherever these pastures may be. Such is the importance of the trade that legal documents survive from the Middle Ages, scrupulously recording and controlling the industry. Towns and villages were born and grew rich on processing the wool, making and selling the cheese and holding the fairs at which the sheep were bought and sold. Some of the sheep movements shared the roads with the salt trade (on the various routes du sel and vie del sale, depending on which side of the border you were), one of the complex interdependencies that has sustained life in these mountain regions for centuries. And some of this salt, in fact, was given to the sheep, since sheep in the mountains must have it added to their diet to survive. It is poured out onto flat rocks every day or so for them to lick up, and during the estives, the summer journey up to the high pastures, shepherds transport hundreds of kilos with them to the cabins that, for up to four months, will be their homes.

  It’s not only salt that’s transported: there’s also beans and pasta and cooking oil; firewood, gas bottles, batteries, troughs, anything they might need in this time, because once they are there they cannot leave the flocks for more than a few hours, if at all, and everyone down in the valleys will be busy making hay for the winter. The transport used to be solely by mule and it would take multiple trips to and fro to stock up fully. Now it’s mainly achieved by helicopter drops, which are subsidised by the regional council, but there are still some mules employed, to take provisions from where the last 4 × 4 track ends or between huts as the grazing moves. Each shepherd knows his pastures, and travels between June and October (when the hivernailles, the winter descent, takes place) in a circular route from low to high and back down again, so that the sheep attack the juiciest grass first and give the most elevated pastures time to defrost completely and for the grass to grow.

  The sheep get a lift up too. In olden times they would have been walked for several days along the roads from the coast, but the proliferation of dual carriageways and other non-sheep-friendly aspects of civilisation means that they now ride most of the way in trucks. For the final few kilometres they are usually still driven in the traditional way, with dogs and by foot, and that’s why we were waiting on Bonette. The sheep had been dropped at the bridge at the bottom and were heading up for their summer holidays. Eventually, we reached the hamlet of Le Pra, where the shepherds waved us down a side road that would let us all overtake, and we left the sheep and their estives behind.

  A couple of years later and the flocks are again stopping traffic – it is a feature of life in the mountains – this time at the local shepherds’ festival in Tende, a town made rich by salt some two valleys away from the Bonette. It is August and it is the saint’s day of St Roch, patron saint of the local shepherds,fn4 and the bells that presage the traffic-stopping begin pealing as I stand in front of a huge copper cauldron of milk heating over a wood fire, watching a strapping lady, bicep-deep in the steaming vat, heap coagulated cheese curds onto what looks like a giant tambourine held by a boy next to her. It is not actually a tambourine, but a cheese cloth; however, musical accompaniment is provided by a band of men in traditional shepherd’s attire of black waistcoats and elaborately ruffed shirts. One has a drum in the crook of his arm that he is hitting with a curved stick (the skin of the drum is presumably a sheep’s), and the others pipe-and-bag instruments that look suspiciously like Scottish bagpipes. There are Celtic overtones and a certain amount of chaos, and the resulting mix of percussion and drone is something of a mash-up between a Highland fling and a free party circa 1999. A group of old ladies sit close by, seemingly unperturbed. They too are wearing traditional dress, white petticoats and long dresses with embroidered fronts, and they chat and laugh as they take raw wool from a big pile on the ground and spin it into yarn on wooden spinning wheels. There is cheese. Lots of cheese. And also clogs, other things fashioned out of olive wood, a fair amount of porchetta and pasta,fn5 and that acme of typical mountain fayre, a giant paella.

  Earlier in the day the Brotherhood of St Roch, which tends sheep and gives charitable help to local shepherds, had processed a statue of the saint through the streets, blessed it and then given thanks in a church service, but this is the main event. Even though it is August and the transhumant sheep are still in the high pastures, there are enough lowland dairy sheep and shepherds to make a ceremonial commotion. To the sound of 50 people ringing giant sheep bells on the flower-adorned balconies of the Italianate town hall, a small herd is driven along the main road under the massed ranks of the houses that cling to the steep flank of the mountain. Behind the sheep, an oompah band and 20 dancers following the bobbing short-tailed behinds – men in waistcoats, white shirts and red sashes, and women in long dresses and colourful scarves, twirling up the road
towards Italy. And behind them, behind a police escort, a large contingent of the San Remo Harley & Flowers motorbike gang. Big, squat men in half-helmets and shades on big, squat low riders. They advance at idle speed in front of the traffic and even at low revs almost drown out the band. The flock is directed down a side street, the dancers leave the road and the bikers open their throttles, and in a wave of noise and exhaust, the old-time celebrations are swept away.

  Later that year I went to another shepherds’ festival, in a village called Belvédère, one valley closer to the Bonette. This one was more real, in a way, in that it was celebrating the return of the bergers from the high pastures.fn6 But there was also more cheesemaking (and a lot more cheese) and more handicrafts, including a stall run by a former Parisian couturière who had left the City of Lights for the country and now made small models of shepherds’ huts in her spare time. Each was presented on a slate, and, with their wells and little buckets, and mini fruit trees laden with tiny fruit, they were undeniably pleasing in a twee kind of way. Upon further inquiry it transpired that all the model huts were imaginary, save for one, the most detailed, which had been bought by the mayor and which depicted an actual hut in a valley above the village. That hut was iconic (for French people at least): it that had been used in the filming of Belle et Sébastien. Belle et Sébastien, if you didn’t know, was a famous TV series about an orphan who is rescued by a shepherd and who befriends a giant, shaggy white mountain dog called Belle. It begat a Japanese children’s anime series in the 1980s, and a floppy-haired Scottish indie band in the ’90s – either of which might ring more bells than the TV series – but mention the original to any French person of a certain age and it is a sure thing they will go misty eyed at the memory of the poor orphan and his faithful friend. But Pyrenean mountain dogs – or patous, as they are known by shepherds – have a serious side, as the mayor was about to explain. Despite his penchant for mountain kitsch, he too had a serious side. He passed through the crowd like a gangster, in an ill-fitting black suit, flanked by policemen with tall hats and big bellies overhanging their dress uniforms. ‘We won’t keep you long, the priority is to get to the bergers,’ he said, before launching, with the help of some other regional officials, into a lengthy and wide-ranging elegiac discourse that lasted several tens of minutes.