Following the Sun

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by John Hanson Mitchell


  This man was not quite as drunk as I took him to be, and he invited me back to his house for a glass of something. Why not, I thought, as it was clouding up and threatening rain. He ushered me into a neatly kept little cottage set at the end of a narrow dooryard garden, blooming with tulips and daffodils. The house was decorated with lace curtains and many china bric-a-brac, and my host introduced me to his civilized prim wife, who wore a frilly apron and made tea and plied me with local candies and later a tiny glass of calvados. Her husband, rumpled and half-shaven, sat politely smiling and nodding at our parlor conversation.

  They both liked Americans immensely because of the war and even had a distant cousin living in Maine. The husband would interrupt every time the word America was mentioned. “Eh, les américains. Vous savez? Pendant la guerre…” and at this he would tip his head, wink, and raise a thumb in approval. Madame prepared a little neatly wrapped packet of gâteaux for me to carry on the road, and they stood at the doorway and waved as I wheeled my bicycle down the little flower-lined stone path to the open road beyond their dooryard gate. I looked back just as I was rounding a corner and they were still there at the doorway, waving.

  After days of pedaling I managed to round Poitiers without undue nastiness and head away from the city on an old Roman road that later became the pilgrim route, and then cut away from this to back roads heading north to Chinon and the Loire Valley. Poitiers was once a lovely city, dominated by a fairy tale castle and originally the site of a monastery founded by the early Christian saint the Lady Radegonde, who later became an inspiration for the troubadour poets who wandered through this region. The city itself is pictured in the illuminated fourteenth-century calendar Les très Riches Heures for the month of July, a clustered town, jagged wilderness mountains beyond, and in the foreground farmers cutting wheat with sickles. I knew better than to visit; however, I knew that inside that city in our time were narrow gray streets much fumed with the exhaust of automobiles.

  North of Poitiers the rural France of legend resumed, an easy country of vineyards and pastures, with grazing cows and the smell of the sun on fresh-mown hay. This general district, south of Tours, the Aquitaine, the Charente, and east all the way to Provence, was the langue d’oc region in the days of the pilgrimages, a section of the world known for its music and poetry and, incidentally, for the earliest freedoms for women of the courts. Northward in the langue d’oil, the dictates of feudalism held sway, but here in the south, wandering troubadours and jongleurs entertained the populace with songs of love, dance, juggling acts, and magic tricks, much to the consternation of the church. This was the region Keats sang about in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” a country of dance and Provençal song, sun-burnt mirth, tasting of Flora and the country green.

  Poor John Keats, locked away in his northern cottage, where but to think, as he wrote, is to be full of sorrow. Those of a solar persuasion may be tempted to suggest that there is a meteorological connection between culture and light. Heavy works of art and literature, gloom, melancholy, and introspection, seem to hang over those sections of Europe that are regularly covered with a seamless pall of gray clouds for most of the winter, whereas in the south—generally speaking—in the sun-blasted sections, ecstatic dances, music, poetry of love, and revels prevail—“O for a beaker full of the warm South” as Keats wrote, “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And a purple stained mouth.…”

  No sooner did these thoughts cross my mind, however, than just north of Poitiers, the sky clouded over again and it suddenly grew colder. I forged on nonetheless, through the fields of yellow mustard and fresh green shoots of wheat, for Châtellerault and Lencoître. This was open country and a welcome relief after the endless pines of Les Landes and there were beautiful old stone châteaux and little villages with Romanesque churches and small farms set at the end of poplar-lined drives. At Châtellerault I made the mistake of staying in a youth hostel, which ended up to be an empty school, a large cavernous building of which I was the only inhabitant.

  To make up for it I treated myself to a fine meal at a restaurant on the Vienne River. The sun was setting later and later each evening now, and a green cool light was fading outside the window beside my table as I sat down to eat. The waiters were chatty and friendly and recommended the trout, which turned out to be a wise choice. While I was eating, one after another, the shells of a local club nautique winged by on the river like silent, mysterious birds. The waiter gave me a cognac on the house after hearing my stories of the road and later in the evening a whole crowd of male jokesters came in for dinner. This was some kind of comedy or humor club, and during their meal one member after another stood in front of the tables and told a long complicated joke, each one of which raised a great deal of laughter and applause. Not a word from any of them could I understand, even though my French at the time was fairly fresh. It made the evening all the more absurd.

  I returned to the empty school and spent a strange and fitful night, listening to the owl calls outside the windows and the creak of pipes, the slam of mysterious doors, and mice or rats scurrying and gnawing in the walls. At one point, I am certain, I heard footsteps approach slowly in the corridor, stop in front of my door, and then continue on to the other end of the hall, echoing as they receded.

  I woke up early and saw the benevolent red sun rising through a grove of plane trees and spreading its kindly light in golden spears across the green grounds of the school. I went out immediately and breathed in the spring air. This was almost May, birds were trilling and fluttering in the upper branches and the shrubbery, the lilies of the valley, the muguet, were blooming under the trees and scenting the air, the dew and earth were fresh, and the evils of the darkness of the Zoroastrian god Ahriman once again had been conquered by Orzmud, the god of light and goodness.

  Somewhere south of the town I had passed the northernmost border of the Moorish advance into Europe. There is a spot somewhere out in the green cow pastures that was the site of the battle at which Charles Martel inflicted the first defeat on the Moors. He couldn’t destroy their culture entirely, however, and the sung verses of the troubadours can be traced in this part of France directly to the sung verse traditions of Moorish Spain.

  Shortly after I left Châtellerault I came to a very long annoying hill. There was a thin, sheltering forest on my right where cuckoos were calling, and to my left at the top of the hill I saw a decaying château, the type of place haunted by barn owls and ghosts, and seemingly deserted. Once I gained the top of the hill I noticed the gate for this place, a canted wrought-iron, much spiked thing in the Victorian mode. A low stone wall, much beset with shrubbery and young trees, surrounded the property, the winding gravel drive was overgrown with weeds and grasses, and the line of cypress trees was unpruned. Beyond the drive, I could see the gray brown façade of the building, its long narrow windows absorbing the light of this otherwise bright May morning and staring out at me like horrid sunken eyes. I rested by the gate for a while, and then, trespasser that I am, I decided to ascend the driveway to see who was home—assuming, of course, that no one was home but the owls and the pigeons.

  The flag terrace in front of the heavy oaken door was rucked and weed grown. On either side of the terrace, the grounds fell away to the tangled briar-strewn slopes of the hill with the road beyond and, beyond that, more woods. It was a strangely deserted landscape for this part of the world, as if the plague had suddenly swept the area and no one had dared return. I stood for a while admiring the workmanship in the corbelled walls, the finely wrought spiky turrets, and the carved window frames and cylindrical towers. I meditated, as is my wont, on the sad beauty of things gone by, the rattling horse carriages that must have pulled in here and disgorged the perfumed, besilked ladies in tiny slippers, and the lecherous old seigneurs with roving eyes and gouted feet. Somewhere here on the terraced courtyard, or under the postern, I imagined d’Artagnan himself fought duels with the evil master of this place and skewered the old devil before he had his
way with the beautiful daughter of some visiting dignitary.

  This was France after all, and here I was in the heartland of the ancien régime. Maybe something of the sort did happen here. Why do we have to live always in this little prison of linear time that traps us in the current era? On the heels of these fancies, I turned back toward the drive and there at the edge of the terrace I saw what I first took for a ghost—a small wraithlike figure of a girl, about twelve years old. She was wearing a dark blue schoolgirl jumper and a ruffled white shirt, buttoned at the neck, and had on dark blue stockings. She had silky black hair, creamy skin, and black eyes, and she was holding in front of her a bouquet of wildflowers. I assumed she must be a resident of the old decaying château, but she seemed more a part of the spring woods and fields behind her, more a part of the nature than this emblem of death and decay. But she was alive, very much alive. I greeted her and she politely greeted me, and held out a muguet.

  “For you,” she said, formally.

  I must have hesitated slightly, and this and no doubt my equipage and my appearance tipped her off immediately.

  “You are not from here, are you?” she asked.

  “No, but are you from here?” I asked, jerking my head toward the château.

  “No, the town,” she said.

  Which town I wondered. I was now three or four miles outside of Châtellerault. I was about to ask when she dipped in a little curtsey and said au revoir.

  “Thank you for the flower,” I said to hold her up.

  “It is nothing.”

  “No, it is very nice.”

  “It is the custom,” she said. “This is the first of May.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, not realizing at the time that on the first of May in this part of France it is the custom to collect the muguet from the forest and give them to strangers.

  “Well goodbye again,” she said, clearly trying to get away. She walked around the back of the château and made her way down through the overgrown pastures toward the road.

  I couldn’t help but think of the fairy tale “Brier Rose” and the old brier-strewn château, the winding drive, the young princess, awakened. This image of her was encouraged by the fact that I knew someplace around here, a little farther north in the Loire Valley, there was a château that had served as the model for the story of Sleeping Beauty.

  The old folktale begins with a curse from a witch who declares that the beautiful virgin princess will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. A wise woman intervenes and alters the curse. The virgin will not die but only sleep. The king, hearing the curse, has all the spinning wheels banished from the castle. But sure enough, on her fifteenth birthday, the beautiful princess makes her way to a small tower room high in the château and there meets an old withered crone, who is working at a spinning wheel. True to the curse, the princess pricks her finger on the spindle and falls asleep. So does the whole castle. The chickens go to roost, the pigeons tuck their heads beneath their wings, the scullery maids and the cooks drift off, nodding, the horses sleep at the carriage harnesses, and the king and queen of the kingdom fall asleep on their thrones. Their whole world enters into a period of cold dormancy. A brier hedge grows over the castle and the legend of a sleeping beauty within spreads over the land. Many brave knights attempt to get through the hedge but fail. Then finally a prince arrives at the hedge. The briers flower for the first time; the hero cuts his way through and places a kiss on the lips of the sleeping princess. She awakens. And then, one by one the entire castle awakens. The hens flutter and fluff themselves up, the pigeons fly from their roosts, the scullery maids and the cooks and the king and queen arise from their deep sleep.

  In short, winter is over; the sun prince has returned to the land and awakened the virgin spring.

  Back on the road I encountered more people out for their May Day stroll. There were many bands of noisy young students who were clearly more intent on holiday making than muguet gathering, and a few gentle middle-aged folks who still believed in the old traditions. I hailed a kindly looking older couple who were emerging from the woods beside the road with bunches of flowers and asked them about the château. They knew nothing.

  “Deserted for years,” the man said. “The whole of our lives, anyway.”

  I told him about the young girl. This begat a discussion between the two of them, in short staccato patois, to no effect. They couldn’t place her, even though they seemed to know many people in the town. So I thanked them and pedaled on, thinking about this old much ghosted landscape and the legends and the rich possibilities of this strange encounter. Maybe she did come out from the spirit world.

  Traveling alone as I was, sometimes pedaling for hours at a stretch with no one to talk to, I had many opportunities to allow my thoughts to ramble, sometimes off into wild unchecked theories, such as my idea that depression, neurosis, and introspection are phenomena of sunless northern cultures whereas ecstatic, ill-considered hedonism comes out of sunny southern climates. My theory du jour was that the desert extremes of bright, hot, cloudless days, followed by black, cloudless, cold nights, month after month, year in year out, would naturally beget the concept of a singular, all-powerful deity among desert people such as the Israelites. Cultures of the forest and variable seasons and a diversity of plant and animal life, according to my theory, would develop religions that involve multiple deities.

  As I pedaled along toward the town of Richelieu, the air warmed, the fresh earth was redolent with spring perfumes, and the chaffinches and sparrows were twittering by the roadside. I stopped often, just for the sake of enjoying the French countryside—the distant islands of woods where cuckoos called, the fresh-turned fields, the rolling hills of yellow mustard and red poppies, and the long straight roads lined with Lombardy poplars and dappled shadows.

  When I lived in New England, every year, sometime in mid February, I would begin to hope for the end to winter, and every year, true to form, rather than a general warming toward spring, the weather would worsen, and I would begin to have long long thoughts of the South. By the end of the month these thoughts would coalesce into a genuine obsession, and I would begin to have dreams of the sun and green landscapes. Waking to the reality of February was always a disappointment.

  This phenomenon of cabin fever, a term invented, I believe, by the Alaskan pioneers from the lower forty-eight, may be a fairly recent development in the human story. According to a friend of mine who has spent years in circumpolar regions, it is not a phenomenon that affects the Inuit of North America, or the Saami of Finland, or other long-suffering northern native tribal peoples. Having skirted on my journeying the well-known cave-dwelling regions of northern Spain and southern France, I could not help but think of our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, who endured a season of ice that lasted for generation after generation, with hardly a summer of relief. They and their conspecifics, the Neanderthals, migrated north or south following the advances and retreats of the past three glaciations that swept over Europe, Asia, and North America. Even in the more benign later eras, they were living on the heels of the retreating ice.

  We are very fortunate indeed to be living in an interglacial period, a time in which the earth has been slowly warming as a result of the retreat of the last glacier, and an era (perhaps not incidentally) characterized as well by the rise of civilizations. In the past hundred years, however, this natural global warming has been speeded up dramatically because of industrialization. Whatever our own effect on climate may be, periodic warming and cooling trends that either melt or expand the amount of ice over the earth have been affecting the planet for more than 3.5 billion years. What is less clear is why.

  The most popular theory is that the long-term fluctuations in the volume of ice are caused by slight changes in the past of the earth’s orbit around the sun, which cause, in turn, a redistribution of the solar radiation that strikes various regions of the earth. One theory for the cause of these changes suggests that the earth’s orbit al
ters every 100,000 years or so because of the gravitational pull by other planets. This pushes the orbit from an ellipse into a more circular shape, thereby changing the areas of the earth that receive the sun’s direct rays.

  Another theory holds that the inclination of the earth to the sun changes. The earth is now tilted at an angle, but that angle changes slowly over a period of about 41,000 years so that eventually the duration of winter at the poles lasts longer. Furthermore, as the earth circles the sun, its path wobbles slightly because of the pull of the moon and the sun, which means that the poles will be tilted toward the sun at different positions in the orbit, altering the seasons. Because of these differing angles, winters could be decidedly warmer—or cooler.

  Any of these slight changes could trigger the expansion of the ice sheets. The length of winter increases, snows are heavier each season, and then finally there is no longer any summer melting, the weight of the snows increases, and with nowhere else to go, the pressure forces the ice southward. Slowly, year by year, decade by decade, millennium by millennium, the wall of ice creeps outward around the poles. Plants alter their ranges as the cold increases, birds and mammals that feed at the edge of the snowy regions migrate southward toward open areas of grazing, and on their heels the little bands of fur-clad, spear-bearing Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hunters, our direct ancestors, followed.

  The art and artifacts of these people offer a record of the changes. Warm weather species now found only in tropical regions, such as lions and rhinos, are depicted on cave walls in southern France during one period. Then images of cold-tolerant mammals, such as the woolly mammoths and reindeer, begin to appear. About eleven thousand years ago, the climate began to warm once more in southern France, the glacier retreated northward and upward to the high peaks of the Alps, and the benign deciduous forest returned to Anjou and Touraine and the landscape through which I was now so contently pedaling.

 

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