The Joy of High Places

by Miller, Patti

  The singing felt like a random gift at the beginning, like a talisman, but it was unsettling to be back in Carcassonne. Anthony and I had come here with our boys more than ten years ago, when we were living and working in Paris. They were grown young men then, but still single. I had felt such love for them, and some sadness, sensing that this would be the last time we were together before they fell in love with others. I remember the week we stayed in that cold stone house near Carcassonne we all read Louis de Bernières’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which, at the end, jumps forward many decades. I remember hating the leap forward to a time when the lovely young ones were old. Why didn’t the writer leave them in the time of endless love and youth?

  Next morning I waited on the Pont Vieux, the bridge over the Aude where the walk began. I stood for a moment, feeling the pack sitting lightly on my hips, poles in one hand, feet on the cobbles. Anthony took a photograph on his phone. There was a certain anxious determination to my stance; I’d had a virus that wouldn’t go away for the ten weeks before – not serious, but wearing – and I had lost fitness and confidence. I had thought I might have to pull out, but then the ‘Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway’ response had kicked in. A dose of blind, unreasonable determination can come in handy at times. I did my pared-down packing ruthlessly: one change of clothes with extra socks and underpants, sheet bag, small towel, raincoat, a combined sun-block moisturiser, phone, GR 78 Topoguide, compass, notebook and pen.

  For the first few hours the path led along the Aude and through the suburbs and villages surrounding Carcassonne. The medieval walled cité rose romantically against the sky behind, but ahead the bitumen and concrete footpaths passed suburban homes. The thrill of beginning subsided under the weight of neat fences and gardens and pink-ochre houses. The wriggling worm of ‘Why am I doing this?’ surfaced briefly, but then came the release of vineyards and sunflower fields on either side of the path.

  The vines were heavy with black grapes, just before harvest, and the sunflowers were huge brown-seeded disks, some as large as dinner plates, heads bowed in final obeisance to the sun. The world started opening out to me. I saw a gold and white butterfly with blue points on its wings clinging to a blade of grass in the strong breeze; men collecting small white snails into plastic sacks; stripped wheatfields that reminded me of childhood: straight furrows, yellow stalks, clods of earth. Mint and yarrow grew everywhere along the side of the path. Old fig trees dropped black fruit and I ate the warm figs. There were almond trees too, old and gnarled, but the almonds were too hard to crack, even with the help of a rock.

  There was no-one else walking that day, nor the day after, although there were hoofprints, neat horseshoe shapes in the dust, in front of us. At one point the Topoguide instructed ‘serpenter au milieu du vignoble’ and so I happily snaked through the middle of the vineyards. Large, tight bunches of grapes begged to be picked and eaten. I gathered a few for lunch and, sitting on a grassy hillside eating bread and grapes, I couldn’t help thinking of the Holy Communion of childhood.

  In those days I knelt at the altar rail, eyes closed, tongue stuck out, waiting for the round wafer of bread and a sip of wine from the chalice. It was a mystery, the story of the bread and wine being actually the body and blood of Jesus. It didn’t make any sense, but I tried to believe it anyway. Transubstantiation, a word I’ve known since I was seven when I made my first Holy Communion, explained that while it still looked like bread and wine, the miracle of the priest saying words over it had changed it into the ‘real presence’ of God. It was no wonder my rational brother rebelled at the nonsense of it. And in my turn, so did I. Yet now, I love the far-fetched nature of the narrative I’d been asked to believe – that a God could be ordinary food and that I could consume Him.

  Anthony and I stayed at a convent in Fanjeaux that night, a vast series of rooms inhabited now by only three nuns. An elderly woman served us dinner and breakfast with silent care. Earlier in the afternoon I had seen her acting as a guide in the local thirteenth-century Gothic church that had a display of highly wrought church vestments, woven with gold and silver threads and embroidered with mystical patterns.

  Here in this quiet town, the local villagers and nobility in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had rejected such displays of material riches and, along with it, the power of the Church. They were Cathars, who advocated and practised a return to the simplicity and humility of Jesus, to truly follow in his footsteps. The Church saw this rejection of its authority as heretical and sent St Dominique to gather the villagers back into the fold. The following year, 1207, an oratory ‘duel’ was arranged between the future saint and the Cathar bishop. At the end, there was a judgment by fire – both men were to throw their words into the flames. As might be predicted in this story, the words of the Cathar bishop were consumed by the flames and St Dominique’s flew out of the fire intact and floated to the ceiling.

  I read the story out to Anthony as we sat in the convent garden drinking beer out of a thermos. There were more stories from other millennia: in the early first century AD there had been a Roman temple here dedicated to Jupiter; in the fourteenth century the town was burned to the ground by the Black Prince. Did any of the stories mean anything now?

  The short Filipina nun who had let us into the convent trotted past, looking curiously at our thermos. Anthony picked up his phone and read aloud from WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn; I had read it before and knew its richness and depth, its flooding darkness. At first it seemed the wrong choice to be a walking companion, with its dissections of decay and horror of every kind, but soon it became clear that it was weaving a necessary dark thread in the bright physical day of walking. The sun was hot in the convent garden, there were roses and bees and butterflies, and Sebald was leading me into the blackness of colonialism in the Belgian Congo.

  As we walked out early the next morning, light caught a plane tree and transformed it. Behind it was a petrol station and, beyond that, the town of the Romans and Cathars and St Dominique and the Black Prince was still asleep.

  It was the third day of walking and the first day the Pyrénées appeared, as if a painter had just got around to blocking them in. They filled the distant horizon with clear blue lines of jagged peaks all that long day of walking. Their clarity reminded me of Barney’s paintings, as if they had been created with scientific precision. No moody interpretation here; the splendid facts were enough. The map indicated the mountains were 40 or 50 kilometres away, but they felt like a guiding arm lying across the landscape, shepherding me along.

  The path led through more fields of stalky wheat and heavy-headed sunflowers, through shifting coins of light in a birch wood, past stony hamlets and farm machinery and hedgerows, and across a meadow where the path was delineated by looped wire to stop us tramping all over the farmer’s pasture. Along the hedgerows, orange and black butterflies rose as Anthony walked ahead of me and, beneath my boots, the horse’s hooves clip-clopped their exact journey. I began to look out for her prints – I thought from the beginning she was a mare – noting where she had picked her way down a slope, and where she slipped sideways a little in the mud as she came up out of a stream. The morning sun touched lightly. I felt a blossoming warmth arise in my chest and flow out into my limbs.

  ‘I think I know how to walk at last,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the morning bliss,’ said Anthony.

  We had both been walking long enough to know the pattern. The first two hours were blissful, body and soul glowing; the second few hours were solid accomplishment; the last two or three shifted between silent endurance and snappy irritation. There was no point in being romantic about it. All the same, my body was finding its strength after the weeks of illness: back straightened, leg muscles stretched, arm muscles strengthening with each pull of the walking poles.

  A week into walking, the horse’s hoofprints disappeared. After the market town of Pamiers, the path became steeper and rougher and I wondered if the horse’s journey had ended because it
was too tough, or whether it had kept going but we were too far behind now and the prints had disappeared. We were swerving southwards into the foothills of the Pyrénées; it was going to be hard walking from now on. I had pasted an altitude profile of the whole 500 kilometres into my notebook before I left home and most of the profile looked like a child’s drawing of dramatically spiky mountains.

  Between Pamiers and Montégut-Plantaurel there were two peaks marked. The path became narrower, steeper, rockier, up through chestnuts, beeches, oaks, robinia, then beeches again, and then pines and firs with green mossy feet. Legs stretched upwards, arms pushed down on the poles, balanced, reached the next rock, stretched up again. I was beginning to feel like some sort of mountain creature: a goat, or even a monkey. The day was hot and I had to drink water often. When I stopped to pee, I dug a hole with the heel of my boot and covered it over afterwards, cat-like. Only disturbed earth and leaf litter was left.

  And then the serried, snow-covered peaks of the Pyrénées appeared again, brilliant white with deep blue shadows, and stopped me in my tracks. I realised the peaks we had seen on the third day were only the first rung of the mountains, a mere hint of the fierce country beyond. We were much closer now. The snowy peaks glittered dramatically against the sky like a postcard image, but I knew about mountains. Mont Blanc had taught me respect. It felt as if I were re-meeting a beautiful friend who had made me afraid.

  The path had turned southwards, heading towards the range, but in the next valley the peaks disappeared again. I found myself longing for them each time I climbed upwards, the brief glimpse, the reward, before the path plunged down again. Then in another few hours, stretching and struggling upwards, rounding the curve of the slope and there they were again, another glimpse. It was like walking a labyrinth, coming close to the source, to being able, nearly, to touch beauty, and then being swung away again, losing sight of it altogether, way out on the edge, remembering only that there once had been a moment of revelation.

  I thought about writing during this day and the next days as the path kept heading south and the mountains were closer, clearer with each glimpse. Before I left I had been working every day on setting down my brother’s stories. He had already given me everything I needed, answered every question in fine detail, shown me not just a bird’s-eye view, but a bird knowledge of air and wind and clouds. I saw hawks often as I walked, and an eagle once, and each time I thought of him. How his shoulder and chest muscles must stretch, how he had overcome a natural human inclination to keep his feet on the ground, and how none of his skill or methodical nature saved him from the random havoc of a small whirlwind. The hawks circled above high meadows and woods in their domed 360-degree world, in which I was of less interest than a field mouse and in no way necessary.

  Days became harder and longer. The swing southwards had taken the path into the Hautes-Pyrénées region, up over passes, descending into deep ravines and scrambling back up again. On the twelfth day, as we walked towards Juzet-d’Izaut, the path at one point was so narrow I could only put one foot in front of the other. It traversed a long slope above the tree line, so steep that any misstep would have meant a fall of more than 100 metres. It was longer than the Mont Blanc crossing that had defeated me, but without slippery snow it was a ‘possible’ rather than a certain-death. I didn’t look down or up; the whole world contained no more than the path in front of me.

  Later on, stands of Pyrénéen oaks towered, grand and silent. I didn’t hear or see any animals in the forest, although the horse’s hoofprints had appeared again. As soon as I saw the prints there was a surge of fellow feeling. She had kept on going. Of course there was no reason to think it was the same horse, but I couldn’t help attributing continuity – an ongoing story – to the reappearance of the prints. Each time there was a difficult traverse or a muddy slope, I looked out for her prints to see how she had fared. Did her hooves slip sideways, did she go around the fallen branch or over it, had she slipped on the slate, did she find another path up through the rocks?

  I had ridden horses as a child on the farm and often rode bareback. I was skilled and courageous enough to gallop head-long across the paddocks, although it wasn’t to last. I remembered the 11-year-old girl I had been, her physical toughness. I knew then the feel of a horse under me as it scrambled upwards; the stretch and rhythm of the legs, shoulders, haunches; the sweaty smell; the wiry mane; the clamp of my own legs over the belly. And then slowing down, cantering across the paddock in the sun, wind in my chopped hair, knees locked into the movement of the horse’s gait.

  It was still hot and our water bottles ran low. There wasn’t a lot of potable water along the track, or at least not marked as potable, and so from the first days of walking I had stopped at barns, knocked on doors, called over fences, asking strangers to fill our bottles. Each time it was need that forced me to ask, but each time it was oddly as if I had done something for them. The woman at an isolated auberge, three hippies in a barn, two men building a shed, a group of men and women out mushrooming, a man sleeping on a couch in the heat of the afternoon whom I woke with my knock; each time they delighted in being able to help. And as I drank, so I peed like a cat, in woods and fields, by the side of the path, behind trees, out in the open. In the upland meadows, short chestnut horses with wild blond manes galloped towards the fences when I stopped to pee, lifted their heads and watched. I thought how simple life can be.

  That night we stayed with a couple, Julie and Jean-Pierre, who ran a private gite in their home. Julie had her hands bandaged and her face held the strain and aging of long illness and pain – I thought she was Jean-Pierre’s mother at first. They were religious, a fact made obvious by the bottles of Lourdes water in the shape of the Virgin Mary by each bed, as well as an atmosphere of resistance to change I recognised from childhood. As I knew from my earliest years, the Virgin had appeared to a young girl at Lourdes and told her that the water was healing, and since then it had become a centre of pilgrimage for millions of the faithful. I asked Julie if she had been to Lourdes.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Many times.’ And then she told me about her illness, an autoimmune disease that was attacking and breaking down her flesh. It was most severe in her bandaged hands but most of her body was in pain most of the time. Jean-Pierre looked after the house, cooked for her, cut her food up as if she were a baby. She told me that she smoked marijuana for the pain. Ah, that accounted for the familiar smell I’d noticed when I was coming down the stairs and had discounted in this religious household. I stifled the impulse to say it was probably of more use than the Lourdes water.

  On the thirteenth day we headed towards St-Bertrand-de-Comminges, which, the Topoguide, said was ‘suspended between the earth and sky’. A whole town floating. Like my brother, I thought, floating above the planet. What is it about human beings that we keep devising ways to feel weightless, to be beyond the earth, to be winged, to be suspended? When I asked my brother what he thought it was, he had given me the ‘mastery’ answer; that all our efforts came from the pleasure of extending our capacities. He may be right, but I wondered if it was more to do with the common enough desire to escape our bodies, to become untethered. It’s the subject of so much poetry and a part of religious experience, that desire to burst free of the body into communion with everything else. It has always been there.

  I plodded along – there was too much bitumen road walking that day, which is dispiriting in itself as well as making knees and hips sore – and then up and over a long rocky mountain. My palms were sweaty on the walking poles and I couldn’t look up for fear of losing my footing. Still, the strange stillness that fell just before noon each day on the countryside arrived in silence, and quietness flowed into my body. The noonday hush, I suddenly realised.

  I bought local sheep’s cheese, hard sausage and small tomatoes at a farmer’s stall and we sat by the Garonne River and ate them for lunch. Afterwards, I took my boots off as usual and lay by the river in the shade and ate windfall
figs. That night in St-Bertrand we ate at a restaurant that only served one meal, the same meal for everyone: soup, salad, confit and fruit, prepared and served by one man, cook and waiter on his own. The next night, at Montsérié, there was no shop and no restaurant and we were offered two tins of food by the mayor, who had opened the gite for us. Lentils and sausages in one tin, Mexican salad in the other. The following night, in Esparros, the shop was closed for the season, not opening until next summer, but I saw a man gardening and asked to buy some tomatoes to go with the dried pasta we’d been offered. He complained about the weather, and gave me four tomatoes and wouldn’t accept payment. Each day it was a relief not to have to choose what to eat. This was all there was, this is what we ate. It was a paring down to what was essential. Asking for water, asking for food. And walking.

  There’s a photograph of me by the Garonne, after I had my boots back on, and there’s a loose air of confidence about me. I felt strong and ready to continue on through the long afternoon. I remember thinking I could feel the 11-year-old girl inside me, wiry and unselfconscious. I was my body, sore here and there, muscled, sweaty; and my body fitted the landscape. I felt like a cicada uncrumpling its wings in the sunlight after a long time in its chrysalis under the ground. It might have been the beginning of a shift that day, the change I had been hoping for without knowing what it was.

  On day 16, we walked towards Escaladieu, translated as ‘ladder to God’, and saw a white crane and a brown eagle above the chestnut and birch forest. The river Arros flowed beside us, the round stones in its bed shining in the clear water. Deep blue crocuses filled small clearings. Later there was a bright red fungi in the shape of a starfish on the side of the path, a sea creature on the floor of the dim woods, and just out of the forest there were two yellow-eyed goats staring at us with evil intent. I saw my horse’s hooves had sunk deep in the mud where cows had trampled along a lane. A tidy woman who reminded me of Jenny, Barney’s wife, filled my water bottles at her kitchen sink in a farmhouse. Days had slowed down to intense moments without purpose, without needing to be read. Days had become simple.