font del carol

Imagine this...

It is our grandson's 9th birthday, and we are in France. After two months away in Europe we are missing him. We sent him a postcard with a picture of an Old Dog barking Happy Birthday in English and French. [Dave plays in a band called the 'Old Dogs']

Why are we here away from home and the people we love?

As I sit out on the deck in my nightie with a bowl of cornflakes and yoghurt, the warm sun burns my back as if I am sitting too close to a radiator. It is bright and hot already. Yesterday Britain had its warmest day so far this year, with the Olympics saturating BBC television. Here in southern France, summer has ripened into relentless heat and humidity.

We decide to drive up to the higher mountains where the air is cooler. I want to see the 'Gorges de la Frau' and we want a distraction from thoughts of home.

As we leave the village we see our little white house in the valley, surmounted by sunflowers.

Soon we are ascending winding mountain roads which make me feel nauseous and dizzy. The surface is newly bituminised, very smooth, hurriedly resurfaced for the recent Tour De France but without white lines. The scenery over the Pyrénées is breathtaking but I feel so sick I can barely take it in.

Old Dog, normally a cautious driver, decides he is Australia's next Jack Brabham as soon as he finds perilous curves.

We stop at a mountain village, Belcaire, for a 'crustade aux pommes', a sort of airy light pastry slice with a stewed apple and cinnamon layer inside, and coffee on the 'terrasse' of the only hotel/bar in town. A short stroll takes us around an apple green lake where happy campers picnic, swim and sunbathe. French families having fun.

From there it is a short drive to another very old stone village, Comus, the first we find with a sign at the water trough declaring the water drinkable, 'eau potable'.

We are up in the alps where the air and the water are fresh and clean, starting the walk to the 'Gorges de la Frau', along a section of the 'Sentier Cathare'. the ancient path of the Cathares from the chateau at Foix to the Mediterranean.

On the way down.

It is a steady descent in the intense midday sun. I have no hat. Neither of us carry water. After a couple of kilometres Dave says, “It is going to be an even longer walk on our return.”

We realise it will be uphill all the way back, and without a cloud in the hot blue sky, I worry about dehydration and about Dave stumbling as he feels dizzy today. [My walking friends will be even more concerned at my foolishness!]

B is for BlueBell and Beautiful Butterfly.

Little lizards scuttle in the undergrowth. Big bumble bees buzz on wild-flowers. Butterflies, pale yellow, leopardskin print or tawny cream and brown, flit around us or lightly land on petals. I notice swarms of small lilac butterflies. “No, they are 'poo' moths,” Dave says. “They are eating the horse 'poo' along the track.”

“Like dung beetles,” I say, disturbed from my romantic reveries.

Sometimes the moths look like one giant flower on the track, but as we approach, they are startled and fly away, revealing the lumps of horse manure. A nice little ecosystem!

Pine trees grow on the mountain sides but other alpine trees gain ascendancy as the rock faces narrow to form the Gorges, which are sunlit only in the early afternoon.

Alpine trees have their individual take on gravity.

As we walk the dappled path between the sheer stone walls of the narrowest section of the gorge alongside a stream, I imagine the Cathares and even earlier human inhabitants of the Pyrénées, following these tracks to hunt, to camp, to traverse the land from mountains to valleys and oceans when the snow fell.

In the silence I feel an almost visceral connection with all my antecedents on planet earth and with our children and grandchildren as they walk their own paths.

On the way back from the gorge, it is even hotter. Now there are frenzied flies feeding on the dung and cicadas noisily tuning up their orchestra. Luckily the flies are so well fed they don't bother us.

With this abundance of insect life, I realise how much the use of pesticides and other chemicals has changed our urban world, impacting on all creatures great and small... as Joni Mitchell wrote forty five years ago...

Hey farmer farmer put away your DDT
I don't care about spots on my apples
leave me the birds and the bees... please!

 This is a world of subtle sounds and pungent smells, of diverse plants and animals, of nature as a presence, before dominated by man.

The lizards, emboldened, or perhaps soporific in the sun, brazenly sit on the track rather than dart away. My eyes are alert for snakes.

Soon there is a new sound. Horses hooves. A man calls out “A gauche”, on the left, to warn us of their approach.

Sharing the trail.

A group of young riders, with bouncing buttocks and long pony tails, mirroring the horses' rear ends, ride past in single file, flicking flies with swatches pulled from leafy trees.

Washing day... the blue of the sky and the clothes.

After our 9km walk, we drive on to Montaillou, a Cathare village nearby. The story goes that four of the Cathares from Montsegur, decided to 'convert' to Catholicism and live, rather than walk into the flames to be burned alive. They formed a settlement in this remote place, and secretly kept alive their Occitan language and culture. 

Stone houses and the remains of a chateau overlook a vast valley. “ God's own country,” I think as I survey the scene from a stone wall.

Apparently the 20 or so current inhabitants are descendants of the original settlers, with the same surnames as on the earliest gravestones. How this is possible after 7 centuries baffles me, but then so do a lot of things.

The road signs are in the Occitan language [hence the name of the region...the 'Language of Oc'... 'Languedoc']. Occitan was the language of love and poetry and rebellion, of troubadours and heretics.

We wander around Montaillou, admiring the vegetable gardens, the rustic buildings, the beauty of the place and searching the faces of the old people for some resemblance to my grandmother, when I come across a fount of water gushing into a trough and go to cool my hands and face.

Imagine my surprise when I find I am dipping my hands into the 'Font del Carol', obviously my occitan source! Home again?

'Font del Carol'