Friday, June 19, 2015

Hospitality along the old Roman Roads

Much of the "official" Via Francigena follows existing GR trails, the Grand Radonnée, the long distance hiking paths of France. Sigeric's actual path, the roads the Archbishop of Canterbury walked, or more likely rode, on horse or in wagon, a millennia ago are not known for certain. His manuscript that describes the Via Francigena provides only the names of the "maisonettes," the cities or villages, in which he stayed but we can assume he used the highway system of his time, the Roman roads, as much as he could. In many cases, those roads are gone, paved over, some by major, high traffic arteries. In other cases, they are simply lost, covered by centuries of change. It makes sense, therefore, to use the existing trail system. 

But if you are willing to move off the "official" route, you can find remnants, even long sections, of road Sigeric must certainly have traveled. Some stretch tens of miles. These old Roman roads were constructed by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa on orders from Octavius for the extension and maintenance of empire. They carried legionnaires to the furthest outposts of Roman influence and food and supplies back to the Roman heartland.
When you find a remnant of the Via Agrippa, you know it. It is usually unwaveringly straight for miles on end, with few major climbs or descents. Walking on that road, covered only by dirt, or clay, or gravel, especially one that runs between two locations mentioned by Sigeric, you can be quite certain that you are walking the path that the Archbishop of Canterbury took on his way to Rome to receive the symbols of his office, one-thousand years ago.

I walked those paths. In the last several days, stretching from a bit just after Chalons-en-Champagne, through Coole, Brienne-les-Vielles and Donnement, to a ways before Bar-sur-Aube, I walked  thirty miles and more of such remnants of the Via Agrippa. These roads are not curious relics. They remain an integral part of village life. When you ask a farmer or a townsman how far it is to a certain location, you are likely to be given a distance followed by "par voie Romaine," by the Roman road.

On this portion of the Via Agrippa there is a feeling of vast emptiness. Fields of wheat and soya stretch into the far distance. Few trees break the horizon. Occasionally, there are copses of wind turbines.  A hog farm announces itself by its stench a half mile in all directions. Otherwise, nothing. 

I walked these roads under clear sky and direct sun, in temperatures near 30°C, 85°F. There was no shade. Even when the road followed the course of a river, and riparian varieties lined the water's banks, the road was in sunlight. The Romans cut these roads into the flanks of the hills, above the flood plain, to assure they would be passable at all times of the year. Shade never reached the stretches I walked. 

I set the alarm on my phone for every two hours to remind myself to apply sunscreen. When the lotion dried, I applied insect repellent, though those large fly-like insects whose bite results in a nearly hemispheric puss filled blister an inch in diameter "ne parle pas DEET." I've been bitten twice in the last six years of my walking. It isn't pleasant.

Here you must play tricks with your mind to help the miles pass. I estimated the tangential velocity of wind turbine wing tips and counted primes. I remember reading that the physiology of walking long distances makes analytical thought difficult and slow. These exercises, therefore, are ideal for passing time. Eventually, I can trick myself into a stream of self-sustaining thought that numbs me to what my physical self is experiencing. But walking these roads, when I finally resurfaced to awareness and checked my GPS, only another mile, or less had passed. 

Each day Patrick and I search for a good place to have lunch. Frequently, we ask our hosts to pack us a sandwich, because even if we pass through a small town or two, these "trous," a French expression for a nothing of a place, have no commercial activity, no tabac, no bar, no boulangerie. Nothing. Sometimes we forget to ask and have to make do with dried figs and trail mix. 

On the Via Agrippa you might get lucky and find a road intersecting the old Roman road. It may lead to a nearby town. But when you are walking 20 or more miles a day you hesitate to make even a small excursion from the trail. Other times, the unpaved section crosses a small village and if you are really lucky there will be a bench. We were lucky only once in the three days we walked the unpaved sections of Via Agrippa. 

I look for a log, a rock, something other than the road to sit on, but instead we have to settle for a small patch where the gravel has been worn flat so the discomfort of sitting on a hard surface is not exacerbated by sharp edges cutting into my bottom. I use my pack as back support and eat quickly. We move on. 

As the day progresses to its end we quicken our pace, anxious for an end to this section of trail. 

As the highest official of the church in England, Sigeric likely was received with great hospitality when he stopped for the night. His trip aimed for stops in the important centers of church activity: cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries. If he had to resort to inns or private homes, the hospitality may have been less grand, but still to the highest levels available within the means of his hosts.

Today, there are remnants not only of the roads Sigeric traveled, but of the hospitality he received. Thus far on this walk, I've stayed in hotels, B&B's, chambre d'hôtes, and gites, in cities, the smallest of villages, on farms and in private homes. You cannot really know how it will be in advance, though you hope you will be fortunate and stay in one of those few places where you are greeted like a friend, enjoy a really great dinner, and have interesting conversation with hosts who are genuinely interested in learning about you, where you come from, what you think about events. In return, they share the stories of their lives with you. 

Patrick and I were lucky enough to find Roseline and Eric on a farm in the Haute-Marne. I am guessing Roseline's age at 50; I know Eric is 52. She still has that coquettish smile and body language of a young woman and a vivacious attractiveness. He started working the family farm at age 16, a farm that's been in the family for 300 years; at 19 he was running it.

Eric is now an organic farmer but his passion is astronomy. When he delivers papers at scientific conferences, other speakers introduce themselves with their PhD's and CV's. Eric introduces himself as "Farmer." 

I asked him how he became interested in astronomy. Eric is left handed and, as a boy his teacher forced him to write with his right hand. He wasn't good at it so he was punished, forced to stay late at school. Walking home at night looking to the sky, he wished he was up there, not down here. The punishments may have been misguided but they gave Eric astronomy.
That evening we drank homemade aperitifs, ate beef, potatoes, and green beans that Eric had raised and farmed, and spoke about genetically modified seed, his fascination with viewing galaxies, and his love of introducing children to astronomy. 

Another evening, we were the guests of Madame Viviene Jaqueminet. Patrick calls Madame Jaqueminet a brave mother. She lost her husband to cancer when she was 32, he 36. She raised her family and now she welcomes pilgrims into her home. 
This kindly woman loves meeting new people and tells us of a pilgrim who carried a tambour on his walk and played it after dinner. Another pilgrim, who until then had not really engaged in conversation, jumped to his feet with bravos, disclosed that he was an orchestra conductor, and the evening continued with conversation and music. Evenings like these are what Madam Jaqueminet lives for.

The night we were there, Madame Jaqueminet served us cuisse de dinde, (leg and thigh of turkey), slow cooked in champagne for a day and a half. Patrick and I each had a room in the house she's lived in since her marriage. 
And one evening we were the guests of Monique and Jean-Pierre Sogny of Coole (there are a lot of Sogny's in Coole, including the mayor). The Sogny's are of that special breed of host who open their private homes to shelter and feed pilgrims, not for financial gain, but purely for the pleasure of doing good works and for conversation with interesting people. These special places are "donativos" where one pays what they are able, without even a soupçon of what may be expected. Nothing is expected. 

We slept in two bedrooms of their modern three bedroom home. They served a simple farm dinner: a salad of lettuce and tomato I saw Monique cut from her garden, steamed potatoes in their skins along with rillettes de porc and pate de ferme made from the hogs they raised, a fine bio rosé from Bergerac and a red Côtes du Rhône. At about 9:00, when we had already been eating and conversing for more than an hour, two Italian pilgrims on bicycles arrived, Lorenza and Mateo from Trieste. After a first stern look from Jean-Pierre for the late hour and the fact that all the bedrooms were taken, he and Monique rolled out a large air mattress in their laundry room and welcomed the new arrivals.

The next morning, as I was about to place some bills in the little porcelain purse kept on an eye level shelf in the kitchen, Monique cautioned me, "Do not give too much," she said in her good English.  "We do not do this for the money. We are donativo."

At the end of a day's walk, Patrick and I hope for a warm shower, a decent meal, and a comfortable bed. Sometimes we get lucky and find much more.

One need not be Sigeric to find great hospitality on the old Roman roads that are part of the Via Francigena. 

Comments welcome at garyontheway@google.com

Monday, June 15, 2015

Communitas

Spring finally arrived in France in the few days before I entered the champagne vineyards near Reims. It came in two incarnations. The weather turned sunny and warm, and the communitas that both Patrick and I had been missing became the focus of this portion of my adventure. 
Anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, in two works, one on ritual and the other on Christian pilgrimage, identified two characteristics that I experienced as key elements of my own walks, liminality and communitas. I won't do either concept justice here, but let me give you my definitions, the way I've internalized them. Liminality describes the sense that once you begin a ritual, a rite of passage, for example, or a pilgrimage, you are no longer the person you were before you began and you are not yet the person you will become when you have completed the ritual. If it is a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, while the participants are engaged in the ritual they are no longer boys but are not yet men. In the kind of pilgrimage I engage in, the passage is more subtle and less predictable. But I can say with certainty that on every pilgrimage I have undertaken, I have learned things about myself that alter my self-perception and understanding. I return home different. 

Communitas describes the community of those engaged in the ritual. In some tribal cultures, participants are removed from the family structure that was their support, and enter a community of those undertaking the ritual. In pilgrimage, people of different backgrounds, nationality, economic class, and even religion, form a community through the leveling process inherent in miles of hiking, sharing of hardships, sleeping in the most basic of accommodations, sharing food, and developing relationships that could not develop elsewhere. I have little doubt that all who have undertaken the Compostela pilgrimage will name community as the single most impactful factor of their pilgrimage experience.

So it is about people. And Patrick and I were heartened when we met our first fellow pilgrim, Wilma, a teacher from Lithuania. Our pilgrimages intersected for the briefest of times, one day, but knowing she was sharing the same road was warmth enough. 
Wilma was sitting on her sleeping pad on the side of a quiet country road, tending her blistered feet. She saw a man with a backpack, me, and asked where I was from, where I started, and where I was going. "San Francisco, Winchester, Rome," I answered. "Vilnius, Canterbury, as far as I can get before my vacation is over," Wilma replied. 

We would not of expected it of her, but Wilma put Patrick and me to shame. She  was making 40 to 45 km a day, 24 to almost 30 miles, sometimes 1.5 times what we were aiming for, though we have had our share of 20+ mile days. She was a pretty slow walker but made her distance by walking from sunup to sundown before finding a place to lay her sleeping bag or pitch her tent. 
Further along, a bit of communitas of a different sort. Along the road I passed an elderly but spry man looking forward to his 90th birthday later this year. He was standing in his driveway watching the world go by. He saw me coming. His eyes locked mine. There was no doubting I would stop and chat in my broken French. He asked if I was a pilgrim and where I was from. I told him that I was and that I was American. His face lit up. His eyes sparkled. It was 1944. The Liberation. His excitement could not be contained. I told him my father had been in France in '45. In a sure sign of friendship, he opened the big  barred driveway gate and called to a young woman back in the house, 40-ish, a Belgian, his aide who looked after him. "Américain!" he called to her. It could not have meant much to her. She was friendly but her age told that she could not share the depth of emotion that was evident in her charge. Or in me. Remember when Americans were respected and appreciated? How far we have come.

And now to the main point. I made some really good friends on my six prior years of pilgrimage. We promised to keep in touch and we have, intermittently. But they all live in Europe and if I am ever to see them again, I have to take the initiative. So I took a break from my walk and set out to see some of the people with whom I've shared an incredible experience. 

I've already told you about Beatrice and Paul and my detour to Dunkerque. Well, my wife, Carol, joined me for the last couple of weeks as we spent time with some of those people I've been telling her about. We spent several days with two really sweet people, Eva and Gösta, on their farm outside of Valberg, Sweden.   And a few more days with my good friend Nicolas, with whom I must have walked and shared dormitory rooms for at least two weeks in 2011, and his wife Lulu, whom he met that same year and with whom I also walked. We stayed with them at Lulu's parent's vacation home on the Bretagne coast. Their two young children, Paul and Louis, and Lulu's parents were also there.
Nicolas and I shared memories and some of the meaningful conversations that had marked our friendship on the road. I am so happy to see how life is working out for them. 

And then to Paris, where Carol and I were well looked after by Jean-Michel, who was Patrick's walking companion when I met him in 2012 and with whom I walked from Porto to Compostela last year, and by his wife Catherine, who is a lovely, kind woman, and who I met in Compostela when she joined Jean-Michel there after his walk. I caught up with Jean-Christophe, another Porto walking companion, and met his wife Areth at a dinner in Versailles hosted by Patrick and Colette. 

And Carol and I had dinner with our long term good friends Barbara and Jean-Philippe, full of vitality as always. So really very good to see them.

So the cold I experienced as I walked through the battlefields of the Somme has been eclipsed by the warmth of friendships renewed and maintained. 

I am ready to start walking again. 

Comments welcome at garyontheway@gmail.com