The simple life

Conditions in the French countryside were slightly less primitive than those in the Vietnamese village where I visited family last summer, but I resisted the low-speed Internet and landline and filled my time with Dostoevsky, grassy hills, and freshly picked leeks. (In fact I may be the last person I know to have heard about the swine flu outbreak.) I spent the better part of a week in Rossas, a hamlet of at most a dozen houses nestled between mountains 200 kilometers southwest of Lyon.

When the weather permitted, we trekked through patches of yellow-green grass and newly bloomed trees, sometimes to a stream that my friend’s brothers dammed themselves, or to a field like an oasis naturally cleared amid the trees. When the weather didn’t, we buried our noses in books, listened to Bach, and watched smoke on the mountains (well, if there can be smoke on the water…). For a split-second I considered that this fog might actually be smoke, the way it rose from the mountains. It was worth watching the low-lying clouds, because to see them drift east to west, in and out of the hills, was to see them connect the earth and sky, to see that the white wisps are much closer to us than to the ceiling, and to see beyond the two dimensions of the sky.

Indoors, we also prepared easy meals, sometimes with vegetables straight from the garden outside, which we tilled when the rain let up. Because we were staying with my friend’s parents and because they are vegetarians, I learned to eat more sustainably than I have in my carnivorous past. Except for a month in sixth grade, my weeks in France were the longest I’ve gone with little or no meat, and I left with a renewed desire to give vegetarianism another shot – for moral reasons, but also because the crap we get from the slaughterhouse is injected almost beyond recognition. So it’s less about avoiding meat (because I will still eat meat) and more about eating real food. It reminds me, why do we cook anyway? In our early days it made sense to grill beef and boil bamboo for health reasons, but I wonder at what point we decided we needed to put things like carrots and tomatoes to heat, too.

Each course was very simple – lettuce with tomatoes or rice, vegetable soup, stir-fried potatoes, bowtie pasta, cheese, fruit yogurt, or chocolate. I didn’t think these alone would be enough for me, but when you have course after course (and that seems to be the French way), it’s more than enough. It also helped that I have learned to like things I used to think I hate:

• Radishes
• Uncooked cauliflower
• Cooked carrots
• String beans
• Lentils
• Cheese
• Unsweetened yogurt
• Celery
• Olives
• Spinach
• Peas
• Ravioli
• Pesto
• Plain pasta

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Reading: Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck
Listening to: Bjork
Watching: Scarface

I climbed this:

Hitchhiking, mountain-climbing, ski-less skiing – I did in one day things I could only imagine and some things I had never imagined at all. Of these, hitchhiking was the most necessary because there was no other way to get to little Barnave from Valence (and to get there we took a train from Lyon). All the horror stories and warnings had succeeded in deterring me from hitchhiking before, but now there were three of us, two girls and Iohan, a veteran hitchhiker because, he said, people here are nice. And he was right. So right that between the five cars it took to reach our final destination, we never had to split up, as we’d feared. So right that I might consider hitchhiking again. So right that (and this is more likely) I might consider picking up hitchhikers one day because the drivers we met were conversational and because I understand the pain of rejection (though, actually, we were quite lucky and didn’t have to wait long between being dropped off by one car and picked up by another).

In Barnave, a mountain village of sixty or so in southwestern France, we slept in a temple on those blue mats used in gym class and wrestling matches. Both (the temple and the mats) were indispensable to Iohan’s sister, who is a trapeze artist and who hosted us because she lives in the house adjacent.

For a backyard she has the fields, the forests, and the mountains, and also one of the many vineyards that seem to make up the town. Wind tossed the clouds around unpredictably, and in the distance, it shook the grass of just one field, seeming eerily to touch nothing else. I noticed there, and on the drive there, the variety in the hills and mountains, because each peak that rises behind each other is different from that other. One is fully forested with evergreens. Another sprinkled with rocks. Another with dead grass and bushes. Another still frozen in snow. I counted at least five different greens.

At breakfast one friend scared the other and me, saying we’d better eat enough for the day ahead on the mountain. But in the face of necessity we survived those ten or so hours on apples, sweet biscuits, and water, some of which we bottled ourselves at a spring one-third of the way up the mountain. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Living in the mountains was enough, I thought, but in fact we had to hitchhike three times to reach Valcroissant, the site of the mountain we would climb.

“I didn’t know hiking would be this easy!” I smiled in the first car, into which I had crawled under the back door and half-sat, half-crouched over a box of nails and a hammer. “Oh, so you think we’ll be riding the whole time!” my friend shot back.

There is also a little church with a hostel at Valcroissant, which I am beginning to understand better. Few residents do not amount to few tourists, and it was a pair of tourists, actually, who drove us the final leg.

Vertically, we ended up covering nearly 2,000 meters; horizontally, perhaps ten kilometers there and ten kilometers back. I knew going into it that I would want to quit and it would become unbearable at some points. But more accurate is to say that your body seems to be able to carry on in these situations as long as your mind doesn’t know about it. And in fact I would have second winds, bursts of energy when I just wanted to run (I would pay for that later, in the days it took to recover), but I think that had more to do with impatience than energy.

The terrain here was as varied as the hills I’d seen earlier, if not more so. One hour we would be trampling over damp and dead leaves, the next we would be fording a cool spring. Or running through dirt and stones, or picking our way through grass and twigs. On one grassy knoll we walked within a few meters of a ram, lying so carefree we thought it might be sick (but probably not because it was gone on our way down). Sitting on a cliff almost worthy of Pride Rock, we eventually saw more like him, probably a dozen rams in the distance fading into the boulders behind them, except for a baby ram that somehow ended up nearby.

To top it off, untainted white snow survived into this late spring at the top of the mountain. I unwittingly wore ankle socks and capris, so Iohan dug a hole into the snow with each step, creating a path for us to follow. Uphill, that is. I didn’t consider that we would have to find a way back down, possibly because I was sick of the snow and just wanted to reach the summit.

Making our way downhill in the snow, it turned out, was the best part of the expedition. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t been there, but we slid down the slope in nothing but our shoes and T shirts! Terrifying but thrilling, difficult but efficient. Simply saying it doesn’t seem to convince me that I glided down a mountain, more than 1500 meters above sea level, riding the crest of the snow. In some places the snow was too soft, so we’d sink down past our knees, or I’d ride piggy back or on shoulders. But mostly I wanted to make it down myself and realized that this, in spirit, was exactly what I’d come out here to do.

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Reading: Dostoevsky, The Possessed
Listening to: Heart

Heart of Lyon

A woman I met briefly in Lyon compared the city to Budapest: in either, one can look down from the hills on the western part of the city (the "Buda" side), to see the river and the rest of the city. The main difference is that Lyon has not one but two main, surprisingly green rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, though they do converge. Indeed, in the hilltop apartment where we stayed two of the three nights, a window faced east (in the end I couldn't get myself up early enough to watch the sunrise), giving us a view of much of the city, the Saone, and the garden immediately below where we sat for breakfast.

It seems there was no shortage of high-altitude vantage points that offered breath-taking views of Lyon, with its red ceramic shingles and darker red chimneys that look like so many top hats tossed onto the roofs. But for this the best part of the city might be the Croix-Rousse (like Red Cross, but "Rousse" isn't quite red, more like fox red). I went there a couple times but even better than the panoramic views was the second evening there, when a light fell over the hill like none I can remember. I was initially unhappy that dusk came on because the eastern sky clouded over so ominously, but after a few meters we noticed a brightness in everything west of the stormy section of the sky, almost like night and day, as if we had stepped from one to the other. To describe it might be impossible, but if I could remember what an eclipse looked like, I'd probably compare it to that. Or like a painter had applied one new glowing color so lightly but evenly across the already colored sidewalks, faces, trees and clouds. It was a pink and orange that changed so quickly that when I looked back at my photo (main, above), I was afraid I might have changed the settings.

Nearby we also saw a cathedral, something meant to look like a mini-Eiffel Tower I think, and Roman ruins, amazingly. The maze of hand-laid stones were not much less impressive than the ruins in Rome, except that we could jump across these freely (I think so... didn't really think about the sacrilege at the time). Imagine our surprise when we walk past these and happen upon the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls. Row upon concentric row formed the half circle before the stage, which I hope is still in use, and then healthy green trees and lawns. The wind would blow leaves and other yellow-green specs from the foliage in misty waves, as well as whole clouds whose shadows we could see racing across the amphitheater.

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Reading: Vaclav Havel, Temptation
Listening to: David Bowie