Thoughts from a road trip

Off-topic miscellany

Rarely Certain is on the road. Hashtag van-life. It's P's van, not mine. I'm helping her return from her Mediterranean sea-view winter bolthole to the tip of the Cotentin peninsula, because someone's got to drive her car back too. Youna rides shotgun with me. She hates it in the front of a vehicle, the whole time we're moving. There isn't room in the back, where she usually rides more happily.

Are we there yet?

This is the evening of day 5. P is working in the van. I'm writing this outside, under the awning (the ‘store’ in French), with an alpine vista beyond the screen of this Macbook. Hashtag digitalnomads.

The cows and goats in the fields around wear bells, which makes for a charming vibe. But I'm not really feeling it, right here. In the winter it's invaded for skiing. And in the summer, by people like us. With our dogs. This means that, despite the apparent wilderness aspect, the beautiful alpine pastures are not really a place to feel free, because of the need to protect the livestock.

I feel for the herders, here. One went by, just now, with his little girl, two collies and a Patou along with a couple of hundred loudly tinkling goats. The collies were taking no shit from the stragglers, as they funnelled them into fenced pasture. The few visitors remaining up here watched this charming scene and somebody filmed it.

There are wolves again, around here. The Patou's job is to see them off. A long history of persecution saw wolves finally eradicated from France in the 1930s. The wolves whose prints we were seeing on the tracks over the winter are Italian. They came from the Abruzzo Massif and they're spreading through all of these French mountain regions. People often think that they were controversially 'reintroduced' and some kick up the inevitable fuss about it. I guess it’s discomfiting for some not to be the apex predator. But what's changed really is that the wolves are just protected in law now, at last.

The Patou is a herd protector, typically a Pyrenean Mountain Dog. Large, fluffy, white and prepared to die for the flock. The one with the goats now is watching Youna intently, through the flimsy fence. Youna isn't stupid. She's seen these dogs before and she obviously knew from the get-go that you don't fuck with them or even greet one, let alone instigate any play.

A Patou joined us for a long walk one day, last winter. He was evidently not on duty that day, leapt a fence and ambled along with us for an 8k circuit. He liked her a lot, but Youna ignored him the whole way. We had to lead him 4k back to his farm, later, with the Patou trotting along behind the car, because he wouldn't accept a lift and we couldn't just abandon him when we finished that far from his home.

Walkers complain about the Patous and they're often in the news here. Mostly it's because some people don't understand them and assume they're like pet dogs. This typically leads to a warning bite for approaching them and their flocks.

The herders are forced to keep Patous by their insurers, because of the wolves. The Patou here, just across the car park where we're stationed for tonight, is a welcome guard. He barks every time a new car arrives.

Patous are dropped into the herds as puppies, so goats are family

Technically it doesn't get much more picturesque than this massif, but in the valleys it feels like a rural workplace rather than a wilderness and I feel somewhat disconnected. Not because I don't think we should be here. More because I'm conscious of a gap between the relationship we have with the land - as a kind of consumer experience - and theirs.

In some native American traditions there is a concept of people belonging to the land, which was swept aside when European settlers imported the concept of land title. I think of this here. It's nice to exercise our rights to be on this land, as visitors, but our experience has little meaning compared with that of the people who live and work here. They belong to these alpine meadows, not me. We walk on them and look at things as we do museum or gallery exhibits. We tell our friends about it and post pictures online.

I often reflect on this subtle difference in the nature of experience and belonging, which seems to manifest in the contrasting ways that cosmopolitan urban liberals and rural conservatives see the spaces they occupy. It’s not about novelty versus familiarity. I'm unsure of what I'm reaching for with these thoughts, but it feels like there's something around the difference between rootedness in tradition and the exercise of consumer rights.

Pointedly, my sense of relationship with the area changes when I ascend to the snow line on a couple of solo walks. Up high, where the marmots bumbling around between their burrows barely seem to notice you. Here, a chamois hisses its objection to my presence several times (I have never heard a goat hissing before), from just a few metres away, before casually ambling off across the mountain flank. Here, I feel puny and insignificant, which is how I like it best. The mountain gives zero fucks for my rights and gently reminds me with a noisy rock fall from a neighbouring spur as I begin an unsteady descent back to the van.

Thank goodness for P’s cooking, because I was wiped out after this ascent

A few days of reflecting later…

Our relationship with place seems to be among the many 'mysteries' that are overlooked or forgotten in a culture which seems to abhor the 'sacred' (while, actually, lacking the cognitive mechanism to really recognise what such a concept signifies). This makes it difficult to bridge the gap between differing worldviews. It's why I no longer have time for sneering at tradition (except, where tradition entails something like forcing a woman to hide her face in public, removing part of her genitalia, hunting rare species to extinction for 'traditional' health supplements etc - I am, after all, still fundamentally a western liberal construct).

Place seems to be, for many of us, a discrete thing, something to consume in passing. Boxes to tick on a bucket list. For later social exchanges about where you've been and what you did there. An American friend I just caught up with was surprised that I've not only never been to New York but that I have no wish to go. That I don't need to see it for real. That a barely known peak, somewhere, that I might scramble up one day holds much more appeal.

I fancy that this possibly reflects my growing tendency to be less and less of a mimetic consumer (ie imitating others), but it might just be that it makes me a dull dinner party guest. Give me five grand tomorrow and a mandatory journey to undertake and it would not be to another continent. I'd buy some better kit, rent the nicest Airbnb I could, scramble up to the top of La Grande Tête de l'Obiou a few hundred miles from here and then find a Michelin star restaurant to celebrate.

Unexpectedly, this trip is giving me fresh appreciation for home and roots that seem to have sunk deeper there than I'd appreciated. Last winter, amid Normandie's wind, rain and clagging mud, I anticipated this period of exploration as an opportunity to search for one last home. One where there are mountains, sunshine and winter snow. Now I'm not sure. My roots have perhaps thickened and sunk deeper than I'd realised into the wet soil, under the grey skies of the northern Cotentin.

Easy to say, sitting here on the shaded terrasse of another friend’s house in Marseille’s 33 degrees.

It may be my age now, but place and roots, just being, really seeing, feeling and breathing seem more appealing than 'travel' and 'seeing the world'.

I have just the one ambition to be somewhere far away, before I get too old, which is to live for maybe six months in an obscure town that no one has heard of, in a country like Uruguay. This is kind of mimetic, though, because the inspiration comes from various characters in the writings of Roberto Bolaño. I will buy passage on a commercial vessel to get there. The town will have a shaded square where I will drink coffee on a morning, watching local life. Future dinner party companions will be nonplussed at how little they can relate to the experience I’ll describe (unless, of course, they've read 2666 or The Savage Detectives). And that's the way I like it.

Since place has been a personal preoccupation of late, a closing recommendation for a writer who often nails the subject. This is just one example.

Blackthorn

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I feel guilty for not writing last week, when there are paying subscribers to honour, so I'll make it up over the coming days with a backlog of subscriber-only thoughts on the more usual topics. There are plenty of them.

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