focs de la Sant Joan

On Wednesday evening, down the mountain they come with torches blazing. The fire at the Canigou peak has been lit (at midnight of June 22nd). The flame bearers can descend the mountains on the 23rd to their Catalan village and light all the village fires in celebration of Catalan unity. The people gather for an evening of Catalan dance and a glorious firework display, while the fire, made strong in Sorede by a mound of old vine roots, now rages high into the night sky.

This is the celebration of Le Feu de la St Jean. Or, in Catalan – Focs de la Sant Joan.

I knew it was coming. All Sorede shop windows bore reminders streamed in the Catalan colors of yellow and red: come to the celebration of St. John’s on June 23rd.





And on the morning of 23rd, you knew that this day is different. Special. Preparations have been under way for some time now.

Even as to us, waking up to a cloudless sky, it is just another glorious day in the beautiful region of Languedoc.









The morning stroll to and from  the bakery and café bar has become somewhat long. The more we know and understand about Sorede, the more delight there is in meandering up one street and down the next.

(We learn, for example, that there are many ways to cross the river that separates our apartment from the center of the village.)





I stop at the tourist office and ask for a list of people who rent out rooms and homes in the summer. Back at our place, I circle those who are within our price range (the very cheapest). It’s a sizeable group of twenty. Ed places each on the map of Sorede. Our goal is to walk past every one of them and assess it from the outside. From this, I’ll have a short list of places I would be happy to inspect further.

And here is the amazing thing I discover about Sorede. France is so wired (with nationwide access readily available if you're near any other user) that it hadn’t struck me that the villagers here would not all be in some fashion users of the Internet. But in fact they’re not. From my list of twenty, none has a presence on the Internet and only one has an email address.

If ever I have wondered why there are no Americans here, the answer becomes obvious now: you can’t find a room here if you live across the ocean.

Ed tells me I could work to put Sorede on the tourist map and it is a tempting proposition. As it is, many of the rentals stand empty.

In the afternoon, I call one after another. Both Ed and I like to have Internet. We cannot find any access to it.


It is late before we put the project to rest for the day. We distract ourselves with a walk to our neighbors to buy the newly ripened juicy as can be white peaches from just outside Sorede.





It's a very warm day and though it is past six, we think a trip to the beach -- the little one at the beachside community of Le Racou is still a good idea.

Ed swims, I people watch. The water is cool still and most everyone stays out of the bay. Some strip down to get the perfect feeling of warmth on most every part of the body, some strum a guitar, some walk along the water's edge, some merely play in the sand. It is a very very pleasant evening by the sea.













But this day really does belong to the people who regard themselves as Catalonian. We notice it's hard to make your way through the villages now. Access is blocked as preparations are underway for the evening celebrations.

We make our way back to Sorede, and eat a dinner Au Margeau, where I ask for the most local fish, following a plateful of local oysters.





It's 9:30 now. The time when the villagers begin to gather outside La Salle de Fetes.

A small chorus sings, young girls do modern dances, but in between, all evening long, groups of men and women form a large circle and dance the lovely Sardana.





The younger dancers break in and form their own circle within the larger one.





It's extremely moving to see this. A dozen young boys now breaks in and they, too, hold hands and work on the delicate steps. Those who are not dancing, are watching in gentle appreciation.













There are speeches, of course. About inclusiveness. About fraternity. About the importance of cultural connectedness.

The mayor announces that the flame bearers are making their way down the mountain -- and you can see them: a small snake of fire slowly winding down the forested slopes to Sorede.

And eventually they arrive. Young people mostly, carrying the torches that will light the village fire.









The flame is carried to the old wood of the grape vines. The fire is tremendous. And immediately, the sky is filled with fireworks.









With the last explosion, for us, the event draws to an end. Many stay and continue to dance, but it is near midnight. We follow a slow trickle back to the village...




...then across the river, and home.

passing through

The morning routine at the café bar goes like this:
I would like a large crème please. (This is my coffee request.)
And monsieur? (The question is directed to Ed, who typically doesn’t want anything and the waiter by now knows this.) Whiskey, right?



It is almost evening and we finally leave the beach at La Franqui (my favorite of the Languedoc beaches). We sit down at the same café we paused in last time. (Once you do something twice, I think it deserves the label of “routine,” no?) I order the same flavors of ice cream – dark chocolate and apricot and Ed has his favorite -- coconut. I add – and a noisette, please. (a macchiato on our turf.)
The waiter shrugs. We do not have any coffee here. I look at him, dumbfounded.
He breaks into a chortle and says the equivalent of “just kidding.” He retreats. He comes back with the noisette and ice cream.
I frown. This is a whiskey? I ask, implying there has been some mistake. He’s thrown off. I thought...
Just kidding! I answer. He slaps me on the arm, delighted at the back and forth and shakes his head at his own culpability.





The sun is low, the shadows grow long. Life at the café bars of rural France.


We are driving back from La Franqui and Ed is determined to get it right this time. Signs can easily misdirect you at the roundabouts and each time we are on the coast we end up driving significantly out of our way because of a missed turn.

His determination pays off. It’s 7:15 and we are almost at Sorede. We have just enough time to drive to the supermarket at the outskirts of the village. We want cheese for tomorrow, fizzy water, apple juice and toilet paper. This last item has been a source of much back and forth between the two of us. Our apartment came supplied with one roll and Ed estimated that this should suffice for two weeks (the market sells packs of 12 and though the cheapest pack is only1.7 Euros, he thought buying 12 is plain silly). It became clear this week that we will not survive and so he agreed to put the twelve pack on our short shopping list.

We pull into the parking lot at 7:22, delighted at the good luck. The supermarket closes at 7:30. Our success rate at pulling in before a store closing has been only at 50 – 50. This time we are lucky.

Or so we thought. The three cashiers are busy checking out customers, but the entrance gate (in France, everyone must enter the supermarket at the proper entrance gate) is closed. I point to my watch and ask why.
Sorry, we close at 7:30.

But it’s 7:24!

Sorry.
Can’t I just hop over and get something quickly? I plead.
What do you need? She asks.
Toilet paper! (I make it sound like an emergency and it elicits a grin here and there.) She waves us in. We split up. Ed runs for the cheese, I get the twelve pack of rolls and the six pack of lemon fizzy water and Ed's favorite apple juice. We’re back at the counter in less than a minute and leave the store as the final light switch is turned off at 7:29 and a half. Closed at 7:30 means, to the clerk, I’m out of here.


It’s Tuesday in Sorede. Market day again. We are surprised, because it looks completely different on this Tuesday. The vendors’ tables circle the square as before, but only the fruit and vegetable person is in the place she was last week. And new vendors have emerged. For instance, the basket seller.





I bought one such basket in Languedoc four years ago and I use it at every Madison market and it looks like it has another ten years of life left. In Sorede, people bring baskets such as these, but they also bring the more traditional wicker...





...and many these days bring the same recyclable bags we now use for grocery shopping.





(I have to smile at this last scene: our little grocery store is closed for the week (or longer: the posted dates keep changing), but these women still appear to treat it as a place to congregate. Ah, habits.)

Perhaps the basket vendor comes only once a month? Or once a year? So many details of village life remain elusive. And that’s okay. Many expats complain that in moving to a village in France, they never really blend into the fabric of the community. That it takes twenty or more years before villagers regard you as their own.

Me, I will never see myself as “belonging” here, even if I were to come back year after year to Sorede. Thirty years after moving to Wisconsin, I am only now feeling that I am truly from Madison. And I qualify that by saying that really, if truth be told, I am from Poland. To be from Sorede I should think would take an equally long span of time. Assimilation is a tricky thing when an individual (or a family) enters as a complete stranger, with no linkages to the enduring community.

In Sorede, as in other villages across France, you see a lot of older people. Even as Languedoc is growing as a region and the cities here are explosively expanding, the villages continue to shrink. It was a torrential flood of departures before the Scandinavians, Germans, and of course the English discovered the virtues of Languedoc countryside as well as its affordability and started to move here -- seasonally and even permanently. Cheap flights on Ryanair to Perpignan have sealed the fate of these rural places: they will survive because the northern Europeans love to spend their money here.

For the locals of course, this is a mixed blessing.





In any case, I know that I will be forever merely passing through.  Not one of them at all, but always on the outside, listening and watching. And maybe in thirty years, when I decide I have heard enough, I will choose a different place to visit. (I speak in rough approximations.)

For now, I am on the lookout for another place to stay (in the future). The apartment we’re in has a perfect location, but my tidiness instincts and my love for a pleasant aesthetic is a little ruffled here. I love the patio and the kitchen is quite decent and the rest is only okay. It’s a cheap place and sometimes (are you listening Ed?) you get what you pay for.

But let me return to the Tuesday story. We’re still at the morning market, having just bought ultimately the winner pain au chocolat and the winner baguette at the larger bakery. I know I praised to high heaven the shopkeeper at the smaller bakery, but the two ladies at this bigger (and I have to now say preferred) bakery are complete gems and jewels and they never fail to pick out the very biggest morning pain when they see Ed at the counter. And the smiles we get set the day ablaze.









At the market, we buy supper. Young potatoes, half dozen tomatoes (now down to 90 Euro cents per kilo), several endives, cherries, haricots verts, lovely carrots, artichokes -- all for a total price of 3 Euros.

And we stroll. Even in this little market, there are things to enjoy, to smile at.





At a charcuterie, we buy anchovies in olive oil and at the cave, -- wine. Such great joy in putting together a meal like this. The baguette, of course, is the binding force – the integrating element. It has to be good, because if it is not, then the rest will be also less well regarded. There are lessons to be learned there and I should note that the French, too, are constantly in the process of learning them – witness the horrible shame brought on by the performance of what has been described as the arrogantly individualistic (and those have been the kinder descriptors) French soccer team in the World Cup.


In the afternoon, as I said, we returned to the preferred beach.

Ah, change. The winds have rearranged the sands here. The inlet separating the village beach from the longer stretch of sand has grown deeper and as we park in the village this day, we struggle to find the shallower crossing point.




The wind, which has died down in Sorede is still gusting here and even though it’s warm and sunny, there are very few people out today.





Except, of course, those who worship strong breezes.





We settle in by what we think is a shallow stretch (you can see the color of the water change where it is more shallow). What I still cannot understand is how the water can look so agitated today when the wind appears to be blowing from the same direction as when we were here last week, when the water was so still that you could sit an inch (or so)  away from the water's edge and not be made wet. Today, the boundaries are not so fixed.





Ed, of course, loves the agitation and he is soon catching fragments of waves. And eventually I join him. The water is still on the cool side by my standards and I don’t stay in for long. The wind has this unfortunate habit of blowing a wave back at you so that after you have jumped and it has moved on, the gust will spray you even as you stand behind it with a fine mist of cold water.





We’re well covered in sun screen and so we stay on the beach for a longer while. The warm sand, the breeze, the perfectly blue sky all act to push away thoughts of anything too difficult or uncomfortable. The tensed muscles relax, the mind relaxes along with them.

A crab tumbles in a wave onto the shore. I want to photograph it, but it always rolls away from me when I aim the camera. Eventually it rolls into deeper waters. He has a job to do down there... Ed muses.






Supper on the patio. Missing from the photo is the dessert – endless good apricots from our neighbor, and nectarines as well now. Soon, she tells us, the peaches will be ripe too.

the sweet long hours of daylight

This is the day I love to wake up to, more than most any other – the one brimming with daylight. And when it’s over, I feel a twinge of sadness, for we are then one step closer to the short cold days of December.

Ah, the lovely pastel colors of a summer evening!

How should I honor this longest day of the year?

Wake early and watch the light emerge. When the sun (assume there is sun; a cloudy day takes away some of the pleasure) rises to a lovely warm place, get going. Spend all the hours outside, use no artificial light at all. Stay close to nature. Eat outdoors. All meals. Then, listen to music, outside still, as dusk sets in.

That last element is easy in France. Some twenty-five years back it was proclaimed that on the day of solstice, the streets should ring with music. And there will be singing and if you’re inclined, dancing. On this day, every town and city street is filled with music. The villages, perhaps worried that the National Fete de la Musique would reveal no local talent, often bring in outside musicians to the village square. Sorede brought in the Buenasuerte band and the villagers ate and drank and tap tap tapped to mostly Andalusian rhythms.

But that’s giving you the ending. And there was so much more to revel in – from the first step out to greet this most brilliant June day.

When the wind cavorts through the Rousilion plane, it so often leaves behind a deep blue cloudless sky. The longest day of the year is, this year, a fantastically clear day. Gusts still shake the branches of trees in the morning hours, but you can tell that it’s a half-hearted shudder. Things have settled down. People come out of hiding. The normal rhythms are in place again.





We pick up our pain au chocolat...





...and take them to the café bar. The trick is to find a table half bathed in sunshine (my half) and half covered with shade (Ed’s half). We evaluate each of the tables that spill out onto the village square. It is at once a lovely and ridiculous routine.

Ten o’clock. Time to get going. I have in mind a hike up the mountains just to the east the great Canigou peak. I have a “light” (meaning it’s glossy but lacks detail) description from the tourist office of a five hour circuit up the Pyrenees Roussillon and it sounds exactly right: a varied topography, and a good elevation (slightly less than 1000 meter ascent to the Pic des Sallines, which is at 1333 meters, or close to 4500 feet, a reasonable goal for a day hike). About half of the loop is on the Spanish side of the mountain – which makes it all rather unique.

The hike begins in the tiny mountain village of Las Illas. And let me say at the outset that the day had two and only two scary moments and the first one was on the drive into Las Illas.

Single lane mountain driving makes my skin crawl. I’m okay if I’m on the side that hugs the mountain. I’m less okay if the road trickles to a few clumps of dirt at the edge of a precipitous drop. The way you handle oncoming traffic is you assess: is there room, or do you back down to a wider spot? It’s not an evaluation I want to be wrong in making.

You could say we crawled to Las Illas. Not knowing if there would be oncoming cars, I took the turns very very slowly. Had there been hikers on the road, I dare say they may have outpaced us at certain junctures.

When the village buildings came into sight, I breathed the heaviest sigh of relief.

The trail began with a yellow marking, easily found at the side of the village restaurant. Sometime in the middle of the hike, we would be switching to a red and white GR trail (part of the Grand Routes system of trails that criss cross Europe). It was not clear when the switch would take place, but I assumed it would be obvious.





Up to the first mountain pass we climb. The markings are done well. And within a half hour we are on the ridge and in Spain.

Coll de Lly. This is not an insignificant mountain pass. It is one of a handful of trails used by hundreds of thousands of republicans fleeing the Spanish fascist government in 1939. Ed, who has a fantastic memory for historic detail (at the same time that he has very little memory for events in his own life), talks about the fighting that took place during the Spanish Civil War as we walk along the ridgeline.

It is so quiet here now. The views extend to the mountains and even to Spain’s Costa Brava. The wind doesn’t bother the southern slopes and the air is almost completely still. I find myself removing layers, allowing the warm air to brush against me as we move along the well marked trail.









Butterflies flutter, bird sing. We pass small meadows of wildflowers. Spanish lavander grows in clumps between the rocks. Sometimes the path is wide, sometimes it narrows and requires careful footing between boulders.

























It is a dream of a hike.

Within an hour we reach an old (seventeenth century) sanctuary – lovely and remote, with commanding views over the Spanish mountains.





A stream emerges here from three spouts and Ed convinces me that the water is purer and safer to drink than what we find in the tap back home. (We carry a pack with plenty of water, but on a sunny day, plenty can be happily supplemented.)





The final climb to the Salines summit is absolutely breathtaking. To the south – the mountains and the coast of Spain. To the north west – Canigou and the Roussillon plane.

I try to patch together a 180 degree panorama for you, but it’s my first attempt and I am still clumsy at it. But you can see the Spanish mountains to the left and the Canigou peak to the right. The ridge line here is just at the border.





Let me add just a few regular photos from the point where we pause for lunch. Yes, I have Pic Canigou to my side. The mountain I have yet to write about. (The Spanish Pyrenees of the second photo are behind me.)












Having reached the summit, it’s now time to begin the descent. At first it is a snap. The trail is well marked, the path is stony but manageable.


 


But less than an hour into the return, we come to a crossroads. The glossy brochure says au col des Cireres, tourner a gauche (turn left). We are at the col des Cireres. There is a small arrow pointing to Las Illas in completely the opposite direction (to the right). Do you follow the brochure or the sign? Both have trail markings: the desired red and white. We take the wrong one and we'll be at the wrong end of the mountain, very, very far from where our car is.

It’s almost a coin toss.

We stuff the brochure into the pack and ignore it. A few steps further, Ed mutters -- of course, someone could have moved the sign...

But we continue. And not too long after our chancy turn we encounter a pair of hikers. Let me say now that they took the worry off the rest of the day for me. They're from Scotland and they’d been walking the Pyrenees for days. They had maps we could only dream of. We were on the right trail.

We give them space and then continue behind, relieved.

About an hour before reaching Las Illas, we come across a mountain farm. Back in the woods, we noticed a hose bringing water down to the farmstead. It had sprung a leak and I wanted to relay this to the farmer.

Noticing my camera, he asks if I'd like to see (and phtograph) his small sheep herd. Real Catalan sheep! – he tells me with pride in heavily accented French. You're from The United States? Ah!!















He thanks me again and I leave, following the road now down to the mountain village of Las Illas. A few minutes later, the farmer passes us in his big boat of a car. I’m impressed that he dares attack the narrow road in it. He pulls over and leans towards us.
You know, I’ve been to Canada! Last year! To Montreal!

To visit friends or relatives?

No, to hunt.
Ah.
He waves and rumbles forward.

In Las Illas we meet our Scottish pals from the trail. Ed buys a round of drinks at the village bar – Sangria for us, pints for them. I’m thinking Sangria, with all that fruit juice, is a lighter option. I have a bit of driving ahead of me.

The sangria is delicious. I ask the server if it’s a home recipe.
Yes, of course, I make it from scratch.

With what juice?

Juice?

Yes, what fruit juice do you use?

Oh, no fruit juice! I use mainly wine and then add a drop of... (she rattles off a few more potent beverages)

That one small sangria may well take the edge off of driving back along the narrow lane. We linger a while longer before returning to the roads.


In the evening I have a more fruity sangria on the village square.





I think about how lucky people are, here and elsewhere in France, with their well developed social spaces. If you live alone, or even with your partner, you still have many daily opportunities for social exchanges -- at the bar, cafe, on the village square. We lack such places and I think we are poorer for it. If you want to celebrate the Fourth of July or just the fact of waking to a bright morning, you can do it alone, you can do it with friends or family, but you have to plan for it. You cannot drop in and exchange a few words with people you know as the whim strikes you.


Ed and I eat a simple meal at Chez Patou, just at the edge of the square.






He's not the type to stay and listen to the boisterous music, but I am. After dinner I linger as he trots back to the apartment. The last wisps of sun still touch the corners of the Sorede buildings as the musicians play their guitars. The moon is out, the day is nearly done.





And before I know it, the electric lights take over and the longest day is not a day anymore. Sorede is still tapping to the rhythms, but it's time for me to head home.