A Dyke A Broad #45: The Chemin de Perdigal Edition
In which I leave Paris, go for a hike, get lost, get found. With photos!
Hello from Paris!
I’ve been back for a few days now after a visit to a pal in the rural village of Assas, just outside Montpellier.
I’d forgotten what it’s like to live in a house. How you open your door, step out, and you’re there, outside. Not just in a hallway, preparing to descend five flights, and even then step out onto concrete which is a kind of floor for humans which en masse create their own movable walls, but truly out-of-doors with all that air becoming naked sky. Even indoors in the rain you feel it, sitting on the couch, listening to its patters and drips, smelling the wet earth through the cracked window, watching the bright green of leaves emerge from behind a dusty grey.
Dry, there’s the relentless, scratchy music of the cicadas, the strangled cries of Turkish pigeons, a home-repairing neighbor’s buzzsaw. Then nothing. I’m told the cicadas work nine-to-nine then clock out. No matter that it’s still light out. At dusk, bats appear, gobbling up silently biting mosquitoes, though not quickly enough to save me. We are eating outside on the patio.The next morning I discover dozens of itchy welts on my calves. My hostess buys me anti-moustique cream, so there will be some flesh left to send back on the train to Paris.
Five minutes away, past a hay field, and near an old cemetery, there’s a path called the Chemin du Perdigal. It leads down a long road used only by farmers and firemen, and lined mostly with vineyards—an elegant word for grape farms. After you cross a main road, there’s the massif forestier du Baillarguet, a patch of forest with Alep pines, oaks with tiny leaves and minuscule acorns, piñon pines, cedars. Scrub. A fire road runs through it, and hiking and bike trails. An information board at the entrance warns of fire. I learn, too, that there are wild boars, badgers, rare hoppoe birds with fancy crests.
Inside, it smells of turpentine and heat. The dry grass crunches on the path, the weeds bite. It feels terribly foreign, then I remember being a kid in the country in August, and forcing my way through patches of what we called stickers, plagued, too, by the same blackberry brambles, mosquitoes, biting flies, chiggers.
I stick to the fire road at first. Bicyclists and hikers sometimes disappear down intersecting trails. When I get hot, I take a parallel, slightly shaded path which winds through the trees and sometimes intersects with other routes. I keep checking google maps to make sure I don’t veer off. It gets really hot. When I turn around to go home, I try to take the path again because it’s shady. After a few minutes, I realize I’m on the wrong one, but think it’s no big deal because the “forest” is so skinny you can cross it in an hour or two, and because I’m still headed in the right direction.
Except bit by bit, the underbrush gets thicker. The trail narrows, pines close in until the prickly scrub is at each shoulder. The path seems to be a dry creek bed. I’m suddenly claustrophobic and nervous because even if I’m going the right direction, the path is so narrow and so winding it blinds you to what’s ahead. And I have no idea what to do if I meet a charging boar. Or worse, a mountain bike going top speed. I figure I’ll have to dive off the path and into a solid wall of spines.
I start to jog, why not? Casually, for just a little while. Unexpectedly I’m happy. Happy and afraid. Leaping over tree roots like I’m ten. When I slow down, I notice a huge blood smear on my arm, and a trickle from what I think is a fly bite. I keep moving, and suddenly burst out into the bare, baked expanse of the fire road like a feral beast. I giggle. Crack open my water. Mop up my bloody arm with a Kleenex. See other humans in the distance. Take the path back into the forest to pee in peace. Bury my paper under pine needles.
Soon, I’m out of the forest altogether and back on Perdigal’s Road. I pass the vineyards, and the farm where pigs have appeared. I’ve been walking for yonks. When I see a bench, I sit on it. After a minute, I can’t help myself. I check the news on my phone. It falls like a blow. After a minute, I turn my phone entirely off, and shove it in my pack.
I stare at the shrubs across the road. I see rosemary and lavender, other stuff I don’t know. The dirt at my feet. My feet. My bitten legs. The sun which beats down on me. I wonder what to do with the news, this knowledge. Even now, back in rainy Paris, I can’t square it with this other world of the “things themselves,” as Husserl said, which brings me so much joy with its indifference. I wonder, at what point I will allow myself to relinquish misery and anger and grief. I have never been so tired.
In Photos
Just a Little More…
Afghan women’s defiance and despair: ‘I never thought I’d have to wear a burqa. My identity will be lost.
Plymouth shooting: Police urged to clamp down on ‘incel’ movement.
Haiti hospitals overwhelmed by quake victims as death toll hits 1,297
Already erasing women in Kabul.
A post by one of my favorite writers on her blog The OK Karen.
Over the Olympic period, I found myself watching the documentary The Price Of Gold, which tells the story of figure skater Tonya Harding. I didn’t particularly want to see it – the parts with which I was already familiar made me fear it would make me sad – but my middle son kept telling me how good it was (he was right, and I was too)…
Welp, that’s it for this time.
Phenomenologically yours,
P.S. Wear a fucking mask in enclosed public places. Even if you’re vaccinated. Even if it’s hot.