LITMIR.BIZ

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This second disappointment of the day made my eyes sting with tears.

      This whole Camino thing wasn’t working out as I planned.

      Jean Claude waved down the road. There were other places in town. We must go on. We passed a cafe with patio tables set in the sunshine, and I looked at it longingly. My feet ached. My bag weighed more by the second. I was still hangry. But Eric wasn’t going to stop again until we found a place to stay.

      Down a side street, I noticed another gîte sign. Following it, we passed through a gate and up a flight of stairs to another courtyard, this one beside a building that was all modern angles and bright white paint. I thought it looked like a Seattle community center, not a place for pilgrims following a medieval path, but if they had space, I would overlook the poor aesthetics.

      A young man sat at a picnic table, reading a book. “English?” Eric asked him.

      “Yes. A little.” We learned that he was German. He had a reservation here, but they wouldn’t open until 4:00, another hour away. He didn’t know if they had room for more pilgrims. “You should call them,” he offered, waving to a phone number printed on the glass door.

      Sure, except this was our offline sabbatical. Our cell phones were turned off, and even if they weren’t, they weren’t connected to European phone plans. We weren’t supposed to need phones to walk a trail that’s a thousand years old.

      Since when do pilgrims need reservations? I stewed. Even as I thought it, I realized that almost everything I read—almost everything that was written in English, for that matter—had focused on the Camino in Spain. I’d assumed that things were the same in France. Clearly that was not the case.

      Eric and I waited, anxious and testy, for the gîte to open. Or at least, I was anxious and testy. Eric kept his thoughts to himself.

      At 3:30 a woman pulled up in a car, but she ignored us. She puttered around a garden, made a phone call, and smoked a cigarette. I suggested that Eric ask her if they had space for us, but he refused to interrupt. Since I was too afraid to try it myself, in French, I continued to sulk and nurse my tired feet.

      A few more pilgrims came into the courtyard, including a Belgian woman I recognized from the pilgrim mass. When someone finally opened the gîte door at 4:00, Eric politely let her go before us. I seethed, convinced that once again we would be turned away. At least this time it wouldn’t be my fault.

      The inside of the building was as cool and modern as the outside. When we got to the counter, it was obvious that my worrying had been pointless. The man who ran the place even spoke a little English. Yes, they had beds available. They would also provide dinner and breakfast, an offer called demi-pension. He took our cash—along the Camino, all of our transactions happened in cash, which we replenished about once a week at the ATMs that were easy to find in most towns—and assigned us to a room with a minimum of words, casually waving toward a stamp pad sitting on a far table where we could stamp our own credentials.

      This was a privately owned, for-profit gîte, and it was about as different from Isidore’s careful attention in Le Puy as I could imagine.

      Our room had three sets of bunk beds, which quickly filled with a varied crew of pilgrims: a slender, serious French teenager who wore a white scarf; an older Frenchwoman with a pinched face and a lot of maps; and a solid, serious Austrian who left his underwear draped on the heater. They all went about their business with a minimum of words or eye contact, and we followed their lead.

      I fumbled through my second night of unpacking and awkwardly navigated a shower in the communal bathroom. That left only one more chore: laundry.

      Like the good hiker I aspired to be, I was traveling light, so I needed to hand-wash at least a few essentials every day or two. The trouble was, I’d never in my life washed clothes in a sink, and Eric was nowhere in sight to help me.

      Covering my lack of knowledge with sheer determination, I scrunched wads of my hiking shirt and underwear under the running water of the bathroom sink, rubbed some of my bar soap across them, and succeeded mostly in splashing water all over the floor. When I’d rinsed out the bulk of the suds, I squeezed some of the water out and hung everything on the clothes bar in our room, where it dripped onto the tile floor.

      With chores accomplished and dinner still two hours away, I found Eric and half-heartedly discussed touring the town; the church was supposed to be lovely. But I was tired, sore, and still hungry. I didn’t care about seeing anything except a chair and a beer at that cafe on the corner. There would be other medieval chapels.

      Ten minutes later we were sitting under an awning, watching package trucks careen at impossibly high speeds around sharp corners and down cobbled streets never intended for motor vehicles. Jean Claude and another man came by and, after a questioning nod and smile of acceptance, joined us. They seemed curious about two young Americans walking the Chemin du Puy. I could see they wanted to question us, to help us. But without a common language we mostly just sat with our beers and our maps, companionable but awkward.

      Eric and I excused ourselves eventually and went back to the gîte for dinner, which was as anticlimactic as the rest of the day. The food was good, as French food almost always is. We had a three-course meal of lentil soup and a salad, then sausage and potatoes, then a cheese plate and dessert. The meal was served family style to a table of ten pilgrims, including the solemn Brothers Grim. They nodded in recognition, but they spoke no English. Neither did the imperious older woman from our room, who sat at the head of the table.

      “Perhaps we could speak English for a little while,” the Belgian woman said to the rest of the group, gesturing at us in sympathy.

      “Non,” the dour woman declared. And then she said something that the German told us meant “I do not speak English. We are in France, and so we must speak only French.”

      Eric and I were left to ourselves at the end of the table. Mute and exhausted, my mind kept coming back to the same question: Was this a mistake?

CLIMBING

      I slept better that night but was awake long before anyone else stirred, filled with a mix of nerves and jet lag. As the dawn light started to creep into the room, I knew I wanted to be out of the gîte as soon as possible and away from these stern-faced people I couldn’t talk to. There was a snag, though. The clothes I’d washed the night before were still wet.

      “Oh, non,” the Belgian woman, whose name was Virginie, said. She had that regret-and-disapproval look down, too. “You must dry clothes outside. There are always sinks and lines behind the building.”

      My breakfast carried the taste of my embarrassment as I worried about what else I didn’t know. I’d thought I was so prepared. How did everyone but me seem to understand how this Camino thing worked? I stuffed my clothes into mesh laundry bags and pinned those to the outside of my pack, so that the things would dry while I walked, and then we set out.

      I could already see a difference in the land around us. The soil was no longer black volcanic rock but had softened to a deep brown. The hills, though, were a constant.

      GR65 leads west, toward the remains of Saint Jacques. The rivers in France, at least in that area, run south toward the Mediterranean. The result is that we constantly climbed and descended steep, rocky river valleys. Our first few kilometers were all uphill. We occasionally saw other people on the trail who passed us with happy “Bonjours” and “Bon chemins” (“Good way”).

      Just past a cluster of houses guarded by well-fed French chats, the trees cleared, leaving only bright green, early spring scrub grass on a rocky outcropping. And on top of the rock, a castle. Or, at least, the ruins of a castle. A crumbling keep balanced on the crest, watching over the river valley. Below the tower stood an intact chapel, built of stone that seemed to extend directly from the hillside and crowned with a roof of seemingly haphazard

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