Getting Lost
There are four distinct routes across France leading towards St Jaques de Compostelle in Spain. I had selected via Podiensis, which starts at Le Puy en Velais and ends at St Jean Pied du Port at the foot of the Pyrenees. This route was known as GR 65.
There are very detailed guidebooks covering different sections of the GR 65. I walked through three, posting the completed books back to Switzerland. During six and a half weeks, the GR 65 took me through seven different departments across France. I sampled the differences in gastronomie, wines, agriculture, types of cattle as I moved through herds, as well as the diversity of landscapes and terrain. I recorded my journey with photos and short videos, using my cell phone placed in a pocket at my knee.
2012 was the year I got my first cell phone, having resisted until then.
Ronald and I had smiled at each other as cell phones went off in restaurants and people patted their pockets and reached for handbags.
He never used a cell phone, to the consternation of his professional colleagues. He was coordinating the Geneva Declaration, a global initiative for the reduction of armed violence for development – without his own private computer or a cell phone. He’d been issued one of course but, at the time of his death, this was found in a drawer in his office. Instead, he carried a flash drive and accessed computers in Swiss Embassies or UN offices – wherever he found himself. He was also never without a small notebook and pen which fitted in his shirt pocket. I’d found a series of little notebooks with his illegible shorthand when clearing out his desk.
Ronald had a superb memory, recalling facts and conversations with individuals from years back, often disconcerting for ‘politicians’ in the Balkans – prone to periodically reinventing the past in the present.
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I followed my guidebook, planning each day and deciding how far I could go, depending on the terrain, the forest cover (it was July and hot), and options for accommodation at the end. I would then phone ahead and book my space.
During the first half of my journey when I was walking in sandals with blisters and bandages, I was fortunate to have the services of malle postale, vehicles which collected pilgrims’ rucksacks in the morning and drove them to their destinations for the night. I therefore only carried a daypack with my water and essentials. There were no such services for the final third of my journey, which is why and when I lightened my load and posted 9 kgs back to Switzerland. I simply kept a change of walking clothes, my sleep attire, casual harem pants and my kikoi, which I wore every night to dinner. This was either in the gite or a restuarant in a village if I’d opted for a more comfortable night with my own room in an auberge.
The Via Podeniensis is well marked and GR 65 signs abound, visible at every twist and turn along the way. It’s virtually impossible to lose your way, unless there’s thick fog and no visibility.
But I did.
I’d been walking for perhaps a week without coming into the vicinity of towns, industry or motorways. But suddenly, walking down a particularly rocky path, I began to feel uncomfortable as the unexpected sound of traffic and low level hum of industry and urban life entered my field.
Quite distraught, I saw a railway bridge passing high overhead and small factories nestled at the base of tall aqueduct-type archways supporting it. There was nothing resembling this urban mass reflected in my guidebook. I would have to continue down into the hub and ask.
It was stressful, venturing out from the undergrowth onto the road. The ‘path’ had ceased being a path as such and I was having to clamber over rocks and through bushes. The road had traffic moving in both directions quite fast, it seemed to me. I needed to pause and adjust to this before trying to cross to the row of small shop fronts I could see.
Walking slowly along the ‘shops’ … I heard birds…and it was the birdsong which drew me into one interior. A pet shop.
Inside, a friendly woman looked at my guidebook and shook her head as we turned it around this way and that, trying to orientate ourselves.
‘You are lost…very lost’
So lost, in fact, that she couldn’t direct me back to where I’d deviated from my path.
She put me in her car and drove me back up the winding mountain road to the place where the GR 65 passed. I got out, thanking this angel profusely.
Then I saw it.
The signs indicated with two huge Xs on either side that the path stopped there. NO ENTRY. Another huge arrow showed a right turn into a short tunnel under the railway line to continue to the other side.
How had I missed this obvious change in direction? These clear signs?
What had I been doing? thinking? focusing on?
Yes. It dawned. I had allowed myself to dwell on some recent events preceding my setting off on the Camino, not pleasant thoughts. In fact, I’d started feeling emotions of anger and resentment as I relived Ronald’s death and the aftermath, directing the feelings at people and my disappointment at the turn of events. Reliving a sense of betrayal.
Standing now in front of the signs and reflecting on my earlier mood and the powerful emotions which had spun me off my path, I had the ‘aha’ moment!
Ronald’s mantra from James Thurber came through loud and clear:
Look back, not in anger
Nor forward in fear
But around, in awareness
A very clear lesson indeed!
I had allowed anger to take me out of the present and had ceased to look around in awareness.
And look where I landed up.
That was the only time it happened!
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