WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 37

Mons to Pissos: 32km

Gérard assures me this morning that there will be no storms today. They have all passed. Nor rain. Yesterday he spoke to an old man at a boulangerie, who showed him the sky and gave him a prediction far more certain than anything he might see online.

And so here I am walking before sunrise, just enough light to see, ignoring the rumbles of thunder and the occasional flash of lightning happening just to my right, trying to work out which way the wind is blowing and whether that noise is rain in the trees. It is.

I stand in the shelter of the woods for a little while until the rain gets heavy enough to start filtering through, and reluctantly I get the coat and the rucksack cover out. Of course, the moment it’s all on and I set off, the rain stops.

But overall, it’s worth setting off early. I’ve come to love the aesthetic of les Landes, all the different levels of trees, a palette of green and brown, parallel lines of different stages of growth, punctuated with deciduous trees.

Once you get to midday, the landscape stays pretty constant. Between half six and nine o’clock, however, the changes in the light and the sky make every vista a little different. Maybe by day three, I’ll have seen all of those too. But with a change in the weather too, and the cloud formations, it’s rather like the earlier sections before Tours, walking in the Beauce. When you get used to the land around you, you look to the skies, which, as long as they’re not clear, are ever-changing.

I think the most interesting to me is I’ve never before walked through such a large area which is contained within a forest, where the villages are distributed sparsely in forest clearings, where all livelihood is based on forest activities.

I’ve been in areas where forests have been planted nearby, and I’ve been in wildernesses where the forest is all there is. But this idea of a lived-in forest, it gives me an idea of what the Weald of sussex may have been like, when the forest still dominated. But here it is the other way round. The forests were planted, not cleared, the villages subsumed, not revealed.

Most cars, when you see them on these little lanes, are enjoying the flat, long stretches to test their speed. But this morning, a small white van stops next to me, winds down the window in order to tell me that in a couple of kilometres from here there is a very good boulangerie with café and a terrace to sit down.

He wishes me a good walk and drives away at a reasonable speed. Later Gerard and Chantal will tell me he did the same for them. I’m not sure if his mission is to help the pilgrims or to help the woman in the Boulangerie. I hope it’s the latter. There is a good story there to play with over the next few miles.

The boulangerie is all that I hoped for. Small, with excellent croissants. I set myself the challenge of making the two men at the table next to me react in a friendly manner. Eventually, by getting up with exaggerated stiffness and making the comment, “The problem is when you stop,” the younger one smiles and sniggers. The older guy maintains his rigidly uninvolved demeanour. But at this point, as I walk off, I’m confident at least of a goodbye and a bon courage.

After second breakfast, the path becomes very sandy. It is very hard to walk on, and also occurs immediately after I put on the sun cream. So today, my legs appear to have a grainy, sandy tan rather than the usual dirt brown one.

I get to Moustey. It has everything, including two churches, one of which hosting a local craft sale. When I see that I’m a thousand kilometres from my destination, which must be pretty much the halfway point, I use this as an excuse to buy a ring for my currently naked middle finger.

Although there are beautiful cafes and restaurants in Moustey, I opt for the little Cocci Market minimart. The little has a little table inside where I can sit and eat my box of salad. And I don’t care how beautiful the other places are, nothing beats that.

It’s another few hours into Pissos, and it gets hotter and I get tired for the last stretch along the main road. I make the decision. I will leave my rucksack at the gîte before carrying on into town to get the information from the mairie.

But rather than the gîte, I walk into a forester’s house, who very kindly tells me I’ve got it wrong. The gîte is not as marked on the map, or at least I’ve misread the map. So, I take an even greater risk: hide my rucksack behind the signage for a closed snack bar in the area and decide to run into town and back as quickly as I can.

But that involves a stop at the bar tabac for a quick panaché, and then obviously a stop at the supermarket to pick up a bag full of drinks. And here I am now, walking back with an extraordinarily stormy-looking sky approaching from the direction where my bag is left. The sky is dark and bright at the same time. Their outlines are so crisp that it looks as though the trees and all the foreground have been superimposed on it.

But I remain cheerful. I’ve had a message from Chantal: “Coucou, Rachel, we’re here.” So somehow, even if I’ve lost nearly all my belongings. I’ve still got my passport and a bag full of drinks and a very cheerful welcome waiting for me.

I retrace my steps, unearth my abandoned rucksack from behind the restaurant sign and go to find chalet number five. Luckily, Chantal spots me, as I wander around, trying in vain to spot any chalet numbers, and I’m invited into my home for tonight.

It’s a little wooden gîte, part of a set of holiday gîtes, this one put aside for pilgrims if they need it. And as a result, we have a strange feeling of being on a holiday: me, these two people I’ve just met, in our little holiday gîte in France, having dinner on the terrace.

Gérard asks me what red wine I prefer. I don’t know why until he tells me he’s planning to get me a good vin de France for our last day, which is a few days away yet. I’m very touched by this wish, and wish I had said nothing. I’d much rather rely one hundred percent on the expertise of an ex-restaurateur.

But maybe I’ll leave the meteorological predictions to the experts.