If yesterday I marveled at the difference between three and six years’ memory, this evening I grapple with the erosion accomplished by six-to-twelve hours. I can tell you that the clouds rolled in overnight, blessing the morning with hours of cool before the sun—finally coming into the heights of its power this week—reasserted itself. I crossed the Pont d’Artigues shortly after rejoining the GR65 and then wound quietly through vineyards and fields, slaloming along tree-lined tracks. As if via teleportation, I was sitting in Montréal-du-Gers nearly before I had rubbed the sleep from my eyes, though I could see well enough to get a croissant and a banana. The fields that followed were impossible to photograph, with no single image conducive to a frame, but all enjoyable enough to stroll through. My most vivid recollections of the morning come from the snack bar at Le Mille Bornes in Lamothe, where Luna the dog transitioned from growler to nuzzler and then never looked back. And then it was into the green tunnel, following the shady, straight track into Éauze. I arrived around noon. Those lampposts illuminate parts of the journey, but so much of the walk itself has already faded.
That’s not necessarily a problem. Today, my shortest stage in France, was critical not for the walking but for attending to the cramped timeline of the abbreviated publication process. I needed to update all of the gpx tracks for the stages I’ve walked thus far (which, really, is most of them—20 of the GR-65 stages, plus all of the Célé and Rocamadour variants), and that work has been delayed by the rarity of wifi robust enough to accommodate the bandwidth-sucking software. The tourism office in Éauze, directly across the street from the Gite Communal—where I have the entire building to myself and where they also let me check in at noon, bless them—offers free wifi, but only in 45-minute increments. After that, you’re locked out for 30 minutes. So, I’ve been making a regular shuttle for the past six hours, coming out to the bench, frantically updating as much as possible, then retreating to the gite to attend to offline matters. The advantage of this early push is that the folks at Cicerone will be able to run the tracks through their map-making-machine while I’m still here in Europe, so that they’re waiting for me when I return home, for all of the labeling that will need to be done.
I also would have done some shopping during this long afternoon, as my shoes are on their last legs, but the town doesn’t have great options. I would have bought a new pair in Condom, but I was there on a Sunday. While they aren’t offering a ton of support, I’m cautiously optimistic that the shoes will get me to Aire-sur-l’Adour tomorrow, where a large sporting goods store is available outside of the center. And if not? Well, some people make pilgrimages barefoot.
After making the bench-gite-bench shuffle most of the afternoon, I started to feel pretty bad about using my limited time in Éauze in so banal a fashion, so I decided to take a break and make a second trip to the cathedral. One can’t help but notice upon arrival in town that it’s markedly different from the religious architecture previously encountered along the way. This Gothic structure is built from bricks—or maybe built from mortar with a side of bricks—and that design difference makes one feel like they have moved into a wholly different region.
What struck me on this second visit, though, was how different the building materials are on the inside. Certainly, some bricks are still visible. Instead of the clean, consistent rows of evenly spaced bricks, though, the cathedral’s interior walls are chockablock with stones of all different shape and size. While they sometimes preserve some measure of linear structure, in other places their piling up seems almost haphazard, like children on a beach laboring feverishly to build something stable before the next wave comes in. In places, the walls looked reminiscent of cairns, informal waymarks to guide the traveler forward.
I had missed all of that my first time inside. My eyes were on auto-pilot. You walk in a church, you orient yourself to the altar. In a Gothic church, in particular, your eyes are pulled immediately to the stained glass. After looping through the ambulatory, if there is one, you peek into each remaining chapel and scope out the rose window in the back for dessert. And in that process of looking over all of the “highlights,” I neglected the connective tissue, perhaps the defining quality of this distinctive space. As chaotic and jumbled as it might be in places, it’s wonderfully beautiful.
I went back to the gite and sat down, next to my pack and my shoes. The shoes will be done in a day. The pack is probably on its last pilgrimage as well. The tops of my feet are dried out and in need of moisturizer. I have some heat rash going up my legs. My dome, freshly shaved when I set out, now has a fuzzy coating that, come day’s end, is pinned closely to my head like a thoroughly useless helmet. My beard is bushy and probably has crumbs from several pastries tucked away in it.
Like the church walls, after weeks on the road I have a raggedy quality—worn down, used up, and hardly presentable in polite French society. And yet, that raggedness is not indicative of decline or disrepair; nothing smacks of failure or brokenness here, aside from those shoes. Every one of those markings is a merit badge, a symbol of the road traveled, the challenges endured, the triumphs of my body, the satisfaction in my heart. The stones have piled together, and even if they have done so by coincidence, there is no accident, there is only intention, the decision made every moment to take another step.
The pilgrim’s body—covered in tape and bandage, lathered in Vaseline and sunscreen, aching and bruised and unshaven and bizarrely tanned—is those cathedral walls, so often viewed as the imperfect vessel when it is actually remarkable, even miraculous, and undeniably still standing.
