Le Stevenson
Sister Becky retired on October 1, 2024 and to celebrate this end of a rich and long teaching life we decided to disconnect her from her computer and head out on a walking trip, or maybe you’d call it a hiking trip through the middle of France. We settled on the Stevenson trail, the secular steps of a secular man, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that parallels the religious path of those pilgrims walking toward Compestello. I thought of us as pilgrims as well, walking our way toward a less anxious, and more present life. Stevenson, writing of his journey that set the trail’s route said it well: “When the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?” So for six days, we had nothing to do but worry about the next step, the next meal, the next bed for the night. And that simple life worked its magic on us, even if we did not walk with a donkey named Modestine. We walked, instead, with Thomas, Becky’s son, who served donkey-like to carry the heavy pack. He was also lead laugher, his laughter carrying us down the trails.
Thomas and me in front of Saint Michel D’aiguilhe
Sister Becky retired on October 1, 2024 and to celebrate this end of a rich and long teaching life we decided to disconnect her from her computer and head out on a walking trip, or maybe you’d call it a hiking trip through the middle of France. She picked the Stevenson trail, planning our route and our nights in gites, following the secular steps of a secular man, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that parallels the religious path of those pilgrims walking toward Compostello. I thought of us as pilgrims as well, walking our way toward a less anxious, and more present life. Stevenson, writing of his journey that set the trail’s route said it well: “When the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?” So for six days, we had nothing to do but worry about the next step, the next meal, the next bed for the night. And that simple life worked its magic on us, even if we did not walk with a donkey named Modestine. We walked, instead, with Thomas, Becky’s son, who served donkey-like to carry the heavy pack. He was also lead laugher, his laughter carrying us down the trails.
Our trip began with a train ride from Paris to Le Puy en Velay where we spent a pleasant night in a 15th century tower and did not rise at 7 for the mass for pilgrims heading west to Finisterre. Le Puy is known for its 12th century cathedral, Notre-Dame du Puy, which has a checkered look with white sandstone and black volcanic rock sitting side by side. What really captured my eye, though was the crazy Saint Michel D’Aiguilhe atop a volcanic plug. The site was closed, but if we had stayed on a day 268 stone steps would have taken us to the church.
The central place in Le Monastier
For the first morning, we turned our sights toward the little village of Le Monastier sur Gazeille, 12 miles away, walking across fields and at times along roads. We rarely strayed far from civilization. We could see the volcanic past in the trail, often littered with basalt, or black with volcanic dust. As we walked, a man pulled up in his car, curious about us and our walk—throughout, everyone along the route was welcoming and friendly (except one grumpy baker). After we answered his questions about where we were from (one from the States, one Parisian, one French man living in Switzerland), we asked our own, mine focusing on the natural landscape (as always). The tree that so puzzled me with its thick, scale like leaves – not the Scots pines, which are plump and blue-green in color and lined much of the trail—was an imported tree that is referred to as the désespoir des singes (monkey puzzle tree). From Chile and Argentina, this is surely not a tree that Stevenson would have seen in his 1878 walk.
We hardly got an early start out of Le Monastier as we set in food supplies for the walk—picnics were important—and admired the stone arches of the village, the lovely stone place where we had spent the night in one of the many chambres d’hotes along the way. On this day, Becky carried the heavy pack to give Thomas’s hips a rest, and we move slowly along the 15.3 miles toward Le Bouchet St. Nicholas, which is a cluster of stone houses (no stores or restaurants that we could see). We walked through fields, up rolling hills, picnicked by the Loire, and in the afternoon when the sun came out, we stopped in a café for an energizing coffee. Still, we were tired and walked the final kilometer holding hands for courage (I admit I was the most tired of the three of us). Because of our meandering pace, we arrived at the warm chambres d’hotes where they served the signature dish of lentils and sausage after all of the other hikers (we were 11 that night). This made us the punters for the night.
Arriving (late) in Le Bouchet
Because all of the walkers or hikers move south, dutifully following the yellow signs that read “Le Stevenson” or the red and white blazes on rocks or trees, we rarely saw anyone during the day. At night we could chat with other hikers, like the retired Welsh couple who hike all of the time and who offered me arnica to help with the hip pains. We crossed paths with them again the next day but there was little sense of community; even the hosts of the gites or chambres d’hotes along the way only spend a few short hours with travelers.
We were once again the last to set off in the morning, heading toward Pradelles. Keeping at least a decent pace—I’ve never been a fast walker—didn’t make for great bird watching but I kept my binoculars near to watch skylarks tumbling over a field, a kestrel hovering, and a gray heron poised beside a stream. Stevenson describes little of the natural world in his narrative, though comments on the birch and the beech trees along his route and I noted them as well, like we might have admired the same stout trees.
Pradelles is declared one of the prettiest towns in France. Our hotel was not so pretty and sat hard on the route national that roared through town. In the morning we wove our way through the narrow cobblestone streets, but the possible sweeping views from the walled village were clouded over, fogged in. Our path took us to Langogne, one of the biggest towns we crossed and out to the Lac de Naussac. On our trek to the lake we overtook an elderly woman, galoshes on, hunched over but walking determinedly uphill. She stopped and smiled at us and told us that she was off to gather mushrooms. It’s a way to pass the afternoon, she explained. The days of damp, warm weather meant there were a lot of mushrooms along our paths, those you want to eat and those you want to avoid. We wished her good luck, waved cheerfully, and continued on our detour from the trail to stay in a modern cabin by the lake—a rest day that involved only nine miles of walking. As we made a final turn a car pulled up next to us. “Are you walking the Stevenson?” They asked. Yes, we cheerfully replied. “You know you are not on the trail, right?” Yes, we cheerfully replied. So now we were the punters who looked lost.
Becky admiring the town of Pradelles
During the night there was a storm for the records, lightening lighting our rooms and thunder shaking the cabin. This was perhaps the most dramatic element of this walk that on the whole traversed a lovely but unspectacular land. There were rolling hills, and gentle streams, swollen by the rain. But even the Loire at this point in its journey is an inconsequential stream. There were contented cows and dense woods. Open fields. Adorable, sleepy towns that felt shuttered and at times perhaps too quiet. The variety of this cozy landscape was enchanting. The storm, though, was breathtaking.
The next morning we bid goodbye to Thomas, who needed to get back to real life. We loaded him with everything we deemed unnecessary and tromped off with much lighter packs if with heavier hearts. Also, we had to figure out how to take decent selfies. This day out of Langogne to Les Hauts de Cheylan was perhaps my favorite day of hiking. The trail was wide, sandy, rolling. It no longer hand a volcanic feel. At times I looked at a wide field with tall pines in the background and thought: I’m in Colorado. There was a great sense of light and space. It helped that the sun came out.
Hike through a forest of pines Stevenson might have also have seen
Our final day we vacillated: would we be super punters and take a bus from Luc to La Bastide-Puylaurent or would we push through and walk, possibly our longest day. By this point, I felt broken in, and eager to hike, and Becky still voiced no pains. So we walked, traversing dense woods where people searched for mushrooms (the mushroom frenzy was real), looped around a pond and stopped to picnic near a castle. After Luc, the trail followed a major road too closely and so lost a bit of its charm. But maybe that sense of “not-pretty” was because the overcast sky that had kept us company all morning unleashed its pent up emotions. Or, as Stevenson would say, “the wind freshened into half a gale, with a heavy discharge of rain.” That wind whipped us up and over a mountain, and a little soggy into the small village of La Bastide-Puylaurent where we settled into our grimmest hotel of the voyage. It didn’t matter. We played cards, ate well, and felt a twinge of sadness as the next morning we boarded the train to Nimes, then on to Paris.
Stevenson’s narrative is filled with information on religious wars, especially the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics that dominated this part of France. We had not one religious conversation through our walk. But mostly, Stevenson’s narrative is centered on his relationship with his donkey Modestine, who is an unwilling walker (and, we learn from one of our hosts, though people still do the walk with donkeys, donkeys really should not be expected to walk more than 15 km a day—Stevenson was pushing Modestine, often cruelly, beyond her limits). Stevenson revels in his time alone with his donkey, describing how he surrendered “himself to that fine intoxication that comes from much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness in the brain, and ends in a peace that passes comprehension.” Well said my swashbuckling writer. (If you have not recently read Treasure Island—do. It’s just great fun.)
Becky peering into the ruins above Luc
Like Stevenson, we put one foot in front of the other, ate well and a lot, stopped to photograph rolling hills and a crumbling castle or two. By the end, like Stevenson, “my blood flowed with [the] luxury of [it all].”
Robins!
On December 18, I rose at 2:45 in the morning, and in perfect silence and darkness drove out to Ulster County, intent on starting Christmas Bird Count with the secretive birds, the owls. They were holding out on us—that is, not hooting--as Peter and I drove to perfect owl locations, listened and whistled. Eventually we heard a few Screech Owls, but we never heard a single toot from a Saw-whet (an owl that has been reliable on our count). Peter and I both felt this was a bad omen, surely a lousy count was going to unfold in daylight hours. Plus, we had dreadful weather. As our sector leader, Steve Chorvas put it: “Environmental conditions can best be described as wet and dreary with low visibility.” Indeed!
But we were wrong. There were birds. On this 2021 Christmas Bird Count—my eleventh in this sector, marking my years as a devoted birder—in Ulster County, New York, what we saw and counted were American Robins. Thousands. At every stop to look and listen and count we heard the song of the Robin, giving our rainy day the sound and feel of early spring, not early winter. They darted near the winterberry, they hopped through tangles of multi flora rose, they speckled small lawns. There were 416 of them. The only bird we saw more of were European Starlings, at 418. Together these two species made up half of the birds that Peter and I saw on that long day of counting birds.
American Robin!
On December 18, I rose at 2:45 in the morning, and in perfect silence and darkness drove out to Ulster County, intent on starting Christmas Bird Count with the secretive birds, the owls. They were holding out on us—that is, not hooting--as Peter and I drove to perfect owl locations, listened and whistled. Eventually we heard a few Screech Owls, but we never heard a single toot from a Saw-whet (an owl that has been reliable on our count). Peter and I both felt this was a bad omen, surely a lousy count was going to unfold in daylight hours. Plus, we had dreadful weather. As our sector leader, Steve Chorvas put it: “Environmental conditions can best be described as wet and dreary with low visibility.” Indeed!
But we were wrong. There were birds. On this 2021 Christmas Bird Count—my eleventh in this sector, marking my years as a devoted birder—in Ulster County, New York, what we saw and counted were American Robins. Thousands. At every stop to look and listen and count we heard the song of the Robin, giving our rainy day the sound and feel of early spring, not early winter. They darted near the winterberry, they hopped through tangles of multi flora rose, they speckled small lawns. There were 416 of them. The only bird we saw more of were European Starlings, at 418. Together these two species made up half of the birds that Peter and I saw on that long day of counting birds.
Finding a Robin nest is fun, but not hard.
Did we get up imagining that we would see Robins? Did we hope for Robins? No, and no. We knew we would see some Robins—we always do (though more like 25). But beyond that, we never know what we will see, which is part of the magic of Christmas Bird Count. We become footloose ornithologists as we try and explain why we heard no Saw whet Owls, or what the Great Horned Owls were doing at 3 a.m. besides talking to us. We scan and listen and Peter always tells me I won’t hear anything with my window up, the cold air blowing through the car. I roll the window down to hear a Blue Jay, a Crow, adding them dutifully to the list of birds seen. And always, we hope for something special. But on this day what is special is not a species but the volume of an utterly ordinary species.
I want this number of birds to be just a “wow, so many birds” cool event. But, it’s hard for that puzzling not to take a dark turn. Our winter has hardly been cold. (Where is the snow? Please snow!) If the ground is still soft, if there’s open water—there’s plenty for the Robin to live off of. Why migrate if you can stay put and stay fat? But is the reason it is so warm another sign of climate change or is it…just a warm winter? Since I do not have the answers to these questions and I do not want this to be a dark post—I want a joyous one to bring in 2022—I will, instead, just think about all of the Robins.
Edwin Howe Forbush, who wrote the wonderful, three volume Birds of Massachusetts and other New England States (published in the late 1920s) begins his entry on the American Robin by celebrating that the bird sings every morning, all across the continent. The Robin is everywhere and everyone knows him. So he asks: “Why then should one write about his haunts and habits, which should be well known to everybody? In answer to this it may be said in truth that most people really know very little about him.”
It is in “Haunts and habits” that is the charm of these guides. Forbush combines his experience and observation of the bird with those of people around New England who write in with what they’ve seen—mostly quirky experiences with a bird. And together they start to form a portrait of the bird, a way to know what it eats, where it nests, what its relationship is to humans.
It is true that a creature too familiar often gets less real attention. We dig into the lives of those who are more mysterious (with people as well!). Like a worn couch or comfy chair, the Robin just is there. It is the one bird that all children know, not just because the bird is present everywhere but, more importantly, easy to see as it hops on a lawn or makes a nest in a nearby bush. Forbush observes that it is often very social with humans, and has stories of Robins that follow farmers in their fields. What is it that Forbush thinks we don’t know?
European Robin—not really an American Robin, except for the red breast
We don’t know that it’s really not a Robin—that is the European bird, and Britain’s national bird. Our Robin reminded early ornithologists of the bird they knew from home so they assigned it the same name, with American attached (here I will not make a detour into protesting the names of birds). He goes on for six long pages about the Robin, as if it were an unknown species, giving information on its less-than monogamous ways (even though the bird is seen as a model of constancy) and that it often does spend the winter in New England (though most migrate south, often to Texas or Florida). And what I really did not know is the brutal way that these birds were killed (at night, while roosting, their heads snapped off)--then sold for sixty cents a dozen to be eaten (do not tell me Robin tastes like chicken!). Though our bird populations are plummeting, at lease the decline is no longer from this sort of slaughter, where in one night a person could kill 400.
And here is what I want to know that Forbush doesn’t tell me: What is a group of Robins called? One piece I read said, a rash, a hood, a riot. Another says, a round of Robins, and a final one, a worm of Robins. Whatever the name, a lot of Robins--5,949 total in our count circle (which surpasses the high of 3,504 seen in 2017)--is a wonderful sight. Here’s to Robins and all of the birds in 2022 and beyond!
Mama Robin bringing food to her young
Jungle Dawn Chorus
The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.
The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, in the Amazon of Peru, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.
Swept into this stream, cradled by my boat, I feel embraced by the land as if at a big family reunion. Every bit of me is there, a perfect meditation that is not focused in on my breath, but out on the breath of the land. What is that? The sound, hollow, almost mystical, fills my bones and I lean back in the raft as I flush downstream in the silty river. And then I remember what our guides told me: the sound that is so deep is not birds, but howler monkeys.
At home in the Hudson Valley I bird mostly by ear. Once the spring leaves come in it’s hard to lay eyes on a bird so learning the bird songs is necessary if you want to know who is stopping by on your driveway or singing near the feeder or sliding out of the reeds in the Tivoli Bays. But the denseness of leaves in the Hudson Valley is a joke compared to the jungle where the green is often so dense it blocks out all light. In this denseness birds thrive, and I know they are out there: the songs punctuate the air. There is no attempt at harmony here, no overall tune, but rather it’s every bird for himself, a great crazy medley that leaves me delighted and baffled.
But on the river: you do get to see things, the little birds, the Water Tyrants, that come to the river’s edge for some water, a bug, a slap of sunlight. Or the Yellow-billed Terns that course up and down the river. Or the Amazon Kingfisher, cackling away on a fishing expedition. Hoatzin fumble about in the bushes, so clumsy, then pose for a photo.
Mid-float I arrive at a sandbar where on a drying log Sand Nighthawks are roosting for the day. I pull onto shore, and shove myself out of the boat (which is leaking just a bit, so it’s become soft; I do a bit of repair work with some duck tape and have faith it will get me back to the station). I walk close enough to the birds to see clearly and to take photos but I don’t want to disturb their day-time snooze, which looks, through my binoculars, like the perfect morning meditation. Are we all meditating out here, at peace with the self and the land?
Soon, the sun rises, more birds sing, and then I hear a motor on the river and it’s Paul, our guide on this trip. He’s in the long wooden boat with his mother, who is making her first trip to the jungle. “Isn’t it great seeing your son in his proper habitat?” I joke with her. But it’s not really a joke: Paul belongs here just as the Tapir and the Jaguar do. And I think it’s sweet that he’s taking her out for a morning boat ride. But that’s not his goal: he’s checking on me. Paul is the best of guides, letting people do what they want to do, giving us our freedom here in this big place. So I have to wonder: have I really been out here so long that even Paul has become curious of my whereabouts? I have. A float that should have taken an hour and a half has stretched to four hours. “You good?” he calls across the water, thumbs up.
I nod and smile and give a thumbs up that says, “More than good.” Excellent. Never been better. Happy. And off he goes to leave me with my happiness.
Four hours of meandering, of observing, of delighting. Four hours during which I am not thinking about breakfast that waits for me, or the mess that our country is in (in fact, for two solid weeks I had not a single political thought, which is a shift for a MSNBC junkie), I am not over-thinking a small heartache. And if none of these things matter, than neither does time, an hour just like four. And perhaps space either, the land here infinite, the land here precious down to a grain of sand.
Swimming with my Fears
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve-jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
This is the jungle me response, one that I never could have anticipated as I planned for this trip to the Amazon. I prepared for this trip as I always do: I read (Oh, and I also fretted over yellow fever shots and hep A and typhoid vaccines). I read books like Tree of Rivers and The Lost City of Z. Both of these wonderful works fed the images I had of the jungle: a dangerous place. If the Bot Flies didn’t take up residence in my flesh, then for sure a Candiru fish was going to swim up my vagina. And then I read Paul’s book Mother of God.
Paul is a smart, passionate man who needs room to move, think, be. He walks barefoot through the jungle, eats with his hands, and enjoys his bug bites. He runs towards snakes and caimans with the love of a teenage boy and the intelligence of a man who wants nothing more than for all of us to love these creatures as he does. Underneath his muscled jungle-man bravado is someone who is wounded every time a tree is cut in the jungle. To protect this world he loves he has formed an ecotourism company with his wife Gowri (one of my former students at Bard College) and others called Tamandua. And he has also formed a nonprofit to protect land in the jungle: Junglekeepers. Before spending intense time in the jungle with him I am already in admiration of the work he’s done and am worried he’s also sort of an asshole, like most focused, driven men who are confident they are right.
Roy serving me more coffee!
The more you know about a place, the safer it becomes. At Paul’s side is JJ, a man who knows the jungle because he grew up there. The two walk with machetes in hand as they take us—a group of eleven family and friends—on walks near the station where we sleep and are fed delicious meals prepared by Roy, who greets me every morning with excellent coffee and a warm hug. Having such comforts in such a remote place feels like a forbidden pleasure. I drink way too much coffee.
Knowing the jungle as he does—fourteen years of spending months here since he was eighteen—Paul makes the jungle not a play ground, but a place where we can play. I climb a massive Kapok tree, hugging the vines that strangle up the tree and pressing my bare feet against the solid smooth bark. My feet are cut, my legs bruised, but is that not a small price to pay to sit in the crown of an ancient tree, to see the world as the birds do and to feel from a different vantage the massive power and fragility of this ecosystem?
And, I swim in the ever-silty Las Piedras River that carves around the station and leads downstream to Puerto Maldonado, eventually joining the Madre de Dios and much further on the Amazon. Almost every day heat, sweat, sore muscles are washed away by jumping into the water and floating downstream. With Piranhas.
Everyone on this trip was challenged in one way or another and I think about how rare that is, especially as we get older. I watched as Paul took his mother-in-law by the hand and offered her the caiman he caught, asks her to bundle up her recoil and touch the beautiful creature. One by one he explicitly or implicitly pushed us to take one step more than we thought we were capable of to walk or swim into this rich, amazing land. I smile through it all, allowing that Paul is right.
I didn’t swim into my fears; I’ve swum with them. And how intoxicating that is, a kind of freedom found in few places, in few moments. By the end of the trip I am covered in bug bites—sand flies, ticks, mosquitoes, I’ve succumbed to jungle fever, my legs are bruised. This, of course, is Paul’s goal. Not that I get sick but rather that I get sick and not really care. Nothing matters—not politics, work, or the line of bites that march up my groin. What mattered was being there, seeing the Trogon, the Sunbittern, the Tapir swimming toward shore; what mattered was being overwhelmed by green. While my body is marked, my spirit is soaring higher than it has in a long time.