September 2019 - Camino de Santiago
I’m in the French town of Limogne-en-Quercy, Occitanie. A typical village with a bar, a church, a Mairie (city hall) and a Monument aux Mort. Monument aux Morts are dedicated war memorials honoring the losses of France during World War I. Nearly every village, town and city I walked through contained a war memorial.
Apparently, the region is also known for its truffles.
But I’m not here for les truffes. All I want is a shower, food and a bed, and very much in that exact order. Having walked 17 km from the previous town under the burning south-of-France sun, I’m dehydrated and teetering dangerously close to heat-exhaustion.
Everything about this day was hard. I moved slow as molasses, my energy lower than usual and my shoes felt concrete slabs. I’m a big baby when I walk in 80+ F degree weather. I wasn’t drinking enough water from my bottle, instead trying to conserving it. For some reason, the fountains were scarce along the route that day. Usually most villages and towns have potable water near the church cemetery, or an open bar is able to fill my water bottle. So I stopped by a small house and asked the owner watering his garden if he could fill my bottle with his hose, which he happily obliged.
That morning I called the woman who runs the gîte municipal (accommodation) and in my god awful terrible French, reserved a bed. She gave me brief directions and the door code to the building so I could let myself in when I arrived.
Of course the door code didn’t work. I tried knocking but no one answered. I poked around the building, opening another door and interrupted some sort of village board meeting. Everyone turned their heads to stare, I apologized profusely and closed the door.
At this point I almost started rage-crying, but pulled myself together and proceeded to stumble around this very adorable French village, looking dishevel and decidedly un-adorable, trying to figure out my next move.
I couldn’t make any decisions until I sat down somewhere, preferably with a cold drink on hand. So parked myself at the town bar (easy to find, naturally it was next to the church) and ordered a jus de pomme and gathered my wits. A few weeks earlier on a particularly scorching day, someone had offered me cold apple juice and it hit the spot. It had become my little habit.
I tried calling other gîtes in the village, but no one answered. So I paid for my juice, heaved my stupid backpack on my tired body and gave it one last try. I walked back to the edge of town, tried the code, and again the code failed to open the door. Then I hear someone walk down the stairs. The door bursts open and a man walks through.
Naturally I lunge forward and shout in English “don’t shut the door!”. He jerks his head back, looks sideways, points his finger at me and not missing a beat, he asks “what’s the code?”
I blurt out the number and he squints. I say it again. More squinting. It doesn’t matter. He could tell by my backpack I was the same as him, a pilgrim who had walked all day…so he let me pass. I gleefully clapped my hands and breeze past him, dashing up the stairs, fantasizing about the hot shower in my very near future.
After I showered and got myself settled, I ran into him in the hallway and struck up a conversation. He was French, a chef and had previously lived in San Francisco for a number of years, cooking in various restaurants around the Bay Area. Apparently his ex-wife was the daughter of the guy who did marketing for Thomas Keller of the French Laundry? Something like that. His English was excellent. He reminded me a little of Anthony Bourdain, the archetypal badass chef, traveling around the world, living hard, his eyes older than his age.
We chatted a bit longer and he invited me to have dinner with him, maybe enjoy some nice canard, no? I declined, as I truly felt like crap after heat exhaustion. All I wanted to was to buy food from the supermarket down the road, make myself a nice little pasta dinner, craw into bed and write.
I KNOW.
A sexy French chef asks me to join him for canard and I’m like, nah I’m good.
I’m awkward when it comes to men but especially when they’re French, very manly and cheffy, like this guy. I wasn’t in the mood to tango with a French chef because I wasn’t on my game and hadn’t been for years. Maybe I was weak in the knees, maybe it was just heat exhaustion.
We parted ways, he to dinner and me to the supermarket, where I discovered one can buy an entire loaf of bread, pre-toasted, no appliance needed. Amazing.
There was a washer and dryer in the gîte, so while I boiled water for pasta, my clothes spun merrily around in the dryer. I didn’t necessarily regret not accepting his invitation. These days I was learning how to pause before automatically saying yes, checking in with myself, my intuition…what do I want?
The Frenchman returned from his solo dinner and sat with me while I finished draining my pasta. We talked a little more, but I wasn’t even sure I liked him. I could feel him wanting to plug into me. But that night, I didn't have the energy to deal with him. It was all I could do to wash my dishes, crawl into bed, scribble into my journal before drifting into a dehydrated sleep.
The next morning I heard his boots clomp past my room and I breathed a little sigh of relief, knowing he had left. I just didn’t want to deal with him.
The day before casually bragged that he walked a 43 km that day, basically the equivalent of two days.
I was like oh, ok you’re that guy.
For him, walking the camino was a race. For me, it was something much deeper, mystical. I wasn’t racing against time or people. I just wanted to burn off years of pain and loss.
Next week: Part Deux
…..À bientôt