Free Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James by David Downie Page A

the sweater, raincoat, and poncho I was wearing. The poncho was essential. April? It was as cold as the lower reaches of Dante’s Inferno, and wet and windy too, and we were both fairly hungry by now.
    We hadn’t actually expected anyone to answer the telephone or the door at the farmhouse B&B. And no one did. With grim satisfaction we gazed upon our petit Paris picnic before digging in. Defrosted camembert never tasted so good. For dessert we made Toblerone chocolate-and-baguette sandwiches, shivered under the rain, and felt footloose and free, glad to be rootless wanderers. All was well in this, about the best of all possible worlds. Except for one thing: there was no coffee. My head ached already.
    OF LIGHT & DARKNESS & CAFFEINE-STARVED BRAINS
    For a plateau, the Morvan certainly felt hilly. Up and down we hiked, from one ridge and deep, encased creek-bed to another. When at last we crested a rise higher than others and intersected with the “GR Tour du Morvan” hiking trail, we knew what watery body lay below us.
    The Lac du Crescent is a good-sized reservoir holding fourteen million cubic meters of water, according to the literature. This tidbit was meaningless to me and possibly others unfamiliar with cubic meters by the million. This particular Crescent Lake was something I ought to be familiar with, however. Not only does it generate electricity for Paris. It also stabilizes the Seine’s flow, ensuring that in summer the river doesn’t run dry, and in winter stays within its UNESCO World Heritage Site banks and out of our cellar. We also drink its contents.
    The view troubled me. The reservoir seemed low, almost empty. And this was the rainy season. Perhaps a postmodern Doomsday had snuck up on us in the night, and the water-table had dropped beyond recovery? Had we reached the drippy tipping point? More likely, we were headed into another dry spell and heat-wave. The one in 2003 had killed 30,000 Europeans and devastated agriculture and forestry. The prospect of another roasting, parched summer brought to mind climate change, which led my enfeebled brain onto SUVs, Kyoto, and home—meaning California. Members of my family owned SUVs. I loved my whacky family but not their gas-guzzling cars.
    Increasingly dizzy from lack of coffee, we decided to rest where the panorama embraced the muddy reservoir and green slopes cupping it. Among friends, I sometimes refer to Alison as my seeing-eye wife. She reads to me Saint-BrissondCh because my eye-power is limited. Essentially I’m a Mr. Magoo, James Thurber’s stumbling, bespectacled hero. We spread a poncho on the grass, got out our Caesar, and drank deep from our water bottles. I wondered if any of the liquid in them had come from Lac du Crescent, and if the millions of cubic meters below would get to our sink in Paris before we did. Alison reminded me that on average, by the time it passed through our spigots, Paris’s water had been filtered by the kidneys of five human beings living upstream. With that thirst-quenching thought in mind, she found where we’d left off in The Conquest of Gaul , and began to read aloud.
    In the year 58 BC, Caesar reminded us, the Helvetii—a Germanic-Celtic tribe in what’s now Switzerland—crossed into Gaul looking for greener pastures. They joined other marauding tribes to wreak havoc on local Celts, including the Aedui, who were “friends of Rome” and happened to live in this part of Burgundy. These soft, victim-Celts, led by a chieftain named Dumnorix, called Caesar in to quell the invaders—or so Julius claimed.
    When they could no longer sustain the Roman charges , Alison read, the Helvetii resumed their retreat.…
    As I gazed over the countryside, my mind’s eye followed the hedgerows through sunny pastures and shadowy woods. Caesar and his legions had galloped by long before the reservoir had been built, before the Gauls’ virgin woods had been felled with the efficiency of a Weyerhaeuser. It was an ancient,