A Walk In The Woods

August 30, 2015

     I have to pick up an English visitor, Matthew Haley, at the Carcassonne railroad station by 4:30 p.m., but otherwise, Sunday is mine to enjoy.

     So I decide it would be fun to take Beau on a long walk in the mountains.  At a few minutes of nine in the morning, Caunes and the vicinity are dead quiet, perhaps everyone is sleeping in after the last of the summer parties before the rentree.  Well after midnight, I heard music coming from the heart of the village: La Mangeoire, a restaurant-cum-music venue, is closing, driven out by La Cantine du Cure, which also offers music --and less pricey food.  So Saturday night was for last hurrahs, and Sunday for facing Monday.

     While some people like being in a crowd, I prefer to be by myself, so the early mornings here are heaven for me, particularly today's.  Beau and I walk up the road leading to the marble quarry, then move off it onto a mountain path which Beau manages easily; I clamber up, holding onto what scrub there is and digging in.  We both make it, and find ourselves in front of the marble statue of the Assyrian lion on the road to the quarry.  At the fork in the road, a ways down from there, I choose to go towards Citou, in the mountains, rather than to the marble cliffs.  I walked part of the path with Beau a few weeks ago, but was turned back by rain.  I want to see whether I can get to Citou, 9 kilometers away, and then back to Caunes.

     The path is easy to walk, wide and meant for cars, the forest on both sides of us.  Beau and I walk and walk as the path rises and rises.  Soon I am looking across mountain valleys to mountains on all sides of me.  I wonder whether the hike is ill-advised: it's boar hunting season.  If I came upon a boar, I'd have to shout and scream, I decide, my first thought being of Beau.  I am disabused of my fear, though, when I see a quartet of the physically fit coming towards me: two are women, jogging, two are men on mountain bikes.   I ask how far it is to Citou and then Caunes, and am told Citou is another hour's walk, Caunes an hour from there.  One of the cyclists tells me:

     But instead of going to Citou, you can take a short cut to Bidaud, a hamlet off the path, a cluster of one or two houses.  Walk about 2 kilometers  until you see a fork in the road.  There will be a sign on your left showing you the way to the path to Bidaud --there's a cross next to it.

     I do just that, and pass another pair of mountain bikers, then a hunter in a truck with four hounds in the back.  He stops, then tells me he's looking for two of his pack, who escaped while he was hunting earlier this morning.  The dogs' names are Hector and Athos.  I tell him I will look out for them, and indeed, I call their names several times on my walk, but they never cross my path.

     It's obvious that the path I thought utterly unfrequented is not as isolated as I thought, which is good news.  Beau and I walk along until I find the fork in the road and beyond it, the sign says "Caunes-Minervois", and  points to a path through the trees.  I leash Beau, for his safety --and mine.   Now Beau and I are on a narrow, rocky path cleared on the mountain's edge.  The path is no more than 18" wide.  On my right is the slope, with its low-lying vegetation; on the right is the drop.

     Beau is so surefooted I have to tell him "doucement, doucement" to get him to slow down.  Nonetheless, his confidence bolsters mine, although I never look up from the path so long as there is no forest cover on my right.   I know of someone who died instantly after falling three hundred feet, an experienced mountain climber, killed when the rock he was using to lift himself up the peak gave way.   If I turn my ankle or Beau deviates from the path or injures himself, a casual hike could become an emergency.  So I am very, very careful, and we make it down to Bidaud where we are joined by the owner of one of the two houses, taking his Newfoundland and his Labrador out for a walk in the woods.

     The Newfoundland (called a Terre Neuve, in French) is a chestnut brown monarch-of-a-dog, the Labrador a handsome brown, too.  The owner is wearing a t-shirt that says "Dogtown"  and a baseball cap that says PS4 Clermont-Auvergne, and he is wearing very large-framed sunglasses tinted amber, that is, Blublockers, eyeglasses that filter out insomnia-producing blue light.  In a word, as well as being a dog owner, he is a skateboarder, and a video gamer who spends long hours at his computer in Bidaud.

     The man points me to the main road and explains that the path I've been on continues to the marble quarry in Caunes.  I have had enough of mountain paths for today, so I thank him and negotiate my way around the fallen pine tree  on the path at the level of the roof of his house (a good way of keeping the path to himself).   I reach the main road, joining Beau, who has easily managed the descent ahead of me.

     The road is for cars, although it is still lovely to walk along.  There is a small bridge, said to have been built by the Romans, with a gite on the other side.  There is another gite closer to Caunes, and within the outer limits of the village, the water mill.  There I find Claire Dedecker, my Belgian friend, and her dog, Rustine.

     There were 250 people at the concert on Friday night, she tells me.  Claire was managing the gate Friday night and is involved with an association that organizes activities in Caunes during the summer.  She continues:

     So we made enough money to pay the musicians.  We'll have lunch with them shortly and discuss whether to do the event again last year.  They made the money they asked for --otherwise the association would have had to fill in the difference.  There were two people who showed up under the influence of drugs --a young man, well-dressed, and a young woman whose exuberance could only be due to drugs.  

     The young people who came didn't like the music: they wanted hip-hop.  The music the musicians played was --well, it was our generation's.  So they didn't like that.  And most of the people who came were English --Thank God for the English!  The villagers don't spend, they're either cheap or just not interested in the music.  

     Earlier this summer, someone died during a "rave" in a house in the mountains.  So it is not as though having more rock concerts --or hip-hop concerts-- would be introducing something unknown  --rock; or rap-- or drugs, to Caunes.  I can't help feeling though, that I would rather Caunes remain sleepy for as long as possible.

     I much prefer worrying about wild boars to worrying about drug-using locals.