Limoges, France
September 28, 1983

Dear Folks,

You don't rush France...and France doesn't rush you--it's as simple as that. If there's a more complacent spot on earth, it's likely tucked away in some exotic corner of the South Pacific. France, like the wine she produces, only gets better and better with time. Or, in my case, with each kilometer walked.

The first nine days here were ones of gray skies, fat dairy cows, and daily rain showers in Normandy and Brittany. Then, for about 100 miles--from near Rennes to the medieval hill city of Parthenay--the poverty of the villages and the cloudless, hot sky reminded me of Mexico. In those 100 miles I feared the heat of Africa was already upon me. Four four long days, the fruit trees and the streams were few while the lizards and spiders and palm trees were many. Walking in the middle of the day was out of the question, and I had to content myself with napping in the shade like a lazy tomcat.

My clothes needed washing badly and nowhere in all of France have I yet to find a coin-operated washing machine--not even in the largest of the cities I passed through! Then, west of Parthenay, I discovered a beautiful little spring-fed pond, and I was able to once again enjoy France in comfort.

Here in the south of France near the Pyrenees all the prior aspects of the country settle into a mixture that is mmmmmwhhhaaa!! I can only wonder how a land can be so blessed.

Walking in the morning is a great joy--looked forward to all night long. First, one is awakened by the songs of hundreds of birds. Then--precisely at 7 o'clock--there is the long tolling of the village church bell. Even the sun knows it's only natural to be lazy in southern France, and it rises from the cotton-candy fog ever so slowly. After a few hours...more magic: dew droplets clinging like zillions of finely-cut diamonds to the vines of fat grapes and to the leaves of the rows of sycamores lining every roadway.

I can now understand why this region has been a mecca for artists and writers; there is so much joy here to rejoice about. The tranquility, the natural beauty, and the fertileness of the land are reflected in the customs of the locals. Indeed, at long last, I have found a people who enjoy lingering for hours over a good meal. They have not forgotten that the things to be enjoyed the most--and the longest--in life are usually the simplest of things...such as eating.

A dinner I shared with a farm family in tiny, tiny Foufreroux de Souvigne was an excellent example of how the French in the rural areas go about life. The room in which the ten of us ate the late evening meal was a combination living-dining-bedroom. First to be served was a strong before-dinner wine. Then came a large bowl of tapioca-tomato soup, with a lighter wine and lots of French-style bread and pate. Then, from the same bowl, everyone ate a large salad of fresh garden vegetables. (All homes in France seem to have an enormous vegetable garden.) Using the same bowls we ate our soup from, we devoured hefty helpings of tomatoes stuffed with beef and pork and onions, all simmered in a light oil and accentuated with still more fresh bread and a seemingly endless supply of wine.

Finally, after the main meal came the customary treats--cheeses made from the milk of goats and cows, yogurts, and cognac-spiked coffee. And of course there was more bread--and home-grown grapes, and apples, and peaches, and walnuts.

Interwoven throughout the meal were generous laughter and conversation. We had sat down to start our feast at 7:30, and we were not to rise from the table until 10:30. And that was after having enjoyed a two-hour-long lunch earlier in the day. Now that's a true art!

One young boy who had studied English in school perhaps best summed up the outlook of the rural French when he remarked, "We understand that in America you put money first, and love second. Here, we put the love of life first, and then, if there is any, money second."

You know, something tells me that my heart will be sad the day I cross the Pyrenees.

Steven

Posted by at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Fougeres, France
September 16, 1983

Dear Folks,

After a week in France, I'm about to fall deeply in love with another country and its people. In this lush republic of rolling hills, moody skies, and bright-eyed beautiful people, the essence of romance seems omnipresent. Even their language--of which I know pitifully little--flows from their lips and radios like the notes of a sweet love song.

Perhaps it is good I'm walking across this country in the dark, rainy fall season and not in the springtime. Honestly, I think my heart would never bear to leave here if there was sunshine to go along with the incredibly gorgeous women and equally appealing landscape.

Strolling south from Cherbourg to Briquebec, St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Lessay, Countances, Gavray, and St. James to Fougeres has been like floating through a time warp. Sometimes, such as the night I passed the crumbling towers of an ancient Norman castle in St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, I swear I can almost hear the clanking of knights'armor and the hoofbeats of their battle-weary horses.

Here in the little gray-stoned villages of the countryside, far from the throbbings of Paris, life still clings tightly to the past. Most residents dwell in the same mortar-and-stone homes that their great-great-greatgrandparents were raised in. And their children are being baptized and married in churches that were blessed long before the United States was formed.

There is a calmness, a regularity to life here in Normandy and Brittany, that to this American is almost ethereal, almost naive.
Every farm has its small herd of black-spotted dairy cows, a small corn field, some cranky geese, a loud dog, many overabundant apple trees, and a cement-floored, shuttered farmhouse with an attached hay barn.

Each town--whether it be a one-cafe, four-house village or a large city like Fougeres--has a tall-steepled church in the center of town on the highest point of land. All the shops and homes are built around the church like some wide halo. Long before I reach a town in this predominately Catholic country I usually spy the church's steeple first. Always the steeple is visible from afar, whether the town was built in a valley (like Gavray) or on a tall hill (like St. James). At times I feel as if I'm merely traveling from church to church, like some wandering monk of the Medieval era.

Caught in the spell of this land of happy faces and sad love songs, I find it difficult to believe that almost 40 years ago there were tens of thousands of soldiers dying alongside these very roads I'm walking. Hardly an hour goes by that I do not pass yet another tall cement crucifix with the local casualties of World Wars I and II listed upon its base. And then there are the most somber of all reminders--the American war cemeteries.

As I stand among those crosses and Stars of David--always in graveyards of several acres covered with thousands upon thousands of identical white crosses, each bearing the name of a fellow American who landed on this chubby peninsula on D-Day but never made it back home--I am made to realize that I am inseparable from that violent period. Were it not for all of those men and women who came here to fight, to cry, and to die, I might not be able to enjoy this land today. I might never know what a beautiful place France is.

In the village of Gavray a couple days before, I had darted from a chilly rain into the town hall, to seek both some warmth and a signature in my log book. The graying secretary, upon learning I was an American, begged me in French to wait for her while she went away to get something for me. But before she fled the room in her high-heeled pomps, she excitedly led me by the hand to a wall of the office, where she directed my attention to the many framed black-and-white photographs arranged upon its white plaster. Then at once I was alone with the photos and the ticking round wall clock.

The photos were of a Gavray ruined by the second world war. From the amount of destruction in the photos, it was evident the village had been smack in the middle of the fighting between the Nazis and the Allies. Gavray had suffered horribly.

When the secretary returned some ten minutes later, she was now as drenched as I must have been earlier. Her heavy breathing told me she had rushed across the village to get whatever it was she had wanted to give to me. Then, as she hid her left hand behind her back and stuck out her chest, she energetically marched back and forth across the creaky floorboards in a loud pantomime of what I took to be the victorious Allied forces marching into a liberated Gavray. All the while she pretended to be waving a small flag of some kind in her right hand, even as she mimicked the sounds of a band playing an American military song.

The entire scene was surreal, and I imagined a mob forming outside the hall, wondering what sort of mayhem was unfolding inside. Her flashing me a V sign every few seconds and her shouting "HOORAY, YANKEES!!" each time she marched past my figure only made me all the more uncertain about her sanity. But then, like a little schoolgirl, she held up to me that mysterious object she had been hiding in her left hand behind her back. In the cradle of her palm was was a French chocolate candy bar.

Now I knew for certain she was re-enacting the time, so many years ago, that she had been freed by the Allied Forces. Not only was she showing her joy at the return of her freedom, but also she was returning that sweet favor shown to her as a little girl by some Allied soldier who had, like me, been weighted down by a heavy pack.

How incredible to think that that simple act of kindness shown to her by some soldier so long ago was still so fresh in her mind and heart. I might have cried, except that she beat me to it. For suddenly she buried her wrinkled face in my leather jacket and weeped. When she finally stood back and looked up with those soft, brown eyes so common in this part of the world, I had to turn and leave rather quickly, lest she see how watery my own eyes had become.

A mile or two out of the village, just when I thought I might be able to get over the strange feelings inside me, I found myself again being stopped in my tracks by a vistage of the past; to my right was a vast war cemetery that mesmerized me with its complete peacefulness and perfection. All too soon, it was evident this scared place was yet another final resting place for another legion of American soldiers.

Towards the back of the cemetery I came across a lone dark-haired man in a dark suit. He was standing silently beside a simple white cross. He greeted me in a low, thick accent that hinted of the U.S.A.'s Deep South. He told me he was there to pay his respects to a much older brother who had been killed in the Second World War. Also, he was there to silently tell that brother thast their mother still prayed daily for the time God would allow her to again see him.

Later, very shortly after I had left the cemetery, I unexpectedly started crying aloud. For the events and images of that magical morning had shown me what it truly meant to be an American. Like so many of my generation I took everything we had for granted. Never had I had to fight and sacrifice for my freedom. But those soldiers beneath those crosses and Stars of David had. And not so much for themselves but for others--others far away who they didn't even know. That, I realized both painfully and proudly, was the stuff of a truly noble nation.

Like it or not, all of us in the USA I had been born not to be simply an American, but also to be a hero. We were of a noble nation; we were all important; each of our lives had meaning; and consequently we should always act as such.

Steven

Posted by at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Portsmouth, England
September 3, 1983

Dear Folks,

Just a little over one month after arriving in the British Isles, I've reached my final destination here--Portsmouth, on the south-central coastline of England.

Behind me now are some 1,800 miles--1,200 on American soil, the rest in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and down the entire length of England. Next comes France and then Spain.

First, however, I must take a week in Portsmouth to update my British Isles notes. Then I will go on to Cherbourg, France, by boat. The memories which have built up in my mind and heart these past few weeks are many. And, for the most part, they have been pleasant ones.

I honestly wonder if I'll remember most of what I've seen and heard. Already Scotland and its wide-open plains and low mountains seem light years ago, It was in the midwestern-type scenery of southern Scotland and the high, windy, grassy dells of northwest England's Lake District that I felt my strongest pangs of homesickness. In those areas the people were few in number, the sky and the land the largest, and the time for contemplation the longest.

Quickly--too quickly--I was to find myself going from the stone-walled sheep and cattle pastures and the pine forests of the north to the congested central and southern regions of England. Since leaving Nottingham (the friendliest large city so far on my walk), the countryside, like the people in general, has been a bit too "reserved" for my liking. Green and lush, you understand, but also ordinary.

In the north of England, where jobs are few and wages are at their lowest, the people seemed to have more time for a smile and a chat. In the booming south, the people, seemed more interested in making and spending money. And they were more suspicious of strangers who came to their doors asking for a glass of water or for directions.

Still, hardly a day goes by when some small incident doesn't remind me just how much love really does exist below the surface.

Just last night, during one of the only three or four rain showers I've seen since being here, a retired old man spent a good hour driving me all over the countryside in the search for a hotel room. I didn't ask him to do it, nor did I evenly remotely suggest it. He just did it out of concern for me. And although he never found a room for me, and I had to sleep in a horse stable on a floor of straw with the wind screeching madly outside, the night had been made quite warm all the same from his compassion.

Then there was last weekend.

That weekend was what the English call a "bank holiday," and for three days--Saturday, Sunday, and Monday--nearly every shop I came to was closed. Now normally having three days' worth of closed shops wouldn't have been been all that big a deal to me, except that I hadn't made it to a bank on Friday and had but two pounds to my name. Not a good thing in England, where the cost of food is terribly high in comparison to the U.S. Here, two pounds will hardly feed a man for one day, let alone for three.

I had little choice but to knock on some doors and ask for a glass of water (in the hopes that the homes' inhabitants might also offer a bit of food). Indeed, in the course of the knocking a few meals did come my way, along with lots of tea! And in one instance--from a policemen's club of all places--there came to me a five-pound note.

In all my walking through the British Isles, there were only two instances where the people were less than friendly. One time was when I went to London, to double-check my plans with some of the foreign embassies. As usual, when one deals with governmental agencies, there were plenty of run-arounds and looks of disinterest.

The second incident was worse, even potentially dangerous.

In the beautiful horse country around the city of Reading, near where the U.S. is basing several cruise missle-carrying jets. a small group of anti-nuclear protestors happened upon me. Quickly I was surrounded and subjected to much verbal abuse. An attempt was made to tear from my possession the small American flag that is pinned to the back of my backpack.

I was able to save the flag and, after a brief scuffle, to get away in one piece. But it was several hours before I could again enjoy myself. For the scars I suffered were not on my outside but inside, on my heart. You see, not even an hour before those protestors had been calling me a "murderer" I had been visiting with crippled children at a Red Cross hospital, bringing smiles and laughter to their faces.

That evening, after much contemplation, I decided to put the American flag into my backpack to avoid any further controversies. I felt afraid and embarrassed.

But my decision to hide the flag was very temporary.

As I neared Portsmouth, it occurred to me that the times when I as an American will be criticized will likely be numerous. This would only increase as I advanced into the Third World countries, I surmised. To start fearing that criticism now would not be wise. Rather, I should learn to face it.

Thus I walked into Portsmouth with my nation's colors showing proudly.

Steven

Posted by at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)