Ojo Caliente

The first European to visit Ojo Caliente was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, about whom you can see a good eponymous movie.

Retrato de
Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca

Shipwrecked in 1527 somewhere in Florida, he and his African slave walked (!) to Mexico City. On the way he made a detailed and meticulous reord of what he saw. This included many Indian cultures that would be wiped out by European diseases. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000,000 may have perished by the middle of the 16^th Century. This was already underway when Cabeza de Vaca came through, and he did note deserted towns. Why on earth he went to the upper Rio Grande I don’t know, but he named the place Ojo Caliente, which I think is a pretty general term for hot springs (it means “hot eye”). Anyway, he described the salutary mud-baths that the Indians loved, which are still available at the big spa.

My reservation was lost, but I was able to stay a half mile away at a cheaper and more commodious B & B, where I was the only guest. They even gave me a discount for letting the breakfast cook have a vacation. And the main spa’s management gave me free use of the facilities for two days, including extras I would not have purchased, which amounted to about $75 worth of free services. On night one, they gave me a private, outdoor, arsenic pool, complete with Kiva fireplace. (For some reason, the arsenic in the water is thought to be good for you – they also have pools heavy in iron and others in sodium.) With the piñon logs crackling, I looked at the stars some more, then went to the hottest pool to finish up. They also have a sauna and steam-room and Swedish wrap, also complimentary, which I accepted the following day. The old hotel where I would have stayed is on the historic treasures list, which may have something to do with its lack of private bathrooms (they figure you can bathe in the pools, and the toilet is down the hall). There is a very creditable restaurant, however, not too pricey and very friendly. The whole thing was built by that congressman guy. Hotel much as it was a hundred years ago, I suppose. The rest of the spa is, of course, much more up-to-date, and getting more so.

Out on the road in Ojo Caliente is a superb little café, the southerly of two, called Café Taquita, as I recall. If you ever find yourself passing through, give it a shot. Real northern New Mexico home cooking. Home-grown chilis and genuine sopapillas (fresh fry-bread),

served by Spanish ladies of winning temperament.

On south through Santa Fe and past Albuquerque to lodging in the quiet and aptly-named town of Socorro. What a lovely state!

Taos the Ancient and an Old Friend

South of Colorado Springs and all of its bad vibes (Air Force Academy with its hazing and right-wing religion, “Focus on the Family”, and those American Taliban, the Christian Reconstructionists) the atmosphere changes for the better. The next town is Pueblo, then Trinidad. Between these two refreshingly Hispanic names is Walsenberg, not so atmospheric, but this is where I leave the freeway and go west across La Veta Pass into the San Luis Valley. (From here on, as you see, nothing but evocative names.) The little town of San Luis isn’t much. It is part of a cluster of tiny settlements (San Pedro, San Pablo, San Francisco) that are the northernmost extent of Spanish colonial settlement north of Santa Fe ~ all of them older than anything in California. For now I have crossed the sub-continental divide that was the rough border between French Louisiana and New Spain, leaving the Mississippi watershed for the Rio Grande.

The great San Luis Valley runs for about a hundred miles north and south, lying between the San Juan mountains on the West and the Sangre de Cristo range on the east. It is said that this is the inspiration for the phrase in America the Beautiful, "...for purple mountains' majesty above the fruited plains..."The valley floor is almost 7,000 feet above sea level. Last weekend, when I was in Boulder, the temperature was twenty below in Alamosa, the valley’s main town. Taos is at the south end of the valley. And in the middle is Colorado's fourth highest mountain, Peña Blanca (Blanca Peak), which everybody just calls Blanca. She is my favorite mountain, my candidate for the American holy mountain.

Blanca

Because there is something about Blanca’s majesty that is almost sinister. Although I have seen her many times, I have never seen her peak; she is usually shrouded in a cloud. In the summer it shrinks to a kind of celebratory banner, trailing from the peak, but it is still there. She is always white, hence the name, and in the winter, her glaciers extend down to meet the snow on the valley floor. Topping 14,000 feet, she seems all alone, even though her range extends north and south on either side, Under her one-hopes-benign shadow, I turn south at Ft. Garland and a few miles later I am in "the land of enchantment" itself, New Mexico.

Questa, Lama, Arroyo Hondo ~ more evocations of distant past and personal memory. In Questa I bought for my mother a turquoise and silver bracelet, made by a part Menominee Indian, whom I had first met at New Buffalo commune in Arroyo Hondo.

Building New Buffalo Commune

New Buffalo was the location of the hot springs scene in Easy Rider, and Pepe lived there when I stopped by on my third bus trip (old school bus converted to a hippie RV). On my SECOND bus trip to Taos, we got stuck in the mud going up to the Lama Foundation, one of the famous centers of hippie/newage spiriutality. Murshid Sam Lewis is buried there (“Sufi Sam” of 60s San Francisco, the model for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural).

Sufi Sam

And then Taos itself. I stay in an adobe motel across the street from the pricier Kachina Lodge. My place has a “Kiva fireplace”, one of those adobe semi-circular corner affairs and an outdoor hot-tub.

"Kiva" fireplace

I brave the ten-degree weather to soak in it and to contemplate the strange lights in the sky, which I am told, are called “stars”. There seem to be a great many of them at this altitude. Milky Way clearly visible. Thus soaking (with the plastic tub-covering pulled up to my chin to save warmth), I reflect ~ as is appropriate for New Year’s Eve ~ on the past. Taos’s past and my own.

On my FIRST trip here in the hippie bus, we risked death by climbing up the dirt switch-back out of Arroyo Hondo to a commune on the high plain (llano) called Morning Star.

Pueblo at Morning Star, 1971

The building was a row of adjoining adobe huts, which they called their pueblo. This was one of sixty-some communes in Taos County. We visited for the afternoon, and then made our way in a snowstorm to Santa Fe, where the communards we brought with us had an outpost where we could crash. The sixty-mile journey took us six hours, because the roads were extremely treacherous and the old exhaust-manifold-vacuum- driven windshield wiper was not up to the thick, wet snow. We had to stop every ten minutes to clear the windshield. We took two of the communards with us all the way to San Diego.

David and Penny Pratt told us about life as hippies in the environs of Taos. They explained that if they were ever walking up the road and saw a car coming, they would dive into the ditch, because it was just as likely that a Spaniard would swerve at them, or even shoot! Many of the hippies carried guns to defend themselves. The inhospitable natives were not to be called Mexicans. They had been here since long before there was a Mexico. The first Spanish families settled here in the 16^th Century. Before even the Calvinist theocrats set foot in Massachusetts. But early as they were, these Spanish were immigrants too, of course.

Taos Pueblo

To the Pueblo Indians (a very generic name, they are more properly known by the name of their respective pueblos) the Spanish are newcomers pretty much the same as the hippies, and they keep to themselves. It is virtually impossible to get into one of their Kivas for a ceremony.

Kiva open to public

The Pratts observed that this country was overlaid with stratum after stratum of history and prehistory, from the Anasazi ancstors of the Taos Pueblo to the Aztecs who are rumored to have ranged this far and to have left a cache somewhere on Blanca, to the Athabascan nation we call Apaches, whose Jicarilla tribe is settled on a reservation not far to the northwest, to the Conquistadores and the Padres and the Spanish settlers (including Maranos ~ crypto-Jews fleeing the Inquisition), to the Penitentes, who arose in the vacuum of episcopal oversight. The diocesan See was Durango, almost five hundred miles to the south. Then came the Mexican Revolution and the Pueblo Revolt and the 1848 war, and suddenly Taos was in the United States. New settlers arrived over the Santa Fe trail from Missouri, including the first archbishop of Santa Fe, the French-born Jean Lamy, who was sent from Cincinnati in the 1850s. (Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop). Lamy had to deal with Penitentes and their secret Moradas cult, with unofficially married clergy, and with a laity that, though Spanish, was pretty much pagan.

Penitente Morada, Taos

Then came the Texas cattle people, who made Albuquerque their center. But still the Santa Fe-based Spanish were sufficiently strong to remain a political force to be reckoned with. In the late 19^th Century, for ten years the territorial congressman was from Ojo Caliente, across the river from Taos. Though an Anglo, he was not a Texan, having been sent back to his parents’ home-town of St. Louis to be educated. A bit later came Georgia O’Keefe and D.H. Lawrence, and finally none other than C.G. Jung. The latter got one of the Taos Pueblo Kiva guys to talk.

C.G. Jung

You can read about it in a remarkable essay in Memoriues, Dreams, and Reflections. Something about consciousness at the top of the world, which is where you are if you are in Taos, from the Pueblo point of view. And REALLY finally, come the hippies, refugees from the flesh-pots of California, following Jung in search of the mystical enchantment that is palpable here.

Well, the hippies weren’t really the last newcomers. Now there is urban sprawl at the Top of the World, including, I am sorry to report, Walmart and plenty of fast-food. The old Plaza is pretty chic. Must be like Santa Fe was 50 years ago. All artisanal shops and galleries. Think Stillwater in adobe. Nevertheless, I am happy to report, the magic is still here.

Part of the magic for me was my visit to my old friend, Gendron Jensen, who lives with his wife, Christine,

in a fabulous Japanese-style house about twenty minutes up in the mountains behind Taos. I got stuck in the driveway, naturally, but his kindly neighbor (a Spaniard who is in charge of security at nearby Los Alamos) pulled me out with his winch and a couple of fat-tire ATVs. The Rio del Pueblo valley (tributary of the Rio Grande) is a lovely, remote spot. Around one corner I spooked a big bull elk (or are they stags?). What a magnificent creature!

The Jensens are both successful artists, with shows in their résumés in all the big cities and in Europe. Still, they have to watch their pennies and it’s a never-ending hustle. They both are artists of the pen, drawing beautiful creations, she abstract, he of bones. (His sobriquet is the Boneman.)

Bell Mueum

I met Gendron through the late Fr. Paul Berg, whom we remembered at length during my visit. Paul was an Episcopal priest at Grand Rapids when I met him. He was a central figure in a remarkable revival of interest in an abandoned Russian church in the muskeg north of the iron range, in a place called Bramble. Paul is buried in the orthodox graveyard there. (Another story.)

G. gave me Paul’s pectoral cross, which I will wear habitually now. Paul was a man of very special and unique holiness. Wherever he was, he attracted people of unusual creativity, like Gendron, and his friends included a wide array of artists and poets. Gendron calls him Paulus Dei and we decided that we must write about him at length. Here I will just say that Paul inhabited the liminal reaches of the church and society. He was counter-cultural in the best possible sense, and a huge influence on anyone who knew him. That G. thinks me worthy of his cross is an honor of which I am not sure what to make. G. and I learned from Paul of the charming Russian iconographic motif, Our Lady of the Unexpected Joy. G.’s gift was certainly that for me. But I have a feeling that it is a sacramental sign of something else.

Here in the mountains, whose underlying rock is a deep blood-red, named for the Eucharistic Mystery, I find myself confronted with opening possibilities. G. and I have already agreed to travel to San Salvador next winter to visit his old friend, who was St. Oscar’s private secretary.

Memories of Muriel

A tough old broad named Muriel Baughan first told me about Taos. Muriel managed the games at the amusement park, where I had my first summer job.

Artist's Recreation of The Cyclone Rollercoaster at the Excelsior Amusement Park

Not quite on its last legs then, the park was a vestige of the glory days at Lake Minnetonka, when there were dozens of resort hotels, serviced by Streetcar Boats, and the great interurban streetcars themselves, which brought crowds to Excelsior from Lake and Hennepin in twenty minutes (a time not possible now, except by helicopter).

I grew up across St. Alban’s Bay from the park, which was lit at night by incandescent lights, strung all over the outline of the roller coaster and the other rides and buildings. With the windows open in the summer, I would go to sleep to the sound of the rattling coaster cars and the shrieks of the passengers. A visit to the amusement park was a high adventure in my childhood, and it was really exciting to g a job there at the age of thirteen.

The law forbade children to work after dark, so I usually worked from (10:00 am) to 5:00 or 6:00 pm. The work wasn’t very hard, just standing behind the counter taking the dimes and quarters from people who threw baseballs at wooden milk bottles or tried their luck at skee-ball. Then there was the fairly creepy “Walking Charlie” in which life-sized dummies of seedy-looking bums paraded across the back of the stall and people tried to knock their hats off with baseballs. The only difficult part was bending over all day to pick up the hats or the milk-bottles. Mostly it was boring, sitting on an orange crate all day, waiting for customers, who rarely came during the day on weekdays. The pay was 75¢ an hour, the minimum wage “for women and children in the entertainment industry."

Muriel liked me because I didn’t rip off the till, like the older boys, muscled and motorcycled, from nearby farm towns, who sometimes worked for her when they couldn’t get a more lucrative position running the rides. They had cut-off denim jackets over their tight T-shirts and thy smoked Camels and they ripped Muriel off. This was not a good idea, because Muriel, an experienced carney, was way tougher than any of them. Even though she was dumpy and short and fat, and wore a man’s shirt outside her slacks, and had a few missing teeth and a couple of gold ones that showed, she had a fierce temper and you didn’t want her mad at you. I never gave her cause, and I brought a number of my more-or-less nerdy friends to work there then next year. They were honest too, and as I reflect, it may be that we opened a whole new world to Muriel.

During the months the park was open (May to September), Muriel lived with her “cousin” Edna, who whirled the candy floss, in an old resort, long since let to long-term renters. They may have had some carney gigs elsewhere in the South, but mainly she and Edna just drove around the Southwest in her ancient, war-time Dodge sedan. She particularly liked northern New Mexico.

Muriel would stop by to chat every day. Just to check in as the boss, but sometimes she would talk a little more. She told m about cowboys and Penitentes, and about the great Taos Pueblo. She showed me pictures, and she even had some Indian-made turquoise and silver jewelry. I learned about the mysterious muradas, the windowless houses where the Penitente societies had their ceremonies. And she told me the lurid stories of the Holy Week excesses, in which people not only flagellated each other, but actually crucified someone. Every year.

I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Was Muriel making this up? She was a sincerely devout Catholic, and I had been raised to know that Catholics were pretty exotic. But real crucifixion? Muriel made Taos sound like a foreign country. I later found out that it was all true, and Northern New Mexico has always been a genuine “land of enchantment” to me. I wanted to see whether the charm was still potent, so I arranged to spend some time in the Taos area. My old friend Gendron Jenson, a successful artist from Grand Rapids, called me last Fall, and I promised a visit. Boy, am I glad I did. More on that below.

***

The Excelsior Amusement Park closed sometime in the late '60s, I think. The last thing to go was a beautiful old dance hall, called The Pavillion, across the street from the main entrance to the park. It was a domed ellipse, all made of wood, with a large dance floor in the middle, circled by an arcade with booths for resting and conversation. I always thought it a shame that they didn't preserve at least that fine old structure. It went out with in glory, though. The last band to play there was the Rolling Stones.

Hello Friends!

I thought I would keep a kind of electronic journal again this year ~ even though I will not have places nearly as interesting as last year's to describe. This will be more "today I drove from a to b", for those who are curious.

So the highways have been clear and dry. There is almost no snow left on the plains, but I did wake to a beautiful frozen-fog effect on the trees. Today I drove across Nebraska ~ from Council Bluffs IA to North Platte. I stayed my first night out on the banks of the Missouri. Well, not really. Harrah's is on the bank. It is technically a "river boar" so they have full Las Vegas gambling, complete with garish lights and a twenty-story hotel (some riverboat).

I made a point of staying in Council Bluffs, because it is a very early childhood memory, from one of the winters before Kindergarten, when my grandmother stayed with us to take care of me. I remember her referring to what sounded to me like "Consa-bluss". It was the Big City for her when she was growing up in the 1880s about fifty miles to the NE in a town called Harlan. It is not too far from Early, for you Greg Brown fans.

Anyway, I think both are very evocative names. We have a number of them, I was thinking: Blue Earth, Sleepy Eye, Good Thunder.

The land is beautiful even in winter. If I remember correctly, last year I compared Piccardy to Iowa. I was right, but it's really more like Nebraska at least the Platte River Valley where I-80 runs. Completely flat, with little groves dotting the horizon, and lots of wetlands all along the river. Just like the Somme. No gothic cathedrals in N. Platte, however, as far as I know.

There is an Episcopal Church, though. And the Baptists barely outnumber the Lutherans. My intelligence is drawn from the Ramada Inn's list of churches. There is one called, suspiciously, "Church of Jesus Christ" which I'll bet has deliberately left off the "LDS". There are also two entries for "Church of Christ", one distinguished by the perplexing qualification, "Vocal." Do you suppose the other one is manual only? Or nasal? Maybe they are mute. anyway, it almost makes me wish I were going to be here on Sunday so I could check out this "Church of Christ (Vocal)." Or maybe the non-vocal one would be more interesting.

So, tomorrow I drive away to the Mountain Time Zone (I am surprised that it is still Central, here in N. Platte) and the unbearably hip town of Boulder. My old friend there, Joe de Raismes (a real, live, French viscount) is a Sufi of many years, whose Pir required them to become Muslims. They have a little community, all of whom I have known for a long time. They never would let me attend any of their meetings, though (they are kind of like Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, as far as that's concerned). But either they have mellowed or they think my contact with Pir Vilayat has koshered me, so to speak, because they have invited me to their initiates-only Khanega tomorrow night.

That should be fun. Years ago, I introduced Joe to another old friend, a Minnesota woman. In 1966, Annie and I drove to Acapulco in my Morgan. She looked like a cross between Melina Mecouri and Julie Christi. Then she moved to the mountains and married a Mountain Man. The last time I saw her, she was living with him in an miner's abandoned log cabin on the back of Aspen Mountain, where you had to climb up on skis. But that's another story.

A Salaam Aleikum*,
Bill+


* Did you know you can be jailed in Pakistan for saying this if you're not a Muslim? Then in Tajikistan, it is the standard greeting for everybody. You want to be careful, I guess.

Piccardy and Notre Dame d'Amiens

After a couple of weeks of driving around Paris, I am really getting to feel comfortable here. It was still pretty overcast and rainy the day my friend Cindi was supposed to arrive from MN. It was even worse in Chicago, where the blizzard was so bad that she missed the Air France connection. Not knowing it, I REALLY got to know the Charles de Gaulle Airport and its several terminals (the AF flight was late, and gated at a terminal different from the scheduled one, so I parked and waited at both until it became clear that something was wrong). Anyway, C. couldn't get on another flight for Paris until it would have been just about time to come home, so after two days at the Holiday Inn in Chicago, she went home. Too bad.

The next day was beautiful here - the first of a series of what really feels like early Spring (crocuses up, and all - even one , lone cherry tree in full bloom down in the Bois de Boulogne). I had been feeling guilty about not taking enough advantage of the city, while I'm here, so I drove to the Musee Guimet (which I have to brag about finding without consulting the map - and on the way found a spectacuklar view of the Eiffel Tower, framed by a beautiful street, Avenue Victor Hugo). This is the Archaeological museum, where Claude's sister, Marielle works (except she's in Laos now). There is a unique exhibition of treasures from Afghanistan, but the line was out the door and down the steps and around the corner, so I decided not to do that. Instead, I just drove around: up the right bank of the Seine (not the underground tunnel expressway, but the quaiside streets past Concorde, the Tuileries park, the Louvre, the Isle de la Cite and Isle St. Louis all the way to Bercy (the Frank Gehry building commissioned as an American center, which then went belly up [the center, not the building] and now houses the Cinematheque Francaise, the museum of hte history of cinema where you can watch lots of classic movies every day - the French invented movies: a couple of brothers aptly named Lumieres, in the 1880s), then back to the eastern arondissments to the famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise. I found out that this part of Paris is delightfully hilly, and it was fun to see a new part of town. Except for the cemetery, tourists don't come here much. Also, it is not particularly trendy. I was strongly reminded of my first visit to Paris 44 years ago.

It occured to me that I don't have to feel guilty about not going to the Louvre or something every day. I'm not a tourist. I am just living here for a while. But then this past weekend, I started some serious sightseeing. On Saturday, I drove to Amiens, the principal city of Piccardy. For those of you to whom Piccardy means a major rather than a minor third at the end of a tune, it's one of the old royal provinces of France, and it is home to several important medieval cathedrals. But none more important than Amiens. It is pretty much my favorite. It doesn't have Chartres' glass, the glass is all clear - grisailles, which is just as well I think because it is so fabulously light inside, and the architectural features are perfect. It is the highest cathedral in France. The highest complete one, that is. Neighboring Beauvais, to the south, is higher, but it just has a choir, because when they started to build the nave, it fell down and they gave up!

Notre Dame d'Amiens was built in an unusually short period of time (16 years), and the unity of the Master Builder's conception is apparent. There is no trace of Romanesque influence or moorish flavors. It is possibly the best example of the pure gothic style. (Be sure to click on the pictures to enlarge them - some of them came out quite well, and you can see lots of detail.)










Its facade also has breathtaking statuary - nothing ever lost. Every niche of every archivolt is ocuupied. (See pictures at Wikipedia) The north portal has one row of saints that depicts two martyrs, one in chasuble and the other in toga, both holding their own severed heads! (Enlarge and check out this one especially, the decapitee in the toga is flanked by a very pleasant, thurificious angel.)

Near the crossing is a large labyrinth, very clearly marked in black and white tiles. It was explained that those who couldn't make the










pilgrimage all the way to Jerusalem or even to Santiago de Compostela, were encouraged to gain spiritual benefit by walking the labyrinth, the center of which represents (I think) Jerusalem. I noticed that the cross in the center's tiling is not oriented with the cathedral itself (which is on an east/west axis, as usual). Maybe the cross is pointed toward Jerusalem or something?

But most glorious is the nave, soaring more than 136 feet. The great nave windows are in the clerestory, atop the blind arcade of the treforium. Seven bays in the nave. The choir

and apse are actually wider than the nave, because the ambulatory leads around a series of apsidal chapels radiating out, each more gorgeous than the last. All of it is a kind of golden white color. Indescribable. UNESCO has registered it as a patrimonial treasure of the human race. I actually wept.

The choir is adorned by a later treasure: carved wooden stalls of the 15th Century. intricate and delicate in detail.

The edifice sits on the high bank above the Somme. [Not far away was the dreadful battle: Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word. (Friedrich Steinbrecher). More than a million casualties. A MILLION in one battle, in 1916. It is also noted as the debut of the tank - a British invention] The river flows more or less east-to-west at this point, and only about ten miles to the east is Corbie, the site of the great Abbey that was home to my Parish's patron, St. Anskar. He was born in Amiens, raised at the Abbey in Corbie, and volunteered to be a missionary to the pagans up north. First Archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg, and first missionary to Scandinavia. He is known to history as the Apostle of the North. Not much is left of his old Abbey on the Somme. Just a much later church, a very large late gothic structure - can't be much older than 15th C. - with plenty of baroque features. It is closed except for occasional services, so I didn't get in. I did ask St. Anskar if he had ever dreamed a guy from Minnesota would come looking for him 1200 years later!

Corbie is a pleasant, laid back town. I saw several like it as I deliberately avoided the freeway for a while. It reminded me of home. Not the architecture, naturally (Piccardy is kind of like Belgium - mostly brick row-houses that aren't all that charming), but the feeling. This is very rich farming country - like southern MN or IA - it was already pretty green (winter wheat.

Mostly flat, with low, forested ridges in the distance, and the occasional ravine or river valley, which made me think of Trempealeau County or the land around Menominee. Think driving from St. Paul to Eau Claire, that's Piccardy. Quite pleasant, but nothing very spectacular - except for those ravines.

The Somme Valley itself is extremely marshy. It's not just a river channel, but a whole lot of backwaters and little ponds and lakes. I drove through this countryside and noticed that there were quite a few houses that looked like humble little vacation homes. This is not a part of France that is mobbed with tourists, ever. And these summer houses were barely more than cabins and trailers. Kind of nice, actually, compared to the swanky and expensive villas in tonier places like Brittany and the South. And the fact is, the Somme Valley is quite wild. No one lives in these marshes except waterfowl, and they are really quite pretty. It made me glad, despite the horrors associated with its name.

And today (Sunday) I managed to get to St. Sulpice in time for the organ audition (recital). Later, I had another driving adventure, to attend a free afternoon concert of 17th C. music on the backside (north) of Montmartre (18th Arr.) This is the seedier part of Paris, and quite fun to drive in. I say that because I got lucky. I consulted the map all the way, but was headed for the wrong section of the street, an error that I caught just in time. I overshot the mark and was about to bail, when I noticed a brasserie named for my street, and so I looked, and sure enough, there it was. I went around the block, checked the numbers, and - by God - I found a PARKING PLACE RIGHT BESIDE THE VENUE, which turned out to be a Protestant church center.

The concert, however (which started one minute after I arrived), was all RC tenebrae music from the 17th and 18th Centuries: Stabat Mater by an Italian named Sances, and Lamentations lessons by Lalande and Couperin, alternating with instrumentals by Frescobaldi, Couperin, and Barriere. A very good soprano, accompanied by a baroque cello and clavecin (is that what we call a clavichord?). And it was FREE. (Donations accepted.)

Good way to get ready for Lent.

Brittany

The medieval lavoir and mill-race at Vannes

Cancale looks SE across the bay towards Mont St. Michel. Just west along the coast is the 17th Century fortified port of St.Malo . :
Very beautiful, although it had to be completely rebuilt after WWII, inside and out. This was an important base for the French Navy in its interminable struggle with the English. St. Malo was the home of the Corsairs (privateers, licensed by the King to do whatever they wanted to the English on the high seas). For some reason, they let you drive in this completely walled city, wqhich has only one gate open to the land. As you can see, it's kind of a nightmare. (The picture is more visible if you click on it.)

We continued west on the coast [you can manipulate this map to see all the detail you wish] past St. Brieuc to Perros-Guirec, which is about the northernmost point in Brittany. Here everything is made out of that striking rosy granite. Seawalls, churches, houses. Then on to Brest, which is the headquarters of the French Atlantic fleet. Poor Brest was really completely destroyed during the war, for obvious strategic reasons. So now, except for the old fort, all the buildings are ugly and hastily-built, in the functional post-war modern style devoid of charm, which reminded me of the Soviet Union. Too bad, because the setting is spectacular: in a deep estuarial bay, with lots of islands, points, and inlets. A perfect harbor.

We spent the night across this big bay, on the southern shore of another peninsula, named for the charming little town of Crozon. [See map.] Here I think I had a feeling for Bretagne profonde. The people were wildly friendly - like the Irish. Everybody smiles and goes out of their way for you. One hotel (42 euros), one restaurant - 39 euros for local lobster. (That’s over $50, so I skipped it. I also skipped the $12 breakfast at the hotel.) We ate dinner and breakfast at the pub next door. And it really was more like an Irish pub than a French café: big exposed timbers for rafters, a crowd of guys watching soccer, and very friendly. The bartender gave us a big smile and offered his hand in greeting. I ate a croque madame andouillette. Now, a croque monsieur is a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, but this was made of andouille sausage instead, which is not like Cajun andouille, but made of tripe (or "bowels", as J-l explained). When served as a croque madame, it comes with a raw egg, which I put inside, where it seemed to cook a little. Anyway, with mustard it was just fine. Crozon has a market on its square every day of the week. Loads of fresh fish from the night before.

Speaking of authentic Brittany, all the road signs out here are in two languages (as they are in Provence and around Perpignan - the Catalan part of France right next to northeastern Spain). It turns out that there is more than one Breton language. As in Wales, it is taught again in schools. It looks really odd in French orthography. Most of these signs are Kerthis and Kerthat, which I guess refers to clans. Ker = Mac in Scotland.

J-l says there is a fairly strong nationalist movement here. They want their language and they are very conservative ("fascist" is J-l’s term) about religion and politics. This is the only part of secularist France in which religion is taught in the public schools. Because, according to J-l, who is a teacher and sometime union official, otherwise the public schools would be empty.

After coffee and croissants at the café, we drove around the next bay to another charming fishing town called Douanenez. They also can the catch, so their economy is thriving.

We headed south for Quimper, a small city in a deep valley, with another to-die-for cathedral (St. Coretin). This one is distinguished by its lightness.

The stone is bright, the ribs are painted a delicate yellow, and there is just a general sense of airiness and space. They have also done very well in incorporating modern elements into the gothic. The altar in the transept is a beautiful big marble table, which I think harmonizes with the gothic feel better than all of those baroque reredoses you usually find. Likewise, the new organ. It is housed in a cylindrical tower of gleaming metal. Per the town’s official website:

Thanks to recent restoration works of the interior polychromes and
ribbed ceilings in yellow and ochre and the white washing of the facings, the
cathedral is a true revelation of 15th century architecture. This colourful restoration was totally in the spirit of the first builders, in opposition to the austere look of religious monuments during the 19th century.

Another feature of this part of Brittany is the pastel and brightly-painted houses. You don't see this in Normandy, or on the north coast of Brittany either. The paint-jobs are almost like Mexico. Lots of images of Quimper here, just stay with it a while, because the images change rapidly.

Those of you familiar with Asterix and his companions will remember Obelix, the menhir (megalith) delivery-man. Well, we found where he delivered them: outside Carnac there are fields and fields of these standing stones, three to four feet high, arranged in rows, as in a modern cemetery. [More on these and some exceptionally good pictures.]

After a quick visit to Vannes, once the capital of the Kingdom of Brittany, (see lavoir at top) which lasted for about three generations just after Charlemagne and then became a Duchy, we headed home, a three-hour drive on the autoroute.

Cotentin

[click on images to enlarge]

Jean-loup drove me out to Normandy and Brittany for last week. It was cloudy and foggy all but the second day, so we came home a day early, but there was still plenty to see. I had never been to Brittany before, and it is well worth the trip. It reminds one of Maine and Quebec and the north coast of California. Full of rocky cliffs and estuaries and inlets, some of which are deep enough to qualify as fjords, I would say.

We started in Normany, where Jean-loup and Claude lived for eight years, near a market town called Briquebec, in the middle of the Cotentin peninsula, which sticks up into the English Channel just northeast of Brittany, [see map] and whose eastern beaches are still called Omaha and Utah. Off the western coast are the Channel Islands, belonging to the UK (Jersey, Guernsey, Sark). The Azéma’s hamlet is not too far from St. Mere Église, the little village where the Amerian paratrooper got caught hanging by his parachute from the steeple and survived, because none of the villagers told the Germans, who miraculously never looked up!

On the way, we stopped at Evreaux, which has a really splendid flamboyant cathedral.
Jean-loup says that this town is the beginning of Normandy. [please consult map] You will find Evreaux in the 27th Department just between "Mantes" and "Nanterre". J-l says that the Duchy of Normandy was basically the territory between the Seine and the Loire, north to the sea, but not including Brittany. The eastern borer was always under negotiation wiuth the King of France. (On this map, the names of the Revolutionary Departments are given, but the old Normandy was bigger.)

Then we dropped in at the unfortunate Basilique de St. Thérèse at Lisieux. Really hideous ‘30s monstrosity. Awful. Ghastly. Think Emmanuel Louis Masqueray satanically possessed by the shade of Albert Speer. Imagine starting with the St. Paul’s Cathedral’s rather uplifting Beaux-arts grandeur and filling it with horrible fascist-modern sculpture and trashy, late nouveau mosaics. The only art that isn’t entirely objectionable are the mosaic angels in the pendentives, but even they are pretty bad.

Norman village architecture, by contrast is delightful and everything you could hope for, distinguished by lots of half-timber, because there are big forests all over, except for Cotentin, which is more windswept, like Cornwall, and the houses are made of stone, as in Brittany. We stayed the night in a fishing/resort town called St.Vaast-la-Hougue, on the northwest coast (see map, just south of Pte. Barfleur). Mostly closed up for the winter, but there was a nice little hotel with an expensive but underwhelming restaurant. I finally found out what dorade is, however: a bronzish fish called sea-bream in England, what we call ocean perch, I think. It came en papillotte (steamed in foil), complete with head. Very tasty, sweet white flesh. There was also a somewhat arduous assiette de fruits de mer, which was mostly decorative. A couple of good oysters, but otherwise lots of tiny shells: sea-snails, langoustine (crayfish), and extremely small shrimp).

The next day we drove up to Cherbourg, where the Azémas used to teach. Then a brief visit to a couple of retired teacher friends and on to Cap de la Hague. This is right at the northwest corner of Cotentin, on a headland with a spectacular view, from which we could see the Cannel Islands. Here is Sark as seen from Cotentin: the private property of the Dame of Sark, who lets people live there under her rules, and she is an absolute dictator (no cars, but also no taxes). Cap de la Hague is the site of one of the world’s two spent-fuel reprocessing centers. They get U-238 from all over the world and turn it into plutonium.

This facility has never had an accident. In their characteristic modesty, the French say this is because of superior technology, just like their high-speed trains. It is true that the TGV has never had an accident, which is something the German bullet trains cannot claim, but Jean-loup says that every so often, the government would come around and buy all the milk and eggs, at outrageously high prices. This was never explained or announced, but the locals, of course, all knew about it. The condition was that nobody talk to the press. You figure it out.

Anyway, the government assures everyone that the radiation danger from the plant is no where near as bad as ordinary earth's, as for example across the water Brittany, where the pink granite makes your geiger counter twitch alot more. So they ship spent fuel here all the way from Japan. About as far from Japan as you can get. The Japanese are not so dumb.

One interesting geographical detail: at the south end of the peninsula, the land is low and marshy. The peninsula at one time actually was “almost an island”, like Mont Saint Michel. Among the many public-works projects of Louis XIV was draining these marshes and building levees to keep it drier. Apparently, one of the reasons for situating the nuclear reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague, was that, in case of a China Syndrome event, the marshes could be flooded again, and whole peninsula made inaccessible. (Meanwhile, the local residents - who would, presumably, be abandoned to their fate - were advised, in case of undefined emergency, to close their shutters and stuff towels under their doors!)

We visited the Abbey of Our Lady of Grace, OCSO (Trappist). This is a short walk from Jean-loup’s former hamlet. Severely simple, of course, as are all Cistercian monasteries. Whitewashed barrel vault that is great for plainchant. J-l used to stop in for Matins at about 3:00 am, after a night of partying. One time, he fell asleep,and a monk gently awakened him, to say that he was most welvcome, but only if he stayed awake.

"If you would sing in Latin, I wouldn't sleep!" said J-l. And, by God, they did. This is the kind of thing that only happens in France.

Then we went to see Madame Denis. She is the neighbor at the other end of the hamlet. A real peasant woman, now 84, now living alone in her old stone farmhouse, connected to the stone barn that houses a five-hundred-year-old cider-press, which J-l says is a twin of one in the museum in Valogne. I remember making hay with M. Denis almost thirty years ago. We began the day at the kitchen table with coffee accompanied by a couple of good shots of eau-de-vie de pommes (home-made calvados - M. Denis used to make over 100 liters/year; he was allowed by law to make 30). Then we went out to the field. Everything in France is on smaller scale than in the US: the field, the bales, the hay-rack, the hay-loft. So that meant several trips back to the barn. Each of them was marked by a nice big glass (NOT small-scale) of hard cider (home-made, of course). M. Denis had several barrels (BIG barrels) of this in the barn.

M. Denis died of alcoholism a few years ago. Mme. Denis is really a beautiful old lady. All smiles and bright as can be. One daughter lives next door and another in Briquebec, so she is safe and happy. She has redone her kitchen. She used to cook exclusively on a wood-stove, which is still her sole source of heat:


It’s chimney connects to the enormous hearth, which is now (wisely) plugged up and never used. Great to see her.

From Briquebec (and its medieval castle in the middle of the town square), we drove down the West side of the peninsula to Coutances, where there is another fabulous cathedral. A little bigger, earlier and simpler than Evreaux, with a big lantern over the crossing and 13th C. glass in the apse. See pictures .

Then we passed through Granville, which was the first big luxury-liner port. There was a fast train non-stop from Paris, and ships like the Normandie would receive passengers here for the voyage to New York. It was bombed to pieces during the war, however, and then served as the Allied headquarters. I remember Fr. George Metcalf, Patton’s Chaplain, remarking about his time there in 1944.

And so to Mont Saint Michel. Truly one of the world’s wonders. Too late for a visit (and too many stairs for me, anyway), so we just drove up as far as we could and admired from afar. The current plan is to eliminate the causeway and make it a permanent island, because the bay is silting up too fast. Anyway, with the ice-caps melting, it may be just making a virtue of necessity. But This holy place is one thing that won’t be affected - too high. We spent the night up the Breton Coast, in the fashionable resort town of Cancale [see map], which has the best (and, alas, the most expensive) oysters in the world. In situ they weren’t nearly as expensive as in Paris, so I had a dozen for dinner for about $8.00.

For pictures better than mine click: Cancale and St.Malo (Bourbon-fortified town from which the Quebec colonists came, subject of next entry).