Nostalgia

Nostalgia

Although we had been coming to the Pyrenees for over thirty years, most of our visits were during the academic summer holidays. Hence, we came to know this part of the range as a warm, sunny place buzzing with the jollity of seasonal visitors and surrounded by snowless peaks and wellfrequented mountain paths.

And as I write, well into the month of August, there is not a cloud in the sky; the carparks where many a mountain trek begins are full and late comers must find a spot by the side of the narrow roads. On top of the Pic D’ Anie, the highest in the Cirque, there will be steady daily traffic of summiteers - at least while the weather holds. And in the village, the hotel, the campsite, the bar and the shop, along with all the smaller businesses that rely on tourism, will be making the most of the influx because, before long, the visitors will have departed.

Having spent almost a complete year in Lescun now, I see the estive*1 in the context of the whole twelve months. So the arrival of holiday-makers becomes simply another event in the annual cycle of this mountainous world - as much a symbol of the seasons as the passing flocks of migratory cranes in October, the transhumance, the autumn alchemy of the forest or the first snow. When the initial visitors arrive, the avant guard, sometime in June, it is rather like coming across the first tentative hellebores curling from the soil in April.

For some it will be a first visit. If the weather is bad and the Cirque is hidden behind a curtain of cloud they will, mostly likely, descend to the valley never to return. Others will stay, sit it out until the mountains choose to revel themselves. Later, perhaps, they will move on to another destination - another part of the chain, another range of mountains, another part of the world.

Some, though, will come back.

Next to our house there is a Gite rented out by the week during July and August. So far, all the clients have been French, mostly very pleasant apart from one idiot who, for reasons only known to himself, felt the need to tell me that he was “a bit racist”. In fact, he went on to explain, it was only people of colour that he couldn’t stand!

Well… it takes all sorts, I suppose.

More recently, though, I had the pleasure of meeting an elderly gentleman, who first came to Lescun as a young boy just before the outbreak of the second world war. His father vowed to return when the conflict was over and he remained true to his word. Back then, visitors stayed at the Hotel Pic D’Anie, then as now presided over by the Carrafanq family.

For a long time it was the only place to find a bed in the village and, reading the accounts of the adventurers who arrived from near or far between the 1920s, when serious Pyreneenism began, right up until the 1990s, the walls of the hotel must be so profoundly infused with history and memories that they surely merit preservation as a monument to the public and private dreams and dramas that, over the years, have unfolded here.

So what of us?

We turned up by chance after hitch-hiking from Cherbourg and passing a night in Gan, just outside Pau. Studying our Michelin Map of France, I noticed a road twisting up into the mountains and going no further.

“That,” I remember saying, “Is where we have to go.”

Fortunately, when we arrived, the sun was shining and the cirque was on full display. That first sight of a sky full of mountains, arcing from Pic Labigouer in the East and tracing a skyline resembling a graph of the fortunes and calamities of one’s life via the Dec de Lhers, the Billare and

Hotel Pic D’Anie Circa 1912 the Pic D’Anie before ending modestly at the Pic D’Ourtasse in the West is a phenomenon that has found a permanent home in what Wordsworth described as “the mind’s eye”.

So… we wanted to stay but we had nowhere to stay.

At the time, the hotel was beyond our reach because we knew, even then, that we would to stay more than a few days but, during a discussion with the owner of the Bar des Bergers, we found out that a women in the village might be prepared to let a garret room above her garage.

Further enquiries revealed that the room had no running water or sanitation. There was a squatty outside loo in the courtyard of the owner’s house and an abreuvoir, a trough for drinking water, twenty metres down the village street. What’s more the place was, effectively, a junk room, stacked high with everything from spare sanitary ware to antique agricultural implements.

“We’ll take it,” we said. And so began a voyage of discovery that endures to this day, albeit in a very different form.

My acquaintance in the next door gite, on the other hand, with family holidays based at the hotel, must have had a privileged introduction. All the same, his memories were no less vivid. Up at dawn, sandwiches packed, to begin the exciting trek to the Pic D’Anie or the Table Des Trois Rois… memories planted for a lifetime. A day out in the mountains with a bunch of friends might provide reminiscences that far into the future will be turned over again and again whenever, or if ever, the protagonists should chance to meet. Those August days were a time to forge new friendships, cemented out on the slopes, the ridges and the peaks. A chance encounter in the bar might easily result in a commitment to, the next day, say, join a party tackling say, the Lac de la Chourique via the Breche d’Hanas or normal route to the Grande Billare.

And that’s exactly how it was for me shortly after arriving here.

Knowing nothing about mountains, neither the potential pleasures nor the intrinsic dangers, it was undoubtedly reckless of me to sign up to an ascent of the La Grand Couloir of the Billare with someone I only just met and who had little more experience than I did. Indeed, Yann only knew the whereabouts of the chimney that gave access to the couloir because a Parisian artist, Roger Bravard who had a house in the village, had shown him where it was.

When I think about it now, I shudder.

Even back then, despite my youthful ignorance, I must have known something was a bit dodgy because I remember not sleeping very well the night before the escapade.

The next day, after a walk up through the forest we came up against the limestone barrier that guarded access to the face. Yann pointed out the obvious weakness in the wall which we scrambled up without difficulty - me in my cheap walking boots and silly shorts, and he who would not have looked out of place on a golf course.

It was soon after this first The Billare with the Grand Couloir dividing the North Face stage of the route that we hit a problem. Two steep gullies led upwards but we had no idea which one to follow. So, it was decided that I should try the left one while Yann explore the other.

After ten minutes I was stuck. Having eased myself tentatively up a rocky gash full of earth, vegetation and loose boulders I could go no further. I was, at this point, about twenty metres above the stony platform from which I had set out.

Yann meanwhile had found the way through and come back down to find out was was going on.

“I’m stuck,” I called.

“Don’t worry,” he said matter-of-factly. “Just do exactly what you did to get up there but in reverse.”

So I did. And it worked.

The next few hours passed on a knife edge with the euphoria of adventure on one side and fear of likely death on the other so that, by the time we reached the breche that divides the Grand and the Petit Billare and began the final treacherous slope to the summit, all sensitivities had been vanquished. We had become immortal and we took it in our stride.

Naive? Certainly, but I was hooked and, what’s more, I had a tale to tell.

Now, towards the end of August, the village is full to bursting. The population, thanks to a better than usual supply of visitors, is back up to what it was in the middle of the nineteenth century - ten times that of the rest of the year. Near the village square, the children’s playground frequented by stray dogs for most months comes alive with the activities of children. Many a teenager will be reacquainted with with their holiday friends and quite possibly new plans for excursions in the Cirque will be hatched. Old timers will recount tales of past adventures often with an edge of competition.

I come across a group of half a dozen or so such fellows enjoying an apero outside the Hotel Pic D’Anie. Some I know while others I have yet to come across. Pascal Senvanter, the keep fit fanatic, is amongst them. He invites me to join them and, before long the conversation turns, inevitably perhaps, to the Billare.

One, a septuagenarian, recounts how when he did the voie normale (classic route) with his late brother there had been a large flat block making access to the final slope worryingly awkward as a slip would find one descending rapidly to the shore of the Lac de Lhurs on the eastern side of the peak.

“Ah..!” interrupts a silver-haired man called Bruno that had seen around the village in the past but had never been introduced to. “It’s not there anymore, you know - the slab.”

“That’s right,” adds Jerome Castegneau with whom I once climbed the Doigt De Petrageme. “It disappeared in the earthquake of seventy-four.”

Several of the men nod knowingly.

“Personally, my preferred route is up the Couloir Occidental from Anaye,” chips in Arnaud Mendieta, the beret-toting Basque from Bayonne. “A couple of tricky sections but it’s a quick way to get to the top of the Petit Billare… whole gang of us did it once the day after the fete of the quinze août. There’s an enormous boulder choke half way up and Olivier Paget was so hung over we had to pull him up at the end of the washing line we’d ‘borrowed’ from old Mother Monette.”

Laughter spread through the little gathering subsiding eventually into various snorts and mumblings.

Senvanter, in the meantime, appeared to be having difficulty remaining in his seat. His right foot was tapping like a woodpeckers beak on the ground while his hands pressed hard down on the table as though her were about to lurch forward into a lofty handstand.

“Did that,” he spluttered. “Up and down in the morning, then almost ran up to the Col de la Countende. Scaled the North Ridge of Pic D’Anie… back down via La Mouline to Sanchez before five o’clock!” And with that he suddenly lurched backwards in his chair and clapped his hands twice as though applauding his own achievement.

Senvanter’s contribution was greeted with a number of nods and a few grins that one might mistakes for smirks before the table fell silent.

“What about you, John?” asked Jerome Castegneau. “Have you climbed the Billare?”

“Well,” I began. “As a matter of fact…”

*1 estive

- the summer season.

August 28th 2016