Back Roads & Breakfasts





Posts from Europe

May-July 2000

How do we prepare for a thirty-day walk across Holland?

John Whiting considerately began our preparations in January, when he put an extra cassoulet in the freezer against our arrival two days ago. There’d been a heat wave at home; we’d had a series of 90-degree days, and cassoulet was not uppermost in mind. But London was cool and cassoulet was welcome after a long day on the airplane, whose kitchen was quite inadequate.

Cassoulet Wednesday night, lunch Thursday at the River Cafe, dinner at Clarke’s. An hour’s maniacal drive took us from Whiting’s Hampstead house to the River Cafe, one big rather bleak dining room right on the Thames at Hammersmith, a room unfortunately reminiscent of the cafeteria at Santa Rosa Junior College.

There the food was quick, complex, highly flavored. We had one course apiece only, Lindsey choosing squid. I took roast pork which was succulent and sweet, well marbled with innocent fat, much like suckling pig, and accompanied by slices of rather large carrots braised together with slices of artichoke heart, a delicious and previously unexperienced combination.

We waited for our food with a bottle of Erbaluce di Caluso, cold and flinty but generous enough for Mary’s taste, and then a half bottle of most delicious Amarone; and the cost was an alarming £188.

The ride back and a short rest left an hour for the tube ride to Clarke’s, in Kensington. I’d been there before, but was surprised to find that the small clubby dining room upstairs was assisted by a larger less traditional one downstairs, where we ate next to a noisy table of four among perhaps sixty other diners.

The menu at Clarke’s is patterned after Chez Panisse; indeed Sally Clarke did a short stint with Alice in the old days. There’s a single menu, and it was just fine: salmon and small radicchio and lettuce, and asparagus salad; charcoal-grilled lamb chops; a cheese course; Black Forest cake. The salmon was Scottish, smoked, and wild, cut into strips and beautifully dressed. The chops came with olive tapenade, a slice of sauteed polenta, sprinkled with pine nuts; and the two cheeses, a salty white one and a ripe blue, were English and hearty; the cake deep and not overly sweet in spite of the black cherries, cooked on their stems, that garnished them. Price, just ninety pounds. London is not cheap.



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Winsum, Netherlands, 30 May

I write this a few days later, so will be confused and regretful. (I wrote it before, but computer difficulties destroyed it.)

After leaving ninetydegree SFO it was confusing to land at Heathrow, where we watched all black fellow travelers (and none of the white) have their bags searched, and to spend ninety minutes on the Tube, and to emerge to find Whiting refusing to answer his phone, but the weather quite brisk.

Taxi to Whiting, where we found we had a phonenumber no longer valid, and a cassoulet he’d prepared in January and considerately set aside in the freezer against our arrival.

So the London coolth was appropriate, and countered by the Whiting warmth, and washed down with the right Vaqueyras. And Lindsey and Mary got on like sisters, maybe even better.

And John had another houseguest, John Kenny, an Irish trombonist-composer down from Edinburgh where he lives to give a few London master classes and coaching sessions — a firstrate raconteur who knows lots of acquaintances of ours, and can talk about them, and then talk about literature, or physics, or best of all food, and tell a good viola joke.

That was our first day’s relaxation from the frenzy of preparing for departure. We went on training for our thirtyday walk by eating at two of London’s finest restaurants the next day, Thursday: lunch at the River Cafe, after Mary’s exciting ninetyminute drive through London traffic, and dinner that night at Clarke’s.

River is trendy, open-roomed (a little too reminiscent of the cafeteria at Santa Rosa Junior College), Italian bistro-flavored. I had a fine roast pork, almost like suckling pig, and Lindsey a nice squid salad.

The white wine was delicious, but when the red came I jokingly told the waiter to let Lindsey try it, as she was best with corked wines.

She lifted the glass to her nose, looked meaningfully across it to me, sipped, and almost giggled. Corked. The next was okay.

At Clarke’s we ate downstairs. I didn’t know there was one. Last time in London I ate upstairs, with the Whitings and Valerie Eliot, T.S.’s widow, in a quiet Kensington clubby dining room.

Down is more popular, in the original sense, and noisier. But the dinner was nice: a smoked-salmon salad with asparagus, and a delicious grassy Welsh lamb with polenta-pine nut-olive garnish — Italy strikes again.

Next day we drove up to Ludlow, stopping first at an Earl’s — Richard, Earl of Bradshaw. He’s an occasional food columnist, hence the connection to the Whitings (they both write on food), and he has a London restaurant, and it seemed an appropriate visit.

Alas he’d misunderstood the date, though. His housekeeper looked at our wet and bedraggled selves a bit suspiciously when we presented ourselves (at the kitchen door, as requested), then announced us.

Soon his Lordship arrived, apologizing for a greatly inflamed nose that had sent him, previous day, to hospital.

(I find it’s time to stop—sunset over the canal. More later.)



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The woman waiting for us in Ludlow, 26 May, was Mirabel Osler, who writes books and articles on food and gardening. You may have seen articles of hers in the New York Times. She published Secret Gardens of France some time ago, and more recently an account of eating in France: A Spoon With Every Course, now reissued as Searching the Elusive Truffle (or something like that: I don’t have it at hand.)

She is a member of the (British) Food Writers Guild, as is Whiting, and the earl of the other day. When Whiting published his own Through Darkest Gaul he sent her a copy; she replied favorably; and a friendship grew.

They had never met, though, until we walked up to her doorstep in the rain. Whiting had arranged a meeting with her over dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, Merchant House.

Ludlow is a small town near the Welsh border, two hundred miles or so from London, and good restaurants may seem improbable there. But the town is a tourist destination. It has a fine ruin of a castle, tasteful boutiques (not Benetton and Hard Rock), and beautiful countryside to its credit.

More to the point it has been a center of livestock-raising, and its traditions seem to extend to evolved farm-based cuisine. I mean, nothing trendy or postmodern or global, but careful treatment of local material.

We settled in our B&B, a very pleasant and comfortable one (Eight Dinham: tel. 01584 875661: fifty pounds, with an incredible breakfast included), and then walked down the street to Mirabel’s.

Narrow corridor, entry, parlor right out of Virginia Woolf, with a hearth, knicknacks, books books books. Insufficient, though, apparently, as we were ushered upstairs to another smaller one, warmer, and apparently also her study, with a fine 1930s painting over the mantel.

She fetched along a bottle of Champagne. Mirabel’s a fun-loving, salty, handsome, intelligent, experienced, articulate, immensely cheerful and generous woman, about my age I suppose, and I’d live with her forever if I hadn’t already found Lindsey.

We talked about food, of course, and poetry (Stevens, Plath) and James and France, and then we walked through town to the restaurant, ten minutes away or so via footpaths and backstreets we wouldn’t have found without her.

Dinner was superb, the best in England. You’ll have to wait for details: the menu’s in a cardboard box on its way to Luxembourg, and I write this in a public library in Winsum, waiting for a haircut.

Next morning we breakfasted late: granola, cereal, fried egg, bangers, grilled tomato, bacon, and toast; and toured the castle and a crafts fair outside; and had a pint or two in the pubs (well, one was cider); and had an okay lunch (a small pizza and salad) in a modest restaurant, and drove back to London, through more beautiful country than we’d seen the way up.

My feelings about London remain: it reminds me of Los Angeles, big, unwieldy, divided between the comfortable and those who provide for them. But then it’s a city. Ludlow is in some danger of Carmelification, but it’s very nice indeed, a sort of English Asolo, and I could see spending a week there.

Especially with Mirabel.



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Groningen, 31 May

Grass, concrete, asphalt. Barns, boats, bicycles. Canals, liftbridges, cafes. Sheep, cows, horses. Plover, herons, swans, ducks, geese; two ostriches.

I am not like the violist in Kenny’s joke: I know exactly what to do. Left foot, right foot; left foot, right foot.

End of second day: after say 11 km yesterday of open country, 18 today (7 miles, 12), we are in a fairly sizable city, the last for a month. The walking has been comfortable, but just now, at dinner’s end, we’re leaning on our eyelashes.

We’re in an Italian restaurant in Groningen, chosen from a list by its name: Osteria da Vinci. It’s Sardinian! I have to wait ‘til later to describe it, but it’s delicious. The famous art museum here is full of trivia & pornography, often in the same piece. Around me, Dutch, American English, Italian. An old guy on a bicycle, clearly workerclass, sported a gold earring.

The day’s walks were lovely. We’re both very glad to be doing this. It will get harder, I suppose; then easier, I hope. It seems the most natural thing in the world to be doing.

And then, finally checking in to our B&B, finding no way to send this e-mail: it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when we have an even longer day — 21 km (13 miles). Our packs weigh about 15 pounds apiece. We may be nuts.



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Zuidlaren, June 1

Rekkekekkek say the Dutch frogs, having read their Aristophanes, and the others answer Owagowag, recalling that the Greek “X” is the same guttural, I guess, as the Dutch “G.”

We’ve heard it from time to time these last three days as we walk past ponds, canals, ditches and lakes. But today it was a siren song and led us well astray, along a deceptively curving bight in the Appelberg, whose name is not from apples at all but from the Appeal made during negotiations over some war or other.

The result was a three-kilometer detour from the Pieterpad, and three kilometers adds up. Why in God’s name has this happened, I wondered, as we neared the point I figured would set us right again.

Toward us came a fellow clutching the green Pieterpad guide in his hands, walking along cheerfully without a care in the world.

Bent U een Pieterpader, I asked, Ja, he answered, Then you’re going the wrong way, I said, No it’s you are going the wrong way, he replied, full of youth and confidence.

So I unfolded the map, set my compass on it, explained where we’d just been, and persuaded him, I thought, for he said I must have been sent wrong in order to intercept him so he wouldn’t go further astray.

He stood there a good long while, though, I noticed, before setting out behind us.

We made up for it with a short cut. Why not? You don’t have to be doctrinaire about these tours. The short cut was just as fine, leading us down a country road, through a neat little village, and out again between cow pastures and cornfields.

It was misty today, and our packs and shoes got damp, but not the things inside. And we had the now usual complement of birds and livestock.

There are so many details! The young mother who ran last night’s B&B said she’d be bored on such a walking tour, but we aren’t, at least not yet.

Windmills, sailboats, liftbridges, canals and locks; farmsteads with great thatched-roof barns and precise little flowergardens.

Underfoot, asphalt, sand, crushed shell, gravel, concrete, tar-and-gravel. There isn’t enough concrete to complain about. Our favorite is the damp packed sand, often between rows of beech or oak trees.

Almost no traffic. Occasionally a great burst of bicycles. Now and then a car. A few equestrians today. Well ahead of us perhaps another Pieterpad couple. Rarely do we meet one: everyone takes this tour north to south.

It is a holiday weekend (Ascension Day) and rooms were hard to find so we booked tonight into a Grand Hotel, the Brinkhotel (Golden Tulip chain) in Zuidlaren. A “brink,” it turns out, is a sort of village square with lots of trees in it; I think they may be unique to Saxon-settled towns.

Zuidlaren has full seven brinks, and ours is the biggest, where the traditional Ascension Day fleamarket was set out, closing as we pulled into town.

How nice to walk through fleamarkets without being tempted to buy anything! Just another of the great advantages of carrying everything on your back.



corrigenda:Whiting advises me that:

Richard is the Earl of Bradford.

Mirabel’s new title: The Elusive Truffle.

Mirabel isn’t a member of the Guild of Food Writers, but of the garden writers, whatever they’re called.

Both Mary and I [Whiting] are members; she was in for several years before me.



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Rolde, June 2

Today we said goodbye to the Amersfoorters, a young couple from that city who set out from Pieterburen a few minutes after us.

We’ve spoken to them once or twice a day since. He’s a teacher; she’s a secretary at City Hall. Like us they’re beginning this walk. Unlike us they’ll take it in several stages.

They took the train and bus to Pieterburen to begin. We first noticed them behind us, he in his white tee-shirt and carrying a sizable backpack, she in her bright red jacket.

Next morning there they were again at our first rest stop, right behind us — a nice cafe on a dike at a liftbridge, in Garneveld. (It seems a month ago now.)

We had walked all through the town clockwise looking for a cafe; it took us a good five minutes. Shortly after we sat down they came in all smiles.

We saw you leaving in Pieterburen, they said, in Dutch, but switching to pretty damn good English when our own speech impediments became evident.

They passed us later: they’re younger and stronger, and she isn’t carrying a pack. At lunchtime they took a nice bench at a bend in the road overlooking the canal, leaving us to perch a bit down the road on a pile of concrete fenceposts, eating our apples just out of reach of a chained goat.

We didn’t see them that second night, in Groningen; they seem to start later than we. We had stumbled into town very tired, and our B&B wasn’t available until seven pm because the woman running it had gone to a movie with her motherinlaw. Gladiator.

So we had killed time looking at pornography in the Groningen Art Museum, walking through the handsome old Hanseatic center, and finding that fine Osteria da Vinci.

When we did hit the B&B, right around the corner from the restaurant, we simply fell into bed. We’d known the second day would be the hardest, and it was.

Next morning they caught up with us on a bicycle path between Haren and Glimmen. They were moving slower, though, and confessed that they both had blisters. I’d wondered about their shoes, heavy leather hiking boots more suited, I think, to mountains.

They laid the problem to wet socks, though. We’d arrived our first night just minutes before a drenching hailstorm; they’d been caught in it.

Today we met again at the Cafe Brinkzicht, where I had the best pannekoek I’ve ever tasted.

I’ve eaten maybe forty pannekoeken over the years in Holland; I love them. They’re as big as a dinnerplate, thick, eggy, and filled with what you will: in my case, chunks or slices of candied ginger and slices of ham or bacon.

This one was utterly fabulous, with the teeniest bit of stroop—black molasses syrup—and a nice glass of beer. As I finished it they came limping in.

You’re late, I said, checking my wristwatch. What’s our penalty, she asked. The best pannekoek you’ve ever had, I said.

He brightened at that, and they sat down at their own table, at some distance because the outside dining terrace was full of Germans who’d driven up in vintage Opels, a car club from over the border.

Poor guys, they were cutting their walk short. They’d planned to walk until Sunday, then catch the train home, but her feet were really hurting, and they were taking a bus back from Rolde.

Rolde is where we are, in another hotel since it’s a holiday weekend and B&B’s are uncertain. Last night’s grand hotel cost us eighty-one bucks, and tonight will cost another sixty or so.

We make up for this on B&B nights, which cost about thirty bucks total, including breakfast and sometimes a lunch thrown in.

And, once again, the walk was marvelous — cuckoos, megaliths, horsedrawn wagons, long country lanes, very little pavement, good weather, friendly smiles.

And what kind of a place is Rolde? Like many of these Drenthe villages. We approached it from the north, walking a few miles on a country unpaved road, between pastures, along heath, through forests.

Suddenly we came out onto a narrow asphalt road, a main country road leading to the provincial capital. We turned the opposite direction and walked a quarter-mile into town.

Brick houses and farmsteads, some with thatched roofs, some with tile. Big Saxon barns with thatched roofs. A fine solid plain well-proportioned brick church with a fine solid tower center front, its roof shiny black wood.

Behind the church a rather large graveyard, well tended. No plastic flowers here: rosebushes, low hedges, occasional sprays of flowers.

Behind it, two “hunebedden,” dolmen-like constructions of parallel rows of huge stones, generally roofed with even larger slab-shaped boulders. Beneath these the old-timers buried their dead, three thousand years or so ago.

Cattle and sheep graze around the church, and a young girl lies on her back to catch the sun — on her patient horse’s back. Another girl, younger, maybe five, in yellow sweater and blue skirt, with a bright paper kite.

The main street is brick, its one broad sidewalk partly striped off with contrasting brick for a bicycle path. A few shops, a few cafes, two hotels, a restaurant or two.

Friday night: the cafe terraces fill up about 4:30, each table with a couple of glasses of beer on it. Fine blue sky. The sun is low but will not set for hours; it turns the brick a rosy pink.

Dinner in the hotel, incredibly slow. We have an aperitif in the bar while they set up a table: a wheat beer with lemon for me, sherry for Lindsey.

After forty minutes I ask if we can’t take our table. Mistake: we simply have to wait longer there.

Mustardsoup for Lindsey — thick chowderlike soup strongly flavored with mustard; good. Big salad for me: sliced Guinea-hen breast, several lettuces, mango, orange, peach, pumpkin seeds, lentil sprouts.

Then our main courses: pork for each of us, what seems to be a whole tenderloin strip for L., with mushroom sauce; two medallions in paprika sauce for me, with fresh white asparagus, which comes with the obligatory hardboiled eggs — one of them a quail egg.

(In truth, this white asparagus, dusted with nutmeg, under hollandaise sauce, goes beautifully with hardboiled egg.)

Side dishes: cauliflower, carrots, broadbeans, mashed potatoes, steamed potatoes in butter, potatoes sauteed in butter. We didn’t finish.

The Village Baker’s Wife’s Village’s Baker asks about Valerie, and the viola joke. He’ll have to wait for both. To him, and to all of you who have written, many thanks; it’s nice to keep in touch. Hope you’re all having a good time too.



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Schoonlo, 3 June

About 20 km today, let’s say twelve miles, all in countryside. Farms, fens, forests, heath. Rather a hard day, as there was only one cafe between Rolde and Schoonlo.

But that was a nice one, The Four Lindens. It looked closed, but we walked up the gravel driveway to find five or six people, little kids and folks in their twenties, playing an impromptu game of soccer in the dooryard.

Inside a couple of oldtimers, one with cigar, sitting in front of the bar. We took the farthest table away, at a floor-to-ceiling window that turned out to look onto the chickenyard.

A pretty girl — they’re all pretty — came to ask if we wanted to eat or just drink (Te eten, of drinken?) and we answered and she brought the menu.

Drente oudepannekoek for me; ham-ginger for Lindsey. A glas melk.

She stepped into the henhouse for an egg or two and went back to the kitchen. A young man came in with his two hounds and she brought them (the dogs, I mean, Village Baker) pans of water and the menu.

After a while we heard organ music, but quickly the CD-player got stuck on a single chord, repeating it fast, sixteenth-notes, legato, MM 104 or thereabouts.

Philip Glass, I said aloud, and the dog guy said Even Philip Glass changes once in a while, in English, and went to the bar to see if they couldn’t do something about it.

It got quieter but no better. Every now and then someone in the kitchen slammed a door, probably the icebox, and the CD skipped to a new sticking-point.

Lindsey and I watched the hens scratch about in the straw and every now and then go berserk chasing an invisible insect. We laughed at the hens, and then laughed at ourselves being amused by such a trivial amusement.

And then left foot right foot, sand brick gravel, forest heather open fields, horses cows, herons blackbirds sparrows and the magnificently colored Vlaamse gaai, a kind of jay I suppose.

A conversation every hour or so with someone met on the road; otherwise silence save birdsong and our occasional talk. Warm and still. A rare bicyclist. Coming to an asphalt road, with the occasional car on it, is an event.

We walked into Schoonloo about 3:30 without a place to stay — on Saturday of a holiday weekend. I wasn’t worried. We sat down in the town cafe and ordered Wieckse Wheat beers, with lemon, and asked the waitress, they’re all pretty, if she knew of a place. In a half hour we checked into a pleasant little room under the sloping roof of a tidy brick house around the corner. Lindsey’s soaking in the hot bath and I’m next.



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Sleen, 4 June

Cobbles and flints, brick-size or smaller, sifted by the hundreds of thousands early in the last century out of the glacial moraine underlying the Drenthe plateau, and artfully laid in a basket-weave to form the bosweggen, quiet roads dividing much of this country into squares, three to the kilometer.

It was thinking of that sentence that distracted me this morning from my primary responsibility: alertness to the path. It curved subtly, as it had when we went astray two days ago, with the same result. This time at least we didn’t miss much, just walked an extra km or two.

We have walked about 100 km from the coast, uphill nearly all the way — we are now at about 20 meters above sea level, and while the air isn’t really thin it is certainly different.

For one thing we are in the 1930s, or so it seems. The only time we’ve seen more than a half dozen cars at once they’ve been in a rally: once of old Opels, today of old MGs.

The people do everything slow. The young boys look designed by Norman Rockwell. Yesterday’s dinner restaurant had two waiters, the Norman Rockwell kid and what may have been an uncle, coarse, crew-cutted, a little stooped, utterly graceless, endlessly cheerful.

They’re all farmers, is what it is. There are sheep grazing in every town. Yesterday’s cheese was bought from its maker. (It was delicious.)

We have had asparagus at every dinner, because it’s in season. Tonight we had it served two ways: lengthwise, in butter, with thin strips of ham and minced hardboiled egg; and crosswise, wrapped in ham and served with butter and chopped hardboiled egg.

They were among the inevitable side-dishes that come with your entree. Also fried potatoes, potato croquettes, canned spinach (I love it, as Giovanna well knows) wrapped in bacon, and broccoli in cream sauce. That with calve’s liver and onions and bacon. Oh: and cole slaw.

Today’s highlight, I suppose, was prehistory: more hunebedden, huge stones piled to make tombs, originally covered with soil; and a prehistoric city, perhaps Celtic, only its grid and wall-footings left.

Today’s walk was mostly through forest, and there were plenty of mounds in that forest. This place is fertile and beautiful and must have been home for millennia, since the last glacial retreat.

I’m afraid I can’t really describe our thoughts and observations well. The time goes by very fast, even though we do nothing but walk, eat, and sleep.

Conversations are often in hopeless Dutch, hopeless at least on my side, and one’s never quite sure what’s being said. It’s the old game of seeming to know the language, being answered immediately and fast in Dutch, and then stumbling around. I say what I can, not what I mean to say. But I suppose that’s all I ever do anyway.



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Coevorden, 5 June

Some of you have wondered about “technical aspects.” Our packs each weigh about 15 pounds, we think — we weighed them at the airport but not since. In addition I carry a little pouch with camera, folding keyboard, modem, and a couple of batteries.

The palmtop computer itself lives in a front pantspocket. It’s worked wonderfully well; I send and receive e-mail easily, and log our expenses, take notes, and all that.

We each have walking clothes — shirt, pants, shoes, socks, and jacket — and a change for evening wear. Each of us has as well a few extra items of clothes that we don’t need and will probably mail away soon.

We’ve been averaging 18-20 km a day, according to the book, with a little extra for side-trips and mistakes, say 12 miles a day. The third day was the hardest; today (the seventh) the easiest so far.

It’s been interesting to see what we don’t need. I don’t have any reading matter beyond our route guide. We don’t have a radio or Walkman. We don’t have canteens or icepacks.

We do carry, and use, a compass, and we’re glad to have the cameras. We wish we had a deck of cards, but not enough to buy one, which would be easy enough.

I wish we’d brought a miniature score of Schubert songs, but come to think of it that would mean we’d be learning German, which doesn’t seem right. Maybe there’s a Dutch Schubert?

Today’s walk was very uneventful. One cafe, and it pretty ordinary, except that it had a guest book for Pieterpad walkers to sign. I didn’t see one note in anything but Dutch, though the book went back several years.

Lunch was bread and cheese on the road. We stop every hour or so for ten minutes or so, maybe up to half an hour if in a cafe.

The last half hour or so it rained gently but we were mostly walking under trees, so hardly noticed. It was only just as we arrived at our B&B that the rain fell heavily enough to be a bother.

And what of our accommodations? B&Bs, except for two nights in hotels. Tonight’s is probably the most spartan, but we like it: two twin beds in an attic with a skylight, a steep ladderlike staircase leading to it from the second floor, itself reached via a typically Dutch steep and narrow half-turn staircase.

The room has its own washbasin, typical; the bathroom is on the level below.

Last night we were in a bedroom with its own bath (but not toilet) on the backside of a single garage attached to a suburban brick house. The night before, another twinbed room next to a family bathroom — many of these B&Bs seem to use bedrooms formerly used by children, now grown up and moved away.

These are not American B&Bs: no teddy-bears, no antiques, not would-be chefs making pastries for breakfast.

Some of you have asked about our feet. I have no trouble (so far!). Lindsey had a small problem with an ankle, resolved with an elastic ace bandage.

We feel the trip, so far, in our shoulders, but only at the end of the day. Feet legs knees and backs seem to be doing pretty well, for a couple of arthritic old geezers. I have lost five pounds (and Lindsey four) in spite of the diet

We’ve done one fourth of the Dutch trip now, and still grin like idiots with the pleasure of it...



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Hardenberg, 7 June

A short account of this day, exceptional for several reasons:

We were joined by our good friends the Elfrings, who drove up from Apeldoorn to walk 20 km. with us.

One result is that after a day of walking and talking I hardly recall anything except the startled deer that so charmed us we neglected our map, causing a 1 km detour around a forest. One sees the origins of folk-tales about enchanted woods.

We stepped into a new province today. We are used to thinking of Holland as tiny, but it isn’t. In fact it is a unification of 12 separate duchies , or whatever they are, and they have quite different characters — and even accents.

We’ve walked across Gronigen and Drenthe, north to south, and now we’re in a third, more familiar province, Overijssel. Almost as if to mark this, we arrived in Hardenberg tired but for the first time not sore.

For the first time in over a week, we got somewhere today other than by walking — we took a bus from the station, where the Elfrings took a train to Coevorden where they’d left their car, to our B&B. What was surprising and a little disturbing was how natural it seemed to be riding inside a huge machine.

After our shower and change of clothes we walked another two km in 20 minutes. Without packs, of course. We were motivated by hunger, said to be the best sauce.

Dinner at what turned out to be a very good restaurant indeed, the Herbergerie, where I had pigeon breast, tasting between wild goose and well aged beef. There was a piece of shot in one breast: this was the real thing. The chef is young (30), local, and serious, and the waiter was a sunny ingratiating courteous boy of sixteen, so sweet we wanted to kidnap him.



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Ommen, 8 June

Because it was Lindsey’s birthday, and especially because there was a terrible hard cold driving rain, we cheated today. I’m sorry to let you all down, but you can’t be perfect.

We took the train down to Ommen, the next stop. Our walk would have taken us 20 km. through forests, with no cafes or other shelter the entire trip.

After lunch in Ommen, though, about two, the rain finally blew off north, and we went for a ten-km. hike. The first half was through suburban woods and flat open country along a narrow river.

Then, however, we entered a serious forest of oaks, beeches, and ashes, along a quiet branch of the same stream, the Regge. After the storm the path was muddy and soggy, slow going, especially when we began climbing.

We negotiated a few fens, two of them quite large and open and covered with white water-lilies. The hardwoods had given way to pines — very tall ones, their bark like Ponderosas, but the habit and needles more like Aleppo.

Finally we reached the peak: 30.7 meters, 107 feet. It sounds funny, but it felt like the top of the world. I climbed four storeys of the observation tower before remembering my distaste of heights: from there, say forty feet higher, I could see forever.

Tonight’s logies en ontbijt — B&B — is the only bedroom in a small house on the edge of town, across from pastures — modern and comfortable and run by a pretty dimpled redhead, Scottish on her mother’s side, who’s put out tea and a terrycloth bathrobe for us: quite exceptional here.

We’re getting decadent. We’ve booked a room in Zutphen for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We’ll go to the Saturday market, maybe to Sunday service in the wonderful old Great Church, have tea in a favorite teahouse, De Pelikan, and do the laundry before it goes off on its own walk.

* * *

Just sauntered back from dinner at De Zon in Ommen, about 1 km. — sorry; I know these distances won’t be interesting to many of you, but they grow crucial to us.

The main thing is, we sauntered. Overhead, at about ten o’clock, a pale blue sky, dulled silvergrey clouds hugging some of the horizon, a crescent moon halfway to half-full above.

Those wonderful European blackbirds, merels in Dutch, sootyblack with black velvet caps, whistling unreproduceable songs in the tall oaks alongside the footpath.

To one side a long pasture, a low row of trees in the distance below that grey cloud, a twostorey mansion off beyond the grass. To the other a series of small pastures and paddocks, shaggy ponies grazing peacefully in the twilight.

A man in a white jacket and grey pants — a cook on his way home? — overtakes us, walking in the bicycle path not to intrude on our loitering saunter; he whistles a tune from a Mozart slow movement (yes, Elvira Madigan).

Dinner was good, but not memorable — except maybe the first course, mashed potatoes and black truffle served in a baked-potato skin, on a bed of grated raw cucumber “spaghetti” marinated in very light soy — with a touch, I’m sure, of wasabe. Delicious, and imaginative.

Back on the road tomorrow, 22 km. Today we probably racked up about 16, without packs. It’ll be nice to be back in harness.

And now it’s another morning, bright and glorious —



¶¶¶

Hellendorn, 8 June

The single-mindedness of it, Thérèse says, and she’s right: that’s the most constant characteristic of this experience.

There are lots of details, of course. This is a trip any fiction-writer should take: there are dozens of vignettes, half-understood anecdotes, memorable characters every day.

I’ll have to catalogue our landladies one of these days — when I’m not writing with a stylus, lying on one elbow with my feet up.

One example: the fellow who showed up at breakfast this morning, who’d obviously spent the night in the living room on a couch.

I saw you two at the restaurant last night, he said. I was sitting at the next table but screened by the big floral arrangement, you know? And I can prove I saw you: at one moment, after the waitress took your order and left, you had a very romantic moment, and took each other’s hands.

I like B&Bs, he went on, I don’t like hotels, oh, it’s not because they’re expensive, I don’t like hotels because they aren’t romantic.

He didn’t look romantic himself: short, pudgy, balding, heavy eyebrow ridges. He did look sensuous, though.

I was with my girlfriend, he said, she’s pregnant, you know, and she wants to eat, and wants to go to the restaurant. I don’t like that restaurant, it has no sfeer —

— atmosphere, I said helpfully, and to show I knew a little Dutch —

Right, he continued, it has no romance. I have a wife and three kids in Israel, and a girlfriend here.

Het is beter zo, I said, to show off my Dutch. The landlady grinned.

No, it isn’t, he said, It’s more expensive. And now my girlfriend’s pregnant.

The landlady rolled her eyes. I told him the joke about the banker, artist, and engineer, and he thought it was hilarious.

Today was hard, partly because of yesterday’s break, mostly because of the terrain — hilly, packed sand underfoot, lots of small exposed roots in the pine forests, much like areas around Carmel.

We went up and over a number of “mountains” — dunes built up 100,000 years ago, now covered with pines, with a few birches in the undergrowth and, especially in the open heath, junipers. It all looks surprisingly Provencal, garrigue.

They ranged to as much as 70 m. high — 230 feet — so we got a foretaste of days to come in Belgium.

On the highest we stopped for the view and an attempt at conversation with an elderly Dutch couple who spoke no English — like many in this part of the country. We could see for miles — straightaways of tree-lined roads, meanders of tree-lined streams, houses and farmsteads made tiny by distance, haze hiding the horizon.

Distant, the voice of the elusive cuckoo; overhead, a pair of silent grey hawks.

It was another 20 km. today — 190 or so total, say 120 miles, in ten days. We don’t feel bad about yesterday; a basic rule for the trip was No Doctrine, and we can always go back and pick up that stage.

(Besides, we did walk half the distance, though on another route.)

Hellendoorn’s a small town. No B&B, so we’re in a small hotel: the typical two single beds pushed together, two chairs, a low table, a small wardrobe, our own shower and toilet.

We’re one flight up at the front of a small brick house. The double casement window looks down on a narrow brick street, a small neighborhood bar-cafe on the other side. Lots of trees. Small houses. Gardens.

The church is a few doors down. Its deep bell just sounded six o’clock, and then a short tunelet played on its carillon. I wonder if it’ll sound the hours all night.



¶¶¶

One of the things I like about Holland is its geometry. The entire country is poised between man and nature, and geometry is the mediator.

The Dutch mind triangulates the space it occupies. I usually awake in a room whose walls meet a sloping ceiling, and the ceiling almost always slopes at the same angle, forty-five degrees.

At the back of our guide to the Pieterpad is a small map of the country showing not cities, provinces, roads, or canals but triangulations. On perhaps 150 points, all on the highest ground available, there are surveying points which form apexes of triangles fixing all legal boundaries.

We were at one of these apexes yesterday, on the Archemerberg, the exposed height in the heather where I heard the distant cuckoo and attempted conversation with an elderly Dutch couple.

A few hundred meters away, on a slightly lower point, stood a tall mast with antennae and dishes. It told us that the old surveying was superseded, but it was characteristically tactful about it. It stands away from the height, the old height, the one people walk to and stand on to marvel at distance and clarity; stands aside like a good and patient servant.

The literal triangulation of Holland was accomplished in the mid-19th century, itself a mediation of the coming age of industrial technology with the older one, the Age of Reason.

Such surveys must have been associated with the increased scale of canal-digging and water-pumping, both to increase agricultural production and to move its products on a larger scale.

But I think of this triangulation as being an inherent aspect of the Dutch mind, with its drive to French clarity and Yankee practicality.

(It’s a combination that characterizes Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly meant a lot to me in my highschool years, and Henrik Willem van Loon, whose Lives introduced Erasmus to me a few years earlier. Hooray for the Book-of-the-Month Club of the 1940s!)

Walking past a poplar forest near the coast quite a few days ago we were enchanted by the changing overlapping geometries of the bare limbs, all sprouting thickly at the same sixty degrees from the trunks: it’s easy to see the origin of Mondrian’s geometry in this kind of visual experience, and in fact there is a painting of exactly such a group of trees among the great Mondrian collection in The Hague.

Geometry is everywhere man is; we’ve all been intrigued as children by the changing angles of rows of orchard trees as we were driven past them by parents on Sunday drives.

But the Dutch confrontation of this drive to geometry seems more constant and more conscious. It is in their love of abstract decoration, enhanced by the repetitive figuration of Indonesian decoration. It is in their railway charts, their knot gardens, their ubiquitous channels and ditches and canals.

It’s another anchoring thing, a way of putting the mind and eye and body at ease with the irregularities of both Nature, whose winds and rains can be disturbing, and Society, whose inequities are always a matter of concern to the inquiring Dutch search for justice among nations few of which are as prosperous and comfortable as theirs.

(Patience, George Orick. I know the sad history of Dutch oppression and exploitation of Indonesia, and the horrors that have resulted as an Asian nation repeats that colonialism on its own and neighboring people.

I simply believe the Dutch are confronting their guilt and responsibility for such treatment, at least at home, somewhat more rationally and effectively than Americans are facing a similar problem. I wish somehow America could learn from this.)



¶¶¶

Zutphen, 9 June

Crisis!

Three days ago Lindsey was worried about our accommodations over this holiday weekend, so I waited out a rainstorm in Hardenberg by looking for a place in Zutphen, a favorite city of ours.

I realized that by juggling trains and buses we could take one room for three consecutive nights. This way we could use free time to explore the city, which is very interesting indeed, and eat well in its good restaurants, and do our wash, and so on.

Today we pulled into Zutphen and went to the VVV, the tourist office, to find out just where our room was.

Six kilometers out of town.

I don’t want to hear that, I told the girl at the counter, and she smiled uncertainly and said But it’s true, it’s a very quiet farmery six kilometers out of town. There’s a bus.

She called the landlady, who’d sounded a little vague on the phone — I should have taken warning — and told her we were coming out. We had a quick beer and took the bus, six or seven dollars, out the road five kilometers, asked directions, and walked another kilometer an a half.

It is a nice quiet place. In fact there are likenesses, not very good ones, of Buddha, everywhere you look. Our room, quite nice and with an adjacent sitting room and bath, has also an adjacent zendo, and there’ll be a group meditating in there evening and morning.

They’d better not chant or burn incense or we’re out of here.

* * *

Well, they do burn incense. But there’s a fire extinguisher at the door of the zendo, and an open skylight in our room, so I guess it’ll be okay.

We took hot BATHS! — the first in days — and discussed things, with ourselves, with one another, and with the strangely vague and evasive landlady, and then we hopped on a couple of her bicycles — mine a bright yellow lady’s model, Lindsey’s a dour Dutch black — and rode fifteen minutes through the sultry evening to a fine restaurant, as it turned out, De Timmerieë, where we had...

Asparagus, of course: with a delicious lightly smoked ham, hardboiled egg, Hollandaise sauce, and a grater and nutmeg so we could do that to taste. Also potatoes, surprise; and two different cole slaws, applesauce, and pickled peaches. And a fine Condrieu.

The evening was superb. We ate outside, and a fine Shanghai rooster paraded a bit for us through our dining room, which we shared with maybe a dozen other diners. The sunset sky was marvelous, thunderheads piling up, their curled tops as white as cauliflower, then going through rose and pink and violet and mauve to the grey bottom, the sun a red wafer, as Stephen Crane so memorably said, pasted against the sky.

And we cycled back. The thunder began to crash and the lightning to crackle maybe a quartermile from home, and the first raindrops hit us just before we turned into the driveway.

The heat is broken, thank God. We walked a short day, only sixteen kilometers or so, but again up and down hill, in still windless forests, the aromas incredibly ready because of the heat, but still it was heat, hardly a birdcall to be heard.

It was over ninety degrees in that forest (thank you David and Julie for the thermometers), and we’re glad the storm has come. But oh dear that last crash was close!

¶¶¶

Zutphen, 10 June

Because some of you attach formatted versions of your letters to the end of the body of your letters — and by “letters” I mean of course e-mail posts — I thought I’d try to end unnecessary duplication by changing a setting on my e-mail program.

I told it not to include binary attachments.

Perhaps that’s why this morning, when I sent and received e-mail in a computer store in Holten, out of an alarming 26 inbound messages that I saw my computer receive and process, only three actually showed up in my in box: those from Hans and Tom Elfring and Nick Story.

So if twenty-three others of you sent something on June 9, or fewer of you sent more than one apiece in some cases, or some such combination, and it was something you wanted us to have, please resubmit.

I’ve changed my settings back and am resigned to duplications. Ah the vagaries of e-mail, otherwise such a wonderful invention.

What else. Mosquitos. They didn’t burn enough incense in the zendo to stun all the mosquitoes in Gelderland, sent by the Pieterpad god to punish me for skipping those dozen kilometers up north a few days ago.

Lindsey of course is not attractive to mosquitos. She lies blissfully playing her nocturnal trombone, wrapt in the arms of Morpheus, while I wake every hour, either too hot because I’m completely under the covers to hide from the little six-legged bastards, or because I’m being eaten alive though cooler. It isn’t fair.

Today it was cycle six kilometers, take the train to Deventer, take the train to Lochem, get the e-mail (see above), and finally walk fifteen kilometers to Laren.

Along the way of course we got lost. You’ve read Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”? Then you know how an error of a few degrees can result in a big discrepancy further down the road. And what was the cause? Complacency overcoming singlemindedness: let that be a lesson. If this had happened in the Alps we could be dead and frozen meat, unfit for mosquito consumption.

Otherwise it was a fine day, misty and a little hot and humid but much improved over yesterday, the walk mostly flat, in farm country, past dairies and cornfields and a venison farm.

We say two donkeys today, the first we’ve seen, and the red deer, and swans and swanlings, and all that.

And now we wait for a taxi to come and take us into Zutphen. We’ve seen the Saturday Market; we’ve taken tea at De Pelikan, one of my favorite places; now we’ll have dinner at Galentijn, where we ate twelve or fifteen years ago while cycling through this “Achterhoek” — “aftercorner,” sort of the Ozarks of Holland, where a surprising number still don’t speak anything but Dutch, and the pace is slow.

Just our style.



¶¶¶

to Giovanna and George, Zutphen, 10 June

Once in a while between left foot, right foot, I actually think of something.

Today I was thinking about friends. It began as I thought about Nadia and Elliott, the young couple who are in our house now. We got a nice long e-mail from your sister today, and she said that they went to Eve’s recital Sunday, and that Nadia was so impressed that she signed up for a two-week course with Eve and Jose.

I thought how nice it was that Eve had met Nadia, a brilliant beautiful gifted woman, say early thirties, long a waitress at Chez P., an actress and singer who is now doing graduate work in dramatic arts at UC Berkeley and who directed her first play a few months ago.

(The House of Bernarda Alba. We saw it. It was memorable.)

I thought how useful it is for a girl Eve’s age to run into someone like that. Emma’s age, too. I remembered how when I was a little boy, and up until I was ten I suppose, my parent’s friends Bob and Sarah Martin, and Will and Edith Irwin, were quite important to me.

Will taught me to play chess, and Bob (who worked at, and maybe partnered, a wonderful record store called Art Music, that was up at Durant and Telegraph in the 1940s and early ‘50s) probably taught me it was okay to know about classical music.

Both couples were somehow sophisticated and smart and exotic and eccentric, and that appealed to me. There isn’t anything more specific than that, I’m afraid, and I haven’t seen any of them in probably thirty years.

Bob and Sarah had a daughter a few years younger that me, Anastasia. She had a crush on me, I realized much too late, and was rather crushed when I went away to college — though in fact we hadn’t seen much of one another after we moved from Berkeley, when I was ten.

Will and Edith had a daughter too, Gene, whom I’ve been in touch with from time to time, though not for years, and not in person — last time I saw her was at Mom’s when she still lived on Rose Street.

I was thinking how when we’re young we have all these friends. Mine were Wiley Keys and Herb Grau and a little bit Bob Ek and Larry Rinne, when I was in junior high; and Merton Tyrrel and Richard Brodt when I was in high school.

Then when I was a student and early in our marriage my friends were Kendall (who curiously lived when he met Claire in the apartment Edith and Will had lived in 20 years earlier) and Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten and Ed Squibb and Charles Watson and Alva Bennett and a couple of others, Arlyn and Chris for example.

Someday if you ask I’ll write about them, but that’s not what this is about. This is about the changing posture toward friends.

After student days I was a careerist of sorts and my career took care of the things that friends used to do for me. I mean my work, the creative aspect of it, triggered something that allowed aspects of my own mind to take their place. And socially it was a matter of professional acquaintances, not friends. The career associates to up so much time that friends drifted away.

There were a couple of exceptions, of course. George Craig for one, for sure. But not many.

That worked for a number of years, especially because family replaced friends. There were you three kids: what good friends you often were! and your mother of course, the best friend I’ve ever had. And her parents.

Now that I’m no longer in a career I realize I want, maybe need, friends again. I’ve been lucky to find that I can still make them, close ones. George Orick for sure, an intimate, a friend so close he might be a brother, a surrogate me, though at times we move far apart as immediate situations fill our lives.

I write all this now because I’m thinking about the kids, and how vital older friends, friends of parents, can be in their formation, imaginative and intellectual. I know you think about this too, and hardly need a lecture from me. Still, it’s today’s aperçue, for whatever it’s worth.

And now if you don’t mind I’ll send this today not Sunday, and I’ll cc it to George himself, because it may interest him too.



¶¶¶

Warnsveld, 13 June

Today was such a low-key day, beginning with a ride from our landlady to the nearby town of Laren, ending with snacks in our bedroom.

It was a short walk, only 14 km. by the guidebook, with another couple thrown in for wandering around afterward. But it was an important walk, for it ended the first half of the Pieterpad, the walk across Holland.

We haven’t covered quite half the distance. We’ve come 232 km, and there’s 256 to go — 144 and 159 miles: I find I still have trouble thinking metrically.

We’ve walked 150 miles in the last 14 days! It’s been oddly easy, and I find that I’m restless on an easy day like today to keep going.

This place we’re staying at is strange. Our digs are nothing to complain about, and the meditators have been virtually invisible and inaudible — from time to time a very quiet sullen drone which is only heard by concentrating on it through birdsong and the occasional moo.

But the landlady’s vagueness is unsettling. We arranged last night to ride with her this morning at eight, for example, and when I knocked on her door she took a few minutes to answer, appearing then in a bathrobe:

”I wasn’t sure you wanted me to drive you, so I overslept.” You never know how literally to take these comments, which may after all be the result of not quite understanding the language.

Today in Vorden, for example, I asked a bartender in Dutch where the telephone was, and he told me, and I made a couple of calls; then I wanted him to get a cab for me, something I didn’t want to trust to my Dutch, so I asked him Sprekt U Engels? and he answered at considerable length in Dutch, so I asked him to get the cab in Dutch.

Later Lindsey joined me — I already had a small beer to help process the language problems — and he asked her politely, in English, if she would like something too.

So you do speak English, I said to him, whereupon he pointed out that my having spoken to him in Dutch, it would have been impolite — condescending in fact — to respond in English.

There are all these fine points. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of James Boswell in the last two weeks. Boswell spent a year studying law in Utrecht, and his Holland Journal is wonderful reading. It portrays a worldly, playful, observant side of Dutch nature, an aspect that can be quite wicked, but rarely appears to be mean.

Oh yes, nostalgia. Yesterday we had tea at De Pelikan, a favorite teahouse of mine, a couple of centuries old, comfortable and bourgeois; and last night we ate at Galentijn.

We were met by the alarmingly louche barman-maitre d. We had a nice little table near the bar: from it we could observe and comment to ourselves on most of the action in this small restaurant, seating maybe 32.

I had a rack of lamb chops, tiny and delicious, eight chops in all, and Lindsey had cod, and we split an interesting salad: duck liver, frisée, nuts (hazel, walnut, pine nut), cucumber, green onion, artichoke hearts, dressed with truffle oil and cider vinegar, really a tasty thing.

We were there maybe 15 years ago, and it was as if the intervening time had vanished. In fact this trip is, so far, a sort of hole in our lives; all the usual activity is set aside.

Technical note: the 23 messages turned out to be old messages from a month ago, things I’d trashed from the palmtop — apparently the net insists on my having them. This technology has minds of its own.



[Later:] & is sometimes demented — no place today from which to connect.

Our longest walk to date, 26 km., went well, though it was our first day in four with full packs.

Virtue has its price, though: today, diet. For breakfast, two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a soft-boiled egg, orange juice, a bowl of strawberries, and a few cups of coffee.

Lunch: an “uitsmijter” — an open-faced sandwich of ham, cheese, and three fried eggs — with two glasses of beer.,

Dinner: steak, fried potatoes, green beans, peas and carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, asparagus, endive wrapped in ham and cheese, grilled tomatoes, cole slaw, fruit salad, and a bottle of red wine. But we skipped dessert.

Two soccer games on TV. Cups run over.



¶¶¶

Hoch Elten, Germany, 14 June

I give them until nine, I said, and then I’m leaving.

Let’s wait and see what happens, Lindsey said.

We’d been sitting at table since 8:15. The waitress asked what we wanted, To eat, I said, Inside?, she asked, Yes, it’s too cold outside, I answered.

That was done in German, her side, and Dutch, mine, since I don’t know any German except Zu hilfe, zu hilfe, the beginning of The Magic Flute, which would have been apposite, as it turned out.

Finally Lindsey was so annoyed, an emotion she usually reserves for her husband only, that she said she was going to order in French.

For God’s sake why, I said, it’ll only delay things further.

The menu was in Dutch and French, or, if you got the other one, in German and French. It’s in French, she said, so I’ll order in French.

At two minutes to nine, as I was getting ready to leave and go instead to the pancakehouse we’d visited hours earlier on walking into this town, the waitress came and I looked inquiringly at Lindsey and she ordered salmon, in French.

The waitress was stunned, so Lindsey quickly repeated her order — irrationally in English. The waitress fled.

We’d gone down to the restaurant instead of the pancakehouse, out of curiosity, I suppose, or because it was after all in our hotel, the Waldhotel Hoog Elten, which gives discounts to walkers of the Pieterpad.

It is a resort hotel. There’s a fitness room, a sauna, and a pool, none of which we feel like using. There isn’t an elevator: you have to be fit. Our room could sleep fourteen people, and the television set perches on a chrome-plated tree of some sort in the middle of the room, ready to be swivelled to any location.

The shower and sinks are cunningly hidden behind smoked glass. There’s a minibar, and a view that looks south over the flattest Germany imaginable, beyond Kleve to, I suppose, Frankfurt and Cologne. I don’t know: the smog gets in the way.

Our dinner eventually arrived, rabbit in sundried tomato sauce for me, salmon for Lindsey. It arrived because when the waiter came, sent by the startled waitress, I simply ordered brusquely in Dutch.

It was okay, but the real entertainment of the evening was observation. The girl in the yellow dress and cloche hat, curiously 1940-style, with her escort, who’d been drinking an aperitif when we looked down on the dining terrace from our room at eight o’clock, and who still hadn’t received dinners before we got our orders in.

The six people with a dachsund under their table who seemed to be drinking wine from endless numbers of glasses.

The three women and a man who were trying to get dinner, like the others I’ve mentioned, all out on the terrace where it was cold and windy. Their food too took forever to arrive, and just before it did the man disappeared, Where is he going Lindsey said, Out for a sandwich I replied, but he was getting a jacket for his poor freezing wife.

While he was away their food arrived. After a while the waiter took the man’s food back, apparently to keep it warm for him.

He came back with the jacket, and of course had to wait twenty minutes for his food to come. Shortly after they all decided, as did everyone else, to move inside, near us.

By now the large balding thick-eyeglasses fellow who’d been hiding, smoking cigarettes on a sofa on the back wall of the dining room, had attracted an improbably pretty young woman.

Together they were catching something in their napkins. The first time they gave the napkin to the waiter, who they’d called over to their corner — how, I can’t imagine. The waiter carried the napkin out onto the terrace and emptied it into a planter.

Subsequently he took the napkin out himself. The two of them made quite an evening of it, hunting and trapping, carrying napkinsful out to the terrace, returning to their corner.

After a couple of hours we’d had enough; I told the waitress we wanted a glassful of ice cubes, she brought them quickly, and we went back upstairs.

I’ve had worse service, but it was in Leningrad in 1983.

The previous night we’d found the entire Hotel Boszicht in Doetinchem staffed, after four o’clock or so, by one fellow.

After our shower we’d got interested in a couple of soccer games on TV, and didn’t think of dinner until eight.

The hotelkeeper, who speaks no English, was eating his own dinner, a plateful of chopped meat and vegetables.

I asked him if we might eat, and he said there was no cook (looking at his watch), and I asked if there were a restaurant nearby, and he asked if steak and potatoes would do, and I said of course,

He showed us to a table and went back to his dinner. Maybe fifteen minutes later he brought us the beginning of our dinner, and everything proceeded nicely from there. I’m sure he cooked it himself.



¶¶¶

The road down from Hoog Elten was shady, gentle, beautiful. The walk along the Rhine could have been unpleasant, with the considerable traffic and the ubiquitous sandyards, but we had fine company.

Petra R. had joined us after breakfast, and the conversation, the skies, and the small towns – Spijk, Tolkamer – distracted us from otherwise plain walking.

The ferry was fun: a small open powerboat, its passengers standing or leaning against bicycles, braced against the considerable current and the wakes of many enormous barges.

We had pannekoeken and asked the barman as to accommodations. He called a number of places, all full, and we finally settled on another hotel.

Lindsey says now that her foot felt a little funny when she got up from the pancake, but she didn’t think anything of it. We checked in and stashed our bags and set off for a garden Petra remembered from a previous visit.

It was a fine garden, one of the best private gardens we’ve seen, run by two guys who began it maybe fifteen years ago, a gardener and a painter-set-designer.

Small garden “rooms”, some formal, others mainly borders spread out to become whole gardens themselves.

A fair amount of sculpture, and a wonderful retreat, a big room open on one side to the garden, furnished with a long low cushioned banquette, a low table and chairs.

We took tea and a current tart out on one of the lawns, looked around, talked to the gardener, and set off for the hotel, conscious of the late hour and the kitchen’s threat to close at eight.

It was twelve kilometers from Hoog Elten to Millingen, and we walked another twelve out to the garden and back.

By the time we’d finished dinner Lindsey couldn’t put her weight on her left foot, and this morning it was no better. We wound up taking a taxi in to Nijmegen to see a doctor.

The receptionist was efficient and friendly with the paperwork. The nurse was sympathetic and thorough taking notes on Lindsey’s descriptions.

The intern and the supervising doctor were warm and goodhumored and careful about their work. The x-ray technician was personable and interested and, again, sympathetic.

They all spoke English; they were all young; they were all pretty; they were all female. Good news, the doctor finally said, No fracture, just too much walking too hard.

So poor Lindsey has to stay off her feet a couple or three days. It could be worse. We’re in a quiet comfortable hotel, de Wolfsberg, Thursday and Friday at least, Saturday too if necessary.

The British Open and the World Cup are on, and we don’t have any deadlines pressing.

Just listen to your foot, the doctors said. If it says something nice in a few days we’ll hit the trail again, dumping Belgium to finish Pieterpad.

If not, we’ll take a train or bus to Luxembourg, where we’ll be in any case on July 1.

Hold your sympathy: we’re having a good time. The only problem is, we might not be able to keep eating as we have been.



¶¶¶

Hotel Wolfsberg, Groesbeek, 19 June

The further south we get, I lied in English, the better is getting the food.

My English grows less idiomatic daily.

I was talking to the waiter, and I meant it favorably. But he countered with stolid Dutch defensiveness:

In that case, he said, maybe you don’t have to go further south. It’s beautiful here.

Indeed it is beautiful here, especially in the dining room, with its view north down a lawn through an English garden to the distant (but not very distant) rooftops.

And the food is in fact good. I was talking last night about a rack of six or eight lamb chops, served with basil sauce, potatoes, potatoes, mixed vegetables, and cole slaw, and with a nice bottle of Rhone.

Ah, but while it’s true it’s no more beautiful anywhere else, I continued, it is equally beautiful, and in a different way.

But look how beautiful it is here in Groesbeek, he went on. I’m very proud of it; it’s my home town.

The Wolfsberg is a nice place — brand new, in an old building, tastefully decorated, well appointed.

The name? This is the site of the most recent recorded shooting of a wolf in the Netherlands. It was in 1822.

Today Lindsey rested her foot, and I walked the stage we would have walked yesterday — but from south to north, unaccountably confusing. You don’t realize how used you get to the sun being either ahead of you or behind you until you shift gears.

Groesbeek is an apparently prosperous suburb of Nijmegen, but the walk began, in the heart of town, next to a little park where I saw my first Dutch pig of the year.

He was the size and shape of a Duroc, but the color of a Chester White. He was a little scruffy and very bored, sharing a big enclosure with goats, ducks, geese, chickens, sheep, and rabbits.

Across the street was one of the two Groesbeek churches. Here in the south there are always two, a Dutch Reformed and the Roman Catholic they failed completely to reform.

Around the corner, a small pasture with a small horse. It seems right and reasonable for farm animals to live in the city.

Walking uphill (!) out of town I passed more chickens and geese, clearly raised for more than companionship. Schoolbags hung on most flagstaffs: such a nice tradition at the end of the semester.

The walk was through pastures and cornfields on grass tracks; then steeply uphill, sometimes scrambling, through the forest.

In the woods, just as I was feeling lonely, I met a nice little black-and-white cat someone had abandoned.

I called it — Komm, poesje! — and it rushed up to me and walked along keeping me company for half an hour or so.

When we came out of the woods at a farmstead — barn, horses in pasture, tractor in hayfield — she hesitated, looking alternately at me and the horses. Finally she chose to stay. I hope she’s welcome.

From the top, views looking out east over the flat German Rhineland. And then a fine walk along graveled roads through a typically inert German village — there’s rarely any life to be seen; one wonders where everyone is.

Lunch was another uitsmijter, so lovely I photographed it: ham spilling over the bread, three orange-yolked fried eggs on top, a bottle of fizzywater, a glass of beer.

In Millingen I had to run to catch the bus. I lifted my hand to signal the driver I intended to board his bus, but he barely let me on, and then after a run of half a block.

Dit is geen taxi, he said, dit is een bus. Ja, I said, ik wit it, maar ik heb lang geloopt — yes, I know, but I’ve walked a long way.

I’ve driven further, he answered, I think. But he was nice to a stumpy brunette in tight shorts who got on a little later wearing inline skates.

Just enough time in Nijmegen, between buses, for a raw herring in a roll.

Met uisjes, the girl asked — With chopped onion?

Sure, I answered in my now fluent Dutch, met uisjes en een glas oude jenever. There’s nothing better with raw herring than that sharp slightly sweet Dutch gin.

She grinned. Uisjes ja, she said, maar jenever niet, niet hier. You don’t get gin from a foodcart, not even in this enlightened country.



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The Road to Gennep: 18 June

Yesterday Hans and Anneke joined us again. Hans drove down to our hotel, a very nice one indeed, and left the car in the parking lot; he and I set out on foot for Gennep.

Anneke came down on train and bus, picked Lindsey up, and they drove to Gennep — the idea being to save Lindsey’s foot.

The walk was very nice for the first half, through hilly forest and fields, with occasional views out of the forest across long vistas.

We got lost twice, largely through inattention, but came out well enough. My guidebook had promised some fine views, and it was right. I doubt the 35 mm format will do them justice, but we’ll see.

The path took us along the St. Jansberg, rising to over 200 feet; and on one section we walked along a busy secondary road (we were lost at that point; the Pieterpad avoids such) to meet a huge number of bicyclists, quite serious ones, speeding up the hills. This is a popular practice route for Dutch racers.

Along the way Hans explained soccer rules to me, drawing diagrams in the dirt with a stick, and revealing the fine points of strategy: influencing the referees, playing to the crowds, marking time, closing for the goal.

Soccer fever is high, of course, and we’re not immune. The quite different styles of the various teams is extremely interesting — like the different approaches to Beethoven quartets played by different ensembles.

Alas last night we stayed in a B&B lacking television, and we have no idea yet — 9:30 Sunday morning — what happened between England and Germany. (I hope they both lost, badly.)

Gennep was at the end of a long flat straight walk of about six kilometers, good for conversation but not much more. But at the end we entered town crossing the river Niers, and the view from the bridge was one of those sudden shocks of recognition, a 17th-c. landscape: bridge, willow, still dark water, cows, glimpse of distant pastures.

Gennep was badly hit in the war. (We’d walked along the German frontier for a few km. on that straightaway.) The result is a mix of architecture in a town hardly big enough for consistency.

But there’s a fine old city hall; a narrow triangular wedge of a plaza, the street market at the other end; and a new “plein” or plaza commemorating a Jewish woman deported to the camps during the occupation.

Here a complex of municipal buildings has been designed according to Theosophical formulae, containing the plein like a pair of cupped hands but leaving corners open to eliminate any sense of claustrophobia.

The plein and its central pool are paved with tiles, many making big circular mosaic pictorial elements.

Many of these were made by citizens, including children, and they reflect all kinds of daily-life activities — soccer included, with vignettes of shoes, feet, glasses of beer, the winner’s cup, and so on.

We found another fine garden, too, much more elaborate and in a sense commercial than the one in Millingen.

Here again was a series of outdoors “rooms,” formal for the most part, featuring roses, lavenders, a long dry garden with a central straight ribbon of flowing water.

There’s an even longer allée of thirty-foot pear trees clipped close to the trunk, with borders artfully planted for subtle gradations of color and texture. And wild gardens too, wet ones with croaking green-striped frogs, and an orangerie, and all sorts of surprises Lindsey is better equipped to describe than I.

I’ll leave for a duller day an account of the dead battery, and dinner along the Maas, and the further discussion of Dutch triangulation. The church is tolling and Kees and Sabine arrive soon. It’s another glorious day.



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Vierlingsbeek, 20 June

Hot is what it is. I walked alone again today, setting out about nine to walk through riverside lowlands, fields and forest, then hop a cable-ferry across the Maas.

On the other side the path slowly climbed to almost 100 feet, through sandy-soiled forest to a considerable open heath, home to a herd of wild bighorn goats who were sticking to the shade.

When I got home again, after a bus ride and another 2 km walking in the sun, I saw by a thermometer hanging on the side of a cafe — in the shade — that it was 38 degrees, over 100. No wonder I was beat.

Lindsey spent the day resting her foot again, lying on her bed working at a short story by Ward Ruyslinck — reading Dutch, I figure, will motivate her foot to heal.

We didn’t walk yesterday, but went picnicking with Kees and Sabine, who drove down from Amsterdam with a big styrofoam box: cheese, cheese, beer, rosé, San Pellegrino.

We stopped first in a cafe for boissons, as I always call them in my notebook, the inevitable drinks you’re always getting: tea, fizzywater, beer, gin, whatever.

As I sat down at the sidewalk table a previously unseen dog, who’d been lying near the chair like a big spilled pool of black, snarled and barked. His owner muzzled him with one big muscular hand and spoke sternly to him.

Later he, the owner, came over to us apologetically. You’re not Dutch, I think, he said, in English. We are, said Kees, in Dutch. Yes, but we aren’t, I said, in Dutch, we’re from California.

(I always identify myself as Californian, not American. I’m not sure why I do that.)

May I borrow your hat, he said to me; I want to teach my dog not to be alarmed by it.

Now hat in question isn’t particularly alarming, but it’s true as I’ve noticed that it is unusual here. It’s a wide-brimmed straw that Thérese and Eric gave me a few years ago.

It has a string that ties behind to keep it secure in breezes, and it has been an absolute necessity here in this weather.

The Dutch, who suffer through long months of darkness, don’t wear hats. There is an occasional baseball cap, worn frontwards I’m happy to report, and on old men the occasional cap. But they are very rare indeed, even on balding men.

He put my hat on and walked slowly up and down the terrace past his dog’s table until the dog lost interest, and then he returned the hat to me, none the worse for wear.

I don’t know if any of us learned anything from this, but it was a nice point of contact, and we congratulated Dogowner and drove on to a picnic site.

I’ve walked about 350 km. now, about 220 miles, in 21 days, with three days off. I have 164 km. to go, in seven days if I stick to the book, which means I’m about three-quarters finished.

My knees felt it today, and my feet too, but I think that’s just the heat. Tomorrow’s walk will be the test, and I’ll probably be doing it when most of you read this.

Our landlord has volunteered to drive me down to Swolgen, whence I’ll walk 21 km home — north and away from the sun, as I did today.

And then the next morning we make another move, to digs yet unchosen, and I get on with the walk.

But now to take the Landlord Taxi to the trainstation, ten minutes’ walk away and too much for Lindsey, and look for another Dutch dinner.



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Swolgen: 20 June

I was walking on the wrong side of the road.

It was deliberate: there was a narrow margin of shade on that side.

Then around a corner there came toward me a bevy, no, a convoy of eleven stalwart young women, say in their late twenties, all wearing shorts, some in shirts, some in brassieres, all in stout leather hiking boots, all wearing complicated backpacks with sleeping bags, pots and pans, umbrellas, canteens, ropes, flashlights, and god knows what else dangling from various corners.

I didn’t see any particular reason to move into the sun; there was plenty of room for them to step around me.

One of them signalled to me to move over, though, so I regretfully stepped a teeny bit to the right and continued onward toward this onslaught from Valhalla.

We brushed shoulders, and they were gone. Too late I thought about my camera: they’d rounded the next curve on their way to the last act of Gotterdammerung. What a photo I’d missed.

That, and millions of flies in the forest, and a swarming of bees high in a beech-tree, and a pineapple-bacon pancake, and a surprise 16th-c. chapel in the middle of a forest, is about all I have to report.

It was over a hundred again in the town plaza, but rarely above ninety on my walk. (Thanks again, David and Julie, for the thermometers.)

Lindsey continues to nurse her foot which continues to hurt when she steps on it. This is unfortunate because that’s about all feet are really good for in this land of single beds.

Two of her sisters report that they too have occasional foot problems, one with sprained ankles, the other with a heel thing that sounds like Lindsey’s.

She, the sister, takes it as a signal that she’s supposed to stop hiking for a few weeks, and that makes sense. Maybe we’ll return for the end of this another day.

Or maybe I’ll continue alone, as I have done the last four stages. I don’t know.

I think I’ve fixed my reply signature. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ll get lots of copies of my own stuff back, with that “charlesshere@earthlink.net wrote:” preface!



¶¶¶

Six men walked into the restaurant last night, past our table on the terrace to a big one reserved for them.

We’d just been served our main course, and we already knew this place was good, really good.

Eet smakkerlijk, the leader of the six said, the Dutch equivalent of Bon appetit. Wij wil, I said, we will; this place is really good.

He nodded and smiled and they sat down and we began to invent stories about them.

Three spoke English, one with an American accent; the others spoke Dutch among themselves from time to time and to the waitress but English to the others.

They talked about pacemakers, PVC, hips, software.

I decided the Dutch guys worked for Philips, in Eindhoven, not that far away, and were entertaining three customers at a provincial restaurant they knew to be particularly good.

We went back there tonight, to the Four Lindens. As we walked in so did five of the six, and the Leader greeted me.

I apologized for speaking English to him and told him I’d decided he knew something about food. I wanted recommendations in Maastricht, but before long we were talking about the Pieterpad.

He quickly saw that Lindsey’s foot was hurting and asked what we’d done about it. Before we knew it he was on the telephone.

As we left the restaurant he came over again and told us everything was arranged: his driver would pick us up tomorrow at half pst nine, take us to a local doctor for a referral, then drive us to Boxmeer to the hospital for x-rays.

From there we will decide what to do next.

The guy does not work for Philips. He has his own company, selling medical stuff — hips, instruments, heart bypass things.

He travels a triangle every year across the Atlantic: Montreal, Madison, Florida. He hopes to get to California sometime soon. Dinner will be waiting.

I’ll send this as usual at breakfast time: then we’ll check out of our Vierlingsbeek B&B for Boxmeer and parts yet unknown. I love this kind of thing.



¶¶¶

Eijsden, 22 June

That is where we are, Eijsden, the southernmost town in Holland.

Lindsey’s foot is not broken, say this morning’s X-rays. So she simply has to keep weight off it for a few weeks.

We got her a shiny new pair of crutches in Maastricht and checked into a small comfortable hotel with TV and will be here a while.

Only problem: no phone, so e-mail will be problematic. Fine neighborhood restaurant, though.



The bus to Maastricht leaves every hour. From it this morning, I saw:

Across the river Maas, the old-gold colored quarry, dating back I wouldn’t doubt to Roman times, whose stones are seen in the more important buildings everywhere, and pave the entire front yard of one house we drive by.

A lady, stout, soberly dressed, with a small terrier on a leash; he looks a little suspiciously at the bus when it “kneels” and opens its huge front door to let them on.

Bollards standing in the middle of the road barring the way to motor vehicles — until the slowly but implacably advancing bus somehow signals them to descend regretfully into the ground, to emerge again the moment we’ve passed.

A big housing tract in the making, the streets laid out but no construction yet begun — except that ditch-digging back-hoes are at work laying utilities in the old gold-colored sandy earth, and surveyors are determining where hedges and fences will appear next year.

An enormous crane mounted on a flatbed truck apparently lifting a wind-broken branch out of a tree, several yards from the street, gently gently so as not to damage hedges and rosebushes in the way.

Our bus barely squeezes past, the driver inching it along, checking first one side-view mirror then the other, onlookers on stopped bicycles watching the work intently, a good-natured driver helping with encouraging hand-signals.

A counterman steps out of an elegant Bang & Olufson shop with a bucket of soapy water and a big squeegee, washing the windows, then to step back to his counter work.

Bedding — mostly those duvets we seem to sleep under in every hotel and B&B — hang out of second-storey windows to air out on this thankfully cool and breezy morning.

Schoolbags still hang from flagstaffs over people’s front doors, and in one case a number of textbooks too, hanging in a line, pages fluttering.

I remember the “unhappy readymade” Marcel Duchamp made for his sister: a geometry book bound and hung like a flayed carcass, submitting to rain and wind on her apartment balcony, a geometry book it was.

Maybe this is where he got the idea. Ideas always come from somewhere.

I may have this wrong — I may have everything wrong — but Holland seems to have no really large cities, though it is the most densely populated country in Europe, if you don’t count Monaco when the hotels are full.

Hans tells me the three largest cities in his province, Gelderland — Apeldoorn, Arnhem, and Nijmegen — have fewer than 200,000 people apiece.

What the Dutch do is see to it that there are lots of cities of 100,000 or so, and that they are cleanly separated from the countryside that surrounds them.

Our current village, Eijsden, is bigger than it seems. Our hotel, if it is a hotel, is on a large city block. But through the large doors some of the buildings have you can see, on the occasions they’re opened, a big courtyard, sometimes filled with a flower-garden or patio, sometimes with tractors and other farm equipment.

There’s a church and a market-square across the street. You’re as likely to see a tractor pulling a cart as a delivery-van or the bus.

Our hotel is two buildings, the front one from the 18th century, in the rather dark brick most of the town’s made of; the rear one, tacked on in 1928, in matching architectural style but in softer and more varied colors of brick.

The side garden is engaging, informal, cluttered — like the hotel’s stairways and corridors, decorated with paintings, engravings, a couple of shopwindow mannequins, old armoires, odd tables, candelabra, and the like.

Our room has seven framed pictures, lithographs watercolors and engravings, and a larger oil painting of a vase of flowers, the latter painted by the lady of the house.

There’s a table with a vase of artificial hydrangeas and a dish of artificial Seckel pears, all quite realistic. A small armoire with the TV set and, on top, a lamp, a jug, a curious still-life sculpture of yet another distressed book, the theme of the day.

The big armoire has on it more vases and jugs and artificial flowers. Horror vacui is at work, but it’s not oppressive; I don’t know why.

Landlady and landlord — but they’ll turn up in due time, in a catalogue of such —

Lindsey’s getting around better on her hardware, and tennis has returned to the television, and it’s nearly dinnertime.



¶¶¶

Eijsden, 25 June: Car!

So I’ve quit the Pieterpad early. Petra spent the night in this charmingly louche hotel and drove us in to Maastricht Saturday morning, and then we drove back, Lindsey and I, in a brand new electric-blue VW Lupo.

The car looks like a big baby shoe glazed with artificial blueberry syrup, but it moves nicely. And the country Petra drove us through Friday afternoon convinced us that this was a promising way to spend a week.

She took us over hills and valleys, past fields and forests, through small villages whose houses and farmsteads in a kind of half-timbered architecture unlike any we’ve seen — more graceful and lighter than the dour English and Norman versions.

From time to time we saw very improbable trees: firs, I guess, looking like they’re at least sixty feet high, stripped of all branches except those at the very top.

Finally, in Norbeek where we stopped to check out a very early church (and a rather late tea), we realized that these trees are set into holes, like fence-posts — part of the St. John’s Day ceremonies, I suppose. I hope those postholes are deep.

We stopped off at the Eijsden Kasteel on the way home yesterday, as its garden has some reputation. These Dutch “castles” are really rural palaces, usually rather Gothic, usually late medieval.

Eijsden’s reminded me of Vorden’s: a big three- or fourstorey brick building with steep black roofs rising to lacy ironwork weathervanes and clocks.

The sky is dull and low today, but it lets light bounce between the lawns, the dark green beeches and oaks, and the pearl-colored gravel. The greens here are subtle, partly because of the immense variety of textures.

On one side, the palace garden is an alley of yew hedges, the top ranging to maybe twelve feet above the paths, but scalloped in long sweeping curves.

Otherwise the gardens are in fact simply lawns, magnificent allées of beeches, huge isolated copper beeches and sycamores, gravel parterres, and fountains.

The palace stands on its square footprint surrounded by a moat. An old woman with piano legs in white cotton stockings feeds the ugly Muscovy ducks, then trundles her shopping-cart away over the gravel.

Down the road is a cherry orchard. The trees are small and close-set, in the European manner, and absolutely loaded with cherries — delicious ones: we bought some for supper.

We ate in, in order to watch two of the quarter-finals. We’re getting to like soccer a lot, I think, though it’s really not representative, I’m sure, any more than the World Series is representative of professional baseball.

Many of you continue to ask about Lindsey’s foot. It’s almost certainly to do with the Achilles tendon or its sheath, and it’s almost certain to take quite a while to heal, is my guess.

She’s getting very graceful with those crutches, and I’m learning a new kind of patience. Which can’t be a bad thing.



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Eijsden, 25 June

We had noticed yesterday many cases of beer left around town at various places.

About ten this morning we walked down to the corner to watch the parade. In the night someone had lined the street with banners, and every fifty meters or so a decorated arch spanned the street, with Biblical quotations painted on it.

We stood at a good station right at the corner. The intersection was scattered with blossoms — marigolds, rose-petals, lilies. Across the way a temporary altar had been set up. Above it an old lady leaned out her secondstorey window in her 17th-century brick house, looking like a detail in any painting of that period except when she occasionally pointed a camera at the crowd.

The procession had begun hours earlier; it winds its way slowly through the entire gemeente — the administrative unit combining several small villages into one.

(For you Californians: as if Jimtown, Foppiano, Dry Creek, maybe Geyserville, and Matteuci were all villages under the jurisdiction of Healdsburg.)

After twenty minutes or so, during which the crowd gathered, a police car drove up toward us from the Kasteel to block the intersection.

Two fellows in formal clothes, wearing hats with elaborate red plumes and carrying shiny axes, were the first of the parade to arrive.

Only then I noticed a sort of symbolic tree standing outside the corner bar-cafe. The crowd parted to allow them to step up to it and begin to hack it apart — first having each had a glass or two of gin.

(The glasses are small here, Kendall.)

After they finished with the greenery the crowd applauded and the gin bottle was passed around as more of the procession began to arrive.

The men turned out to be accompanied by a number of men, women, and children in what seemed to be ritual black attire. Many wore various emblems. Two of the ladies carried small wooden kegs with spigots slung from their shoulders, and non-ritual bottles of Bokma and Bols gin in their hands.

So many costumes and uniforms! And such serious expressions on the faces!

If the gin and axes represented the working class, the next to arrive was the military — an honor guard and drill team in 19th-century uniforms led by a major with a sword, who stopped them smartly, made them present arms, and then put them at ease.

After a time they resumed their slow serious march and the first band arrived, the Blue Band, playing a slow, sober march in a minor key. You couldn’t help thinking of Mahler.

Groups of ordinary citizens, all carefully dressed and utterly sober, carried banners representing the various villages in the community.

Then came three groups of little children presenting tributes to angels, then saints, then the people. They too were utterly serious while marching, growing restless only after a long pause in the parade.

The Red Band was next, playing a somewhat quicker major-key march. Like the Blue, they played perfectly in tune — a good trick, as both were big ensembles, with all sizes of clarinets, oboes and bassoons, all kinds of brass (valves and natural), tuned percussion, and saxophones.

As near as we can understand, the Blue and Red represent two different aspects of the community, and the competition between them is fierce.

The military and the people having been represented, it was time finally for the Church. This is after all a religious procession: many of the groups already had carried religious banners and statues.

Now it turned serious, though, with first children scattering blossoms, others carrying ritual offerings (plastic bread-panniers filled with fruit or pastries, covered with plastic wrap so as not to be spilled).

A group of women came through shaking offering-boxes, and just in case you missed them they were followed by men with long plastic tubes, snorkeling spare change out of people deeper in the crowd.

A group of men marched slowly by reciting the Ave Maria in Dutch, antiphonally, led by an elder. After them a similar group of ladies.

Then came incense-bearers, and a priest slowly marching under a canopy carried by four men. The crowd knelt as the priest stopped up to the temporary altar across the street from us.

By now a choir had arrived, carrying their sheet music and led by a choirmaster wearing a marvelous toupee out of the 1930s. He led them in a hymn and an amen to the priest’s barely audible litany, and then from behind us thundered the Word of God, a series of eight or ten cannon shots provided, it turned out, by members of the fire brigade armed with cannon firing blanks.

Then it was over. It had lasted about an hour, and had moved on to the next station. Apparently this takes three days to make its circuit.

Apart from the uniforms of the bands, the military, and the priests and altarboys, everyone was dressed as soberly as possible. Many of the men and boys were in tails; the women in nicely tailored dinner suits. The onlokers, to, were dressed in their Sunday finest. This was was serious event: everyone enjoyed it, but after the gin there was no applause, few smiles, no shouting, hardly any conversation even.

We had dinner at midday, so as to be free to watch the soccer games in the evening. The bands continued to march through town, stopping before each bar, where waiters brought out trayloads of overflowing beerglasses for them.

Technical note: I have tried something new here, inserting a line-end every sixty characters or so, because some of you are complaining that your computers don’t wrap the lines of these messages.

I hope this does the trick. It is tedious for me to do this, but then perhaps it is tedious for you to read these dispatches.



¶¶¶

Eijsden, 27 June

The castle at Mheer is even more elaborate than that at Eijsden. You approach it over a stone bridge crossing a moat now dry, leading from the town church, also late medieval, to the castle stables.

These form the outer wall of the courtyard, and there you find two men repairing the brick inner wall, a few parked cars, and a well-dressed handsome woman in her fifties who is watering the flowerboxes.

I ask her how to visit the castle garden, which is what brings us to Mheer, and she apologizes that the garden is no longer open to the public. Maintenance is too difficult and too costly, and the government will not help with it, as it does to an extent with maintenance of the buildings.

Seeing Lindsey’s disappointment she relents, though, and we wind up inside one of the most interesting gardens yet. She apologizes for its state: lawns uncut, thus sprinkled with daisies; hedges untrimmed; roses not yet deadheaded; borders gone leggy — familiar problems to any gardener.

I prefer the lawns so, I tell her; yes, she agrees, she likes the daisies too, but the lawns are not restful, the eye is not calmed by their intrusion.

Consciously or not she has taken a motif from the stone bridge — a semicircular niche with a bench, appearing at rhythmic intervals on the side walls overlooking the moat — and used it to unite the entire series of garden “rooms.”

I like circles, she says, explaining the circular beds of flowers slowly expanding into the lawn.

The garden slopes in two directions, north and west, for we are truly in hilly country in South Limburg. This, and occasional plantings of species trees, allows a few “rooms” to appear by surprise.

There’s an allée of roses, for example, entered via a gate whose upper edge descends to complete the circle described above by the arbor.

There’s a white garden and a yellow garden and a blue garden and a pink, each running down a long rectangle from a central circle, a low birdbath at its center, appropriately colored roses flanking the four entrances.

Two long yew hedgerows are cut nearly to the ground and have died in the heat — apparently the result of a mistake by some gardening students. (Explanations were mostly in Dutch with some French, and we’re not sure we perfectly understood anything!)

The woman turned out to be the wife of the present owner, of course ; and he turns out to be the twelfth generation owning the castle.

Before then it was still in the family, but then, and once previously, it went to a married daughter, there being no sons. So since its origin, many centuries ago, only three names have been attached to the Kasteel Mheer.

When we moved in, thirty years ago, it was a mess, she says; it had been unoccupied for a generation, and before that had been rented.

(Let’s see: that would have been about the time of World War II. Let’s not ask about that just now.)

The castle is stone and brick, more stone. It has turrets and casements and ivy and steep roofs — all the proper accoutrements.

The garden was a horse pasture when they took occupancy, and she has made it virtually single-handedly, though with help at the labor, of course, designing it as she went: “I like to improvise.”

It covers at least an acre, and mediates beautifully the formal stone castle and the outlying pastures, which slope down a mile or so to oak forests which are Belgium.

As we began to disengage — one doesn’t like to presume with the wealthy, and we’d been there an hour — she opened a huge wooden door to show us the inner courtyard.

Her husband’s grandfather had made changes to some of the facade, but her husband had made changes much more extensive, opening this court by removing a huge staircase with a series of landings roofing (inadequately) rooms no longer needed.

We did not meet him; he was busy mending fences, literally, to keep sheep and roe-deer from the roses.

The visit, and a series of detours caused by road-mending and setups for local festivities, and incredibly slow service at lunch in Maastricht, took up a good bit of the day.

Then we drove all the way to Nuth, the other end of South Limburg — half an hour away — for dinner in a remarkable restaurant, 25 seats in a 1790 farmbuilding, a woman in her sixties in the dining room, her son in the kitchen.

There was one other couple dining. We started with an amazing black pudding with an apple slice quickly fried in pork-fat, very delicate, and went on from there — but these meals bore many of you, so I won’t go on.



¶¶¶

Eijsden, 27 June

Our hotel is on a long street with no bars on it. Just down the street is the church and the marketplace, though, and at the bottom of the marketplace is the Radtskellar, I think it’s called.

The marktplein slopes down to the Radtskellar, the church with its small churchyard walled off from it by a waist-high wall.

Just now the marktplein is full of people. Young, old, fat, thin, married, not, little kids, old serious guys smoking pipes.

The band, in street clothes, mixes with the rest of the crowd. There are glasses of beer everywhere, full, empty, abandoned, being worked at.

The band arrived about 9:30. It had slowly ambled down Kerkstraat playing a lively six-eight tune called the Cramignole.

No one knows where the tune came from, or how old it is. When it plays, people begin to grab one another’s hands, forming a long chain, and go skipping about the street, dancing through the village. The girl at the lead carries a big bouquet.

At the other end of Kerkstraat is another street, call it Maasstraat though that’s not it’s name, I forget its name, but it runs down to the river.

The two long blocks of Maasstraat boast three bar-cafes, and uphill past the last of these is the band’s rehearsal hall, where I went yesterday to buy a CD of their music.

The band began there at eight o’clock. At each bar it stops, the dancers stop, the little kids stop, the old guys stop.

The strollers, baby-buggies, and kid’s wagons stop. Everyone stops.

Trays of beer sail along above the heads of the crowd.

Watching all this you can’t help think of Henrik Willem van Loon’s drawing of the Bachs and the Breughels entertaining one another, scores of them, on the Sunday afternoon that he invited them all from whatever Limbo they spend eternity in to picnic on the village square in Veere, in the early 1940s, during the war, in his wonderful book Van Loon’s Lives.

We sit on a bench, Lindsey and I, for a little while, to watch all this. Our bench was the only one empty, and we quickly discover that’s because a bunch of little kids, say six to nine, had been using it as one of the goals in an impromptu soccer game.

No problem. The game, the strollers, the old guys, the lovers, the dancers, the beerdrinkers all mill about, somehow never colliding, an intuitively organized Brownian motion of citizens all observing the final evening of a traditional three-day binge.

This morning the band played in the church, and it was glorious. Afterward they marched up Kerkstraat to the pastor’s house, and the officials in their grey top hats and their cutaways, and the honor guard, and the bannercarriers, all approached the pastor, one by one, and knelt to him and gave him symbolic gifts. One was an enormous pacifier.

It was the annual tribute, a lady explained to me, of the city to the church. The pastor was gracious and good-humored and kept his speech short.

* * *

Technical note from the people who make my e-mail software:

MultiMail should not cause the lines to unwrap if people have line wrapping enabled on their desktop. The message that you sent to me does not run off to the right.

On the other hand George Orick writes:

Your e-mails do come in without word wrap sometimes. I simply press Edit and at the bottom of the edit menu there is a choice Switch Fonts. I press that and the font changes to a smaller different one and everything can be read wrapped properly.

So some of you might try that. Others might try enabling “word wrap” on your e-mail programs.

Or simply copy the whole thing and paste it into a word processor. Or delete, or send me an e-mail asking to be dropped from this group!

¶¶¶

Eijsden, 29 June

Quite right, most of you: I left you with only black pudding and apple. Here’s the entire story of Pingerhof, as sent to Kees:



We ate at Pingerhof tonight. The place is very beautiful, an old (1790) farmhouse with a good-sized rather neglected garden.

A woman in her sixties in the dining room, her son in the kitchen, someone else to help out, a dog.

Lindsey and I were half the clientele tonight. The dining room is about the size of Chez Panisse’s, but seats only two dozen.

One long table was set for twelve, and there were maybe four other tables.

We had aperitifs on the porch — sherry for Lindsey, a nice Alsatian Riesling for me. Then we went in.

The amuse-gueule was absolutely delicious, the best single thing we’ve eaten in Holland, and maybe on the trip.

It was a small (but not too small) rectangle of black pudding, with a consistency somewhere between rillettes and bavarois. With it a tablespoonful of shaved radish, pickled.

Also three little pots: butter, rillettes, liversausage, all quite wonderful. And a raisin-candied fruit hot cross bun, the cross made of puffpaste.

Then poached salmon in a kind of hollandaise pinked with tomato, with beluga caviar on top, and two spears of green asparagus.

Then beef bouillon, very clear, with shiitake and summer truffles and bits of beef brisket simmered in.

Then a tournedos of delicious Belgian beef on mashed potato mixed with yoghurt, very thin and subtle, with on the side white asperges in bechamel.

Then almond bavarois with a white chocolate-and-raisin “cookie”.

With the coffee, a chocolate truffle and a delicious little poppyseed tartlet.

We had a ‘97 Var that was quite nice — inky dark and deep.

Cost altogether was Nfl 300.

What I would say is, the chef is amazingly good on technique. When he cooks Limburgse, as in the black pudding, he’s fabulous.

The dinner went downhill a bit from there, with each dish not quite striking enough.

Well, that’s not true of the soup: it was first-rate. But the salmon needed a touch of some sharp flavor — citrus or pepper or something of that sort.

And the beef was a little bland. But I could be wrong: you could say it was very nicely understated.



End forward from Kees.

Now we are in Apeldoorn with Hans, who cooked some delicious PASTA! our first in five weeks.

And we watched the game of France and Portugal, decided in so terrible a fashion, such a disturbing game to see that in the night I had an extraordinary complex and surreal dream.

But that’s a subject for another day.



¶¶¶

Luxembourg, 2 July

Fortunately, an intelligent white terrier saw the problem. Someone was either not available or not willing to do his or her job, admittedly a dangerous one — or at least apparently so.

So he picked up a small liqueur glass from a table and dove into a placid inlet at the beach, then planted himself firmly in the sand at the bottom, stood on his hind legs, and carefully set the glass on his head, facing the audience.

The marksman made all sorts of excuses. His confederate was supposed to be human, not canine. The target was meant to be larger, not this pathetically small liqueur glass. His revolver would not fire underwater.

No excuse prevailed. He levelled his pistol, hesitated a dramatic moment, and fired. The dog wavered. A thin stream of blood slowly ascended to the surface, describing a whorl like that of water going down a drain.

Afterward in the bus a number of us, all journalists covering the event, discussed what we had seen, or thought we had seen, or made of what we had seen, at great length.

There was a fairly large bookcase on the bus, but it contained nothing that would shed much light. Only a selection of books on contemporary art, especially performance art, with the requisite number of books on Marcel Duchamp.

I argued with all these reporters and scholars. Art and art history had little to do with the event. Have you read Jean Dutourd, I said; his novel Tete du chien (A Dog’s Head) has much more to do with this.

Or Vercors, whose novel By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them — I’m sorry, I don’t know the original French title — does a lot to clarify this situation. The question was, who was guilty of this murder? Clearly not the marksman, who stood to lose his career and reputation, both of which had been until then considerable.

I had my idea: it was his wife, whom I heard complain that it was her position to be the target, and who was clearly jealous of the terrier — but had been too fearful to take her normal position.

By now the bus was a hotel, or perhaps a tennis court. Tennis balls were bounding out of the court over the fence, and it was up to me to catch them, or find them, and return them to play. They lay in various places on the street, on whose pavement flower-petals lay scattered.

I know many of the sources of this dream, from which the alarm woke me Thursday morning. (It’s a mistake to be awakened by an alarm; they snatch you from another place, and if you’re not entirely reassembled at the moment of waking serious damage can result.)

Just before going to bed I was reading a book by Cees Noteboom, and one of the last words I saw was “zeehonden,” Dutch for “seals (zee=sea, honden=dogs).

We had also seen something on television about the torch being carried underwater to the Australian Olympics, and Monday I will be seeing a man in Basel who has written me about a Duchamp exhibition, at which it may be possible to have some of my opera played.

I don’t know why the poet Stephen Rodefer, whom I roomed with for three weeks in 1983 while touring Russia and Romania, or Russell Moore, who resembles him not at all (except for his affability and intelligence) should have been in this dream.

Or why I am burdening you all with this, except that it’s the sort of thing that happens on this trip.

Since last writing we have been two days in Apeldoorn with the Elfrings. Friday we drove back to Maastricht, then took the train to Luxembourg.

We are now in Luxembourg with two dear friends whom we rarely see but with whom we feel a perfect connection. Catharina stayed with us for three weeks in 1980 or so, and her husband Hans is very like Paolo, and their two children are very like Paolo and Meadow’s two children.

We leave Monday for Italy, stopping that night in Basel (see above). I don’t know how the e-mail will work from Italy. We’ll see.

Technical note: I am told that if you hit the “reply” button my message will magically be word-wrapped for your convenience.

But for God’s sake don’t send it back to me. I have only so much space on this machine.

On the other hand if you do write to me and I don’t respond personally in a day or three, the odds are we didn’t get your post. In that case please re-send.



¶¶¶

Another country, another public telephone format. This one takes coins, and confusingly there are two numberpads side by side.

I’m calling a doctor about Lindsey’s foot, and have to dial 1-2, then 2-6. One set of numbers for the service, the other to get to the doctor.

I dial 1-2, then notice a surreptitious stirring of curtains in the window alongside the telephone, which is hanging on the side of an apartment building.

One of the numberpads is for doorbells, I decide. I hang up, then begin the procedure again.

Again I misdial somehow. By now there are several people queued up behind me to use the phone. They aren’t impatient; in fact they seem to be enjoying my ineptitude; but I decide to give it up for now and let them have their turns.

A few coins drop into the coin return; then a dollar bill. The folks behind me are pleased at my good luck. As I extract the dollar bill I notice behind it a small pop-bottle full of water and what seems to be a piece of white cloth. I leave it in place.

Walking across the piazza, though, in which a number of people are strolling, alone or in couples, I see a cop; he had been watching the whole phenomenon quite good-humoredly.

He smiles as I approach him, but when I ask him, pointing toward the bottle in the coinreturn slot in the telephone, “Non e sospettabile?” he catches me by the collar, marches me to the telephone, and orders “Prova!”

I manage to get the bottle out. It’s clearly just water and a small white washcloth of some kind. I see a trashcan, turn back to the cop, and ask Mette dientro? He nods, and I toss the bottle in.

Why would anyone leave such a thing inside a telephone, I wonder to myself, Perhaps to have it handy for some later need, the cop thinks back to me, and I walk on to the doctor’s office..



¶¶¶

Well, yes: the phones do require new analysis from one country to the next. There have been a lot of atms. (That isn’t my pin number, by the way.)

Bottles turn out to be returnable for deposit. Various uniformed officials are almost invariably helpful.

A fifth set of coins has begun messing up my pockets, or would have if I hadn’t got rid of each country’s money as we crossed the next border.

Friday’s train: we sat in the firstclass coach, empty and comfortable, with secondclass tickets. When the conductor showed up I paid a supplement.

In Luxembourg, though, a new conductor came on, looked at tickets and supplement, and pointed out we’d paid first class only to the border.

I gave him my last German money — oh yes: six sets of currency — and he fixed things up and returned Belgian francs in change.

We like Luxembourg; it is pretty and prosperous. Yesterday we drove out to the American and German cemeteries and through the vineyards along the Moselle.

This is long enough, though, and I’ll save them for another day. Lindsey feels her foot has suddenly improved noticeably, and we’re eating and drinking far too much, and Catarina and Hans are marvelous hosts, as always.



¶¶¶

Val d’Aosta, 4 July

A fingernail paring of a moon hangs over the flagstone roof of our inn.

It’s a farmhouse on the flank of the Gran San Bernardo, the major pass from Switzerland to west Italy.

We found the hotel-restaurant in the guide we depended on so heavily last fall: Osterie d’Italia, a Slow Food publication.

We are probably 1,000 meters above the valley floor, up 21 hairpins and a number of other curves, 20 km (a day’s walk if it were level) from Aosta.

Non-foodies delete now. We had:

prosciutto di tacchino: turkeybreast, salted and air-dried for 15 days, sliced very thin and served in walnut oil with very thin garlic and chive slices,

White bread and brown bread, both made here and tasting of wheat and the slightest bit of yeast;

pickled poached eggs in vinaigrette with sage;

cotecchino, potato, and ratatouille: the sausage home made from home-grown pigs, coarse-ground and loosely stuffed in the casings, with lots of fennel seed, a touch of nutmeg, pepper, salt, and garlic;

the ratatouille slow-simmered (this is a Slow Food establishment) and nicely balanced between red and green peppers, red onions, and a bit of tomato sauce;

raspberries and fresh goat cheese, delicate in flavor but firm and nicely textured.

With it all, a Grosjean Vallée d’Aosta Gamay 1999, and pitchers of that sweet granite-flavored water you find in the Alps and rarely elsewhere.

Lindsey asked: why do people continue to do this? The food is perfectly of its region, nothing inventive or imaginative. You would never call this food “interesting.”

It reminds me of the dinners Lindsey’s Aunt Victoria cooked for us. Truly Italian, truly mountain, frugal, substantial, nutritious, tasty. I though of Lindsey’s father a dozen times.

Two grandparents, a daughter, a granddaughter in view. The son must be working somewhere. Outside, a small vegetable garden, fruit trees, a donkey, geese, goats, chickens.

And across from our balcony the fabulous Gran Paradiso, Alps of the south. Alpenglow on the eastern end from the setting sun. Mont Blanc up the road.

We have been on the road five weeks, I think. We are in Italy and we are happy.

But we are unable to log on for e-mail, and won’t be able to correct this until we get to France, 7/7/00!



¶¶¶

Barjols, 7 July

We are now in Barjols, France, and if you receive this we are now back online.

I didn’t have proper settings for Switzerland and Italy, and it will take me a while to catch up with e-mail.

We’ll be here for a week or so. Please be patient.



¶¶¶

This morning, our first in this quiet Provencal town since last November, we woke up before the others and slipped quietly out to drive into town.

Normally we would walk the kilometer or so, down the rocky driveway, through the three short damp dark craggy tunnels, between the lugubrious abandoned tanneries, and up into the village.

But Lindsey’s still on crutches, and they’re a bit uncertain on loose shale. So we drove.

The heart of the village is a street a long block long, the place de la mairie at one end, with the biggest sycamore tree in the Var among its decorations, and a T-junction at the other.

The street runs east past George’s quarter to Brignoles, say 15 miles away; this is where the huge supermarket is where George buys his oysters by the hundreds.

It runs on through the T-junction west across a crumbling falaise which has restricted it in the last couple of years to a single lane. It then turns south to St. Maximin, say 15 miles away: the town where St. Mary Magdalene’s skull, delicate and pretty, lies in its gold reliquary.

We sat at the cafe we like best, Marigny, also the tobacconist, near the junction.

The main street east is too narrow for two lanes of traffic, and a pair of trafficlights works ceaselessly moving the traffic first one direction, then the other.

When it turns red a last-minute arrival frequently runs it, and people good-naturedly negotiate matters.

All the time townspeople walk up and down that street, shops lining both sides. Bakers, appliance store, the Presse where you buy newspapers or maps or detective novels, the Produits de Provence where you buy olives and lettuces, the houseware shop, and so on.

People stop in the middle of the street and greet one another, often blocking traffic.

As we drank our coffee and watched all this we were amazed to see an impossibly huge truck lumber up the street and attempt the rightangle turn uphill.

We were more amazed that it pulled an equally huge trailer. And another. And finally a third, though in fact the third was quite smaller, something like a big lifeboat turned upsidedown and set on wheels and carrying metal poles.

Even more amazing: another truck followed, also with three trailers. And, I’d forgotten, all this was preceded by a big caravan pulled by an old Mercedes driven by a blowsy-looking woman with tousled blond hair.

All this was nothing less than the France American (sic) Circus, and we looked forward all day to going, because there’s nothing more entertaining than a smalltown French circus.

But first we went back home to find George and his daughter Sarah and her boyfriend Paul sitting out under the parasol drinking their coffee.

We joined them with more coffee and talk until it was clearly time for lunch, so George brought out three enormous crabs and four cheeses for me and a bottle of wine and another of water and we got down to business.

And then it was time to assault my technical problem which kept me offline for a week. Two or three hours on helplines and the net helped not at all.

Then I had the bright idea of using the phoneline George’s computer is hooked to, and behold it all worked. I suspect the problem is reversed polarity phonelines, which can happen. The moral: simple cable-substitution first, helplines later if at all.

And then time to shop for dinner, at the Intermarché up the hill on the third leg of the T-junction. We noticed posters scattered all through town advertising the circus, its pre-performance parade, and the free visit to the animals throughout the afternoon.

And then it was time for boissons, Pernod and ice cube and water, and another, and more conversation.

And then it was time for dinner, roast chicken stuffed with whole lemons, and haricots vert, and steamed potatoes, and a bottle of red wine.

And then finally time for the circus. Sarah and Paul had gone up hill to the Cramoisys for pernod, and George wanted no truck with circus.

Lindsey and I drove around looking for it, and finally followed our ears.

In a small parking-plaza around the corner from the gas station, a dirt lot with sycamores and a creek running by, there stood the circus.

One ring, a tattered “Persian” carpet in its center, tightrope and trapeze apparatus high above, one of the trailers parked across the back, its side opened to expose a gaily painted backdrop, a pair of speakers blaring bright circus music.

Around the front half of the ring two sections of seating, say 140 folding chairs on each side of a central aisle.

In the chairs an audience of six: a 30-year-old rather scruffy man with a five-year-old girl who paraded and skipped to the music; a pair of young lovers; Lindsey and I.

Two little girls, say three and five, in sequins and satin, peeped out at the audience from time to time. A man led an alpaca past. The tousled blonde worked at something on the sidelines, and a young man sold cotton candy.

Then suddenly the young man tumbled across the ring in a series of forward flips and became a ringmaster, announcing the beginning of the circus. The little girls did some acrobatics: splits, back bends, somersaults.

But then the action stopped, and in a few moments the ringmaster came to the audience, asking if they were french or english.

French, said the man with the little girl, in French. English, said the young lovers, in English. Neither, said I, in French.

I had made one of my rare categorical failures: he hadn’t asked if we were french or english, but if we wanted him to speak in french or english.

He hesitated, then said that since the audience was so small they would not be performing.

It was rather heartbreaking. So much equipment, so many posters, so much goodhearted skill, dashed by so little interest.

A small goat was tethered to a tree. A housecat was tethered to the caravan, in which the blonde was now washing up the dinnerdishes.

I asked the ringmaster how many they were. Five: His parents, his two little sisters, and himself.

They travel from town to town like this. Sometimes this happens, he said, the weather is so nice, and people are on vacation. He was immensely pleasant and goodnatured and we said we were sorry and left in a mood of some sadness.



¶¶¶

Barjols, 11 July

And what about that week between reports?

About a day was given to art, in Switzerland, where we visited the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, housed in a fine new Renzo Piano building, and the next day the foundation, I forget its name, in Martigny.

The Beyeler houses a marvelous collection of 20th-c. painting, a private collection rivalled only, in my experience, by the de Menil collection in Houston.

There was also a group show purporting to trace Color and Light through 20th-century painting, and there at the entrance was an old friend, Matisse’s green-eyed woman in a hat from the San Francisco Museum.

In Martigny we saw a fine small van Gogh show, much of it also drawn from private collections.

But mostly what we did those few days was collect mountain passes and look at flowers.

We drove both the Grand and the Little St. Bernard Passes, at the north and west borders of the Val d’Aosta. We drove the Moncenisio pass into the Valsusa, where Lindsey’s father was born 96 years ago in the town of Chiomonte.

We drove the Monginevra pass from Valsusa to Briançon, the highest city in Europe, also and eccentrically a Provencal city of stucco, tile, and geraniums, contained within Vauban fortifications.

We drove the Col de Maure pass to Digne, and then down through incandescent lavender fields between Riez and the Verdon, and then down into Barjols.

We bought delicious apricots on the Swiss side of the St. Bernard, which we crossed on the high road, because a theme of the trip so far has been the avoidance of toll-roads.

We avoided them because we decided this time it was not the destination but the journey we were after, and the result was color.

In the Alps we saw gentians and fireweed everywhere. Gentians please Lindsey for their unique blue; fireweed pleases me because it produces epilobio, the herbal extract that lets me sleep the whole night through.

We watched the spruces of the Val d’Aosta give way to the pines and mixed hardwoods of the French mountains, and we realized again how immensely varied the French landscape is: mountains, gorges, heath, farmland, pastures, villages, cities.

In Provence of course there were the miles of lavender punctuated by sudden sunflower fields, under intense blue skies and occasional looming white thunderheads.

And the sudden fields of Flanders poppies, just to be sure the reds of this amazing palette are not overlooked.

A week’s rest from e-mail left me occasionally purposeless, a condition I must cultivate. (You’ll have been grateful, some of you, I’m sure, at the respite from non-word-wrap.)

The problem seems in general to be twisted polarity, a condition I should have foreseen. Don’t travel without a wrongly-wired phone cord!

And now a week’s sojourn in Barjols, where the wind blows cool, the conversation ranges over dialectics and ethics and oh the hell with it, and we drive tomorrow to Nice for a visit with Dominique.



¶¶¶

Barjols, 14 July

The object of crossing the Alps was the town of Chiomonte, in the Valsusa, west of Turin. A small town on the main road through an important pass from France to Italy.

So important that it is one of many said to have been marched by Hannibal and his troops and elephants; and so important that up the road from Chiomonte, another eight or ten kilometers toward France, there’s a huge, dark, menacing fort at Exilles.

Lindsey’s father was born in Chiomonte in 1904, and he recalled that fort, and being told it was their that The Man in the Iron Mask had been held prisoner.

Lindsey’s desire to establish a genealogical chart around her father is one of the reasons for this trip. Another is a visit, now fairly frequently made, to her cousin Rosa.

Lindsey’s grandfather, Luigi, had three brothers and two sisters. One of these sisters was the mother of Ernesto, Rosa’s husband. I may have this wrong.

Ernesto and Rosa married in the early thirties and went to Nice where they had a small store during the war. War over, they returned to Chiomonte, where they ran the Albergo Chiomonte.

We used to stay in the Albergo when they ran it, but they retired in the 1980s and it has gone downhill.

Chiomonte in general went downhill, and continues to, if only physically. The old village drops, from the main road to France, down to the Dora Riparia, which rushes through the valley to join the Dora Baltea in Torino, ultimately flowing into the Po.

The old village is stone. Stone walls, stone streets, stone roofs. The one central street is car-negotiable, but cars are quite infrequent. There are few parking lots: one is at the central war-memorial piazza, big enough to contain maybe ten parked cars.

The municipio, which contains a registry and a few other offices, has been reconfigured and is now air-conditioned. This gives an idea of the interiors behind those blind sulking stone façades: terrazzo floors, nicely papered walls, up-to-date appliances.

When we first visited Chiomonte, in 1974, women in high heels and tight skirts washed their laundry in the public fountains, using the ancient washboards still in place. When we asked about this we were told Yes, of course, we have washing machines at home, but what fun is it to do your laundry alone?

It seems that many of the women now work in town (Susa, Torino); they weren’t in evidence at the fountains.

The woman at the Records Registry was as helpful as she could be, but you have to know what you’re looking for. You’re not allowed to page through the record-books on your own, and no wonder: they’re very old, blank-books of forms in which the information has all been entered by hand in flowing script, with steel pens and good black ink.

There are many names, and many abbreviations. Lindsey’s father, who we know as Robert Albert Remolif, born July 7 1904, is in fact Medardo Alberto Remolif (or is it Medardo Roberto, I don’t recall just now), born July 8 1904. His birth is entered on that date, and the names of his parents are listed, and I think his godparents, though for some reason we didn’t inquire about that: too bad, as we may have found the name of an uncle or aunt.

Then again, maybe not. The town cemetery is full of Remolifs and Baccons and Burins and Sibilles and a few other surnames: there aren’t many surnames here.

(I have read that the older a culture is, the smaller the variety of surnames; this is a statistical inevitability, and accounts for the complete lack or comparative infrequency of surnames once common. The extreme of the situation is Korea, where so many are named Kim or Park.)

We investigated the cemetery twice, once clockwise and again the next day counterclockwise. We easily found Lindsey’s grandfather, buried among relatives of Rosa’s, Ernesto included, because the rest of his immediate family were all emigrated to the U.S.

Otherwise we found many possible relatives, but they have to be checked against the registers. Next time, I told Lindsey, We’ll have a tape machine, and we’ll just read names and dates into it, and transcribe them with speech recognition software, making this job much simpler.

Registers in the plural, because those in the municipio are supplemented by those in the church. We talked twice to the parocco, the parish priest.

He is difficult to understand, because he is 85, and speaks only Italian and the local dialect, and speaks Italian with a considerable accent of the local dialect, which he has done much to save and re-institutionalize.

Chiomontino is very similar to old Provencal — no wonder: this town and the valley west of it were in France, or rather in Savoy, allied to France, until just before living memory.

At Rosa’s we had the dinner she has often prepared for us: peppers, olives, and mushrooms with two or three kinds of ham; vitello tonnato (roast veal sliced and served cold with a tuna sauce);ravioli; roast beef and boiled potatoes; and tiramisu.

With this, white wine from Arneis, red from Chiomonte, and (had we wanted them) liqueurs and grappas, along with water of course.

Rosa is 86, bright and alert, and does much of the preparation herself, r supervises her Peruvian-born live-in companion.

The next night we took them both to dinner at a Slow Food osteria thirty kilometers down the road toward Torino.

It was in a small village, actually more a large family farmstead, up in the hills, up an alarming number of switchbacks. (This has been the case with three of these osterie now.)

The restaurant seated about 24, and had a staff of two: man and wife, each of whom both cooked and served. (And, presumably, cleaned up.)

The menu was much like Rosa’s, which I had feared. It was completely different in finish and somewhat more extensive in range, but neither better nor worse in flavor or technique. We all agreed that it was very good indeed, and I would go back, perhaps with Rosa next time.

Lindsey has been walking without her crutches for two days. We don’t go for walks, but this is a significant improvement.

Today was the festivity of the 14 July, but I’ll describe that next time.



¶¶¶

Barjols, 14 July

That circus set the tone of our Barjols visit.

Today, for example, we went into the village for our breakfast, George, Lindsey, and I. We sat at the Cafe Martigny over cafes au lait — George had an espresso — and watched the street.

It was much busier than usual, which I attributed to the holiday — many fewer working, more walking the street in that purposeful manner Lindsey had noticed in the French.

We asked Jean-Philippe’s mother, who brought us our coffees, whether there would be a parade. Oh yes of course, she said, growing more animated at the thought, At eleven o’clock.

Eleven was when I was supposed to phone Alice in Paris, and I wanted to do some writing, and George had things to do, so when we finished our coffee we paid, saying we’d be back, and George asked if we could have our table back, and we drove home for an hour.

We got back just before eleven. I know, because the churchbell sounded eleven strokes, and I looked at my watch, and it said eleven, and two minutes later it sounded eleven again, and I realized my watch was two minutes fast.

The street activity had increased. Before, there had been the little drama of a man parked outside the Casino supermarkette who on returning to his car found his battery too weak to start it, and who had then lighted a cigar, and waited a bit, and made a couple of phone calls, and then tried again, with no more success.

Someone drove up finally, and had to drive further up the street to turn around and point in the right direction, and that required the clearing of the adjacent parking space, and a considerable backup down the street where one lane is closed off because the falaise is crumbling away, and up the street where it turns the right-angle before the trafficlight.

But now there was neither time nor space for such dramas, though the man in the blue shirt continued to hang out is thirdstorey window looking for them.

Familiar people walked one way, returned a few minutes later the other. The man who’d slipped in some dog-droppings two days ago walked by, his eyes on the pavement. Motorcyclists arrived, parked, bought cigarettes, had a coffee or a glass of rose, and left, all ostentatiously.

The eccentric slim woman in the flowing black dress walked by with her stick, its knob carved into a fox head, and stepped into the cafe for a few minutes, and went gracefully back toward the post office.

The big bakery items truck double-parked outside most of the bakeries, one after another, contributing to the backups.

The Cafe Martigny was very busy indeed. Jean-Philippe worked the till, his wife the bar, his mother the tables. I went in to telephone Alice, and found the bar interior crowded.

We had a pot of tea, George and I, and Lindsey a hot chocolate, and watched all this. It was getting on toward twelve and the parade hadn’t materialized.

The man who’d walked by carrying a baritone horn at eleven o’clock, walking down toward the Place de la Mairie at the other end of the center, walked back, carrying in addition to the baritone horn three baguettes.

Pas de parade, I called out, forgetting that “parade” is a false cognate in French; “As you like,” he answered, unless it was “as you see”: the last word was indistinct.

By now Lindsey was on an orange juice, I a rose, George another coffee. The traffic was constant, and we noticed many of the cars were from other regions.

Across from us at the right-angle the two directional signs stood: to the right for the péage, the toll-highway, in the direction of Aix; to the left for the direction of Nice.

In either case you drive twenty kilometers or so to the on-ramp, the former at St. Maximin where we’ll go tomorrow for another look at St. Mary Magdalene’s skull, the latter at Brignoles where we went Wednesday en route to see Dominique in Nice.

And then it struck us: all this traffic was coming from the highway to drive up to Aups where the Tour de France was going through from Avignon toward Draguignan.

This was confirmed by a few media trucks, one Dutch, the others Belgian, who had apparently lost their way.

Our parade never arrived. It couldn’t: there was simply too much traffic to permit the closure of the streets. That’s why we’d noticed three cops, two men and a pretty young woman, walking down toward the Place de la Marie a little after eleven, and back fifteen minutes later toward to gendarmerie: they must have gone there to advise the band to drop the whole project.

I suppose we missed a band concert at the other end of town. Oh well: we missed the parade last November, on Armistice Day; the circus had folded last week without performing for us; we missed the bullfight and pig races Tuesday night.

Instead we converse, converse, converse: fathers and children, cause and effect, romanticism and classicism, developed and underdeveloped countries.

We shop and eat and occasionally cook. Lunch today: two jars of cannelini, a can of tuna, a chopped onion, salt, thyme (no sage to be found), olive oil.

And yesterday I built George a bookcase, nine feet long by eight high or thereabouts, and we unloaded the boxes of unpacked books from his storage closet. You can imagine how pleasant this was for me! Books!



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Vincelottes-sur-Yonne, 17 July

Four years. That represents nearly half the lifetime of Grace, when she was here with us, four years ago; and a third her present age.

It’s nearly a quarter Eve’s lifetime. A tenth her uncle Paolo’s. A sixteenth ours.

This way madness lies. The relativity of time-spans, as they represent a fraction of our ages, has always fascinated me.

There is of course nothing to be done about it. The time goes by; it goes by quicker as we have less.

We stayed in this hotel four years ago, Lindsey and I — I had thought it must have been two. We were with Grace, driving to Paris for a return flight, spending a last night in the country — just as we are doing now.

Vincelottes is a small stone Northern town on the peaceful Yonne, which drains the mostly pastoral country lying between Burgundy and Ile-de-France.

Vincelottes is between the Chablis country and Auxerre, and the table here at the Hotel les Tilleuls (yet another Hotel les Tilleuls!) is burgundian, and the chef looks as if he might be Burgundian, or maybe Alsatian.

He is heavy-set without being stout, a bit under six feet high, with a face that recalls Virgil Thomson’s description of Gertrude Stein’s: like a Roman general’s. He stands in his chef’s whites with his arms crossed across his chest, and speaks deliberately, with irony.

You are in luck, he says, this is the first time the sun has appeared in two weeks. You can take your aperitif on the terrace.

The terrace is on the bank of the dark and quiet Yonne, across the street from the hotel: three white pavilions in a contiguous row, protecting a number of square plastic-resin tables and chairs from the rain.

A pleasantly coarse-featured farmer was waiting his turn to speak to the chef.

You like Burgundian food? the chef asked me, as I waited for Lindsey to come down from the room. That’s what we have here; I have just cooked 350 kilos of fresh escargot.

Your aperitif will be based on this man’s wine, he continued, gesturing to the farmer, he makes a good red in Irancy.

A conversation develops, for the winemaker has tasted Oregon pinot noirs, and merlots from the state of Washington.

I agree they can be good, but opine that there is one wine which represents my country best: Zinfandel.

This brings a cascade of agreement from the farmer. The pinot noirs and merlots of the United States can be good, but represent attempts to duplicate French wines, attempts doomed to fail.

But Zinfandel! There’s a grape that speaks of its terroir, the earth it grows in; and a wine that’s being made by people who listen to the grape, not the industry. And then you have good wine.

Worse yet, the chef said, who’d been thinking his own thoughts, are the assemblages the Americans make, looking for a Bordeaux.

All this was promising, as was our room, the same we’d had four years ago — a big front room looking out on the quiet village street and, across it, the Yonne and its border of trees.

The tilleuls stand in a row just this side the pavilions, five or six lime-trees with huge stems beneath neatly trimmed balls of foliage.

(The French like to torture their trees, George always says; to which I reply that the French like most aspects of life bien regulé, well regulated.)

Our first course was absolutely wonderful: a thick slice of fattened duck-liver, served on a plate with some redcurrants, some raisin chutney, a good pinch of pepper and nutmeg mixed, and another of good salt. With it, brioche toasts and a glass of late harvest Gewurtztraminer.

From there, though, the dinner went downhill. You foodies will have to wait for the details; I’ll almost certainly be writing a fairly extensive piece about all our eating on this trip. For now, suffice it to say that it went downhill.

We thought about our dinner here four years ago: almost exactly the same, down to the chef’s banter on presenting the menu.

We though also about the previous night’s dinner, in a fancy hotel-restaurant in a provincial town in Provence, where we at with George and his daughter and her boyfriend, a correct French hotel-restaurant dinner without any pretensions.

Part of the problem at Les Tilleuls was the impossible menu, offering far too many things to too small a clientele. (There were four tables served, and three of them spoke English.)

And part of the problem was the chef, I think, but this is very subjective on my part.

I’ll write another time, perhaps, about the hotel itself, very comfortably and rather curiously installed in a tightly clustered group of buildings — probably an old Burgundian farmstead incorporated into its village as it grew, maybe centuries ago.

Now, though, it’s a day later, I’m thinking about today’s events in Paris, and all too aware that we’ll soon be doing the tedious final packing for our return.

There’ll be one more message like this, perhaps sent simultaneously. Then it’s back to the desktop at home, the correcting and amplifying and so on.



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Paris, 18 July

What a nice hotel Dominique found for us here! It’s between the Blvd. St. Germain and the Seine, between Rue St. Jacques and the Boul’ Mich’, with nice rooms looking at St. Severin, and a full-length tub in which Lindsey is now napping.

But what a day it’s been! First we checked our favorite Paris tree, the ancient robinier planted in 1602 at St. Julien-le-Pauvre, because I was afraid it might have been blown down in last December’s storm. (It hadn’t.)

Then to an internet cafe to get e-mail: eight messages, and thank you all very much; you’ll get responses on our return home.

Then to Cafe Panis (!) for a croque-monsieur for lunch.

Then to Myra Hoefer’s apartment near the Place des Vosges to meet Alice, who’s staying there; and a quick trip to two museums with her: the Luxembourg, for a private collection ranging from a couple of delicious Fra Angelicos to a marvelous Bonnard (and a hundred things in between); and then to Beaubourg.

There we saw a big Picasso sculpture show, just about all the ones he made that are small enough to get into a museum. Alas, the one that used to be outside the Eglise St. Germain is still missing; but nearly everything you know was there, and a lot of unsuspected things as well.

The Pompidou Center is just as irritating as ever. We first saw it in 1977, when it opened with a big Duchamp show. It’s been closed for a year for complete overhaul, but a quarter of the escalators still weren’t working, the men’s restroom is completely inadequate, and the cruel French genius for roundabout traffic flow is working overtime.

And then the question of dinner. By now it was nearly nine p.m. Willi’s Wine Bar was full. Balzar had a long wait. So we walked over to the old standby, L’Ecurie, and Lindsey finally had the aioli she’s been lusting for, and I had my usual: a green salad with walnuts and saddle of lamb.

L’Ecurie’s kitchen is about forty inches wide by ten feet long. Two men work in it: one at the grill which is also an oven, where he broils the meat, bakes the apple tart, and prepares the sauces and the desserts — chocolate mousse, creme caramel, and so on.

The other makes the salads and washes the dishes. A barman makes coffee, dispenses wine, produces the sangria that’s delivered to every table gratis at the beginning of the meal, and pours the calvados that comes ditto with the check.

He also waits tables, along with another guy. How many are served? I’d guess sixteen at tables on the sidewalk, two dozen at tables inside on the ground floor, and perhaps another two dozen downstairs.

Maybe four salads to choose from, maybe six main courses, maybe a half dozen desserts. Also a few extras, like Lindsey’s aioli.

Nothing fancy. But the bread is organic, the salad greens fresh, the lamb tasty. Everyone is happy. The waiters crack jokes, hum to the piano jazz that plays quietly in the background, the cooks are quick and competent and watch the diners enjoy their work.

The place was full; we sat at the counter that serves as waiter station and guardrail at the head of a precipitous staircase to the cellar dining rooms.

At one point a couple came in and asked for a table. The waiter pointed to the only available chairs, two across from one another at one end of a table at which five regulars were eating.

They rejected it and left. The waiter shrugged. It’s this kind of place, he said, If you don’t want other people around, you have to go somewhere else.

It’s a Paris institution, unchanged in twentyfive years that I know of. Since it’s in the Sorbonne district it’s full of young people, writers, students. A lively crowd.

It’s not for everyone. You might not like it. I’ve always wished I could take Alice there, but she was eating with Louvre people.



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Envoi: Berkeley, July 20

And now we’re back after a smooth flight from Orly marred only by a hour-and-a-half wait for our baggage. Next time pack lighter! Carry-ons only!

We still haven’t been home, because we went directly to a party in Bolinas, staged by Alice and the restaurant at the request of Saveur magazine.

There past and present chefs and cooks of Chez Panisse cooked and ate suckling pig, gazpacho, extraordinary salads and desserts, and drank a pretty satisfactory range of wines.

Deborah Madison met us at the airport, where she’d arrived a few minutes earlier, and we drove out together, and back to Alice’s late at night — thanks, Deb — and now we’ll all go down to Cafe Fanny for breakfast, and then a meeting and lunch and then, somehow, the final drive home to Healdsburg.

Lindsey’s put her crutches away. Everything seems back to normal. We’re curious so see our house and garden. It’s been a marvelous two months, but it’s time to get back to normal.

Thank you all for being such patient readers — not one letter of complaint, except for those long lines of type. There won’t be any more of them, at least not on a daily basis.

We wish you all as fine a time as we’ve been having!





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