Part 7

Tucked into my daypack was my camera and snacks, a high-fat selection with a sleeve of the gloriously light and crisp Petit Beurre biscuits by LU and a small net of Babybel cheese, and I picked up six 1.5 liter bottles of water to share.  Our volunteer hiking crew consisted of seven students: myself and two others who were experienced hikers, my roommate Alejandro who hadn’t hiked much but was in great shape, and three inexperienced hikers including the two flatmates from Korea.  As I had suggested this trail and organized our departure, I carried most of the responsibility for the latter three, and passed the water around to them, but conveniently ignored their small, but significant, red flags.  These were just minor things, like wearing denim jeans for a strenuous hike in high summer, or flat-soled skater shoes for walking on a rocky, uneven trail, or slinging a camera with a long, heavy zoom lens over a shoulder.  Everyone was all smiles posing with the trailhead marker, but all we had done so far was walk about half a mile along paved streets rising out of Cargèse.

Evidence of civilization in Corsica stretches back more than 8000 years, to the late Stone Age, with the most famous archeological site at Filitosa, a hamlet at the southern end of the island.  Scattered throughout the site are numerous carved statue-menhirs, tall, thin stone pieces with detailed faces, weathering and watching beyond the past 80 centuries.  From its terminus, the Mare e Monti trail quickly gained elevation along the northern face of a hill, generously granting views of the jagged coast and interior mountains topped with bare granite, until it reached a grassy plateau, skirting fences that divided private property.  Before diving back down the hillside into a deep valley, the trail kissed a road at a hairpin turn through the driveway of a farmhouse or chambre d’hôtes, ringed by manicured hedgerows, and where, now an hour into the hike, we enjoyed a brief hydration break.  Framed by four large protective timbers, each solidly planted in the ground for the practical purpose of preventing farm equipment from driving over it, was one of these statue-menhirs, unadorned by any informative signage and standing about eight feet tall, simply set out in the middle of the front yard and I, oblivious to its provenance, casually snapped a picture.

The cacophony of a rural menagerie filled the valley, goats, sheep, horses, and dogs all making their presence known.  The trail had followed the descent of a broad, dried stream bed from the farmhouse, thankfully marked by orange blazes that prevented us from wandering off into a field, and now coincided with a dusty dirt road on the valley floor.  The livestock were all securely pastured behind fences, but otherwise able to graze freely.  The oddest sight was dozens and dozens of dogs tied to trees in a clearing just off the road, their terrible yelping and the clattering chains casting a foreboding pall like something out of a horror movie.  I had thought they might be hunting dogs and tying them up ensured that wildlife wasn’t frightened away, but as we walked closer and could see through the space in the trees, these dogs were in no shape to hunt.  Mangy, emaciated, and exposed bare to the fiery sun in the heat of the day, we could only hope that they were somehow cared for.  The barking continued clawing at our backs long after we had passed, only mercifully drifting away with the zephyr as the trail veered off and cut uphill.

I grew up on CCC trails in the American West, diligently planned and carefully chiseled from the sweat of millions of men that supported their families during the Depression.  In general, there had been no maintained historical trails, and starting fresh, the Forest Service and other government organizations designed switchbacks in trails during sections of significant elevation gain on a sheer slope which both reduced erosion and the pitch of the trail.  By contrast, if you needed to climb up an incline for whatever reason, it seems only natural that you would simply walk directly, and not meander back and forth.  Indeed, that is what this trail, an ancient path to homesteads in the mountains, now did.  Hundreds of meters up it went, and the loose, cascading gravel made the going even slower as we were constantly losing our footing.  Only years later did I gain the perspective that this was the norm, with trails in Appalachian New England, for example, venturing straight up thousands of feet to the peaks of the White Mountains, and not even diverting for massive boulders or rock faces, and that I had been spoiled by paths for summiting that were born out of recreation, and not necessity.

The smiles in the group photo at the top, looking down at the valley that slides into the bay from over 2000 feet above, were demure, fewer sets of teeth visible through ear-to-ear grins and much more sweat than at the trailhead.  Closing in on noon, we paused for lunch here, and spotted the few ocher clay-tiled roofs of Revinda, our destination, peaking out of the trees across the valley.  Our naked exposure to the sun as it rose higher accelerated eating, but rendered the scenery that much more spectacular, the sapphire zenith yielding to a cirrus haze at the horizon and then inverted until broken by the verdant tans of dried fields that stretched up the hills until the slope became too much and the oak shrubs dominated all the way until the boulder field in which we sat, so we all took the necessary pictures and moved on in hopes that we could find more pleasant and shaded rest soon.  Revinda was hardly more than a handful of buildings indeed, mostly for animal husbandry, with one store-front business run by a hardy woman who live in these rugged hills.  She seemed to do it all, offering beds for the night, preparing lunches for the day, and harvesting pure Corsican honey, the prized maquis d’été, proudly advertised by a sign aside the entrance to the modest dining room.  We settled under a broad chestnut tree just above a stone wall, drinking down the diminishing bottles and petting the lone donkey who was also escaping the midday sun.  

That much water and walking challenges the sturdiest of bladders and I was asked by one of our group if I knew where the bathroom was located.  While I was far from fluent, a couple years of French in college easily pushed me to the most conversant among us and I approached the proprietress, who was intermittently chatting with the two men eating.  “Excusez-moi, où est la toilette?” I asked, with the reasonable expectation that she would point through the open door and say something like “À la gauche” and then it would be simple to relay the message and we would line up patiently waiting to use the facilities.  Instead, she spread her arms wide, seemingly embracing the earth from which all is taken and to which all must be given, and raising her head toward the heavens replied in a sort of mystic prayer, chanting “Pas de toilette; la nature est votre toilette.”  We each searched for our own altar of micturition among the widest-trunked trees set a bit further back from houses and roads, but only slowly through the fog of mild dehydration did her solution become more obvious.  We were patently foreigners forcing ourselves upon this tiny village and our group outnumbered its entire exterior population by more than a factor of two, not including the donkey, and anyway he pissed outside all the time.  With a couple more sips of water, we came to admire the generosity of her poetry when she was well within rights to stare me down, eyes boring into my soul, and bluntly say “Va chier derrière cet arbre”.

The fellowship began to crumble on the slog back.  One of our group thought that we were going too slow, and decided to run the miles that remained to Cargèse.  The inexperienced hikers fell further and further back from the rest of us, now burdened by useless plastic bottles, and I shared what I could to maintain both morale and their health.  The shade returned as the trail transformed into the stream bed, but lacked any reprieve due to the climb.  I was becoming legitimately scared; this was the only way back, three of us were suffering from dehydration, and the Petit Beurre biscuits and a shoulder to grasp I could offer were rendered effete.  Foot planted in front of foot purely from the feeble motivation that at the top was that chambre d’hôtes and the promise of water, water, water.  With the trees thinning and the crest approaching, I ran ahead, passing by the hedgerows, crying out “Avez-vous de l’eau?” and luckily the woman tending the flowers looked up and gestured me to the house, filling bottle after bottle with water from the hydrant.  “Merci, merci beaucoup!” I called over my shoulder sprinting back, and her confused look changed to concern as she could now see the reason for my haste, three people crumpled over in her driveway and two others doing their best to calm and comfort.  Their first sips were like fresh breaths of life, averting total disaster.

Bearing several bottles of Powerade in my arms, I passed them around, demanding they be drank here, in the supermarket parking lot, in my presence.  5 pm was already long in the past, and the hike was ultimately more than 17 miles and close to a full mile of gross vertical elevation gain on a trail whose quality varied enormously.  I had both severely underestimated its arduousness and had been irresponsible in advertising the hike, very nearly paying a dear price for it.  With the Powerade down, one of my flatmates excused themselves from our circle, and passed back into the supermarket.  He returned a few minutes later, wearing a fresh, wide grin, and cradling a liter of vodka.