Tag: hiking

South Korea

December 13th, 2024

Part 6

As my heart decrescendoed and my vision returned, I noticed that I was far from alone anymore, a group of spry, gray-haired women all dressed head-to-toe identical in boots, multicolored paneling synthetic pants and jackets, all under broad sunhats and carried by the sounds of gossip, laughter, and the flam clicks of hiking poles marched past, and another group sat across the trail from me, with the only differences being their sex and relative velocity. The men eyed me with curiosity, back to the trail and holding my camera at arm’s length, and generously shared rice crackers and took my picture in front of the trail marker. Various peaks were now but short jaunts above this ridge, the spine of the dragon, and everywhere there was signage or an elevation marker, there would be some group of septuagenarians who would magnanimously thrust food into my face and kidnap my camera off of my shoulder, then insistently gesture to my mark in front of the interpretive board. The trail along the top was no easy going, typically bouldering on the knife edge or scrambling up a near shear rock face where a couple of bolts had been anchored many vertical feet apart, testing the limits of the definition of a non-technical foothold, and I found myself the slow one, their junior by four decades and passed by band of a half dozen where the trail was wide enough, the echos of their annyeoung haseyos soon abandoning me too, swallowed by the forest.

Four 20 year olds stood looking out into the clouds obscuring the valley floor, and the five of us were the only that I saw the entire hike that deviated from the official uniform, both by our relative youthfulness and my green t-shirt and shorts and their, each one of them, shirts of deep blue, home during summer break from the University of Michigan. They were coming up while I was now headed down to complete the loop, and further down more and more people were rushing up, hikers bubbling from the source, a pagoda just below the ridge. Hundreds were here, resting, snacking, or chatting, amongst the picnic tables, taking celebratory group pictures, or refilling water bottles, while from speakers above the amplified chant of a deep, booming voice lead prayers that were, it seemed, mostly ignored. With midday coming all too quickly and along with it the unbearable humidity, I lingered no longer than necessary to film the scene myself and to catch a final glimpse into the deep gorge under the high sun, then dodged beneath the canopy, beating on against the current that continued to flow steadily up, until the last boulder gave way to tarmac. My watch read 12:37 pm.

The park entrance was bustling, shopkeepers shouting across the road, hawking their soup or dumpling special, families eating under the canvas tents propped behind the registers in the food stalls, and children mining the piles of toys on a storefront sidewalk for that perfect water gun, remote control car, or plastic katana. Despite the animation and with no knowledge of Korean, there was nothing identifiable as a taxi stand, but just beyond the park gate, where I had been dropped off five hours before, was both a bus stop and an information kiosk so, accompanied by annyeong haseyo, I inquired about a cab back to Daejeon. The woman’s reply was clear, unambiguous, that the bus stop was directly behind me and the next bus would arrive in 20 minutes, and started augmenting a local road map with the transfers and bus numbers and intermediate stops, for which I was grateful, but I would greatly appreciate if she could please call a cab. No, a cab is too expensive she volleyed, and dug back in to how I would have to cross the street at the second transfer, but I insisted that a cab was perfectly fine, and on she continued, that I would see one bus pass before the bus I needed to catch, thank you, but really a cab, and would be dropped of a few blocks from the hotel which hopefully wouldn’t be inconvenient, but if it was, please, please, please, went my pleading, I am happy to pay for a cab. With a look of disgust and frustration, she put down her pen and picked up the receiver.

With the long drive back to Incheon and in my abhorrence for delayed inconveniences, I booked a ride on an excessively early shuttle bus and waited my turn to board in the orderly line at the stop, still deep in the darkness of night. Of course, the drive was uneventful, arriving with many hours to spare and the lack of a wait at customs provided no impedance, so I perused the shops to pass the time, picking up a ginseng tea for my wife as a souvenir. Now with only one fewer hour to wait, I settled in to a deep leather armchair in the United Lounge, where exclusively my yearly mileage and corresponding status provided entry, opened my computer and set to work replying to emails or polishing up the conclusions of a paper that we would soon post. The chores on the paper soon turned more intellectual, and I pulled out a pad of paper from my backpack and the ballpoint pen that was kept at the ready in my pocket and set to write some equations down and stare at them, to possibly divine some new connection or re-expression that illuminated the problem from a new angle. While pensively staring off at the lounge’s wood paneling, chin rested on the hand holding the pen, it slipped and landed tip first on my blaze orange shirt, rolling into my lap, and on my chest left an inky black line.
South Korea

December 6th, 2024

Part 5

My watch read 8:51 am. The wind through the open window of the cab was warm, comforting, just dry enough early in the morning to be refreshing, though the haze had settled and never left through the night. The paved road continued another kilometer from the parking lot and gate, first past a row of dark and shuttered vendor stalls, with only one or two out and sweeping or counting the till, many hours yet to greet the hordes, then into the forest and along a trickling stream bed, the formal, sacred entrance to the park through hongsalmun, one simple, staid, painted red and adorned by a small taegeuk, another smaller though much more intricate, with soaring storks set above roaring dragons and all amongst the green, blue, and red pattern familiar from the eaves of temples. More signage in Korean that I couldn’t read set rules and provided context for visiting the park, the accompanying pictures telling a complete enough story, the tall, stately Korean pines providing lumber for houses, while the nuts and pollen were widely used for food and in traditional medicine, warning of deer crossing roads, and a section of the park that was closed for the next 15 years and where camping, cooking, smoking, littering and making loud noises was strictly forbidden to protect the habitat of an endangered, endemic salamander. Where the pavement ended and the trail began, a broad, clear stone path that crawled up the valley, I checked my watch.

It is altogether too easy to get lost in the weeds in physics, to get so absorbed in the minutiae of some calculation, or to work for weeks on end to streamline some bit of code just to eke out 10% faster compute times. In many aspects of the profession, the rules are completely defined, and so you can take those rules and apply them to situations every so slightly distinct from others, and turn the crank, and keep turning and turning until some number pops out, or in other cases, you can even just apply the rules on simulated data and plot a whole distribution of points, one that has a bump over here and a deficit over there, and that is supposed to mean something and so in your paper you write some rhetoric to accompany the figure and claim victory in “understanding”. However, physics was always meant to be simple, even if the path to simplicity is long, tortuous, unilluminated, and with many dead ends or false intersections, and is structured around concepts, not exclusively equations. With new concepts, the cycle can repeat, slowly ratcheting up the mountain of knowledge through studying the details of an example and then another, identifying their common threads, then pulling them out to novel cases, and finally validating through prediction.

This had been the story in my subfield for several years now, with people drilling down on the rules, deeper and deeper into their own tiny pocket, seemingly becoming more disconnected from others who all attended the same conferences. Everyone had their darlings and to everyone else they were ugly, ad hoc, contrived, and meaningless debates would ensue over which was the “best”, but everyone had their own, private metric for measuring success and could always find some scenario in which they won by their own rules. The problem was that often any distinctions were only due to idiosyncrasies in the simulation, and not due to underlying, fundamental principles, and at any rate, experimental data would be the ultimate, dispassionate, unbiased arbiter. A few of us had begun to claw our way up out of the murky depths, and identify those handful of rules that became perfectly, exactly true in sensible limits, and away from those limits, still dominated the description of these physical systems. The beauty of working in asymptotic limits is that everything dramatically simplifies in such a way that any calculations are nearly superfluous, and we could see wide swaths of these techniques and procedures that had previously been host to the most bitter disagreements were actually identical in the limit, and differed most mildly in a realistic environment. Being so simple, we doubted ourselves, had no one really ever thought of this before?, but as test after test passed our uncertainty subsided and we earnestly set to writing a paper.

Set apart from the trees and shrubs and chirping birds was the trail, paved in large stones when the grade was shallow and stacked into stair steps where steep was unavoidable, an orderly human construction taming the chaos of nature. Up it went the mountain, completely devoid of deviation or switchbacks, exactly on the gradient of the slope, then as even the trees fell away due to the angle of repose of the scree, the trail went, and along with the stairs a handrail cemented into bedrock led the way and protected the hiker from the consequences of an errantly placed foot. I had past 100 vertical meters, then 200, then 300 from the trailhead, and heavier came the salty stinging sweat from my brow into my eyes, its cohesion adhering my shirt and pack firmly to my back, but still trusted my feet to keep the steady cadence left, right, left one stair at a time. Over 400 meters up, the false summits appeared where the hill briefly pulled away then disappeared and then another just behind it and on and on this went until I had passed 500 meters and my head grew light, darkness claimed my peripheral vision and the light that remained at the center was blurry and spotty, a crackling firework display within my retina, but my feet kept the tempo as the trees returned at the saddle below a few peaks where I slumped down for a breath and a drink of water, over 500 vertical meters in less than 2 kilometers of trail.
South Korea

November 29th, 2024

Part 4

At the word that we were to meet back here in one hour, I turned on my heel and set away through the packed streets, dodging shoulders, stuffed animals, and variegated arrays of “JonSport” backpacks, drawn toward the red and white spire that punched through the background of the neon signs that extended stories and stories above the pavement. Three hours by bus had landed us at Gyeongbokgung Palace for the mid-week break, an ancient site but continually restored to its imperial grandeur since the 1990s, brilliant lotus flowers set on fields of blue and green punctuating the free end of every ceiling beam, and the fat, gold Hanja script bowing slightly over the thresholds of each temple. The day had long since been hot and sticky, the masses of tourists and school groups resigned to the remaining cool that clung tightly under gateways and only braved venturing across the bare, open stone courtyard to reach the next shaded island, or to strike a pose amongst the explosion of pastels on the gabling. We had no formal tour, but were instructed by our self-appointed handler to maintain a rapid clip, determined to pass every structure and every wall and every moat if but for the few seconds required to depress a shutter and to listen for a word of what it was we were pointed at.

The ascent began once past Soong Eui Women’s College, a cluster of stately buildings etched into the hillside, where the winding road shook off its dashed centerline for slim, parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths and tucked itself into the thickening green canopy, and I banked left, glancing at the plaque map and up the first granite stair. Lunch awaited us outside the palace walls across boulevards lined with cute, anthropomorphized blue buses, around a statue of an enormous calligraphy brush sweeping a glossy circle onto its concrete pedestal, and into a pedestrian shopping district where I joined three others at a table adjacent to a restaurant’s peaceful interior garden. Positive reinforcement, gamsa hamnidas to bus drivers or annyeoung haseos from baristas, had encouraged my Korean, so I courageously asked the waiter for mul while the others searched through the menu. Complete apathy, no acknowledgement whatsoever, unblinking eyes and relaxed, open mouth responded, and again I said mul, and again the response was zombie-like, lifeless, no wheels turning behind the vacant stare. I could stand there and repeat myself all afternoon, but I resigned and said, in English, water, and something finally snapped, the waiter quickened and excitedly replied, “Oh mul!” When four full glasses arrived, we simply pointed to a few meals to share and raised all the fingers on one hand on the page with the pints of OB.

Thousands of steps lay before me, unrelenting and weaving up the hillside, passing synthetic cascades spilling into calm, shallow pools, kissing the decaying fortification then retreating back into the trees, and occasionally peaking through to the open sky at the vertex of a zigzag, progress tracked by the roofs of buildings now visible and those yet to be. The heart of the country lay bare, ripped from its chest and rent apart with the pieces, thousands on thousands of yellow ribbons tied to the hundreds of vertical metal poles, sandwich boards with prayers and drawings of a great lotus flower bearing the souls from the sea to heaven, and simple paper boats arranged in a grand flotilla floating on the grass, each with a toothpick mast but no sail. From its core, the tendrils of grief extended to the ideal point of boulevards, fluttering in the breeze on ropes hung from railings and on makeshift installations of bicycle wheels lashed together into a giant cracked eggshell. Only a month after 306 died in the sinking of the MV Sewol, outrage was directed all the way to the top, claims of incompetence and negligence, censorship and manipulation, and the golden blaze of city hall’s courtyard reflected back from the glass building and the hopes of 50 million rest in the assurance that it was transmitted through, too.

What a sight Seoul was from the summit of Namsan: the sounds of shoppers and buses and the stroboscopic lighting from advertisements on advertisements had already been filtered out through monochromatic high-rise sieve hundreds of feet below, replaced by the uncountable undulations of buildings that either disappeared into the haze miles away or abutted the verdant hills to the north, and an eery, lonesome breeze under which the conversations of 20 million were hidden. The Han river wriggled its way through the grey that itself had sloshed like a tsunami through the wide valley, low and quiet far away, rising then cresting as it approached Namsan, set far above as a refuge, and then crashing on its way toward the sea. N Seoul Tower reached another 230 meters to the sky behind me, with a single-file tail of tourists that weaved around the mountain’s summit waiting for their ride to the viewing platform, and as the spike near the heart of the city’s compass rose it was visible from anywhere, a waypoint for pedestrian dead-reckoning navigation. Some quick pictures was all the time I had, then a rushed descent retracing my path to the square where our group lazily waited, wandering in small circles, seated on benches, or chatting about the view from the top, easily accessible by a couple block walk from here and then hopping on the cable car.

The final two days of the conference ended much the same as it started, with lunches at locations strewn throughout Daejeon, including the local college’s canteen, and loud conversations over too many Dry Finish lagers after the sun had set. As I had no talk of my own to prepare for anymore, my attention to the remaining talks drifted as the weekend approached as I had arranged for an extra day of hiking in the nearby Gyeryongsan National Park, for which its kinked, rocky backbone ridges soaring 2,000 feet above the valleys resembled some unholy union of its eponym of a chicken and a dragon and bore the most qi of any mountain on the peninsula. I pored over trail maps, estimating potential elevation gains and optimal routes, reading reviews for the best viewpoints, and pieced together a three-transfer bus route from my hotel to the main gate, writing down the number of stops between transfers, on my laptop while at the front of the room there was pointing at the screen and some droning on about some other technique that could separate signal from noise. After the final talks, and after inadvertently lightening my burden by one badge, I thanked the host and casually mentioned the convoluted hiking plan for the following day. He was excited by this idea, for while he and the younger generation in general, apparently, rarely hiked, his parents found a trail every weekend, but vehemently refused to permit my bus plan to materialize. He took his notebook from his backpack and tore out a leaf of paper, writing directions to Gyeryongsan in Hangul for me to pass to a cab driver.

The brilliant red and embossed gold print menus were passed around to the eight of us that remained on the final evening, though rich in flowing Chinese script and lacking photos most of us could do nothing until a native speaker translated. Apparently, we had decided as a group that we had grown tired of Korean cuisine during the week, and so sought out a Chinese restaurant near the hotel that indulged our weary palettes. In hindsight this seemed rather unreasonable, but as the size of this group increased, so our collective ambition decreased and choices were limited to something on this side of the river, away from the hustle and bustle and breadth of options downtown. The dining room was quiet, empty, though dinner time on a Friday, but decorated extravagantly, exposed, knotty beams in the ceiling, marble and jade carvings in every niche along the walls, and an octet of high-backed leather seats arranged about each circular table. Before sitting down, before the waitress returned to inquire about our orders, the menu had been summarized into English and, as the ambiance suggested and the prices confirmed, this was an extremely nice restaurant where nothing was inexpensive. With harried shaking of heads and hurried pushing of chairs, we handed back the menus and searched for dinner elsewhere, somewhere where the house specialty wasn’t shark fin soup.
Vienna

October 18th, 2024

Part 3

Lunches went typically like this: as a junior colleague of the organizer from MIT, I was among those regularly selected for a meal off campus, at some favorite place of the organizer from UWien. Our cohort, relatively small and some days even small enough to fit comfortably at a four-top, would head out following our local guide and arrive at the restaurant that was, midday and midweek, almost always otherwise deserted. If today’s group was on the larger size, a crowd-pleasing menu and long booths were called for, but a small group could sit outside at a bit fancier place and a favorite returned to a few times during my stay was informally referred to as the French academy, not because of the style of cuisine, but because of its proximity to an immersion school. We would enter through a door that opened to a garden or park, tables set under the cooling shade of beeches, and request free Leitungswasser while the younger of the group chose a beer and the elder a Clausthaler, lest a full stomach and the heat of a summer’s afternoon lull them to sleep. Physics specifically was rarely the topic of conversation, a mere hour’s break during the whole day, but instead recommendations for Viennese entertainment, places to travel on the weekend, or the state of regional politics were discussed. At the request Zahlen, bitte the organizer from MIT would always wave off my attempts at pulling out my wallet, as Simons would be covering lunch.

Another evening saw me back in the Institute after dinner, the sun having long since set, back again writing at the blackboard, pacing to and fro, or just staring at it seated at the edge of my desk, hypnotized, thoughts unfocused and hazy, tumbling around in my brain but going nowhere. A cursory glance at my watch revealed that a respectable time for departure was long in the past, so I gathered my things and hurried down the stairs and out the door, walking at a brisk pace on the radiating pavement through the finally-cooled night air. This night was no busier than previous, I was still all alone on the tram track street’s sidewalk, though behind I could hear a car speeding up and then passing me, its illuminated scarlet tail lights and rooflight fading as it turned a corner ahead. Though it had seemed to be in a great hurry, once I had turned that corner, there the car was, parked, hazard lights blinking, and the driver’s door open and just off the sidewalk, at those same bushes into which that badger had waddled, I could make out the silhouette of a person, standing slightly hunched facing away from their car, legs astride of some invisible saddle, with the unmistakable sound of drizzling water. My hotel would be on the other side anyway, so I thought this as good a place as any to cross the street.

As with several times since I left, this Skype call had turned silent, staring, longing for each other, lonely and confined in 800 square feet with just blank pages of her thesis glowing from her screen. I could tell her about the food I’ve eaten, or the research projects that I had made progress on, or the baroque architecture of palaces and cathedrals and museums, or that opera is piped into the public bathrooms of the Wiener Staatsoper, but it made the chasm deeper, the rift wider. I was here surrounded by everyone in my field, days filled with busy lunches and talks and gossip with coffee and felt more alone, more that I was faking, putting on a face and acting to be excited by what I was doing around a hollow inside missing that part that inspired and motivated. Now long after midnight here and dinnertime there, I had to saw goodbye and a weak, resigned goodbye was echoed, miss yous exchanged, and with a kiss closed my laptop. The still air had done little to cool the room through the cracked window, so all I could do was lie in the dark on the springy double bed, a few inches too short for me so my feet hung over the edge, and stare at the ceiling until exhaustion succumbed to sleep.

I had scoped out a nice five mile loop for a morning run through a combination of MapMyRun and Google Maps that would take me north, away from the city center to quieter neighborhoods that hugged the base of the grapevined hills, and had woke early with plenty of time to enjoy the crisp morning before the sun had aroused the ground from its slumber and into its humid, hazy hypnopompic state. A few turns into the run, I had reached a waypoint, running adjacent to a stream, and jumped into and off of the road as the width of the cobbled sidewalk waxed and waned. Next, I should turn right at a major intersection, but the name of that street had dissolved from my memory, so I had to trust that my subconscious had internalized the route and would just tell my feet the way. My legs formed no such divining rod, however, and I was left to guessing, and this right seemed as good as I could expect, so away I went. I had not noticed that my path north had drifted significantly west to become nearly parallel itself with the base of the hills, so a right turn started gaining elevation and the road I was on shrunk and shrunk, rather unlike the behavior of major thoroughfares, and soon I was on a one-lane path, the shoulder overgrown with brambles, and that transformed abruptly into a flight of concrete stairs once the pitch had become too steep. Now certain I had missed my turn, I nevertheless beat on, with a certainty that a right turn would appear and transport me back to the familiar.

Enough right turns had eventually bore me back east, but not before gaining more and more and more elevation, the trees and brush had thinned down to tightly trimmed grass, and I had reached the pot-holed farm road that orbited the summit. Just higher now was the farmhouse, but I turned away, and there below lay all of Vienna, filling my view but silent, the sounds of the city waking up had not yet permeated to these heights. An emerald carpet of stringed vines rolled down and away, and stretched to the base of the hill into which the blanket of trees was tucked, quilted with the alleys and streets and avenues and boulevards. The majestic Danube, broad and blue, cut the western bank and drew the eye along a line southeast into the heart of Vienna, to just where the domes of palaces and spires of cathedrals peeked above the apartment rooftops. Farther yet, the haze had already started its morning meal, making its slow march north, devouring buildings and roads and leaving behind a formless, milky nothingness. This sight soon required a more and more extreme twisting back while running forward, but then mercifully the path cut steeply down and into the darkened forest, growing broader as tributaries rejoined until its delta spilled into that street I had missed, now almost an hour ago.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

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.

Tag: hiking

South Korea

Part 6

South Korea

Part 5

South Korea

Part 4

Vienna

Part 3

Cargèse

Part 7