TheBanyanTree: Ramblin' hither, also: yon

[Karen Cooper]

Hi, all.

I don't think the list accepts HTML, and I don't know how to send 
e-mail in HTML format anyway.  Unfortunately, that means at all my 
carefully drawn accents graves, and italicized French, and most 
important my links to photos and John Bailey's journal are all not 
showing up here.

If you want the complete story, it's at: http://www.blurty.com/users/indre

Otherwise, here's my report from France.

Regards, all.

Karen.
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The French are magnificent cartographers. The Michelin tire company 
makes maps so famously good that the Allies used them to find their 
way around after D-Day. And the Institut Gèographique National puts 
out a series at 1:25000 scale, with such detail that the local map 
shows not only our house, but our cave. Every public footpath and 
farm access road is marked, so going off for a cross-country stroll 
is quite possible.

We bought the map showing Azay-le-Rideau. It covers little enough 
ground that B.'s morning bike ride goes off the chart for quite a lot 
of it. But this map helped me figure out my evening walking route. I 
used it today to take a hike.

I ended up covered just 2.7 miles. (The map is in kilometers, 
naturally, but I laid a piece of dental floss along my route and 
checked that against the map scale, then did the math. I bet I'm 
close.) And it took me three hours to cover that ground, because I 
was out photographing wildflowers. Sometimes every few feet I'd find 
another new one, and take a few pictures.

I started along a fairly big back road.  Two cars can pass each other 
on this route, even at speed. Nevertheless, the locals trim back the 
overhanging trees so that they don't encroach on the roadway. Given 
this odd haircut, the understory fills in and makes it impossible to 
see into the woods. It's a little creepy.

July is the month when the farmers roll up their hay bales. I don't 
know how long these just sit in the fields, but it seems that 
sometimes the hay bales have a mind of their own. The one I saw in a 
ditch surely wasn't supposed to be there.

Soon enough, I turned off the pavement on a chemin d'exploitation, a 
farm access road. I have the idea that walking along these is 
perfectly legal and acceptable and people are welcome to. Once away 
from the cars, I only saw one person all day, and that across a field 
a great distance, so I couldn't actually ask. I saw occasional signs 
forbidding hunting, and one that forbade mushroom hunting, but 
nothing saying private property, nor anything like it.

I planned to walk over to something called the Grand Allée. It's a 
perfectly straight chemin d'exploitation, running through the heart 
of the local forest, the Foret de Villandry. I had no idea why it 
might be a good place to go, but it was a trampin's ways off, and I 
thought, why not? I'd go see.

Leaving the pavement behind, the way lead straight into the woods. It 
was cooler in the shade, of course, though much too late for any 
woodland wildflowers. I made better time, not stopping to photograph 
the flowers.

A little aside: My very favorite journal-keeper on the Internet is a 
writer in the UK named John Bailey. He's retired, and writes about 
his quiet life and its dear small pleasures: cats, gardens, coffee. 
He's got a fine sense of whimsy and importance, and I am charmed by 
his writing again and again. Not so long ago, John Bailey wrote about 
the history of place, which is built up in deep layers in England and 
France and all over Europe. It's different on the plains of North 
America. The house we are staying in here was standing when the first 
white people staked claims in Minnesota Territory. But John knows, 
and we all know, that most history disappears with memory. That 
permanency means nothing in the end, and legacy is nearly impossible 
an objective. I passed a hollow spot next to a bend in the road, and 
wondered if that were once the site of someone's home.  John Bailey 
described what I was thinking better than I ever could.

So, my way rambled past hedgerows and meadows, all aflutter with 
butterflies and ablooming with the midsummer flowers. Eventually, I 
found the Grand Allée, which was a through-going disappointment. It 
was a logging access road, roughly made and torn through the piney 
woods. Wide, weedy, and unpleasant. I quickly found my way back to 
the charming paths the tractors used to access the fields.

We'd had rain the night before, and the sun pulled a lot of moisture 
into the air. The distances became hazy. Still the views were quiet 
bucolic countryside as I neared home. It was hot, sweaty, sunny, and 
despite all that, quite wonderful.

Most of my wildflower pictures were lousy snapshots, washed out in 
the bright noon sunshine. But I did get a nice picture of Queen 
Anne's Lace, a flower I've always liked. I didn't know until a friend 
told me last year that sometimes the flower comes with a single 
purple floret in the center and that that one is the Queen. There's 
plenty of Queen Anne's Lace along the edges of the fields.

K.