(Day 10 – St. Gaudens > Rieulhès – 9 July 2025 – 107 km, 1235 m)
Today I dust off the people and places of childhood fairytales and adolescent fantasy books and movies and welcome them back in gorgeous living detail after years tucked away long-abandoned corners of the mind.
I travel through two forests today — lush and verdant, with trickling streams, beds of fallen oak and pine leaves, little orange flowers I haven’t yet identified, white lilies, the distinct scent of wet earth and rotting wood, cricket chirps and bird songs echoing through the trees, whitish butterflies popping out on occasion, and sunlight patterns that turn the ground into shards of shadow and light. Save for one car and the steady click click of my bike hub when coasting, the forest muffles all the honking and cranking and blasting of the modern world. Hansel and Gretel, elves, dwarves, the Elvenking, Little Red Riding Hood, my D&D character, Aslan, and others peek out from behind trunks and branches. It is thrilling and comforting. There is no beckoning bony finger, shiny apple or wolf dressed as granny; I am in rolling slowly, so very slowly, through the forest — willingly and wholly, contented and at peace in a way I cannot faithfully describe.
Between the two forests lies Notre-Dame de Lourdes, and I brake at a light just to the side of the imposing sanctuary and wait for all manner of sick and ailing people and all manner of persons with disabilities to move or be wheeled over the crosswalk en masse. They have come for a miracle, to join the ranks of the 7000 others who purport to have been healed of their maladies by drinking the blessed water from the sacred grotto. I cross and begin to slowly pedal upwards as I catch Rapunzel letting down her magical locks down from a sanctuary window, the frog hopping aside her, waiting patiently for a kiss, Miracle Max laughing heartily. (Two days later, the person who laughs heartily is the physical therapist I visit in the city of Pau to address the numbness in my hands and fingers, joking that I should have stopped to drink the grotto water myself).
After the magic forests and the land of miracles, I reach the haunted house where I am to spend the night. It is a partially refurbished old farm house, remotely situated a good way’s up a steep hill. It is covered floor-to-ceiling with nicknacks, bibelots, posters, plastic flowers, pots, pans, tacky decorations, plush and once-live stuffed animals, calendars, cup holders, musical instruments turned thimble racks, mementos from 2004, strange and faded photographs of persons whose eyes follow me as I walk to an fro, crocheted quilts with years-old layers of dust, incomplete children’s book series, and so on and so on in every single room and hallway of the house, with countless freaky, half-dressed dolls placed in pots or hung from their backs in the corridors, kitchen, and (most disturbingly) bathrooms. The bedrooms are furnished with hundred-year-old empty cradles. The beds and floors creak. I am on the top floor, beneath the pitched roof. The lodging outdoes every Halloween haunted house I have ever visited and will ever visit in this lifetime.
And so ends a magical day of reacquainting myself with the cast and characters, hamlets and haunts that magnificently colored my childhood and adolescence.
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