The Best Travel Writing 2011 Read online

I am a woman who lost my relationship. Then I lost my nonprofit job to the California economy. Then I lost my home. I was tethered to nothing. There was nothing to take stock of. I did not know what to do or where to go. Then my aunt in Holland, who was very much like a second mother to me, died of cancer. Several years ago, she and my mother bought a three-hundred-year-old stone house together in this rural area of Lorraine, in the wooded rolling hills of les Vosges. The house normally stands empty in the winters. Now it stands even emptier.

  Lorraine is like a weary child of divorce; it has stood in the middle of countless gruesome and bloody custody battles with Germany for centuries, unsure of where its allegiance lies, deep in identity crisis. Steeped in a mish-mash of Gallo-Roman, Catholic, and Pagan traditions, it is awkward and gawky. With a shift away from small-farm agriculture and a decline in the mining industry in the early half of the twentieth century, its economy collapsed in a mass exodus of its population to Paris and the sunnier climes of the south. Now, most of the villages are deserted and still during the mist of fall and the sleet of winter. There are a few local farmers who eek out a meager living from their cattle or sheep, and laborers in the building trade who restore vacation houses for the Dutch and Germans. In the summer, the villages mirror the landscape and spring back to life. But in the winter, people do not come here. Except for me, because I decided that deep in my own identity crisis and depression, coming to a frozen stone home with no telephone or internet in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere somehow would be a good idea. I admit that I romanticized it, and I realize my error the moment I arrive. But in a way, this gray landscape holds a perfect mirror to my heart in its weary state, and I stay for months.

  My mother and aunt’s house is in a village called Serécourt and sits on a road just above the village called “Haut de Fée.” Literally, this is translated as “High Faerie,” but I soon discover that it signifies a “faerie mound,” which has pagan folklore surrounding it. The only neighbor on the Haut de Fée is the cemetery around the bend. There are no other houses on the road, which winds from the church to the cemetery before disappearing between cow pasture and into the woods. This may be because, as I discover, faerie mounds are burial mounds, magical places where the veil between the living and the dead is thin, and in a superstition-soaked region, one is not supposed to build houses on faerie mounds because it generally upsets the faeries. I guess whoever built my mother and aunt’s house didn’t get the memo. As my fertile imagination begins to run at night while I sleep in my recently deceased aunt’s bedroom, I am both comforted by that thought, as well as spooked when I begin to hear faint voices and singing in the house late at night. I start to doubt my sanity, but the sound is unmistakable.

  The nearest neighbors, an older, reserved Dutch couple named Hans and Elizabeth, walk by the house one day, and I strike up a conversation. I tell them about my experience, and they sheepishly admit that yes, they have heard some singing too, that they too have heard voices late at night in their house, and that Elizabeth has even seen what she thought was a group of nuns late one night in the footpath between their house and the former convent, now the summer home of a wealthy Parisian publisher. Hans and Elizabeth live in a 400-year-old house that has seen many ill-fated occupants. In World War II, a Jewish butcher lived there. He was taken away to the concentration camps. During the French Revolution, their house was used by the church, and the inhabitants wiped out along with most of the other villagers during the Reign of Terror, which sent to the guillotine Catholics who refused to pledge allegiance to the government’s control over the church. Before that, the plague swept through the village. If ever there were a house predisposed to ghosts, theirs would be it. However, we all agree somewhat noncommittally that of course there must be a plausible explanation for the voices, not wanting to sound irrational or prone to flights of fancy. “I think I was just over-tired, hallucinating,” says Elizabeth. Yet I see in her eyes that she is not fully convinced, and I find myself entertaining the possibility of ghosts, in the spirit of the folklore upon which this village was built. So I talk to the faeries just in case, and ask them to please take it easy on me, and when I pass the cemetery on my walks, I stop at the gates and call in to the centuries worth of bones buried there. “Rest easy, spirits of Serécourt. I am your friend!”

  Initially, I sleep a lot and spend my days indoors, reading, crying, feeding log after log into the wood stove, and drinking wine. I am in my late thirties, and I try to figure out where my life veered off the tracks. I had imagined I would have a fulfilling career by now. I had imagined my life with a partner who stayed, who would be next to me drinking wine and asking me for crossword puzzle help. I always imagined I would have a child, have children. My future children had become so real to me that their perceived loss stings almost as much, if not more, than the loss of love. When I first got to France, I cocooned myself in the safety of the house, extracting myself from a world I no longer felt like playing with. I loved intensely, I was loyal, I did my job, but those didn’t seem to be the rules of the game after all. So I don’t want to play anymore. But I eventually run out of wine, notice the rapidity with which I am burning through logs during the day, and so begin to venture out, taking walks and visiting nearby towns. And as I immerse myself in the history of Lorraine, I find more than quiche. I find other women. I find strong women, women pushed out by society, following their own paths, thumbing their noses at convention. Women who found their way in this landscape. I find Joan of Arc, who I learn grew up in a village nearby. I find hundreds of women who were unjustly burned at the stake as witches, one of the highest concentrations in Europe, thanks to the leading demonologist’s residence here in the sixteenth century. I find goddesses worshipped in a culture of Celtic, Roman, and Catholic tradition in this area, melting together in this muddy, rain soaked ground. Damona, the Roman goddess, has her name carved in many of the stones recovered from the Gallo-Roman ruins here. Epona, Rosmerta, and Nantosuelta, goddesses of fertility, also feature prominently in the artifacts they dig up here and take their place alongside the Catholic Virgin Mary. I find a long line of women who wove their way into this landscape. There are very few weak women in this culture.

  This is a region famous for water, the source of several large rivers, the site of hot springs which have fostered a spa culture famous in all of Europe for centuries, millennia even. In the fifth century B.C., a tribe of female Celtic druids settled here, at the source of the Saône River, in worship of the river goddess Sagona who brings forth the springs from the earth. I am living in the middle of a triangle of three large spa towns: Bourbonne les Bains, Vittel, and Contrexeville. These spa town clocks seem to have been set permanently on 1890 while the rest of us moved on to Pilates and Power Yoga, acupuncture and chiropractors. Sunday afternoons, the spas even put on civilized “tea dances” in the ballroom. I find myself suddenly plunged into a Jane Austin novel when I go to these towns to visit their farmers’ markets. Amazed, I wander through groomed rose gardens where “curists” sit in antiquated Pavilions and on benches along the promenade, in between their water cures for rheumatism or perhaps, one begins to wonder, for their tuberculosis or polio, quaintly unaware of the vaccines and antibiotics that exist outside the walls of this time capsule. Reading the advertisements for the magic spring waters that’ll cure what ails you, it would not entirely surprise me if leeches and bloodletting were also on the menu. I find myself wanting intensely to believe, wishing I could wash clean my afflicted spirit, but when I drink the special waters, I am not cured.

  One afternoon in Lamarche, the closest town where I can do grocery shopping, I pull over when I see a beautiful gothic steeple rising up from behind a tall stone wall. It appears to be a chapel of some sort. I find a place where the wall has crumbled and push through the brambles to make my way in, then stand, mouth agape, at the scene before me. I am standing in thick, deep mud, on the expansive property of an imposing chateau with two wings. With a large black thundercloud hangi
ng ominously above it, this is exactly what a “haunted house” looks like in every child’s imagination. There are several magnificent outbuildings, including the spectacular gothic chapel. But the property is now a morass of mud and junkyard and cow pasture. I climb over old motors and rusted washing machines to get a better look at the gothic chapel, its spires piercing the gray and threatening sky above. It is adorned with intricate carved stone flourishes. Through its crumbling arches, it is stuffed full of hay. The hay is propped up by marble gravestones from the cemetery next door. A cow lies in the muck beneath the chapel, lord of the most stately hayloft in the world. Other white cows stand about, up to their bovine knees in thick black mud, lowing at my arrival. We stand for many minutes, staring coldly at each other, each finding the other an equally unwelcome intrusion. A second outbuilding with a round turret decomposes in abandonment, its stone wall collapsed in on itself. It’s a disturbing scene, this forsaken estate which clearly was once quite majestic. Certainly once upon a time, horse-drawn carriages rode up this lane to deliver ladies in their Parisian fineries to this country estate. The image is incongruous with this swampy junkyard overrun with stray cats and dirty cattle. It’s a tragedy. How could they let it get this way? When did they stop caring? But then, one could easily ask me the same question. I imagine it crept up on them, just as it crept up on me. I snap photographs, then leave.

  I only go to Domrémy-la-Pucelle, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, because that’s what one does as a tourist in this region. I figure I’ll pop in, check it out, check it off my list. But it shifts something in me. Watching a video about her life in the small museum adjacent to her house, I feel deeply connected to her isolation, the sense of her difficulty as a woman. She spent her childhood a loner and a dreamer, walking through the woods. Later, after she left her family and went into battle, she spent nights alone, always in armor and male clothing against a sea of dark figures who tried to sexually assault her while she slept. I taste her loneliness. I walk through her tiny childhood home, put my hands on the modest walls of her bedroom, see the hearth where she sat with her family. Somehow, I never really grasped her as a real person before. I saw her only as a mythical icon. Seeing where she actually lived changes all that. I go inside the village church where she heard the voices of angels that told her to fight for France, to don armor and lead an army of men to defeat the British and take back her country. Whether or not it was divine intervention or mental illness that produced the voices, I marvel at the injustice she endured and her unwavering resolution, even when her former allies offered her up on a platter after she led them to victory. Sold out by the very people she had saved, imprisoned and sexually harassed in her cell by guards, sleep deprived, forced to endure months of twelve-hour days of relentless interrogation in a trial designed solely for the purpose of tripping her up in semantics and trick questions, she never capitulated. They called her “witch, soothsayer, false prophet, sacrilegist, idolator, apostate, scandalmonger, rebel, troublemaker,” but no matter what, Joan knew who she was. I envy her conviction and try to summon her strength. Even after having come through the trial without a single slip-up in her carefully worded testimony, after they ignored the lack of proof and convicted her of the ridiculous charges of witchcraft and heresy anyway, even then, as she was tied to a stake and burned alive, she stayed strong. Something about Joan triggers my fighting instinct. A pilot light re-ignites inside me. “Hold the crucifix up before my eyes so I may see it until I die,” Joan told them, even as the flames licked at her feet.

  In the weeks that follow, I find myself noticing more and more the hidden beauty of this place, behind the imposing grim façade which is there to frighten off the fickle, it seems. This place is for those made of stronger stuff, for those who refuse to capitulate. Its rewards come out of hiding only for patient eyes. One day on my walk in the woods, a red fox leaps across my path, its tail a proud streaming flag behind it. And on the front steps as I come home one evening, I disturb a hedgehog descending. He curls in on himself, nose tucked in, playing dead. A hedgehog! I am beside myself with satisfaction at this development and set a dish of milk next to the little ball of prickles, but it is committed to the bluff, and remains motionless, fleeing the moment I turn my back. The woods here are brilliant golds and crimsons, and odd new mushroom clusters sprout from the mossy ground. And the people here are salt of the earth people, but I find a delightful streak of twisted humor behind their weathered “visages de terroir,” their “faces of the land.” The doctor in town, whom I see for a kidney infection, is decked out in full western gear—leather vest, bolo tie, and cowboy boots—so that I have to check the name plate on his office door to make sure I am in the right place. He writes me a prescription with a smile and saunters out of the office in his clacking boots as though he’s exiting through the swinging door of a saloon. The pharmacist has a Weimariner dog that sits beside him in the small village pharmacy. “C’est mon fils,” says the pharmacist. His son. He produces a felt fedora, which he places on the dog’s head, and the dog walks around the pharmacy patiently adorned. This is a place of contrasts, warm against cold. It melts my icy view of the road before me. These are people enjoying the only life they have and what is before them, and their lives are hard work. Yet they find simple pleasures. And I find my rhythm, and the baker learns that I am here, so he stops his truck before my little house at 11:30 every morning except Sunday and Monday and honks his horn. I come down and he opens the side of his truck to expose the glass cases of pastries and baskets of baguettes. He is a jolly plump fellow, just what you expect a baker to be, and he sing-songs “bonne journée” when he leaves. “Maybe tomorrow, a brioche!” I say as he drives off, and he honks again and waves. In Monthureaux, I visit the butcher and order a pork pie and a bottle of wine. He notices my sniffling, and I tell him I have a cold from the frigid damp that won’t let up. Ah! Mon dieu! Sick! Lucky for me, he knows what to do. He tells me I must drink much more hard liquor, that the French never get sick because the alcohol burns the germs right out of them. He laughs heartily as he packs up my pie in crisp paper and makes a motion of tipping back a phantom glass to his lips. I eat my pork pie, which must have a pound of butter in the flaky crust alone and a pound of cream in the filling, on the steps of the town square, and drink straight from the bottle, and it is good. This is a place one learns to love slowly, I discover. And maybe my life is not over yet.

  I begin to write in the evenings, and I begin to like what I write. A tiny idea is beginning to form, a dream I had once and discarded because it wasn’t practical and I didn’t believe I was worthy of it. I decide I am going to apply to M.F.A programs in Creative Writing and try to become a writer. After years of writing press releases and articles in communications and marketing jobs, I’ve learned to forget about writing what I wanted to write, that I even have my own voice. The fantasy alone gives me a secret thrill. The thought of being among writers, of living as a writer, being back in academia, teaching even, feels like a naughty thought. But it feels good. It feels rebellious. It feels like I’m taking up arms against my circumstances and finding a new way into my life. It’s thumbing my nose at the past and deciding that I can start over at thirty-seven, that I won’t capitulate, that I won’t let myself go to ruin, but that I will renovate. And I spend the next weeks writing words that will become applications. I take walks in the mornings and drive into town in the afternoons, then write in the evenings until the middle of the night. I go to the library in Bourbonne les Bains to use the Internet, and I dare to ask three people across the ocean to recommend me to be a writer. I dare to write a statement of intent and proclaim my worthiness to be a writer. And I send the applications off to nine universities, asking them to help me to be a writer. And then I wait.

  One morning, I am awoken early by the distinct sound of a man’s voice inside my house, calling out. I bolt up in a panic and rush out to the kitchen to confront the intruder. The front door is wide open, but nobody is there. Confused, I go to
it just in time to see a man get into his Renault and drive away on the road below. I’m puzzled and alarmed, but I scan the room and see nothing out of place, so I close and lock the door before crawling back in bed. Fifteen minutes later, as I am drifting off again, there is a frenzied knocking at the front door. Again, I get up and go to the kitchen. I open the door, but there is nobody there. The same Renault from before is idling down on the road, the doors flung open. “Oui, hallo!” I call out into the wet gray morning. I hear knocking at the back door now. So I walk to the back door and open it. Nobody. I call out again, “Hallo!!!! Oui?!!!” So I return to the front door. And from around the side of the house the neighbor Hans appears with the same man I had seen drive away earlier. “Oh! Thank God you are O.K.!” Hans says. The man begins to speak excitedly in French, grabbing his head, pointing at the front door.

  Hans translates, as the rapidity with which the man speaks is too much for me to follow. It appears that he had passed my house on his morning stroll and had seen the door ajar. It had bothered him, so he returned with his car after his walk and saw that it was still open. He had come up to the house and poked his head in the door, called out for me. When there was no response and he saw that my car keys were lying by the front door, he became convinced that I had been kidnapped and murdered by an intruder. Afraid to go further into the house, he left quickly to get help. Asking around the village, he ended up at Hans’s house, where Monsieur Moreau, a carpenter, was working on the facade. He informed Monsieur Moreau that I had been kidnapped and murdered by intruders. Zut alors! Together they raced to the front of Hans’s house and banged on his door. Hans appeared and together they told him I had been kidnapped and murdered by intruders. Hans jumped into the car with the man. They raced back to my house and ran up the stairs, leaving the car running, where they finally encountered me, befuddled and sleepy and not murdered. And here we stand. The man is very embarrassed. But I am deeply touched by his concern. I had not thought anyone in the village was paying much attention to me, but it turns out they have been keeping a quiet eye on me all along, looking out for their American neighbor. I thank him for his concern, and assure him I am fine. It’s likely that the door had been left open absentmindedly the night before, when I had gone out to the barn to get more wood for the stove.