Pyrenees with my dog

It was supposed to be a good day for a getaway in the Pyrenees.

I imagined rustic stone villages set against a backdrop of crisp white peaks and blue sky—photogenic material for my travel blog. The weather app on my phone predicted sunshine and 20C which was pleasant weather for the first Sunday in October. 

Joining me on this adventure was my dog, Luka, my affable rescue hound. We set off by train from Toulouse to a town called Montréjeau, in the Hautes-Pyrenées department of France. 

It’s a journey of about fifty minutes in a largely empty carriage. Luka lay at my feet, unhappily wearing the muzzle that was strictly required by the train company. I was looking forward to the crisp, mountain air, and sunshine bathing the scenery. 

Instead, as we emerged from the station, a cold mountain wind blew rain into my face. I shivered in my light jacket. Checking my phone app., it read 13C. The clouds were so low, no mountain tops were visible. 

What I’d hoped would be a comfortable, uplifting outing was curdling into something else.

My transition from life in Canada to life in Toulouse also hadn’t gone quite as planned. A year in, and I still didn’t feel connected to my new home. My apartment was cramped (no room for bathtub nor clothes dryer). The job market was tough, and my social network patchy. Sometimes I felt adrift, though my loving dog helped. I’d hoped this day trip to the Pyrenees would cheer me up and give him some freedom to roam.

At least, I thought, I could still take photos for my travel blog and salvage something from the chilly, dank day.

When the rain let up, a muzzle-free Luka and I made our way down a wide boulevard lined with pollarded trees and dreary stucco houses that looked shabby in the flat light. Surprisingly for a mountain village, the main street felt almost Parisian in its Haussmann-like, grandiose proportions—but it was empty and desolate. 

The village centre lay ahead, atop a hill. I snapped a photo of Luka looking up at it hopefully.

Then, the unthinkable happened. My phone died.

I stared in disbelief at the black screen while the cold rain started hitting my bare head with a thousand little daggers. Reboot? Nothing happened. 

Over the years, my cell phone has become a vital extension of my body. Now it felt like a limb had been lopped off. What about the map that I had downloaded with my hiking circuit on it? What about my return train ticket, stored on my now dead phone? How would I convince the train conductor that I had indeed purchased the return ticket? 

Worries piled up. It occurred to me that I hadn’t told a single person about this outing. The boulevard, like the next six hours before my scheduled return journey, stretched out ahead of me, unpromising and dreary.

Just up ahead the main road crossed a mountain river that bisected the town. The Garonne River, closer to its headwaters in Spain, was smaller here than in Toulouse. Instead of crossing over it on an arched stone bridge, we stepped off the main road to pause and to take shelter under the canopy of a Catalpa tree. The river, a smooth liquid jade, was a stone’s throw away.

On the opposite bank, I noticed a majestic mansion with an elegant turret sitting amid lush grounds that sloped down to an ornate balustrade along the riverbank. Then, I spotted two donkeys, two goats, and a sheep staring at me placidly from beneath a palm tree. They must have been hidden, munching on grass or hay, behind the balustrade. Maybe they were curious about Luka and had raised their heads to take a look. I regretted not being able to take a photo for this blog.

While I was admiring the view, an ancient shepherd with a wooden crook approached, with a shaggy white dog beside him. Luka stiffened with interest. I asked him in French if there was a restaurant nearby. Not stopping, he grunted a response in a mystifying country dialect and motioned toward the stone bridge.  

Luka would have liked to have followed the dog, but instead we trudged toward the bridge, and after a hike, we found ourselves in an arcaded square where a dozen villagers were gathered at the sole restaurant, Chez Jules, that doubled as a bar-tabac.

Hooray! A friendly waitress showed me to an indoor table by a window overlooking the arcade. I perused the menu and took out the bone I’d brought for Luka.

Without the phone to absorb me, I took in my surroundings. The inside of the restaurant was modest–several square tables divided by empty wine barrels that had been placed on end to serve as side tables. A long counter on the other side of the room was part cash register and part bar. A few older men stood chatting with the bartender, a burly man with tattoos on his forearms.

The men broke off their banter when a young blonde woman wearing tight designer jeans and heels came to the counter to pay. They seemed to fall silent out of admiration. As soon as she left, they resumed their talk. An older lady, perhaps seventy-five, sitting at a nearby table was dressed in a busy print dress, with thick stockings, and sensible shoes. She reminded me of my mother’s country relatives, far away in the Loire Valley. 

I spotted familiar packets of Hollywood gum for sale below the cash register. I relaxed a little, as memories rose of my childhood and family—and the fun we used to have together. I started to breathe more deeply and feel more comfortable in my surroundings.

Feeling warm after my lunch of pizza and a half pint of cider, I asked the waitress if we could move to an outdoor table for coffee. She smiled and invited me to sit anywhere I wanted. With Luka newly installed under the table, I watched as a parade of local families arrived to enjoy a Sunday meal. It was clear that the patrons knew one another because they greeted each other with the French bise. I caught the twinkling gaze of an older man with a goatee and a missing front tooth, who was eating a plate of mussels and fries. He gave me a wink. I winked back.

The rain had stopped, and the sun was punching through the cloud cover. Refreshed and revived after the long interlude at Chez Jules, Luka and I set off to explore the countryside. My goal was to hike to the next village, about 5k away, which I could see on the next hilltop: Gourdan—but I was on the wrong side of the river. Just as I started to worry about this, a handy footbridge came into view. Things were looking up!

With my dead phone in my pocket, I followed my intuition. It felt good. A gravel path widened. I allowed Luka off his leash. He leapt and pounced through the tall grass, and sniffed the earth, behaving like the hunting dog that he is. 

The sun warmed us, and birdsong cheered us onward.  

The church steeple of Gourdan, the axis mundus, rose above the village, surrounded by forested foothills. We hiked up to it, passing the tiny village on the way. We arrived at the small square in front of the church, thirsty and tired. I pulled out Luka’s dog bowl and a bottle of water and we both had a drink. As a lapsed Catholic, I resisted the pull to enter the church, content to sit outside it, enjoying the vista of the apple green pastures lined by thick forests.

It was here that I experienced a distinct moment of stillness. The wind had died down, the clouds had lifted, and the air was warm in the sun’s rays. Several red kites, once an endangered species, circled and soared above the church steeple in the unchecked sky.

I decided to wander along the narrow winding road behind the hill a short way, to see where it led. I was soon rewarded with a picturesque scene: dozens of tiny white lambs, like little clouds, only a few days old, slept and lounged on the bright green grass while their mothers grazed and watched over them. Luka’s floppy ears perked up when he heard a lamb bleat, but he stayed calm and so did the mothers. 

By now it was mid-afternoon, so I didn’t have a lot of time left before the 4:20 p.m. train back to Toulouse. After an easy hike past tidy farms and houses with colourful shutters, we reached the train station. As a matter of habit, I pulled out my phone to check if the train was on time but then I realized my mistake. I put the dead phone back inside my backpack, next to a sketchbook I’d packed just in case. 

We waited outside the train station looking down the boulevard as we had five hours earlier. Sunshine had broken through the low clouds and colour had returned to the blue shutters of the houses. The leaves of the pollarded trees shimmered green and gold in the light.

As I stood looking at the pleasant scene, I was inspired by an idea. I had forty-five minutes left before the train to Toulouse came. Why not go back to the majestic mansion and do a painting of it? I thought that if I hurried, I might be able to capture an image for my blog after all.

The timing was tight, but I felt a pull, so I decided to take the risk. 

For the second time that day, Luka and I walked down the main boulevard from the train station toward the hilltop town and the river. When we got to the mansion, the animals had disappeared, but I was able to complete a painting. I turned back happy with this success.

Halfway back, an old plant pot in the middle of a garden caught my eye. Strange. I hadn’t noticed it before. I didn’t know why, since it was quite visible in the middle of an open space on the other side of a wrought iron fence. I peered through the pickets to look at it. Then, for some reason that I couldn’t explain, I slowly stepped backward. I saw something in my peripheral vision that caught me completely off guard—there, hanging from one of the pickets, was Luka’s muzzle.

We made it back to the station on time to catch the train. I hadn’t realized I’d lost Luka’s muzzle, so I felt lucky that I’d found it; without it I doubted that we would have been able to get past any of the attendants on the platform.

As for my return ticket on my dead phone...in the end, the train conductor didn’t even come round to check! But it wouldn’t have mattered that much to me if he had. I would have figured something out.

Now I was unfettered.