The Wanderer above the sea of fog

To Selene.

After a heatwaved Saturday, Sunday was grey. The kind of mid-grey leaning towards white and which you wouldn’t know if it’s going to color the entire day or only a fleeting and uncertain morning. The previous day’s suffocating atmosphere had simmered down, the night’s humidity lingered; or was it only a countryside’s privilege? Hiking in the Pyrénées was the only safe and cool haven the day before and was way less appealing as I woke up. I would have preferred to spend a lazy day enjoying this profitable weather… But the commitment was made and, as hammered by my hike buddy, you sometimes need to go against your own stroller flow in order to meet the mountain.

I therefore went against my own flaneur flow and hit the road, with my one and only brother and my aforementioned companion, towards the Pyrénées Ariègeoises.

And, to be perfectly honest, the weather on the road was not to convince me we were right to have followed our commitment. A Normandish drizzle was sweeping the windshield, telepathically freezing the very summertime outfit I chose for that very summertime hike. We went through intergalactic gates as we were 4-wheels climbing passes, but nothing seemed to change, the Ariège was trapped in a weather bubble I would almost have been relieved to trade for the previous day’s wall of heat.

Thus, when we arrived at the Col de la Core – our hike’s trailhead – the grey sky made room for an ivory whiteness. A fog, similar (to my own surprise) to a Maroccan hammam’s hot steam more than hard rains’ Irish haze, was blinding the scenery. As we had gone up, we actually got closer to the sun and its heat filtered by the mossy air’s opaque particules. We then were a higher cloud’s fluffy prisoners.

The air’s softness had reassured my naked legs, I finally felt ready for this August morning’s local and ephemeral adventure.

My journey started at the stone praising for WW2 passeurs, those who escorted outcasts, opponents, victims, of Vichy Regime and its cousin, German Occupation; I stepped on the Liberty Trail. Wrong parallel or Godwin Point, it nonetheless touched me thinking of the world I was evolving (and am still evolving…) in. Because, that morning, one of my heavy heart’s reasons found its roots in the outside; facing violence insidiously distilled in our lives for years, for months, for weeks. But fortunately, both healed through my steps and humbled by the wilderness’s phosphorescent beauty, my soul was receiving the grace of a truce – maybe as passeurs and exiled were 80 years ago -; I threw away all my recent labels “selfish”, “irresponsible” or worst “too silly to understand the real fight for freedom”, which I have been given against my own will for weeks. I could be simply me again, sincerely “lost” in front of a world irrevocably escaping my understanding each minute, deeply “wounded” by Afterward World’s dissensions and “fragile in my whole unperfect vital quest”. Pierced by the mat light’s translucent beauty through trees, I felt free like I haven’t for a while. I reconnected to forgotten sensations; proof is my soul thrown on my screen like during my pilgrimage, so foreign so much the world is far from how it used to be, so much I am far from who I used to be. Pierced by the mat light’s translucent beauty through trees, I was not any limiting labels anymore, I was a simple human on the Earth. Equal to everyone and everything; endlessly tiny in front of the huge World.

Relief gained me one step after the other. During that fleeting minute, during that endless minute, I was the human from the beginning of the world. And all hikers as well, and my companions too. We were so little things compared to the huge wilderness. Our arbitrary and human laws were so insignificant compared to mountain’s unchanging constancy. The higher I went, the more I let my mood behind, that mood I have been trying to write for weeks but my words kept sliping away. I let fake realities downthere to better get the one and only truth. Unseen and unspoken.

And I could have left it there, thinking my imagination was too utopian to believe a hike would be enough to free me, even fleetingly. Yet, landscapes came to my rescue: we went through the clouds wall and got to the world only Gods may gaze at in any circumstance. Mythologies were wrong, Mount Olympus doesn’t look at Thessaly, it sets up deep in Ariège. I know because I witnessed it weeks ago! And I was like my front page’s Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer; I faced, dazzled and moved, above the sea of fog pierced by irregular and shy peaks.

I clinched to my radiant and puzzling achievement feeling. That emotion would have been enough to make my day and balance my sorrows… But Gods gave me a more permanentpeace, effortlessly leading me to Eychelle pond where sun shone all day long. Maskless and passless, I crushed that opensky restaurant, feet in water and light hearted. A microsm had rebuilt up there, oblivious of below rules. Dogs snorted in dark waters, children loudly whispered; even Babel Tower belonged. Worldwide languages were talked, meals were shared, chatting were told, encounters happened. We were clumsily trying to let nature laws rule over policed and ill-mannered hearts.

Humanity has a long way to go though…

Thankfully, Gods still have some kindness for Humans whose mortality and imperfection are so desirable for them; they distilled one last magic to golden my better world’s utopia. At the end of our alpin halt, a steamy fog ephemerally swept waters’ beautiful mirror and took any sorrow towards Heaven, and erased any bad memories. It was so fleeting we almost indescribably felt like it wasn’t real. It was simply mesmerizing. We couldn’t get tired of it, amazed each time by this hazy waltz.

I still had to leave Heaven and Gods’ realm though, go down under clouds wall which had finally reached out, and return like wet rats in the unworthy human underworld we belong. Fog was not a sea to gaze at from above anymore, it soaked through my skin and had hidden in people’s eyes, “promises for upcoming frightened storms” despite utopias spread into the sky.

I hope someone else will be able to put some blue sky in their threatened eyes…