Hiking to Bibémus

Planted March 1, 2016

The path that leads to the Carrières de Bibémus starts just past the Lycée Paul Cézanne.

I took my first hike to the areas east of the Bibémus plateau on January 31, a month ago today: a bruising 15-miler that reminded me that I belong off the couch and on the trail. I had been living in France for just over a month by then. My partner moved here to take up a postdoctoral research position in Aix-en-Provence; I needed a change of scenery from Mountain View, California, so I moved on Christmas Day to France. After several hikes here, I realized that I’ve actually wanted to have more views of mountains and quiet, open spaces — and less frustration with living in the shadow of Google while contending with career moves and watching my well-heeled friends walk off to tenure-track jobs and fancy consultancies. Near the end of my time at Stanford and in the Bay Area, my hikes in the Santa Cruz mountains became a central pleasure of my life: As I filled my lungs with the conifer-tinged air of Provence, I knew I had found a fitting successor.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire dominates the landscape east of Aix-en-Provence. Sainte-Victoire is rocky and spinal. It reminds me in several ways of the mountains of San Diego County. The massif, however, is composed primarily of limestone unlike the granite sheets of El Capitan in San Diego (itself recalling the sheers of Yosemite).

The hike to the plateau isn’t difficult and mostly unfolds on paved roads (cars are the only real hazard and for only part of the way). After reaching the top, hikers find themselves in a lightly wooded area, the Carrières de Bibémus. Rangy pines quietly hover over oaks and trees whose names I don’t know beceause of tree blindness. This is the site of the famous quarries that Cézanne visited in his attempts to find ever new angles from which to paint Sainte-Victoire. I’ve returned many times to the Plateau de Bibémus in February, and in the evening the quarry cliffs jut out like molar stalactites while Sainte-Victoire rises cream-gray in the distance, flanked by leaves in the foreground.

The eastern ridge of the plateau provides an unobstructed view of Sainte-Victoire. It’s impossible not to want to sit down with bread and some sort of liquid and enjoy life away from the hurry below. Bibemus, “we shall drink,” is more than just the cell of a Latin verbal paradigm. I’ve seen bicyclists lug themselves up the plateau only to avail themselves of a bottle of Bandol rosé while conversing in French. The tenseness of French vowels come through even while eavesdropping across straits of foliage.

East of the plateau, the soil of the trail leading to Lac Zola and Lac du Bimont has a chalky, crumbling texture. The sound it makes against the flam accent of my footfall is like dusty static until solid rock takes over on the canyon cliffs between the plateau and Lac du Bimont. The soil is fine and varies in yellowness between chiffon and amber. On the plains even farther east of Bibémus, the exposed trails have an albedo reminiscent of hills like white elephants.

I hiked as far east as Lac du Bimont on January 31, turned south for several kilometers, and then followed ruddy narrow trails that wound through the jagged dales south of Lac de Zola, the result of a dam Émile Zola’s father completed in 1851.¹ Le barrage de Zola, as it is called in French, was painted by Cézanne, like so many natural and non-natural wonders in the shadow of Cézanne’s mountain. The area to the south of the barrage, the Éspinades, alternates between dense undergrowth and exposed hills from which Sainte-Victoire is easily visible. By the time I reached the Éspinades and found myself on the southern edge of Lac de Zola, the afternoon had settled into colors I don’t often see in Cézanne’s paintings. I find them hard to describe with words as well (yes, I know that is what words do). In the winter light the colors were sullen but vivacious — some ill-understood meshing of latitude, climate, the declination of the sun, and the individual variation inherent in perceptual psychology. Perhaps this time of day reminds me of a condition “memory painted from paradise,”² to shift Betty Bennett’s description of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Italy to the evening colors of rural southern France.

While walking the thirty-kilometer stretch on the last day of January, I found myself once again drawn to the paths of solitary artists and writers. I’ve spent the last several months chasing down where Cézanne walked and painted. In my native California, I like to walk where Muir walked; someday I will hike the Muir Trail, perhaps the entire Pacific Crest. While living in Germany I once spent an entire day exploring the forests near the Drachenfels, which gave me an opportunity to wander in the head of Heine, source of haunting and longing poetry that maintains a weird freshness in an age unsuited to iambic tetrameter. I think, for me, all of this walking-forward-ness comes down to wanting to be enveloped by places that are old and seem forbidden and even a touch menacing, with all of their ragged beauty intact in the midst of postmodernity’s rush to make an app out of it or engage in endless scolding.

My hikes to Bibémus and the foot of Sainte-Victoire have reinforced a commitment to physical and emotional respite in an era in which technological lock-in, in the sense Jaron Lanier describes in You Are Not a Gadget, is a silent overlord of vaguely obedient social behavior in the swamps of neoliberalism. For all of the real virtues of technology, I feel a wholeness return when I engage in one of humankind’s oldest and most technologically obtuse haunts: wandering. Like daily journaling, walking keeps me honest about my emotional and intellectual needs and keeps me connected to the things I love, however counter-intuitive tramping in the semi-wild can be in that regard.