Les Pointieres, Beaufortain

by Patricia Perkins

Montagne ou je suis né
Pays de mes vacances
Lieu de mes rencontres
Les Pointieres, Beaufortain

Mountain where I was born
Land of my vacations
Gathering place
Les Pointieres, Beaufortain

I had expected Old Williamsburg a la French Alps, towering mountains, beguiling cowbells and a sanitized and restored little village the way we Americans romanticize the past. I was looking for rosy-cheeked actors in costume looking fat and earnest as they wove on a handloom or beat a red-tipped piece of iron on an anvil. In the American version, you do the walking tour with a brochure in your hand, and there is a cute souvenir store at the end and an auditorium where videos show more in-depth "how it used to be." I'm not denigrating that approach to history, but the Path of Memory was something else. It was a walking trail through a vanished way of life punctuated by simple poetry carved on wooden signs.

My French friend Christine and I were spending a week doing walking tours around her home town of Chambery, France. Whenever I visit her, we drive up to the Beaufortain, a land of ski resorts, vacation homes and a wonderful hard cheese called Beaufort. We load up on cheese and walk the picturesque town of Beaufort. Driving back we pass Albertville, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1992. The region of Beaufortain looks up, awestruck, at the massive Mont Blanc, one of the French Alps' most spectacular mountains.

Faire un bout de chemin
Un soir our un matin
En équipe, seul, avec un copain
Et comme l'oiseau chanter un refrain

Take the road a bit
Evening or morning
With a group, alone or with a friend
And like a bird, sing a song

The tiny hamlet Les Pointieres was our destination the day of the walk. The mountain slopes here are steep. Just over 50 years ago, however, there were 172 farms around Les Pointieres' chapelle, the little church that was the center of the community. Since the arrival of ski resorts, mechanized farming techniques and factories in the valley cities, there are just 23 farms left. Today, the mountain trail takes about two or three hours. Hikers begin at the chapelle, which now houses a simple photo exhibit. We picked up a trail map there and vowed to come back for the photos.

Ce sentier est le seul
Livre d'histoire
Dont on tourne
Les pages en marchant

This path is the only
Book of history
Where you turn
Pages while walking

The hikers, along with the people whose ancestors lived in this little hamlet, have created this trail to commemorate both the life of the peasants and the relentless and wonderful power of nature to reclaim her own land. We walked past the ruins of farm buildings, (sometimes nothing more than cellar holes) past the hand-carved wooden boxes that catch spring water and past mill and barn. At every stop, the trail makers have left wooden signs of poetry, Burma Shave signs celebrating the mountain, the now absent farmers and the power of nature that surges back across the landscape.

La vie est un chemin
Que l'on emprunte chaque matin
Des lignes droites et des detours
On en decouvre un troncon chaque jour

Life is a road
That we take every morning
Straight lines and detours
Where we find a fragment every day

Here was a whole mountainside of farms, sheep ranchers and owners of cattle and horses. They thatched the roofs of their buildings. They had to keep hauling dirt up the steep mountainsides to create their fields. They piled stones they'd dug out. Life was brutal in many ways; days long, winters dark. The young people went off to the big cities to make more money and have a little leisure time. For a while, they would come back to the mountain, retire there or decide that city life wasn't as fulfilling as life closer to nature.

Chemin avec des bosses et des trous
De la boue et des cailloux
Chemin borde de fleurs
Aux multiples couleurs

Road with humps and potholes
Mud and rocks
Road bordered with flowers
Of many colors

Along the Path of Memory, then, there was an intriguing tension between the obvious pleasure the hikers derive from a mostly empty landscape and this historical hardship that this landscape once represented. The back-and-forth between delight in the views, the rivulets, the alpine meadows and the old homestead cottages now in some ruin, the restored barns with photos detailing how to thatch a roof and the piles of stones--this see-saw is played out on the carved wooden signboards that appear at intervals on the walk.

Chemin de vie
Sous le soleil et la pluie
Peu importe le temps
Toujours en avant a pas lent

Path of life
Under sun and rain
The weather doesn't matter
Onward, slow progress

The signs are graced with doggerel and rhyming poetry that exhorts the hiker to ponder the importance of water or to understand that where forest now grows there once were fields, cows and the sound of cowbells. Life was hard--the signs tell us. Life was maybe more real. On the other hand, listen to the birdcalls right now. That's real.

A chaque arret une virgule
Plus on avance moins on gesticule
Au bout du chemin il y aura un point
Nous n'irons pas plus loin.

Every stop a comma
The further we go, the less we bustle
At the end of the road, a period
We won't go farther.

The evolution of the French landscape reminded me of Vermont and the Green Mountains, the northern end of the Appalachians Mountains that span the East Coast of the U.S. There, the forest has taken back the cultivated fields of the folks who lived and farmed 100 years ago. Walking through the forest in New England, we pass moss-covered lines of stone mounds that once were well-tended walls and dents in the ground that once were root cellars. Wood was cut and stacked, vegetables stored in leaves, meat cured and grain milled to flour. Now all that's left is the millstone and some rusting bits of iron. Much of what once was cultivated land is now furry green forest in New England and many of the same reasons apply for its abandonment: ski resorts, factories that paid wages and mechanized farm equipment that didn't negotiate the rock-strewn slopes of the mountains.

Marcher, c'est aller
Au bout de soi-meme
Tout en allant
Au bout du monde.
Le vie, l'eau, le vaisseau
Savoir se mouiller
Ecouter et regarder
Ce qui est beau

To walk is to go
To end of yourself
All the while going
To the end of the world.
Life, water, vessel
To know how to get wet
How to listen and consider
Beauty.

Throughout the walk, I could hear echoes of my friend Helen, who lives in Asheville, North Carolina, at the southern end of the Appalachian mountains. She was born in the mountains and farmed all her young life. Yet, as soon as there was work in the factories in town, she and her husband moved. Factory work! How could that hold a candle to life growing your own food, making your own butter and jam? I asked Helen.

"Life up in those mountains was hard. Don't you forget it," Helen replied.

Revenir avec des amis
Là où l'agriculture a péri
Se promener, marcher
Respirer la santé

Come back with friends
Here, where farming has perished
Take a walk
Breathe in health.

Une famille, un enfant qui sourit
Des pres, une fleur qui s'epanouit
Aujourd'hui
Une foret avec son ombrage
Pour abriter les betes sauvages

A family, a smiling child
Fields, a blooming flower
Today
A forest with its shade
To shelter the wild animals.

Une cheminée qui fume
La faux que l'on bat
Sur l'enclume
Le coq qui chante
Ici, avant que
L'épicéa s'implante.

A smoking fireplace
A scythe we beat
On an anvil
The crowing rooster
Here, before the
Spruce trees take root.

Des champs, du seigle et du grain
De la farine, un four et du pain
Passant il faut que tu saches
Qu'ici en 1950 paturaient des vaches

Fields of rye and wheat
Flour, an oven and bread
Passerby, you have to know
That here, in 1950, cows grazed.

Construisons des ponts
Entre les nations
Entre les regions et les religions
Entre les partis, entre les couleurs
Des ponts pour un peu de bonheur

Let's build bridges
Between nations
Between regions and religions
Between parties, between colors
Bridges for a little happiness.

Peu importe les cultures
Il y a les lois de la nature
L'homme est parti
Car il fallait bien
Gagner sa vie.

Culture matters little.
Nature has its own laws.
Man is gone
Because he had, after all,
To make a living.

That tension between the past and the present, that elasticity that stretches between them and, in a very poignant fashion, that acceptance of the inevitability of change..."Because it was, after all, necessary to make a living..." is what sets this tourist circuit apart from so many others. There is no backward yearning, exactly, as much as a remembrance, and acknowledgement of what life used to be.

The old photos in the chapelle show the life in the village, the faces of those who lived here, aerial photos of the area, pictures of kids sitting in hay wagons, girls on their way to church and making hay and thatching a roof.

Toi qui marches sur le chemin
La vie te prend par la main
En arrière inutile de revenir
Mais de l'histoire se souvenir

You, who walk this path
Life take you by the hand
No point in going backward
Just remember the past.

These are the ancestors of this place, the photos say, and you are here to do something else, to walk and breathe and pay attention. So pay attention to what was, the signs tell us, while you think about what is.

"Un sentier pour marcher, non seulement avec ses jambes mais aussi avec sa tete et son coeur," says the last sign. A path not only to walk with your legs, but also with your head and your heart.