In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Camille Dungy talks about developing particular and intimate relationships with place, adding “everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others … should … take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy.” This series of posts #Plots&Plants offers a chance for writers and environmentalists to talk about places and plots to which they are particularly attached or invested in. #Plots&Plants will act as an archive and record of places which we will later be able to reflect on as we continue to experience environmental emergency and loss.
THE PYRENEES BY SOPHIE BUCHAILLARD
In the summer of 2001, a few weeks before I first moved to Wales, I took a two-week trip to the Pyrenees and stayed in a dry-stone shepherd cabin with no electricity or running water. It was a peculiar little building at the mercy of the elements, erected in the middle of a field populated by a herd of a dozen cows. From there, I walked across the mountain, from the French side to Spain, through Euskal Herria – the Basque country – and back a few times. Each journey took three days. I carried only what I thought I needed: bags of nuts and dry noodles mostly, a small tent, a sleeping bag, a cup, a bag of instant coffee, a little gas burner and some matches. Enough water until the next watering point. The bag was heavy and by the end of the first trip, every bone in my body felt like it might be bruised. Yet I persevered, spurred on by some intangible desire to immerse myself in this vast, and at times inhospitable landscape of rocky terrain and ice-cold rivers, shaped by tectonic forces and relentless winters. Using the cabin as an anchor, I retraced lines on a topographic map, waking on the shaded side of the mountain some days, fingers frozen, fumbling for matches to start the flame of my little gas cooker and make warm coffee as if it were the most important thing in the world.
On all the pictures from that summer, I am smiling, a broad smile the like of which I haven’t noticed in the mirror since. Something about the paring down to simple needs, the self-sufficiency, the focus on walking miles to reach a water point, feeling the weight of all your belongings digging into your shoulders. Looking back at the little cabin, this time I spent in the Pyrenees is the happiest I have felt my whole life.
No phone. No people. Just vast mountains, which I knew claimed incautious walkers every year, and the strain and release of walking between two points, interrupted only by the odd mountain sheep, intent on eating the ropes holding my tent up at night, and the thrill of marmots welcoming the sunshine in the early mornings. I learnt who I was that summer. What I was capable of achieving, with very little. I developed a lifelong appreciation for a natural world that, as a city-girl, I’d externalised, but which seeped into my very bones, so that when I came to Wales it is to Bannau Brycheiniog – then the Brecon Beacons – that I came to find solace when I began to feel homeless, displaced by unfamiliar sounds in a forest of people. I took a bus from Cardiff to the Mountain Centre in Libanus and walked across to Brecon, anchoring myself to this new place, feeling a little more at home, a little less alone, with every step.
Sophie Buchaillard’s novels explore the themes of identity and connection in response to migration, mental health and trauma. Her debut novel, This is Not Who We Are (Seren Books), was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2023. Assimilation (Honno, 2024), her second novel is out 29th of February.
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