Because it's there
In Provence, Honoring a Poet at 6,263 Feet
Hikers on the GR4 footpath, which follows the route up Mont Ventoux, in the Vaucluse region of Provence, that Petrarch took in 1336.
THE spring day in 1336 when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux near Avignon in Provence, the Italian poet and humanist made history with his feet, mind and pen. As he wrote his father in a celebrated letter after the descent, “my only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.”
Mountain bikers follow Petrarch’s route on Mont Ventoux. Petrarch is considered by some to be the first mountaineer — and a pioneer of sightseeing.
This wish — to visit an unfamiliar place solely to gain an unfamiliar perspective on the world — has afforded Petrarch a nomination in various histories as the first mountaineer, and as a pioneer of sightseeing. “The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of,” Jacob Burkhardt wrote in “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,” his classic 1860 book, which links Petrarch’s impractical action to later shifts in attitude toward nature and leisure by European painters and writers.
It was to honor Petrarch’s whim that I chose to climb Mont Ventoux, 670 years later but motivated by the same desire. To look at an enormous pile of rocks as something other than an obstacle requires imagination, and though others had trudged up steep inclines before him, they don’t seem to have shown his peculiarly modern attitude toward the journey.
Guidebooks to Provence commonly mention Petrarch’s 1336 feat in their entries on Mont Ventoux, at 6,263 feet the most visible landmark in the Vaucluse region. A popular tourist destination since the 19th century, with a variety of local products trading on its name from wine to honey, the mountain is the area’s only major ski resort in winter. In the summer entire families trek up and down and picnic on the wooded slopes of this limestone cone.
Since the 1930’s cars and bicycles have paraded up its sides as well. There are three paved routes — originating in the villages of Sault, Bedouin and Malaucène. The Tour de France has intermittently scheduled one of its most brutal stages of the race over the mountain. Cyclists face a gradient in some places of 10 percent, and fierce head winds.
My main qualm in scaling the mountain on April 26, the very day Petrarch is said to have made his ascent, was fear of running into other pilgrims. As I motored into Malaucène, where Petrarch writes that he began and ended his journey, I searched for commemorative signs. The French love to decorate their country with plaques in memory of deceased writers and patriots. In the village of Chamonix, for example, an enormous statue of Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard recognizes his 1786 ascent of Mont Blanc. But even though the French play host to annual conferences devoted to Petrarch, I could find nothing around Mont Ventoux to indicate that this was where he had walked uphill into history.
The woman in the Malaucène tourist office was baffled by my request. Surely, there must be a Petrarch trail, I asked her. She directed me to a young volunteer walking in the door. “Oui, le chemin de Petrarch,” she said, shaking her hair loose from her motorcycle helmet. She pulled out a map and directed me to the GR4 path, about 2,200 feet from the summit.
As I would be stepping off the next day in the dark, I drove up to reconnoiter. This was prudent. No signs to the GR4 trail were visible, and without a map I would have been clueless; only after walking for five minutes did I stumble upon a trail sign on a small brown post.
Before bed that night I reread a translation of Petrarch’s letter, originally written in Latin. He had drawn inspiration from a passage in Livy’s “History of Rome”: “where Philip of Macedon, the same who waged war against the Romans, ascended Mount Haemus in Thessaly, from whose summit he was able, it is said, to see two seas, the Adriatic and the Euxine.” My authorial afflatus was Petrarch himself. He had climbed with his brother and two local servants. An old shepherd they encountered warned them to turn back: the mountain was haunted. I was heading up alone, but was certain I would run into kindred spirits along the way.
Leaving my hotel in the village of Mazan at 5 a.m., I drove half an hour, spiraling up from Malaucène, and found the parking area empty. I set off at 5:45, probing my way in the dark to the trailhead. My backpack held two blood oranges, a hard-boiled egg, a water bottle and a copy of St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” which Petrarch read aloud after completing his mission.
For the first half hour of my star-lighted hike, the pine cover deepened the chill of the morning. A chamois startled me by bounding headfirst down the mountain in the shadows ahead. But the rising trail, a series of switchbacks, was well marked, and gradually the eastern horizon brightened. Waking sparrows kept me company.
It wasn’t until I came across the first patches of snow that I sensed a problem. Packing my suitcase in New York, I had had to make a choice between the extra weight of hiking boots or more books, and the books won.
My Nike tennis shoes were fine on the dirt-and-stone path but offered no grip on ice. The higher I went, the more packed snow I encountered. At points I could plant my heels in the recent boot prints of hikers from previous days, but elsewhere I found myself slipping and bracing myself against loose rock. If it hadn’t been as perilous to retrace my steps, I would have turned back. My predicament was compounded by the thought that no one knew exactly where I was. The climbers who routinely follow this trail to watch the sun rise in summer, according to the guidebooks, were nowhere to be seen on the morning of April 26.
Petrarch never mentions ice and snow. The chief obstacle he faced was his own timidity. He berates himself for choosing easy, meandering grades while his brother chooses steeper ones. “I was simply trying to avoid the exertion of the ascent; but no human ingenuity can alter the nature of things, or cause anything to reach a height by going down,” he writes.
With his admonition in mind, and knowing that my ill-suited footwear couldn’t possibly be worse than his (leather drawstring boot? toggle latchet ankle shoe?), I pressed on. Twice, when the trail vanished, small blue arrows painted on outcroppings by earlier climbers pointed the way.
Emerging above tree line in tandem with the risen sun, I could at last see the communications tower at the summit. Another 20-minute trudge, a final 200-yard scamper over a snow field, and I was safely on the paved road. At 7:07 I reached the top of Mont Ventoux.
My sense of accomplishment was short-lived. The warmth of the sun in a cloudless sky was no match for swirling spring winds, a feature of the mountain that Petrarch fails to note. Velocities of 180 miles an hour have been recorded here; gusts often force closure of the road. I sought shelter behind the boarded-up snack stand. My freezing head and hands were not fooled. This was no fun.
The voices of crows riding the summit currents blended with the whine of the wind to mock me. As Petrarch’s shepherd had warned, the mountain was haunted. The poet rhapsodized about “the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me”; he gazed east with an “irrepressible longing” toward his native Italy. The prospect is indeed impressive, with the Rhone Valley to the north and other mountain ranges, including the Dentelles de Montmirail — the Alps on a child’s scale and another splendid area for hiking — to the west and south. But I admired the landscape at the panoramic map table for only a minute or so before the wind buffeted me so much that I headed down, this time on the road.
Farther down the mountain, I found enough shelter from the wind to take off my backpack and scan my copy of St. Augustine. Petrarch claimed that he opened at random to the following passage in Book 10, which he read aloud to his brother: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”
My fingers were less apt. Instead of pertinent lines about the foolishness of human wishes, I opened to a passage, also in Book 10, about the Church Father’s “struggle each day against concupiscence in eating and drinking.” His words did not seem relevant to my spartan breakfast of oranges and water. If the chasm between Petrarch’s world and mine was no closer than when I began the climb, at least I was finally enjoying the mountain, which, until the first bicyclists came into sight two hours later, I had all to myself.
posted by Joe Paris @ Friday, July 28, 2006
