That afternoon, we drove to what continues to be of Barcares, now an deserted, overgrown discipline comprehensive of unclaimed internment camp artifacts. I walked along the straight rows of what seemed like the cement foundations of barracks and picked up a bullet casing and a single of lots of rusted twists of barbed wire. Throughout the highway was a massive metallic archway memorializing the Spanish Republicans at the time interned there, and farther out, the exact same silver waves my grandfather described in his letter. A gentleman in a barely-there bikini ran down the seashore with a rainbow kite hoping to capture the wind. You could have quickly pushed previous the scene devoid of a second assumed.
The pursuing morning, I took the very first move of the real climb. The initial hour or so, Ms. Arran and I shared the route with youngsters, grandparents and each individual age in concerning who have been taking a popular hike to the 13th-century fortress of Fort Saint-Elme. But as the working day-trippers manufactured their way down, Ms. Arran and I continued our climb and hardly observed yet another soul until eventually we arrived in Spain.
As the climb got steeper up to Puig de Sallfort, a flat mountain top rated, Ms. Arran explained to me tales about prior treks she’d led along the Chemin de la Liberté wherever out-of-shape hikers had to be rescued. This “walk,” as she named it, a great deal to my huffing and puffing dismay, was so substantially much easier, lower, shorter.
We flung ourselves down the afternoon’s closing mountain meters to the Refugi Coll de Banyuls, a initial-appear-1st-provide “refuge” that made available only a roof in excess of our heads and wooden slats on which to lay sleeping baggage. We have been greeted by Mr. Key, who experienced arrived with beer and bags of dehydrated Indian-spiced rooster and rice. (The refuge can also be attained by dust road.) I did some downward canine on Ms. Arran’s insistence so my muscle mass would not cramp up overnight and drifted off to snooze to the seems of mice scurrying close by.
The up coming morning I came throughout a nearby plaque memorializing the Spanish troopers who experienced escaped in excess of these mountains to France, with a map detailing different paths taken, published in French, Spanish, Catalan and English. A few yards absent lay a large stone with terms engraved in French, a “tribute to the 1000’s of Republican guys, gals, and young children … who experienced to go into exile immediately after three many years of war versus Francoism,” in accordance to one particular translation. “They were being the precursors of the antifascist battle in Europe.”
That last sentence was the only mention of any even more continental fascism. While there was a lot of information to be experienced about those people trying to find refuge in France, there was none about those people fleeing the dangers within the country’s borders. The pretty very same mountain trails that had been crossed from south to north in 1939 were taken north to south just 1 calendar year later on. Distinct dictators, diverse directions.
Our 2nd day’s hike, from Coll de Banyuls up to Coll de Rumpissa, was so steep that Ms. Arran walked in front of me and Mr. Key guiding. We climbed previous wild boar droppings until finally the properly-marked path little by little disappeared and we had to use our climbing poles to whack aside thorny branches. The extended, pointy spines tore my trousers and dug bloody stripes into my skin. Determined to feel as if I’d uncovered some fact, I certain myself these had been the very same wild plants that scratched and bloodied my father’s legs. The magical pondering didn’t stop there.