A Quick Trip to Lyon, France

This is the beautiful French city of Lyon.  Let me tell you what I was doing there.  

When I was living in Cameroon, lo these 26 years ago, I took in a smart, sweet kid who had a very bad home situation.  He just needed a place to live...regular meals...and someone to care about him. 

This is the basilica on the high hilltop above Lyon.  It's much more ornate than the cathedral down below.

When this kid asked to convert to Christianity, which I did not pressure him to do, I "stood godfather" for him.  He's my godson, but he calls me his father...

That child is all grown up now, just like my biological children, but we still see each other as often as possible.  He lives in Cameroon, and I go there from time to time, and he's come to the US on two separate occasions. 

Here's one of the Protestant churches in Lyon.  The French Reformed Church is essentially Presbyterian, the "Huguenots," and they were severely persecuted for centuries.  

But the Trump administration has banned all travel from 70 countries, Cameroon included.  Not surprisingly, the countries whose citizens can no longer visit the States all have populations where blacks or Muslims are the majority.  Which is to say, my adopted son can no longer come here to see me.

And this is the cathedral church of Lyon, where the bishop has his throne.

And so, we came up with a solution.  We would start meeting halfway between Cameroon and the US, in France.  This was especially ideal because my former housekeeper is now living in France and has been for the past 20 years.  (This "housekeeper" was really more a part of the family than a servant, kind of like Alice on The Brady Bunch.)  I hadn't seen her in 26 years.

I left Cameroon for good in July, 2000--well before social media and WhatsApp.  I lost touch with her and never knew what became of her.  On one trip back to Cameroon, someone told me she'd emigrated to Switzerland.  On a trip to that country in 2006, I looked for her but never found her.

I assumed--with great sadness--that I'd never see her again...until I made another trip back to Cameroon, and found that her aunt was still alive.  She gave me her telephone number.  We've corresponded on WhatsApp, but last week was the first time I'd seen her since the dark days when I got my sad drunken self deported back to America, two and a half decades (and a whole lifetime) prior...

So my godson and I met up at her place.  It was truly a joyous family reunion.  And Lyon is a really lovely place.

I mean, just look at this hotel room.  It has a bedroom and a separate sitting room with a view out over those quaint French streets.

The architecture there is so glorious and old.

The same sitting room by light of day.  It's so...French.

As a fan of sacred spaces, I could spend the rest of my life exploring Europe...

Of course, the churches get a lot more tourists than worshipers.

But there were actually 20 or 30 people just sitting or kneeling in the cathedral--pictured here--praying.  I've never seen so many people praying in a church in France.

There was a mass going on when we went to the top of the hill to visit the basilica on a Saturday evening.  The priest was preaching about the great need to love each other in these times.  

See the basilica high above, presiding over the city streets, just as St. Joseph's presides over my humbler hometown of Oil City?

I HATE it when people put photos of their food on Facebook.  But this fruit here?  It's savory, not sweet, and it's called a safout.  I loved safout.  It tastes kind of like green olives.  It's a common street food in Cameroon, but I hadn't had it in--again--26 years.  Due to the large immigrant population of Lyon, you can buy safouts in the open-air produce markets there.

Another woman I knew in Cameroon many years ago--one of my former housekeeper's closest relatives--spends her time between Lyon and Cameroon.  I saw her last time I went to Cameroon; she's the one dancing in the video below that I took in Ako'akas.  She was the wife of the principal at the school where I worked, now in her 80s.  She gave me this smart outfit to give to my wife...

It did my heart good to see my old Alice-character ("housekeeper") in Lyon--older than when I last saw her, but so, so happy.  She's married to a retired French plumber now, and he's perfect for her.  They're so affectionate with each other.

And here she is with her relative, mentioned above, weeping a little as they bid us goodbye.

It's strange.  I once believed that "relative" to be an evil person.  In my old Cameroon journals I consistently referred to her as "The Wicked and Powerful Madame ****."  (I'm not comfortable sharing her real name here.)  I didn't realize at the time that I was being used as a pawn in a power struggle that predated my arrival in that country.  A certain alcoholic pastor--who hated that woman and her family--happened to speak English.  He had lived in Atlanta in the 1970s and sometimes called me a "Jive Turkey."  Upon arrival in Cameroon, my French was still limited, and so I relied on this guy and ended up falling under his influence.  I should have known better.  He once officiated at a funeral so drunk that he fell into the grave, right on top of the coffin.  But it's strange, the things you'll turn to in a foreign land.  He poisoned my mind against a very sweet, gentle, kind human being...and it took me all these years to realize it.

Oh, the joy of this reunion--my little family from The House Behind the Mango Tree.

I need to spend way more time in France...

The Church at Ako’akas, Cameroon

 

This is the "Rocher d'Ako'akas" in the South Province of Cameroon. "Rocher" is a French word for a rock that makes itself conspicuous, which this one certainly does--except that it can only be seen by traveling many miles down a dirt lane that snakes through the rainforests toward the Gabonese border. "Ako'akas"? That's the name of the nearest village, and it too basically just means "rock" in Bulu (a.k.a. "Fang"), which is the local language. So in translation, this place is "Rock Rock." 

My most recent visit to Ako'akas was a little over a year ago, but I wanted to get my photos and memories of the church here all in one spot. My love of sacred architecture and my attachment to this place are such that I want to be able to pull it up from time to time and look at it, remember it, revisit it in my heart.

There is a Cameroonian Presbyterian pastor--Rev. Medjo Philippe--buried under the floor of this church, which he had constructed on his own property in his native village. Pastor Medjo welcomed me to Cameroon back in the mid-1990s, where he was briefly the principal of the private school that I ended up serving for 5 years.

The whole church is a monument to his memory, and it's a classic example of Protestant ecclesiastical architecture in that area: simple but elegant, spacious and clean but made of dirt, flooded with natural light but nowhere is the light direct.

Madame Medjo, the pastor's widow, asked me to do a brief ceremony in his memory, for which she sang those traditional old Bulu hymns, dancing all the while, and the local fieldhands came in from their labor to sing along. In this photo, you can see that construction on the church is not yet completed, though it's close. The windows on either side of the main entrance are boarded and incomplete; the walls need to be plastered and whitewashed. Many--maybe even MOST--Cameroonian churches are never completed, and they are heavily used all the same. It puts me in mind of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, which has been under construction since 1892 and is likewise incomplete, with scaffolding all over the exterior. But imagine this space with its decorative cinderblock windows and its walls all smooth and white. It would have a very uniquely sacred feel about it. I'm toying with the idea of financing its completion...

Here's a spontaneous thing that happened inside the church at the end of our ceremony of remembrance for Pastor Medjo... 

PS: The Bulu words on the chancel wall are found in most churches of the Église Presbytérienne Camerounaise. It's a quote from the minor prophet Habakkuk that says: "Holy, Holy, Holy. The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him." It's nice that Habakkuk gets some airplay somewhere in this world. However, the word "etyi," in Bulu, can mean either "holy" or "off-limits." And so, many people interpret it to mean that the chancel is forbidden for anyone except pastors, elders, and deacons. It's interesting because the word "holy" actually doesn't mean "morally pure"--which is how it's usually heard in English. Instead, it means "set-apart," "consecrated," or "other than ordinary." The Bulu word actually comes closer to its real meaning.

Seneca Creek Backcountry & Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

I’ll just tell this harrowing winter tale for my future self to remember:

The guy I usually backpack with is a schoolteacher, so we have to schedule our treks far in advance.  We typically do a winter backpacking trip just after Christmas, while he’s still on break.  This time, we selected the Seneca Creek Backcountry in the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia, at the foot of that state’s highest peak, Spruce Knob.

The purpose of these photos is to capture the condition of the roads into said backcountry… The roads down there are dodgy in the best of weather: unpaved and narrow as driveways with steep drops off to one side and never any guardrails.  But here?  Here the narrow lane out to the tiny hamlet of Whitmer was patchily maintained.  A snowplow had made a cursory swipe through there at some point, and sand and gravel had been scattered thinly on the slippery surface for traction.  But shortly after Whitmer, the roads were completely untreated and untraveled.  We made the first set of tracks for about 7 miles in 10 inches of snow.  It was a little unreal.  

The unrealest thing of all was when we gave up on the snowy roads, found a trailhead, and decided to set up camp close to the car on our first night.  It was a meager 13 degrees and painfully windy.  My friend and I were walking around in the afternoon light, looking for a good place to pitch the tents—a level place, out of the wind—when he said, “What’s that noise?  It sounds like something…cracking.”  Exactly then, the unseen ice beneath his feet broke, and he sank into 5 feet of water…with a 40 pound pack on his back.  We had unwittingly ventured out onto a beaver pond that was hidden under snow.  Murderous beavers!  We managed to pull him out of the icy waters.  He was drenched, as was all his clothing, shelter, and gear.  I insisted—against his loud protestations—that we get a cabin for the night and try camping again the next night.  He unwillingly saw the wisdom of that, but it turns out that booking a same-night cabin on New Year’s Day isn’t all that easy.

Several state parks nearby do rent out cabins, but they were all closed.  And on a holiday, it can be hard to get a same-day booking through Airbnb and Verbo.  Others were not willing to rent out cabins for just a single night.  But then we found The Renovated Barn at Seneca Rocks…the little place pictured here, with a pet pig, and a few goats as well as chickens and ducks to keep you company.  We were so grateful for this place, even though it was a bit small for two old Gen X guys who didn’t want to share a bed…

My friend seemed really bent on conveying to our hostess the fact that he and I were not a couple!  I didn’t care.  She had a Great Lakes accent anyway, and I’m sure she’s seen plenty of same-sex couples coming through her doors.  We just needed a place to get warm, dry out his gear, and regroup.  Instead of looking at the stars from an outdoor fireside in the frigid woods, we lounged in this pleasant old barn and watched The Revenant on Netflix.  Of course, it had to be The Revenant.  Isn’t that the adventurous life we were pretending to live out there, away from our quiet suburban selves?  

I’ve never seen trees caked in snow and ice the way they were in the higher reaches of the mountains on that trip.

We would learn the next night, out on the trail, that collecting firewood isn’t easy when all the fallen wood is covered in ice and snow.  

The next day, with everything dry and ready to go, we decided to hike into our original destination from a different direction, crossing up and over the ridge of Spruce Mountain and going down the other side to Seneca creek.  But the fever dream of the previous day had us feeling a little edgy, so we quickly tucked tail and returned to the familiar safety of nearby Dolly Sods for a single-night camp in terrain where we didn’t feel so endangered by beavers and other unseen threats….

Here’s Weiss Knob, which is the pinnacle of Cabin Mountain.  It’s still an unclaimed peak in my online peak-bagging club, and just barely within the bounds of national forest lands.  There are many such unclaimed peaks in West Virginia, and I would have great fun coming down here to bag a half dozen of them in a long day of climbing.  But alas, I’d have to rent a reliable car to do such a thing…

Dolly Sods…again.  What can I say?  We hiked northward up Red Creek about 1.5 miles and found a streamside spot to call home for the night.  You don’t often get the Sods all to yourself, but we only saw two other hikers on this trip, and they were not camping.  Just one of the many reasons I love the month of January.

The day was less cold; it got up to 27 degrees, which felt absolutely balmy…

The skies were dramatic that night, with a bright full moon and irritable clouds drifting rapidly overhead.

We spent a few hours setting up camp and collecting dead wood for a fire—a wild conflagration that brightened and warmed the night till about 11pm, when we finally went to bed.  See how the firelight illumines its small ring in orange, while the moon casts pale shadows on the snowy forest floor all around.  We’d been sure to put our tents beneath the shelter of some low hemlock trees, which offered much protection from the cold wind.

And then?  Then I sat by the fire and took to snapping pictures of the night’s dramatic light-show through the trees.

It almost felt like a movie...a really quiet one without a strong plot.

Steam rose off my saturated socks as I warmed my numb feet by the fire.  We had decided beforehand to sleep in our own separate tents, even though a shared tent with shared body heat is a huge help when camping out in the winter.  I spent a bitterly cold night with insufficient gear—in a cheap “0-degree bag” from Dunham’s that kept me plenty cold till I finally and fully woke up around 4:00am, only to read a hilarious P.G. Wodehouse novel with numb fingers by the light of a headlamp.

But I did get some awesome photos of the changing light among the trees in early January in the mountains.