Day Nine: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
Today's itinerary was a toss-up between Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and a crocodile farm near Valence. I wish I'd chosen the crocodile farm -- it would have been a lot less touristy.
It all started out with one of those quaint medieval legends (as so much trouble in my life tends to...). The story goes, those nasty old Romans put Mary Magdalene and Mary Salome and Mary Jacobe and some other unimportant personages not named Mary, in a boat without oars or sails. And then one Mary's servant, Sarah the Egyptian, being a flamboyant Ella-Fitzgerald-in-the-Carnegie-Hall-years sort of person, made such a fuss about being left behind that they threw their cloaks back to her so she could walk out to them. Apparently she kept the cloaks, because she's also known as Sarah of the Seven Skirts... Anyway, eventually they ran aground in the Camargue, and the younger members of the expedition went inland and tamed man-eating armadillos and other things, while Mary J. and Mary S. and servant Sarah built a cathedral in their spare time. And Sarah became the patron saint of the gypsies, who descend on the town in hordes on her saint's day, May 24th, and make a pious ruckus carrying her statue down to the sea and splashing water on it as a refreshing astringent treatment.
So weighed against this lovely story is the fact that I live not a mile from the Steinhart aquarium and can see crocodiles virtually every day of the year.
The drive was undoubtedly lovely, on eensy weensy departmental roads without another car in either direction for miles. All along the road are planted catkins as windbreaks -- in some places, the old ones were harvested and standing in sheaves ready to be used as thatch or fodder. There were also lots of vines and big old mas -- what would be the correct plural for mas, or is it one of those words like trousers or grits that belie the division between singular and plural? Saw lots of birds -- cormorants, egrets, swallows, swifts, flamingos, and a red kite hunting for a few feet beside my car. Lots of bulls too... Sad to say, many squashed beaver corpses on the verge or in the middle of the road -- must be some sort of migratory or mating season for the poor creatures. And literally hundreds of white horses.
This was not an unmixed pleasure, however. Seeing them in fields or foraging wild along the canals -- a brave and delicious sight indeed. But as I got closer to Stes.-M.-de-la-M., I began to cringe at every promenade de cheval sign, knowing that I'd see tired, dirty horses snuffling miserably through the chaff in their manger, waiting for the next tourist with iron hands and a brick bottom to mount up and twist them farther away from their natural nobility. And that one soul among them would lift his soft muzzle up and gaze directly, unreproachfully at me.
I had time to make eye contact with horses, because the traffic was terrific... On Easter Monday, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is about as tranquil and unspoiled a retreat as Carmel on Memorial Day. I did not linger.