At the end of the world

Oct. 8: Mont Saint Michel

Clock time here doesn’t really agree with the sun’s position in the sky. At noon the sun is still only halfway to the top of the sky.

So when I woke up at 6 a.m. today to catch my bus, it was so dark it could have been midnight. And when, after a five-hour drive, we arrived at Mont St. Michel at noon, the island was still coolly luminescent in the light of a morning sun.

Mont St. Michel is an island off the coast of Normandy with an abbey built on its steep contours. Before I heard of it, I would not have thought such a place on earth existed. But exist it does, rising improbably out of the sea shallows like a mythic city. Maybe that’s why UNESCO designates Mont St. Michel, which is hundreds of years old, a World Heritage Site (Carcassonne, which I visited last, is one too).

Surrounding the abbey is a small village, which, like La Cité de Carcassonne, seems to survive exclusively on tourists’ euros. I’d seen it all before, so I walked briskly by the souvenir shops to take in the steep views from higher up the island, including in the abbey itself.

Outside, low tide afforded visitors the opportunity to trudge through the sand surrounding the island. Maybe they didn’t want to get their shoes dirty or risk falling in the mud — out there, the figures standing out against the dun of the sand and dull blue of the sky were few. It was almost desolate.

I could imagine then that Mont St. Michel was a magical, sacred place at the end of the world, not in Normandy near a village named Avranches. That we, out there on the sand, were pilgrims, not sightseers, come to seek answers to questions and prayers — only to find that the builders of this place had gone long ago.

… And in their place were people selling T-shirts and €20 omelets.