Deep breath before the plunge

Painted into posterity by not a few "Lost Generation" writers, the Franco-Spanish frontier is some sight that has chilled these boldest of men. It inspired the setting of many fiction books. Among them is the book by Ernest Hemingway called "The Sun Also Rises."

Spain figures in many Hemingway books. In the Sun Also Rises, he exhausted three chapters to describe that Franco-Spanish frontier trail. There is little chance that there's anyone who can offer anything new about it. On an excursion to Pamplona for the fiesta and the bullfights, a group of expats boarded a trail-rated automibile and Jacob Barnes, the protagonist in the book, stayed up all throughout the trip.

He was the eye of the author. He was tall and thin, brown-faced and had sun-streaked hair. That must be the image Hemingway had in mind of a well-traveled man. After the drive, his collar and hair was thick with dust. And so was their car. It was not mentioned in that part of the story but it must be some hell for the vehicle.

Sitting cheek by jowl between two progressive capitals of two great countries, the frontier has been for a long time now a hideaway for city metrosexuals. It makes sense that after long nights of hard drinking in France, there is the mountains of Spain to detoxify a body. It did for the chaps in Hemingway's book.

After hiking and fishing trouts in a mountain stream, they went to Pamplona for the bulfights and the fiesta, as I have said. More hard drinking. That's one thing you can't help but love about being an expat in Europe. At least in France anyway.

It was different, the story claims, to be in the mountains than it was in the city. In the mountains, one is at risk (or at an advantage) of forgetting about time, both past and future. That trick may have done it for the Lost Generation.