Warm Wind on the Path

Wake-up feel: 7.

The muscles want stretching. Yesterday's tasks, yesterday's road.

Two days in the city — Ivano-Frankivsk, people to meet, the immigration office, the foreigner's papers put in order, jets over the city and around it. Back late. The car climbed until it could not climb, and stopped. The rest on foot. Thirty minutes up the mountain, the moon one night past full, enough to walk by. Back in the heart of the Hutsul land, the Hutsul way of living on it.

Cold air coming down onto my head the whole way. The path pale under the moon. The same moon over the same ridge — painted pots on the plain below, five thousand years back, carried the spiral and the crescent; the herders who first brought cattle to the foot of these mountains lay under mounds and looked at it; the Vlach shepherds who walked the polonyna into being — vatra, bryndza, the words still in the mouth here — moved the flocks by moon and grass. Then, at one bend, warm. A flow of warm wind on the face, as if someone stood on the path. Fifty metres on, cold again.

The Hutsuls set the moon inside the church year. Last night it fell full on the old-style Dormition: harvest Mary, herbs and sheaves carried in to be blessed. Ten days before, the dead had received the first apples. And before dawn yesterday the full moon was eaten at its edge — the eclipse. The old people would have read it. I walked under it, warm air and cold. I did not read it — I felt it.

Today the beheading, by the new column. A fast where that column is kept. Nothing round cut, no knife to the cabbage head. The birds, they say, sent off to vyrii on this day. The old column keeps it in two weeks, under no moon at all. Which column this valley keeps, I still have to ask.

Whoever it was on the path, I did not see them.

Day 70
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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