DAY 217 - COLMAR TO KOGENHEIM: 24.3 MILES (48,600 STEPS)

26 November, 2011

24.3 miles (Total: 2157.2 miles) –48,600 steps (Total: 4,625,401 steps)

I arrived in Colmar in bad shape—I had worn my long-johns for the first time and was severely chafed. I arrived into Hotel Ibis in Colmar like John Wayne entered into the saloon at Dodge. I didn’t sleep well–I haven’t since my accident. I seem to be incapable of not rolling over onto my left shoulder during the night, which sends a shooting pain through my arm and shoulder and the resulting throbbing will keep me awake for a couple of hours, after which I drift off and an hour later I will do it again. I was sorry to be in such bad shape because Colmar was a beautiful town and full of history. I would have enjoyed nothing better than doing my usual routine of finding my place to stay, having a shower, putting on my casual (non/less-smelly) clothes and wandering out into the town to find something to eat. This was impossible on a number of levels, not least that all my clothes and my rucksack had been left in Mulhouse and were due to be picked up by Rob and Peter when they arrived the next day and then taken up to Strasbourg.

I set off the next morning from Colmar feeling in worse physical shape than I had felt for many months – a combination of lack of sleep and the constant pain in my shoulder. The painkillers no longer seemed to have any effect. As I was leaving Colmar I turned onto the N83 which was showing on my map as a duel carriageway just as the A35 motorway was ending, but just as I was walking down the side of the road, I was stopped by the police who told me that walking on this road was forbidden (he actually said ‘Verboten’ which threw me a bit as I thought I was still in France). Anyway, this intervention messed up my plans for the day and meant that I needed to take a less direct route around fields and forests than I had planned for or calculated. All in all this was not going to be a great day, except for one thing, and that was the arrival of my dear friends Rob Parsons and Peter Vardy who were coming out to give support with the luggage for a few days, but they would not arrive until early evening.

I tried to think on ‘other things’ than the discomfort of my chafing from the day before and of my shoulder and arm. As I left Colmar there was a huge replica Statue of Liberty on one of the traffic islands. The statue looked too intentional to be a mere publicity stunt and when I reached the McDonalds at Selstat, I was able to look up the history of the replica statue. It was erected in Colmar in 2004 to mark the centenary since the death of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who was the sculptor and designer of the Statue of Liberty and was born in Colmar.  I was quite fascinated by the history of this iconic monument:

I had thought that it was a gift from the French to the American people to mark their achievement of Independence from the British, but in fact it was jointly funded by private subscription, with the French funding the statue and the Americans funding the land and the pedestal. Moreover, it wasn’t actually constructed until 1876, a century after the Declaration of Independence and took ten years to fund, build and dedicate. Its arrival in New York was marked by the first ticker tape parade.

Part of the reason for the delay was that France around 1870 was far from free and was under the repressive dictatorship of Napoleon III, who took them into the Franco-Prussian War in which   Bartholdi served as a major. The French lost that war and with it went Colmar, Alsace to be part of Prussia. The experience of this war clearly had an impact on the design of the sculpture by Bartholdi and resulted in the piece originally being called ‘Liberty Enlightens the World’ and was intended to be a lighthouse at the entrance to New York harbour.

Bartholdi managed to secure the help of his friend Alexandre Gustave Eiffel to undertake the great structural engineering requirements of the statue. Of course Eifel would leave his own mark on the iconic landscape of the world a few years later with his completion of his eponymous tower in Paris. At the dedication service of the Statue of Liberty in New York in 1886, President Cleveland stated that the statue’s “stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world“. Powerful words, but they were spoken to a new nation which was seeking to heal the wounds of a bloody civil war and in which ignorance was still to oppress large numbers of former slaves for nearly another century.

After my Chicken McNuggets in Selestat, I hobbled back to the road to contemplate the meaning of ‘liberty’. I concluded that liberty must be for something, not just from something. That liberty needed to be balanced by responsibility. That liberty was the freedom to do what we should, rather than to do what we want. That if my liberty is to be respected, then I must respect the liberty of others, because my freedom imposed on others is not their liberty, but their tyranny. That liberty is a state of mind not a nation state. That liberty thrives where there is security of love and is extinguished where there is fear and hate and therefore, if you want to open men’s minds, then you must first warm their hearts. That we are shackled, not just through the chains of dictators and despots, but through our debts, our addictions, our envy, our greed, our selfish-ambition.   Ultimately our freedom is secured not by the laws of man, but by the love of our neighbour.