The small towns near the France-Spain border do not look like the small towns in the USA. I am used to driving passed the sparse houses in rural America that loosely gather around one or two stores and a dilapidated gas station with boarded windows that could easily be open, closed or abandoned for decades and you would not know the difference. Houses and people in those towns are only connected by highways and sagging power lines. In that north-east portion of Spain, towns look like someone cut out a half kilometer circle of city with the church in the center, lifted it and dropped it in the countryside. Cobblestone streets wriggle past tiendas and mercados and the apartments squeeze together, too dense for their facades and the town contains itself modestly, as if to not impede on the view of wheat fields and groomed vineyards.
I thought about cordycep mushrooms for those first few days. Cordyceps drop spores that infect insects, and the infection compels the critters crawl to the highest place they can find and then they die and a new cordycep grows out of their head and drops new spores into the wind from the advantageous height.
There is a cross or monestary on every tall hill in this countryside. Thousands of prople across the millinea were compelled to climb these massive hills with masonry stones and crosses in the name Christianity.
I wonder what ants think as they crawl up blades of grass, carrying the spores of cordyceps in their bodies?