I’ve travelled through the Pyrenees mountains twice. The first time (June of ‘76) I was hitchhiking with girlfriend Sophie; the second time was during a France-to-Spain journey in a rental car, sometime in the late aughts.

My “Bernstein on the Staten Island ferry” moment happened the first time around. We were strolling (or were we sitting in the back seat of a car?) along a narrow Pyrenees blacktop and looking up at a huge, very steep, grass-covered mountainous foothill and being struck by the sight of a distant herd of sheep about, oh, a third of a mile away but way up there…high, high, all the way to the sky.

They were so far off you couldn’t hear those little cowbells that shepherds loop around the baahers’ woolen necks. But it was such a magnificent sight…awed by the enormity of that emerald-green Pyrenees slope, and the serenity that came with that.