(A) Tour of France

Let us consider these small postcards from a brief cycling trip in France, from someone who has never before been to France and who has only been cycling fewer than 24 months.

A delight:

The hotelier who greets us on the first night—us, somewhat wilted from eleven hours of flights and four hours of trains and the jolt of six hours’ time change—speaks at least four languages with ease and at least three people’s measure of good cheer. We spend two nights in this place, which means two breakfasts and two dinners, and though the hotel itself is modest, road-side, and a full mile’s walk from the nearest bus stop, his particular bonhomie is like a sunlamp turned upon us during each meal. At dinner, when he checks on us and I am beside myself with joy at how good everything is and he is genially nonplussed with the praise, he deflects: “So far, so good!” The way it arrives—a little bit of a question to which he surely knows the answer—is also filled with pleasure at the phrase. He says he learned it while traveling in Australia. He says he loves this phrase. That he loves such a phrase makes me love him.

A challenge:

The bridge to Pont-Saint-Esprit is 700 years old, supported by twenty arches across the floor of the Rhône valley, and is 919 meters long, which is to say nearly .6 miles. As architecture, it is impressive: it supports a very busy run of cars every day, despite its age. Its beauty is a workmanlike kind: mostly plain, dark stone, sturdy and unadorned. But 700 years old! And the first day of the cycling part of our trip ends somewhere on the other side of it, in the chateau where we are scheduled to sleep.

With my feet on my pedals, I am fearful of every centimeter of this bridge. I don’t mind heights, but this is one of the very few places we encounter with no bike lane and a sidewalk so narrow and overgrown it makes walking its own precariousness. The wind buffets in excess of forty miles an hour—more than enough to swat me sideways into the stone wall or into the Friday midday traffic—and I lose my nerve for riding. I have never biked in wind like this, and I have never biked in traffic like this. I walk the bike across, fighting to keep my shoulder from smacking into rearview mirrors when the gusts are worst. I’m glad enough to have made it without being hit by a delivery van that the sting to my pride is almost blunted.

Another delight:

At the Abbaye Sainte-André, cloistered behind the 14th century walls of Fort Saint-André, a quintet of wildflower beds spread across an Italian garden like a fan. A silver gnarl of olive trees filigree the slope below the 11th century chapel to Saint Casarie. Koi circle in lilied fountains mere steps from the thousand-year-old cemetary between two churches now visible only from their unmistakable footprints. A fantastical grotto filled with more than a ton of brightly glazed clay plants and creatures, sculpted by an artist in the 1990s, bubbles with water, while a small garden of medicinal simples line a pathway that leads to cactus and cypress. The abbey, the roots of which date to the location of the hermitage of Saint Casarie in the 6th century and the formal establishment of a monastic community in 999 AD, has undergone many transformations in its history, including several kinds of destruction. Its present guise as a living garden both modern and ancient owes to the vision of Elsa Koeberlé and Génia Lioubow, a pair of poets and artists who lived there following World War I. Koeberlé, and later her goddaughter Roseline Bacou, devoted themselves to restoring and reimagining the space.

During a week wherein we saw many very old things that were preserved, as much as possible, in their original state, to see this space that carried such reverence for its holy roots while also daring to think intentionally about other conventions of beauty and retreat (and environmental sustainability) was its own revelation.

Another challenge: 

I say sí when I mean oui so many times I lose count. In Mornas, I say gracias to the barman as he gives me my change, and my French is just good enough to understand when he says, “You speak Spanish? I have family in Spain, near Valencia.” This is an inordinately kind way to approach my brain’s wonky unconscious choice to reply neither in the language that was spoken to me nor in my first language. I don’t have much time to be embarrassed; it’s time to get back on the bike, which consumes all of my processing power as I am in charge of navigating us back to our planned route after this stop for lunch and a(nother) ruined fortress1.

Delight the third:

In Orange, the proprietor of our bed and breakfast, Seline, explains that the lavender bloom is short-lived: a week or two at most. That we are here, in Provence, to see it is a matter of very good luck. Every deep purple field we pass thereafter, then, is like being washed in a censer’s sweet fog.

A question, with an answer:

In the morning, when the wind has died down a little, I make myself ride back across the bridge from Pont-Saint-Esprit instead of walk, so we can continue on our way. I hunker low and pedal as fast as I can, and I am still scared, but the meters pass, and I am breathless with the air and the traffic and the sight of the distant trees bending. The bridge ends and our route slides us gently to the right: the designated greenway awaits. A hare darts across the path, long-legged, and disappears into some soy beans. Sun breaks on our shoulders and the wind cools them. The ViaRhôna unwinds like a ribbon and the water is never far.

So far, so good?

So far, so good.

The Miscellany

• Here’s a fascinating article on the way languages interfere with each other in multilingual people, which at least reassures me that there’s a reason for my silly slip-ups.

• Next week, I am off to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, where I will serve as one of the Peter Taylor Fellows in fiction for Cleyvis Natera’s workshop. I cannot wait; I was a participant in Nick White’s workshop last summer, and it was life-changing. You can read more here.

• While traveling, I read Helene Wecker’s The Hidden Palace and started Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. The Hidden Palace took the characters made familiar by her previous novel, The Golem and the Jinni, in intriguing directions; I was thrilled to be proven wrong about how I thought their stories would turn out. H is for Hawk, a memoir of grief but also a book deeply knowledgeable about falconry, is wholly engrossing. It reminds me, of course, of Rebecca K. O’Connor’s Lift, which I mean as deepest compliment: in both works, the world of falconry, in all of its wildness and specificity of language and action, anchors the books’ personal and interior journeys in apt but not obvious ways.

• Presently, the Tour de France is underway, which also means that the Tour de Fleece is underway, wherein spinners undertake an especially concentrated effort in creating yarn for the duration of the peloton’s adventure. (They spin their wheels, we spin ours—or our spindles, etc.) For my own efforts of yarn-making, I’m taking a pretty relaxed approach this time around and spinning whatever I feel like in the moment. So far, that’s meant some time at my wheel with a fine gradient spin and a little turn on my book charkha for some very fine silk and my first attempt at a cotton puni I blended myself on hand-cards, which is pictured below. I’m not showing you the resultant cotton thread because the fineness of it resists my poor photography skills and the blended colors muddied a little, rather than creating little runs of color. Live, learn, etc. But look at that wee soft snail of fiber!