We woke to the sound of rain and as I hurried to my morning shower I discovered the clouds we had watched the night before had settled on Cherbourg. At home, in a place that sometimes borders on desert we speak glibly of “a gentle mist.” Here was a mist so thick that you breathed more water than air. Sunlight at 8 in the morning had virtually disappeared behind a wall of gray and to move was to become soaked. Earth, sky and ocean had blurred their boundaries over our campsite that morning. In truth it was beautiful, a primal experience, like the mist of chaos out of which everything was formed. I could have stayed in it for hours. This is what we so felt the lack of in our landlocked home. But it made lousy biking weather.
We bundled ourselves well in our rainproof gear, shook off our tent as well as we were able, loaded the bikes and set off. We biked back into the heart of Cherbourg and returned to the change office to change more money. This time the man at the counter was less than impressed by her lack of French. We also stopped at the hypermarket to refuel our empty bellies. Heather shopped while I waited.
I tried to write but every time I opened the journal the skies opened in sympathy, so I gave up and watched as the local fishermen loaded their nets in their boats. Each net ran down almost the length of the inner city quayside. When they haul those through the water they must depopulate everything around them. Watching them I know, intellectually, that it must be backbreaking work for little pay and no respect, a hard life on the waves. But it seemed so perfect, so romantically in tune with earth and ocean that I wanted to go over and ask for a berth aboard ship.
Did our ancestors feel the loss when they left the ocean? Or did they see it as an escape from a world of danger and horrors that even now we can only pass through or over? Was it we, or was it the dolphins and the whales who were truly the intelligent ones? The ocean is a three dimensional universe, every direction a possibility. Our minds, developed for the flat plains and for the surfaces of mountains whose sides we can rarely separate from, are not capable of existing in a fully three dimensional world for long spaces of time. We can fly in three dimensions, but we must land, we can dive but eventually we must surface. We are trapped in a world with entire directions barred to us by the limitations of mind and body. Is it any wonder that people long for the ocean?
After eating we turned our backs on the ocean, at least for a while and began the climb up into the Cotentin Peninsula. Cherbourg was built into a hillside we were not yet ready to scale on bikes so we dismounted and pushed. We passed into the ugly high rises we had seen from the water and their bases were no less so. H.P Lovecraft always wrote of the horror evoked by lushly overgrown spaces filled with green growing things that fill one with a sense of foreboding. I could never understand what he meant. Why should plants, trees and shrubs be harbingers of evil? Instead they should be things of good, signs of life. But there were patches of green as we left Cherbourg that drove his meaning home to me. Here in the centre of a city, parkland should be beautiful and organized, well cared for and tended. But as we climbed out of the city we passed these spaces filled with lush, over fertile greenery, growing together in such a tangle that would have been impassable should anyone have tried. Untended seems to indicate a laissez fair attitude that hinted as a moral lassitude. If someone does not even care about tending something like a park, why would they care about more important matters? At least the tangled brush of Cherbourg granted me some insight into Lovecraft’s way of thinking.
I should mention, in all fairness to the people of Cherbourg, that there were crews clearing out the brush as we passed.
We passed into the subdepartment or province of La Havre, a territory described as being “wild and rugged” I can’t speak for the wilderness, it seemed to us to be virtually the same as any other pastoral farming area. And for us rugged generally conveys a sense of sharp jagged cliffs and inaccessible mountains. But the continual rise and fall of its gently rolling hills was more than rugged enough for us. Going up and down over and over again was as exhausting as the long climb at the beginning of this journey. And we had the wind to contend with, harsh blowing gusts that killed any momentum we gained on the downhill sides and pushed us back almost as much as we gained on the uphill sides. Fighting the wind seemed to double the distance we traveled.
I discovered to my chagrin that my Michelin Guide to Camping, so expensively gained, was not as necessary as I had thought it to be at least in this part of the country. Here every town seemed to have a municipal campsite or signs for many privately owned ones. Good because it allowed us to stop whenever we wanted, bad because it allowed us to stop whenever we wanted.
We finally gave up the ghost at a small municipal campground perhaps ten kilometers short of our intended destination at Surtainville. Heather’s pannier racks had been wobbling dangerously close to her spokes and we were forced to stop and wrapped duct tape around them to provide some support. Without duct tape where would we be?
Stopping has set us back a lot and we needed to settle down quickly, before we lost our daylight. I should say that we made an excellent choice for an emergency stopping place. This campground had the most immaculately kept washrooms of any place we had seen on this trip or ones before. We waited all night for the attendant to come and ask for payment but she left early and didn’t return all night. The only fly, so to speak, in the ointment were, well, the flies. Actually they are not flies but enormous long legged insects that float about everywhere. Their massive wings sound more like propellers and, perhaps because of the wind outside, they sought refuge in our tent in numbers that boggled the mind. I was especially annoyed that my panniers, piled just beside my head, should have been such a tempting mating spot for them. The really galling thing about them is, because of their size and slow speed, they are really easy to catch, so easy in fact that you feel guilty catching them and let them go again. Survival of the fittest? These things live on guilty consciences.
I suppose another small problem was the quantity of dog feces, not just at the campsite, but everywhere. I suppose French laws about cleaning up after your pet must be more lax than in Britain, because everywhere you go the ground is liberally coated in dog leftovers. It makes it very uncomfortable to walk in sandals. Heather ended today a little more cheerful than last night, but she is feeling weaker, we will have to choose town closer together.
Next Entry: Day 52. Denneville.
Previous Entry: Day 50. Cherbourg
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