We packed up quickly, after eating breakfast in our tent and trying to convince the farm dog that we had nothing appetizing for him. Neither of us mentioned the weather in the hope that it would remain bright and blue. Off in the distance we could hear the turkey gobbling. He was enormous and on coming in the night before we had been more afraid of him than the energetic dogs. The chickens had seemed a little abnormal as well, they had a huge spread of feathers on their legs that made them look as thought they were wearing bell bottom pants. What with the turkey’s huge fan of feathers and one of the dog’s shaggy beard it was a very fashionable farm.
I had slept well despite the downpour and the ridge of dirt that ran directly under my shoulders.
Mounting our bikes in the morning has become an art of compromise. We know that we must get moving but we are reluctant to begin the never ending effort and the sawing pain of insufficient padding. Generally, by unspoken agreement, the bikes are walked to the entrance of the site. When we finally climb our steeds of aluminum we try to avoid sitting for as long as possible. Today was no different and setting out was harder than usual because we had to face the one task we hated above all else, retracing our steps. Back we went, following last nights hard road, past the abandoned campground and past the turn to the lake.
Finally we found new ground and we headed towards Les Sables D’Olonne. Today the transformation in architectural styles is almost complete. Gone are the stone and brick houses with slate or shingle roofs. Every house here has whitewashed walls, terra cotta shingling and, more often than not, blue shutters on the windows. Before we had biked too far we came within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Sea breezes caressed our faces once more. The houses look perfect nestled against the distant band of blue on the horizon. Design elements in the plan of an artist who has sculpted the world. The ocean has become our ally and our nemesis. The land near it runs in long flat strips, where we can see almost to eternity and worry not about what comes after a downhill ride. There are no downhill rides except to the water. But the sea breathes and its breath is a wind against which we are locked in terrible conflict. Every gust is our foe and every calm merely a pause in the struggle.
Soon the sea was lost to us once more, hidden behind the shelter of the island of Olonne. We cycled over a thin strip of pavement perching precariously over marshlands that stretched as far as the eye could see. There was an air of abandonment and decay here, a basketball court so overgrown with weeds that only the rotting backboard and iron hoop from a long vanished net spoke to its original purpose. The whitewash on houses cracked and fell to the ground in faint speckles as if snow had come too early. Pornographic posters, elsewhere left alone as if not worthy of notice, were blacked out in reactionary anger, only to be replaced by more until they papered over the landscape. In the distance a spire rose on a rocky hill above the marshes. Our goal, we though, until we reached it and another rose behind it.
Les Sables D’Olonne sat along a whaleback ridge at the marshes edge, separating wetland from ocean. We cycled in and were surrounded by urbanity once more. Urbanity in this case most obviously exemplified by the motorists who tried to run me over as I crossed the street, despite the light being in my favor.
The foliage was brilliant and verdant and I thought to myself how nice it was to be in the middle of October and see green trees. We found our campsite with little difficulty and simultaneously discovered the one place in town where no leaves, not a one, were left. All the trees were bare and most, I am sure, were dead. The broken wreckage of their limbs littered the grounds, filling the sites with the debris and detritus of approaching winter. We found a site clear of branches, not yet transfigured into a pit of slime from the terrible downpour of the night before and we pitched out ten on the sands beneath the twisted cedars.
We had made good time; it was scarcely past noon, and many hours of daylight lay before us. We stretched out our sleeping bags on a line, trying to let their smell dissipate before we crowded into them once more. While we waited we used the parks glass shrouded phone booth and made contact with those we left behind. They were well, Dad had just returned from his excursion to Halifax and was very excited about his new photos. We spoke for a long time, sharing news across countless miles of ocean and land.
On our side a storm began brewing and Heather raced off to pull our things down from the line. I finished talking and followed after her, arriving at the tent as the big drops began to fall. We huddled under our waterproof shelter and listened to the shower, the winds and the sound of the water trickling. At this last we sat up and noticed a small river forming under the tent and others to the side. Heedless of the freezing rain around us we leapt up and hurried out of our small shelter. The sand around us was pockmarked with a million pinhole craters, shifting and reforming under the bombardment of water from the heavens. We hurried to fill the trenches around our tent, trying to stem the surging rivers. The ground was saturated with water and would take no more and all the overflow seemed bent on filling our tent. We managed to fill in the area around our tent with makeshift sandy dikes. We hurried into the protective shelter once more, only to have the rain stop completely.
Heather is sick tonight, still, and I cannot seem to shake this cough that wracks my body from time to time. Whether we are truly ill or merely allergic to our surroundings, our tent, our sleeping bags, each other or ourselves, is a frequent topic of discussion. I must admit that we are both feeling melancholy tonight and the subject of our date to return home was the primary topic of conversation. Both of us are missing the comforts of home but leaving would mean an end to our journey and a return to normalcy. That would be, to put the best possible spin on it, anticlimactic.
Our spirits were lightened somewhat by the camp's cat. It rummaged through our garbage, hoping no doubt to find the sausage that we ate for dinner. We shoved the cat away but it was brazen enough to return eventually, near midnight. It grew willful enough to steal our garbage out from under my watchful eyes.
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