Sunday, October 23, 2011

Day 78. Talmont St. Hilaire. Oct 23 2001.

What a relief to wake from a night of sleep with no interruptions and feeling a hundred times better. Today I feel as though I am almost me again and I am anxious to get going. But a hundredfold improvement is still not all the way. I still hack and cough, sputtering for air, even if only once or twice every 10 minutes. We resolved today to stay for the whole day and sleep one more night in our sagging bed. Our next destination is a long ride from here and there is little sense in tackling it while still sick.

Today we are homebodies resting body and mind, cleaning and clearing and getting ready to tackle life with canvas walls once more. We find that when we rest in a place it become our home, we leave our marks, scattered debris that proclaims our territorial boundaries, and we learn the features and it is hard to leave.

Fear for the unknown has sent me searching for a phone. I am not willing to trust the guide that has proved so deceptive, so disappointing. We tramped out together and found a phone not too far from our lodgings. But when the operator asked courteously for country codes and city codes that we did not have I gave up in frustration.

We continued up Talmont’s centre street where we found the Super U and stopped for groceries. Heather showed me the seafood section in delight. Even after almost thirty days in France we are still delighted by counter tops swathed in ice and a colorful display of seafood. The shrimp in a woven wicker basket flipped and writhed in angry spasmodic jerks, as if cursed with a foreknowledge of their gastronomical fate. Eels and deep sea fish stared up from their frozen bed with lifeless eyes and the crabs here seemed listless and crusted with sand. Heather walked purposefully through the aisle of the market, trying to feed us and still not destroy a budget already broken and shattered. I fell behind and drifted away into the aisle of books and music and toys. ABBA came over the radio and the stock clerk counting inventory unconsciously broke into song. I flipped through books on Vendee legends, naval history and prehistoric artifacts. I was startled to find references to home in the book on naval history. The people of the Vendee had been delighted, it seems, by the crew of the HMCS Iroqois when, after liberating the area of Nazi occupation, they had erected a huge cake declaring “Vivre la France, Canada, Angleterre et Amerique.” What delighted the French so much was, unlike messages from their other liberators these words were delivered bilingually.

The books were a surreal mix of French culture and pervasive American influence. Dark French police novels, covers adorned with sexy women and guns rested on racks next to Buffy Contre les Vampires and Anne Rice novels. The racks of toys mixed unknown French action heroes and G.I. Joe dolls. But all the video games were American and even the boxes were English with no translation. French had been the international language of diplomacy but now gave way to English, international language of computer geeks.

Heather finished selecting our meals for the day, a fare not much different from yesterday or the day before, meat, cheese, grapes and the ubiquitous French baguette. We returned to our hotel, our haven, and ate our lunch.

We hauled out our sand and grime coated tent and threw it into the shower and let the water run. I leapt in and scrubbed dirt and sand away until the showers floor resembled more the sea bed than anything else. We threw our sopping dwelling out the window and let it dry over the kitchen roof. And then we did nothing. We lay in bed as I read Heather Hyperion, then she slept while I snuck out to the phone once more. Even as I walked our previously sunny and warm day disintegrated under an onslaught of clouds and down the rain came. Heather had woken up in time to see the rushing clouds and save our drying things. Armed as I was this time with calling codes and city numbers still I failed to get through and I feared my failure might have more to do with a closed campground than inability to use a French phone. I returned to our hotel in disgust.

As I did the clouds dissipated and a brilliant rainbow filled the sky, arching, like a tourist ad for the perfect vacation, over the crumbling ruins of Richard's castle. I stared and longed for a camera and knew that moments like that were not really meant to be caught on film.

I arrived once more at our sheltered door and a realization hit me. We have lived with the elements, on an intimate first name basis, twenty four hours a day since, it seems, before time began. We have considered weather to be our friend, our foe, our ally and our indifferent nemesis and we are always aware of it. We have come to think of ourselves as weather conscious, knowing the pulse beat of the skies, and yet, now, behind the shelter of solidity, weather is forgotten. Not merely relegated to a secondary status, not ignored, just forgotten. Rarely do we look at the sky and never to assess what the next minute of life will hold for us. The sky and clouds are merely pretty decorative objects that no longer dictate our lives like the stars on an astrologers chart. Three days and we have become absolutely disconnect from what had been the most important aspect of our lives, and we had scarcely noticed. How many other things pass from places of critical importance in our lives and we never notice their passing?

I entered our room, or rather tried to enter. Heather had set up the tent in the room to let it dry out of the rain and it blocked the door with a fabric barricade that yielded but would not give. After minutes of struggle I finally squeezed into the room. The tent was on its side and the blue groundsheet rose menacingly in our little room, a blue nylon monolith, a science fiction metaphor for our journey. I expected to look in to the mirror and see wrinkled hands and face, Also Sprach Zarathustra humming from spinning bike wheels in the garage below us.

The smell of sautéed onions and freshly baking pizza drifted up through cracks in the floor, taunting us with delicious scents and odors too expensive to inhale. Tentatively I went down the stairs and asked our hostess to kindly explain the phones to me. Instead she called the campground in Marans, a long ride away, and confirmed that they were open until nov. 15. I appreciated her kindness, but as the ancient saying goes: “give a man a phone…”

Strange how much I will regret leaving here. In the sunken bed and water stained walls I have found a sort of spiritual balm. Talmont can be an ugly little town, slowly decaying in the sun of southern France and the rains and winds off the Atlantic. But it seems to harbour a soul full of inspiration such as I have found in so few places, a taint of artistry that calls out to be created. Tomorrow is the pain of hard bike seats and the elements and I can only hope to find that feeling elsewhere...

...and pray that my bike will not say “we have a problem Dave.”

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