Tuesday 25 August 2015 (Day 93 of my midlife gap-year)
9:25 am, Camping Municipal de Jonville
Today’s ride will bring me closer to the landing zones of D-Day – I’ll be following Utah Beach much of the day. This campground is filled with holidaying European families, including some German-speakers. There’s a dissonance in that.
Over a breakfast of pain au chocolates I’ve continued to read Robert Pinsky’s Selected Poems and write my poem about where I’ve read them.
Where:
And in the morning
With Irish tea and the crunch, chewy, (not too) sweet of ‘deux pain au chocolat’ from the bakery van.
Three blonde German-speaking children appear and I think: D-Day beaches – weird place for a German holiday.
It’s grey, windy, and cool but, for now, not raining.
11:35 am, St Vaast-la-Houge – To Ride is to Feel Alive
I’ve ridden 30 minutes in the wind and the rain. I’ve stopped to just get out of it for a bit.
Riding thoughts:
To ride is to feel alive – to really feel it in a way too often masked by all the modern comforts and easy-ways we’ve made for ourselves.
I feel my heart beating and my blood coursing and not in some sort of urban panic or frustration or some professional (or financial) anxiety. And not from some manufactured ‘exercise’- but from transporting myself and all I need from last night’s rest to tonight’s.
I experience the weather – feel the wind and the misty Atlantic rain gathering on my face until the weight of it brings it coursing toward my chin.
In a car – it’s like you’re playing a boring, frustrating, but dangerous video game. You’re watching TV. You’re sitting on your couch.
Driving is not living.
8:50 pm, Camping Baie des Veys – They are Not Forgotten Here
The rain kept my camera in the bag most of the day but with my mind on poetry and my emotions being stirred by how the past is vividly on display, everywhere, here – when I stopped to get out the rain I recorded this ridiculously overly earnest bit of spoken-word picture-making. (The rain was also pretty loud so I was over-enunciating too boot.)
I saw a memorial disc on a house – as new as yesterday – commemorating it as the landing place of a particular officer from the 82nd Airborne on the morning of 6 June 1944 – something in French about the soil of France and the beginning of the liberation.
And I thought: You boys. You crazy, brave, ignorant, terrified boys. You are not forgotten here.
The ride today – other than being (mostly) wet and (mostly) windy was beautiful. (Mostly) flat and (mostly) small quiet roads – not too much on dirt or gravel, and, generally, near the sea.
In a moment of sunshine, I came to my first German pillbox in a field of French cows.
(French cows, French milk, always make me think of this scene)
I stopped at the second pillbox I passed, to lean my bicycle and reorganise some. I didn’t want to touch that Nazi cement. Is that weird? Maybe. But I didn’t want to. So, I didn’t. My bike did but not me.
l almost stopped at a farm camping ground but pushed on thinking I’d go all the way to Carentan but came to this campground with a restaurant and I was home.The steak and chips and beer for €12.60 and now a ½ litre of red wine – very happy. But there are two whingy noisy small children putting lie to the myth of well-behaved French children.
10:25 pm – Tent
In comparison to how we think of the WWII generation – we are miserable at collective action. The EARTH is becoming less hospitable to our species and we can’t agree to do something.
1:45 am – Pee Break
I love the French devotion to the freshly baked. There was the boulangerie van at the campground this morning and here I was able to place an order tonight for two pain au raisin – available in the bar at 8:30 am.
Wednesday 26 August 2015 (Day 94)
8:15 am – Tent
Where:
And in the tent in morning showers (waiting for a break so I can make my way to the loo)
Mild breezes bicker with the trees, small birds twitter. Here it smells of a Chinese tent factory and me. I will not be like ‘The Old Man’
9:00 am – Full of sweet French pastry and almost, but not quite, enough coffee.
I’ll ride to the next town and hope their tourist office can supply cycling information for the neighbouring province – where Omaha Beach is.
Where:
In here – warm with scent of Chinese tent factory and of myself – sleeping breath, yesterday’s riding clothes – of effort and life. I will not be like ‘The Old Man’
2:05 pm – Caratans: Waiting for Rain (Which Will Never End) to End
I’ve become a little stuck here. I stopped at the tourist office and found nothing for the next department. Then I got ham from the charcuterie and F(ruits) & V(eg) from the F&Vie to make my lunch on a bench in a spot of grass next to a car park. The post office, closed when I arrived in town, was open after I’d lunched so Rob’s birthday card, Jim’s and VAL’s postcard are finally on their way. When I came out it was piss-pissing. I retreated to the arcaded shops where the tourist office is for un café in hopes it will pass – lessen – or I’ll just get on with it.
People – hiding from the rain – keep stopping, lingering, to look at my bicycle – propped and locked outside. Still it rains.
Where:
In a pizzeria in Caratans – foolishly waiting for the Normandy rain to stop (as if it ever does). Having un café – a husky-mix under the next table. Interrupted by West End Girls to which I semi-consciously lip synch.
6:45 pm – Camping Le Fanal, Isigny-sur-Mer: I Make Quiet My Friend
Where:
Third night camping and four days of dialogues beginning, “Pardon, je non parlez francaise. Parlez vous ingles?’ I return to Samuri Song: When I had no friend I made quiet my friend.”
Perhaps it’s that in the quiet I’ve made a friend of Robert – that I fill the quiet with an inner monologue which is more interesting imagined as a dialogue? It is what it is – he’s the presence in my silence for now.
Not that I’m lonely – not too much anyway – okay – a little bit. I do wish I had internet and might find someone to chat with.
The SUN – THE SUN – fantastique!
The bloke in the tourist office said this much rain is unusual for August.
11:45 pm – Oppa
After two nights of wind and rain tonight the elements are silent but there is a thumping disco going here at the campground. And also, a complaining cow in a nearby field.
I ate dinner in the restaurant here – hopefully tomorrow night will be clear and I can cook. It’s hard when it keeps raining and there are no campers’ kitchens or even covered tables. Pizza & wine for €15 – €2 more than the campsite.
While I was eating some sort of entertainment began. I don’t know what it was – a game or maybe trivia. Kids and parents were being led by a loud, excitable woman with a microphone.
The music, the thumping, is fucking awful.
I think …
Oh wait, I think maybe, just maybe that’s Gangnam Style. Yup. Ha ha ha.
Oh, world you are funny.
Ah, there’s a slow song – promising for a midnight finish – oh, now it’s thumping again.
My first stop for the day tomorrow is the German war cemetery. That should be interesting – not sure what to expect.
