Les triomphes et les défaites

It's been raining almost every day that I've been here. Jesus' tears have put a major damper on my ambitious plans of excursion. Nonetheless, at the first hint of sunshine I did manage to flee the farm and visit la ville.

Laurens, my new best buddy, hooked me up with a viable bicycle. He has about ten in storage here, all in various levels of disrepair. Some simply have flat, rotten tires. Others lack wheels altogether. The one that he glossed up for me is a white Motobecane women's bike. It has fenders and lights and reflectors and grips and brakes and gears. Being accustomed to my fixed gear, this bike seems like something Dr. Frankenstein would have issued had he started a bicycle company in the seventies. It's heavy, it has way too much frame, it's a full-on girl's bike, you can't put your hands anywhere without touching a gear or a switch or a lever of some sort, and, I love it. It works and it gets me up and down the ambling hills which constitute this area.

After Marie left, I cleaned it up, as much as I could, filled the tubes with a moderate amount of air, and removed the reflectors - I mean - those are just plain gratuitous. Unfortunately, the rain kept me from riding it for almost a week. Then, a few days ago, a ray of sunlight shot through my bedroom window and spurred me into action. I grabbed my small backpack, rolled up my pant leg and shot off towards Bussy-le-Grand. Well, okay, I didn't "shoot" necessarily, it was more of a wobble at first, and then I guess you could call it a coast, since I was starting at the top of a hill. But it felt like a shot, like a reckless bolt of lightening, fleeing the constraints of the stone farmhouse and striking into the heart of France. Armed with an ATM CheckCard and a fingertip grasp of the French language, I sped straight to Les Laumes to resupply my bare kitchen cabinets.

Les Laumes, or more properly Venarey-les-Laumes (because a town without at least two dashes in its name ain't shit in France), is about ten kilometers away. The main road leading to it is two lanes without a shoulder. The width of a lane in France is officially determined by measuring the width of a 1981 Fiat Le Car. That makes it about three-quarters the width of a Jeep Cherokee. So in effect, two lane roads are really just one lane roads with a white stripe painted down the middle. I suppose they use the stripe in combination with the skid-marks to determine fault in an accident.

The road passes through a couple of small towns before Les Laumes, and in between there are farming lands and grazing pastures. The hills surrounding the valley are each capped with a large copse of motley trees and shrubbery. The air was crisp and my breath trailed behind me as I pedaled with a contented grin up the hills and through the dales. Motorists were very accommodating. I noted two types (if you don't count tractors, whose sheer practicality clearly disqualifies them from the motorist class): Young people and old people. Young people watch rally racing on France5 and then emulate the driving style of people with names like Frederico Vitessolini. Old people seem to be too short to fully engage the gas pedal. So some tiny little Fiat starts to gently overtake me, and then a brand new Peugeot 307 zooms past all of us, lights flashing while the crooked-capped operator takes a last draw from his cigarette and finally flings it out the window.

Finally in town, I went first to the Super U (pronounced seupair-ew), bought vegetables and ingredients for crépes, then to the bank for some cash, then the boulangerie for some baguettes and then the local bookshop for a map. A French supermarket appears to be exactly the same as an American one, and if you just walk through without buying anything, it pretty much is. Problems arise when you need to purchase something. For example: peanut butter. They don't have it. Flour - they got it in spades. Actually they have so many different kinds of flour that I almost gave up on the crépes idea. Finally I saw a package that had a picture of crepes on the cover so I bought that one. It was marked FLUIDE. Whatever that means. Wine would be tough if you could make a mistake. The wine here is all French (surprise!) and they have a preponderance of local wines, like Irancey, one of my favorites. They're all similar to Beaujolais or Pinot Noir. Five euros buys you a very nice bottle of wine. Actually the white wines are really quite surprising. I'm far from being a wine connoisseur, but I've drunk my share of wine (weddings, art openings, last thirty minutes of a party - you know the good stuff), and I'd say the red wine here is good, but nothing to fawn over. The white wine however is damn good. So good in fact, that I'm writing home about it.

The baker lady was nice to me. I do a lot of stumbling in French. A lot of backpedaling. I probably sound like a caveman to the locals with my 22 word vocabulary. It's just enough to get in trouble. If all I knew were hello, goodbye and thank you - and that was enough to get by in Asia for months - then I'd probably be okay. But I gotta be clever and try to slip in words that I don't actually know exist. One of my French books claims, rather suspiciously I think, that thirty percent of all English words are derived from French. So I figure if I take an English word and add a French ending I've got a thirty percent chance of conveying meaning. That's pretty darn good if you think about it. There must be an error in my calculations however, because empirically, my results are more like 5 or 10 percent. Which ain't bad.

So I stuff the baguettes into my backpack - and now I'm feeling very franch with such accessorization. Rain begins to come down lightly, but it's nice - sort of misty and morning-like. Then I feel the thumpity-thump of a flat. My rear tire has disintegrated. It's just flopping around inside the fender like one of those gratuitous casualty shots from Saving Private Ryan. Oh mon dieu! Now it's ten kilometers of pushing a bike. That's not the end of the world. So I start pushing, checking out the countryside in slow motion detail. Then, as if out of a movie, a thunderclap erupts and moments later it begins to rain wholeheartedly. I put a grocery bag over my baguettes and settled in to a squishy march back to Bussy.