Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

18 September 2001: Pointe du Hoc et le Mont St. Michel

I just looked at the Denver Post's site. In its left column are listed constant news stories: the war, the expansion of I-25, the Census, and Columbine. Also Jon Benet. How even less important that case seems now.

---

Tuesday morning found us in the salle again having le petit dejeuner. Some people eat steak and eggs for breakfast (ack!) and others baked beans (double ack!). The other extreme is bread and jam, which Just Isn't Enough. I was amused to note that Madame had set the table with coffee bowls for Corine and Michel but coffee mugs for us. We like coffee bowls. At least she had orange juice.

We paid her, 250 francs for the bed and breakfast plus 190 for dinner hier soir, which works out to less than eighty bucks for my favorite non-Nisou crash space of the trip. That magical, magical place: the town, the donkeys ("le heehaw," said RDC, which sounded better than "l'eeyore" that I tried--I figured they might almost speak British), the garden, the farmhouse, gardens, and fairytale path. And then we left, not without regret. I couldn't even indenture anyone into being captive audience because of the language barrier and I still liked it.

Our first stop was something we decided on only the afternoon or evening before. One battlefield has been left alone, not leveled or guided or tidied, and there we went. It was only a tiny detour along the coast. I think--I know--RDC was more interested in it than I was, but I had my own interest, of a nonliterary book sort. (I couldn't say "nonliterary bookish" because the two adjectives cancel each other out. A book, but not a literary one.) Pointe du Hoc was where Richard from The Shell-Seekers played his part in the invasion. And, as I would realize when we got home, one of its monoliths is the subject of the Seurac painting we'd seen on the 10th, which painted and then not too long afterward blasted to smithereens.

Pointe du Hoc. A stiff breeze with what felt like gale-strength spurts gusted from the Channel, bringing salt spray with it even here to the top of the cliffs--the cliffs that men climbed while other men rained gunfire upon them. And the top of the cliffs had not been leveled. There were craters thirty and more feet deep. And bunkers and gun turrets with concrete walls three feet thick, reinforced with steel, broken like so many crackers.

Everyone, particularly my sister, said that going abroad would be life-altering in ways you wouldn't understand till you got there. I thought that was at least a little pretentious: "Oh, but you wouldn't understand, you've never gone, you're incapable of understanding." I am not sure I would have been changed if I had only been to London, or indeed to both London and Paris, despite the greater language and cultural differences. The countryside did it.

Maybe my sister knew it would happen to me because it happened to her and we are, despite Jessie's first impression, very much alike. Maybe it happened to me because I wanted to be like my sister. Maybe it happened to be now when it couldn't've before, even in August, because of les attentats. But it did happen.

When El-ahrairah wants to save his people, he sacrifices his ears, his tail, and his whiskers to the Black Rabbit of Inlé. When he returns to his warren, he finds his people saved, but at what cost? Very much in the mood of his times, Adams put words into the mouth of a youngish rabbit who is the first El-ahrairah encounters, something about the old fogeys and "all that war talk" and how pointless it is, because if no one fought in them there wouldn't be any. Yet the rabbit hero has given up his so much--"oh, my ears and whiskers," as the White Rabbit himself said a hundred years before--and does the young rabbit appreciate it? Or, rather, is the young rabbit's freedom from worries of war all that El-ahrairah should need?

That's always been the sticking factor in my pacifism, that it should not come at the cost of thinking all war to be evil and unnecessary and violence-mongering. I do think the goal of war should be no more war, and that that can be a goal without dismissing the price paid and the benefits garnered.

In fifth grade social studies, we had an assignment to talk to a war veteran. I talked to my across-the-street neighbor, a jovial man who still got up at 5:00 every day and has a Cadillac older than I am. He had a Weimaraner, and it was because of that dog, whose name I forget, that (in pre-Wegner days) I could surprise subsequent Weimaraner companions by knowing their breed of dog. I don't remember what questions I had to ask him, only that he served in the Pacific and was an officer, and at the end when I said I was done he exclaimed, "Well, don't you want to know if I won any medals?!" and I said yeah, sure. He had a Purple Heart (is that officially a medal?) and maybe, since I don't know if the Heart is actually a medal, a Silver Star. I have always wondered how someone who has seen combat, seen his friends die agonizingly, seen his friends die at all even if not agonizingly, had to kill people, can ever afterward be normal with dogs and a convertible Cadillac and a backyard pool to which his neighbors are welcome.

Pointe du Hoc looked like the moon, only with grass, and the action it saw seemed about as alien.

---

Then the driving began. Crossing the base of the Cherbourg peninsula didn't seem like that far of a drive, 70 miles or so. Ha. All that countryside comes at the price of covering ground quickly. I had also heard somewhere that, tourism-wise, in the U.S., a hundred years is a long time, while in Europe, a hundred miles is a long way. We drove, or RDC drove, and drove and drove, and found ourselves, we thought by accident, going up up up the side of a little hill, very steep, all by itself, which was the town of St-Lo. It wasn't an accident, because that's how you go through the town, up, and then almost immediately down, down down down, and out again. West of St-Lo the military cemeteries began to be German rather than American. Also west of St-Lo, the land flattened out.

But we should have got used to sudden hills in the middle of flat. We were cruising along in a drizzling mist, knowing we were close to le Mont St Michel, when suddenly, ahead, looming out of a coastal plain, was a small mountain. Le Mont St Michel. It looked like how Jesse wanted to paint Hamlet's ghost, if he ever had the right watercolors. There should be a way to paint the ghost between layers of cloud...

The island is no longer an island; a causeway was built in the 19th century (for its millennial?). Silt from the Cousenon has built up around the causeway, so now maybe you can walk to the island at any time. But it's not safe yet: there were signs in different sections of the parking lot saying that the tide would reclaim the ground at such-and-such a time. As we approached, we saw that the spire of the abbey is being repaired. Either that, or someone decided the place wouldn't be complete without a retro-Jetsons spinny antenna.

The town is fantastically crowded. The streets are about two feet wide and you can shake hands between the windows of the upper floors. Or nearly. The north, ocean-side of the island, probably the windward side that would be colder, had no buildings and lots of trees. And every single planting was edible. Walnut trees, chestnut trees, apple and pear trees, and at least one palm tree (non-coconut-bearing). I loved that. The cemetery is probably as packed as any traditional graveyard in Ireland--what is that short story? Or the calculation the gravediggers make in Falling Angels, of so many inches per family member with so many inches between layers of coffins. Farther from the north side is another island, uninhabited, and skedaddling shoreward ahead of the tide was an excursion that had tromped thither over the tidals sands that kept the island easily defensible for so long. (Makes me think what wimps Titty, Roger, and Bridget were as Egyptians in The Secret Water--Ransome's are pleasant books, but the kids had oodles of money and sandshoes, whatever those are. How much fun can they have had?)

We ate on the island Mme Poulard's. Can I remember that right, with an English possessive formation? RDC had an omelette hand-whipped into ecstacies of fluffiness. I ordered lobster, because it looked like one of the cheaper things on the menu, and I figured lobster might be cheap here because it was native. RDC pointed out, after the server left, that the price was by the 100 grams, and I had ordered 400 grams of lobster, the smallest animal in the tank. Oh. To be fair to our neighboring table, they probably asked if I had never had lobster before not because they heard we were Usan but because they heard the tension in the ensuing conversation and probably mistook the cause.

But they might have been idiots anyway, because the man's first comment was not "Hello" or "Bonjour" or "This is the way-coolest place I have ever seen" (except, you know, in French) but "Comment va la guerre?" Last I had checked, and we had had no English-language news since Sunday morning, we hadn't gone to war. I don't know. I possibly could have been over-sensitive about the war-mongering reputation I fear the States might have. So anyway, we got to talking to them, and after I ignored the war-comment and surprised them by asserting that yes I had had lobster before, I asked where they were from. My aural comprehension? Sucks, as I've established. I had to have him write down his answer. It turned out he was from Réunion and I surprised him a second time by knowing where in the world that is. His wife was from Mauritius, which I wasn't so clear on--it sounds too much like Mauritania, which is properly landlocked.

They were the least pleasant of all the people we would talk to. Later in the day, up on a rooftop looking down at a tree canopy, I heard a bird call and wished I had brought a book of European birds. A woman overheard that comment and speculated with me what the bird might be. She was British; she and her husband had been staying with family in rural France the week before under such a rock that they hadn't found out what had happened until Thursday. I told her I envied her two extra days of peace. They had also gone to Normany beaches; I exclaimed, "Oh, we did too, except to the U.S. ones," and the man said, smilingly, "Well, so you would do." I just love that British English construction--in American English, we wouldn't say the "do." I liked the feeling that the knowledge of the 11th was there, remembered, but that we could still talk about traveling and the island and birds with me, at least, wondering how the conversation might have gone without the attacks.

We wandered and clambered here and there. We did not go into the abbey for want of time--the driving really had taken much longer than we'd anticipated--but set off homeward, stopping at a roadside phone booth--the only one we'd seen all day--to call Nisou et Steph and tell them when to expect us. Nisou fed us another yummy supper and afterward I did the dishes. This is the least I can do; like Shelley Latham, I believe that's the houseguest's constant, the one service always gladly accepted. But, Nisou had said on Sunday when I tried the first time, in France, houseguests are not expected to lift a finger. "Okay," I said, "but I'm a Yank, and therefore expected to be rude, such as by insisting on doing the dishes."

It's a great country but they need more dishwashing machines.