Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7 

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

 
Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

Preparations 503 and 506

At risk of offending the fine folks who invited me to their shit-shoveling festival a few weeks back in the Loire valley, as recounted a couple of posts ago, I want to revisit the subject of biodynamic farming, because I'm now feeling I let those promoting the agricultural theories of Rudolph Steiner off a little too easily. It's easy to do so, and I think I know why. Because the goals of biodynamic farmers are so closely aligned with the natural wine, organic, fresh and local, and slow food movements, the more kooky elements that go into biodynamics have never emerged as a favored target of secular humanists. With all the evil in the world, why bother going after the possibly self-deluding biodynamic farmer? Furthermore, there seems to me to be little doubt that Steiner was prescient in comprehending the ravages of what would become industrial agriculture, and biodynamics is broadly concerned with soil health and sustainability, more than sixty years before that term became the overused mantra of the green movement. Why risk the perception that you are opposed to a thriving ecosystem, healthy eating, and happy animals by attacking biodynamics?

I wrote in that previous post that biodynamics "typically goes well beyond the basic prescriptions for organic farming." This is essentially true, but only if we are talking about the kind of co-opted organic farming decried by Michael Pollan, in which giant, industrial farms produce "organic" products on vast monocrop farms in order to exploit the marketing value of the term. And that wasn't what I meant: "organic" used to mean, to me, small, thoughtful pesticide-free farming of diverse plantings in a varied and complete ecosystem. Compared with this sort of agriculture, the ways in which biodynamics "goes well beyond...organic" seem upon further reflection to be limited to the mystical and the magical, namely the bizarre Steinerian preparations 500 through 508. The question then becomes: are the results of the biodynamic method superior to the results from any other less dogmatic approach to artisanal, pesticide and chemical-fertilizer-free farming? Are biodynamic farms superior in any way to other farms farmed by farmers deeply invested in soil health, the environment, and tasty eating?

 Preparation 506, in which Dandelion flowers are blanched and then packed into the peritoneum of a cow. This tiny bundle is then buried over the winter before being used as a sort of homeopathic additive to compost.

There are plenty of believers eager to point out that scientific evidence exists for the superiority of biodynamics. Some basic googling will bring up a host of such claims, but nothing I waded through went one simple step further and told you what that evidence is, or, heaven forfend, actually linked to a study demonstrating the point. If you want to enter deeper in this debate, take a look at Biodynamics is a Hoax, in which Napa vintner Stuart Smith pulls absolutely no punches under the subheading "Someone has to speak up."

 Chamomile flowers awaiting deployment in Preparation 503.

The moistened flowers are pushed through a funnel, stuffing for a length of cow intestine. 

 The finished product, a chamomile sausage. It's very attractive, but the problem is that I can't find anyone who can explain why adding this to your spring compost will "reactivate" the soil...

There is, sadly, a more cynical perspective from which to consider the success of biodynamics, at least in the wine world. Thierry Puzelat, with whom I spent most of October learning how to make wine, is a very good example of the kind of conscientious farmer who cares deeply about his land and vines and produces excellent plonk without subscribing to the strange prescriptions of Mr. Steiner. He has no quarrel with biodynamic farming, and buys plenty of grapes from friends like Bruno Allion who follow the Steiner line, but his own attitude is "show me the evidence." He told me that it is remarkable how often groups come in to the Puzelat cellars for a tasting and ask him "are these grapes produced in biodynamie?" This before so much as taking a sniff of the first glass. In other words, biodynamics has become so trendy that for some the Demeter stamp of approval is more important to their drinking experience, or their self-perception of what sort of wine drinkers they are, than what the wine actually tastes like. While I have yet to meet a biodynamic farmer who I felt was insincere or concerned with anything more than creating the best possible farm environment, in the face of fetishizing like this I'd be very surprised if there aren't some vintners out there who are burying horns full of manure just because they think they will turn to gold.

After the preparation of the magical packets, we dug a hole in the ground and lined it with old slate roofing tiles, in order to avoid cutting open the parcels with a shovel in the spring dig. I have a similar attraction/skepticism for the rituals of Haitian vodoun, which also often involve the meticulous preparation and burial of small parcels, known as wanga. 

 The burial.

Poop Horn (Suspension of Disbelief)

One of the more exotic episodes in my recent visit to the Loire valley was a day spent assisting in the creation of some of the semi-mystical preparations used in Biodynamic farming. Practitioners of the Biodynamic method view earth, cosmos, farm, crop and land from a holistic perspective. The health of each, and therefore our own, such farmers argue, are indissolubly linked. A field that is endlessly fertilized with powerful nitrates and sprayed with pesticides in order to maximize annual yields across a monocrop topography is a field that is ailing and poisoned. In this world view, the way most farmers use their land, and the way most of our food is produced, is deeply wrong; the equivalent for a human would be something like an endless repetition of Morgan Spurlock's experiment in Super Size Me, when he eats nothing but McDonald's products for an entire month.

Biodynamics, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher-shaman Rudolph Steiner, typically goes well beyond the basic prescriptions for organic farming, and it embodies many similar ideas about environmental and soil health. As a general practice, I find it deeply appealing. Bruno Allion's farm and vineyard near Thesee, in the Loire valley, which I visited last week, looks the way a farm ought to look. There is dirt and mud, weeds and trees and grass. There are flowers and bees and ladybugs, and a happy pig in a comfortably big pen. It looks nothing like the vast and sterile monocrop lots on which America's corn and beef is produced.

 Looking over the horns

But what to do when the general appeal of a philosophy promoting a loving stewardship of the land seems diminished by peculiar prescriptions that seem odd, irrational and altogether divorced from the scientific method? This, for me, is the conundrum of Biodynamics. Take, for example, the "cornerstone of the Biodynamic method," Steiner's preparation 500, or cow's horn manure. The basic recipe is simple, if creative. In the fall, fill empty cow's horns with cow shit, bury them underground for the winter, and then dig them up in the spring. Although I'm certain cow dung is a high quality all-natural fertilizer, and cow's horns make perfectly good vessels in which to mature or compost the manure, it now starts to get weird.

 That's the, uh, substance, with which we will shortly begin to fill the horns.

One horn's worth of the fermented dung, generally about 80 grams of the stuff, is mixed into a suspension with 20 liters of rainwater by stirring it in a whirlpool vortex for a full hour. It is then whisked or sprayed over the fields. One horn is used to treat about one hectare of land (roughly 2.5 acres).  Not to bore you, but I did the math, and that comes out to 0.00074 grams of poop per square foot. If you've ever done cocaine, you'll understand this to be a minuscule quantity unworthy of your attention, a speck of fallen dust so small as to be all but invisible. You may also recognize from your long nights crouched over the mirror the way in which the ritual of preparation dominates the event; the horns must be buried in a specific way, and the stirring activity should alternate from clockwise to counterclockwise, perhaps "attracting cosmic influences into the liquid." The spritzing of the fields appears in photographs to be not unlike the splashing of holy water from a Catholic font. Biodynamicists describe the use of Steiner's preparations as a kind of soil homeopathy, and there doesn't seem to be any more scientific proof of its efficacy than there is for most homeopathic medicine. Just like homeopathy, I'd love to believe it works, but it sure does stretch the imagination.

What are we doing? We're making pâté de poop a la corne, you dipshit. I promise I filled some horns up myself, between photographs. (That's my main man Amane Hagiwara on the left. Within a few years I expect that you'll be seeing his name on a wine label or two. If you do, I suggest you buy the bottles).

 Locked and loaded, and ready for burial.

Bruno Allion has a beautiful farm, and he grows some serious grapes. I know, because I spent my first three days in the Loire valley harvesting them.

Looking wistfully into the pit. You gotta believe...



Next week join us for Biodynamic Preparation #503, cow intestine stuffed with macerated chamomile flowers. No, I'm not kidding.

Forkful of Gamay

For the very last decuvage of the season, the boys down at the Puzelat -Bonhomme operation decided that the visiting gringo was just the guy to get in the tank and scoop out the grapes. The idea is to shovel out 40 hectoliters of sodden, semi-fermented berries (that's 4000 liters) that have been happily bubbling for ten days or so, while their sugar turns into alcohol. The poor bastard in the tank uses a pitchfork to fill one plastic tub after another. These are then carted off to the pressoir to be mechanically trampled. The carters have far less work to do than the forker, and they delight in looking down into the tank and abusing the sweaty and fitness-challenged shoveler within. One tends to get covered in a good amount of wine.

In the tank, or as the British say, in the soup.

Grapes are heavier than they look.

Jerome looks on with some skepticism

Aah, thank you. Yet another empty crate to fill up.

Shin-deep in Gamay

Are we done yet?

Sticky Fingers

The good news is, I'm toiling in the vineyards of the Loire valley, helping collect grapes for the famed natural vintners Jean-Marie and Thierry Puzelat. The bad news is I'm working hard enough that I barely have time to blog about all the fabulous wine I've been tasting. The day starts at sunrise amidst the dewy vines, and for most of the day my fingers are so sticky and covered in grape juice that I'm afraid to get my camera out, lest I gum it up with natural sugars. Nevertheless, I've managed to take a few snaps.

Côt, the grape that goes into Puzelat's wittily named "In Côt we Trust."

One of my fellow vendangeurs (grape harvesters). Her french is only marginally better than my chinese, which is to say just about good enough for us painstakingly to have established that she is from China. Her silver rice paddy hat wins her the vendange fashion award for 2010. There are painful similarities between my posture picking grapes and those archetypal National Geographic style images of South-East Asian women bent double in the rice paddies.

Grapes. (Not Thierry Puzelat's: note the lack of grass, weeds and wild herbs, and the regimented rows, like box-hedges. These are vines that have had fertilizer treatments and likely been sprayed with pesticides, and they will be harvested by machine, not by our merry band of vendangeurs. Thierry's look wilder and rawer, vines growing in a complete ecosystem. But the mist in the background was irresistible.)

The team to beat when it comes to making time down the rows is a family foursome from Laos, including the eternally smiling matriarch known simply as Mother.

Many more grapes. The only psychological relief from picking comes from reaching the end of a row, but the rows vary wildly in length. One commonly hears expressed such sentiments as "what a bitch of a row that was," although the length of the row has no impact on the length of the day.

I could get in really big trouble here, as nationalism seems to be a strong suit in Eastern Europe, but I'm pretty sure Artur is from Estonia Poland and Igor is from Latvia.

Menu Pineau, or Arbois. Thierry Puzelat is one of the few producers of this all but forgotten grape, with which he makes incredible white wine. That's him humping some sort of case in the background.

The writer's hands at the end of a row of ripe-to-bursting Gamay.

Tour de France, part deux

If you have not read the previous post, you may wish to do so now, lest you be left bewildered by your abrupt arrival in mid-narrative.

Chapter Three

After the flurry of emails leading up to my final, embarrassed suggestion that she seek other transportation, I didn't hear back from Traci Macnamara that day. It was as if she had finally realized that the whole offer had been nothing more than a fever dream, a transatlantic hoax. I sheepishly wondered whether I would ever again see or hear from that poor woman whose time I had wasted, while she was stranded, lame, in Paris. I imagined she thought I had made the entire story up, for obscure and perverse reasons of my own.

The next day, to my surprise, I found in my inbox the continuation of our correspondence. "Unbelievable, mission accomplished! I have your yellow velo and a new kryptonite lock." (Velo means "bicycle" in French. As Steve Martin once said, "those French people have a different word for everything!")

The bicycle, saved, or at least salvaged? It seemed impossible, or at best, unlikely. I wrote back at once: "Please ring me tomorrow. This is a story I want to hear."

When Macnamara called, she explained that she was holding yet another bag of frozen peas hard against her inflamed achilles tendon. Her long and arduous trudging about the far-flung quartiers of Paris, while attempting to solve the bicycle conundrum, had caused a relapse. Nonetheless, she was effervescent.

The day before, she had made her way to the Avenue de Suffren and, with the help of a Google streetview snapshot I had sent her, easily located the building. I had suggested that it was a large and crowded complex, and that even without the passcode it would be easy enough to gain access to the courtyard by opportunistically gliding in on the coattails of a resident. But Traci soon discovered that this notion was simply another one of my optimistic fabrications. She lurked and lingered about on the street in front of the locked doorway to no avail, until, perhaps, passersby began to look at her strangely and wonder what sort of sordid business she was up to. It was as mortifying as it was unproductive.

courtesy: Google Streetview

Already, imagining the raised eyebrows and the leers that might have been directed her way, we could forgive Macnamara had she abandoned the whole enterprise and gone hobbling back to her hotel. But I had described the courtyard, in which the bicycle might or might not still exist, as being a full city block long, and backing onto a sort of an alley. Instead of going home and sulking, she limped down to the corner and along the side street, looking for the service access to the back of the building. After jumping over a waist-high retaining wall, she found herself with her nose pressed up against the bars securing the courtyard, mere inches from the bike rack. "And there it was," she said. "I saw it right away."  (I believe she added that "The bicycle looked like it was painted by Jackson Pollack, with a bad hangover." Or words to that effect. I didn't record the conversation, so that might not be verbatim.) The bicycle was directly in front of her, elusive and unobtainable behind the bars.

Realizing that she needed a plan of attack, Macnamara set out in search of two tools that her scouting had revealed were necessary: a pump for the visibly flat tires, and something to cut a lock off with. Many disappointments were in store. The Avenue de Suffren, which divides the 7th from the 15th Arrondissement, is a rather toney address. Imagine lurching along Park Avenue in the neighborhood of 70th street. with a gimp leg, trying to borrow a hacksaw and a bike pump from the doormen there, and you will get some idea of what Traci was up against. There is a boulangerie on Suffren where the woman behind the counter looks over the tops of her eyeglasses with a disdainful sneer, as if to suggest that Americans are not fit to eat the baguettes that she bakes. On the corner, at the epicerie, blemishless fruits are piled in immaculate pyramids by fastidious Tunisians. There are no sordid corners in this hood. It is not the kind of place where a wink and the offer of a few francs in return for the short-term loan of a pair of bolt-cutters will be met with the knowing smile of approval of an underworld collaborator.

Seething with frustration, her ankle throbbing, Traci refused to lose focus. Instead of the criminal route, she determined to triumph with smiles, and perhaps even some feminine wiles. Plan B was to arrive at the front door, ring the bell, and explain her predicament to the concierge, who might, if he believed her story, be happy to see a surplus bicycle removed, never again to take up space on the bike rack of which he was the steward. With any luck the more friendly, flirty sort of concierge (if there is such a thing to be found in Paris) might even offer up a demonstration of his manly French bolt-cutting prowess. There was also the risk that she might be sent away, having accomplished nothing except the alerting of the building's guardian to her designs on one of its bicycles. She had to exercise caution, for nothing less than Wordsworth's legacy was at stake.

There is a uniform worn by workingmen all across Europe, a sort of coverall, in royal blue. German carpenters wear it, as do Swedish auto-mechanics, Spanish plasterers and French maintenance men. In front of the doorway Traci wanted opened was just such a workingman, all but blocking the entrance as he sucked on a Gauloise and chattered on a téléfone portable. He was clearly taking a break from some sort of task within the premises. Perhaps he himself was the concierge. Macnamara approached, trying out a few polite French trivialities. The man refused to come unglued from his cellphone, but he turned, punched in the code, and gestured toward the door with gallic dismissiveness. She was in!

Chapter Four

It was unbearable. She was now standing over the bicycle, touching it, and admiring the patina of its comparatively recent repainting. But she was no closer, really, to victory. Three years ago, I had purchased the most inexpensive lock I could find, five euros worth of cable. With the key permanently lost, that lock was now the only thing preventing Macnamara from continuing her glorious journey down the Loire valley. She tugged at it, and peeled back the plastic tubing that protects the cable from rust. It might have been a cheap lock, but it had done its work for three years already, and it wasn't done yet.

But neither was Macnamara. She is, after all, as close as one can come to being from Antarctica, a place where people survive the long dark winters by gnawing on frozen seal blubber and eating penguin sushi. Traci had dressed fetchingly for her trek to the 15ieme Arrondissement, in order better to manipulate hapless, besotted concierges, but inside her clutch she had a weapon. She took it out now. It was a petite and delicate Swiss Army knife, but one with a saw attachment. Looking about her to see if she was observed, she attacked the lock with the three-inch blade, like a prisoner on Alcatraz trying to remove a cinderblock with a smuggled spoon. If you lived there, and had been home that day, you might have spied out the window a woman in a dress, with an inflamed ankle, bent over a bicycle and savagely hacking away.

Those Swiss don't only make watches. Under the pressure of the serrated steel, first one strand of wire gave way, and then another. Soon Traci found her rhythm. Look around, saw feverishly, pause. Repeat. FWANG! Finally, the lock gave way. Macnamara smiled. Looking around calmly, she pulled the bike away from the rack, pressed the button to unlock the back door, and pushed out into the alley.

I'm expecting a postcard from Switzerland, any day now.

The bicycle, reclaimed, relocked and loaded

Macnamara, heading South, like Shackleton

Next stop, Chamonix

All photographs: Anne Aghion

A Bicycle in every Port, Part One (REDACTED)

Chapter One

People, and by that I mean primarily men, sure are funny about their vehicles. Perhaps the cherishing of vintage cars and the fetishization of motorcycles is a kind of evolutionary relic left over from the gratitude, grain, and soothing words we once lavished on our horses. Personally, I have a comparable fond spot in my memory for almost all the bicycles with which I have ever had an intimate relationship. There was my first ten-speed, the pale green Fuji on which I learned to race, purchased with months of salted-away allowance. The classic Italian steel Pinarello I ride now is bright red, like the convertible sportscar of a man in a profound midlife crisis. It is the bicycle I drooled over in my teenage years but couldn't dream of affording. Slowest by far, but no less cherished, is the one-speed Flying Pigeon I rode across Cuba, from Trinidad to Santiago, through weeks of unremitting headwind. Leaving it with a family at the end of the journey was heart-wrenching. I tried to make them promise they would care for it as I had, and allow me to come back, for visits.

But bicycles come and go. In New York the old saying is that you never really own a bicycle, you only rent it, until it is stolen and you are forced to return to the bike shop to "rent" another one. As a lover of bicycles, what shocks me more is how often they die of abandonment and neglect. The world's cities are full of mangled tubular corpses permanently affixed to lamposts and no-parking signs. Countless mouldering, rubber-rotted, dust-crusted orphans are left rusting in basements, storage rooms and courtyards just because their owners can't fit them in the moving van or be bothered to fix that flat.

I've only just noticed that the Eiffel Tower looks like a giant vuvuzela, set down on its business end

I found one like this three years ago in Paris, a once-stately Dutch city-bike, forlorn and forgotten and coated with ochre dust. Both tires were completely flat, the rubber cracked and brittle. I disapprove of theft, of course, but bicycles are a bit like pets; when they have clearly been abandoned by their owners, what crime can there be in washing them off, showing them some love, and taking them for a walk? Keeping in mind the Paris spirit of 1968, perhaps the same year this antique had been manufactured, I liberated her.

Encore une pauvre abandonée dans les tristes ruelles de Paris

Under all the dust, my Dutch was a satiny black, a classic tuxedoed beauty. Little can go wrong with these stolid, one-speed cruisers, and in no time at all, after a petit investment in a new set of whitewall tires and a few drops of oil, I was gleefully pedaling her through the rues and avenues of the left bank. I bought a lock, the cheapest I could find. The bike gave me weeks of faultless transport. When I left Paris, I gave it to my niece, Sophia, hoping to introduce her to the joys of urban cycling. I tried to make her promise to care for it as I had, and allow me to come back, for visits.

My niece's building made no accommodation for bicycles, so we locked the bike across the street in the courtyard of another apartment building where my parents had briefly rented; we knew the key-code for the front door, and imagined that no one would be the wiser if we parked it there temporarily. In any case I was sure that once Sophia got the hang of it she would soon be riding to school, and to cafés, cherishing it and generally getting such good use out of it that it wouldn't need a permanent home. That was three years ago.

Two years ago, I asked Sophia, via trans-atlantic skype, if she was taking good care of my baby. Was she riding it a lot? Caressing it, polishing the brake calipers and whispering sweet nothings in its ear? Feeding it the occasional sugar cube? Things got a bit quiet at the other end of the internet. "Well, I did paint it, one afternoon," she said, finally. I took a deep breath, and said nothing. "Yeah," she went on. "My friends and I spray-painted it yellow. It looks kind of cool." I said goodbye, exhaled, and closed my laptop. Horrors and sacrilege! The mere thought of it was unbearable. How dare she? I tried to continue my New York life as usual, but I was living a poisoned quotidian existence of bitter denial. Eventually, after months of struggle, during which I undoubtedly drank too much and snapped angrily at my loved ones, I managed at last to put the whole sordid business out of my mind. Picking up the shattered pieces of my broken avuncular dreams, I moved on.

Quel horreur. If I wanted a taxicab, I would stand in the street with my hand out.

Chapter Two

Last week I got an email from an antarctican acquaintance, my friend Traci Macnamara. She used to wish us good morning on the Motorola radio from MacMurdo Operations, when Anne Aghion, Sylvestre Guidi and I were camped in the remote wilds of the Friis Hills. Every day at 6AM it was obligatory to put a call in to "MacOps" to announce that all were healthy and accounted for, and often Macnamara was on the other end of that call. We kept vaguely in touch, and from time to time since leaving Antarctica I have checked in on her blog. In northern hemisphere life Macnamara is an accomplished writer and adventurer. Unless she is making it all up, she is the sort of woman who lives for months on end in a tent in a remote Rocky Mountain encampment, goes solo off-piste skiing deep into the wilderness, and pulls her way up vertical cliff-faces in the French Alps with her fingertips. I knew that for her latest little jaunt she was planning on "fast-packing" her way across Europe, retracing Wordsworth's journey from England to Switzerland on foot. Whereas for most people going to Antarctica is the adventure of a lifetime, for Traci it's just a day job.

I was flattered when Macnamara referenced my book in her email. It's the story of an overweight and out-of-shape slog across Cuba, and for those of you who haven't read it, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by telling you that I fell lame with a blown knee after four days of hiking. Ultimately I procured the bicycle I mention above. "Here I am in Paris, thinking of you," wrote Macnamara. "After 7 days of near heat stroke in the wheat fields of northern France, I developed tendonitis in my left ankle. I'm sitting here with a bag of frozen peas on my leg, dreaming of finding a bike over the weekend so that I can continue this warped journey in some manner...."

Suddenly, memories of my beloved Parisian ride came rushing back. For all I knew my niece had by now completely dismantled the bicycle and sold the parts on eBay in order to buy Gauloises, but at this stage, I couldn't bear to ask. I was thinking only of the bike and how it could still be saved from the terrible death of neglect. "I have a bicycle you might be able to use," I wrote back to Traci, somewhat optimistically. "It is locked up in a courtyard on Avenue Suffren, a few hundred yards from the Eiffel tower." I had only vague hopes that this was still true. "I imagine it would need new tires and a good going over by a bike shop." This last bit, although perhaps an understatement, seemed less of a stretch. "Let me know if you are interested."

To my embarrassment, she wrote back almost immediately: "Seriously???? I'm absolutely interested!!" It seemed I would have now to reveal what we might politely call the vagueness and uncertainly surrounding my offer. Namely, the probability that the bicycle had long ago been removed by a fastidious concierge and carted off to the dump. By coincidence, my sister, the mother of my nefarious, spraycan-wielding niece, was stopping by for lunch that very afternoon. I wrote Traci that I would ask for any and all details, and explained that I hadn't actually seen the poor beast myself for almost three years.

I really only needed two things in order to save face. One was the key code to get into the courtyard, and the other was the key to unlock the bicycle. No sooner had she sat down at my luncheon table than I made my poor sister call her daughter. The news was not good. My ingrate niece had no memory of the key code and had not visited the poor and affection-starved bicycle in at least a year and a half, since doing a "very, very ghetto job" of painting it. Her keychain, containing the key to the bike lock, had been pickpocketed from her only a few months ago, while she was sitting in a bar, guzzling kir and smoking Gitanes. It was hard for me to complain about the loss of my key once my sister informed me that as a result of the same crime she had been forced to replace her own apartment's front door lock to the tune of €1600. I gathered that Sophia is unlikely to receive any more allowance until her eightieth birthday, but this was but a small consolation.

"Bad news," I wrote to Traci. "Nobody knows nothing. No code, no key, no clue. Take my advice, forget I ever even mentioned it, and have a look on eBay.fr for something used and reasonable. Sorry to have gotten your hopes up."

To be continued...

Traci Macnamara, soothing her disappointment, and her tendonitis, with a frozen bag of organic peas.

All photographs: Theo Cremona

For Part Two of this cliffhanger, click HERE

Walking to Santiago (de Compostela, not Cuba)

It is largely to my mother's side of the family that I believe I owe my interest in walking. My proper British grandfather, Arthur, who gave me my middle name, believed in everything in moderation, except hiking. As a wee one, I often visited the grandparental home in England, on the hilltops of Rye, in Sussex. It overlooked expansive sheep's meadows that stretched out to the edge of the horizon. On clear days a pale strip of sand at the edge of the view marked the English channel. My grandfather would lead my sister and me charging out of the back gate, down the terraces of grandmother's immaculate rose garden, into the lane and then across the pastures on long, long walks, until my adolescent legs were sore. Once, I think, we walked all the way to Hastings, or back from there, but it could be that I'm only remembering a story granddad told, of having made that long trek himself.

Only, gulp, 1100+ kilometers to go!

So I may have walked to Guantánamo, but I got it from my mother. In the context of Mom, I'm not sure what the word "retired" is supposed to mean, but it doesn't involve relaxing beside a swimming pool while growing old. No sooner had she claimed retirement than she announced a multi-year plan to hike with her friend Susan Saltrick the more than a thousand miles across much of southern France and northern Spain, on the centuries-old pilgrim trail to Santiago de Compostela.

Unlike those members of her immediate family who set off on such journeys only for their own selfish amusement, Mom promptly identified the proposed trip as a potential money-earner and sought out sponsors willing to pay her by the mile. I'm one of them, and I'm out some money. All funds go to benefit the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, an NGO that had the brilliant idea of connecting lonely Azerbaijani grandmothers with lonely orphans desperately in need of early parenting. A win-win situation, as they say.

Recently back from the second leg of the trek, Mom sends this report:

Dear friends, sponsors, and well-wishers,
Thank you all so much for supporting our pilgrimage, with your pledges, prayers, cash and concern. You truly were “with us” on the way as we walked, and your good thoughts refreshed and energized us daily. Many of you have helped us raise further funds for the “granny program” in Azerbaijan of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, and for those of you who had pledged us per/mile, we are pleased to tell you that we walked a total of 255 miles in 17 days. We are grateful in many more ways than one!

Graffiti left by pilgrims who passed this way earlier...

As some of you know, we began the first stage of our journey to Compostela last year at Le Puy-en-Velay in central France, but we can now report the successful completion of our second stage—not, as anticipated, at the foot of the Pyrenees, but across them, in Spain! The decision to attempt this came late, but the thought of crossing a mountain pass on Day One of our third stage encouraged us to step up the pace significantly on our last few days in order to hike over the top while our legs were “broken in.” Thus, on our final day, after a straight run of sunshine, we climbed relentlessly up into the clouds, crossing Roland’s pass in a chill shroud of mist and rain, to descend, drenched but triumphant, into Roncevalles, where we stepped with relief into the ancient church where so many pilgrims before us must have fallen in gratitude to their knees.


Our journey had taken us through a constantly changing landscape, past acres of sunflowers and miles of corn, across lush green pastures, beside the still waters of a canal overhung with mighty plane trees. After ten days or so we began scanning the horizon for a first glimpse of the Pyrenees, but clouds can resemble mountains and we had to admit that our early sightings were a mirage. However, a day came when the dim outline took on undeniable, jagged substance, and it was then that the mountains took shape as a personal challenge.

Mom hits the road

We were amazed once again by the focused simplicity of life on pilgrimage, and fell happily into the repeater pattern of walking (vigorously), sleeping (soundly), eating (heartily)—and laundry (vital). We marveled at the varieties of architecture, of fauna and flora, of people whom we met or who hosted us, and the places we stayed: There was the couple who miraculously survived the tsunami while vacationing in Sri Lanka and had committed to walking from their home in Austria to Compostela as an act of gratitude, because “we needed to do something ‘impossible’;” and the calm symmetry of the 12th-century cloister at Moissac, where a remarkable tympanum depicts the beatific vision, while below, a line of patriarchs and kings gape upwards in stupefaction … We came upon, surely, the world’s longest earthworm, over two and a half feet long; and then there were the huge and mystifying wooden ladders propped up in the forest—whatever for?

Harvesting walnuts, maybe?

"Drenched but triumphant"

When at last the half-timbered farmhouses and tiled roofs with tip-tilted corners of the Béarn gave way to the Basque whitewashed houses with their ox-blood colored shutters, the Pyrenees were a constant presence, beckoning, challenging, and beautiful.
With our best wishes and grateful thanks - Susan and Joan


If you would like to sponsor my mother on the remaining two legs of her epic walk, which is to say the Spanish portion, send me an email, or, you may donate directly to the Worldwide Orphans Foundation HERE.