Moncabrier, France: Worrying the Dutch

June 12, 2015

Nothing as sad as names, bald and now unknown to the world, of those deported to extermination camps

IT'S RAINING. It seems particularly unjust on my first day because things started so well - although that didn't stop my complaining about the humid heat and the unsheltered sun, of course. The air has been thick enough to spread with a trowel.

I'm sitting here now in the wood-and-stone shelter of an outdoor bar on the edge of a campground in south-west France. It's in a long, green and, now, wet valley. There are trees all around, conifer and deciduous in promiscuous closeness, and I can hear leaves dripping on baked earth and curled, brown leaves.

And outside the station, a wagon of the sort in which they were taken away

There are two remarkable things about this campground. The first is that it's run by a fat woman, a lean man with a silver goatee beard, and a younger woman wearing a cowboy hat and cut-off jeans. The second is that I didn't plan to stop here. I was looking for a short cut to where I wanted to be, mistook its name on my GPS, and rode a little further than I intended and rolled up here towards the end of the afternoon. The cost - or the pleasure - of letting batteries do the route-finding was to ride a helter-skelter of narrow, clod-spotted roads that rose and plunged like a snake with an itchy back.

Everyone here is talking Dutch. One day Holland will call Paris and say it's invaded but there's no point looking for the troops because they're scattered around the nation's campgrounds. Summer is an excellent time to rob houses in Holland; the owners are all away in southern France.

I am a foreigner in my own land. I have this feeling, from other people's looks, that I have done something which nobody will explain. There's nothing said: it's an understanding, understood by everyone except me.

You know places like that?

It's starting to get darker now. It's still only seven but the sky is grey and mournful. I am tired of being found guilty without charge. I'll finish this beer and leave you. It's a quick run to my tent and then the Dutch will have to find someone else to judge.

** UPDATE on the campground man: he's not lean at all. He's just walked past. He has a belly and a stoop and he's gone to seed. I just thought you'd like to know.

Today's ride: 90 km (56 miles)
Total: 90 km (56 miles)

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