June 20, 2012
Another day, yet another col: St-Dier - Chalmazel
I KEEP THINKING that if you were to judge this ride merely by its daily distances, you'd put us down as a bunch of malingerers. Oh, we stop for coffee now and then, obviously, but the rest is slog. It is three-dimensional. So today we rode 57km, which is nothing very much, but we climbed 1 338 metres, which is very much indeed.
We are going against the grain of the land. We are going through a mountain range, over much more often than we go round. The climbs succeed one another with often aggravating steepness. And we know it will continue like this until just before we reach Geneva and the Swiss border. We are, we are sure, much holier characters because of it but we finish each day on our knees. Which is what holy people do, although they probably have less trouble getting up afterwards.
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Today we climbed immediately for five kilometres and then more gently through a pine-scented forest. The trees stood beside the road in salute, like rows of old soldiers, as proud and erect as they could manage but drooping at the shoulder. Their branches curved downwards, to shed the snow as best they could, and then frayed into the tatters of an army sleeve. Elsewhere the old soldiers lay slaughtered and heaped, mown down at the knee and waiting for the tumbril to cart them off to the logging station. Several loaded trucks crossed us coming the other way, although with a courtesy that their brothers in other lands are known not to respect.
The pines stayed with us all day until we reached the col du Beal. I feel embarrassed to write that because not one of the hours of planning this ride had alerted me to its presence. Sure, it's marked clearly enough on the map. But I missed it. We none of it missed it, though, when a big brown sign announced we were in for 14km of solid climbing at one to two degrees steeper than the Puy Marie.
Our climb started with Karen's bike falling apart, or at any rate her rear rack separating itself from everything else. Retightened bolts and the application of an ancient toe-strap carried for miscellaneous emergencies got her back on the road. Which then rose without distraction past the last houses and on through a curtain of trees until the altitude brought an end to all that and put us on a rocky incline instead.
There's an observatory at the top, with a large scarlet sign beside the road insisting that only army vehicles were allowed up there. That didn't mean that walkers, not being vehicles, couldn't also get to the top. And two of them appeared and nodded to us but not to each other as we sat in the mountain sunshine and chewed life back into our bodies.
I have often wondered how much long-distance lone walkers are introverts or shy or simply anti-social. These two would have delighted anyone with the same thought. They appeared on different tracks, converging where we sat. The first, lean and nimble, with the air of a man who last walked a city street in his childhood, knew exactly where to go for running water. The second, younger, smooth-faced and seemingly more a beginner, didn't know where the water is but wasn't prepared to admit that that to the other. Instead, he walked around aimlessly for a while and then, when the water trough was abandoned, strolled over as though getting water was the last thing he'd considered.
There were, though, only limited places to sit. We occupied all of one low wall and that left only a shorter and lower wall 20 steps away. The walkers sat at opposite ends of it, neither acknowledging the other. And then came the awful moment they knew would arrive: they were both going in the same direction, towards the observatory.
Carefully, they got up at the same time and made for the start of the track. The first to cross the road took the main path. The other took a bumpier, grassier trail a few metres to one side. For a moment they walked beside each other, but three paces apart. One acknowledged the other with a single word and got a single word in return. And from then on they did all they could to get as far from each other as their common destination would allow.
And people say cyclists are odd.
We started the descent with squealing brakes. We whirled in seconds round hairpins of the sort that had taken a minute on the way up. And then we rode into a charming village, Chalmazel, squealing in past its castle... and got no further. The woman in charge offered us rooms for 40 and 30 euros, astonishingly cheap, then dropped the price to 30 and 20 for no reason than that she seemed to like us.
Three people and one hotelkeeper have never been happier.
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