July 23, 2017
Day Three, July 23: Broken Spokes, and Jean-Philippe and Agnès.
Day Three, July 23: Broken Spokes, and Jean-Philippe and Agnès.
Day three started with the French breakfast of champions, called "deux croissants et un petit cafe", and then was uneventful until lunch. At which point my bicycle made a noise:
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TING!
I was sitting at a picnic table, eating a sandwich. I was not expecting my bicycle to say “TING!”. I went looking for anything that was out of place, and I found a broken spoke. I had never heard of a wheel breaking a spoke while sitting still, but here mine had just done it.
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There was nothing else to do but replace it, and check the rest of the spokes. While I was working, another solo tourist, Christophe, rolled up on his recumbent. We compared notes from other tours, and about how we did better alone than on group tours. “Je suis un touriste autonome!” he declared (“I am an autonomous tourist!”), which I thought was an appropriate word for it. We talked about how it was predicted to rain in the early evening, and then he moved on so he could get to his next stop before then. I finished up work, plucking the spoke like a guitar string to try to match the tension with the others, and put the wheel back together and on the bike, and kept rolling.
At intersections, I started to see bicycles. Not bicycles for riding, but bicycles ready for a party: usually painted bright colors, or covered in paper flowers, or with a doll or other creature seated riding it. “This region sure likes bicycles,” I thought. Then I came across a seven-foot-tall model of a bicycle made from bamboo and irrigation tubing. Two men were chatting nearby outside of a house. I asked what was up with all the bicycles. They explained that it was a national week of bike tourism in this département next week. Ten thousand bike tourists were expected to descent on the area. Wasn’t I one of them? I expressed my regret – which was real, had I known about this I might have reversed the direction of my tour – but no, I was just a guy who decided to bike here on a random week. One of them showed me the routes in his newspaper that he happened to be holding. It was a national event, in a different region every year, to highlight its biking potential, the Semaine fédérale internationale de cyclotourisme. I thanked them for getting me up to speed.
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That afternoon I rode through more forests: the Parc Régional du Perche, and the Forêt Domaniale de Bellême. Perche is a historical regional of France that is no longer a political territory and the name exists mostly on the park. Belleme was a town that gave its name to the surrounding forests.
All the forests had a similar feel: they were large, but it was always possible to sense the presence of forestry professionals at work. Trees were spread out, obviously culled to be a minimum distance from each other, and usually leaving an open feeling to the forest floor, the sort of place where you could imagine Hansel and Gretel wandering through. Every ten kilometers or so there would be a gigantic pile of lumber from cut trees. Occasionally there would be a few acres of forest seemed to have been clear-cut and then re-planted systematically, the trees points on a grid. Ferns were everywhere, gigantic ones that grew six feet tall like hedgerows along the side of the road, and scattered in the forest understory. The roads were all ones that would be white on a Michelin map: narrow, low speed limit, low traffic. Perfect for biking. I passed by Basilique Notre-Dame de Montligeon, a gigantic cathedral-like church built in the middle of nowhere by the Catholic Church around the turn of the twentieth century for a charismatic priest who drew enormous crowds to hear his preaching.
In late afternoon, a few kilometers past yet another bike-festival-bedecked village, it started to drizzle, and then slightly more than drizzle. I had experienced this before in Ireland and Brittany, which have a similar maritime climate: the raingear-ambiguous level of precipitation. Without raingear and you are pleasantly cool and unencumbered, but if it rains more and more, you can end up completely soaked and shivering. With raingear, and you tend to overheat, and it might stop raining in five minutes in which case you’ve spent five or ten minutes stopped, putting on and taking off raingear. Based on the precipitation, I put it on.
And then it happened again. TING! Drive side this time. An easier fix . . . if I had a spoke. I only brought one spare. Well, I certainly wasn’t staying where I was, which was on a moderately busy road with wheat fields on either side. I was pretty sure that in the distant past I had read that you can ride a short distance missing one spoke. Onward, at least to the next hotel or campground so I could deal with it in the morning; it was now Saturday at 6pm and for sure not a single bike shop in France was open now. I stopped a spandex-clad bicyclist going the other way, and asked where the nearest bike shops were. He gave me the names of three towns. If I had to hitchhike, at least I could try to hitchhike to somewhere where there would be spokes.
It started raining harder. Not a storm, but unambiguous keep-your-raingear-on precipitation. The bike started feeling funny. I looked down; my rear wheel was distinctly out of true and was causing a wobble that felt like being on a train. So much for riding with a missing spoke. I stopped, thought for a moment, and started walking back towards town.
I had passed a “Gites de France” sign about a kilometer before that. At the time all that I could recall was that a “gite” was some kind of place that tourists stay, kind of like a bed and breakfast maybe? The sign was about a kilometer back, and since I was walking past it on the way to town, I decided to ask for help there, or at the very least if I could just camp there for the night to get out of the rain and to be settled someplace before dark. The gite itself was about another half-kilometer down a dirt road; I set my bike down halfway and walked the rest without it. The gite was a beautiful, fully-restored farmhouse with a large outbuilding. There were three shiny cars parked outside, and large glass windows with a view into a beautiful common room. I knocked on two doors. No response. Whatever this place was, it was surely booked up. In retrospect, over the rest of the trip, I learned that this was not so much like a bed and breakfast as just a rental house (a “Gite de Hote” is more like a bed and breakfast. This was just a plain “gite” with no host). Probably it was filled with wealthy English tourists who were out at dinner, and did not want their vacation interrupted by a drenched man with a broken bicycle. In any event, there was no one here to help me. I left.
Walking back to the main road, I encountered a middle-aged farmer and his wife driving an old pickup truck. I waved them down. “Is that your gite there?” I asked. It wasn’t. “Ok, thank you.” They looked mildly confused and concerned, but drove on.
“That was really dumb, Joe,” I said to myself. “Why didn’t you ask them for help? An American bicyclist might have been the most interesting thing to happen to that couple this year. Suzanne wouldn’t have just said ‘Ok, thank you.’ She would have charmingly and assertively asked for help. The bike would be in the back of their pickup, and we’d be on our way to drinking warm tea in their farmhouse.” My wife Suzanne had skipped this tour to be home with our eighteen-month-old daughter, so she was not there to be charming and assertive for me. But I did have her voice in my head reminding me that I shouldn’t worry about inconveniencing other people. “I am going to talk to other people. This is a point where I need help. I will be ok with inconveniencing people,” I said to myself. When things get rough, sometimes I have to give myself a pep talk. This was one of those times.
I walked the three kilometers back into town. Hadn’t I seen a sign for a hotel in this village? The plan had been to camp every night, but this was definitely an extenuating circumstance warranting a hotel. The first people I saw were a couple getting out of their car and walking to their house, which had one of the bike-festival painted bikes over the doorway. The woman walked in the door to get out of the rain. The man looked my way with a slightly concerned look – the look of a bicyclist who knows that when someone is walking a bike in the rain, there’s a problem.
“Excuse me, is there a hotel in town?” I asked. There wasn’t. I explained the situation briefly. Broken spokes, need a bike shop. “Is there somewhere I can camp for the night, so I can deal with this in the morning?” Of course there was! In his garden.
His name was Jean-Philippe. The building Jean-Philippe lived in could have been called townhouses or row houses, if the layout was not so byzantine. It was several large residences smooshed together into an interlocking but spacious warren of walls and passageways. He led me under an arched entryway, through a courtyard-and-parking area, through a low dark passageway and then opened a wooden gate into a garden surrounded by a wall. I could stay here. The only condition was that I had to make sure to keep the gate closed, because the hen stayed here at night and he didn’t want her to get out.
I asked him about bike shops. He listed the various bike shops in the area. I asked him how my bicycle and I might get to one of the towns that had those bike shops. Jean-Philippe thought about that. He wasn’t really sure, but he could probably find someone who could drive me, or worst case he could drive me himself. Part of the problem was that it was Saturday evening and French bike shops are typically closed on Sundays and Mondays, so even if I got there, I’d be sitting still for two days. Maybe, he had a friend nearby who might have some extra spokes that would be the right size, and that way there would be no driving at all. The friend was a real bike nerd, had ridden Paris-Brest-Paris multiple times.
We were getting rained on. I was still in full rain gear, but Jean-Philippe was just holding his cotton jacket over his head and he was starting to get wet. He told me to follow him, heading towards his house. It wasn’t really clear what we were going to do there – call his friend maybe? I followed. When we got there, he asked me to take off my shoes and put on some slippers in the entry hallway. Was he inviting me into the house? Should I take off my raingear so it wasn’t dripping all over the floors in the house? Probably best, yes.
Jean-Philippe introduced me to his wife Agnès. Her name is pronounced ANN-yayhs in French, so it took me a moment to realize that it was a name I already knew in English. Agnès offered me tea. His children Rose and Mathis showed up and sat at the table, as well as another man whom I think was family also. It was clear the house was probably two centuries old from the appearance of the heavy wooden beams in the ceiling.
Jean-Philippe and I kept talking about the wheel, and he came to the conclusion that what I needed wasn’t a bike shop, it was a spoke. How long was my spoke? I had the lengths of all my spokes in notes I kept with me: this one was 266 millimeters. “Let me look at my old wheels,” said Jean-Philippe, taking a measuring tape off a sideboard and dashing upstairs. Several minutes later he bounced back down, with a radially-laced front wheel in his hand. The measurement was close but it was impossible to tell exactly while the spokes were in the wheel. Jean-Philippe was completely ok taking it out but wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Did we have to take the tire off? I assured him we did not; I did this once already this morning. I got my spoke wrench and took a spoke off; it was 270mm. A little long, but it seemed better than any of the other options. Did they mind I set to work to see if I can get this to fit? Not at all . . . and Agnès told me that dinner was in an hour and there was absolutely no way I was staying in the garden in the rain when they had a dry bedroom. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to inconvenience you too much.” She assured me it was not an inconvenience.
Jean-Philippe showed me a work room, full of bicycles and a lawn mower that made it smell of gasoline. It had a workbench which had only one power tool, and it was the one I really needed: a grinding wheel. After grinding a few millimeters off the end of a spoke, I laced it in to the rim and tightened it. The two bad things I was concerned about – the spoke being too long and poking the inner tube, or not having enough threading to tighten properly – did not happen. This might actually work. Jean-Philippe gave me a chain so I could haul the rear wheel off the ground, and I set to truing the wobble out of it. Since the only theory I could come up with for the breaking spokes was excessive tension, I also de-tensioned all the spokes somewhat. I ground several more spokes down to the right length as spares.
It was dinnertime. Salad, a variety of Norman cheeses, French bread. Agnès made crepes, served with raspberry jam and rhubarb preserves from their garden. Over the course of dinner, I learned that Jean-Philippe had rescued the hen, who as a runaway from a nearby large farming operation; the dog, who someone else had abandoned; and last week he had rescued two young tourists from the Czech Republic who were hitchhiking and got dropped off in his town. Visiting the bathroom, I noticed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was posted on the wall. I asked him about it. “It’s for the children to learn.” I had studied the Declaration in law school, in a course on International Human Rights Law, but it had never previously occurred to me that it was something I might post in my house. It doesn’t have anything about rescuing bicyclists in it, but I couldn’t help but think that it was all part of the same philosophical package of helping others when they need it.
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After a hot shower, a solid night of sleep in a real bed, and breakfast with Jean-Philipp and Agnès, I got ready to head off in the morning. Europeans really like seeing people off. I had learned this from my wife’s family, who are Danish and German. They will walk you to the front door, stand where they can see the street where you are departing from, and watch you drive or ride away until you are no longer visible. Normally this is endearing, but when you are on a vehicle you just repaired yourself and that you fear will break again after two hundred meters, it is nerve-wracking. Jean-Philippe and Agnès were no exception to this practice: they walked me out to the street and stood, waving the whole time, as I pedaled away.
It didn’t break. The new spoke and I made it out of sight. For the rest of the day, the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts, from the move The Princess Bride echoed in my head: “Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning." My wheel said every night: “Good night, Joe. Nice riding. Sleep well. I’ll most likely break another three spokes in the morning”. The Dread Pirate Roberts never does kill Westley, and in fact Westley assumes the role of Dread Pirate Roberts so the old one could retire. And so it was with the new spoke: it never broke, and it just became the new spoke that traveled with me. It made it to Mont Saint-Michel, to Utah Beach, back to Paris, and as I write it is sitting in my garage, still laced to the wheel, in Oakland, California. I’m thinking about mounting it on the wall of the garage next to a copy of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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