Paris to the Pyrenees by David Downie

Author:David Downie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

VINTAGE RALLIES AND CARBON FOOTPRINTS

Dawn drizzle highlighted the slumping tile roofs and winding streets of soulful Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray, one of those once-upon-a-time places. Gallic, Roman, and medieval pilgrim roads had traversed its main square, and still did, though they were now covered with asphalt. In the mid and late 1800s, Second Empire and Belle Époque vacationers had come for the clean air and gone with the wind. End of story?

We bought supplies at the local grocery, counted the names of dead soldiers on the war memorial, and stood in silence in the many-times rebuilt church, gazing at a remarkable cross. It was sculpted with grapevine and tree-of-life motifs, and spoke of earlier times of faith, ignorance, and poverty. Incongruously, the rumble of powerful engines shook the stained-glass windows.

We’d seen posters advertising the crosscountry vintage car rally that was to pass through the village en route to Mont Beuvray. Up the Gallo-Roman highway roared the antique Maseratis, slaloming amid Ferraris, Triumphs, Austin-Martins, and Morgans, the leather belts over their hoods rattling. I wondered how many chickens had been run over so far. Local boozers in the main square swilled wine from a shared bottle and shouted at the drivers. We were about to dart across the road when I sighted a 1966 Mustang convertible. It was white inside and out. Mine had been black on black. Otherwise the cars were identical. I recognized the chirping of the tires—early Mustangs were overpowered, the body weight badly distributed. They didn’t hold the road. For a moment my skin prickled. I was a teenager again, sun-bleached and mindless, life an open road. But that was a willing misrepresentation. If memory served, fog was more abundant than sunshine in the San Francisco of my youth, the minds I’d known had been sharp, often brilliant, and traffic had long clogged the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, and most of the scenic roads on the coast. California Dreaming was precisely that, even in the 1960s and ’70s, a time now shrouded in the rosy fog of nostalgia.

“You used to collect cars like these, didn’t you?” Alison asked. “Can you explain to me what the attraction is?” I know she didn’t mean to sound judgmental. As someone who suffers car sickness, and prefers nature to the automobile, she was quite simply baffled by the sight of grown men and women playing with toy cars.

I shook my head. I couldn’t explain it. Not any more. The utter vapidness of the exercise made me smile. Some people dance, I said to myself, others drive on the deck of the Titanic. Granted, walking across France was a pretty silly, selfish thing to do too, but at least it was quiet and pollution-free. “Some people grow sideways,” I said, lost in my thoughts, “like those trees back on Mont Beuvray.”

Ghosts in platform shoes and bell-bottoms walked with me past a herd of cows gorging on dandelions, under a grove of blossoming apple trees, and sang 1970s tunes in my ears. Perhaps that’s why we lost our way and turned due south down a dirt road.

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