Be My Guest

"When life gives you lemons/proof of the endemic misunderstanding of economics, racism, sexism, and nihilism of one's society, make lemonade/feverishly binge watch a distracting fantasy."  And so it came to pass that I finally watched Emily in Paris.  It's just as preposterous as I had imagined, but man, it's nice to see some hot men in beautiful places and watch a relentless woman make it in a new town through force of will and a boatload of serendipity.  It's in this vein of confectionery escapism that I now write to you, friends, hoping to provide a short break from quotidian and existential disappointments.

But I didn't watch Emily in Paris alone -- I was with my delightful friend Sam.  Sam is my first visitor(!), connecting the seasonal world to my own new adventure living in France.  She and I worked together a few summers ago in Alaska and bonded over long talks in the sauna, hiking and kayaking, and our increasing distaste for the multi-colored-exclamation-point-smattered-corporate-speak e-mails (and the in-person equivalent) that one boss saw fit to spam us with.  But I digress; Sam arrived in France ready to indulge in generous amounts of dairy, seafood, dessert, and bicycling.  We scoured the bakeries of La Rochelle for the best croissant, had a seaside cheese picnic, slathered our baguettes with butter, and cycled over the bridge and through the woods and beside the low cliffs that give way to oyster aquaculture and coastal marshland.  

To best utilize our time exploring the city, Sam arranged a home-exchange apartment for us in the very center of La Rochelle.  For a few days I was once again a city dweller in a chic neighborhood, tripping down the cobblestones and wending through colorful markets, flowing with the ebb and flood tides of people as the midday and evening crowds filled and emptied the charismatic streets.

This fishing hut would be the perfect writing shack.

grapes are dun 

The morning after the election Sam and I were a bit down and took a ride on a carousel, which cheered us up and also provided a cheesy metaphor for our uneasy sense of finding ourselves, after pointless circling, back again where we were not so long ago...

The aquarium, on the other hand, was fucking great.

Come visit, we'll get a drink at the harbor!

October-fest

To better contextualize the grammar, French class has included the study of such subjects as encouraging sustainable consumerism, Senegalese street food, contemporary slang for arguing with your landlord, and a group of pranksters who scaled a cathedral dressed as Spiderman.  We learn related vocabulary to bolster this conversational framework, and alternate between chatting in groups, listening to short interviews, and writing.  On Mondays, I also have a Civilization class -- basically, general important facts about France, like its borders and mountain ranges, and how it co-opted the Renaissance from Italy.  On Fridays, I have History, in which we focus on the local contrarianism that makes La Rochelle special.  (The ascendant medieval merchant class aligned with Protestantism to disrupt entrenched Catholic and feudal hierarchies; today, they host the annual Socialist Party shindig.)

As if all that weren't simultaneously stimulating and fatiguing enough, a deluge of extracurricular activity -- primarily, house-hunting -- has flooded our domestic riverbed.  Prospective buyers, agents, notaries, architects, builders, square footage, sketches, plans, clumsily articulated hopes and dreams, lengths, distances, money...!  A few highlights from the saga: 1) being shown a house with a burst pipe(?) actively dripping the length of the living room; 2) discovering that the water meter of our current house was never registered and no bills were issued for seven years; 3) successfully negotiating the seller's vintage leather bar seats into our purchase.

Happily, it seemed as though La Rochelle was cheering us on through the morass of uncertainty.  Friends invited us for pleasant diversions, the annual jazz festival was solid, and a historic boat parade wowed the city with a fireworks extravaganza.  And we uncorked some champagne to celebrate one year together.

our French professor encourages us to use a wide variety of learning and memorization tools

from disco to Tchaikovsky to the theme from Jurassic Park, with colored lights and dudes waving sparklers on jet-skis, it was a multimedia production

a benefit of the bike commute

fall colors

Treasure Island

Ile de Ré is essentially the French Martha's Vineyard.  There are a handful of charming villages with classic central places (a café, a bakery, a few small shops).  Much of the land remains agricultural, mostly given over to grapes.  The coast is at once both beautiful and fierce -- the long sandy beaches are punctuated by limestone cliffs and various rocky layers of seabed that emerge at low tide, and the winds and currents can generate formidable square wave patterns.  

A smallish year-round population of retirees, local business owners, and laborers includes many families with deep island roots, still selling oysters and harvesting sea salt.  There are $5 million second homes down the street from family campgrounds with ball courts; there are luxury boutiques with grotesquely expensive purses close to deteriorating Nazi lookout bunkers.  During summer everywhere is at max capacity, with roughly 200,000 tourists that cannot get enough of the artisanal ice cream and/or riding bikes incredibly slowly down the middle of the road.

It is a low-lying, windswept, and (despite the tourists) rather quiet place.  In addition to the abundant shellfish, an early attraction was the natural predisposition for salt harvesting.  There are great swaths of tidal marsh where shallow pools gradually evaporate at low tide.  While today it's merely tasty and full of minerals, salt in the Middle Ages was scarce and in high demand, and with a bit of engineering, humans maximized the yield.  Thus did La Rochelle become France's biggest port, and its citizens leveraged significant political and religious autonomy.  Salt from the island is still a coveted commodity, sold across France for about 20 times the usual price.

There is a scenic bike path that winds through the salt marshes near Loix, in the farthest corner of the island.  The cool autumn evenings and waning daylight have tinged the leaves.  We cycled past yellowing vineyards, entered the muted gray silt and sere-blond grasses of the marsh, dotted with white seagulls and the occasional balletic egret.  Rich, red-purple glasswort(?) bearded the pond-grid.  And "flowers" of salt imperceptibly crystallized, molecule by molecule, drawn from the sea by the sun and wind. 

salt marsh

The berms of clay-soil divide the water, and gravity carries it into increasingly salty solution 

A lot of the bunker graffiti promotes "Save the Big Fat Whales"

crazy guy, crazy sunset

low tide sunset is rough on the toes but easy on the eyes

Rochelle, Rochelle

One of our conversation starters the first day of school last week was, "When did you arrive in La Rochelle?"  The eight Ukrainians that make up half the class all arrived in 2022; the three American undergrads all arrived a week ago; two Afghan nurses have been here a semester already; the nice Brazilian guy got here in summer.  Even though I technically arrived in March, it is only very recently that I've stayed for two consecutive weeks.  Jean-François and I have taken a grand total of one long walk in the city.  So in many ways, I still feel like a new arrival.

I am piecing the place together with my bicycle commute: 8 miles traversing two cute villages, a longish bridge almost invariably howling with wind, the industrial exurbs of the commercial harbor and airport, and finally the charming and tourist-choked 17th-century cobblestone streets of the city center and old harbor, the far side on which the university sits.  Sweaty and bedraggled, I eat some cheese, stare at sailboats for a few minutes, and try to remember what one of my favorite-sounding words -- presque -- means.  ("Almost.")

The core of the old city is actually pretty compact, but the several basins and channels it clusters around imbue a sense of expansiveness, extending the amount of "coastline" and open space.  It's difficult to believe only about 75,000 people live here; there are countless festivals and cultural events, a big aquarium, Jacques Cousteau's old boat, and seemingly more bakeries than I could ever visit.  At least right now while the weather is nice, the sidewalk and quayside bars and restaurants are vibrant, the medieval towers guarding the harbor entrance tranquilly sun themselves, and a contented student awaits her companion for an aperitif as the sun fades toward the equinox.

Clairey's first day of school

my lunch spot

the prettiest part of the commute

downtown

Escar-go-go-go

France is sort of in limbo right now, with a caretaker government while trying to form a coalition and choose a prime minister.  But that's not the reason the university still hasn't sent me a schedule for the semester that starts in a few days. Maybe it's showmanship -- a dramatic unveiling of the awaited for hour of the most aMAZing, inCOMParable, FANTASTICAL lecture on possessive pronouns!

In the meantime, I'm just getting resettled in the house, meeting more of Jean-François's very nice friends, and wondering where the trillions of snails will go in winter.  They are legion.  They love to scoodge their way onto the van, and spawn on fence posts and grapevines.  The vast majority are content to hang out and digest by osmosis(?) the fennel flowers, but a few daring fellows cross the bike path at great peril.  They scoff at the speeding assassins pursuing them, goo-ing nonchalantly as looming beasts approach.  The snails traverse the gauntlet carefree, in their own sweet time.  Not a bad way to be.

Beautiful infestation

This year's vintage has notes of stone fruit and gastropod 

Bumper sticker: "My other car is a jalopy"

Good hair day

Bad hair day

Desperately trying to blend in and not be eaten like popcorn by a heron

Slow-Motion Whiplash

Junior year of college I studied one semester in Italy.  This was 20 years ago, in the early days of the internet, and so once I gathered all the necessary documents, I woke up early one morning to visit the embassy.  December, 6am, huddled in an extra coat for hours on a Midtown sidewalk waiting for office hours with an ever-lengthening line of fellow beseechers.  Luckily I had everything required, and didn't suffer an invented whim of the interviewer.  I surrendered my passport for a few weeks, then repeated the pre-dawn vigil to retrieve it, now graced with an iridescent green-gold student visa.

Fast-forward to now.  I want to improve my French, to build a full life, comprehend the culture, and communicate with élan.  I am formally and legally saying, "Hey France!  I like you a lot, let's hang out!"  For several months the response was, "Hmm, yeah.  Or maybe just fuck off?"

Bureaucracy in France is pretty notorious.  I get it, it's hard being so cool and sexy and smart, with everybody fawning over you all the time -- especially scads of overeager international students.  But did they have to resort to such tactics as:

- hiding the log-in page on the application website 

- requiring a resume and letter of intention written in French, when you are applying to learn French 

- requiring the signature of the mayor of the town where I'll live

- employing a smarmy for-profit third party to process the paperwork, with a useless and kafkaesque helpline with operators that neither confirm nor deny even the most basic information, so that eventually you break down and eat the cost of multiple visits to Chicago, and finally after twisting in the wind to breaking point you receive your visa the day before you are supposed to fly to France...

'Tis such stuff as green card marriages are made on.  But in the end, I made it.  I get to stay a whole year, during which I hope to continue trundling about with and consuming the contents of my cheese-filled rucksack on a more local level, and with an expert guide and partner.

Lots of nice fun things also happened, like beach picnic and fire

As we returned a final time to the Windy City, I yelled into the night, "Fuck you, Chicago!"

Also lots of progress framing Mike's house!

And a beautiful visit to the dunes

M!ch!gan

It turns out I was born to do menial labor.  Whether it's scooping 100 lbs. of cookie dough into balls, dicing case after case of bell peppers, shoveling four inches of dirt to level the future floor of a garage, or beating hundreds of nails into roof trusses, I derive great contentment chipping away at big, basic tasks.  I can't exactly say I achieved meditative zen this week, because it's been hot and humid to the point of chafing my eyes wiping away sweat.  But the Protestant-work-ethic gremlin that grumbles within me granted begrudging approval.

My brother is building a new house, and it's at a gratifyingly transformative stage.  Framing and sheathing progress daily -- the bare half-skeleton of two weeks ago is shaping up and all the rooms are recognizable.  A minimum of blood and a maximum of sweat keep work flowing.

Jean-François and I had a break from the heat in the UP (northern Michigan), or as I now think of it, Junior Alaska.  The forests and lakes and fishermen and accents can be quite similar, and if you squint you can imagine mountains in the background.  We went to the Les Cheneaux Islands, camped in a gorgeous bit of National Forest along the lakeshore, and kayaked among the myriad beguiling passages.  Jean-François was in awe of the veritable sea of fresh water, extending beyond the horizon.  He was charmed by spontaneous friendly conversations with strangers.  And he had his first ham steak in this majestic land between the woods and the water.

nature writing

We met the nicest most helpful kayak guide/local booster ever; she offered us her fire pit and wood, and sent her parents and friends to chat with us.

Michigan or Alaska?!

geometry and trees