04/08/12 12:55, Bar outside Quimper train station, en route to Brest
For the first four days of my trip, the journey easily outweighed the destination. I saw a few sites and sights – the forest, the town, the small city, the beach – but mostly, I biked. My diary has reflected this, I think, focused more on how I move than what I see.
Yesterday that changed. I visited three veritable destinations, places that attract tourists, events that are known, items written up in my guidebook. It changed the tone of my trip: expectations about other things entered the picture. With expectations come fulfillment and disappointment. Indeed, yesterday had a bit of both.
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| People sometimes say I'm on the track to nowhere... |
The first site belonged to nature. Le Côte Sauvage, the wild coast, marks the western edge of the Quiberon peninsula (peninsula, in French, at least for smaller ones, is “presqu’île” – almost island). Both a coastal road and a worn-in runners’ and bikers’ path mirror the water imperfectly. The coast begins on the Southern tip of the peninsula at Quiberon and runs 8-10 km, stopping just short of Penthièvre, where I was staying.
I took the creaky peninsula train (le tire bouchon – the corkscrew) to Quiberon, loaded up with bread and an apple, and took off. The coast begins with a dramatic stone house or castle just past a roundabout. From there the dramatics continue: craggy clifflets and rocky shores; inlets and mini pools; stark changes in elevation on a small scale; clouds looming and evaporating on the horizon; tall grass and short shorn brush and shrubbery adorned with purple glowers off the coast; and the odd hosue or tourist couple breaking up the scenery. The ocean roars and gulls squawk, but there is no smell of seafood, seaweed, sea stink, just of moist, fresh air. Stone monuments loom on and off shore in all directions, whether ancient or imitative, and in the water a double-bumped “island” 50 meters off shore looks like a beached Loch Ness monster, trapped in shallow sand.
Le Côte Sauvage ends and I drift inland. Inland though a couple kilometers up the peninsula narrows to an isthmus no more than five football fields wide. Later, a small forest encloses the bike path. The peninsula is full of delights. Nature, even when predictable, not stunningly wilder than other natures, is worth it.
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I’ve been reading that large book by the Pole nobody I know knows. It’s also a diary, and old Witold Gombrowicz entertains in his cantankerousness. One of his many targets for rhetorical attack was painting. “Painting is one great resignation from what cannot be painted. It is a cry: I would like to do more, but I cannot. This cry is oppressive.” He argues we only like paintings because everybody else does, and we fear looking stupid. Aspects of the artists’ biographies intrigue us too (he mentions Van Gogh as an example), but the painting itself is static, plastic, and thus of little value.
This idea of liking something because everyone else does infects travel as well. Such is especially the fight with the guidebook. The guidebook is an indispensible source of ideas, phone numbers, and lame essays. One wants to travel to the best sites, but also to do it freely. Hence the struggle with even the best guidebooks; with those less than best, one suspects the must-sees are not quite musts.
My guidebook’s top recommendation for Bretagne was to see the megaliths. Stone monuments dating back 5,000 years, to a time before any reasonably engineering – the wheel, e.g. – existed to help build or erect them. Grandeur on the order of Stonehenge, but less grand and with more stones.
After eating the best crepe I’ve had yet this trip (the complète with onions, ham, cheese, and egg) from a place not in the guide, I rode to the site in Carnac. In the summer, one is not allowed into the actual site without a guide, but can walk or bike around the alignments. I left the “Maison des Megaliths” next to a family of four Italians. The mother took photos and exhorted her children, the father biked eagerly, the teenage daughter fended off her younger brother, and the brother, when not teasing the sister, ripped off sarcasm-tinged lines: look ma, there are the stones. Wow.
And not to be a child, but I empathized with the ragazzo. The site was full of stones. Granite stone monuments, some to a tall man’s height, others two or three times that high, set in long, precise lines, with tall wild grass growing among them. A few of the monuments were shaped differently or set one against the other. A small circular guard tower next to the middle alignment site offered a nice lookout point to see those lines.
My book asks how and why these were erected. How is a question for archaeologists and engineers, why seems obvious enough – with spiritual or religious purposes in mind. Further, this is not as bold a site as I imagine Stonehenge to be, or Easter Island (nor as comic as the version in Spinal Tap). It is a collection of tall granite stones in a grassy field with limited majesty.
Actually, the location excited me. The path led through forests and past ponds. The better question is why here? Presumably, the proximity to water matters, and the forest helps too – we imagine old druids chanting under a canopy, wearing bear skins as a designation of status.
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| There was also an amazingly life-like statue of an oversized head... |
The best collection of megaliths at the Carnac site is “Le Petit Menec.” Just off the last main alignment heading east, this little row hides under trees. These monuments are smaller, shorter than me even. Where the rest of the megaliths stick out as slightly incongruous, like overgrown cemeteries, these felt humble, understated, and in line with their surroundings.
I’m not sure I would recommend the site to other people. Maybe the guided visit would be better. Maybe you really like stones. I cannot confirm the consensus positivity, nor my guidebook’s affirmation of the site. But if one were to go, I would tell him/her to see the trip out to the end, where a little secret hides. Even in the (mild) disappointments, good surprises can be found.
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Lorient was turning sour on me by the minute. The bus left me two minutes late. The rain doused and delayed me. The music did not deliver on its promise. A bus would leave for my hotel at 21:30, and I was ready to give up for the night, to go back to my room and read and write, such as I do every night.
Lorient was my first real deviation from plan. Instead of biking off the train some 20 kilometers to Concarneau, a small coastal town, I would stay in Lorient, a city big enough to have a first division football club, if one that barely survived relegation last season. The city also hosts the Festival InterCeltique Lorient (FIL), a large gathering of Celts from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, Galicia in Spain, and, of course, Bretagne. My book claims 600K visitors descend on the city, though strangely Lorient receives no other mention.
Due to the crowds and my last-minute change in plans, I only found a room just outside the city, across an étang. I stumbled into the center, where a genuine buzz emanated from the booths and stages along the port. The sunshine and the ever-young late evening assured me that I had done well to come here, to change.
Less than two hours later, clouds loomed and I found that I had unwittingly missed the bus by two minutes. My legs had logged 45 kilometers on the bike that day, and 165 over the last three days, but I had not choice but to walk another four. The étang crossing, beautiful to the hotel with a lush forest and that sun, was bleak this time. Boats floated off the port to my right like toys in a dingy bathtub.
When the rain came, on the other side of the crossing, I at first pushed on, using the sidewalk trees for scant cover. After five minutes of dousing, I escaped under a bus stop. No bus, of course, and I twiddled my thumbs for ten minutes while the drops, as measured by their impact on the street puddles, slowed.
My plan had been to take the 22:45 bus back after 2+ hours of Celtic fun, with the midnight bus as an option if I was having great Celtic fun. By the time I got to the center, it was about 20:40, I was wet and tired, and the festival had a lot of work to do to re-impress me.
I went to the Celtic tent to eat dinner and avoid drizzle. I bought an Estrella Galicia, a mediocre Spanish beer that would never be sold in France except for the festival. I exchanged seven Euros for plastic tokens and bought a(nother) crepe and fries. By the time I crammed the fries and their three attendant sauces – mayo, ketchup, and orange mystery – I felt ready to go home in a body bag.
Nothing about this distinguished FIL from a typical European festival, each with its own local flavors, except that the music over the loudspeakers often featured bagpipes, and the young folk acting like jackasses wore green hats and kilts.
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| Really guys? Really? |
I left the tent. The rain had stopped, and only music could save my life. The first band I came across had blue-striped white sailor shirts – Picasso was photographed a few times wearing these – a nice, local uniform. Unfortunately, they played corny American music, New Orleans jazz and doo-wop and the like. The music was neither good nor appropriate, costumes aside. Another strike.
The 21:30 bus and the white flag loomed as a more and more tempting option. What can I do if the festival is disappointing, the weather dismal, and staying out late to me disagreeable? Such is me, and fighting my innate sense will only lead to later regrets.
I walked past the bus stop. I’d give another street a try. If no good, either a bus or a cab could get me closer to bed. One must validate one’s choice in destination, after all.
Around the corner, I heard a tone, a reedy sound, the tumult of a crowd. I turned. At the Porc de Lorient bar (or some such name – their emblem included a pig, and I learned French pigs say “groin-groin” instead of oink), a band played on the terrace. Six men from 30-50 years old, the band featured two guitarists, a drummer, a bald bespectacled dude on a wooden accordion/squeezebox, and two, of course, pipes players. These two would alternate, one between bagpipes (or uilleann pipes, I don’t quite know the difference) and a flute, the other between pipes and something like a mini-clarinet, with a tone similar to the pipes. None, by the way, wore costumes.
This last was the leader of the band, calling on the crowd to join in and, when he could, waving a Bretagne flag at his side. The Bretagne flag is great – black and white stripes with triangular figures meant to represent the initial bishoprics in the corner. It looks like a bizarro, pirate version of the U.S.A. flag – I’m sure there’s no connection, though the U.S. flag came first.
The music was all well and good, traditional Celtic music with a modern rock backing, but what made me stay was the crowd. In front of the stage, 16-20 people danced the appropriate traditional dances, either in pairs or in a circle as called for by the song. None of the crowd was dressed up, and most looked like they were copying what everybody else did, but with joy and honest intent. The exception was a man no older than me with long blonde hair and a long gray kilt. He had a goatee and shining eyes, and when not leading a partner or a group, he danced alone, setting the example, investing his blood and joie de vivre into the mutual crowd/band performance.
I took a seat in the back of the crowd. The band flowed through the set industriously and with attentive joy. The songs were pleasant and evocative the way well-played folk music always is. In a different setting, or for a longer period of time, or with the band wearing costumes, this might have grown dull, tedious, or kitsch.
Instead, the dancing crowd’s number swelled with each song. Around the crowd, an older drunk with a big backpack and a hat pestered the fun, trying to add to (or detract from) the music on a cheap recorder. The staff ushered him off the outdoor premises. The crowd continued; a pair of young women who had fended off the drunk danced together, then split up to dance with others for the next song. A bigger man with no hair struggled to time his claps right. Older couples sparkled in the culture of the moment. Blondie, who I called a “Viking Celt” in my head, sipped on his beer between songs, and disappeared for a song even, but returned to prance up and down the dancing space. The drunk returned through the back and, in moving one of the big parasols, drenched a group of onlookers. There’s always one. The music went on.
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I don’t know. I’m loath to assign true, wide-spanning unity between vast numbers of people to any moment. I don’t believe the Olympics really bring us together; they just give us something to talk about amongst each other. I don’t believe nations on the scope of the U.S., France, India, even Luxembourg almost, make sense, not on a spiritual level; nation-states are convenient for wielding power, for administrative purposes, but not for identity. It makes just as much sense to build a nation out of the millions of people who own Thriller as out of people born or living in a 100,000 square mile area, say.
But on a smaller, humbler level, there are things we all share, just as humans. We can share in moments, in temporary connections. Even as they dissolve, those connections become more real and satisfying than the connections forced on us.
Nothing is better than music and dance at drawing out those connections. Movement and sound, simple sound, can bring us down to our most basic urges – to react, to thrust and shake, to act like animals. Get on the floor and just freak out: there is no better one time cure-all.
Get on the floor called the bandleader as the band circled through two riffs over and over to close down the set. I sat and watched. I’m not shy about dancing, but I prefer to do it alone or for someone I know, to amuse or irritate or impress. I sat and watched.
The last remnants from the sitting crowd got up. The circle of dancers expanded. In the middle, a few bolder dancers, the two guitarists, and of course the whirling dervish of a Viking Celt, eyes lit and hair aflame. The music both hollowed out as the guitars lost bite in the crowd and heightened to a final crest.
I put my bag down and walked to the front. The circle had no opening. I stood on its edge, tangent to the dance and clapping with the beat.
The song and the set ended a few seconds later. The crowd dispersed happily. The band went on a break. The tension of the moment eased.
I took the bus home 15 minutes later at 22:45. All in all, I was pleased, both with day and with night.
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