France 2013
The gusto that buoyed me back home from Japan sustained me the whole school year in Alabama. I went from a consummate underachiever accepting Cs like a buckyball to a straight-A student. Any opportunity to travel through school affordably I leapt at. I began studying French voraciously, signing up for a three week summer course in Aix-en-Provence and a student exchange program in Montréal for the Fall. Discovering my tiny university town had a sister city in Japan, I got in touch with our mayor and my advisor to arrange an independent study. I would follow the path of the famous haiku poet Matsuo Basho on the journey he took for The Narrow Road to the Interior in the 17th Century, staying in Buddhist monasteries and homestays I arranged along the way.
So it was that I plotted my first hare-brained, nonstop expedition through multiple countries. Not my last.
Landing in Aix-en-Provence, I stood at the luggage carousel waiting for it to begin spewing what the airport workers fed it and for my homestay mother to pick me up. A girl my age was standing next to me, and I struck up a conversation. She was Dutch, named Mathilde, and staying the summer by herself at her ancestral chateau in the hinterlands. (Europeans are like this.) The first words out of her mouth after pleasantries were, “You should come visit me.” Ignoring the risk of becoming plot fodder for a Taken sequel, I emphatically agreed and saved her number before getting in the car with my homestay mother, who had the same name as my real mother, just pronounced with a French accent.
It might be derivative to say, but homestays are like a box of chocolates. Mine in France was especially sweet in that it contained a brother my age named Pierre who was very cool and rode a motorcycle. A lot of other students ended up with stinkers, like an old couple requiring them to be home and quiet by 9 pm, or a family with young children. Pierre and I hung out every day and he took me to parties with him, which taught me a lot more about French language and culture than class did. He also took me on a motorcycle trip down to the coast and, on a bridge overlooking the port of Marseilles and the Notre Dame, popped a wheelie going 160 mph with me on the back, which did not teach me any French but did give me the opportunity to pardon some.
The other students on the course were from all over the U.S. I went out with them a few times, but we never quite cottoned to each other. I think we were the least novel thing each other could encounter and the biggest hindrance to new experiences: I doubt I would have struck up a conversation with Mathilde or that she would have invited me to her chateau if I had had five classmates in tow. Not to say I never had an interesting night thanks to another student. One began hanging out with a wild group of Frenchmen who would throw parties at their apartment. The ringleader, Anton, had a boyish, mirthful charm; it juxtaposed oddly with the suitcase full of euros and the glock he showed us. The troupe also contained a male stripper who went out into the street and enticed a group of pretty French girls to come up to the apartment, then fairly roundly seduced one while explaining to me—whom he seemed to regard as a mentee—exactly how he was doing it. Still one of the more surreal experiences I have had in my travels.
Pierre and his friend drove me to Mathilde’s chateau half an hour out of town one evening. They stayed for a while visiting with us, but after she offered to let me stay the night and tour the estate with her the next day, we said our goodbyes and they left me to my own devices. I do not know how many acres her family had, but she lamented as we walked that her grandfather had sold the horses, to me suggesting quite a lot. She took me to a defunct marble quarry on the property, telling me it had been abandoned since the 1920s. It had been a small operation, I would assume on the whim of some aristocratic ancestor to furnish the house back when it was more expedient to hire laborers to dig marble out of the yard than to have it delivered. She told me as children they would explore the shafts and dare each other farther and farther into the narrowing crevices. I made a decent sortie into one, though I would have gone much farther when I was smaller and did not know what an insurance deductible was. It struck me as an apt metaphor for something. I left it buried. A defunct mine was no place to dig.