(Day 1 – Briançon > La Motte-du-Caire – 30 June 2025 – 119 km, 1141 m)
Before I part ways with the boys, (with whom I’ve spent a week going up and down 2 out of a planned 5 mountains), Brody asks me what I am most nervous about. I am still under the weather, have tummy aches, headaches, and am too nervous to offer a coherent answer. It turns out that both the answer to what I am truly nervous about and the help needed to calm those nerves present themselves on the road.
The weight of the bike and bags (even without my already light load), the unrelenting heat, the weirdo at the rest stop along the side of the road, backup offline maps that decide to take siestas on cue with the local break time, leaving late (more about this on Day 2). The long journey. The worries prod and poke in relentless waves.
I catch up with Filippo about 15 km from my start, walking his bike uphill. Filippo is a big guy, carrying lots of extra body weight and lots of extra bike weight (complete with massive panniers, overstuffed front fork bags, and even a small stool strapped to the back rack). In lieu of a bike bell, his handlebars are decked with an old circus clown horn, which he uses to offer a boisterous hello instead of a warning for cars to get out the way. He smiles to everyone he sees. We travel together for 20 km, both realize our maps are cluelessly instructing us to cut through a forest ravine, reroute without a bike map (just an offline map and intuition), then stop for a coffee and baguette before I bid him farewell. This is his 17th bike packing trip, including Caminho da Fé in Brazil. His advice, unsolicited yet welcome, ranging from the practical to the philosophical, is poetic and precious. Midway along our slow moseying is the gem I shall most cherish: Melissa, on your journey, you will find all the answers to all the questions you are not yet asking. The questions come when the answers come. Be well, my fellow journeywoman.
And off I go, feeling the quiet and the fields and the blessed isolation until the clouds roll in and the skies begin to rumble. On a rural route that crisscrosses electrical lines, I realize I have no idea what to do if stuck with a bike during a lightning storm. I check my map, now failing me for the second time: turn left, it gingerly tells me, and go through fields and forest with not so much as a single track for a bike. I look at the offline map, but it offers no directions. It seems I am still 12 k from my backpacker’s gite. The climb is steep. I hop off and begin pushing the bike, the rainless thunder getting louder, and my mind telling me I am a walking lightening rod. Halfway up the mountain, a small, beaten-up van comes rumbling slowly down.
I wave it down and meet Poupine. Her vehicle is a disorganized piece of art, complete with a bed in the back, and she helps me heft the entire bike into a generous space she carves out between the bed and the boxes, art, camera, blankets, books, clippings, a perfectly formed chrysalis she found early in the day. She takes me back in the exact direction whence she came, seemingly unphased by the change in plans. It takes 2 minutes to understand she doesn’t believe in plans, and going backwards or forwards for her is mere illusion. Writer, photographer, artist, off-gridder, feminist, recycler, former illegal alien, and peace activist who swears like a sailor (even her bumper sticker swears: coller au cul dangeroux). She goes in all directions, in no direction, always. And my sweaty, stinky, tense body just melts into her passenger seat, tears nearly forming, the weight dissipating. She drops me off in the village square and tells me about helping others, seeing the art. There is a reason for it all, but we only know when we’re meant to know.
I thank the goddesses for sending me the two people I most needed to start my journey, and I cry as I write this.
Yes, Filippo, the answers are to the questions we do not ask. Yes, Poupine, I’ll know when I’m meant to know.
thewanderingbee.earth 