Canicule

(Day 2 – La Motte-du-Claire > Aix-en-Provence – 1 July 2025 – 135 km, 690 m)

I imagined it would be charming to wander through the pear orchards and lavender fields bordering the rivers, streams and lakes formed by the Alpe ice runoff, so the planned bike routes have me and Liora Bree (my trusty two-wheeled travel partner) meandering far from the main roads and even farther from the main highways. I gathered I would need backups and contingency plans, so my helmet is labeled with my allergies, blood type and emergency phone numbers, offline maps have been downloaded to my phone, the battery pack is charged nightly, and I outfit myself daily with arm covers, a neon pink neck buff, a blue helmet hat, etc. and bike around looking like my outfit has been designed with the sartorial eye for design of a four year old given access to a full 64 color crayon set. I believed I would want to cover the bulk of my long distances before noon each day, so I have conservatively budgeted for a slower kph than my noodling pace on my virtual bike set up at home.

But I failed to plan for a canicule.

The normal cooling effect of the wind hitting my sweat or the tunnel created by moving at a relatively fast clip through space is now thoroughly cancelled by the abnormally high temperatures. Effectively, I am exercising in front of a hair dryer on high. And it is breaking and braking all of my plans.

So… plan D (maybe E?), which I began fleshing out in my head over today’s merciless 135 kilometers: reroute the next three days (and later whole chunks of northern Spain); start pedaling no later than 5:30 a.m. (civil twilight), even if that means skipping formal breakfast and just getting a boulangerie stop in around 9:00 a.m.; keep ample fresh fruit in my handlebar bag (not just dates, bananinha and paçoquinha); and dump weight (the running shirts, pair of shorts, bra, sneakers, cap, the light sweater, two of the spare tires, the extra gear bag, etc.).

I relay this matter-of-factly, but it has been a cosmic slap in the face. I spent money on the perfectly good items I am offloading. I swam in cold Maine waters for the spring hoodie I am ditching. I took hours to figure out my routes. I agonized over details. And already on day 2 of about 30 comes the reckoning. It takes me back to Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried and to the high school teacher who shared it with me exactly 30 years ago.

Memories of Mrs. Reed commenting on the book filter in between the filaments of my plan-D planning as I gruel through the final stretch. Suddenly she’s right beside me on my bike, reading the opening paragraph with the perfect diction and intonation that years ago kept me so rapt. And riding alongside us on a garage sale bike from the 1960’s is O’Brian’s Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, holding fast to his dear non-love letters from Martha so that every night he can read them and pretend Martha’s love for him is real.

My bag is heavy. My legs are sore. My thoughts are laden. Like the lieutenant, like all of us, I carry physical manifestations of my mental distractions and soothe myself with the physical distractions to my mental manifestations. I read, write, watch. I meet people and meet up with people, talk to them, talk to myself, talk to my dogs. I jump from conversation to video to art to blog to article to thought to thought to thought and to thing to thing to thing. I too am carrying so much that serves to pretend.

I reach Aix-en-Provence at 7:00 p.m. utterly exhausted. Plan D, Mrs. Reed, Tim O’Brian and Lieutenant Jimmy Cross have parted. It’s just me alone in the sparse room I have rented.

I don’t get a clean slate today, just a partially erased one with daunting space for wordless, dreamless sleeping and for dropping a small bit of the physical and mental load. New plans can be chalked up tomorrow. Now it’s time for quiet. Now I stop.