Ahead of us the Johanna Grietje’s tall wheelhouse appeared suddenly around a bend.
I’d boasted that we’d catch her up in a couple of kilometres in our fine powerful cruiser. She after all, was an old barge with an old engine. Now we weren’t far from Verdun-sur-le-Doubs, some forty kilometres from St Jean de Losne. The Johanna Grietje was slipping through the water leaving scarcely a wake from her fine hull.
Buschy appeared from the double doors at the back of the wheelhouse. He was gesticulating wildly. Yes, I know it has taken a long time, and we’re glad to see you too, I waved back, and ran right over the log he’d been trying to warn us away from.
Verdun-sur-le-Doubs was difficult. Heavy rain had turned the Doubs into a torrent. We swept downstream on the Saône and caught a glimpse of water foaming around bridge piles as we steered around the hairpin bend leading into the Doubs then battled the current into Verdun’s little harbour.
Houses whose foundations fell vertically into the river towered above us on one side but the port was a pleasant place shaded by old trees with a newish capitainerie built over the water. Madame la Capitaine emerged and told us we must tie up at right angles to the jetties or be charged for three boats. But she was an amiable soul. We did as she said, then helped in a skipper struggling to control his rental boat against the current. In the end he threw us lines and we towed him in backwards. He was from Denmark.
Next morning he berated us for blowing smoke over the river as our DAF engine warmed up. ‘I thought New Zealanders were environmentalists,’ he said. Well, I thought Danes were once such expert sailors they ruled the seas, albeit raping and pillaging.
In the warm evening we walked the narrow streets of the old town and admired the church and visited the bread museum whose curator had been about to close its doors but ate into her dinnertime by keeping them open for us. Sally loved bread, the feel and smell of it, the baking of it, the taste.
The French loved bread too. Our bread bin was always full of square loaves, and round ones, and oval, usually so nutty even the smallest towns had a dentist or two, and heavy enough to take a body straight to the bottom if you should fall overboard after lunch.
But a bread museum? Certainly some of the bread we had aboard tasted old enough to be on its shelves. I demurred. Sally went alone. She emerged elated, as if someone had added yeast and sat her in a warm place to rise.
I slept uneasily that night, my dreams full of our boat being swept helplessly on the current and smashed against the bridge piles as a galley-full of Danes rattled their tin hats and chorused verses which turned out to be complaints to the European commission on atmospheric pollution.
In fact we woke up and chugged off in company with nothing more dramatic than a few dead branches.
What a difference a day made. This morning the Saône seemed wide as the Pacific, free as the black kites soaring and swooping along its banks. The morning sun frolicked in the spring green of the passing trees, young sunflowers rose high on stalks which sometimes exploded like fireworks into great clouds of black crows, and we crowed over the cameo appearance of a white heron, so thin that when it turned to face us it almost vanished. The sky was deep blue, clouds plumped and the world was wide and bright as a South Island summer. Fishermen waved merrily from the shore as if they’d all just feasted on fat perch for breakfast.
Chalon-sur-Saône rose ahead of us. An island split the river and boats in the town’s port bucked against the current. This was the most expensive port we’d been in. Villages were quixotic with their mooring fees. Some charged up to $20 a night, some nothing at all. Chalon was the second-dearest of the trip, not much cheaper than Paris at $44 a night.
The hot showers were en panne, out of order. Two fat workmen returned from lunch and began keening over the innards of a boiler. An alleged mechanic shook his head over our bow-thruster and delivered his verdict: en panne.
Who cared? The island in the river had a street jammed full of restaurants and bars. Chalon was a magnificent city, and its splendid eleventh-century Saint-Vincent Cathedral looked even better through a glass of Bordeaux from Chez Louis across the square where we sat in the sun and watched the promenade.
An Australian yacht lay beside us in the port. When we’d arrived, a man had emerged from its cabin, introduced himself as Peter, and helped us tie up. He was friendly and cheerful. His blue eyes laughed as I grumbled about the current. His wife, Jan, grinned. Her eyes were a deep, thoughtful brown.
The Australian stars flew from the stern of a Laurent Giles-designed Salar class yacht, a renowned ocean cruiser, yet it did not look as if it could handle a storm. This was not because of its condition, which seemed good enough, or its gear, which looked excellent.
There was just so much of it. Jerrycans, bikes, planks, wire, boxes, spars, crates, lumps of unidentifiable machinery and things of unknown origin and purpose were packed solid on the deck. Wherever there was something capable of being tied to, something was tied to it. Sometimes, in the evenings when the setting sun cast long shadows over the assembly, I wondered at the physics principles which allowed the boat to stay upright. Clambering around and through all this stuff required the determination of a Hillary and the agility of a monkey.
Its crew had neither. Pete was, well, stout. He might have preferred burly, but stout would do. His face was that shade of pink which springs from within rather than without. His thinning fair hair was usually stuck to his scalp by drops of sweat which appeared after the smallest exertion. His wife Jan was of a build which suggested that Pete had not got stuck into dinner alone.
Deep-sea sailors are not famous for weight problems. Grim determination, self-confidence, independence, mild to serious insanity, yes. Dieting, no.
Perhaps both clutter and weight disappeared at sea. For these two were not just sailors, but ocean cruisers extraordinaire. They’d first left home for adventure on the high seas seventeen years before. The boat had every right to look weatherbeaten. So had they.
They’d sailed from Australia through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean and through the French canals to Britain. They had escaped storms and pirates. They were a couple of paladins in plain clothes. They spoke of all this as if it were a toddle across an estuary, yet without any false modesty. It was something they did. The River Queen, formerly pride of my life, suddenly looked pasty as a custard square.
Now they were planning to return to the Mediterranean and prepare their yacht for the voyage home across the Atlantic Ocean with their son as crew. Then they’d sail through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean. A merry jaunt. Where to then?
‘Home’, said Jan, firmly.
‘Hum,’ said Pete.
She gave him the Look. He studied his knees, or what he could see of them. They’d talked of their little house in the suburbs. He could see the picket fence around his life.
‘Pete’s not keen,’ said Jan, in case we had missed the drift.
Sally asked Pete why he liked the life. He thought for a while.
‘Because I’m good at it,’ he said, ‘and I’m not good at much else.’
Jan said, ‘He says he’s going home to die. I’m going home to live.’
Sally chimed in, two clocks striking the hour. She loved France; but it just wasn’t … home. Leaving home to follow me had cost her dearly in the past.
The iron hills in Denis Glover’s song of Mick Stimpson had ringed our house in Port Levy, the quiet tides whispered below. Stimpson lay in his grave in the old Māori cemetery above the pa on the other side of the bay.
Scenes still glowed in my mind: of a picnic on the stream bank, the water shaded by the huge wattle. The creek rustled gently to the sea, touched silver by sunlight. The scent of heavy white hawthorn blossom hung over us, the grass lush and sweet-smelling. The oldest of our elk stags ambled over curiously, then grazed nearby, his shiny summer coat glistening. The vast animal standing so calmly exuded peace, the dog lay at our feet and ducklings squeaked f
rom somewhere in the rushes.
I’d found happiness, peace, contentment in the tiny community. We were so lucky, I’d said, for the thousandth time.
It didn’t feel like that when the boys came home, around seven. Simon was quiet, sad. Both of them were still grieving for our old home. They could not believe we’d given it up, for this.
I’d sat on the sofa that night and thought of our beautiful old house on the hill above the sea in Sumner and the picture was so clear and familiar I started to weep. Sally was sad too. She went to bed and we didn’t talk again that evening. My god, I wrote in my diary, I hope this works. The awful loss if it didn’t.
The boys and Sally had commuted at first, in the farm’s Toyota truck. It cost a fortune in petrol and was hard to drive. They bought a Holden stationwagon and roared into town with Sally, Sting’s Fields of Gold on the stereo.
The boys’ absences grew longer. They stayed with friends. They spent more and more time in the city, less and less at home. Finally they moved into a little house in Sumner and left home forever.
Sally packed cartons of food, cutlery, crockery. We gave them sofas and beds and a TV. They stacked everything on the truck.
Sally kept coming out and giving them more. Her face was pinched. Then she and I drove over to Akaroa for a bowl of hot chocolate. We stared over the pretty harbour. We were on our own now.
We went back and lit the fire and ate leek and kumara soup, which the boys loathed. Outside the cherry trees were afire with autumn. Flames of bright red, brilliant orange and yellow filled the panes. The lime tree was pale yellow. I went outside and sat beneath it, in a room full of light.
The sycamores filled the little wood beside the house with colour. I stood at the edge of the front paddock. A gentle breeze slipped down the hill and over the water, warming the twilight, but speaking of sadness.
Pete and Jan cast off next morning. I took their photograph before they went. They stood in front of their boat stiff as ‘American Gothic’.
We caught our last glimpse of Jan as she waved from the foredeck. She looked wistful. I thought Sally did too. Jan faced a couple of oceans and a lot of living in very small spaces. But at least she was pointing towards home.
We crossed all fingers for both of them. Next morning I crossed a couple for us. We set off for the Canal du Centre, which would, in 500 kilometres, 155 locks and four changes of name plus the River Seine, take us to Paris. Pete and Jan had put our journey into perspective, but it still looked serious enough from here.
The first lock on the Canal du Centre was going to lead us into another world, but was an unlikely looking-glass. It was a huge, dark thing, eleven metres deep, and going through it promised a less-than-magical experience.
We huddled in the bottom of the lock, the Johanna Grietje in front. Glenn liked that possie, which was all right with us who still believed in Mr Benny’s dictum: the water boiled in from that end and set whatever was floating on it banging this way and that with the crew trying to look as nonchalant as possible while hanging grimly onto lines, fending off concrete and trying to keep the whole assembly facing the front.
The lock-keeper hid in a glass box somewhere far above, sometimes yelling commands which would have been incomprehensible even if he had not sounded like Robocop with the ’flu. The lock gates rose and lowered like guillotine blades, and we had the same expectation of emerging in one piece.
Like Alice, though, we reappeared in another place. We were in picture-book French countryside, full of pretty houses and smiling people. The lock-keeper laughed. His pretty daughter took our lines and laughed. The locks went wrong and wouldn’t work. We all laughed.
We worked hard all day, passing through several five metre locks, waiting for locks that were out of order, waiting for other boats that had waited because the locks were out of order, and at the end of it arrived in Chagny in fine spirits although we could have biked the same distance in not much more than an hour.
We tied up in a great brickyard where once navvies loaded barges with rock from the quarries, by hand. We unloaded our bikes and set off for Santenay, pedalling down the canal in the soft evening with the light falling on vineyards turning the hills to velvet, past a hotel boat whose guests seemed entranced by their new world, down a rough track to a road which took us over a bridge almost buried in pink roses, then across a railway line — no, two railway lines, warned a sign, and don’t forget there could be a train sneaking up on the other one — then up narrow streets into a town filled with wineries.
Signs pointed to dozens of them, many owned by members of the same families. We climbed to the fifteenth-century château built by Philippe-le-Hardi, Philip the Bold, the king’s son; its intricately tiled roof zig-zagged in the Burgundian fashion, the sunset now so luminous the vines seemed lit from the inside.
I bought a bottle of wine made by one of the Clair family, for a special occasion. The young woman in the shop reeked of knowledge. She wanted to share it. She pointed me towards dusty shelves. I checked the labels. No, the ones on the shelves, $30, $40, $100. Mine cost $15; well, you had to splash out every now and then.
We bought chocolate éclairs for dessert, their delicate pastry cases filled with thick chocolatey cream so delicious a single bite seemed sinful. The wine was soft as the night.
Next day we sailed to St Léger sur Dheune on a canal winding through the sparkling countryside, accompanied by an éclusier in a truss.
A car with two men and a woman stopped as we were going through a lock. They hopped out for a chat. Where were we from? And the boat? Did we like it? How much had we paid for the vignette? Did we get a discount when l’éclusier was in a truss? No? My, it was dear: ‘Cher, oui?’
‘Non, non,’ I protested. The vignette, the certificate in the front window which gave us access to every canal and lock in the country, along with the help of every éclusier, was the best value of all.
Besides, the lockie might be in a truss, but he was handsome. Except I could not remember the word for handsome. L’éclusier laughed.
‘Joli?’ Sally ventured.
He didn’t mind being called pretty. He laughed some more. He clutched his truss. His hernia was included in the vignette too.
Until St Léger we had not met many New Zealanders. We had heard of them. Almost-permanent canal dwellers from New Zealand were reputed to be in residence all over the canals. The Dutch, the Germans, port captains, éclusiers and all marvelled at how many New Zealanders took to the canals each summer, from so small a country, where only old people and children must be left to look after the only other known feature of our South Pacific paradise not counting the All Blacks, its sixty million sheep. Only forty million? Ooh la la la.
We doubted the Kiwi count was any more accurate than the sheep. For how did they know we were New Zealanders? In a continent where everyone spoke with an accent in every language but their own, no one could recognise a Black-and-Decker twang, except Australians, who had us figured in a trice. Fush-and-chups they said. Feesh-and-cheeps we said back. These intricacies went over the heads of most continental voyagers like the blackbirds and starlings: they all looked the same from any distance, and if one sang, and one croaked, only the participants cared to dispute which was the more musical.
No one could tell the difference between the flags, either. To them it was a mess of stars either way. And wasn’t that the Union Jack? These must be English. ‘Pas Anglais,’ I got tired of saying, as if anyone cared much about that either.
New Zealanders had their own recognition signal, reliable as a Mason’s handshake. ‘Gidday,’ you both said, and fell into each other’s arms. For the rest, we relied on our little black ensigns with the silver ferns, and the battle for a change in the national flag was already well-settled among travellers sick of being taken for any one of three nationalities, if they were recognised at all.
The kiwi was the most instantly-recognised symbol. But the kiwi ran second to the All Blacks in brand recognition, so most
Kiwis favoured silver ferns. Some, like ours, carried the words ‘New Zealand’ underneath. Others wanted locals to be absolutely certain of their country of origin, so their flags said, ‘All Blacks’.
We had the Australians beaten hands-down. Plain green-and-gold didn’t go far with the French. They were just colours. All those stars? Could be either country.
Some Australians had their city of origin painted on their boats’ sterns in large letters. I liked the Robert, from Melbourne. Now there was a no-nonsense name. But the sophistry had the French asking, in a puzzled way, how they’d sailed around the world in a boat so plainly unsuited to the voyage.
So many Aussies reverted to the good old kangaroo. This had advantages. Most people recognised the kangaroo. It was the only word of Australian known to the French despite the rest of that language being a great deal shorter and easier to spell.
The disadvantage was that to be recognisable the kangaroo had to be big. Regular flag-size, it might as well be a squirrel, or a rat. Some Australians tried to get around the problem by super-sizing their kangaroo flags. This only reinforced their reputations as a nation of skites.
We were very pleased to spend an evening or two with all the New Zealanders we met, which might go without saying had it not been for our experiences on our several trips around Europe in a van.
Then, we learned to treat fellow-New Zealanders like unexploded bombs. In those days some had reconstructed themselves as Europeans, or English (such was the degree of cultural cringe). Others had bounded off in the opposite direction and emerged fully formed from the fusion of Fred Dagg and Barry Crump.
Some would ignore you altogether; and some you wished would ignore you altogether. One quiet evening we were camped on a lovely beach in Corfu when down the road came a purple VW with ‘Stan’s Van’ written large in yellow.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 18