Vélo Encyclical

On the first full day of our beach holiday at Andernos-les-Bains, west of Bordeaux and some 630km southwest of Paris, the non-bike faring people among our number hired some cycles and joined the committed velo lifers on a trek out of town.

The day was still and quiet, 29C or so, and the sky was glowing a washed out blue in the heat. We set out from town and ride to a beach outside of Cap Ferret, hidden behind walls of soaring maritime pine trees that are emblematic of the region. It is 20km in one direction and the bike path takes us the entire way, even if it deteriorates into sand and shaky white gravel with an ever-narrowing strip of asphalt that vanishes to a line scarcely wider than a bike tyre.

My shirt is open and pulls behind me like a windsock as my electric cycle gets up to speeds of 30km/h. We ride in a column, at first, like some deranged gang of misfits confused about which movie from the 1980s we are supposed to be in. Hannah is on a fixie, which I'm told is the hardest of all to ride, while Jacob, Christopher and Bart are on pedal-powered bikes with gears – the man at the rental store called these velo musculaire to my face while he handed over electric bikes to me and Ella, the least accomplished riders in the group – and Victoria is on an electric bike of her own with fat tyres and the neutered spirit of a motorcycle.

Towels are strapped to our bikes and we carry food for lunch on the beach. Jacob, a serious biker, performs a series of hand gestures in front of me that I do not understand so he asks me to pull up alongside him to explain.

'When I do this,' he says as we race along parallel at 20km/h, 'it means there is something on the ground I want you to look out for. There was a pothole back there.'

I am listening but also trying to steer and cannot do both. I fall behind Jacob immediately and lose control of my handlebars, veering sharply off to the right, off the path entirely and nearly into the bushes. I recover and zoom off, determined to never again listen to a safety announcement.

As far as introductions to cycling as a mode of transport go, my entrée in Paris – crashing twice while drunk and achieving some kind of permanent (?) damage to my left pinky finger – should have been the end of the story. But some of you may recall this left me, instead, with a hankering for more. Just not in Paris. Two hours cycling around the gardens at Versailles a few weeks later only provoked me further in this instinct.

In all the ways my move to France has changed, is changing, me the most enduring and significant of these may well become my emerging love for getting on a bike. I'm not good at it, but this cycle ride in particular, and this group of people, taught me that it is something I could do on my own, at will, in any number of places I may travel in the future. I'm not bad at it either. Certainly not as bad as Ella who fell off three times.

The first blob to crawl out of the primordial ooze and onto land may have been so daunted, but it didn't have friends like mine. I felt safe and secure, and totally free. Around Cap-Ferret, famous for its oysters, the beaches are wild and walled in by a vast assembly of trees, bushes and grasses such as the maritime pines, arbutus, oaks and prehistoric ferns. Finding access to the beach was actually something of a challenge with our bikes on this score but it only served to heighten the sense of adventure. We stopped and poked around, tried and failed several potential entry points that were too sandy and too long to traverse. Jacob scouted ahead on one such option and was gone so long we briefly considered cannibalism.

It was a borderline religious experience, to be honest. Riding through the pines with the sun high ahead, shafts of light piercing the spaces between. The forest's body, shot through with luminous beams, produced a strobing effect as we rode past at speed. There was salt in the air which cooled us as it whipped past and the whole scene had an ethereal quality, as if we existed in some delicate cocoon outside of space and time. I could have stayed there forever.

I wanted to stay there forever.

In the back half of the ride to the beach, as the ground turned to gravel and ruts, the top half of my bicycle's bell fell off. I did not realise until we made it to the beach when Hannah pointed out that my ding-a-ling could no longer ring-a-ling, which ordinarily might have bothered me but there are no rental agencies in heaven. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls but, if you do, could someone have a look in the dirt for the crown? It's silver, I think.

Watching the others ride is a treat. Hannah, who looks like a young Joni Mitchell at Woodstock, hollers with joy whenever one of us goes aerodynamic, leaning into the bike's chassis and zooming ahead of the column. Bart, the groups' bard and resident Wes Anderson character, performs this move with something like a cheetah's hunting technique. Head down, tail up.

Jacob stalks, in his patented unga bunga style. Legs out, arms out; a face with the targeting apparatus of a Lockheed Martin jet. As far as I am aware, Ella never once tries to achieve full speed and spends the 40km round trip in a state of Swedish dissociation which is how I imagine they do winter up there. Christopher is [redacted].

My technique is neither particularly special nor completely unsuccessful. I am at my most vulnerable coming to a stop or slowing to a crawl, when the physical forces of inertia and gravity trade places and I am reminded, suddenly, of my mortality. Riding a bike, I feel, is an exercise in belief. It is easy to believe when you have momentum. Many are the gods to whom I've subscribed at speed. Without the faith of propulsion, however, I am agnostic at best. I mount and dismount the bicycle as if it has called me a slur. Afraid but defiant.

When we finally do make it to the beach – La Plage du Truc Vert or beach of the green thing (?) – we are hungry and it is hot. I do not have sandals with me in France and the walkway to the actual ocean is long and burns my feet. We stay on the sand for hours, reading.

Jacob and I play four or five games of chess which focuses the mind to such an extent that I did not move, exposing one particular portion of my left leg – a corporal crypt, never previously seeing any direct sunlight – to the harshest rays.

I had told myself I would not swim. The ocean is not for me. It was built by forces greater than me and I respect them. And yet. So hot. For the first time in at least a decade (I genuinely cannot remember the last time I encountered a wave) I went into the surf. The current was extraordinary and the waves powerful. I went under one and was swept away, emerging in front of a young woman and her friend who simply said: 'Oh'. And that was enough for me, until 2036.

Late in the afternoon we rode for home, through the same enchanting forest paths and at a more confident pace. I had long forgotten my missing bell. Let the world have it, let Napolean find that crown in the gutter and have the people place it atop his head.

Perhaps 45 minutes into our return I was riding side by side with Jacob, talking about my brother I think, when I spotted something shiny on the white path and all of my training as a magpie slash bowerbird kicked in.

'My bell!' I yelled, skidding to an immediate stop while the others zoomed past.

Hannah was ecstatic. 'No fucking way,' she said.

The bell was not silver, it was blue. I attached the crown back in its housing and tickled the clapper. And then I rang it again and again and the group's shared ecstasy at my discovery turned to dread.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

Addenda

Life's a Beach

The rest of the trip to the beach was extraordinary, even celebrating July 4 with four Americans in regional France at a line-dancing country ball put on for the occasion. I am relaxed. I am only mildly depressed it is over. Here are some photos because I have other things I want to write about (below). I love my friends and I am very grateful I have met them.

Pulp got the Juice

Another wave of heat greeted me on arrival in Paris. On account of this, I scored a last minute ticket to see Pulp play at an arena in the city's northeast on account of this heat (Megan Clement, I am deeply touched by your sacrifice) because the venue does not have air-conditioning and 6000 people in one place tend to have a troubling thermodynamic effect. I've never sweat so much sitting still in my life, except perhaps for that one time when a cassowary approached me on a beach in far north Queensland. I didn't even know Pulp were still together, let alone touring, but Disco 2000 and Common People are among my favourite songs on the planet and this was so fucking special. No further notes.

The following night I scored another ticket – third choice of my benefactor, but I'll take it – to see jazz pianist Diana Krall play at La Salle Pleyel not far from the Arc de Triomphe. This place was air-conditioned and we had a direct eyeline to the piano keys to watch the way she commanded them. It was magic. She is a genius, and quite funny as she starts tinkling away before conceding: 'I wasn't sure I was going to play this, but here we are'. At the end of the performance she re-emerged with the band for an encore and as she idly caressed the keys, thinking about what to play, the most stereotypical French man yelled from the balcony seats behind us at full volume with a request: 'FLY ME TO ZE MOON!'

And she played it. It was all mesmerising.

Fin.