Hysterical Weather Girls Blamed
In an extended scientific experiment here on the French canals, we
have proved once and for all that September and October lead into Europe’s
autumn. You might think this is common knowledge but a blind acceptance of such
a statement could lead to confusion. It had to be checked, so we have stayed
beyond mid-September.
We use three of the most prominent weather prediction
services: the Norwegian Weather Office (which we call ‘The Vikings’), the French
Government’s Meteo Service (which we call the ‘Hysterics’), and The Weather
Channel (which we call something obscene based on one of The Donald’s personal
habits). We rate each one in order of its accuracy. The Vikings is right about
40% of the time, The French Meteo over-reacts about 40% of the time and the
Obscene is distracted about 40% of the time.
The first sign of an impending change in the weather is an
increasingly hysterical tone among the weather predictors. For the forthcoming
week The Vikings foresees rain and overcast in its usual calm but clenched tone,
the French Meteo uses shrill doomsday scenarios warning of storms, high winds
and heavy rain at the same time, and the Obscene predicts a cold front from
Mexico will bring Europe to a standstill.
Uppity Swans
Uppity Swans
In the real world, we find ourselves marooned by wind and
rain at Chalon-sur-Soane, where we sit in our heated boat and drink Cru
Bourgeois red wine and stare at the chrome-yellow poplar leaves falling in
drifts on our deck. The wind pushes rafts of leaves around on the surface of the
water. The ducks have already departed for their resorts in the south of France,
leaving the swans to come calling for bread. They hiss unpleasantly, complaining
about the staleness of our baguettes – but they eat them
anyway.
We get a five-Euro reduction in the nightly mooring price at
the Chalon marina (‘By law it is now the beginning of low season and we must
reduce the fee,’ moans the lonely girl in the office, ‘you are lucky.’). Five
Euros is not much compensation for the bitterly cold mornings, sharp-edged wind
and unpredictable rain. The marina is full of boats abandoned by their owners
for the winter – we are among the very few people actually using a boat.
The
restaurants in town are as busy as they were during the plague. Our planning
has been sound: a Carrefor hypermarket is 5 minutes’ walk away, so huge that
staff glide amongst the shelves wearing rollerblades. We will not go short of
all the food and wine we can think of.
In two weeks we depart for Greece and Malta but not by boat.
First we must return to St Jean de Losne, our home marina, in time to give the
boat its annual enema, pump-out and shampoo so she can be craned out and left
under a tarp for winter. This will take about a week. Once again we will prepare
a worklist for the engineer and electrician and keep all our appendages crossed
in the hope that they’ll get to the work before we return.
The morning we decide to leave Chalon the fog is so thick we
can’t see the pylons of the nearby bridge, let alone the far side of the river.
By 10.30am it’s lifted a little and we stick our bow out into the river. No
other boats can be seen, but then visibility is 100 metres or so.
Insane Fishermen
We creep
forward. Inexplicably, groups of rowers and kayakers are fading in and out of
the mist, directly in our path. The main channel is marked by red and green
posts on each side. We know the posts and kayakers are there but we can’t see
them. Fishermen – the really insane users of French rivers – fly by at full
speed on either side of us in their aluminium and plastic dinghies.
Even in this
fog they wear full camouflage clothing so any fog-defying fish can’t see them.
These stealth-clad weirdos are out in all weathers, including today, crossing
our bow suicidally and shouting to us to reduce speed or get out of their way.
Somehow the fog absorbs the sound of their outboards. We know they can’t see us
at a safe distance because we don’t have any navigation lights; we removed them
months ago because they and their ‘radar arch’ got in the way, and anyway we
didn’t plan on moving at night or in the fog.
Such is life – or is it
death, I wonder, as we manage to avoid a buoy which inexplicably materialises in
mid-channel. We know there are more bridges to pass under, but they are
invisible. Rope Girl, who is not subject to the challenges of machismo,
suggests we do something about it. First, this means we should accept the danger
of our situation and second, we should turn tail and return to the marina.
This
seems wise, especially as an even thicker slab of fog rolls down the river and
blankets us. After a blind U-turn I note several red and green lights glowing in
the murk. In sailor-talk, red means Port (left) and green means Starboard
(right). The town looms as a dematerialised shadow on each bank. It’s silent.
Are the lights I see anything to do with navigation – like bridge pylons?
Burleigh Man or Mouse ?
Fearing my voice will be reduced to the squeak of a frightened Dormouse I say
nothing but increase my concentration to Awareness Level 12, if this is
possible, and reduce our speed to ‘idle’ and somehow find the narrow entrance to
the Chalon marina.Later, she says ‘Good thing you worked out the traffic lights
weren’t nav lights. Could have been difficult.’
After a couple of days later we reach Seurre, a pretty town
which also tends to be fog-bound in the mornings. We hang about because of the
fresh bread from the Boulangerie and free mooring. The marina office is open but
no one asks us for fees, and as this includes electricity we’ll wait two or
three days for them to collect. This morning for example we are the only boat in
the Seurre marina! Attuned to the silence, we start at any vibration on the
pontoons. Sometimes a floating piece of timber impacts on the walkways and
brings us to our feet.
Despite the occasional stray rental boat full of Germans (or
is that occasional boats of full Germans?) beer-carousing all night, the odd
Swede, Dane and other eccentrics of early winter, the boating season is over. It
happened suddenly. There’s virtually no movement on the river and canals. Boats
are trussed up, stored and winterised for the winter freeze, due in a few weeks.
Traffic through the locks has dropped to almost zero; for example, the huge
locks on the Soane which can accommodate six huge commercial cargo
peniche at once now must fill up and empty a vast volume of water for one
small pleasure craft – us.
The evidence of past seasons is piled up around
rubbish bins and marina offices as the French summer lifestyle slips into
hibernation. In small towns like Seurre more businesses are closing forever.
It’s sad and affecting. The country is being transformed into islands of crowded
cities ringed by commercial zones of strip development…and empty towns set
adrift in between. If you think you know France now it sure won’t be the same
when you return.
The beauty of the surroundings has not lessened. On our boat,
condensation beads spider webs like chains of minute pearls. There is a spider,
type unknown, which seems to have a parasitic relationship with steel rails and
canvas covers. Red bites on our hands and legs are evidence of its aggression.
These insects take no notice of our attempts to negotiate. They choose to bite
first and confer later, but by then it’s too late; there’s a limit to our
tolerance. The cold hasn’t slowed them down.
Autumn colour illuminates the river banks and in some trick
of nature every second tree has yellow leaves… in a few days all will curl up
parched and gnarled. When there is no fog, shoals of mist rise from the river as
if a thousand dead smokers are puffing away underwater. The mist makes vision
difficult, like looking through stained glass.
The insects of summer have taken
up their winter hiding places and no longer seethe around night lights, and yet
your eyes still see them although they are not there. A night watch of birds,
their numbers dramatically reduced by their migration imperative, twitter at
earliest light but soon fade away. They sit in the treetops warily watching the
Jackdaws on the church roof, then give it up and leap into the crisp air and
flap silently southward.
The weather settles as a heavy weight on people like us who
think of ourselves as summer-seasonal beings. Dew drips in bucket-loads from the
trees, spattering on the windshield and running in all directions over the cabin
roof. We sit inside the boat telling anecdotes about summer happenings although
they’ve been told before. Our minds turn to our impending departure for the
Greek Islands and Malta and the restoration of our suntans. Secretly we fear the
cold weather will reach out to us there too.
So that’s it from France. Please wait for my next post, if it comes at all. Hopefully
it’ll be from the Parthenon or Stromboli and I’ll be drunk on Retsina,
suntanned once again and in happy optimistic oblivion about the weather, which
will stubbornly stay summer wherever we are.