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The day before my forty-ninth birthday, I stood at the helm of a 60-ton barge, about to enter my first lock on the Canal de Briare, 90 miles south of Paris. My husband, Paul, rode on the front deck, ready to work the lines for me. Appearing oh so casual, he pretended to study the landscape. Roger Van Dyken, my instructor, hovered just off my left shoulder. He owned this boat, Vertrouwen, Dutch for “trustworthy.” I squeezed the eighty-year-old wheel and prayed the boat would live up to her name.
I had two locks to navigate, the first just ten minutes ahead. I stared down the seventy-foot deck, which seemed as long as an aircraft carrier.
Roger moved behind me, centering his gaze on my line of approach. That he could also grab the wheel, if necessary, reassured me – a little.
A waterfall materialized ahead. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. My navigation chart showed it to be a lock nine feet deep. We’d been in a dozen or more locks already this trip, so I knew from experience how narrow these granite chambers were. I also knew what it felt like to have rushing water fill the compartment to lift the boat up to the next section of the canal. It could be a wild ride, depending on the lockkeeper’s whim. The difference this time, however, was profound.
I was the pilot.
“Is the lock open?” Roger asked.
“I….think so.” Even though I was wearing my glasses, all I saw a few hundred feet ahead of me was a black hole with rushing water.
He peered through his field glasses. “It is.”
Good, I wouldn’t have to wait for the lockkeeper to crank the doors open with those big metal levers.
“Keep your eyes on the lock doors, though,” Roger said. “If a boat on the other side of the lock is closer, the lockkeeper may shut the doors, especially if it’s a péniche.”
He was right: commercial barges, péniches, have the right of way over pleasure boats like ours. As sweat from my palms made the varnished amber wheel glisten, I wasn’t sure “pleasure” applied at the moment.
“Is there anyone behind us?” he asked.
I checked. “No,” and I heard relief in my voice. No smaller pleasure boats to contend with, thank God.
“Now slow her down.” I felt his touch on my arm. He didn’t need to tell me twice. Breathing diesel fumes, I throttled to a crawl but remained in gear. Only eighty or so feet remained before we were in – or would hit the sides of the lock, if I misjudged. As the engine vibrations made my feet tingle, I stared at water pouring over the back metal lock doors. It really did look exactly like a waterfall. I blinked to refocus.
“Relax. You’re doing okay. Which lock wall do you see more of?” How could he sound so calm when I might scrape the barge, take out a lock door…and put a big dent in his boat? Just the tiniest miscalculation on my part could create disaster.
Grabbing the field glasses, I checked. “The right.” My God, so much to remember.
“And that means…?”
Which was it, left or right? “Um, I need to steer more to, um, the right, yeah, the right, so both walls seem even.” Everything moved in slow motion, even my brain. I turned the wheel back and forth; we glided right, and then straightened out.
He patted my shoulder. “Good. You’re steering much better now.”
This meant a lot. Until that day, I’d had trouble piloting. I’d turned the wheel right when I wanted to go left and vice versa. We’d owned boats before, but this barge intimidated me.
“The walls are even now.” I set the glasses down.
“I agree,” he said. “Remember what I told you about lining up on your approach?”
I nodded, pictured a white line from the middle of the lock and aimed the front flag of the barge at it. I saw the lockkeeper in his blue serge pants leaning on the huge lever, ready to close the steel doors behind us. The lock was only a few feet away now. Only a foot of churning water lay between each side of the boat and granite lock walls. From my angle, it seemed like an inch. Believe, I told myself.
The water poured into the lock and carried with it the scent of fish and decaying plants. On tiptoe, I checked left, then right. Confident at last, I shifted to neutral. Almost in, I thought.
“Don’t stop steering,” Roger said.
This was it. I would hit the corner of the lock or steer us in. Vertrouwen veered toward the left wall, shoved over by the strong currents. I turned the wheel hand-over-hand to the right, spinning it so hard its spokes blurred. Then back left. The bow was in, then the stern.
I’d made it. I wiped my sweaty palms on the legs of my bib overalls.
“Check aft. Make sure we’re in far enough so he can close the back door.”
The boat glided forward, caught in the currents of the lock. I twisted, peered over my shoulder, and sighed with relief. The stern was clear. Now I needed to stop this baby – without brakes – before 60 tons of barge crashed into the front steel doors, only a few feet away.
“Get ready to reverse,” Roger said.
The boat inched forward like a lumbering elephant. I held my breath. Paul stood up, ready to throw his line to a nearby bollard. Now, I thought, and shifted into reverse.
“Leave it, leave it, now neutral,” Roger said.
Vertrouwen shuddered, burped a blue puff of diesel smoke, and stopped.
“Good job, Michelle. I think you have a knack for this.” Roger gave me a quick hug and headed out to work the back lines.
My shaking hands rested on top of the wheel and I took a deep breath.
Paul smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. He took his line, tossed it up like a cowboy and looped it over a mushroom-shaped bollard ten feet over his head. Then he wrapped the loose end under one ear of Vertrouwen’s bollard and held fast.
The lockkeeper put his body weight behind the huge lever, pushed with all his might, and one massive back door clunked shut. He walked around the front of the lock, and came back to repeat the maneuver to shut the other door. Then he ambled back to the front, cranked a handle, and a torrent of water rushed into the lock through the front gates.
I grinned and savored Roger’s compliment. A knack for this. Could he be right?
Emerging from the corner of the pilothouse where they’d watched my performance, Fred and Shirley hugged me. Retirees who lived in the Caribbean on a sailboat, they were considering the barging life on European waterways. This week was a test for all four of us. We were paying Roger for a week’s stay on his boat and lessons in handling barges to see if we could take the plunge and own one of these behemoths. Would we translate “considering” into “doing”?
“Great job, Sweetie,” Shirley said. “And you didn’t hurt the paint job one bit.”
I gazed down the long deck of this 1908 steel barge-turned-houseboat, painted in forest green with brown and white trim. Jaunty, handsome, even graceful came to mind. Before this week, when I thought about barges, I remembered the big, ugly black utilitarian things on the rivers in the States. In Europe, barges have style and class, the older the better.
In the sixties, someone with an eye for old barges had the vision to turn Vertrouwen into a houseboat with most of the modern comforts. The first day aboard, as we followed Roger like obedient school children, we had learned its quirks as part of our orientation.
“This is how you operate a marine toilet.” He yanked on a handle. “Put nothing in it, however.”
“Nothing? Not even toilet paper?” I’d asked.
“Well, you could, but then if it jams up, you’ll be the one to Roto-rooter it out, not me.”
I’m not a plumber. Used toilet paper went into plastic bags for disposal.
Gross.
The electrical system wasn’t set up for gadgets like bathroom hairdryers. I had to ask Roger to run the generator while I blew my hair dry, hunched over in a corner of the living room. When I complained to Paul, he reminded me we could fix our boat the way we wanted it.
Our boat?
Fred trudged up the steep stairway, carrying a cup of steaming coffee in one hand and a chocolate-filled croissant - a pain au chocolat - in the other.
“For Madame capitaine,” he said.
I nibbled the rich pastry and sipped the French roast. Then Roger nodded and pointed at the fully retracted lock doors. I shifted into forward and Vertrouwen crept ahead. The only trick now was to steer her away from the wall where she’d been tied and then keep her straight.
The lockkeeper leaned on the door handle. A dark Gauloise jutted from the corner of his full mouth, interrupting his bored expression.
“Merci, monsieur. Au revoir,” I called out. I even dared to take one hand off the wheel and wave at him.
A shadow of a smile passed over his weathered face. He gave me the barest of nods, as if to acknowledge my status as captain, and I treasured it as if it were a French Legion of Honor medal.
“Bon voyage, Madame.”
*
There are times in our lives when we get “a cosmic kick in the butt.” Challenge and opportunity demonstrate they are two sides of the same coin. Our kick came when the small software company where Paul and I worked was sold in June of 1999. Paul’s job was now obsolete. At 56, he had a choice: take a demotion to become a salesman or….
He quit. Just like that.
“ I can’t give one more sales demo – I’m sick of the computer industry,” he said. “How about you? Do you love consulting?”
“No. You know I like to teach and mentor, but the rest…leaving you for days, even weeks at a time, is terrible. But what are we going to do for money?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”
I clung to my software-consulting job and waited for Paul to come up with an idea for a new career. We could make ends meet on my salary alone, at least for a while. We’d “retired” once already and had run a video and computer store for a couple of years and we’d taken software sales and support employment in Penang, Malaysia. We’d been adventurous, but always with the safety net of our computer software backgrounds ready to catch us.
In August 1999, Paul announced, “I think I’ve found something we’ll both like.”
“What now?” So far, we’d considered and dismissed owning a winery (too expensive), living on a sailboat (I get seasick), and several other ideas.
“How about buying a barge? You know, like the one we saw on the PBS show Barging Through France?”
I remembered the show all right. But buy a barge? “How could we do it?”
“If we sell our house, the cars, and the furniture, we’ll have enough to buy a decent barge and have money left over to refit it. We could even charter to help pay for everything.” He waved a spreadsheet printout at me.
I imagined all of what I called “home” gone. My stomach dropped as I glanced out our window at the city of Boulder below us, nestled against the foothills. There was the red tile roof of the University of Colorado where I took evening writing classes. We often hiked a nearby hill to glory in the view of the plains and the Continental Divide. To leave a career after 25 years, a house in Boulder, everything we’d worked so hard to acquire….for a big old boat in Europe?
“What if we hate it?” I asked.
“Believe it or not, there’s an American guy who actually teaches people how to handle these boats. We could take a hands-on training class and see if we like it.”
“You’re kidding. Where?”
“France.”
I raised my eyebrows. “France?”
He nodded. He knew how to get to me. France, gorgeous France.
“Well? Want to try it?”
“Sure, why not?” After all, I told myself, we won’t like it enough to go through with this… idea. Besides, I couldn’t pass up a trip to the country where we’d celebrated our tenth anniversary, four years earlier. I imagined sitting on deck gazing at the bucolic countryside as I nibbled Brie and sipped crisp Pouilly-Fuissé.
Paul is adventurous, and I’m not. But I AM romantic.
I was heady with success the evening of my first piloting, but we had a new problem to solve – no food on board. Grocery stores are closed on Sunday in France, and Montargis was as quiet as a small town in the Midwest after midnight. Roger, Paul and I volunteered to find a restaurant. On the rear deck sat a black Austin Mini Cooper, a tiny shoebox-shaped English car, one of my favorites. It looked small enough for three of us to lift it and place it on the grassy canal bank. Instead, Paul and Roger put down two metal planks, Roger twisted his six-foot-three-inch frame into the Mini, and we putt-putted to shore. Paul crawled into the tiny backseat and I rode shotgun.
We stopped at an ivy-covered hotel. A buxom woman in a white lace apron told me in French the empty restaurant was for guests only. Another café had people crowded around its smoky bar, but the patron told me it was fermé. Closed. I was thrilled my high school French still worked.
As we bumped over cobblestone streets, one restaurant kept reappearing, but we vetoed it because of its pulsing neon lights and flashing sign advertising Le Ranchville Grill. We asked for a recommendation at a gas station, and the attendant pointed at the neon sign.
“Good food,” he said.
The three of us looked at one another and with a shrug, Paul said, “Le Ranchville Grill it is.”
Inside the door, we flinched as a French interpretation of the American West assaulted us – crudely painted cowboy murals, wagon wheel chandeliers and blaring American country music. It wasn’t what I’d expected for my first dinner out in France, but the tantalizing aroma of frying steaks helped me make the decision. While Roger went back to the ship for Fred and Shirley, Paul and I studied the salad bar with its odd mixture of American-style salads and French pâtés. We ordered steaks with fries from a waitress who spoke no English. Too bad; I was dying to find out the story behind this place.
The waitress, no more resembling a cowgirl than I, placed hot, crisp frites and steaks done to perfection in front of us. Even in a modest place like this, each bite was a delight. Wasn’t there any bad French food? I thought. We poured Côtes du Rhône from a carafe and after a few glasses, I said to Shirley, “Why fight it?” She giggled and we all started to sing along with Johnny Cash, “And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire. The ring of fire.”
That night, a flash of lightning and a percussive clap of thunder woke me from sound sleep. I peered out the porthole of our back cabin. Sycamore leaves scattered in gusts of wind. I held my breath and waited for the boat to shake. When I was little, I used to lie awake trembling whenever there were storm warnings, trying to distinguish between the sounds of freight trains rumbling by on the tracks behind my house and tornadoes. Vertrouwen didn’t budge. I cocooned myself in my down comforter and listened to the rat-a-tat-tat of rain on steel. Trustworthy, I thought, and fell back to sleep.
The next morning Roger warned us a commercial barge, a péniche, would be passing by; he’d heard their transmissions on our radio. No big deal I figured; we’d been passed before.
First we heard the throbbing engines of the large boat and then felt it sucking Vertrouwen off the bank. We all ran up top. The lines at the bow held, but the ones at the stern pulled out our stakes as if they were toothpicks in a club sandwich. The car ramps still stretched to shore, but we were about to lose them into the canal as the stern continued swinging out. Paul grabbed those first, while Roger stood ready to fend off the larger boat with his boathook. I doubted it would be effective against a barge three times our size. As it rumbled by at full speed, I gaped at the barge captain who smiled and waved. Did he really expect a wave back?
After it passed, Roger pointed out a lesson for us.
“Do you know what happened?” he asked.
I raised my hand. “Yeah. We were sucked off the bank by a maniacal, sadistic barge captain who waved and smiled at us.”
“I missed the wave and smile, but why were we pulled off our mooring?” Roger asked. When I shrugged, he explained: The stakes pulled from the rain-softened ground and couldn’t hold us. The fully loaded péniche sucked us off the bank because its propeller pushed all of the water from the narrow canal.
Paul nodded and said, “So, if we were underway, a péniche could run us aground.”
Roger nodded.
“What should I do? I mean it’s bound to happen, isn’t it?” Paul asked.
“Stay under power, but sometimes you’ll run aground, especially if the commercial barge is in a hurry. You just have to figure out how to get your boat off the bank.”
Paul raised his eyebrows. “That’s a sobering thought.”
I would remember the smiling captain every time one of those big dark barges bore down at us.
On my forty-ninth birthday, we shopped at the tiny village of Châtillon Coligny, its ancient grey stone buildings clinging to the sides of the canal. It was market day, a once-a-week event. The flower stalls brimmed with ruby, ginger and gold: asters, chrysanthemums, dahlias, yarrow and strawflowers. Underneath the tents were housedresses for Mesdames, jeans for kids, lacy underwear for young women and sturdy cotton panties and bras for the more mature figure. Other stalls offered more utilitarian items: vacuum cleaner bags, kitchenware, American music cassettes, mattresses, pillows and linens.
But we were on a provisioning mission to get food. One truck sold whole fresh fish, and another neatly tied roasts and dried sausages. A rotisserie spun with golden chickens, and next to it, a bread truck displayed baguettes and round country loaves with dark, thick crusts. I smelled roasted nuts and vowed to find the source.
We’d all been given an essential food-group to procure: meat, bread, pastries, produce and wine. I’d volunteered to roundup cheeses since that form of calcium had always been a favorite with me. When it was my turn in the cheese truck line, the young woman fromagère smiled encouragingly when I wished her, “Bonjour, Madame.”
“You are English, non?” she said.
Jeez, two words out of my mouth and I couldn’t fool anyone. Ah well. I told her I was an American, traveling on a bateau, a boat.
I recognized some of the cheeses, artfully arranged on grape leaves: wheels of Brie, wedges of Bresse Bleu, circles of Camembert, and molded goat cheese, chèvre. The soft ones oozed in the sun, some even had ferns pressed onto their powdery white rinds, while others had veins of indigo running like road maps through the center. When I pointed at a cheese, she cut a slice and I caught the scent of goat, grass, or even the cellar where it had aged. I let each sliver dissolve in my mouth and tasted the balance of saltiness and sourness, the pleasant tang of mold.
She weighed my purchases, and then cut a large chunk of the local sausage. The hand lettered sign next to it read “rosette du porc.”
“It is a gift for you,” she said as she handed me the carefully wrapped package. “Welcome to France, Madame.”
I thanked her, touched by her generosity to me, a foreigner. This, I thought, was a genuine birthday present.
We dined on the feast from the market: a cheese and sausage course, fresh crunchy baguettes, poulet en rôti, juicy roasted chicken, boiled new potatoes and the meatiest artichokes I had ever tasted. Roger gave me a bouquet of golden mums while my shipmates sang Happy Birthday. We devoured chocolate cake, gateau au chocolat, each morsel melting on my tongue.
Later, Paul and I went on deck, surveying the canal bordered by peaceful farmland on both sides. In the twilight, a paper lantern moon rose over the fields. The breeze rustled the leaves of the sycamores that lined the banks, trees as timeless as the landscape. Most of them were planted by Napoleon’s men and will be standing long after I’m gone. I studied the nearest sycamore, its bark a pattern of camouflage, standing like a sentinel. Just at the top of a rolling hill, a stone farmhouse’s chimney sent out puffs of wood smoke into the air while cattle grazed in the meadow below it. It could have been any century.
We stood with our arms around each other, and I yawned. All of the fresh air and exercise had contributed to my sleeping well since we’d arrived on Vertrouwen. I wore my birthday present, a necklace of blue pearls Paul brought from the States, and fingered them like rosary beads.
He said, “You know how on almost every trip there’s a pleasant surprise?”
I nodded.
“Sometimes it’s the food, or the people you meet. Sometimes it’s the country itself. This time, it’s you.”
I knew what he meant. I’d taken to the routine more than I’d ever imagined. I was proud of my developing prowess working the lines and piloting the boat. I’m usually an observer; instead, I’d enjoyed being in the middle of the action. I had surprised myself.
Over the next few days, we all made mistakes – bumped the sides of the boat against the lock, touched the rudder on the shallow sides of the canal while commercial barges passed us, banged around when mooring. But by the end of the week, the four of us could go through locks without Roger’s constant coaching. When he gave us a comprehensive written test, we all passed.
“As the Dutch say, ‘To water in the blood,’” Roger said as he toasted us with his finest brandy. “You are now part of an elite group – barge pilots.”
“What now?” I asked Fred and Shirley.
“Not for us,” Shirley said. “At least not till my hip improves.”
I tried to imagine doing something this physical with the pain Shirley had and realized the window of opportunity for barging was limited. The previous night, Paul and I had weighed the pros and cons of barging. It would be a completely different existence for us. Part of this life would be better, but much of it was unknown. I grabbed Paul’s hand and squeezed.
“We’ve decided to find our own barge,” Paul said.
“Fantastic,” Roger said. “You two are naturals. May barging cruise into your heart and stay forever, like it did mine.” He raised his glass.
The brandy warmed the back of my throat. It occurred to me that Roger was being kind to include me in the complement. Paul was a natural all right. From the first day on board, it was clear who was the best student. He’d handled the lines, the mechanics and the helm better than any of us. I’d expected it of him - he’d been a boater all his life. I had always considered myself more cerebral than physical, one of the last girls to be picked for a team. None of the physical side of boating came naturally to me.
Another sip of brandy warmed my limbs. I watched Paul’s animated gestures as he described our ideal barge. He was charged with the adventure. For almost 30 years, I’d been too busy to hear my soul. My life had been filled with voicemails, emails, demos, sales quota pressure, delayed flights, hotels, budget constraints, irate customers, hiring and firing. I craved peace. I wanted the energy back that my jobs had leeched from me. I needed the time to create, to think, and to just “be.” This week I’d had a tantalizing glimpse at tranquility on a boat gliding through France at an escargot’s pace.
“To our future as bargées,” I said, clinking my glass against Paul’s.
This week I’d discovered that if I wanted something I could do it, even if it didn’t come naturally.
I could learn.
But, could I learn it quickly enough to make this venture work?
