I’d been in France for almost two months, but I was still confused by the idea of going west to get to the Atlantic coast. We boarded the bus that would take us from Angers to Normandy early in the morning, and like most other days, to appease my almost insatiable paranoia, I had to climb back up three flights of stairs to make sure that I had in fact locked the door to my apartment. I think that was the form my homesickness was being manifested into, the need to know my only possessions and I were secure in a place that still felt somewhat unfamiliar.
My apartment in Angers reminded me of a hotel room. The empty, white walls; the space-saving furniture; the micro-kitchenette, despite having been my residence for almost two months, it all seemed cold, sterile and foreign. For lack of room in my suitcase or money to spend I had neither brought decorations from home or purchased anything in Angers that would make my room seem like anything less than a temporary habitat for my stay in Europe. The only ‘decoration’ in the room was a single 4x5 photograph of my brother and I dressed as British soldiers that was taken the summer before in a costume shop in Austin. I didn’t even own a single picture frame. I was excited about spending a night away from this room that, save the want of iron bars and abundance of metal silverware, had the aesthetic quality of a minimum security prison cell.
Angers is different from Austin, not in a bad way—its just different. The people are different. Just like in Austin, the young people flock to the bars and cafés at night, drink, flirt and make noise on their ways home. But there is something profoundly different that I had a lot of trouble placing. Teenagers in Angers don’t use their 24-hour laundromats as free music venues. No one is out chugging beer while riding bikes in groups of 50. People in Angers live, work and socialize in the same basic way, but maybe it was the age of the city or lack of live music in every bar that made everything feel routine and complacent to me. Part of me wanted to be like the young French men who sit in cafés in evenings, drinking espresso surrounded by friends. In Austin every coffee shop is full of people typing on laptops with their headphones on and it isn’t the most inviting environment. I wanted to feel like a part of French culture, but I always wound up sitting alone outside of cafés, unapproached and afraid of approaching. I like Angers, and I like Austin, and I was ready to get out of Angers for a while.
Mont Saint Michel is one place that, at least to me, seems like it should not be a community. Nature, God or whichever force made the tiny mountain, placed it in the middle of what during low tide is a lovely, barren peninsula with a grey beach and low hanging clouds, all of which give the place a dream-like quality. During high tide, however, Mont Saint Michel stands in what the French call La Manche— the English Channel. This inhospitable, yet strangely attracting place was obviously idyllic for the Benedictine monks, not minding the solitary and isolated life, to establish a monastery in the 11th century. I would think the monks would still be there had it not been for the French revolution.
The modern village of Mont Saint Michel appears to be mostly based around capitalizing on the vast amount of tourists who pass through every year. The base of the mountain is filled with souvenir shops, restaurants and pay toilets. Miniature Eiffel towers and novelty knives with pictures of French kings are just a prevalent as prayer cards and depictions of saints. Above the commercial street is the neighborhood, complete with its own adjacent graveyard—high enough to keep the tide from uncovering caskets.
After 300 or so steps one finally makes it to the abbey at Mont Saint Michel. With it’s combination of Romanesque and gothic architecture you can imagine the abbey on a stormy night as the setting of a Victorian vampire story. The view of the channel from the terrace in the rear of the abbey awed me. In the distance you could see the remains of the island from which masons obtained all of the stone used in the construction of the abbey. If you allow your eye to follow the lines in the brick all the way up the side of the abbey your eyes will find the tall spire, atop which sits a statue of Saint Michel the archangel. Saint Michel hangs in the air, the highest point on the island, as if he is singlehandedly supporting the entire mountain, preventing it from washing away in the high tides.
My group took a tour. Our guide was a Frenchman who had lived in Liverpool for a lot his life and had a bit of British accent. He liked The Kinks more than The Beatles. It had never occurred to me before but I decided that what British rock and roll band someone prefers over The Beatles might actually be a very important character trait. I tried to figure out what my liking The Zombies more than The Beatles said about me.
Our guide seemed to have worked at the abbey for a long time and he liked to joke about the fact that he could very well be making up everything he told us. Very little of the written histories of the abbey exist anymore. During the French revolution the abbey was converted into a prison and the contents of the library were sent to Saint-Malo, where they would later be destroyed in WWII.
Part of me wished I could have the abbey to myself for a few hours. I wanted to ask all the other tourists to leave me one room in which to spend the afternoon in silence and solitude like the monks who had built the place. I wanted to find the old the Mont Saint Michel and understand the ascetic, spartan lifestyle that the monks had led. But the abbey, after all these years, remains a major destination for travelers, both pilgrims and tourist.
Saint-Malo pretends to be an old city, but the first Saint-Malo was destroyed in the Second World War. The new Saint-Malo, modeled after the original Saint-Malo, is a beautiful beach city surrounded on all sides by a large wall. You can circle the entirety of it in a 30-minute walk atop the wall, with the endlessly blue Atlantic on you right and the marvelous, bustling city on your left. Though a large tourist destination, inner Saint-Malo is like a coastal Angers or any other small French city. The strange twisting streets are filled with cafés, patisseries, restaurants, libraries and art galleries. After walking the wall I found an antique shop that I wanted to investigate, but like all French businesses the employees were out on a two-hour lunch break.
Our hotel was outside the wall, in a newer part of town a short walk from the city gate but on the beach. Even as evening set in to Saint-Malo I could see children, unaffected but the cool ocean wind, playing in the sand and locals walking their dogs. This part of Saint-Malo some what reminded me of an American East coast city like Charleston, South Carolina or Savannah, Georgia. The city had a kind of lazy, coastal feel to it—given we were only there over a weekend.
Walking down the beach in the morning, with the wind blowing my hair, I searched for the quick sand I had been told about. I had only seen quick sand in movies and wanted to experience the potentially deadly absorption into the Earth. After almost thirty minutes I found a spot in the sand that started to suck my feet in after I stood on it for a few seconds. Resisting is supposed to cause it to suck you in faster, I’ve heard, so I wiggled my feet and I think if I had tried hard enough I could have gotten in further than just a few inches of my shoes. It certainly was not ‘quick’ by any means, but I had found quick sand. With my now muddy shoes I boarded the bus to return to Angers.
As the bus drove back into the city on Sunday evening Angers was still alive. The city buses still circled the town on the their usual routes, the few shops and patisseries that operated on Sundays were open, and the whole city seemed to have gone on about its life all weekend unaware of the missing busload of American students with whom I had travelled. John Berger once wrote: “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” I knew that Austin, or at least my friends and family in Austin, knew of my distance, noticed my absence from the city, but it didn’t seem Angers would. Could you call you call a place home when 95% of the people you know there also leave with you? Back in my apartment, beginning my writing, I wondered if I could really call this place home if it didn’t notice my absence when I left and if I would have to miss Angers the same way I missed Austin.
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