Chapter 8

Finding Our Stride

Nice, France

September 11

Life aboard our houseboat in Burgundy was peaceful and languorous, and it wasn’t long before we settled into an agreeable daily routine. Every morning, we woke up moored in another picturesque river town. There were always handsome old stone houses with red-tile roofs, spreading green willows, and a rubber-booted fisherman or two tending stout fifteen-foot poles.

Devi usually woke up first and brewed a pot of fragrant café filtre. Then she strolled to the local boulangerie for fresh, warm baguettes and flawless croissants. After breakfast, we hunched over the waterways chart and set our course for the day. Then we filled our water tanks, strapped the kids into their life jackets and cast off the lines.

During the morning and early afternoon we cruised the Saone River at a leisurely pace. The houseboat’s top speed was only eight miles per hour, so there was no temptation to rush. We just floated along, savoring the scenery and stopping randomly at gorgeous little riverine villages. It was like meandering inside a Constable painting.

At mid-afternoon, Lucas went down for his nap, and Devi shepherded Kara and Willie through their school lessons. Up until this point, I’m afraid we’ve been pretty lax in the homeschooling area, but once the cool days of autumn were upon us, the old rhythms kicked in, telling us it was time for class. Devi tutored Kara and Willie, while I drove the houseboat, sipped red wine, and admired her infinite reserve of patience.

As dusk fell, I kept an eye out for a place to moor. The moment we landed, Kara and Willie jettisoned their schoolbooks, leapt off the boat, and chased up and down the docks like little maniacs. They even had playmates for a few days, a brother and sister from Bath, England, who were cruising the Saone on another family houseboat.

While the children played under Betty’s watchful eye, Devi and I wandered into town to shop in the local markets. We carefully selected autumn produce, crusty baguettes, salamis, and ripe cheeses. I usually prepared dinner, and Devi read the kids a bedtime story by the dim yellow light of the boat. By nine o’clock, everyone was drowsy, so we snuggled under our comforters, and were gently rocked to sleep by soft, lapping river waves.

We floated along for seven days, cruising up the river to the friendly village of Auxonne, where Napoleon served as a young artillery officer, then we rambled on to Gray, a handsome town decimated by warfare and plague throughout the entire Middle Ages. When we got that far, we came about and drifted downstream to the ancient village of Seurre, where Julius Caesar pitched his camp during the Gallic Wars twenty centuries ago. By that time, the tourist season was long gone, and only a few straggling houseboats plied the river.

All in all, our week on the Saone was placid and uneventful—a sweet interlude during which we could savor the aesthetic pleasures of Burgundy and catch our breath after three months on the road. It was also a time when we made important strides as a family. Remarkably, all six of us—even Kara and Willie—managed to live together harmoniously in a space no larger than our kitchen back home. It’s not that the children suddenly began to treat each other with unbounded respect and affection. That’s still a long way off. But for the first time since we left home, they seem to be moving in that direction.

There was another transformation during this period that was subtler, but just as significant. I think I can explain it best by saying that our journey, up until this point, felt as if it were merely a diversion from our real life. Like what we used to do—living in a house, going to work, taking the kids to school—was “normal,” and this trip was a respite. But sometime this week, while we were floating down the Saone, our life in motion began to feel more normal and comfortable. Maybe it’s because we were doing everyday activities like shopping, cooking, and teaching the kids to read. Or maybe I just stopped comparing everything we do now to the way it used to be. But more than anything else, I think it just took time—three months to be exact—to fully relinquish our old routines and embrace a new way of life. I should say that it took Devi and me three months to make this transition, because the children seemed to manage it much more quickly.

At the end of the week, we sailed back to Dôle. According to our rental agreement, we had to return the boat by 9:00 A.M. sharp or risk losing our deposit. Just to be sure, we arrived the night before, and moored at the little marina beneath Dole’s venerable basilica. When we first picked up our houseboat, Devi and I were charmed by this photogenic arrangement—our little boat framed by the majestic cathedral. But there was a drawback, and it revealed itself to us Monday morning at the crack of dawn.

Each September morning on the river had been getting progressively colder, but Monday was the coldest by far. According to the ship’s French-language manual, there was a heater on board, but either it was broken or we didn’t know how to use it. Either way, the boat felt like a walk-in freezer. Consequently, Devi and I were buried deep under the covers when the basilica’s prodigious bells began to toll … and toll … and toll. Bong, bong, bong. It was unimaginably loud, like we’d somehow awakened inside the belfry. After a few minutes of this skull-rattling tintinnabulation, Devi peeked out from under the covers and said, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe the town is being sacked by Huns. We should probably flee.”

“No, I’m too tired to flee,” said Devi, closing her eyes again. “It has to stop soon.”

But it didn’t. It just went on and on for twenty minutes or more. I groaned and covered my head with a pillow. When that didn’t work, I surrendered and jumped out of bed. It was so cold, I could see my breath, so I started hopping around the tiny cabin trying to generate some body heat. The ceiling was only about five feet high, so I had to hunch over. Between the hunching and the hopping and the pounding bells, I began to feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame. So, I started doing my Charles Laughton-Quasimodo imitation. I hunched over Devi, contorted my face and said, “I call the big bell Marie.”

Even though she looks the part, Devi was disinclined to play Esmeralda. She moaned and said, “Oh, no. Get out of here. I can’t stand this anymore.”

Then, one by one, Kara, Willie, and Lucas wandered into the room rubbing their eyes. The clanging bells bewildered them, but they liked the Quasimodo routine, so soon there were three more little hunchbacks bounding around the bed. Devi retreated to the bathroom, and I got all three kids to yell, “Esmeralda, fear not our hideous aspect.” Alas, we were all spurned in favor of the fair Phoebus, or at least a hot shower, and incredibly, the bells kept right on tolling. I have no idea whether they ring like that every Monday morning at the crack of dawn, but if they do, only the drunk and the dead sleep late in Dôle.

When the racket finally subsided, we were wide awake and ready to head south toward Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy. We picked up a grey Citroën minivan at the only car rental agency in town, loaded the bags, and bid a fond farewell to our trusty houseboat. I hadn’t driven a standard transmission car for more than a decade, so Devi took the wheel. We found the autoroute out of town, and Devi quickly cranked the van up to 140 kilometers per hour (about 85 mph). We reached the Beaune turnoff in no time. Devi parked the van, and we set off to explore the old walled city on foot.

Beaune’s present-day circumstances were largely determined five centuries ago when the Duchy of Burgundy was the largest country in Europe, encompassing most of present-day Belgium, Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Netherlands. At its zenith of power, Burgundy’s ducal chancellor, Nicolas Rolin, decided to build a great hospital in Beaune. To insure its future, he endowed the Hospices de Beaune with expansive vineyards and a saltworks. The saltworks didn’t turn out to be any great shakes, but five hundred years later the vineyards still produce some of the finest wines on earth.

Devi knew all this from her guidebook, and she deftly steered us toward the Marché aux Vins, the expansive eleventh-century wine cellars operated by the Hospices de Beaune. A woman at the front desk gave each of us our own tastevins (those shallow dimpled shell-cups that sommeliers wear on ribbons around their necks) and an impressive carte de vins listing twenty-two rarefied offerings. Then we ducked our heads and crouched down a cramped spiral staircase made from stone slabs. When we reached the cellars, and our eyes adjusted to the underground darkness, we found ourselves standing at one end of a very long passageway lit only by candles set in shallow wall niches. The passage was lined with polished oak barrels, three feet in diameter, and every thirty feet or so, the hallway widened into a small room.

We walked slowly down the shadowy corridor to the first room, where we found a six-foot wine rack and three upturned barrels. Atop each barrel was a lit candle, a bottle of wine opened to breathe, and another bottle in reserve. There was also a carafe for spitting out the wine after you tasted it. Of course, there was little chance of that. I mean here we were essentially unescorted in one of the world’s greatest wine cellars, encompassed by countless cases of Montrachets, Meursaults, and Mazis-Chambertains. It was a scenario I could only dream about at home, so I wasn’t going to take just one tiny little sip and spit it out. I filled the tastevins time and again lingering for seconds or thirds. There were a dozen sublime wines to taste in the cellar and another ten upstairs in a cavernous old chapel. The chapel was an appropriate venue, because by the time I got there, I was having a religious experience. (Bacchanalian, but religious, nonetheless.) I felt as if I were embraced in a red velvet fog. I said to Devi over and over, “This must be the best place on earth. No seriously, there has never been a better place than this.”

Since Devi was driving to Nice after lunch (and she’s a pretty light drinker anyway) I didn’t press too much grog on her. Still, this was the sort of epiphanous experience I wanted to share with someone, and after a while, I noticed I was sharing it with Willie. I heard myself saying things like, “This is a very nice one, Willie.”

Then Willie would sip a magnificent Chambolle-Musigny ’87 from the tastevins, nod thoughtfully and respond, “Mmm. Yea. That one’s pretty good.”

It was only after another American couple started staring at us pointedly that I remembered Willie was only seven and a half. He’d had only six or seven sips from the tastevins, so he wasn’t drunk or anything, but I figured I better cut him off. After all, if Willie’s first experience with wine included the finest vintages Burgundy had to offer, it would probably spoil him for life.

When we emerged from the Marché aux Vins, blinking in the sunlight, Betty and the kids desperately wanted to shop for more souvenirs. At this point in the trip, Devi and I couldn’t even look at another souvenir shop, so we gave the troops lunch money and ducked around the corner for a proper French lunch. We chose an old-fashioned place with burgundy-velvet walls, brass fixtures, and tufted banquettes. We ordered the old standbys from the prix fixe menu: escargot, then rack of lamb followed by cheese, fruit, and dessert. Everything was superb.

As we were finishing our tartes tatin, three French men entered the restaurant accompanied by two young American women in miniskirts. The oldest man, obviously the alpha male, was in his late fifties. He was bald with a thin grey moustache, and he wore a camel-colored cashmere sport jacket with an expensive green and gold tie. The moment this fellow sat down, he began to hold forth expansively about life and love in heavily accented English while the young women made a good-faith effort to appear enthralled.

“I am so very bored when I travel,” he said loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “When I travel, I am always weteeng for somesing. I wet foh zee ’otel room. I wet foh zee aeroplane. I wet foh zee taxi.” Then he paused for effect, and said, even more loudly, “What can you do when you travel, but wet and mek love seven times a night?”

When I heard that seven-times-a-night thing, I twisted around involuntarily and I found myself staring at the guy. I guess I was looking for traces of irony, but monsieur was deadly serious. To their credit, both young women managed to maintain straight faces. The other men just puffed on their cigarettes as though they’d heard this all before.

When we walked out of the restaurant, I apologized to Devi. “I’m sorry,” I said, “we’ve been traveling for three months now. We’ve wetted foh zee ’otel rooms … foh zee aeroplane … foh zee taxis. And never once, in all that time, have I ever made love to you seven times a night. You must be so bored.”

“That’s alright” said Devi, “I’m not that bored with travelling yet.”

“Good thing,” I replied, and we ran off to find Betty and the kids.

In vino veritas.