La vue de ma selle (The View from the Bicycle Seat)

(Essay appearing in May 2008 Minnesota Monthly)
In my 40th year and for the usual reasons, I decided it was time to abandon home and work and go off on some reckless experiment for a while … maybe for good, who could say?

I bought a serious touring bicycle and loaded it up with tent, sleeping bag, skimpy biking clothes and my smallest accordion, and in mid-May I headed for Paris and four months of solo rambling. I figured I’d earned it, an entire summer exploring the most fascinating places (I thought) on earth, France and Italy mostly, doing the things I loved best: long-haul bicycling and random music-making.

My first night in Paris, jostling my jet-lagged self through crowded Left Bank streets, accordion on my back, I stumbled upon a piano bar-restaurant advertising, “OPEN MIC CE SOIR.” Inside it was cool and dark, as was the look I got from the piano-playing hostess when I approached to inquire about playing the accordion. “Non, non, non,” she clucked, her eyes dropping to my biking sandals and socks. “Certainly not. But here’s the songbook. Sing any one you want.” I decided to order a salad instead. Soon I was chatting with the American couple who’d taken the table next to mine. Minnesotans, as it happened, from Excelsior, on their honeymoon in Paris. (Paul and Rachelle, are you out there?) We commiserated about construction back on 494, endured an hour of karaoke singing, and as night fell we headed across the Seine to sit and gaze at the luminous wedding cake of Notre-Dame Cathedral. I played a few quiet requests for them as the moon rose over our unlikely trio.

In three days’ time I’d be pedaling up and out of Paris and into four months of uncharted vagabondage, consulting maps in the morning over coffee, then heading out, laundry flapping from the handlebars, into the unknown, into the everyday.

Terrain was my only to-do list, the pedals were my clock. In the long wordless solitudes of the road, the diesel-infused sweetness of summer filled my lungs, the taste of morning’s baguette and coffee lingered through herbal woods, chalky vineyards and could-be-anywhere office park sprawl. In noontime’s crowded square and clattering cafe there was the comfort of human company. And at the end of the day, in the hostel or campground or restaurant, lived the promise, or at least the prospect, of camaraderie, of a shared meal, of music. Perhaps even of love, who could say?