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Joie de Bike (Cont.)

We were asking Alex to adapt to an awful lot of things at once. He had never been in a foreign country, and he was trying to adjust to an unfamiliar setting, unfamiliar food, and an unfamiliar language, in addition to an unfamiliar vehicle. Sometimes it was just too much. On the third day, as we were walking back home from the cafe in the village square, Alex said, "Daddy, I'm feeling kind of lonely for home." There was no mistaking the pain in his voice. When I asked why, he said mournfully, "Because I can't talk to anybody here; nobody speaks American." For a child who lives to talk, the idea that he couldn't make himself understood by a waiter or shopkeeper or another kid was just unbearable. And it was a little bit like the bicycle: Everything that was supposed to become easy had turned into an effort. At that moment, Alex would have given anything to be back home in summer camp.

And then the moment passed. Alex got a little steadier on his bike, and he started making farting noises with a boy in tennis class, and he went to the candy store where he could get weird-shaped fruit sticks for ten francs. And then there was the beach. The first time we went, Alex gasped in amazement—there were women, some older than his own mother, who weren't wearing anything on top. In public! "That is so gross," he said.

Alex never got over his shock; he would shoot me a look when a particularly dreadful specimen walked by. Perhaps to combat this moral pollution, Alex took to making drawings of a spiritual nature in the sand; he would pose by his work cross-legged, his palms pressed together in meditation. None of this work survives, alas.

The major source of recreation in Les Portes, besides dawdling at the beach or in the cafe, was a leisurely bike trip one could take along the paths through the salt marshes that lie between the town and its neighbor, Ars-en-Ré. Signs along the way identified the migratory waterfowl, thus inviting the rider to dismount every kilometer or so to take in the picturesque scenery. The terrain was perfectly flat, and a fresh breeze always seemed to blow through the tall grasses; the French would go out of an evening and ride around as if they were taking a constitutional. Since Alex had continued to make modest progress in the cycling arts, we decided toward the end of our week on the island that he was ready for the five-mile promenade to Ars.

Leaving the house, Alex and I rode down a narrow alley to avoid a trafficked road, and he wobbled to a halt. Since he was still starting off with his head down, he didn't see an older woman coming up the alley on a bike, and he just about flattened her. She said something that fortunately I didn't understand, and went furiously on her way. It was Alex's fault, but we still hated her. Alex gamely remounted and we crossed the highway to the marshes. I rode ahead of him, occasionally turning around to shout, "Get over to the side!" But the cycling gods were with him: He didn't run into anyone, and no one ran into him, and he only tipped over once, at a sharp turn, and after about half an hour of steady pedaling across marshes and salt ponds and vineyards and fields of sunflowers, we made it to Ars. I could only guess what a colossal sense of vindication and relief Alex must have been feeling. He rolled his bike into a stand, and we found a cafe, where he celebrated his victory with a Roy Rogers. It had been, he said, one of the great achievements of his life.

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