• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 679 0

on the wild, usually deserted stretch of beach, play in the massive poured-concrete blockhouses the Germans had left behind, exploring the spider holes, the tunnels that often extended underground from the central gun emplacements. We’d play army – on a real battlefield – hunting the dead Nazis rumored to be still decomposing under the sand, and hurl firecrackers down ventilation pipes and into crumbling, sand-filled stairwells. It was a paradise for kids; scores of ominous gray piles loomed up out of the sand in the vast, barren dunes, set back from the water’s edge to provide interlocking fields of fire, overlooking that wild and magnificent surf and a beach that seemed to extend forever.

I had the brilliant idea that Chris and I should rent motor scooters and retrace the long drive from Arcachon, through La Teste and Gujan-Mestras, all the way around the bay to Cap Ferret. We’d made the trek many times as a family, first in the old Rover sedan, later in rented Simcas and Renaults. It would be, I thought, more tactile and immediate on scooters. We would be able to smell the air, get a better view of the towns as we passed through, unobstructed by dashboards or windows. That it was freezing cold and drizzling made no impression on me, caught up as I was in reverie. We dressed for the weather as best we could, packed the traditional Bourdain family lunch of saucissons, stinky cheese, baguettes from the La Teste boulangerie, Vittel, and a bottle of Bordeaux red, and set out for the beach. Chris crashed his scooter straight out of the hotel parking lot, smacking a street sign and falling over, skinning a significant portion of his shoulder and back. But he clambered gamely back on his bike and soldiered on – good sense having long ago been dispensed with by both of us.

It was cold – extremity-numbing cold. My bike could speed along at a good clip (I’m bigger – I got the good one), but Chris’s bike putted along at twenty-five miles an hour, slowing our progress considerably. Our helmets were too tight. In our zeal to recapture the past, we hadn’t really checked them for fit beyond a cursory look. My head soon felt like I had a drill bit lodged behind my right eye. The rain whipped and lashed our faces, even at our reduced speed, and soaked us to an ambient, dispiriting damp.

But we were cruising past the boarded-up villas, shuttered restaurants, and businesses we’d so often passed in our youth. This was a bold and heroic venture, wasn’t it? A noble attempt to reconnect with our past, to bond, however foolhardy it was to be trying this in January. The trip took about two hours, maybe a bit more, given the frequent pit stops to unhelmet and allow our aching brainpans some relief. We finally arrived at a sandy turnoff, drove slowly down a scrub pine-lined road, parked, dismounted by a dune fence, and began the half-mile walk to the beach. There was nothing but wind, the sound of our heavy hiking boots in the sand, the distant thudding of surf.

‘I recognize that one, I think,’ said Chris, pointing out a graffiti-covered blockhouse in the distance, midway between beach and pine forest, just visible in the rolling dunes.

‘Picnic site?’ I suggested.

‘Plan!’

We trudged over dunes, berms, hillocks, slow going in the sand, then finally clambered up a thick, sloping concrete wall and sat atop the thing, exactly where we’d played as kids. I laid out a blanket and our little picnic lunch and we chewed silently, our fingers stiff in the cold wind coming off the sea. The saucisson tasted the same, the cheese was good, and the wine proved serviceable.

I produced a package of firecrackers, and soon two men in their forties were playing army, as they’d done three decades or more ago: dropping explosives down rusted vents, jamming them into discarded bleach bottles, the dull bang of the explosions whipped immediately away by the wind, to disappear into the sand. We chased each other around the blockhouse for a while, and when we got tired of blowing stuff up – or, more accurately, when the firecrackers ran out – we nosed around inside,