Carol & David's Excellent Adventures
PART XII - Flocculance
- David A. Braun
Copyright - October 1998
The rubric of rime for Isere is flocculating nascent wisps of cloud on
verdant peaks and naked spires. I came up with that sentence on my way
to work, going the "long way." Isere is the river after which the
department (approximately equivalent to a state) is named, in whose
valley the city of Grenoble, France sits. If you see a picture of
Grenoble's Telepherique, a ski-lift-like string of bubble cars hanging
from a wire rope, they are likely to be directly above the Isere.
We live on what you call the second floor (first floor in Europe, as in
first floor UP from the ground floor). We can look almost directly
across the street to the door of the court where the bike lives (but can
not see the bike). It takes me about two minutes from the time I walk
out the door of our apartment to clear the entrance of my building,
cross the street, enter the building in whose interior courtyard the
bike is parked (assuming the portal is not locked), and go down the
entry-hall to the bike.
Éclair Blanche ("White Lightning," my F650 BMW) starts easily. If the
weather is cold, some or all of the choke is required. She runs
unfalteringly within a few seconds. Although sometimes I leave the
choke on a bit until we are either traveling freely or I notice that the
temp gage is up off the pin, because sometimes she'll stall at a
stoplight or sign within the first few minutes.
There are several long ways to get to work from our apartment in Centre
Ville de Grenoble. None of them are actually ON the way. One of my
favorites goes like this... we leave the where the bike sleeps. This is
sometimes tricky in that I do not possess a key. And I occasionally
find my bike inaccessible on holidays or some Sundays. (Note: there are
hundreds of holidays in France. The trick is to know in advance which
are the important ones and park on the street the night before, u-locked
to a pole.)
We go up my block, cross one street, go up the next block, and then it
gets a little tricky. At the corner is a Yamaha shop and right turn
only. We need to turn left. But there is a little parking strip to the
left that we can take. The little strip exits onto Gambetta, a
left-only one way street. But we need to go right. To the right is a
HUGE intersection, Place Hubert Dubedout, which looks from far away to
be a seven-point intersection. Due to the layout, with the little
parking strips and extra side streets and stuff, there are actually more
like eleven ways to enter and/or exit the intersection. Judging from the
layout of the curbstones, and judging from the fact that there is a
traffic light facing us from the right, the little parking strip we are
exiting used to funnel traffic to the right, before they made Boulevard
Gambetta one-way south. I THINK I could argue my way out of a ticket
should we get pulled over for what we are about to do. ("Vraiment,
Messeur Gendarme, si n'est pas dans le loi por je fait une tourne a
droit ici, donc porquoi curve le rue a droit et porquoi il y a un feu du
traffic en face d'ici?"[1]) When that light turns green, I punch it and
we clear the intersection before the traffic coming the other way cuts
across our bow. Punching it is not at all a butt-puckering experience.
It is just that if I wait a five count after the light turns green, the
intersection is packed with cross-traffic from too many directions to
comprehend. And, depending on the volume, we may or may not have an
opportunity to make our play before the light turns red again. Once
across the intersection, we traverse the bridge over the Isere and go
straight (instead of curving left onto the beginning of the autoroute,
"Direction Lyon"). One block later, we turn right, and the Ride begins.
At the instant we turn right, the road starts to go up. And I mean UP.
This is one of those twisty, in city, uphill roads you see in movies,
first-gear stuff. Rising the first two hundred meters vertically takes
a half dozen or so switches between the concrete and stone walls of the
houses and businesses. Then, it begins to open up a bit. Only snatches
of the View are available, because at every place where it is
architecturally possible someone has built a house. After all, this
region has had folks trading real estate since well before there were
Christians. In fact, the Romans claimed some of the best real estate
above Grenoble a long LONG time ago. (But a couple millennia without
significant preventative maintenance will cause even the highest quality
structures to get sorta run down.)
After about a kilometer, we come to the end-of-limits sign. This means
that the speed limit is now 90 kph. But what it REALLY means is that
the Laws of Physics now apply. One peg-scraping first-gear turn later,
we are blasting up into the Chartreuse[2], gazing DOWN upon the
synchrotron and singularly-designed suspension-bridge at the confluence
of the Isere and Drac rivers near downtown Grenoble. Across the Isere
Valley, sits the massif of the Vercors. (Most mornings, there are
usually a bunch of nascent wisps flocculating up there, atop the
spires.) Another turn, and I'm gazing UP at the massif of the Chartreuse
(more of those lil flocculating buggers). All picture-postcard stuff.
We dance to the song of the two-lane blacktop road, the bike and I
together. There is a rhythm to the roads in the Alps that resonates in
my soul. It changes tempo, like the Dragon in Tennessee[3]. But unlike
the Dragon, situated in hilly tree-cloistered woodlands approaching the
Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the roads in the Alps have a
breathtaking vista around most every turn. Imagine riding over Trail
Ridge Road (through the Rocky Mountain National Park, over the Divide)
on your way to work in the morning[4]. Now imagine that you are riding
the Rhythm of the Dragon (in the vicinity of the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park) with the View from Trail Ridge... without any traffic and
with a legal limit of 55 mph. Pinch me.
One nice thing about driving in the Alps is that there don't seem to be
any revenuers. I have yet to see speed traps ala USA, set up by
municipalities in order to extract "tax" dollars from passing
motorists. Once in a while I see some police. But they generally seem
to be performing useful work. I have only seen radar in use twice
between last December and now (October), once at the foot of a viaduct
downtown, and once on the autoroute.
Another nice thing about driving in the Alps is that folks seem to be
paying attention. And yet another feature, related to the previous one,
is that you can pass just about anywhere. This is not just a function
of the lines stitched onto the road surface, but also of etiquette. In
France, if you find yourself having erred in your instantaneous
performance the differential calculus required to model three
dimensional time-space locations of all the players on the road for a
given pass, your fellow players will alter their trajectories so as to
let you in. (The buffalo on that nickel is that you've got to be
mentally prepared to deal with coming around a curve to find both lanes
filled with cars coming at you.)
Road rage doesn't play here. This is clearly illustrated by the queues
at traffic lights. Approaching a stoplight, it is natural here for the
motorcycles and motor scooters to filter to the front. In fact, the
cars will often pull aside a bit to make MORE room for a bike. Quite
the opposite of the cager[5] behavior bikers in the USA expect.
Our ride up the Chartreuse carries us into a national forest. We wind
ever upward, around the curve of valleys, seeing little French towns
>from nearly every possible angle, sitting nestled into their hillsides.
There is a lot of territory here for us to explore, but not on my way to
work. For me, the uphill path is more of a joy and a pleasure, as it
requires a bit less concentration than the downhill ride. If you
overcook an uphill turn a bit, gravity's claws help to scrape off some
of your speed. But, if you overcook a downhill curve... the teeth of
gravity pull you into her gaping maw. Put another way, I always feel
more comfortable looking at my surroundings on the uphill sections than
I do on the downhill sections, where I am compelled to concentrate
virtually all of my attention on the road.
At the tee at the top, we turn right, and head back down. We climbed up
one side of the massif; we'll descend another. There is plenty of
territory in the Chartreuse to the north of here, all the way to
Chambery, located on the flat at the bottom of the cliff (another
stunning ride) past the north end of the massif. Dropping down the
cliff into Chambray sits, as Carol put it, "God's own hairnet," a woven
wire rope net to keep the rocks and boulders on the cliff and off the
road (or your head). The road appears to have been constructed by Mole
Men[6].
Road numbers in the French hinterlands are just about worthless. When
you come to an intersection, you need to know the name of the next town
along your direction of travel. Compass directions are not included on
any signage. The French have placed these little plinths along the way.
Sometimes the grass is even cut down to where you might have been able
to see the little numbers carved in them if they hadn't been whitewashed
along with the rest of the plinth. But for now, I don't mind taking the
occasional wrong turn. For how can you really be lost if you don't mind
being where you are?
Anyway, we turn right and zip through a quick, curvy, downhill section
before entering a little Alpine village. Unlike the ersatz Alpine
villages in the Appalachians, Rockies, or Sierras, this one not only
looks real, but IS real. The cafes and bakeries are not just for the
tourists, though they certainly appreciate the business. In fact, this
particular village, Le Sappey en Chartreuse, is where Sam went on a
two-week succession of daily school trips to take nature walks and learn
about life in general with visits to the baker, the mayor, the post
office... It takes only two minutes at 50-kph (the national in-town
speed limit) to clear the village. No stoplight. But the end of limits
sign doesn't show up for another klick or so because of some
intersections related to the "suburbs" of Le Sappey.
When the limit goes away, there is a snaking "straight" section that can
be taken at a good clip. It is snaking, in that it is curvy. It is
straight, in that even though the road is doing a dance, the visibility
is as unobscured as that of a straight section. A good place to pass.
The last good place to pass before things start getting complicated.
The first hint of complication is when you have to exhale to make the
road skinny enough to fit between the (stone) barn and (stone) house at
the apex of a left hander just before a series of blind curves. (I
prefer to take this curve heading down. Heading up, I always think of
Joey Dunlop talking about banging his helmet on some of the houses on
the Isle of Man[7]. The marks are there, on the house.) In the middle
of the last short section where you might be able to pass is a turn-off
option. Sometimes we take this one and sometimes we don't. It drops
down and reconnects with the road on which we came up.
When we go "straight," the wall is on the left, the precipice is on the
right, and the tires are running on the sidewalls, flip-flopping back
and forth and forth and back, left right left right, as we hurtle down
the massif. Within an eyeblink, I'm looking on the opposite end of
Grenoble down (and I do mean DOWN, with full views of the roofs of the
tallest buildings in the city) than the one I saw on the way up. If I
look far to the west, I can see the range called le Belle Donne, the
border with Italy. If the day is clear, there is a spot from which I
can see Mont Blanc in Switzerland. Pinch me.
Like CW McCall said, ~"Down, around, around, and down until we wound up
in a feed store in downtown Pagosa Springs.[8]" Actually, we zip into
la Tronche, which is to Grenoble what Camden is to Philadelphia, I
suppose. La Tronche is across the Isere from Grenoble and a separate
municipality. If we continue straight, we will go past the 35 pizza
places and Italian restaurants along the river, which I can see from two
blocks from home. (Now WHY there are 35 pizza joints in a row is a
matter of conjecture. But... there they are.) If we continued
straight, we'd come out at the third bridge, where this whole thing
started. Be that all as it may, we usually take a left across the first
bridge. (The second one, the oldest bridge with the most character,
sporting chains with links as big as your arm, is now strictly limited
to pedestrian traffic.) A right runs us along the river, and about
three blocks from home, we can drop down to the one-way drive along the
river. This miniature "expressway" carries us back under the
seven-point intersection at Place Hubert Dubedout[9] and zips past a
bunch of other traffic-slowing obstacles and spits us out at the foot of
a viaduct that runs over the railroad gulch. Two traffic lights later,
we get on the autoroute and we're on our way to work, six kilometers
away.
OK, sometimes instead of taking the scenic route, we just turn right at
the Yamaha shop in the beginning and then hairpin left for the "river
drive." The rest of the way to work is the same. But the scenic route
only runs either 35 or 45-km longer and only takes an extra half-hour or
so. In terms of Soul Food (as in Food for my Soul) it is heck of a lot
better than a day off from work sitting around watching teevee in my
underwear. I arrive at work energized, fully re-created, ready to face
whatever challenges are in store, having had a few up close and personal
thoughts (conversations with God?) along the way about things like tire
traction, lean angle, the existential tenuousness of existence, and the
shape and function of terrestrial planetary formations and their
attendant coloration. Yeah, we could have done worse than to move from
the Front Range of Colorado to Grenoble, France, the self proclaimed
"Capital des Alpes," a LOT worse.
(End)
[1] "Honest, Officer, if it was not legal for me to make a right turn
here, why does the pavement curve to the right and why is there a
traffic light facing me?"
[2] Chartreuse is a massif, a big plateau, north of Grenoble, France. A
good bit of it is Parc Nationale. Chartreuse is a healthy-tasting,
strong, alcoholic beverage, akin to brandy, made by monks in the
Chartreuse. It comes in yellow and green. The green is the stronger of
the two. Chartreuse is also a color that is sort of a pastel
green/yellow.
[3] "The Dragon" is a very curvy road in East Tennessee, (US129)
terminating at "The Crossroads of Time" in North Carolina (Hwy. 28),
legend to motorcyclists, "318 mountain curves in 11 miles."
[4] Trail Ridge Road (US34) in Colorado is the highest paved
through-road in the continental USA, well over 12,000 feet. The view,
as you might imagine, is rather pleasant. The weather up there is often
not pleasant. The road is generally closed from October to May.
[5] Cager - one who drives an automobile (a cage)
[6] Ref: B-sci-fi flicks: Superman and The Mole Men (1958), Mole Men
Against the Son of Hercules (1961). To me roads that "stitch" along the
side of a cliff look like they were built by Mole Men in that I guess I
think that a race of Mole Men would have no reservations about digging
holes.
[7] Joey Dunlop narrates a lap around the 37-mile, public road, race
circuit on the Isle of Man in the classic (to motorcyclists) film
entitled "V-Four Victory." Some of what he says you can actually
understand through his thick brogue, such as the bit about banging his
helmet.
[8] More or less lifted from the song "Wolf Creek Pass" - C.W. McCall
[9] Hubert Dubedout was once mayor of Grenoble. But we prefer to
remember him as the guy whose name inspired some Frank Sinatra lyrics...
"oobie doobie doo."
A photo of l'Éclair Blanche is at:
http://www.deathstar.org/~flash/DONOTDIE.JPG
A photo of the road to Die is at:
http://www.deathstar.org/~flash/ROAD2DIE.JPG
And a photo of what the Mole Men built is at
http://www.deathstar.org/~flash/MOLEMEN.JPG
And, just for grins, a shot of Sam, standing in our apartment is at
http://www.deathstar.org/~flash/LE_SAM.JPG
To keep current (or catch up) on Carol & David's Excellent Adventures
(C&DEA) as well as read motorcycle Adventure Tales, visit
http://www.deathstar.org/~flash
- David A. Braun = Flash = l'Éclair - DoD #412