***life raft - Katherine Relf

My fiancee drives around with a book of French verbs in the back of his car. I keep mine in the back of my mind. After years and years, the verbs are still there. We went to France during the Christmas holidays of 1995. We referred to our trip as "wintering in France," and, like a winter day, it was over too soon. We had to come home to let work consume our days and our lives.

France is back in my life again, I thought once we arrived. There it was, December, and I had just returned from France three months before. France had been all I was into back when I was 16. It seemed that in the space of a few months I was once more confronted with my 16-year old self.

Back then, I had an adolescent's great desire. I wanted to live an exciting, eventful, quietly flamboyant life--but it had to be in France. I know I would not have been in France in October, or December had not that 16-year old who I once was decided France was worthy of attention. France was a good story. And I could write myself into this tale and this place again and again, as so many people before me had.

In October, I had stayed in Treziers as the guest of a couple whom I'd met hundreds of miles from where they called home. I was invited to see where they lived -- a rural village, almost an abandoned one, where they were renovating some properties they had bought. They'd ventured down from Scottland to live there and were transforming three adjoining buildings into their new abode. Though he was from L.A., he had long lived in Scottland. His sweetheart was Scottish, and this seemed to have everything to do with his expatriation.

Treziers, close to Mirepoix, is near the foothills of the Eastern Pyrenees. The ruins of Cathar castles are visible along the way, and you can sense from the signs in Catalan that you are near Spain. The mayor of the town keeps the fish fed that live in the fountain pond in the main square. That is just part of his duty, I was told. I never saw him, but the fish were alive and that seemed sufficient proof. Although he was no child, it left me with the impression that he was a sort of Little Prince character, who protected his rose and swept out his volcanos. (The pilot/writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote The Little Prince, grew up one hour away from this town, in Toulouse, which was then and continues to be an aviator's town. The mayor's fountain pond would, I think, look very small from the air.)

Near the mayor's house and not too far from where I was staying, on the main square, there was a house for sale, which might be the place for us to go back to. I don't know. By now, it may be sold. Or perhaps it still belongs to the frogs and birds who inhabited it when I was there. When my hosts, who lived around the corner, took me to see it, we opened the door to get a better look at the inside, and a hawk flew up through the fallen beams and what was left of the roof. Animals seemed to be everywhere: I encountered my first bat, which flew closely over my head one night when we went out for a walk, naming the town's winding paths for ourselves because they don't have street signs. The frog was also apparently out on a walk -- if you call that walking. My host picked it up, and the three of us felt its sticky body and reassured it we wouldn't cut off its legs.

I only met a few of the 68 people of Treziers. I learned about other neighbors by anecdote, people whose lives were interconnected in soap operatic ways. The gossip about the man who had done a bad job of repairing the tiles in the bathroom that I used, part of the hayloft, where I read The Fall, by Albert Camus. The nextdoor neighbor on one side, who used to live nine months of the year at sea, is now surrounded by rolling hills and still is not comfortable if his drink is too close to the edge of a table. He stocks up on food as though he would not have enough provisions to live on otherwise, although he can just drive down to Mirepoix if he wants to.

One night of my stay, I stood in one spot -- probably for hours -- listening to a beautiful piece of music playing on a turntable sitting in a horse feed-trough. I just stood there and listened and watched the face of Lenny Kravitz spin around and around. The trough was along one wall of the converted barn, which was the working livingroom/dining room. In the other rooms, were straw and dust and the wormy beams of knocked out walls, lathes and drills and hammers and saws. The barn was the third of the trio of buildings that were being joined lovingly into one household. In the 18th Century, when the structures were split up, one was a barn, one a bakery and nextdoor, a cobblershop. The livingroom/diningroom had a glass door that looked out onto the town's single diminutive square, where an out-of-order telephone booth stood next to a statue of Jesus on the cross.

The surrounding area was called l'Aude and, they told me, it was linked to Stonehenge by lay lines. They had a photo of Stonehenge on a shelf in the livingroom along with a menora. Many of the other objects in the room evoked a sense of culture meeting culture: a laptop, a green, village-bottled liqueur, copies of magazines with articles he had written and I had read while I was there. I helped myself regularly to the contents of an English teapot, which was always being filled, and also listened constantly to music stored against a wall: crates and crates of music, records and cds, which she sold at market fairs for income. He had just published a novel and was writing a book of stories about death.

Treziers was not a bad setting for a life like theirs.

***

Crossing the Atlantic and losing myself in Europe has been like that Lenny Kravitz record I played over and over. Why I do it I do not know for sure. Do I have unaccomplished business? Am I trying to set right something that didn't go so well when I was just starting out in my travels? I would not be the first adult who wanted to remake an early experience so that it would turn out alright after all in the end.

There are many patterns we repeat throughout our lives. We don't always live on automatic, creatures of pure habit, but nor are we constantly gathering inspiration from our past like artists who self-plagiarize. Sometimes we do the same things with enjoyment. Sometimes we must look perfect masochists to those outside our cycles. But obsession has produced great art, has it not? How else would an artist have a hallmark, a signature of style? Be recognised? Monet painted his water lillies at Giverny hundreds of times. In each iteration there was variation, and he never stepped into the same river twice.

I also have an opposite tendency: to feel attached to the places I call home. I have had great depth of feeling about my parent's house, the street I lived on, the first town I ever knew. How tricky and ambivalent have these feelings been. As adult refugees from our childhoods, we must all take a lesson from the snail and learn to carry our homes on our backs. Over the years, I have remade my surroundings into something recognizable, like reforming a sentence by rearranging the same words. But part of me still wants to be home with mom in my childhood house. When I left it for good, I took a gift: my own little stonehenge, three smooth black rocks I keep with me, which used to be part of a rock bed surrounding a Japanese Pine just to the left of my parent's front door.

The first time I really left my parents, I was 15. I stayed a summer in Greece working for a painter and his wife who lived on an island in the Aegean with their baby whom I looked after. I thought I did a half-assed job. Although when I was there it was an unbelievable land. Somehow, I think I will always feel I blew it because I had wanted to evaporate into that world and be of it, not leave it. I wasn't of the world yet and longed to be -- like the Australian girl I met in Italy who had the road in her. She and the world were as tight as her jeans. She was sitting on the sidewalk like that's where people were supposed to sit. We talked two minutes and I have remembered that talk for nearly two decades. (My little heart opening to the possibilities of moving freely across borders and not having to be confined in my hometown again.) When I returned to high school, I could not keep my mind off of what I'd seen.

So there I was: 16, and the world beckoned. I wanted to get going so I could accumulate experiences that would shock and entertain. Traveling seemed an elegant solution to the problem of not fitting in, and I had long learned I would not be part of the well-to-do in- crowd. Perhaps it was that I thought it would help me like the person standing in my shoes. I didn't want my regular life that seemed to be coming at me with its excrutiating banality. It wasn't big enough.

I chose Paris. Before I could expatriate, I knew I'd need to have a second language. So I learned one. That meant I could talk about life's discomforts in two languages. French came easily, and it seemed such a happy coincidence that it turned out I had a knack for languages.

My private French teacher in California, Madame Tihanyi, lived near the university in a gleaming white condo complex with her three daughters and husband. When I found out about her and learned she taught French, she became my ally, and her house became my favorite place to go -- after school two days a week or more often. Sometimes we sat on the balcony with lemonade, went over my workbooks and read long short stories until it grew dark and we had to go inside. Learning my second language was one of the most beautiful things I ever did and come to think of it, one of the most sad. I thought it would be all the preparation I'd need. Words indeed can help us, but they cannot do everything.

And ironically, it was something I read in an article that got me going and pushed me forward: American high school SAT tests were open to graduates of French Lycees. I could "justify" a French Baccalaureat to my parents. I could forget high school and it could sound reasonable.

At that time in life, it seemed everyone around me was busy preparing for making money. My town was so wealthy, dollar bills shot skyward from chimneys making green-tinted curly-Qs that rode the smoke. While classmates listened to and heeded the advice of their counselors and parents, to help them along towards brilliant careers, I decided to go for something more unusual and unstructured. Not everyone's parents would just say yes, but mine did eventually, and bought me a ticket and -- though it caused rifts -- let me go.

When I got there indeed I was surrounded by words, and I understood them. My U.S. passport had gotten me past the legal border. Being impassioned of words let me in the next.

***

I forgot the way I first walked out of the Gare du Nord to the first taxi that took me to an address whose exact number I also forget, but whose street name remains in my memory: Rue du Longchamp. The street was near the horse racing course of the same name in the Bois de Boulogne, one of the larger patches of green in the city.

The morning after I arrived in Paris, I found myself sitting in a bathtub looking at the peeling wallpaper curling above the wainscotting. It was nearly noon. Out one window was a view that imprinted itself on me, although it was just of the ordinary windows of the building across the street. People were coming home to their apartments for lunch. Plastic Bertrand was singing his latest hit, Sentimental Moi, on the radio. I could not see the crowd below, as I was on an upper level, but I could hear the clack clack of their heels. I could hear bicycles and car horns and people greeting one another, their conversations drifting up to the open window.

I remember being all naked there in the water, and feeling I finally knew I had the power to wish for something and get it. I have had nice feelings since, but getting out on your own at sixteen is incomparable. At that time, however, I was unaware that it was a false start .

Why, although I'd spent the better part of a year trying to get over the Atlantic, did I make the split decision to return home? A girl nearly my age asked me the same question. I remember that one of the clasps on her overalls was broken, and she was trying to rig them up by tying the strap into a knot. I don't remember her name, but I do remember how she tried to convince me not to go back home. I think she must have said something classic like "you'll be sorry." We were brought together at a place where travelers either meet or bump into one another and stride on, perhaps a curt “sorry” thrown back: Victoria Station in London. Why hadn't she, this stranger, but my superior in the life adventurous, not shown up a week before to set me right, not in Victoria Station, but in my neighborhood in Paris. She could have taken me to her favorite cafe, full of creamy fillings and smoke, or to her aged, wise grandmother's house for a tisane and talk about knowing what to do at the right time, while a little dog slept in a corner chair below a set of collector picture plates of recent Popes.

My road friend, with all her street smarts, stood guard at the border and tried to keep me in. But she didn't manage to convince me not to take the train to Heathrow. Suffice it to say, I returned limp and American. Yet I finally had something grand to regret, which I wore on the front of me for years: I graduated from an American high school.

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