( COASTAL VIEW )
FRENCH DISCONNECTION A decade-old diary evokes memories of a solitary coastal journey BY JACO B B AY N H A M I RECENTLY UNEARTHED an old journal from
the clutter in my closet. It’s a diary I kept during a trip to France when I was 22. The entries are penned in cursive—cursive, I remember thinking, was the only way one should write about France. Back then I was committed to rules like this. I made two more for this trip: I would travel alone, and I would be out of contact. No e-mail. No telephone. Just France and moi-même. Old journals are disconcerting because they demand a reconciling of your past and present selves. The man in this journal makes me cringe. I was so impressionable! (April 11: Bordeaux inspires me to get rich.) So inane! (April 9: I love bread.) So
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COASTAL LIVING April 2016
melodramatic! (April 12: Like vineyards in spring, I traverse my life in straight lines.) But he also makes me nostalgic. When he stepped off the ferry in Calais, he had a working theory that the world was more friend than foe. Rereading this journal 10 years later, I can’t help but root for him. In Paris, I checked into a crumbling Montmartre hotel. By evening I was lonely. Tempted to check e-mail, but will resist, my journal reads. I walked to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica with a bottle of wine, a baguette, some Camembert, and the vague hope of company. A gallant girl named Sophie rescued me. She was throwing a ball for her dog. We started talking,
ILLU STRAT I ON BY SA R A H WI LKI N S
and she brought me home to meet her parents and her puzzled boyfriend. We shared dinner. It was a wonderful, unexpected present. Sometimes you have to unplug from the world you know to connect with the far grander one that you don’t. The lesson feels even timelier today. By instinct, I stuck to the coast. I hitchhiked to Pornic, a village where I pitched my tent on the beach. Seashells tinkled under the waves. I found a starfish. I rolled a message inside a wine bottle and flung it into the Atlantic, a ping to the universe. I was used to holding strangers at arm’s length. But in my communication fast, I craved their kinship. In Nantes I met Somphone, a refugee from Laos who escaped the revolution in 1975 by swimming across the Mekong. We went to his house for lunch and then to the corner bar, where he lost money on horses and argued with a Turkish communist. Down the coast in La Rochelle, I shared a hostel room with Chris, a teenage runaway from Manchester. He had fallen in love with a classmate from Sri Lanka, but her parents forced them to break up. We sat on our beds and split a bag of pears. He ate his from top to bottom because the bottoms were juiciest and best saved for last. In town, we met some students in a bohemian grotto where people drank wine and tapped cigarettes into seashell ashtrays. Among them was a French tutor named Delphine. We walked to a bar and danced until late. Delphine wrapped me in her arms and kissed me. I walked her home along the moonlit beach, and she told me she was in love with the world. I traveled onward to a Mediterranean village where Matisse came to paint, so transfixed was he by its light. I felt less lonely now. Three weeks had passed and I no longer missed my e-mail or phone. And then an epiphany hit me one afternoon in Nice. I drew a box around the idea in my journal. If I left the life I knew and everyone in it, I could build a new one on this shore or any other. People teemed around me, strangers, close enough to touch. Jacob Baynham is a journalist and adjunct professor who lives in Montana.
