"Furrowed Brows and Twisted Tongues"
Limoux, France
October 13, 1983
Dear Folks,
When I entered France 850 miles ago, I wondered if my unfamiliarity with the language would cause me much grief. After all, I had almost 1,000 miles of French soil to cross on foot, and all I knew of the language was the sole word oui . It was unsettling to think that each day I would be surrounded by thousands of people making strange sounds with their lips.
As it would turn out, the first week was definitely not any confidence booster.
Upon landing in the port of Cherbourg, I had with me two pairs of new walking shoes (worth $120) that I wanted to mail ahead to the city of Limoux in the south of France. The shoes were a gift from someone in Bolton, England, where I had watched a marathon race, and I wasn't too keen on the idea of carrying the shoes across France on my back. I might have worn one set of the new shoes, but the Rocky boots I had been wearing since the start of my journey--1,750 miles ago--were still in excellent condition.
Unfortunately, it seemed that no one at the Cherbourg post office spoke a lick of English. And, worse, the clerk was obviously new at her job. I couldn't seem to make her understand that I wanted to mail a package to myself , and that I wouldn't arrive at the package's destination for at least a month, and that the poste in Limoux needed to hold the package until I arrived. What should have been a two-minute chore turned into an agonizing fifteen minutes of stuttering and pleaful looks. When I left that post office, I was so sure I'd never see those shoes again.
The first five days took me through many small French towns, and though the scenery was absolutely lovely, I grew despondent. It seemed no one spoke English. I lamented that, since I couldn't speak to anyone, I would never learn much about the life of the French people.
It wasn't until I met Jackie Bell, the Kansas-born supervisor of an American war cemetery near St. James, that I was able to speak my first complete sentence in France. Never in my life had I gone so long without a decent conversation, and I relished our long, long chat like a dog might a juicy bone.
Oddly enough, after meeting Mr. Bell it seemed that not another day went by that I didn't meet someone who spoke at least a little English. Usually the person was someone aged between 14 and 35, and they had learned their English in school and then nurtured it further along by listening to American pop music.
Indeed, most of the songs on the juke boxes in the bars of France are English or American rock-and-roll. And in the supermarkets, the background music is inevitably accompanying the lyrics of some American pop song. Even in the traditional rural open-air farm markets, many of the songs piped through the loud speakers are in English--everything from punk to country western. Nuns and bereted old farmers cradling long loaves of bread are shopping each morning to songs they can't begin to understand--especially the punk songs!
Since I am traveling mostly through small villages and the countryside, I am the first American many of my new friends have had a chance to chat with. Therefore none have spoken their English very well. And yet I believe that that has helped to make our encounters all the more special. Because they and I have had to put so much effort and thought into both our listening and our speaking, we have apreciated all the more our brief time together. Yes it has been exhausting, but still it has been worth every furrowed eyebrow. Language, I have found, is not all that great a barrier, when you really want to learn.
It is surprising how much of our thoughts we can get across to another, even if we must resort to acting them out after downing a few glasses of wine. (Which, I've found out many times, brings a lot of laughter to even the most ordinary of conversations.)
Now I find myself jabbering away with at least one French family each day. We "talk" of everything from politics to food, even though I doubt we truly understand three-fourths of what the other is saying. What matters, I've decided, is that we gained something--if only a new friend--from our encounter.
Now I have friends in France to add to the new ones I've made in the eastern USA, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. To this point they range from a bright 11-year-old schoolboy in St. Hilaire du Harcouet who loves the Dallas Cowboys football team to a beautiful dark-haired poetess in Argentre-du-Plessis to a gray-bearded ex-guerilla fighter near Bourg-St. Bernard who runs a farm for former drug addicts. In between them have been many others. Admitedly many have been poor in education and in money, but still they've been worth a fortune to my mind and heart.
I hope I never again make the mistake of forgetting that much of the time words are not all that important, when I meet someone else I want to know.
Steven
P.S. Those shoes I mailed in Cherbourg? They were waiting for me at the post office in Limoux, a big URGENT stamped onto the package.