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Out of the Blue
Roaches, rats and other unticketed passengers
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Vagabonding
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I journeyed 5,000 miles to learn that God is in the weiners and William S. Burroughs is a cult star.
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[11/13/99]

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Imagine owning your own dollop of sand, with palm trees and tropical blossoms, surrounded by aquamarine water. But at what price?
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[11/13/99]

Wanderlust
Dancing under the mango trees
My life in a Chadian village took a roller-coaster turn when I became obsessed with the local bad boy.
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[11/12/99]

Vagabonding
The great railway bizarre
Taiga forests, first class follies and a Slavic Lolita in short-shorts enliven the train journey that has no end.
By Rolf Potts
[11/12/99]

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Finally someone says: "He doesn't want to go back to Paris."

"Who does?" comes the reply.

For most people, Paris is a city of dreams, and most of those dreams are true. But Paris is also what the French escape in the summer. Paris is where you make the money, and where there must be more money, as D.H. Lawrence's rocking-horse winner said before he died. Paris is where everything you do must have a purpose, because it is the capital, the place where you find all the brains, prizes and risks.

The Creuse belongs to an anti-Paris, another France, that was rich when Lutetia was still a swampy Roman outpost. Its wealth is in the ground, and the ground has been shaped by humans for millennia, until you can't always tell where nature stops and human nature begins. It's damp, misty and wild -- capital-R Romantic country, if you judge by the fact that Georges Sand and Chopin summered in Gargilesse, where the moonlight on the castle overlooking a strategic bend in the river Creuse makes you hungry for a deep kiss.

After 17 years in France I don't mind playing tourist -- hey, the French do it, and it's their country -- but the only tourism I really like is parking myself in a place long and often enough to forget that I don't live there yet. And the Creuse, unlike a lot of paysan France, allows me that illusion.

In medieval times it was called La Marche -- the last long blood-soaked step between the lords of Limousin and Aquitaine to the south and the church-backed kings to the north. The highest hilltop for 15 miles in any direction from Mischa's terrace is capped by the sinister ruins of Brosse, a 12 century fortress ringed by a stream and stone terraces, staring down on the ghosts of shivering battalions armed with dented iron and wood. Local lore tells that after one battle, 100 defenders were hanged from the walls. Well, anyone who survived an assault on that hill would be eager to celebrate with a lynching.

Most of the high ground is just high enough to make pushing a bike over it pleasant work. The bottom land is sculpted by sand-bottomed streams like the Anglin, the pastures divided by stone walls into pastures for sheep, cattle and donkey (the main cart animal here until World War II), bordered by beech, oak and thorn hedges, with marked trails cutting across the hills. The weather can be hard: One April day, I saw snow, hail and rain in a single afternoon. Winter comes early on the sorth wind from the Massif Central. But I'll take that blast any day to escape the monotonous plains of grain and sunflowers 40 miles north, broken only by the forests and lakes of the Sologne, where nobles and executives and politicians keep their hunting lodges and castles and drink Chinon and Touraine wines.

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