The summer months of caravans and camping is done. Children and the Ados (short for adolescents) are back in school. Walking down the hot stretch of a two lane highway, all that is left now is a file of campers filled with retirees and the occasional child during the weekends. The single strand of campers line the beach front, an easy descent towards the hot sand and aquamarine water.
Last weekend, I made a day of it. I had my backpack on my shoulders and clasped around my waste, my Rollei around my neck and a hanging side pack which contains my Quantum battery, flash meter and film, shot and unshot. That orange side pack, should I regret to add, I bought from Walmart around a decade ago in Tampa. I tied its band in a not and used a safety pin to make it fall on my hip, instead of drag along the ground.
First, I stumbled upon a group of pasty Anglos taking in the sun. I turned to take a photograph of their burnt flesh until I climbed down the rocks and began a conversation that lasted an hour. I was with a group of Irish retirees, in couples of two. They smiled and laughed at my banter. Freedom! Alas, no searching for words in French. We talked about Dingle and the County of Cork where they reside. The husbands were brothers, one taciturn the other full of questions. After an hour, I knew that my purpose of the day was to take photographs and to return to the world of French speakers.
Three campers down after a man shook is head at me as if I had come to torment him.
The next camper down, I meet a French retiree couple from Grenoble. She loves the mountains. He jests with me. Would I use the photograph to incriminate him....well, most of us doc people have heard this one time or another...this was my first time in French. And if it needs to be said, he did look a little squirely. They offer me two glasses of a kind and lukewarm dry rose which under the heat of the still day is better than none. We said our good-byes as yes, again it was time to move on and for me to work.
Snap, snap...I think I must be happier to sit on tarps that day laid out in front of side camper doors shaded with rolling canopies than to actually shoot.
A very blonde and burnt bosom strapped in a black bikini top peers from behind a black car...could it have been a Camaro? No, probably not, although it appears to bare the semblance of the stereotypical mid-life crisis paraphanelia of sitcoms from years back.
I turn the corner to meet her on the other side of the door swung open, shielding her, I suppose from harsh afternoon sunshine. I reached to grab her hand and she refused. She has a look of fear upon her face hid behind a protective nervous smile.
I speak in French.
"Est-que je peux parler avec vous". She was sprawled back on one chaise and her husband on another who doesn't lift his eyes from a magazine.
I reach to shake her hand instead of the three kiss southern kiss credo. She shakes her head several times and holds on tightly to a gossip magazine.
"No, thank you", she responded in a accented English.
I take the most blonde route...hmm, they must be German. She does have the doll face and plumpishness of a Marianne Sägebrecht. I try this time in my shakey German, now befuddled with weeks French speaking, thinking and now dreams.
She turns around, as if I were a irritating ghost.
Then I say the magic words, "Gratis". It works wonders around the world. I remember when I learned it when I was 16 and living in Italy. Latin is just so precise and still has a magical power to it.
From a prior experience, I made note on the camper trail that many people think that I am a vagabond traveler with camera in hand looking for handouts. Terror!!
"We are Swedish," and then still, "No, thank you."
I reach to take her hand and she shook her hand. I ask her why? She says she doesn't want the sick. She doesn't want the "flu", in other words, I can only assume she doesn't want the Pork Flu.
"Oh," I said. And walk towards a older and shockingly blonde Dutch couple who offer me a coffee, a step stool to sit on and philosophical conversation. At the end, the woman with dark sun glasses covering the wrinkled skin around her eyes, offers her hand and holds on dearly and tightly, her face close to mine and says like a platinum orb,
"You must have a good life, live life strongly. I know you will."
