When I was writing for a local newspaper, I talked to police officers as well as their commanders. One of the brass I saw regularly was, as it turned out, very well-read. He told me his favorite novel was Les Miserables.
"It poses a question that we, in law enforcement, always deal with." That question, he said, is this: "Is redemption possible?"
Was Jean Valjean the thief and escaped convict Inspector Javert pursues from one end of France to another? Or was he the industrious benefactor and kindly benefactor of Montreuil-sur-Mer who had to be coaxed into accepting its mayoralty but still declined the king's offer to make him a chevalier in the Legion d'honneur?
There's a parallel, I think, in Floyd Landis' story. He was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory after failing drug tests. Later, he was involved in a federal whistle-blower lawsuit against Lance Armstrong. It was settled this past spring, and he is scheduled to receive about $1 million.
So, is he going to ride off into the sunset? Or is he going to fund his business? (More about that later.)
No, he plans to fund his Floyd's of Leadville Pro Cycling Team with one of his former teammates, Gord Fraser. He is seeking a UCI Pro Continental license for the team, which will be based in Canada.
His motivation, he explains, is that he likes the sport. Referring to what he and his fellow riders did, he explains that it is "part of the reason" the bicycle racing "is at a low point now." Though he "can't fix what happened in the past", he says, he wants "to help."
"I understand I hurt the cycling community," he admits.
He believes that starting a team is the thing to do because "teams are going away." He was referring, no doubt, to the recent dissolution of two longtime US teams, Jelly Belly-Maxxis and UnitedHealthcare.
Floyd's of Leadville is, as you've probably guessed, his business, based in the Colorado town where he lives. It offers soft gels, tinctures and creams for pain relief. The common ingredient in all of them is...cannabis.
As you probably know by now, Colorado was one of the first US states to legalize marijuana for both medical and recreational purposes. But, in most other states--and in the eyes of the Federal government-- it's still not legal for medical or recreational purposes.
The irony of being a pot purveyor (well, all right, it's not quite as simple as that) doesn't seem to be lost on Landis. His website points out that his business was borne of a "crossroads" when he realized he could no longer depend on opiods to relieve his pain.
So...Is Floyd the guy who tried to claim that the unusually high levels of testosterone found in his blood were "natural"? Or the guy who helped to bring down a team and a generation of riders? Or the man who, apparently, is trying to rebuild a sport--to be a benefactor, if you will?
And should we see him as someone who used some substances to gain an unfair advantage--or one who will use others to help young riders win, and more important, ride, in ways he never did?
So why am I beginning this post with a photo of a house in France most Americans have never seen?
Well, if you've been reading this blog long enough, you know that I'm a bit of a Francophile. Yes, just a little bit. One way you know that I'm American is that I am also something of an Anglophile and see no contradiction!
Anyway, the house is in a French city most foreigners (except, perhaps, from neighboring countries) never visit. That's a shame, really, because it reveals so much about France that people don't experience during the three or four das they spend in Paris as part of their European trips.
You can probably guess one reason I included the photo: I have cycled to that house. And to this one:
Now, that's one tourists are more likely to see. It's in Paris, on one of the city's most elegant squares, the Place des Vosges. There's a nice little park in the middle of the square where Parisians take lunch breaks or walk their dogs or kids, or just loll around on the grass. And folks like me ride or walk there, baguette and hunk of cheese in hand.
One great thing about the Place des Vosges is that it's next to one of the most historic parts of Paris--le Marais--and literally steps from all sorts of interesting museums, galleries and shops.
Anyway, the house in Besancon and the one in Paris share something: specifically, someone who lived in them.
I'll give you a hint: He wrote the novel more people know about without actually having read. In the English-speaking world that has much to do with a musical--a musical!--made out of that novel. You may have seen it.
That novel is, of course, Les Miserables, written by none other than Victor Hugo.
Just as more people know about Les Miserables than any other novel without having read it, more people lie about having read Moby Dick than any other novel. Now I'm going to tell you a secret: If you're ever at a dinner party with a bunch of snotty pseudo-intellectuals, you can more or less bluff your way through a discussion of MD if you've read Old Man and the Sea!
But I digress. No, it's not really a digression: It's part of what I'm going to say, just like all of those hundred-page long asides about the Paris sewer system or whaling in New England are integral to LM and MD, respectively.
You see, such seeming digressions are part of some of the best bike rides. You might start with a destination in mind or that you are simply going to ride a certain distance or amount of time. Unless you're riding strictly for training purposes, the parts of the ride you'll remember are the things you encountered along the way.
In the case of Besancon, I found myself there because of a challenge. In the summer of 1997, I bought a round-trip ticket to Paris--with a return date of a month after my departure--and brought my bicycle, among other things. I had no particular plan except to visit my friends in Paris and get on my bike. In those days, I used to take trips like that, staying in hostels or pensiones--or simply rolling out my sleeping bag--wherever I found myself when I stopped riding for the day.
I was talking to Jay and Isabelle, whom I've mentioned in other posts, when Isabelle asked, "Ou n'avais pas visite en France?" As I tried to think of some place in France where I hadn't been, Jay blurted "Alpes"!
"Les Alpes?" Even though I understood perfectly well, I just had to make sure.
They both nodded. So did I.
And so I pedaled south and east from Paris. That is how I found myself, five days later (spending days in Troyes and Chaumont) in Besancon, on the edge of the Jura mountains, which are a kind of sub-range of the Alps. A few days after that I was in Chamonix and hiked up part of Mont Blanc.
Anyway, Victor Hugo was born in the house in Besancon. That house, amazingly enough, is in a square that also contains the houses in which painter Gustave Courbet, writer Charles Nodier and the Lumiere brothers--considered the "fathers" of cinema--were born!
And, of course, I've cycled (and walked) to the Hugo house on Place des Vosges any number of times during my stays in Paris.
So why am I thinking about Victor Hugo now? Turns out, on this date in 1862, he completed Les Miserables. It was published soon after and became popular with soldiers on both sides of the US Civil War. "I've been reading Hugo's account of Waterloo in Les Miserables and preparing my mind for something of the same sort," wrote Wilky James of the Massachusetts Free Black Regiment in 1863. "God grant the battle may do as much harm to the rebels as Waterloo did to the French."
The funny thing is that the sections about Waterloo--and the Paris sewer system--are what got the novel both praised and lambasted. But Les Miserables could no more exist without them than Moby Dick could without al the stuff about New England whaling practices--or our favorite ride without whatever you encountered along the way.
I am going to make the most audacious claim you'll hear for a while.
I am going to show you a photo of a dream:
Here's another photo of that same dream:
Believe it or not, the place in the photo looked more or less as you see it back around 1961. Yes, it's a place I'd actually been to before today. This is how I got there today:
OK, so now you know I'm not in some exotic foreign land. To give you an idea of where I am, here's another shot.
Those of you who are familiar with Brooklyn, NY--or part of it, anyway--now know where I am. It's Sunset Park, which is on a hill surrounded by the eponymous neighborhood.
Save for the views, not many people would call it their "dream" park. But it has become mine, through no choice of my own.
I don't make any great effort to remember my dreams. Some of them just happen to stick with me, for whatever reasons. But I know that I have had more than a few dreams in Sunset Park, or some place that looks very much like it.
One of those dreams came during my first night in France. That day, I took the boat from Dover to Calais. After I'd gone through French customs, I went to a bar. In those days, Calais was fairly gritty and, being a seaport town, full of sailors, dockworkers and such: the very kinds of people who were in the bar.
Every one of them was even more inebriated than I would become. Given the sort of person I was then--at age twenty-one--that's saying quite a bit. However, I'm not sure if the libations were lubricating their tongues and making them start conversations with me.
I wasn't worried about them. I was, however, worried about this: The only word I understood of what they were saying was "miss-shyure." Did I not work hard enough in my French classes? Was I taught a dialect they didn't speak?
Anyway, we all got laughs at each other's expense and I managed to ride to Boulogne-sur-mer. It wasn't very far, but the town had a hostel listed in the Hosteling International guide. It was clean and relatively quiet. At least, it was quiet enough for me to fall asleep not long after I had supper. Or maybe the alcohol had something to do with it--or the dream I would have in Sunset Park.
My grandmother was in that dream. I spent a lot of time with her and my grandfather when my mother had to go to work. My grandparents lived not far from the park and, very early in my childhood, they used to take me to it. In those days, it had a garden in the middle of it. Of course, in my memory, it's one of the most beautiful gardens in the history or horticulture--or, at least, one of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen. So is the view I've shown, which--as I've said--is much like the view I have in my memory.
The following day after my first dream in that park, I cycled into a town called Montreuil-sur-mer. It's a few kilometres inland from the English Channel, but a few centuries ago, before its harbor silted up, it was right on the coast and was a fairly major port. It's the town in which Jean Valjean of Les Miserables becomes one of les bourgeois and serves as mayor--and where Inspector Jalabert tracks him down.
Nothing quite that dramatic happened to me. (After all, we're talking about life, not fiction, here!) However, I did come to a garden in the town that overlooked the sea and gave me a clear view--even on that overcast day--of the coast from which I'd sailed the day before. And the grayness of the day did nothing to dampen the vibrancy of the colors in that garden: there were sunrises, sunsets and dusks, and all of the seasons, in it even thought the sky wasn't expressing any of them. Perhaps the view of the sea had something to do with that.
Now, remember that I was twenty-one years old when I say what I'm going to say next: That was the first time I cried during that trip. At least, it's the first time I recall crying.
That evening, I got to a town called Abbeville and called my grandmother. Somehow I knew she sounded better than she actually was. And, without my asking or prompting, she talked about that park, and that we used to go to it. "You loved to go there."
"Yes, I did. I always loved going there with you and grandpa."
"It seems like only yesterday that we used to go there."
I didn't tell her I had indeed been there the night before.
