Stage 14 of the Tour de France will pass through Briancon today, and it's our job to see it. We have conflicting reports as to when it is scheduled to pass through, so we leave early enough to be sure not to miss it. We won't go back into the town, but will instead walk a mile or so up the Col d'Izoard and pick an appropriate spot. The Col d'Izoard is pronounced something like "cull dizsh-ward", but it is really an untranslatable use of ones mouth to make sounds… which to my ear is the nature of the French language. I realize this is due to my ignorance.
Stage 14 is a tough race through the Alps, going up three big climbs. The race starts in Grenoble and heads south to the first climb up the Col du Lautaret (18 miles of climbing), then downhill from there to Briancon. The peleton will blow through the town, over the bridge of the small river there, and then hang a right to immediately start the climb of the Col du d'Izoard (13 mile climb), where we will await them a few miles up the mountain. After cresting the d'Izoard, they race down a valley and then uphill to the finish at the ski station of Risoul.
We leave Baccu-ber bed-and-breakfast, and walk up the street called Baccu-ber. There are people on the street and they are all kind-a walking in the same direction. This is the nature of the Tour, that it exerts a magnetic influence on everyone, even those who probably don't follow cycling. It is more than a race… it is a reason to be outside with everyone else on a sunny day and crack a smile. When the activity surrounding a sporting event becomes bigger than the event itself, it is typically referred to as transcending the sport, as if some great synthesis between sport and public spectacle gives rise to a new for of social interaction. I believe this is the case with the Tour. I contrast this with the spectacle that attends sporting events in the U.S., where the spectacle isn't part of a transcendent alchemy, but rather replaces the sport in yet another grim reminder of the medium becoming the message.
Being on the second climb of the day means the peloton will not being going up the mountain at full speed. More than likely we will see a breakaway of a few riders, followed a few minutes later by the peloton going up at a medium tempo. This is typical bike racing strategy. The main contenders will sit patiently in the peloton, waiting for the final climb to attack each other. Those with no chance of winning the overall race will break away early and try to stay clear till the end. And this is exactly what happens. We position ourselves at a nice, twisty, steep spot on the road… and wait.
The passing of the riders is our main objective… but equally important to Margaret (and to most of the crowd as it turns out) is the passing of the caravan of advertising vehicles, which precedes the race. These vehicles are opened topped with people standing or sitting in them. They fling swag to the crowds (free, promotional giveaways) as they careen around the uphill turn at 40 miles per hour. It's unclear to me why they drive so fast, but they do. It is as if they are in a hurry to get somewhere. Given our location two miles up the climb, I suspect we won't get any swag. Margaret is convinced we will, and she is right… as we get more swag than we ever have before. In an act of swag-genius, I cross to the other side of the road in order to get swag that is tossed to that side (while Margaret collects swag from her side). My side of the road is the outside of the vehicles high-speed turn, and so the personnel manning the swag-throwing are typically thrown (by inertia) to my side of their car, inclining them to throw in my direction. Genius observation leads to genius plan.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I suppose the french teenager who crossed the road to copy my success flattered me greatly. He saw my shrewd move. Maybe he was pissed that an American was getting swag. Maybe he was pissed that an American thought it up… since Americans excel in the calculation of material gain. But ya know… the more the merrier. And merry is exactly what swag produces. These poor French people, with their dour expressions… they positively light up when receiving swag. Eighty percent of it is useless crap… but it is free… and the clamor and racket of it's distribution brings together the warm-fuzzy of group activity with the lascivious promise of Santa's good favor. When the dozens and dozens of advertising vehicles have passed… a lull falls over the crowd. There will now be a gap of 45 minutes until the race comes through. The long wait begins.
Being an industrious American, I begin strategizing where to take a good picture from. I walk up and down the roadway there, peering through my camera endlessly, imagining the peloton passing my position. From experience, I know that I'll only have time to take one or two pictures… maybe three. I have to decide whether to shoot in color or black&white. I have one of each kind loaded into two identical Olympus XA cameras. The skies are turning grey, and rain threatens. No use taking black&white if there no good light. But then the sun breaks through the clouds, producing dramatic effects. In the end I choose color film. It's a safer bet, because if nothing else the colorful impression of the cyclists uniforms and bikes should produce a decent picture.
This goes on for quite a while. My constant back-and-forth makes me the focus of those fans who remain stationary. Just another American trying to optimize a situation. If it wasn't for some older Italian guys that kept crossing the street, I'd feel more self-conscious than I already do. To make matters even more obsessive, I begin to fear that the camera with color film will get jammed, and so I read the black and white camera, just in case. This means I have to practice putting down the one and picking up the other, which I do repeatedly… as if I were preparing for a gunfight. Suddenly I get the great idea to use my iPhone to to shoot video of the passing riders. So I cobble together a few sticks to prop the iPhone into a stationary position on the guard rail next to the road. Of course, I must fidget constantly with this. All of this is necessary if you want the great photo… because once the peloton's arrive is immanent, the adrenaline starts pumping and all kind of panicky mistakes domino together into a big mess.
The big risk in all of this… the big tradeoff perhaps for sure… is that by attending to the recording of the race via the camera, that one loses the immediate experience of it. This bothers me about what I'm doing. I have seen others obsess over getting endless photographs at weddings, graduations, birthdays, and other such singular moments. I've often wondered what is lost by peering through the lens. By attending to the mechanical recording of the image via the camera-machine, one reduces the experience of the moment to the machinations they affect while the moment plays out at one level removed. So here I am doing that. And any photo I get is very likely no better than the thousands of others that will be taken by official race photographers who ride on the motorcycles that follow the race, and who have unfettered access to moments of the race certainly more dramatic than what I'll see, anchored to this singular spot in a race that never stops moving past.
The Tour de France is about movement, yet the perception of it by most is from a stationary vantage point, who then attempt to arrest that moment in a photograph, so that they can retain some sliver of it… so as to deny the most fundamental truth of life… that it is not a frozen moment, or series of frozen moments… but rather a flow of continuous experience. You either flow with it, or against it, or watch it flow by. And by such choices we play out varying relations to the world about us. But to desire it be frozen on film is almost a sin against the very nature of experience… almost a sin against ourselves. Almost, but not quite… that is… if one has a very good reason to peer through the lens. The contemplations that the photographer might bring to bear upon experience can be a form of experience themselves. Or they might not be. Usually they are not. Usually, they are evasion and denial of life. So what say I about my photographs? I think I am removing myself from experience, and I regret it. The meaning of my ambitions here is simply to prove to myself that I can get a half-decent shot of the Tour, which I failed to do on the Col du Marie Blanque in 2010. I'm using this rare moment of the Tour to make up for past mistakes. Such redemption comes at the cost of enjoying this moment fully… and until the film is developed… I do not know if I was redeemed… and I do not know what was won or lost. Probably a risk not worth having taken, but I took it anyway.
My biggest worry now is that when the riders come by, my view will be obscured by one of the many motorcycles or cars that are constantly driving alongside the cyclists. So as the minutes wear on and on… and as I go through my pantomimes of taking photos, and switching cameras, and turning my iPhone's video on and off… and as I worry about the existential nature of photography… and as I worry about getting good shots… a new worry enters my mind. I worry about Margaret. I am in a moment of ignoring her, as she remains at our initial location 100 feet away. I seek her out with my eyes, to make sure she's ok. The truth is, she is perfectly happy. Margaret loves the Tour de France. She loves the public spectacle, she loves the participation she has as part of the viewing public, and she loves the swag.
And she loves talking to this guy Nicola, an "interesting" character that was sitting next to us when we found the spot Margaret now sits on. Nicola looks to be in his early 40s, I suppose. He sits on a small blanked, with an Italian flag at his feet. He has a small backpack from which he retrieves a big can of beer. He is shirtless and tanned, and though not gross to look at, he is at most physically ordinary. His hair is brown and unkempt, and there is a slight body odor wafting off of him that is typical of French men. He lounges in a most natural way, though up here on the mountain he seems out of place…. since most people here seem to be upper-middle class… and Nicola is most definitely not. Margaret later learns that he works in a factory in Briancon, which makes perfect sense.
And because of these un-presupposing ways, and because of his ordinariness… he turns out to be quite remarkable. He is an open-hearted person who initiates an encounter and keeps it going by offering up himself. He laughs. He understands humor. He receives it and gives it back in conversation. It is by his efforts that we converse at all… as he struggles to use his broken English to connect with us. Who else would bother, of all these dour French peoples, turned inward on themselves and their own. It takes somebody like Nicola… someone who's social prerogatives and advantages have expired… to stop caring about them… and to seek out some meaning in the world around him. Someone like Nicola… someone on the other side of 40… still young but not quite… still handsome but fading… still shirtless but not perfect… someone intelligent but not distinguished… someone who drinks beer from the can with simply honesty. It's hard to say what combination of factors add up to a special person.
When the race comes by, Nicola ties the Italian flag around his neck like a super-hero cape, and jumps up and down like a maniac. He laughed like a kid at the swag being tossed his way. He surprises me by later shelling out 20 euros for an "official" bag of race memorabilia from one passing car. I would have thought he was very nearly homeless… but I have read too much into his appearance. He's an ordinary guy that I don't quite understand, which is OK.
So as I look up the hill to check on Margaret, I see that Nicola is up there keeping her company, and they are having some conversation that they probably wouldn't have if I was up there casting my dark and broody cloud over them. So I'm glad for that.
At some point we here helicopters. They follow the race to provide arial footage, often flying quite close to the ground. Their presence surely indicates the arrival of the riders. The pulsating beat of their rotors reaches our ears as if they are already upon us already. But then the sound fades. I think they must have been higher in the sky, as they covered the racers as they descended the Col du Lauteret. The sound carried miles in the open spaces of the Alps. But as the road descended into Briancon, the sound of the helicopters become muffled by the low lying houses and trees. The adrenaline in the crowd had increased upon first hearing them, but now that it has disappeared the silent crowds gathered there on the mountain are suspended in a very protracted moment of confusing. Where is the race? Agitation sets in. Everyone stands and looks down the road. The occasion race vehicle shoots by… the occasional police motorcycle. But no race. Time drags on. Five minutes becomes ten becomes fifteen. I pace up and down the street, obsessing over the aforementioned photographic agenda.
It starts to rain. The old italian men run for cover. Their retreat was premature, as the sun comes out a few minutes later, strong and bright and warm. They return to their open-air positions and their conversations. Here and there people appear at the edges of properties along the route, only to disappear out of view a moment later. Nobody really knows when the Tour de France comes through. To the riders of the Tour, the race is a continual fact, as they grunt and sweat through every single moment of it. To the riders, it is the spectator on the roadside who has no particular existence. We come and go in a flash, only to be replaced by the next flash of spectator, in an unending display of spectators stretched for thousands of miles, that bears evidence to the enduring love of the race.
More than the event it self, with it's winners and losers… the race is about distance and unending traversals across it. A conflict as old as time… the townsman and the troubadour… the stationary man vs traveller… the safe harbor vs. the ships that come and go. Each views the other as the strange, inverted reflection of what they are not. We stand still so that others may race, and they race so that we may mark their passing. And when these two parties meet for whatever small moment, their is a balance achieved. We are all for that instant… no matter how small… we are all witness to the countervailing forces of life. The riders will no doubt flow by us in a few seconds… and I will pass them as a blur. Yet these two blurs met on the side of a mountain means something. Like seeing a shooting star, or the splash of a fish on a calm lake, or catching the gaze of a stranger moving away from you. We are all witness to each other, and there's no shame in that. Neither consumed nor consuming, we await the Tour.
And then it happens. The helicopters have returned… the beat of their rotors now upon us… then suddenly they are a hundred feet over our heads… suspended there like huge insects hunting us. I turn on my iPhone's video recording and waith. Motorcyles shoot by urgently. Then a car. And then we see it. Two hundred feet of empty mountain road, and the end of which a small group of men on bikes moves uphill toward us. Hands clap in the distance. Shouts here and there. The cyclists move quickly up the steep slope. I ready my camera and take my position. The dreaded motorcycle that follows the group threatens to block my view. I raise the camera to my eyes as the small breakaway group of a dozen riders is nearly on the spot I had set aside for photographing them. My finger reaches for the shutter button on the camera… the button that sometimes sticks… for which my backup plan was to ditch it and grab the other camera. But now the time margins are too tight. If it sticks I'll never have time to get the other camera. A sense of panic waits in the wings of my consciousness. What will I do? The Tour is upon me.
As they move to that spot, I squeeze the shutter and hear "CLICK". It worked. This fuckin' camera worked. Thank god. I quickly wind to the next frame and get another "CLICK". Then a third. But in that small sliver of time the breakaway group is gone. Up around the steep, tight turn. Already past Margaret's position even. Their grim, focused faces told the story of their ambitions. They have broken away from the peloton, and now must face up the biggest mountain of the tour, this Col d'Izoard they are on. Twenty more kilometers await them, nearly 13 miles of racing up to 7700 feet. Up to where the air is thin, the wind hard and unobstructed above the tree-line, the temperatures 30 degrees cooler than here. They will be there soon enough, the down the other side at 50mph, and so on endlessly. So what is this moment to them but a muscle twitch in an endless death march.
I suspect the rest of the race will pass by in a few minutes, which is exactly what happens. As before, I position myself with the camera as the mass of cyclists comes up the same steep slope. The camera goes CLICK again. Then again. I pull myself away from it to spot the yellow jersey of Niboli. One should never miss the yellow jersey. I recall seeing Contador in yellow on the Marie Blanque. It was a beautiful sight… one to take your breath away. Of all the things you didn't know were real at the Tour de France, the last one revealed is the yellow jersey. There it is… tucked away in the front of the peloton behind a teammate. The protected man, the man with a target on is back… the dominant man… the most glorified person on earth. So do catch a glimpse of Niboli from behind as he goes round the steep inside bend of the corner… up and past Margaret's position. His figure is slight as he bends over the endless effort that is the Tour de France for him. And then my view is swallowed up by the other riders as they too pass our position. And then they are gone.
Team cars bring up the rear. Loaded with bikes on their roofs, they look ready to tumble over as they careen around the corner… too close for comfort. In and amongst these cars are the stragglers. These are the Tour riders not suited to these big mountains. They have given up trying to keep pace with the peloton. They will probably just ride up this mountain and the next at their own speed, just trying to survive. I see two members of the Garmin Sharp team who ride next to their team car, commenting to the driver something about making it up the climb. More team cars pass… and then there are no more stragglers. A huge tow-truck-like vehicle goes by, which I reckon follows the tour to service any broken down team cars. And then finally a big van goes by with a sign on it indicating that the race caravan is now past.
And with that… a years worth of effort and planning and anticipation are complete. The crowd immediately disperses down the mountain. As we walk, cyclists who had positioned themselves further up the mountain descend down to Briancon, passing us at high speed as they do. We keep and ear out for the sound of their tires coming up behind us, lest we get involved an a stupid collision with them. We make our way back to Baccu-ber, and turn on the TV to watch the Tour. We see the same configuration of the race as we had just seen go by 20 minutes earlier. The breakaway group is approaching the summit. The race just keeps going without us. Our little moment of participation is over. It is up to new fans on new spots to carry on the example we set. They too will have their preparations extinguished by the rapid passing. And so on endless… like a vast field of dominoes being mowed over by the previous one falling upon it. A mass grave of spectator dreams extinguished in one frantic moment of being there… only to retire (as we do) back to the television set, to wonder if it was ever real.
But of course it was. The race is real. It's not what you think it is… but it is real. But you'll never know that unless you go. Until then, you'll think the race is a permanent moment of consumption. TV allows for that fantasy. But consider this… that every single spectator you see on the side of the road… they have been waiting there for hours or days, just to experience a moment such as I have described. All of their life before that moment was not the Tour, and two minutes later, they return to such nothingness. They exist only in that flash of the riders, and the passing of that which never stops moving.
AND SO… We move on.
Today is Saturday, and we are staying over Saturday night in Briancon… but we had been undecided whether we would stay over in Briancon for Sunday night. By the time we decide that we want to, Georges has already rented our room to someone else, so we'll have to ether find other accommodations in Briancon, or else head to Grenoble or Geneva, which we had kind-of considered doing. Georges offers to set us up with a room at a place not far away. We decide to accept his help again, as it spares us the effort of relocating to a new city and having to find accommodations. Earlier in the day (before the Tour) we had picked up our rental car from the Hertz dealership in Briacon. Of course, Georges drove us there and talked to the guy, who he is good friends with.
We go back to our room and crash for several hours. Then we get in the rental car and drive to the top of the Col d'Izoard, which is about 13 miles long, and the peak is at 7700 feet. We drive back down the mountain and into Briancon to eat the same exact meal as the night before. I leave the table before the meal is done, on order to run over to the Carrefour to buy some cokes before it closes, but then I come back.
We come back to the room, but I leave to walk around the dark and scary back alley here, in order to take cool pictures of creepy buildings at night, where the streetlights produce weird shadows and textures on the old stone buildings.
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