My most recent trip to the Benelux region was a bike tour, the first installment of which is described here. The easy access from Charles de Gaulle airport to Charles de Gaulle’s hometown of Lille makes that city a good entryway into Flanders.
Not that I was thinking very carefully about navigation. After renting my bike I spent a pleasant afternoon making wrong turns in and around Lille airport. My giddiness at exploring the unfamiliar city only slightly outweighed my jet lag. I think I moved vaguely southwest with the idea that it’s the fastest way to get out of the city limits. This makes sense if you study the contours of the city on a map, but only on my return to Lille from the north would I understand just how confused this reasoning was.
But poor wayfinding was no great worry. The streetscape was such that the narrowness of the asphalt and various constructed obstacles discouraging speed meant there were no real wrong turns. There was nearly always either a damp sidewalk off to the side or a damp lane adjacent to the car traffic. I sported my reflective vest (“gilet jaune”) for safety and I surrendered to the sublime feeling of invincibility on a foreign continent, at least through my navigation decisions.
The Lille area has more canals than other French metro areas, another sign of its quasi-Dutch roots. Houseboats remindful of Amsterdam hostelry floated canalside. Earth flags and various other graphical protestations signaled a certain flashy attitude of political opposition (also like Amsterdam). At Monoprix I bought Nutella and water and a baguette. Without a handbag and my arms full of supplies, I scribbled my signature awkwardly during payment, which the cashier was gracious about. Out in the small parking lot I attached the groceries to the pack on my bike’s rear rack while a panhandling kid asked mock-insistently that I give him the bike.
Before long I had left behind the urban grit for horse country. Certainly something hooved would be better transport than the bike through a farming area with perennially low skies, although a thin strip of pavement, maintained by local authorities, certainly changes the equation. Horses ignored me as I whizzed past them, then turned back and passed them in the other direction. I swept through quiet exurban villages whose names I muttered to myself (“Cobrieux…Bachy”), each road swooping past hedges in some slightly unforeseen direction. Wrong turns and dead ends lend a little bit of drama to a ramble, as long as there is some ultimate feeling of progress. I stayed plenty warm with nips from a bottle of spicy Danish bitter I got at the duty-free.
The bucolic ambiance I’d been enjoying belied the reason why cycling in this area is so famous: the Paris-Roubaix race, the “Hell of the North,” which finishes here annually. The feel of the course has been compared to operating a jackhammer. Pure textural malevolence, kind of like Petko’s opinion of grass. Springtime means wet cobblestones, flat tires, and often, fractured bones. Shooting down a weathered cobblestone path requires strategic decisions about staying in smooth, crowded gutters or passing on the “crown,” i.e. the ridge between where two-wheeled traffic ground down the road. On this gentle autumn day, it was damp enough to evoke the iconic ride without subjecting me to too much “hell.”
Wondering about the mental state of people who subject themselves gladiatorially to such intense pressure brought me to Michael Mann’s movie Ferrari, which depicts World War II survivors who can’t seem to pivot away from mortal danger. Both the auto engineers and the drivers themselves enthusiastically self-destruct, for reasons that are esoteric and aesthetic. It contrasts intensely with the postwar languor that we presumed to enjoy so much. Post-traumatic stress? Fascist guilty consciences? I’m no psychologist, just a tourist flitting about at a turtle’s pace, baffled by anyone craving more speed.
The horse farms were getting a bit farther apart when I reached a mothballed frontier post at the village of Sartaine. The little cabin near the road had a weird statue/dummy in there, a puppet cop, kind of like the Sergeant in Pirates of Penzance. A funny kind of costume gag, a jape at the early 20th century civil service. The description of this customs officer’s duties on the informational placard was not too revealing (sixteen customs men kept their vigil day and night), but the fact that the post was abandoned and memorialized spoke volumes. The France-Belgium border is so wildly jagged that I think a dedicated smuggler could have figured something out. But the flesh-and-blood surveyors are worthy of tribute. Instead of today’s urbanized technocratic planners, these were human-scale, street-level beat cops, keeping an eye on flows of people and produce. The cheeky homage felt strangely genuine.
I learned after my trip that I was passing through “Lille-Tournai,” the first ever officially designated International Metro Area (EGTC). The EGTC is a strange EU legalism: a sort of mini-government creation that invites all surrounding governments to converge and allow for cross-border cooperation. This was just the opposite of the of kitschy medieval checkpoint at Sartaine. Now the emanation of authority is a humorless kind of “sector,” all technocratic rationality. Here we can see some of EGTC’s achievements in land use management, train passes and fence coordination. Another layer of government in an area that is not short on layers.