The Hard Edge

1995

I was leaving Belgium for a new life in France. In fact I had already half-left a month earlier, sitting in the passenger seat while my friend Matt drove a rental van that contained all the furniture, clothes, and books I had accumulated in my downtown Brussels apartment in the previous five years. Having offloaded all my worldly possessions we made the trip in reverse. Back in Brussels I worked my notice period and was overstaying my welcome on a friend’s couch. My final day came. I was ready to take the train south, but the powerful unions in the SNCF had other plans.

A week went past without any sign of the rail strike ending, so I decided to hitch-hike the twelve hundred kilometres from the French-Belgian border to my new home in Pau, at the foot of the Pyrenees. I bought an inch-thick indelible marker and a sheet of Day-Glo orange card, which I cut into large strips and packed them in my bag along with a large sandwich, the Bruce Chatwin book I was rereading, and the few clothes I wasn’t wearing. 

I thought about the journey that lay ahead. Though it wasn’t directly on my route, I had decided to stop off in Brittany and visit my Aunt Margaret. It seemed like a reasonable goal for my first day and I had called ahead to warn her of my imminent arrival.

I fortified myself with some strong coffee while scribbling a goodbye-thank-you note to my host. The flat door clicked shut behind me. I slipped the keys through the letterbox and climbed down the dingy staircase and out into the bright December morning cold, where the elongated shadows of gnarled plane trees crazy-paved the sidewalk. I walked to the tram stop and stood waiting for the number 81, thinking of the years I was leaving behind and the people I would miss. 

I just missed a train, so I spent a cold hour waiting at Brussel Zuid station, an hour I could have been spending hitching, an hour I could have spent in bed. I was too filled with the momentousness of the occasion to read, and the combination of my morning coffee, the cold, and the anticipation had me repeatedly tracing the route between the platform and the bathroom. 

The train was warm. Almost too warm. Soothed by the pseudo-heartbeat of wheels running over icy tracks, I fell asleep. 

The border town of Quiévrain was the end of the line – at least until the rail strike ended. Contrasted with the heat inside the train the bracing cold was all the harsher. I left the station and asked an elderly man for directions towards the road to France. He answered in such a thick dialect that I could hardly believe he was speaking French. He accompanied me a little way, muttering and gesturing, while I nodded in pretended comprehension. As soon as he was out of sight I asked a young man of North-African descent, and he was much more helpful. Within a few minutes I was at the side of the road, cursing the cold and holding a bright orange sign marked "FRANCE".

20 minutes later I secured my first lift from a friendly unassuming young man who casually informed me that he was a heroin addict. 

“I just picked up my dose,” he said gesturing to a paper bag on the back seat. “Methadone,” he explained. “I wanted to get on a detox programme for a long time, but there are only five hundred places in the entire département of Le Nord. Lucky I know a doctor. He writes me a prescription. Lucky also I have a car and live close to Belgium. I guess I am a lucky guy. Some of my friends are not so lucky. Overdoses, hepatitis, AIDS. Some of them are in prison. There is no way for them to get off heroin in there. There is too much of it and nothing else to do.”

He brought me as far as Valenciennes.

I consulted my road map and made a new orange sign for Cambrai, but I had competition and had to wait a while. A cold mist blurred the horizons.

A young couple stopped at the traffic lights where I stood holding my sign. They offered to bring me some of the way towards Paris, but I was trying to avoid Paris because of the strikes and explained this to them. I noticed the driver had a strong accent. I switched to English and asked him where he was from. 

“From London, innit, but living over here now.”  

The lights changed and our conversation abruptly ended.
I was growing weary of waiting. A grey-haired man was making slow progress down the pavement and he leaned heavily on a cane. When he drew level with me he stopped. His wheezing breaths were clouds of vapour. 

"You're hitching because of this stupid strike?" 

I affirmed I was, and he cheered me with the forecast that snow was on its way. 

"You are English perhaps?”

For what seemed like the twenty millionth time in my life I explained that I was Irish. 

"Ahhhh, Irish," he said and looked into the distance for a long moment. "I had Irish friends once,” he said softly. “They were good men. We fought together. They were killed – the war. I hope you will never know war." He wished me good luck and headed on his way, but stopped a little further, to dab his eyes with a handkerchief. I watched him continue towards the town centre until he was just an indistinguishable form in the distant mist and echoed his hope that I would never know war.

My next lift was in a Mercedes, driven by a smiling man dressed in a smart business suit. His car was well heated and exceedingly comfortable, so soon I was smiling too. He worked for an insurance company and was going to check out a farmhouse that had burned down the day before. 

"It's always the same," he said nodding his head and smiling, "they expect me to believe it was an accident." 

I ventured that according to the law of averages that it was always a possibility to be considered. He continued smiling and then nodded his head again. 

"No. No possibility." 

I thought his job had rendered him a tad cynical, but kept that opinion to myself. He kept smiling and nodding, as if keeping time with music that only he could hear. 

The white line in the centre of the road disappeared beneath us, the car a giant beast swallowing a long strand of spaghetti. I made a few more attempts at conversation and all elicited the same nodding, smiling silence. I began to feel uneasy.

Then he turned. His smile had faded. His pupils were tiny. All of France is on drugs, I thought to myself. 

“We are approaching Fontaine Notre Dame, my favourite town in all of France. They make chairs there you know." 
It soon became clear that they did indeed make chairs there, but apart from at least fifteen different chair manufacturers there seemed to be little else of particular merit about the town. My smiling driver was obviously a chair fanatic. As if reading my thoughts he announced, "I like chairs very much."

I was going in the direction I wanted and the car was comfortable, but I wasn’t. 

"You speak funny," he said, frowning. 
"Yes, that's because I'm from Ireland." 
"Ireland!" he shouted. "Is this in America?"

This threw me, but he was still curious about Ireland. I explained where it was. He smiled and started back at the nodding thing. 

"You have volcanoes there, and much ice, no?" 

I considered lying, but instead gave him a brief geography lesson. He listened with a look of complete disbelief. I shut up and concentrated on the spaghetti again.

We passed a signpost indicating that Cambrai was ten kilometres away. 

“I must go down this little side road,” he said. I felt a surge of panic rise in my chest, but then he pulled over to the roadside and let me out. 

I was relieved, but back in the cold wind, and this time in the middle of nowhere. Frosty ploughed fields stretched out either side of the road and the cars speeding by only increased the chill factor of the wind. I examined my map and was dismayed to see how little ground I had covered and how incredibly far away Pau seemed. 

Time was getting on and it was obvious no cars would stop for me, so I resigned myself to walking. About two kilometres later a beat up Renault 4 van pulled up in front of me. 

"Come and get in out of the cold." 

I didn't need to be told twice. There was straw strewn around the back of the van and a not unpleasant farmyardy smell that might have come from the straw or the bearded driver. He was a history teacher in Cambrai and very down to earth.

“So, what do you think of Chirac?” he asked. I noticed that nobody ever referred to him as President Chirac - ever. 

“He doesn’t seem to be very popular,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. The teacher laughed loudly. 

"This is the truth, he is not popular. But do you know why he is not popular?" 

I took my cue and asked him why. 

"Because he is a bourgeois bastard," this latter in English. The teacher beamed with himself, then launched into an anti-Chirac rant that lasted all the way to Cambrai, where, with a firm handshake and wishes of good luck he left me at a spot where he assured me I would get a lift.

Once again I was standing on a windswept corner holding an orange sign. This time it said "AMIENS" and I had managed to cover my gloves in indelible ink whilst writing it.

I pulled my woolly hat low over my brow and my scarf high up over my mouth. I stamped my feet and flapped my arms. My cheeks were raw and the tip of my nose was numb. This wait turned out to be the longest and coldest of the day.

There is little enough to say about standing on the side of the road. You look at the registration plates and smile when you see one that might be from the region you are trying to get to. You also spit a lot since it is too cold to take your gloves off to blow your nose every two minutes. You console yourself that at least you are moving quicker than if you solely depended upon the strike-bound rail network. Then you think of a nice cosy train seat and how you could just doze or read as you travel. You think about your final destination. You think about how not a single person you have ever met in your entire life has any idea where you are. You open your map and it blows around in the wind and you fumble with the folds and imagine yourself as a tiny point moving across the distances. You think about how low the sun and how close it is to the shortest day in the year and you wonder why couldn't you be doing this on a balmy, long eveninged summer's day. After a lot of thoughts along these lines a truck driver waves at you and you wave back and think there's a friendly soul and then you realise he's pulling in to give you a lift. 

This driver is a Belgian. He tells me he is from Liege. He tells me he hates Liege, but since he has always lived there he can't go anywhere else. That's why he is a long distance truck driver. He gets to spend a lot of time away from Liege and that suits him just fine. Belgian logic, I think to myself. Conversation fades and we are driving into the sun. I close my eyes and listen to the radio and soon I'm drifting. I wake up after a while. The driver tells me I look awful and tells me to go back to sleep and he'll wake me when we get to Amiens. This he does, true to his word. He assures me I will not have to wait long for my next lift. I bid him farewell, feeling much refreshed, and vaguely guilty at not having been such good company.

The sun is still low in the sky but doesn't seem to be sinking yet. I wonder how far I will get today. Where will I spend the night? How long will I have to wait for my next lift? 

Thankfully my Belgian trucker proved true to his word once more. Not two minutes later another truck stopped and I was making up for time lost earlier. 

Getting a lift in a car would be much quicker - the speed limit and a device known as a Tacograph, that records speed and distance, ensure that trucks travel at 80 kilometres per hour or less, but in the cab of a truck you have a great view and a lot of leg room. This driver told me he was growing his beard for New Year's Eve. He had been invited to a fancy dress party and decided to go as a Viking.

His girlfriend had ruined his dreams of emigrating to Canada by getting pregnant. She maintained the child was his, although he expressed his doubts. He told me he didn't believe in marriage, but agreed to live with her and support her and the child. As he spent a lot of time on the road he only saw them on the weekends. He figured that this would give her time to meet someone else, or perhaps just leave him out of sheer frustration. Then he told me of his own childhood. He was also an illegitimate child and had never known his father. He said this was why he looked after the girl and child. He didn't like the idea of the child growing up without a father and was prepared to make the sacrifice to save the child from the misery he had known. I thought about Christmas, less than two weeks away, and the illegitimate child who changed the world.

The sky glowed orange-pink, then faded into cold blue and finally was black. We chatted on and off, but mostly there were just long periods of silence while we listened to the crazy cracklings of the C.B. radio and watched the red tail-lights of the cars in front of us. Driving at night in France is different from Belgium. In Belgium the motorways are lit up almost as bright as day, and along with the Great Wall of China are apparently visible from space, something which, peculiarly enough, evokes a sense of national pride in the Belgian people. In France there is little, or more often than not, no lighting. The blackness was all absorbing. The world beyond the reach of the headlights had ceased to exist.

We drove for a long time. As we reached Laval the driver used the C.B. radio to try and secure me a lift towards Vannes, or Rennes at least. Despite my constant dozing I was exhausted, bed a frequently recurrent theme in my idle thoughts. I had little hope of making it to Vannes today and had resigned myself to finding a cheap hotel in Laval or Rennes. 

We pulled in at a truckers’ cafe. My driver asked the drivers at the bar if anyone was going my way. A chubby red-faced man said he would gladly bring me most of the way to Rennes if I was willing to wait while he finished his coffee. Obviously I waited. I had already covered more ground than expected and knew that I could easily get to my Aunt's from Rennes the next morning.

Soon I was been driven through the night again. More indecipherable ranting poured from the C.B. radio. This driver conformed precisely to the chauvinistic stereotype. I made the mistake of asking him to elaborate on some of the finer points of his vocabulary which eluded me. His graphic descriptions left me in no doubt as to their meanings and I filed them in that little part of my brain reserved for "words not to be used in polite conversation". We went through the toll gates to the autoroute and he pulled over to make phone calls. I took the chance to call my aunt to tell her not to expect me, but she insisted I call her when I had a place for the night, or if I managed to make it as far as Vannes.

The driver was still in the phone booth. There were other trucks coming through the toll gates so I took my fluorescent "RENNES" sign and held it up in the hope of finding someone going further than this driver. The third truck that passed stopped to take me. I rushed to grab my bag from the other truck and made signs to the driver in the phone booth that I was off. I later discovered that in my haste I had left my hat behind in his truck.

My new truck driver dropped me at the exit for Vannes on the ring road around Rennes. It was almost eleven at this stage. 

The cold was bitter. Despite my gloves, my fingers were frozen within minutes, I was missing my hat and there was frustratingly little traffic on the road. I had another sign and more indelible ink on my gloves. I walked up and down the road in a range of about 100 metres looking for an optimal hitching position, but to no avail.

After half an hour I figured I had given it my best shot and reckoned that picking up a hitcher at this late hour of night was hardly an activity many would indulge in. There was a garage with a cafe nearby and I hoped a room would not be too hard to find. As I walked towards the garage I heard a beeping behind me and a car pulled up beside me.

I thought this was odd as I had already put my sign away and was giving my aching shoulder a rest from holding up my thumb. 

"I saw you a few minutes ago. You are going to Vannes?"

I climbed into the car.

“I passed you earlier. I thought this person is crazy to be hitch-hiking in the cold so late at night. Then I thought about the rail strikes and was sure this was why you were hitching. I knew you would not get a lift. Then I started to feel guilty about sitting in my warm car knowing that I was going in the direction you wanted, so I had to turn around and pick you up.”  

I thanked him profusely. If I was a little less numb I might have cried in gratitude.

I had grown used to the view from a truck and it was odd being in a car with my feet practically on the same level as the road. I recounted my journey to the driver. He was an eager listener but spoke little of himself. He stopped for petrol, so I called my aunt again. She said she would come to pick me up in Vannes, in front of the town hall at midnight, and twenty minutes later the driver dropped me there. I had travelled almost seven hundred kilometres, all thanks to the generosity of strangers.

Technically my Aunt Margaret was no longer my aunt, but she retained the honorific title. We caught up on family gossip as she drove the twenty kilometres to Sarzeau at breakneck speed. I hadn’t seen her in years and I thought of how peculiar was to be with someone who knew a much younger version of me but who knew nothing of the changes time had put between my younger self and the road-weary relation who sat beside her in her car. Her husband, Bauke, a grizzly old Dutchman, was up waiting for me with dinner, which was all the more welcome since I had hardly eaten all day. Behind the gentle hum of our conversation and the clink of cutlery against my plate, the silence that replaced the sound of traffic was ringing in my ears. It was good to be out of the wind and stationary. I tried not to fall asleep with my face in the plate. 

“You’re not going to come all this way to stay just one night,” said Aunt Margaret, in a tone that brooked no disagreement. It wasn’t hard to acquiesce. I didn’t relish a rapid return to the hard edge.

I climbed into a creaky bed that reminded me of sunburnt childhood holidays and instantly fell into a deep sleep, with dreams of red-eyed monsters, indecipherable voices crackling with static, and the melancholic thrum of traffic. 

The low sun in the winter-blue sky cast a long distorted shadow teapot across the wooden table top. I was still in a daze from my travels the day before. Though it was tiring, and at times boring, the unpredictability of hitching was a thrill. Memory is selective. Just one day gone and I was already romanticising my trip. 

Bauke said he was going for a walk, so I joined him, thinking I might find a suitable hat in one of the village shops to replace the one I had left in the truck. He suggested we make a pit-stop for a little aperitif, so we wandered into a bar, shook hands with the barman and ordered a couple of pastis. The measures were on the extravagant side of generous. I looked at the clock. It was midday and the shops had just shut. I wouldn’t be finding a hat any time soon. The two hour lunch break was another part of French life I would have to get used to.

We emerged into the cold air a little more light and cold headed. I mourned my hat, picturing it on the truck driver’s seat, now perhaps already tossed away. 

“It’s just a hat,” said Bauke, and suggested we make up for its loss by seeking a little liquid consolation elsewhere. 

We had downed a couple of bottles of wine over dinner the night before and I woke up with a hangover. After a hearty breakfast my Aunt gave me a peculiar knitted hat, which she may or may not have made during the night, and drove me to a spot where I could hitch south. The clouds were burnished stainless steel and filled the sky completely. 

After five minutes a van pulled up. I climbed in and was answering the usual questions about where I was going and where I was from when I felt something wet and rough rub against the back of my neck. I turned to look into the slavering jaws of a huge Alsatian. I have never felt comfortable around dogs. The blood drained from my cheeks. The driver laughed and assured me, as every dog owner does, that the dog was only being friendly. 

"Besides, he’s already had his breakfast." More laughter. I sat forward in my seat and clenched my teeth until we reached the exit for Bordeaux. I climbed down from the van, pulling on my new hat, glad to be out of reach of the dog’s sharp teeth.

It was still early. Bordeaux was only three hours from Pau. I optimistically calculated that if I didn’t have to wait too long for a lift to Bordeaux I could make it to Pau by late afternoon. Within minutes it started to snow. Not a gentle Christmas card sprinkling, but a small scale blizzard. Cars flew by too fast. Trucks spun me in their tail winds and the snow got so heavy that they all put on their headlights.

The ground was hard, the air was hard. It was so cold it hurt my eardrums. The wind tried to strip the skin from my face. The whirling snowflakes bit my eyes and nose. Nature can be romanticised from afar, but here I was reminded of my insignificance. After an hour I was shivering badly and starting to despair. I had visions of passing out in the sub-zero wind, thoughts of hypothermia and exposure, a little frozen foetal hitcher curled up on the side of the road clutching a Day-Glo orange sign that said "BORDEAUX."

The sky was still dark and I could hardly make out the clouds through the falling snow. I considered hitching back into Nantes and waiting for the weather to improve. I kept thinking someone will stop soon. Just a minute more. Just a minute more.

After an hour and a half of this Arctic hell André arrived. The "33" registration plates told me that his truck was from Bordeaux. It was just gone midday. It would take three hours to get to Bordeaux. I could still be in Pau by nightfall.

Eight hours later I was still with André and miles from Bordeaux.

It was my own fault. I was so happy to be out of the wind and cold that once he affirmed Bordeaux as his destination I didn't listen too carefully. He said something about making a delivery first and then we would be Bordeaux bound. My shivering was subsiding and my hands had turned from blue-white to blotchy purple. Soon I was asleep. I think my dozing was my body's reaction to the quiet after the storm.

I woke up to find we were travelling west. West? What happened to south? I remembered André mentioned a delivery he had to make. It transpired that his port of call was well past Poitiers, towards the centre of France. I resigned myself. Anything was better than being stuck on the roadside.

André proved very talkative. He was a short, stocky, bearded character and said he would be fifty in the spring. He was carrying a load of veneer-covered chipboard he had picked up in Germany the day before. It was for a factory that made fitted bedroom units - our destination. 

We talked about the strikes, travelling, the moral decline of society. Later he talked about his life. He had never known his parents and had been brought up in a small country orphanage. 

“Recently I got my mother's name and address. I never knew if she was dead or alive, but apparently she’s alive.”

“Have you met her?” I asked. 

“What’s the point? I’m not going to build a relationship with a complete stranger at this stage. With my luck she will die as soon as I meet her.”

Death followed André everywhere. At the age of five he was run over by a car and barely survived. The car swerved, crashed into a wall and the driver and his wife were killed. Almost every bone in his body was broken and he spent three months in hospital. He needed major surgery. During one of the operations the doctor had a heart attack and keeled over dead on top of him.

When he got out of hospital he went back to the orphanage. The woman who ran the orphanage was explaining to his class how to use a toothbrush when she dropped the brush, grabbed her head, flopped to her knees and died from a brain haemorrhage. 

“I kept that toothbrush for years. No one else wanted it, so I took it. I don’t know why.” 

André had so many bad luck stories I suspected he has winding me up. Then he started to cry. 

“I joined the Legion.”

“The French Foreign Legion?”

“Is there another?”

“I don’t know.”

“I joined to run away from my childhood. I served in Madagascar, the Congo, Indochina.”

That was when he stopped counting the deaths that seemed to follow him wherever he went. If he had problems before he joined the legion he had a lot more coming out. He spent a couple of years in occupational therapy and learned carpentry. 

“But I couldn’t work with other people, so I abandoned carpentry and started long-distance driving.” 

“I was on a run through Spain. I was shot at. The bullets smashed the windscreen and barely missed me. There was a road block. They were Basque separatists and didn't like my truck being French. They set the truck on fire, but let me go. Then I had to hitch-hike, just like you. I got a lift to Madrid and waited for another truck from my firm.”

“So you lived in Belgium?” he asked after a long silence. “How do you know that the Manneken Pis is Belgian?” 

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Because only a Belgian would piss with his back against the wall."

The furniture factory was in the middle of nowhere. André had to ask for directions several times. Some of the roads were so narrow that it seemed like the truck would never fit. It was still snowing. I helped André unload, then we climbed back into the cab. We had to rest for an hour because of the Tacograph. He produced a gas burner and a saucepan, and within a few minutes we were drinking coffee and watching the snow and evening fall. When the hour was up we hit the road again.

André had called his headquarters from the furniture factory and was told to pick up a consignment of shoes on his way to Bordeaux. This added at least another hour to the journey. By the time we left the shoe factory it was dark. I had hoped to be in Pau by now and we were still one hundred and fifty kilometres from Bordeaux and still had to drop off the consignment of shoes. It seemed like I would be in André’s truck forever.

“You put a dog in a cage and keep him there for hours and hours every day. As soon as you open the door of the cage the dog will do one of two things – he’ll either run away, or attack the first thing he sees. Truckers are like dogs in cages. But we can’t run away. Being locked in a cab destroys a man. It makes him more like a dog than a human. I have never met a happy trucker.”

André had been trying the C.B. radio all evening to find a lift for me and eventually found someone going directly to Bordeaux. We pulled in at a car park and my new truck was waiting for me. I was both sad and relieved to say goodbye to André. He was such a tragic figure.

My new driver had five hundred million furry toys in the cab. Something squeaked beneath me as I sat down. I extricated a flattened yellow duck and put him in the pile with his colleagues. 

"My daughter," the driver explained, before announcing that he was a supporter of Jean-Marie Lepen’s extreme right-wing National Front party. I needed to get to Bordeaux, so I played the-foreigner-who-doesn’t-understand-French card. 

It was ten o’clock on an icy December night and I was in the smoky bar of a trucker’s hotel on the outskirts of Bordeaux. There were three hundred trucks in the car park outside. I had as much chance of getting a lift here as elsewhere. The place was like a cowboy saloon. I couldn't remember the last time I was in such an exclusively male environment. The only women in sight were the receptionist and the barmaid. 

Despite André’s reflections on the aggressivity of truckers the atmosphere was friendly, the men enjoying  a bit of human companionship after a day of isolation in the cab. I moved from table to table asking for a lift to Pau, the girl at the reception even called my request out over the P.A. system, but everyone seemed to be here for the night. I was exhausted. I sat at an empty table and sipped mineral water. I would have keeled over if I had anything stronger. I watched the truckers come and go and noticed that when they stood they constantly shifted their weight from one foot to the other, and when they walked they moved with an unnatural stagger like seafarers suddenly on terra firma. 

After reading the same sentence for what seemed like the tenth time I annoyed the receptionist to repeat the PA announcement, but there were still no takers.  She informed me that I could have a room for ninety francs. I paid, took the key, and made my way upstairs. The room was small, clean and adequate for my needs. I had a hot shower, ate a three day old sandwich. I was less than three hours from Pau. I set my alarm for six.

I was on the roadside at seven. It was cold, but not as cold as the day before. I had expected it to be easy to get a lift to Pau, but it took more than two hours of stamping and flapping before a Mercedes pulled up. 

I laboured under the misconception that people with expensive cars would be reluctant to pick up hitch-hikers, but I was being proven wrong. This particular Mercedes was driven by an elderly Italian man who had a tiling business in Pau and drove very fast. He and complained about the strikes. 

“In the future there will be no more trains. Everyone will have a car, even you. There will be more roads, bigger roads and it will be easier to get around.”  

“But the problem,” he continued, “the problem is these environmentalists. They want to stop progress. Like this tunnel to Spain. These environmentalists are trying to stop it because of the bears. Just shoot them all and get on with the road.” 

“The activists or the bears?” I asked with a grin.

“Either. Though both would be better.”

The road was empty, and as we sped past fields of corn stubble the snow-capped mountains that filled the horizon loomed closer.

As luck would have it, my driver knew my street. In fact he even knew the owner of the laundry that occupied the ground floor of the house where I had rented the apartment that would be my new home. He left me right at the door. It was just past midday and thanks to the kindness of strangers I had covered a thousand five hundred kilometres and beaten the rail union’s strike to make a new beginning in a new country. I waved goodbye to my driver, turned the key in the door and stepped into a new chapter of my life.