Cycling trip through the Cevennes

It’s always a bit hard to leave a beloved wife and daughter still asleep under the duvet to go and feel the compact and cold night. It’s 7:05 am, just enough time to mount the pedal horse, that is, my faithful Tornado bike, and then let myself slide to the Nîmes station for the 7:29 am train that will cross the Cévennes to La Bastide-Puylaurent.

Malditos, the SNCF has played with my nerves once again. The train to Mende, via Chasseradès and Belvezet, is on track C when it should be on track B or A, ah, ah, ah! at a pinch. Too easy! Here it is on track C and it’s beatific that I settle into the train, the same one that usually goes to Mende but this time leaves in the opposite direction, to Montpellier in the Hérault. The cousin train was on track C, I kill myself to say and curse without saying a word while I move away with heartaches and sudden exhaustion. It’s sure whispers the Seuneuceufeu, I do what I can, I do what I can and choo-choo, goodbye and hello your cow blows and your pig turns my chickens!

Fortunately, the train to Mende stops at the first station of the route, Saint-Cézaire. Time to find the push button and the bobbin will fall. I find myself on the platform. I put on my big bad desperado look and I pedal, tongue hanging in the wind and fangs gleaming with the hope of catching the 8:00 am train on Nîmes that goes to Clermont-Ferrand via Génolhac, Villefort and La Bastide-Puylaurent. Once at the top of the line, the train will follow the Allier by Langogne and Monistrol d’Allier.

I always have a great appetite to fight and no grandmother, steam, diesel or electric will usurp my little solitary pleasure: to crunch the space and the silence of the Cévennes, oh no then! it’s true that! My wild Cévennes!

The old green train is faithful to the post, track B, him, as it should be according to the directives, the annals and the history. Its outdated comfort delights me. There is room to stretch your legs. The armchairs of a strange yellow are padded and the compartment is empty of occupants. The train also has the peculiarity of taking the direction of Avignon and stopping in the middle of the track to take another switch, direction the north of the Cévennes and the Massif Central.

Those who wanted to travel in the direction of the march will have to change places but what is the direction of the march? Especially on a train, Jacques, a writer on a bicycle-solex, on foot and on a choo-choo, recommends sitting in the opposite direction of the train’s march. In this way, the landscape does not come to crash on the retina of the traveler but can unfold at its leisure.

The Cévennes announce themselves from Alès but unfold at ease after La Grand-Combe-la-Pise. It would be necessary to raze all the mining infrastructures of an unoxidizable ugliness but nostalgia slips everywhere where the country of yesteryear is the simple past, even imperfect. From the simple imperfect past, let’s make a terril ras and set the table and the cover to the mineral, animal, vegetable nature garnished with a large bowl of air.

La Bastide-Puylaurent, at over a thousand meters of altitude is really built apart, at the tilt of several landscapes, at the crossroads of several paths of water and stone. The air of the Cévennes seems better than elsewhere. The hairy lichens hanging from the oaks say so. Spring is an orgy of flowers: orchids, hyacinths. The microclimate is the Master here with the god Tanargue on the Ardèche side.

According to the customer at the grocer’s, the cold pinched at minus twenty degrees in December. The ice is encrusted on the ground and I have to review my escapades downwards. I will have to abandon Laval-d’Aurelle and especially Ourlette where I planned to park my bike and attack on foot the wilderness of the Ourlette stream and the Combe-Nègre wood. As the grocer says, in the shade, the roads must be white and I surely green with fear on top. I have never totally mastered the skid. In skiing it’s snowplow, in cycling it’s the brakes or nada down from the dada.

With the Ardèche sausage, I take nonnettes, these little sweet treats that melt in the sultan’s palate. I still ogle the driftwood in the window at the grocer’s who would sell them to me for a thousand franchaoui francs but I only speak in euros now; France, Europe region as my Belgian friend says.

I go to the baker’s for the baguette and the two apple-filled slippers, yum-yum! It changes from elastic bread and industrial jam in a jar. A little tour at the bookstore which had enchanted me in June with its sympathy, its top 25 map of Largentière (Ardèche) and its small metal box of mint candies and which had billed me the whole sixty francs transformed into sixty euros. When peeling my accounts, I was not very happy and not yet too euro. I came to claim my due after six months of waiting (but La Bastide-Puylaurent is out of time and its inhabitants also necessarily).

Madame Chabalier has well received my request. After some accounting checks, she will have to send me a small check for fifty euros. In the meantime, Fifi Papa came to pick up his duck and, endowed with a bread in hand, he spontaneously recognized me and testified a non-feigned cordiality. Madame Chabalier must have been reassured, I hope, after such an introduction.

A phone call to the beloved and after some hesitation, for example at 11:30, a train could take me back down to the Cévennes and the foot of Mont Lozère, less icy, I opted for the visit to the L’Etoile gîte, the well-named one. Philippe, the giant manager of two meters and Billy, the master’s labrador dog welcomed me with a wagging tail for one, an erect ear for the other, an identical amiability except that Mr. Billy offered his belly to the caress, as a supplement.

Philippe made me visit the places again for my great pleasure. The engine room of the boat has just been tiled. A conference room has been created and the rooms are gaining in space and comfort.

The old holiday hotel is silent. I feel that the radiating hearth of the place is Philippe and that his departure would provoke a new shipwreck of this hotel.