Onder Zeeniveau

The late summer with Amit.

That late summer we went on holiday to the South of France. We traveled with the blue Volkswagen van that Amit and her two friends used to travel in. It had large windows in the back that we could close with batiked rags. In the back was a large bed with a thick mattress and against the driver’s seat was a small two-burner stove that we could cook on.

We drove on a B-road to the south, Route National 7. Just across the French border, we picked up two young hitchhikers, long-haired German hippies with a guitar, who didn’t know exactly where they wanted to go but they wanted to go south, just like us. They had two modern backpacks that fit under the bed, they sat on the bed next to each other and didn’t say much.

One boy spoke English with a thick accent, which was quite exceptional for a German at the time. Not that thick accent but that he spoke English.  The other boy didn’t speak a word of English but laughed sweetly.  The English-speaking hippie said that he used to go with his parents to a place near Saintes Marie de la Mer and that his parents were at the campsite there.

Amit and I decided to take the boys to that place of Saint Mary of the Sea and see if we could find a place somewhere nearby along the beach. We drove into a field to look at the map, we rolled a joint and smoked it with the hippies. They started giggling a lot, they weren’t used to it.

I didn’t laugh. The joint came in hard. I alternated Amit behind the wheel, and I was incredibly high. Sometimes when I smoked, I got so high that it wasn’t fun anymore and this was one of those times. Smoking a joint is best done when you have nothing to do and not when you drive through a part of France with oil refineries. The road had become a six-lane road for several kilometers, illuminated with orange lamps.  Left and right were oil tanks with names like Chevron, Shell, and Esso, large flames came out of the pipes next to the tanks. Tanker trucks were driving next to me and in front of me and I held the steering wheel tightly with both hands, wanting neither to look up nor around. I steered straight ahead while in my head the entire world went up in flames.

Soon we were driving through the countryside again. The disadvantage of most of the Route National 7 was that it was a two-lane road. If you drove behind a truck, you didn’t go faster than 50 or 60 km until the road became a three-lane road and you could pass it. Sometimes no oncoming car arrived for a minute, and I could try to press the accelerator deep with my foot. Up a hill, I slowly passed a much slower truck. An oncoming car was also overtaking and honking past me at about five inches.  Amit who had fallen asleep next to me woke up and she suggested to get off the road and find a place to sleep somewhere. A rural road with trees on both sides and an open fence. I drove in past trees.  We sent the two hippies outside, we lit them up with the front lights as they set up their tent and then fell asleep kissing each other. The next morning, we turned out to be standing in an apple orchard, we picked some sweet and sour and delicious apples.

It was getting warmer, the landscape was getting sandy. We passed a walled fortified town that had been built as a base for the Crusades, Aigues Mortes, and the hippie suddenly remembered that his parents were not at all on a campsite in the town with the lovely name of Saint Marys but that the campsite was in a place called La Grande Motte.

The hippies had gotten on our nerves by now. They just sat in the back, giggled a bit at times but contributed nothing to our trip. We drove on to La Grande Motte which looked like a futuristic Mediterranean sister of the Bijlmer, a modern neighborhood of Amsterdam. Modern crooked buildings, a marina, in short, a city where I preferred to get away as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the hippie didn’t remember the name of the campsite, so we drove around a bit from campsite to campsite until he shouted that he recognized something. We stopped, shook hands, and they thanked us profusely and waved us off.