‘The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle…if he stops moving…he will fall off.’
William Golding
Day Three and my somewhat saddle sore life –despite the padded shorts – is concerned solely with questions of comfort and survival.
This is a good thing, I guess. This is why I chose to make this journey, to quiet the monkey chatter the better to hear myself think, to become a traveller and so an outsider, able to see myself objectively from the distance of the road. I try to think nothing, though I’m worried about Lilly, of course I am. I couldn’t get her on the phone, but I spoke to Megs and she tells me things are okay though she’s been so busy with work they’ve hardly seen each other. I got through to my heroic sister, who is the reason I’m able to make this trip, and she promised me she was coping well with the care of our mother and said I shouldn’t worry. But I do, about them all and about Phil who is right now going through chemo. His next session is in a couple of days, and I’ll call him then. Not that there’s much I can achieve by worrying. Besides, I’m here to break with that mind set, the yellow alert status that means I’m constantly wired to act or intervene, or just listen, and my quest is only helped by the fact that each day is turning out to be very like the day before.
Since I left l’environs de Bayonne, I have been surrounded by nothing but pristine pine forest, monotonous and uniform with no sign of fire, and with endless sand dunes bordering the sea. The Atlantic is seldom more than a kilometre away from the route of la Velodysée, and often just a few hundred metres away. I am usually riding a tarmac path wide enough for two bicycles to pass each other in comfort with no cars in sight and surprisingly few fellow travellers. Occasionally, the path becomes part of a road, but the route is still clearly marked with reassuring signs to keep you on track.
I am not complaining. The unchanging nature of the landscape brings with it a certain calm, a capitulation to the automatic action of my legs going around and around, the path stretches out before and behind, so much the same in each direction that when I do stop, I have to think twice about which way I should be going. There is a sense of refuge in the liminal, in being neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.
 
I have yet to reach the areas of Landes most affected by the recent fires. They are inland and to the northeast of where I am. But whether in my imagination or not, I get the sense that the shock waves of the devastation have been felt here too. I know there are vast tracts of land affected – I’ve seen reports of 20,000 hectares, around two hundred square kilometres – and I wonder if I can’t smell smoke from time to time. Though it’s more the psychological impact that is palpable in a certain subdued atmosphere and fewer tourists than I expected for August, traditionally the height of the French holiday season.
Which is not to say that as I make my pilgrim’s progress at a stately seven or eight kilometres an hour – the pace of a walking horse, as it happens – along the unchanging paths, I am feeling subdued myself. Rather, I feel much lighter than I did at home, more alert and with less clutter in my mind and with a simple task to accomplish each day, getting from A to B, and a host of chores necessary to keep me going. Buying and packing sufficient drinking water is a constant when the air temperature is thirty plus. It is not hard to imagine how the forest fires took hold in these temperatures, where twenty-eight degrees is a relief and clouds in the sky are longed for mirages, harbingers of rain that never quite fulfil their promise. The heat is one more justification for taking things slowly and keeping the daily mileage, or kilométrage, low.