Community, Friendship, Travel

European Vacation, ’75: Part III: A Near-Adventure at the Lycée Jacques-Cartier

Our group was a few minutes late in returning to the bus after touring Mont Saint Michel.  The Chickamaugans,  hopping mad because of the delay, demanded an apology.  I can’t remember if we apologized or not.  If we did, I’m sure we managed to ooze contempt and condescension.  Our traveling companions had clearly missed the magic of Mont Saint-Michel.   That night we were to stay in nearby Saint-Malo in a French boarding school, empty over the Easter holidays.  The trip to the Lycée Jacques Cartier didn’t take long.  The school, in a pleasant wooded setting, consisted of long, low gray stone modernist buildings.  It appeared to be very new at the time.  We immediately went to dinner.  In a big room adjacent to the dining hall were several huge round basins for washing hands.  The water, controlled by foot levers, came out from the center in a smooth round sheet, as in some fountains.  Bars of soap on metal rods extended out over the basin.  Seven or eight people could wash their hands at once.  It was the highest-tech lavatory we had ever seen.  Dinner was unremarkable.  After dinner we headed up to the dormitories.  The girls all slept in one enormous room.  Partitions that approached but did not reach the ceiling separated the space into smaller areas, each with six beds.  My friend Jackie, her mother and I found ourselves rooming with three Chickamauga girls, much to our dismay.  The bathrooms were of great interest.  There were eight shower stalls and perhaps even more bidets (a word I misspelled biday throughout my journal), but only two toilets.  Very strange, we thought, but consistent, as our hotel room in Paris had had a bidet but no toilet. 

That night, of course, none of us was in the mood for sleep; the camp-like living quarters spoke to the fundamental need for teenagers to indulge in late-night antics.  Our Chickamauga roommates seemed to have forgotten their animosity toward us after the bus incident, and we gained a new appreciation for them.  They entertained the crowd with comically rendered country songs, liberally borrowing from episodes of the TV show Hee-Haw.  My friends and I considered ourselves too cosmopolitan to admit to watching that show, but we had to say that the Chickamaugans could have starred in it.  They had the requisite country twangs, the goofy, expansive personalities, and they really sang well together.

After the North Georgians had concluded their performance, Jackie and I joined Katie and Rebecca in the room they shared with other friends from our school.  We were engaged in some sort of forgotten silliness when one of us happened to look out the window and notice several boys hanging around outside.  We didn’t know them; they were evidently French locals.  This was an unexpected and exciting development.  My memory of what follows is hazy, and my journal, surprisingly, doesn’t record the details.  My guess is that windows were opened, and intercultural flirting began. The boys felt sufficiently encouraged that they tried to scale the building and climb in the windows.  Seems like I remember one of them standing on a portion of the lower roof.  When it looked like they were really planning to storm the barricades, our group tried to backtrack.  We didn’t really plan to invite them in.  How do you say Never mind in French?  I assume we locked the windows and hissed Arretez!  Allez-vous!  Va t’en!  The commotion awakened one of our chaperones.  She addressed the boys with severe words, the gist of which was unmistakable no matter the language.  After they had retreated and disappeared, she treated us to similarly severe words and herded us back to our little beds. 

Although Jackie and I returned to our room, we still had no intention of sleeping.  We sneaked off quietly to the expansive bathrooms, hoping for further distraction.  To our delight, we found a couple of forgotten bras hanging on hooks outside the shower stalls.  They were for full-figured girls, unlike us, and made for ideal comic props.  Whatever we did with those bras (and I can’t remember), it was the height of middle-school hilarity.  It must have been near 3 AM when we returned to our cubicle.  I had never been to sleep-away summer camp, and I never would go, but that night, I got an exhilarating taste of it.

It was Jackie’s birthday yesterday.  After all these years, when we get together, we still tend to stay up late, talking and laughing.  The difference is that today, we catch up on the current events of our lives while also reveling in so much shared history.  It’s one of the nicer things about growing older.  It makes the present moment all the sweeter.