I had Matt with me. It’s the story of my life apparently – my boat life, anyway – half the time not understanding what’s going on, and what I do understand isn’t going well at all.
I’m doing some adjusting on my little pump and bailing more water out when M. Teurnier arrives promptly as he said he would. He pulls up to the bank where I’ve been trying to glue my furniture back together.
He goes down the bank past me and looks around the inside of the boat. He comes out shaking his head and motions me to climb into his rattletrap of a car. His head just about clears the dash so he can see out the windshield. To make it possible, he has three ragged pillows to boost himself up on, giving him a few centimeters of height, and half a chance.
The seats in the back of the car have been ripped out, and the space is filled with grease-smeared tools and pieces of cut metal. He drives the way a madman should.
After half an hour of twisting, turning driving, we stop in the middle of nowhere. His house turns out to be a houseboat pulled up onto a section of land, a sort of small island between branches of the meandering Seine. He pantomimes with his arms how the river rises with floods.
It turns out, he moved his boat up onto the land when the flood was high, then, as the water went down, he built concrete foundations under his boat. He laughs and slaps his knee as he tells this. It certainly makes for a peculiar-looking house.
We go inside and I meet his wife, who speaks a little English. She tells me their daughter is studying English at school and will be home soon. It turns out the daughter will translate. M. Teurnier pulls me by the arm down to one of the riverbanks. I can see this is the equivalent of a boat cemetery. There are half-sunken rusty boats everywhere, from rowboats to enormous barges. They’re all rusting into nothingness. Men are cutting and arc-welding on all sides. The smell of burnt metal dominates everything, even the foul smell of the river.
M. Teurnier is dragging me over to an abortion of a filthy barge. To me it looks something like a giant sea dragon with its head cut off. It’s rusted everywhere, and where there isn’t rust, there are streaks and puddles of oil smeared haphazardly.
Now I know this kind of thing might be heaven to a real boat person, but it looks hellish to me. Before I acquired my sinking violet of a wooden boat, my marine experience had been limited to some rowing of rowboats in parks, a few fishing trips on hired fishing boats off the Jersey shore, two half-day excursions in Arthur’s sailboat out of the marina in Los Angeles, and playing with boats in my bathtub as a child. What I’m seeing in front of me is an unmitigated horror. I find myself flinching, I want to escape.
But, M. Teurnier leads me across a watery canyon between the bank and this filthy wreck. He’s jabbering away and gesticulating all the time. Lord, what am I getting myself into now?
I’m looking back to the comforts of M. Teurnier’s goofy boathouse up on stilts, on dry land, searching for some remnants of sanity. It’s then I see what seems to me like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman film. A small girl in a pinafore is running, jumping and skipping over this desolate landscape littered with rusting, sharp shards of boats and parts of boats. She’s shouting as she comes.
‘Papa!’
A French Angel Named Corinne
M. Teurnier’s face lights up and he winks at me. He moves over to the narrow plank bridge onto this derelict boat, but there’s no need. She lightly dances across it the way her father did. She runs into his arms, seemingly unaware of the contrast between her beautiful ruffled dress, covered by her school tablier, a sort of apron, compared to her dad’s mud-, sweat- and oil-covered ‘blues.’ He gives her a swing in the air. I assume she is to be our translator for whatever there is to translate. I’m right.
She pushes her face up to me for the typical Breton three kisses. I manage it, but I’m almost pulled off my footing on this slippery deck covered with various unplanned, unannounced booby traps. I almost fall into her. She appears to be about eleven years old and is absolutely bursting with enthusiasm. She looks me right straight in the eyes, hers blue as old M. Teurnier’s must have been fifty years ago. M. Teurnier speaks to her quickly, and she turns to me.
‘Ah, you are the American who has a boat mon père lifted out of the water.’
Her accent is quite good. She speaks clearly and with verve.
‘Yes, that’s right, little one. What is your name?’
‘I am called Corinne. Mama says I should tell you what Papa is trying to tell you.’
So, from then on, M. Teurnier speaks and she, haltingly but carefully, translates. She’s really rather amazing.
It seems this old shell of a hull I’m standing on had once been an oil barge, hauling oil from Le Havre to different ports along the canals that traverse all of France. The boat was built sixty years ago and had been in service every day since, until recently. This part is easy. Then she points out, at M. Teurnier’s instruction, that the plates of steel forming the boat are riveted, not welded. He points to rivets all over the hull. This, apparently, is good. We look down an open hatch into a deep pitch-black interior. I knew it was a hell. We move to the other end of the boat. It really has had the head cut off, but the beheaded dragon isn’t bleeding. In fact, it’s still shining metal where the surgery was performed. Saint George would be proud.
This part is hard for Corinne to translate. Her father has his arms going like a windmill, trying to explain. It’s so complicated, I can just barely hang on.
It seems that boats like this, standard barges, thirty-nine meters long, are no longer practical on the rivers and canals. They cannot carry enough cargo, and it takes three people to run them safely, especially going through the many locks.
This part I understand reasonably well. Then, with the wind-milling of M. Teurnier and Corinne’s stumbling, halting search for words, I gather that they cut off the part of this boat with the motor and cabin, along with two of the oil-storage sections. The idea was to convert it into a ‘pusher’. It will push four empty barges, without motors, along the river. Then, three people running it can make four times as much money as before. They cannot carry oil, only grain, sand, gravel or coal, but that’s enough.
M. Teurnier points across his no-man’s-land to what I assume is the onetime head of this monster boat. Men are climbing over it, cutting, welding, pounding. I figure this will be the ‘pusher’.
Then M. Teurnier starts marching along the length of this beheaded boat beneath us. It’s still enormous, even with the amputation. He shows me that it’s about seventy feet long. At intervals there are bulging, complex sorts of metal bubbles. Corinne explains they are the pumps that pumped the oil into and out of the barge when it functioned, before it was turned into a metal corpse. M. Teurnier makes swinging, chopping motions to show how he would cut these off. It looks impossible, but little Corinne verifies.
Now he takes me to the other end of the boat. There’s a raised hatch cover and a steep boat-type ladder staircase going down into the dark. He whips out a flashlight he had strapped to his waist and motions me to follow. Down there, it’s almost sane. A bed is fitted against one wall, a sink, some varnished mahogany cabinets, and a built-in bench with storage under it, along another wall. All the fittings are beautiful shined brass. Corinne explains this was the crew cabin. We go upstairs onto the deck mayhem again.
Now, M. Teurnier goes down into that dark hole. He motions for me to follow. It’s a metal ladder with thin, round iron rungs, standing almost vertically against the hatch opening. M. Teurnier obviously tells Corinne
