June 2006, Paris

By Kaitlin Barker

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled,
each meal I have eaten, each person I have known,
each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears,
there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
– Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

For some it is the Great Wall of China, for others it’s Macchu Picchu, or maybe the Globe Theater. It is that post-card destination that you just know you’ll see one day; you don’t know when, or maybe even how, but somehow you know it will happen. And for some reason you feel like it will make you a little bit more alive. Who knows how, or why.

One of mine is the Eiffel Tower. Something in that deep, whispery part of me has always told me I needed to stand beneath her, preferably at night, in the rain, with the gold reflection of her lights glimmering off the wet pavement, and maybe even topped with a wonderful someone holding my hand. But I’d take an unaccompanied sunny day; my life to-do list just has a bullet with “Eiffel Tower” after it.

We didn’t have very much money by the time we got to Paris, but somehow we always had enough for overpriced coffee on perfect street corners. This is probably because we skimped on the metro passes. Upon figuring out the Paris metro system, Melissa, my dear friend and travel partner, and I opted to stretch out a pack of 10 discount metro passes over the span of our two-day traipse around Paris. Ten passes equal five passes each, approximately 2.5 trips on the metro a day. It sounded great, and it turned out so, because the alternative was our own two feet. That’s how we like to tell it – that our own two feet walked us all over central Paris.

When I remember Paris I remember my feet hurting quite a bit for two days straight. I also remember seeing the Bastille, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Musee d’Orsay, the Sacred Heart Cathedral, and of course, the Eiffel Tower (or Tour Eiffel if you want to feign French like myself), but before I remember those places I remember walking.

I kept a city map and drew on it in different color pens all the distances we walked. I used red for Day One and gold for Day Two. I thought I would show it off when I got home, but it’s lost in a pile somewhere on my desk. People want to see my pictures of the Eiffel Tower, not my walking map.

If any of my friends ever go to Paris I will tell them to take the walking tour that we found in our Lonely Planet France book. I am an advocate of the walking tour, simply because it let me be a tourist who walked. Surprisingly, most tourists are not tourists who walk. Most are like the mom I met on one of my 2.5 rides on the metro.

“Oh my dears, you’re from San Diego, too?”

Her fanny pack and jumbled map screamed tourist.

Thought: Oh wow. Um, yes … you’re really overwhelming. And overtly American. How long do I have to talk to you?

Words: “Yes, what a small world! How long have you been in Paris?”

“Oh just a day or so. We’ve seen everything!”

The mother told us about this great bus tour she and her two college-aged kids had been on. The kids stood to the side looking typically embarrassed and apologetic for their mother.

“You really must do it! You get on and off the bus wherever you want. It takes you to all the great sights.”

It sounded repulsive, but I nodded politely and humored her, asking how much it cost, knowing it would be more than I had left in my budget. Having just proudly completed our walking tour, only my feet were in support of the acclaimed bus tour. I wanted to respond that she “really must” borrow my Lonely Planet book, save herself a fortune, and see all the great sights she’d never know were great sights.

We took turns, Melissa and I, being the keeper of the book, navigating our course through the sprawling streets of Paris. She would read and I would look for street signs until we got tangled in a crowd and our inner lost alarms would sound. Then we’d simply take a breath, a glimpse around, and switch roles. In one hour we walked across the whole world: the Tunisian quarter, the Latin quarter, the Turkish, the Jewish, the Muslim, the Moroccan, the Chinese. Every corner was a new country; it was a cultural smorgasbord, my nose sampling so many smells that I felt full on aromas.

Paris was the New York City of France. I never would have known. Everyone goes to see the Notre Dame, a grand symbol of holiness and peace, but I saw a sidewalk bench of holiness and peace. On it sat four old men talking in the shouting manner of old man conversations. Their skin tones created a blackish, brownish, tannish rainbow, and their varying French accents wove a linguist’s tapestry. The East African wrap of vibrant color laughed at the yamika next to him, and the dark Muslim cloak patted the knee of the white mustache with the old violin. Holiness and peace on a city bench. I snuck a picture.

The vendors were closing down their little outdoor market stations, bustling boxes of fruit to cars, spraying fish remainders down the gutter, tossing baguettes over our heads, all with the jubilant orchestra of French words flying about in the background. The scene enamored me, but when I looked over to share the moment with my fellow moment-seeker, I instead found a lost little girl at my side. Melissa’s eyes darted apprehensively from her watch to the map to the dusky sky a few times before they caught my eye.

“Mel? You okay?”

“What? Oh, yeah, mmmhmm, um, well, I just….”

Growing up, Melissa was always terrified of getting lost. She was never at ease on road trips, as her eyes were always checking the gas tank to make sure the family wasn’t going to be lost and stranded to die in the deserts of Arizona. Grown up, she still gets a little scared at times, like in extremely large foreign cities, when night is creeping into the sky and the hostel is an hour’s walk away. Very understandable.

Our current conundrum was whether to use a precious metro pass to get up to the Montmarte neighborhood and see the Sacred Heart Cathedral or try our chances walking. It looked pretty close on the map, only about a centimeter from where we stood. Melissa looked uncertain, and slightly unamused, when I pointed out my measurements.

“Look, it’s like a centimeter from here. We can walk a centimeter.”

She checked the shade of the sky warily, and I shifted my weight from foot to sore foot. I decided to feign confidence.

“It’ll be fine. It must be right up that hill.”

I was fairly certain of this for two reasons. I’d heard that Paris was one of the flattest cities in the world, and I’d also seen a picture of the Sacred Heart on top of a hill. Plus, we’d walked at least ten centimeters already that day. What was one more.

Weaving us through more entangled French streets, I stopped at a corner where I noticed a cobblestone staircase across the street. Willow trees hung their sweeping branches across it in a roof of foliage, and the wisp of the branches’ long arms against the cobblestones beckoned me to climb. Melissa’s got a thing for staircases, so I knew she’d take them even if her lost fears were kicking in.

“Look at those stairs, it’s like the secret garden,” I pointed out luringly, like it was made out of chocolate or something.

I started across the street before she could object. Peering past the willows, I couldn’t see the top, but I could see the strewn glass bottles and the flies. We stepped gingerly up the steps, and despite the aroma and the buzzing flies, the way the staircase twisted and the cobble-stones were uneven romanced me enough to keep my feet stepping up. A last turn revealed twilight filtering through the willow-branch doorway. Emerging from the trees, we found ourselves at the top of a hill surrounded by crowds of people. And straight in front of me rose an immense and immaculate cathedral.

“Kait….” Melissa breathed my name. “We found it.”

Somehow our enchanted staircase had delivered us right on the doorstep of the cathedral, the sight Melissa had most wanted to see in Paris. I think this was an “it” place for her. She had that kind of glow on her face; unrestrained child-like giddiness was twinkling in her eyes and dancing on her smile. I noticed a sign that had a camera with an X through it. Melissa just stood there gazing up.

A few hours later, after sacrificing a precious metro ticket to see the Eiffel Tower at night, I was the giddy little girl. Even though it was just a few blocks away, I couldn’t see it yet. It was hiding somewhere behind the trees and the tall brick buildings. It was there, somewhere. Melissa called after me to wait, and I hadn’t realized my walk had become a run. As I ran past an alley, a tall flash of gold light blipped between the walls. My breath caught. I stopped and took a few steps back. It. And then a raindrop fell, and then a few, and then it was raining – but you can’t see the rain or the reflection of the lights on the pavement in my pictures.

I met a man named Desmond, delightful in that charming Irish way, whose voice rang with an ancient Celtic sort of joy, a few days after we left Paris. He asked me and Melissa a question that I won’t forget: “Now, missies, are you American tourists?”

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I did know that it was not a term of endearment. He specified, and my suspicions were correct.

“You know my dears, the likes of whom rush into a city for a day and take photographs o’ themselves with anything and everything famous and rush about to the next city. When they get home they’ve got themselves a grand bunch of the same photos with a different something in the backdrop. But they didn’t really see a place. Didn’t really know her.”

I think my cheeks blushed for a moment as I sat silent. I knew what kind of tourists he thought we were, but I really wanted to know. Was that me? Did I know the places I had been? Had they given to me or had I taken? Desmond sat awaiting my response. The pink cooled from my cheeks as I took out my red and gold marked Paris street map.

Paris was not the Eiffel Tower or the Sacred Heart; she was not anything that I could take but only what she could give. Paris was the bench of old men and the enchanted staircase. She was the cups of coffee and conversations in busy corner cafés. The tangled streets and sore feet. Melissa told me she’d always remember Paris in colors – as black, beige, green and gold. Just colors. An impression.

And so Paris, like most of my life, doesn’t just live in photographs, but in that deep whispery part, that part that seems to know of secrets and of beauty. Life, thank goodness, is not in the brief moment of reaching a destination. Life, rather, is the impression left by the journey.

Kaitlin Barker currently lives in San Diego, although a few months will find her without an address, traveling the world in search of peace and understanding. Her work has appeared in “The Driftwood” and “The Viewpoint.”

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, October 30th, 2006 | Email This Post

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