We arrived to Saint-Malo in the late afternoon and spent a few hours walking around and becoming acquainted with the town and the beach. We then went out to dinner and afterwards walked up on the city wall to get a glorious view of the sun setting over the ocean. (It is also notable to mention that we had oysters, or huîtres, with dinner—and being by the sea, there were more to come.)
The next morning we headed out on a driving tour of Brittany, stopping first at a little town called Dinan which we spent an hour or so exploring and walking along the city wall.
We then went to the beach and had a beautiful picnic, complete with Nick's daily ball-toss with one of the family. It was really windy, though, so that didn't go as well as usual. Interestingly enogh, the Brittany coast reminded me a lot of the California coast back home. Not the Southern California coast that people always go to in the movies, with the palm trees and the gorgeous weather and sandy beaches, but the Northern California coast, my coast, with the rocky cliffs and the wind and the short brush which grows on all the hills and the cyprus trees. A little bit of the Marin Headlands way over in France.
Anyway, after that we headed out to an old medieval fort wich was built on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was called Fort La Latte and had been mostly rebuilt from a few piles of leftover rocks (it was from the 12th century). It was beautiful, and again it really reminded me of home. We greatly enjoyed touring it, and we even got to climb to the top of the tower keep and walk around the roof. The wind was incredible up there; we could really see why the fort had been so worn down over the years.
That pretty much ended our day, and then we headed back to Saint-Malo for dinner. It was actually really cool because we went to a restaurant that was right on the water, and we happened to be visiting Brittany during the high tide of the century. We had beautiful seats, right next to the window, and we started dinner with a beach on the other side of the glass and ended it with the ocean there; not a trace of sand was visible. Some people on the other side of the restaurant were situated so that the waves kept splashing up against the window next to them! We also got to enjoy another gorgeous sunset and some delicious huîtres (seems like the recipe to the perfect life, eh?) and thus ended our second day in Brittany.
The next day we were extremely excited, because we were heading to Mont Saint-Michel, the famous island cathedral and monestary. It was unfortuantely not an island when we arrived there, but a giant salt marsh (because we hit low tide) but we enjoyed it nonetheless, learning about the lives of the monks who lived there and the history of the cathedral.
We then went to a town which was well-known for its (you guessed it) oysters. It was pretty cool because you could see oyster farms out in the water and watch the fishing boats come in with huge sacks of them. Basically instead of docking the boats, a truck would just come by, put the entire boat on a flatbed behind it (people and all) and drive it into town. Crazy! But the best part was that there were a bunch of small farmer's market-like tents right by the water that were selling the fresh oysters—and for incredibly cheap prices, too. You could buy a dozen oysters for six bucks (six bucks!!!!) and sit on the beach and eat them. It was crazy because the entire beach was basically made of oyster shells. People would buy the oysters from the tents, sit and eat them, and then toss the shells on the beach. So that's what we did, too. The huîtres were amazing and it was quite an experience. And thus ends our stay in Brittany!
All right, so this next part is a summary of our three and a half days in Normandy. What you'll read will not necessarily be in chronological order, but I don't think that matters. The only thing I"ll be skipping over in this explanation of our visit will be the one day where I was terribly sick and stayed home, throwing up 9 times in 24 hours. But you don't want to hear about that.
The next day we hopped in the car and sped on to Normandy. It's fascinating how just that one word dredges up so many associtions—associations with death and sacrifice, a bloodbath of a beach on which thousands of lives were lost in a heroic effort to begin the end of World War II. I can't say that our visit did anything to dissuade such associations; if anything it enhanced them. Visiting Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the landing beaches and one of the two which American troops landed on, and the Pont du Hoc, where 200 US Army Rangers scaled the seaside cliffs to take out German guns, gave me a great sense of admiration for everyone on every side of this conflict, but in particular a great pride in being an American. Though I know I had nothing to do with it, I was proud to know that I could associate myself with the people who so bravely risked—and sometimes lost—everything, for so noble a cause. To be able to go into a conflict, and lay your life down for the sake of people you have never even met, who live on a different continent from you—that is bravery. And to know that those people did those things in part for their country, for my country, made me incredibly proud. I couldn't help but be in awe of them and their sacrifices, sacrifices made on that very beach. I often say that I'm not an American, I'm a San Franciscan, and honestly that's how I feel. I don't feel particularly connected with other people from the United States simply because of their nationality, I don't have any large sense of pride in seeing the American flag, and often I'm disgusted by some of the politics in my country. Besides, the United States has been at war in my lifetime, is still at war, and I cannot say that I support that. I don't honestly know enough about the wars we're involved in to make a good judgement about them, but I do know that the thought of them don't dredge up any nationalist pride in me. I am, as an American citizen, extremely un-patriotic, and as a San Franciscan citizen, quite the opposite. But standing on Omaha Beach, learning about the sacrifices of American soldiers dragged into that conflict, I was thoroughly proud to be an American. I believed strongly in the cause of that war, I felt for the people involved in it, and understood the idea of fighting for your country. What they did was brave and honorable and so impossible to be grateful enough for. And so it was on that day, standing on Omaha Beach, that I first looked at the American flag flying above me with pride.
I honestly didn't start writing that with the intention of explaining my temporary nationalistic awakening at Omaha Beach (as well as the Pont du Hoc), but I think it's a perfect way to explain how powerful it was to be there. I think Josef Stalin once said something along the lines of, "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic." I don't remember exactly how it goes, but that's the gist of it. When you read about the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, it's hard to find the human element in that. It always is, when learning about war. The first time I really felt any human connection to that day and that landing is when I saw the movie Saving Private Ryan. The first 15-20 minutes or so were dedicated to D-Day; the entire movie was dedicated to the de-glorification of war. It was a powerful movie, and I couldn't help but think of it as we walked those beaches and looked up at those hills, or stared down into the bombshell craters and abandoned bunkers. The lives lost at that very spot… And when you hear the accounts of people who were actually there on D-Day, you begin to see that all of those pristine white gravestones in the American Cemetery there at Normandy, ordered in such perfect rows, were lives. When you see each of those gravestones as one dead, it's hard to wrap your head around the life that went with it, the human element. But instead of trying to imagine the person buried there, I tried to imagine the families. Each gravestone represents one grieving family, one group of sobbing people who lost a loved one. Somehow that helped me see how that's actually a person there. And the accounts of the survivors. Recalling friends, with their little quirks and jokes and even hardships and struggles, who died in a blink of an eye, unceremoniously, without glory. That's a lot of lives thrown away for the greater good. I know that there will never be a way for me to truly understand D-Day, and WWII, the way people who lived at the time did. But going to Omaha Beach helped open my eyes just a little bit more.
No comments:
Post a Comment