It was a typical boiling hot day in the south of France in the Languedoc-Roussillon region nicknamed 'the cauldron' because anyone experiencing the weather acts like a complete witch. We decided to picnic under the trees, hoping the shade and the babbling Gardon river would give us reprieve before hiking up to the bridge. So, we unfolded ourselves from the rented Renault and marched hot, sweaty and thirsty toward the trees.
A French family doing the same showed us where we could get chilled wine and juice. When I returned with drinks for my family, my naked children were frolicking in the river, following the French children upstream. My traitorous husband was leaning back on his elbows gawking at the mostly naked French women along the beach. He smiled when I walked up as if I were a Giesha with wine and grapes. I plunked the wine bottle in the sand and told him he had to gnaw off the cork because I had no idea where the Swiss army knife had gone. I was grateful at least he wasn’t naked and upstream along with the children.
After some chilled wine, I too, loosened some clothes and we waded up stream toward the children. The view from under the bridge was ‘magnifiques’ as our French compatriots had commented. They had taken pity on us and shared their cork screw before my husband lost his front teeth de-corking the bottle.
We followed the couple up to where our children were playing and that’s when her husband spoke for the first and only time. He said with a small wave at their children daintily walking along stones and ours hurling themselves in and out of the river at top volume and speed, ‘one can always tell the level of a culture by the behavior of its children.’ So, we gathered ours up, waved ‘au revoir’ and marched everyone quick time to the top of the bridge.
As we made our way toward the Sartanette Valley, a battle started that will forever reverberate among the ancient stones:
‘You must carry me’ demanded our three year old Johnny in his most royal and carrying voice.
My husband, being kind and not wanting a scene, agreed. I helped lift Johnny up and followed the two of them as they teetered back and forth, barely missing passersby. Huffing and puffing along, the redness of my pale, Irish husband’s face could only be matched by the redness of my pale, half Irish son’s face which was scrunched in the most offending scowl known to mankind.
We carried on like that until Johnny started screaming and kicking. He kicked Patrick in the chest and back and then started whacking him on the head, which of course, made his precarious perch extremely dangerous. That was it.
We stopped in the middle of the Pont du Guard as crowds of people moved around us.
‘You must stop,’ I commanded looking up at my son who was now about two feet taller than I.
‘No!’ he bellowed looking around to make sure the audience appreciated his performance.
Then Johnny squirmed and swayed making the crowds around us ‘oh and ah’ as he and my husband teetered side to side near the edge.
A tall French man passing by reached up and plucked Johnny down giving us a gentle smile.
Johnny immediately dissolved into the stones creating a crying, moaning, screaming, kicking blob. We stood in a circle around him.
‘Johnny!’ Patrick said, ‘we’re going to walk and you’re going to hold Daddy’s hand right now.’
The blob stopped moving long enough for it to yell, ‘no!’
Then he picked up some stones and started hurling them toward the river almost knocking out a lovely pair of Japanese women. The crowd immediately started to disperse. Clearly no one wanted to get stoned to death. Patrick was done.
‘Michael, Mommy & I are walking to the end right now. We hope you will join us,’ He said as he grabbed our older son’s hand and mine. We started across very slowly while looking back.
People walking toward us gave conflicting reports. ‘He’s starting to walk,’ a backpacker said.
‘No, no, he’s back down,’ said the backpacker’s girlfriend.
‘It’s appalling what you are doing to that poor child,’ said an older American couple.
‘Keep going – he’ll follow soon enough,’ commented an older English woman.
‘Bravo!’ from an Italian woman, her mother and three children in tow.
We carried on with Johnny moving like a cow with a sore back as he dramatically flopped one hand in front of the other, sobbing and crawling pathetically toward us.
‘There’s ice cream when we reach the end.’ Patrick said yelled back.
At that, Johnny stopped, stood up and skipped the rest of the way, smiling. Our family walked the last few feet off the aqueduct, hand in hand.
And that, my people, was how the battle over the River Gardon was won. The Romans, Thank God, built things to last and I am happy to report that the bridge is still there despite the havoc wrecked on it that day. It’s just missing a few stones.
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