Rosenblum - The Secret Life of the Seine

E VERY OTHER MORNING, my friend Paul slouched into the office with yet another hard-luck story about the boat he loved. The something-something had clogged and frozen his family overnight. A bateau-mouche had decked his poop, or pooped his deck. The river had risen, and he needed a dinghy to get home.

Paul slouched because he was six feet one inch high, and the saloon ceiling of La Vieille was not. Winter or summer, his clothes were ripe with mildew and diesel. One sleeting December night, his clothes smelled even worse. He had slipped on the gangway and belly flopped into the Seine.

Paul could talk your ear off about epoxy resin fatigue and wet carpets. He and his wife, Jill, had lived aboard La Vieille since the time they nursed her ancient teak timbers across the English Channel in 1967 and tied her up in the middle of Paris. That they had a son to rear on a fifty-four-foot boat didnt faze them, not even when young Ozzie grew so tall he could stand erect only with the hatch open.

During the decade that Paul and I worked together, I could never fathom his devotion to La Vieille. But I knew why he loved the Seine. There is not a river like it in the world, for beauty and passion along its banks. Its history is as old as the Jordans, and it is no muddy stream across moonscape. If hardly a Mississippi, it still conceals treacherous sandbanks that keep boatmen anxiously marking their twain.

From the time I first gasped at the view from the Pont Marie, years ago, I was smitten by the Seine. And back then, I didnt know the half of it.

While Paul and Jill lived aboard La Vieille, I rented a country cottage four floors up in an old building in the heart of Paris, on the Ile Saint-Louis. Each time Paul lamented over his Webasto diesel heater, I thought of my cheery steam radiators and fireplaces on two floors. When winds and waves rocked the boat, I shut double doors to a terrace rose garden. I was a happy landlubber, and my clothes did not smell.

Late one night, I walked home across the Pont Sully. Golden light from the Quai dAnjou glittered on the Seine. The narrow street curved by slate-roofed stone mansions that had sheltered the families, from the Voltaires to the Rothschilds, who had made France into France. Climbing the last steps to my door, I figured I had found the loveliest speck of real estate in the world. With any luck, Id live there forever.

Inside, I exulted on the subject to my friend and roommate. We have to leave, she said.

It was a typical low Parisian story. A local reptile who inherited some money had heard about the apartment and visited our landlord. The short version of the story is that we had a few months to clear out, with no idea where to go. I only knew that I had to be near the Seine.

Paul showed up for work, as usual, with another La Vieille hard-luck story. You dont want to sell that old wreck, do you? I asked. I just might, he said. Not long after, I was the one telling the stories and reeking of old boat.

Paul and Jill had decided to move to England, and they were looking for friendly hands to take the helm. I was a reluctant candidate, a son of Arizona desert and a klutz with wrench or varnish brush. It took only one lunch on deck. The spring air was electric. Dutch barges lazed past, piloted by housewives in slippers and patrolled by stubby dogs trained to coil rope with their teeth. Tugs puffed by, their wakes sloshing the Burgundy in our glasses. On neighboring boats and along the quai, I watched characters Hugo had missed and Flaubert never imagined. Along with foul water, I saw waterfowl. It had to be Paris because the Eiffel Tower loomed over the golden cherubs on the Pont Alexandre IE. But we were also somewhere else, in a place most Parisians seldom see.

Only a few nylon ropes, a power cable and a garden hose connected us to the real world. Suddenly, I understood why my friends loved La Vieille and had resolved to sell her with lumps in their throats. I had discovered the secret life of the Seine.

A glance at the river in Paris tells you what is going on in France. If it is not slopping over its stone quais at the new year, farmers had a bad time with drought. When it runs fast, high, and cocoa brown in April, the skiing was terrific-keepers had to drop the sluice gates on the Marne to drain off melting snow. When France is happiest, for a bicentennial celebration of the revolution or only Bastille Day, barges and barks jam the Seine on their way to the fireworks.