Omaha Beach
By joj
Saturday was supposed to be sunny and someone suggested we go to Paris for the day to escape the Norman rain. We could see the Eiffel Tower.
“No, thanks. I’m walking to Omaha Beach,” I declared to the handful of students sharing my blanket on the grass in front of our temporary housing. We had survived the first of a three-week intensive meant to prepare us for a year of study in other French cities.
“Why?” Someone asked.
I don’t like war movies, but Saving Private Ryan had surprised me, and watching it was one of the few times I’d felt patriotic. When I realized how close Omaha Beach was to Caen, I vowed not to leave Normandy without visiting the American cemetery—a sprawling green lawn of valor dotted with alabaster crosses.
“You realize that’s like thirty miles, right?” Some guy said.
A couple of people laughed.
“Or you could take the train as far as you can and walk the rest,” Rebecca said. She swept her long hair onto her back and hugged her knees. “I bet from Bayeux, it’s only five miles or so.”
“If you do that, I’ll go with,” Brandon said, all thick neck, square head and shoulders, puppy sweet smile.
“I’ll go, too.” Luke was from Wisconsin.
We walked to the station after Saturday breakfast, their backpacks laden with cheese, pâté, baguette and wine. I brought my second-hand camera. The train to Bayeux zoomed by farms and fields, castles and cathedrals just like in a movie, everything painfully green. We stopped by the tourism office to get a map, thwarted a guide’s attempt to lure us to visit some famous medieval tapestry I had never heard of.
Our steps were swift with excitement at being in France and on a mission. The road was straight and flat, bordered on each side by narrow grass shoulders and walls of greenery. With nothing to do but talk, we fell into a cadence in pairs. After the usual what’s-your-major, favorite color, singer, actor, someone asked, “What do you want from France?”
Rebecca talked about the Peace Corps. Luke wanted a doctorate in French Lit. Brandon mentioned conservation.
The fields opened up. We clamored up a ditch to meet a braying donkey and fed him handfuls of clover.
“Is that a castle?” Brandon pointed to a sprawling manor on the edge of the facing field. We crossed the road and lay in the grass at the base of the trees, made up stories about who lived there.
We found a patch of blackberries, nibbled our bellies full, our lips and tongues stained gray. Shielding our eyes from the sun, we peered at the bomb-pocked walls of a distant ruin and wondered what it had been. I stopped to take a picture of a round tower of tightly piled stones, the pointy roof reminding me of a sleeping princess. We tried to photograph a tank in front of a small private war museum but the owner shooed us away in a cocktail of French, English and hand gestures. Everything was just different enough to not be home, but the corn waved on the wind like home, the willows wept the same, the blackberry seeds crunched as bitter.
“You never answered,” Brandon said, “about why you’re here.”
The others stopped talking.
My story was starkly different from theirs, my reasons more urgent. They were strangers. Still, I banked on the value of vulnerability, told them anyway. I grew up on Welfare living half the year in a trailer in Arkansas and the other half in a camper chasing forestry jobs all over the southeastern U.S. There was abuse. I became “promiscuous.” I came of age in a tent on the side of the road, ate food from strangers’ plates I’d cleared, spent most of my pregnancy in a shelter, gave the baby up for adoption. I tidied the story up and lightened it with humor. “I’m here to buff the fried bologna from my veins,” I said, laughing.
After a long silence, Brandon said, “I almost feel guilty for being here now.”
I didn’t tell them I’d secretly wished to be the kind of person who runs off to Paris because the weather is nice. I wasn’t in France on a whim or to pad my grad school application. I was there on borrowed money because the movies, TV shows, and glossy magazine ads I had seen about it said France is where you go to change, to be worth something, to go home unrecognizable.
The landscape began to round and roll. A seagull cawed. The billowy white clouds turned gray and the breeze was fishy with brine.
Over the next rise, the world spilled into the sea. Masts teetered in the marina, piles of green netting lined the docks, squawking gulls dipped in the air. Poles stood steady, Allied flags whipping at their tops. I shook at the sight of my country’s colors. I had worked so hard to flee them, but looking up at them from French soil, I felt strangely proud.
The German bunker was closed, but we climbed the hillside to a turret-like the one we had passed on our walk, cheese, and baguette caught in our throats. From there we spied the sandy cliffs beyond the village, the dark salty horizon. But no white crosses.
We stopped by the tourism office at the base of the hill. “The cemetery is another five kilometers that way,” the agent said, pointing. It was getting dark. Our feet hurt. Our bellies were full of pâté, our legs heavy with wine. I was sure they’d vote to go home.
“Let’s hit it,” Rebecca said, started walking.
The road meandered with treacherous curves. We jumped into the ditch once to avoid a speeding car. But at the top, the land flattened into wheat fields, the sound of waves crashing just beyond.
“This might have to be close enough,” Luke said.
We crossed the field, sat huddled on the sandy cliff and watched the setting sun turn the sky into blackberry jam. I saw my face reflected in these three people who had followed me on a fool’s mission all because of a movie. We were nothing alike on paper, but our walk was the same, more precious to me than a thousand Eiffel Towers.
joj grew up an American nomad on welfare. They now live, write and parent their four children in southern France. To follow more of their adventures and receive news on their imminent memoir, visit https://thejojshow.substack.com
