[YD6-59(SHEn) Chapter Code] Highway Surveyor's Solitude: Maze Mirroring a Relationship's Parting Paths
This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine -- Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn.
Pulling Ingrid’s Fiat Uno to a halt, I step out, walk toward the entrance. Entering the house, I feel rehearsing, climb upstairs to glance through the doorway into the kitchen. Step beside the dining table out the patio door. Finding Ingrid in her vegetable garden, crouching among rows of green. Approaching her, greeting, “Je peux t’aider — Can I help you?”
“J’ai fini — I’m finished,” Ingrid says. Continuing to pick tomatoes through the greenhouse, on her way out. Conversing, I slip in. “I’ve been fired by Giobbini.” relieving me of carrying the weight any longer. She sleeks from asking, ‘What happened?’ walking back with my sister, enter the dining room, past Chantal and Philip in books and homework exercises, through the gapping doorway to the kitchen.
Standing at the sink, I lend a hand, washing salads and tomatoes, setting the table, soothing the chaos inside me. While she stands over pots and pans, welcoming Rico home. He back tracks, after asking, “On va se partager une bouteille de vin ? — We’re going to share some wine?” he disappears, returns, with a bottle to find the corkscrew, pull the cork onto sitting at the table. Ingrid serves soup, around the table, sitting down. After savoring, I offer to collect the plates to the dishwasher, to serve the main course, cheese, coffee, and clear the table. Rico retrieves to the sunken lounge, to sit facing the news broadcaster, Ingrid trails. Their silence cuts deeper, as I repeat the table conversation, with a side of accusation, “…la jalousie du contremaître — …the foreman jealousy. . .”
The feral child raised in the African jungle by the great apes, Tarzan — severed from a perfect family, lasting beyond the weekend. Mirrors my place here, as though I accused, Giobbini of the jealousy for my dismissal.
Ingrid and Rico — warriors, armed with a samurai sword, sever the conversation with a single blow. Rico interjects, “Ca se peut pas -- No way. . . — ‘_he is not like that!’_” Ever the Piscean, channels soft wisdom — a steady current cutting through the storm.
Her Sun in Rooster, Ingrid, preening her feathers, sharpening their edges to guard her family from the tarnish of my presence. Her disappointment hangs in the air, thick and unspoken, the silence broken by the hum of the television broadcast.
She retrieves, I imagine, to her distant shores, leaving me behind with Rico. We sit exchanging a few commentaries until the television dissolves into static. Wishing good night, across the dining table. He vanishes behind the closing of the facing doorways. Leaving me alone, I enter my room, ducking under the covers, and let Morpheus huddle me.
By late morning on Monday - Twock - the door closes behind me. Downstairs’ airlock a garden of greenery, and beyond the door pane, the paved driveway flows to the street. I walk around the block of villas up the street to the bus halt pole, crossing the hillside road. With flashbacks of Ingrid’s echoing judgment, I’m pushing back last Friday’s memory, from swallowing me in the quiet.
The shuttle bus arrives, what seems, an hour later. I step on, fumbling with my cash.
“Où est votre carte ? — where is your card?” the driver asks, growing as though I should know the rules.
“Je n’ai que de la monnaie — I only have cash!” I plead, his gaze fixing on me.
“Ca va -- Ok,” the driver replies, straightening in his seat, facing the leading road, drives off. Lending me to wonder, if caught by the inspectors, onto a Samaritan, my broken French bought me this free ride — not superstitious, but I’m thinking, ‘Maybe my day starts well.’
Winding down the hill, over the railway crossing from Paris, zigzagging neighborhood street, to a halt at the train station, saying, “C’est the terminus — It’s the terminus.”
I step off, facing the elaborate entrance, too grand for my state of mind. I steer clear, grounding myself on the leading sidewalk. Walking, my thoughts niggle at me — a constant reminder: ‘starting anew.’ With open-date flight tickets to New York and Johannesburg, comfort lingers only in the fleeting, paradisaical joy of flight, though landing returns me to sweating the laborious uncertainty of the future.
I’m aware of the leafy, creeping fence lining the sidewalk as I follow the prolonged railway tracks, marked by gantries strung with electrifying overhead cables. Beyond, I recall the train conductor from a few weeks ago, destined for border towns to Switzerland.
A row of fenestrated facades, relics of another age, guides me down a side street that cracks open, fading into the distant neighborhood. I cross the sidewalk, passing by a storefront. My step falters. A sign splash “BIS” underscores “agence pour l’emploi — employment agency” Along a pair of fishing-lines, index cards stagger and further across the window, announcing opportunities. I lean closer, peeking past the curtain of cards, searching into the office for a person.
I push the door open, meeting the soft gaze of a woman. As I approach her desk, she could have said, ‘I’m a Cancer. . .’ I hold my heart and mind from wandering into the jungle of her zodiac, to meet her greetings. “Que puis-je faire pour vous — Can I help you?” she asks.
When I leave, the summer sunlight warms my being, feeling I’ve stolen the day. My footsteps carry me further down the block. At a principal intersection, trickling traffic, I jaywalk across the street. Crossing a few streets outbound, drawn to a polished plaque “Cabinet CLERGET Géomètre-Expert — Cabinet CLERGET Surveyor-Expert."
The door creaks as I step inside, revealing an elusive mansion’s high and long hallway, buckling walls. A sturdy, middle-aged man appears in the gapping doorway, framed by a heavy desk behind him. His eyes pull me mid-stride, meeting me with a nod.
I assume, ‘Mr. Clerget!’ The name scribbled on a note handed to me by the BIS woman. He ushers me deeper into the mansion, into a room alive crossing a woman exit, leaving another man hunch over a table besides a soft dot matrix printer - Brrt… chhkk… chhkk… brrt… bzzzz… - conjuring a continuous blueprint.
‘Mr. Clerget could have been on his way,’ I reckon, as my introduction feels seamless, although I’ve stepped into his milieu. My gaze sweeps across the room, doing a 180-degree turn, to take in the band of continuous paper plastered on the walls, breaking for the window and door.
Unimaginable. Aetheria holds on to her promise to personify, hovering overhead. As I read, the dot matrix projection emerges—a pointillistic face of the land. Contours are mapped and shaded, with straight lines bisecting the terrain, carving order into chaos.
She hints at strides yet to come, foreshadowing paths delineating routes that trans-cut through forests, grazing fields bordered by barbed wire fences, winding roadways, and the rigmarole of signposts—a route I’ll soon traverse, zigzagging from side to side along its course, lodging in villages along the way.
The field surveys will return their data, promising a highway and projecting the land claim for the TGV, the high-speed train, onto a blueprint.
I left Clerget’s office, following Arnault into the street, heading to his Peugeot. Driving off, he reassures me, “We’ll be returning only for the weekend.” We’re weaving through town, outbound, from the city outskirts, onto the national road following flashing road signs “Paris.” Crossing Champaign's plains until “Troyes” flashes. We enter the town, to pull in the street up across a parvis. He steps out the car, head alongside the white stone church. Around the corner, he points to a horizontal slit — an Ordnance benchmark — saying, “C’est le niveau — it's the level. . .” walking away, he didn’t explain this is a level indicating height above sea level on the side of old stone.
Joining him again in his car, driving off, we head into the outskirts, onto a country road for a stretch wind inland. He halts the car on the dirt road shoulder, and stepping out, Arnault expects me to follow to the tailgate. After lifting, Arnault pulls three javelins out - smack - close and walks away. With his peculiar stride — feet stepping over treads by habit of walking in the rough — The surveyor stakes one of the tree javelins, entering the woods. He advances in a linear course, aligning, until a tree, stands in the way.
By now I understand that he plants the past and future in the woods, planting the javelin markers guiding us straight through the woods, emerging into grazing fields. We head off for lunch, follow a road with an excessive long hauler trucks. Pull up in a parking, surrounding a banal but catering for truckers restaurants, meet another who had been heading to us. We pull up, walk toward the entrance, pull the door, to a dining mess hall with stretch tables, with lone drivers at a bar counter, and at tables dotted with fussy truckers chatting as they’re eating.
Maids are leaving the truckers, coming around, as we’re seated. To my dismay, from an urn, she serves steaming soup. She follows up hors d’oeuvres, the main meals, finishing with desert, cheese, and coffee. Before we rise, and return to our cars, to drive away.
By evening, we enter the hotel, lugging baggage upstairs to our room, to return downstairs to the dining room. Meet at the bar, over wines, chat into the night until they disperse for the night, I edge off to my rooms. When we returned tracking through the woods, I’m left to continue bomb with the red paint pray-can the line of trees to uproot. Until, I emerge from the woods, with curious cows and juvenile calves trotting up. My only defense, I pray their sleek black muzzles until they gave way. I jump the barbed wire fence, and head through the field across offside, to continue marking the trees, finishing our day’s work, and head for the hotel for the evening.
While Arnault pockets his note pad and grabs the prism, I station the tripod, on the uneven ground, pressing a foot the sharp tips biting into the earth. I mount the total station on the tripod, sliding the instrument, position, plumb over the milestone’s control point, and tightening the clamping screw underneath. Fine-tuning the head plate, I alternate adjustments to the leveling screws until the bubbles centers in the bull’s-eye spirit level.
I hand over the setup of the total station, walk away through the field with the prism. Staking out the first of poles that need to be displaced, carrying a trio of electric lines. As the futuristic TGV corridor — beyond my wildest imagination — a day will come to ride. The countryside air-sketch alongside the window, the landscape rotating as the high-speed train races from Paris to pull into Belfort station.
By lunch, we gathered outside the hotel. A chorus of students and prism holders, entering for a meal before regrouping to head off and out for the afternoon's work. Surveying the connecting road until evenings, through the week, withdrawing the topographic equipment from the vehicles, backing up the day's data onto safeguard diskettes. Off to dinner. When the dim glow in the hotel windows, arouses a new rhythm around the bar counter. Standing by, voices surge and ebb — banners of their craft.
Laughter rippled through the air, punctuating by regional accents and ethnic refrains. The words flow past me, slipping from my grasp like leaves caught in a current. Until — ‘Ah, ah, ah!’ I chuckled to myself, catching a phrase. “But I’d prefer someone a bit older — 40 years, perhaps!” One of the women teases the young men nearby, her meaning carried downstream, tangled in the playful clash of voices.
My laptop sits open, posing to take notes, speaking to Renault. Until, he breaks me off with a bemused grin. “Je n’ai rien compris — I didn’t understand a dawn thing.”
Arnault’s words snag on me, pulling me into a reflection. Finding my drifting mind, abandoned deciphering regional French. Exhausted, wandering in New York, finding my conversation with Arnault spoken in English.
Glasses of wine are abandoned on the counter, as we leave the bar, tailing toward our rooms for the night — and the nights to come, until Friday evening arrives. The sun still high over the horizon, the group dissolves in the shade before the hotel. We scatter across the street, stepping into Renault R4 and similar Peugeot panel vans, I climb with Arnault to drive off toward the weekend.
At dawn, I climbed into a bright orange Renault, stacked the tailgate with surveyor’s equipment into the panel van, and drove away from Clerget’s backyard. I’d been driving for a while now, cosmic music in rhyme to mind. “On the road again; Goin' places that I've never been…” The little engine purred along, finding the asphalt band sweeping a course through a shallow green valley with flocculent tufts of trees. Echoing in mind, “… Seein’ things that I may never see again . . .”
The atmosphere morphs, Aetheria’s hand brushes to consciousness, transposing the countryside to an oasis by a stream along a South African golf course. The atmosphere stirs a montage, on the road. First dates with Jean before we married, then Jacqueline after my divorce.
No sooner did the warmth of nostalgia seep into my heart than Aetheria suscitating to mind, not to be forgotten, intangible yet vivid, stirring Francine to mind.
"It’s as if I’d touch you, and you’d disappear." The line echoed, stark and cutting. I waited not, concluding my escape, just as The Savage Orchid had warned: “You were my pride, and I was frightened that you’d slip away.”
The countryside morph, returning me to the lonely desert country road, the little engine whining against the slope ahead. I press on, bemused by the lonely drive, finding quiet solace rolling in the novelties, arriving in the town of Annemass, where I’m joining Arnault.
By late morning, we were setting up the tripod amidst mammoth tracks, checking batter pegs while drivers dwarfed in the cabins of their monstrous tractor-scrapers. Far afield, the pan among colossal pneumatic tires, scraping the earth. Carving through distant mount, in turnarounds, rumbling past us in the road corridor at high speeds. Their hoppers bounce through the road corridor dumping loads of earth, leveling across the valley through before returning empty for the next cycle.
At lunch, we pack up the topographic equipment, head to the hotel. Greets other surveyors tabled around commune tables. Sharing an apéritif to soften the edge of the day. Then comes the entrée, followed by the dish of the day. Cheese, dessert, and coffee crowning the affair, erasing the rush.
‘Lunch here isn’t just eating,’ I muse to myself. ‘It’s an event,’ rich and deliberate. Yet, by two o’clock we are back at it — changing field, changing sites.
Weeks pass along the Swiss border, watching a viaduct deck beam protruding through the air, launched overheads with the cliff of the Mont Salève in its optic. While surveying diverting road beneath, sending data to Belfort sketching, the topographic points substituting satellite images.
The weekend offers me a reprieve. I drive the cliffhanger road, winding along the cliff to Mont Salève’s thousand-meter plateau. Imagining the city, I strolled to the city square, where students sprawl alongside street walls.
From a stone seat by the statue, I rise and walk away, window-licking as I stroll along the lake. The promenade draws me onward, gazing at the unfurled water sail with an air spray from the fountain. From where I cross the street to the curiosity of terrace tables invite idle conversations, along the wooded corridor.
I backtrack and pass the cascade leaking an Espresso Ice Cream at hand, to sit on stone steps admiring the thousands of light globes stretch between lampposts along the bridge across the lake to the far waterfront city.
A young woman throws me an occasional glance, her fleeting eyes, as she crosses by, ignited Francine’s void in me. An envy rises, taking my breath away. My anger might be influenced by — Rourke — rhyming to mind — ‘I envied those people — They who belonged — They who have a city — If not Geneva, New Yorkers, South Africans — For all those rooted — With a Home, a family!’
Music rhymes in my mind, echoing, “On the road again; I just can't wait to get on the road again. . .” Reminiscing on stretches of road, I needn’t fear being lost in all azimuths — after all, I’ve tracked roads, turning 360 degrees in my head to find my whereabouts. On the highway, I fumble over letters that teasing me with meaningless towns, multiplying sings until my brain finds its accord with my mind. Missing a turnoff sent me dozens of kilometers before an overpass returned me on my tracks.
On my way to Belfort, my inner gyroscope spins, doubts cloud my mind when I expect to see sings or landmarks, but the wizard doesn't turn up. All roads seem to converging on the city, though the point of entry always confuses me. I find my ways through the hillside woods, across the plain, on a last stroke by car, or bus, to walk through the front door — greetings an ever homecoming family, always the members in motion.
I didn't anticipate the formal welcome — the childhood friends, Karine, Ingrid, Rico’s second eldest, and Manu’s engagement. An irony in Manu being the son of their school director. From Ingrid’s kitchen window, the rooftops cascaded down the piedmont to the Tirole’s house.
Then, the day shifted rhythm, following the cadence of family life. Dedication flowed from the youngest to the eldest. The Third Republic granted France a national holiday on 14th July, in memory of the storming of the Bastille. Yet, I found myself caught in its echo.
I joined the family for an afternoon by the shores of Étang du Malsaucy, the water glaze mirroring the skies. Didier, Eric, and Manu windfoil afar on the pond, figuring gliding along. Standing among the scattered crowds on the beachfront, my gaze trace the horizon. My heart aches for Francine — tortured by her family’s present at the periphery of my thoughts, thought not in my midst.
By now, I'm driving along a leading country road, rhymes the music’s lyrics to mind, ‘On the road again . . . The life I love is making music. . .’ — the music of Francine filing my sad heart again, for one moment. As distant are the team of surveyors, meeting with Arnault. As the leading asphalt band unwinds through golden fields, rolling in peaceful waves of cropped hills. The undulation spread out into the midmorning sunlight, as if all the farmers had the same idea for these fields embracing that Friday, into Saturday the 14th of July, to Sunday.
I follow the evanescent country road as it winds around the crown of a hilltop, where farmers’ tractors have cleared the fields. Abandoned rolls of hay lie scattered, their shadows grazing the sunlit harvest like resting cattle. Ahead, at the heel of a branching field road, its tracks cut straight through the shallow valley onto the opposing hillside.
On the still landscape, a flicker draws my eyes to the dark trace crowning the opposite side of the hill. A dwarfing shadow stirs, sharpens into a figure of a young woman. Her fluid gait carries her along the path at the hill’s crest, enigmatic and slink. Her gaze in her path, she approaches the junction of the straight track with a barbed wire fence, part the equal left and right hill side fields.
My curiosity sharpens; time suspends itself as the young woman emerging from the golden, cropped blur. At the toe of the junction, Francine unveils herself. Her slow pace turns to a pause, her gaze lifting across the valley, locking onto mine. Steadfast, regret lingers in her expression — sadness mingled with quiet resolve.
Her eyes serve me a message; I ache to hear her voice, to be assured. Instead, she resumes her soft, ballet-like walk, her steps lingering as though moving against a headwind. She continues her passive walk along the hill’s crest until she vanishes into the shadowy depths of the far hillside blur.
My fingers rest on the wheel, shifting through the gears as the little cylindric engine hums, tunes changing with the thrum of tires on the road. The music drifts into my mind, spilling words I caution my false voice from singing aloud. “… On the road again…” Cruel, truthful words, tethering me to the field road slipping further behind, as the asphalt ribbon unwinds ahead.
Her ghost across the valley vivid in my mind, as I spoke to her gaze. ‘Are you still living alone?’ My words a lingering echo, her enigmatic eyes betrayed, dodged answering, but her eyes flickered, ‘Yes!’ My chest’s in a grip.
I pressed on. ‘You're not alone any longer — in the big Apple?’ Francine’s hesitation carried weight, and my will flared in anger, my heart — mindless and stubborn — clung to the thread reeled her back to me.
By a golden sun glow, Aetheria hints at our life’s running parallel — opposing hill crests mirrored across the valley. Yet, I’m left with a ribbon the wind dropped on the landscape, the asphalt winding away ahead. Ahead lies the next surveys in Auxerre — a hotel, a fleeting base, and weeks of setting up total stations and walking the fields.
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