AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL . . .

This is the third of four “feuilletons” that I wrote for The Milton Times.  (This one appeared on May 23rd under the headline “Finding ‘Your Place’ in Paris, the City of Lights.”)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an essay written by inveterate and intrepid globetrotter Pico Iyer.  First published on the salon.com website in 2000, “Why We Travel” lives up to its title, as Iyer offers a variety of reasons why we pack our bags and head off to far corners of the earth.  Some of us, he suggests, travel to feel humbled—to acknowledge, and thus to broaden, the narrowness of our personal knowledge of the world.  Some of us travel to feel ennobled—to leave some impression of ourselves behind in a foreign place.  One of my favorite reasons that he gives is really quite whimsical: “we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

What Iyer means is that travel allows us to step out of our familiar lives, to step away from the daily patterns and habits that define us and confine us: even if we can’t fully reinvent ourselves, he hints, perhaps we can at least re-imagine ourselves.  And perhaps some element of that re-imagining will endure beyond the time of travel.  There is more than a whiff of reality behind that old song popular at the end of World War I: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree).”

Or perhaps it will quicken us just for the moment.  In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes a phenomenon that I think most travelers experience at some point.  The personal example that he gives is set in Amsterdam: “In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.”  He then goes on to imagine in wonderfully specific detail the lasting contentment he could find behind that alluring door.

My own most recent example is set in Le Marais, a hip district of Paris with streets lined by cafés, brasseries, boulangeries, and boutiques.  De Botton also writes about how simply seeing signs in another language begins the process of transformation that travel enacts on us: the “exoticism” of signage “offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere.”  When I saw the name over a small bar on the rue Vieille du Temple, I was drawn in as if by a magnet: AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL translates literally as “the little iron of a horse” . . . but somehow I knew that it really meant THE LITTLE HORSESHOE.  Sometimes translation seems as magical as alchemy!

And it was perfectly named.  The epitome of “a hole in a wall,” Au Petit Fer à Cheval amounted to a small horseshoe-shaped bar with a half-dozen stools snuggled against it and a pair of low café tables, each with four chairs, squeezed up against the long windows on either side of the doorway.  Outside, four more tables crowded the sidewalk underneath the awning.  The moment we stepped inside, I felt that we had crossed some sort of psychic border.  My wife ordered a pastis—a refreshing anise-flavored liqueur.  I ordered a Leffe, a Belgian beer.

Pico Iyer explains what crossing geographic and cultural borders can do to us: “Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love.  We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation.”  Inside Au Petit Fer à Cheval an old clock jutted out from the wall.  Perched at the horseshoe-shaped bar, I took a sip of my Leffe.  Time stood still.