Monday, March 17, 2008
SUMMERSCAPES: An occasional series on the rites of summer.
By JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Published: August 10, 2003

It's been a funny summer. Guilt-ridden, I've stayed inside. I've been touring too much this past year and writing too little, and this summer was supposed to be spent clearing my head and getting back to work. But summer is a disobedient season. We plan our summers to be one thing but they turn out to be something else.
I began to realize things weren't going as planned during the Alpe-d'Huez stage of the Tour de France. One benefit of living in Europe is the chance to watch the Tour live on television. To someone clearing his head and getting back to work, 20 days of bike racing, every second of which is broadcast, has much to recommend it. (At the time of this writing, the leader, Lance Armstrong, has pedaled a total of 65 hours, 36 minutes and 23 seconds.) During the early stages of the Tour, after the cyclists left Paris and headed out into the countryside, I checked in only intermittently. Outside, the weather in Berlin was beautiful. I drew the shades against the sunlight and hunched over the glow of my laptop.
Sometimes I kept the television on in the other room, with the sound off, so that I could check on the progress of the race. From my dim office I would see the green hills, the gray sinuosities of stone walls, the charming villages, the sun-hatted spectators waving flags. French girls with bare midriffs stood cheering next to their handsome, sun-tanned, skinny boyfriends.
Those kids were having a real summer. Had I had a real summer when I was their age? It seemed to me I hadn't. As a teenager I had been in a room similar to this, or perhaps the room I remembered was not a real room but only my personality, the viewing booth from which I look out on life. But that's how I feel about summer. Summer always happens to other people. Those spectators who camped out or who rented hotel rooms in St.-Michel-de-Maurienne to see the riders pass by from their balconies, those people were taking in the actual sun, witnessing the drama firsthand, and after the riders disappeared they would go off to eat choucroute and drink Brouilly and make love in their pup tents and chalets.
Of course this outcast feeling of mine is purely temperamental. In reality, I've had a busy summer. I've explored the Blue Grotto on Capri, given a public reading in the Roman Forum, galloped on an Icelandic horse. But these activities lacked the necessary repetitiveness for them to enter my imagination; their very intensity made them pale in retrospect. Only now, watching the multi-colored snake of the Tour winding its way along the roads of France, did I receive my first real impression of summer -- at a distance of 600 or 700 miles. On the day of the Alpe-d'Huez I gave myself permission to tune in earlier than usual. Last year, Armstrong put in a superhuman performance on this stage, powering up the mountain slope at twice the speed of his rivals. This year, Armstrong didn't win. He came out of the Alps with a small lead and, after Jan Ullrich won the time trial to Cap'Découverte, the race tightened further. By the time the Tour reached the Pyrenees, I was guiltlessly watching two to three hours a day.
It's a stirring thing to follow the 100-plus riders on their circuit around the country. From the vantage point of pursuing motorcycles, or sometimes from on high in a helicopter, I swept down from the Belgian border to the southern harbor of Marseille, across to the bridges of Toulouse and toward the southwestern wine region of Bordeaux. Every day I was scandalized by the chaos, by the whole gypsy caravan the Tour is, with scooters and cars whizzing in and out, and spectators getting in the way, squirting water on the riders, running alongside the bikes. Such chaos would never be allowed in an American sporting competition. That's why it's so great. It's vital and boisterous and enliveningly tribal, and every day it drives me to distraction.
Right about here was where the dog came in. Because of course I haven't been staying in my apartment day and night. A few weeks ago I met friends at a biergarten on the Lietzensee, a small lake in the middle of the city. We went to eat in a nearby restaurant and, as we were finishing, an extraordinary beast arrived. For some time now I've been wanting to get a dog. I imagine this animal at my feet while I'm writing. (Yes, it may come to that some day: author portrait with pet.) Out of predictable eccentricity, I was looking into the lavish, semi-obscure breeds, the bouvier des Flandres, the Bernese mountain dog. The shaggy black dog that entered the restaurant, with its long beard and huge stage presence, looked to be a bouvier. The reason I hadn't gone ahead and gotten a bouvier is that the enthusiastic owners of bouviers discourage prospective buyers from getting one. The bouvier has a wonderful disposition, but is famously flatulent, ungodly difficult to groom, and smells, when wet, as you might imagine a Flemish sheepdog might smell.
But here was an actual city-dwelling bouv, accompanying its master into the restaurant after a late-night walk, settling under the table while his owner ordered a schnapps. When I went over to talk with the owner, I learned that the dog was not, in fact, a bouvier, but a breed I'd never heard of before: a Black Russian terrier. The dog paid no attention when I petted it. It just stayed magnificently under the table. Which is exactly what I'm looking for in a dog: a spiritual amanuensis, a sleeping muse.
And so now, when I'm not watching the Tour de France, I find myself corresponding with a Mrs. Pirjo Vakiparta, a breeder of Black Russian terriers in Eura, Finland. I'm learning the specifics about the breed, how it was created during the Second World War from a mix of 20 breeds including the giant schnauzer, the Airedale and the Newfoundland. I am downloading videos from B.R.T. fanatics in Vladivostok in which, instead of the canine romping I expect, the blackies are set loose upon thickly padded figures fleeing across a snowy forest. It occurs to me that maybe the Black Russian terrier isn't such a great family dog. But then I find my way into another site (''The result is St. Petersburg B.R.T.'s due to inbreeding have not the defects of other dogs''). And here is a photograph of a little Russian girl, floral kerchief on her head like a nesting doll, and she herself nesting against the huge, tousled, laughing head of a Black Russian terrier named Ivan.
S ummer isn't over yet. Le Tour continues. (Yesterday Armstrong crashed and came back to win the stage, and from my couch I cheered, all alone.) Every so often I go back to that restaurant by the lake. And that's how it's been. This summer, I'm flying through the Tourmalet Pass with Lance Armstrong and, at night, while Lance is resting, I'm waiting by the Lietzensee, under available moonlight, hoping my Black Russian might amble by. I've lost the ability to partake of nature directly and so must hitch a ride on Lance's Trek. The green of real grass makes less of an impression on me than the Fountainbleau Forest. City-rooted, tired from my travels the rest of the year, I watch summer happening to other people in other places, and the way summer finally reaches me is in the form of a big black dog.
Without moving, I travel to Russia, to Estonia. I enter the little houses and the heartbreaking backyards of the dog breeders in the photos on the Internet. You see them in their living rooms, with the noble terriers squeezed up against the side table and the aging TV, and there on the mantel are the family photos and tchotchkes, and in another shot a plump grandmother has the dog up on its hind legs, its forelegs around her neck, so that they can dance, cheek to cheek, at a wedding celebration in Moscow. At such a time in the world, a picture of an old lady dancing with a dog at a wedding can do wonders for your spirits. It is, after all, a true picture of summer. And when I saw it I knew that summer had happened even to me.
Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for ''Middlesex.''