La Rochelle and the Mission — Part 1
Taking a train from Paris, I arrived in La Rochelle, an old fishing town on the coast of western France, in August of 1965. I was there to stay with a local family and improve my French, a subject I was not exactly acing back at Exeter. I had been on a safari in East Africa with my father and his new wife (more on that in another post), and the decision was made to drop me off in France for a month before I returned to California. It sounded good…in theory.
The family turned out to be middle-aged, very Catholic, and strict, with a drab apartment whose walls reeked nauseatingly of steamed vegetables. I was supposed to attend a school down the road, speak only French with the family, and then pass an exam at the end of the summer. I wasn’t a cool, worldly seventeen year-old, but I saw immediately that this situation was going to be deadly…unless I could figure some way out of it. And still pass the exam.
I didn’t bother to unpack. After dinner (served at five o’clock, naturally), I laid on the bed in one of their grown children’s rooms and scoured a map for signs of surfable beaches. There was an island just off the coast called the Ile de Re, and it looked promising. How I was going to get there, or find a surfboard, were questions I would answer later on. But the prospect of waves was good, so I had hope. I walked into the living room and, fumbling obsequiously in French, asked where I might find people my age, perhaps a nightclub? The couple looked at me with raised eyebrows, wondering whether I was going to be a problem, then conferred and told me of a place in town where music was played and young people danced.
The Rolling Stones’ “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” dominated the airwaves that summer; you couldn’t go anywhere in the streets of the western world without hearing it. I arrived at the “Cirque” nightclub after a twenty minute walk and, drawn by the siren song, entered the pulsing darkness where maybe 75 people were dancing. Things were looking up.
I scanned the dancers and was eventuallly drawn to a longish, curly-haired young man dancing without inhibition…and then saw what his T-shirt said: “Biarritz Surf Club,” I kid you not. My jaw dropped. He must have read my mind, because when he saw my expression he broke into a grin. I made my way over to him and shouted above the music—“Vous jouez sur les vagues??”
He laughed and replied in very American English, “Of course! I’m the only surfer for a hundred miles!” Not only did he confirm that there were waves on the Ile de Re’s long, sandy beaches, but he had them all to himself and he was getting awfully lonely. Oh, and he happened to have a second surfboard! I almost fell over.
His name was Coco Boshard—I remembered the name and a photo of him from a recent issue of Surfer Magazine—and he was in La Rochelle on his Mormon mission. Meaning he had to go door to door proselytizing, then break away every few days to ride his scooter out to the island and surf the empty waves. We became instant friends; I rented a scooter and left for the island with him the very next morning. Until I returned four weeks later to take the exam, that was the last night I spent with my assigned French family.
Coming Next: Part Two—Ile de Re, living in the dunes