kitesurfing in the bays of antibes
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man! —King Lear
The winds are blowing in Antibes, not, of course, with the same gravitas one finds in Shakespeare’s King Lear. They are more of a nuisance–embêtant, emmerdant–than a metaphor for any internal angoisse I might feel.
When the wind blows the kitesurfers come out to play. I counted eight of them at the Plage de Salis, one of the beaches in Antibes. They race back and forth across the water, jumping over waves and somehow managing not to cross each others’ paths. (Click on any photo to see it larger and in more detail.)
I planted myself at one end of the beach where they would turn and I waited. They saw my camera. One kitesurfer, the yellow helmeted daredevil, soared into the air, letting his kite take him many meters above the water where he would hang and float before slowly dropping into the water, the wind pulling him further across the bay. (Click on any photo to see it larger and in more detail.)
un Voyageur 