Day 14 Part 1 - The inferno

20090507 Yesterday's post was perhaps a tad self-pitying, so apologies for that. I'll say no more about my leg today, save that it looks better this morning and mys spirits are higher.

I left Caudebec-en-Caux on the old Havre road, the D982. My thinking was that this would be quiet and a little shorter than staying on the valley floor. French roads are classified by letters: A for autoroute (motorways), N for national trunk roads and D for local. The numbers of A and N roads are unique, like our British system but the numbering of D roads is unique only within the departéent.

I'd thought that a D road would likely be as quiet as our British B roads but the D982 isn't.

I reached it by footpath and walked along the verge as lorries thundered past every few seconds. I don't find it particularly frightening but it's bothersome. In passing, it seems half the lorry drivers are on the phone as they drive.

To improve my visibility, I'm using one of the bright orange tabards that Sue kindly gave me as a present before I left. I've cut it into two pieces; one square on the back of my rucksack and the other is tied to my waistband, dangling like a pennant.

It seems to work pretty well. I've only had honks from drivers on the few occasions that terrrain has led me to walk on the right.

Anyway, I'd had enough of the D982, so plotted a new course on small country lanes. This took me through villages too small for shops or bars. It also meant I passed the giant sequoia tree at la Guerche (pictured). Like me with my orange pennants, it looks incongruous and it's a long way from home.

I didn't get any lunch until after 2pm, when I reached Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon, a petrochemical town with a peculiar smell.

I must have looked forlorn sitting in the empty market, munching on a slice of pizza.

Going further downhill, I was the only pedestrian to walk through the industrial zone, on a road which goes through the centre of the Exxon Mobil refinery. There was the noise of whirring pumps, escaping steam, huge fans for the cooling towers. The smells ranged from revoltingly sulphurous to pleasantly phenolic to sweet and oily. Each installation was a tower of reaction vessels and pipework, with flame stacks decked around like candles. Some of these produced regular gulps of bright orange flame, some burned with constant brightness, and I saw one whose flame was invisible but whose heat shimmered and distorted the shapes of distant chimneys.

To some, it might all look, sound and smell infernal. I loved it.

The problem of environmental pollution and our exploitation of the natural world is immense and I wouldn't want to downplay the seriousness of the issues. But to me, the industrial plant I walked through was no more symbolic of this than the hotel room in which I now sit. Most of these fabrics and fittings and the clothes I wear were manufactured from materials produced in plants like this. The industrial machinery is just another link in the chain which produces so much that we all use and so many despoiling byproducts

The petrochemical plants look quite magnificent. If to some they suggest human callousness of creation then they might also suggest human ingenuity. Walking through them I felt as small as I did on the first day of the walk, which took me beneath La Defense's towers. But unlike the boastful skyscrapers, which try to outshine each other as monuments to corporate ego, the pipes and scaffolds here are honestly functional.

The money shuffled at La Defense, or Canary Wharf or Manhattan, is really no cleaner than the liquids and gasses that are pumped and churned at Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon.

(Continued in Part 2)