Mistral — Issue Seven

MISTRAL ISSUE SEVEN · A MAGAZINE ABOUT GOING SLOWLY Twelve days on a boat that does eight kilometres an hour Why the night train came back A cartographer who refuses to draw roads

Contents 04 Eight kilometres an hour Twelve days between Rotterdam and Nancy 18 The night train, again What came back, and what did not 30 Blank where the road is A cartographer's quiet argument 44 Letters Mostly about the bread piece Mistral comes out three times a year and is made by four people who have other jobs. We do not take advertising, which is why this issue is thin and late, and why the next one will probably be too.

Eight kilometres an hour TWELVE DAYS BETWEEN ROTTERDAM AND NANCY · WORDS BY ANNIKA BERG T he barge does eight kilometres an hour and cannot be persuaded to do more. I knew that before I stepped on, and I had told myself it was the point. It took four days before I believed it. What changes first is not the pace of the boat but the pace of your attention. On day one I read two books and was bored. On day five I watched a heron for forty minutes and would have called it a full afternoon. On day nine I stopped carrying my phone to the wheelhouse, not as a discipline but because I kept forgetting it. The locks are where the day happens. There are eighty-two of them between the Maas and the Moselle, and each one is a conversation: with the keeper, with the boat ahead, with whoever is walking the towpath and has decided to help whether or not help was needed. Most of them are automatic now. You hang on a rope, press a pole, wait for a light. It takes eleven minutes and there is nothing to do with those minutes, which is the first thing that feels like waste and the last thing you would give up. At Liverdun a woman in her seventies took our rope without being asked, tied it off, and told us her father had done this stretch with horses. She said it as a fact, not as nostalgia, and then she went back to her walk. Nobody on the water is in a hurry, and it takes a week to stop finding that suspicious. The commercial barges — the real ones, ninety metres of gravel — go faster than us and still wave. Twice we were overtaken by a cyclist we had overtaken that morning. “On day five I watched a heron for forty minutes and would have called it a full afternoon.” On the twelfth day the Moselle opened up and Nancy arrived the way a town arrives when you are doing eight kilometres an hour: slowly, and then for a very long time. First the gas holder. Then the sidings. Then an hour of warehouses. Then, eventually, a spire. I had booked a train home for the following morning and I changed it. Not out of any great revelation — I simply could not face doing in four hours what had just taken twelve days, and I wanted one more evening of not moving quickly. MISTRAL 07 · 4

Letters Your piece on bread was wrong about the salt, and I say that as someone who has been wrong about the salt for twenty years. Keep going. R. OKONJO, BRISTOL I read the night train article on a night train, which I understand is the most predictable thing a reader can do. It was better that way. M. HALVORSEN, TROMSØ Please stop putting the page numbers in the middle of the footer. That is my whole letter. ANONYMOUS Six months ago you printed a map with the ferry route drawn in the wrong direction. I have been waiting for the correction and I now suspect it was the cartographer's idea of a joke. If so, well played. J. PRIETO, VALENCIA A small thing: the paper. Whatever you changed to in issue five, keep it. It does not shine under the lamp I read by, which no magazine has managed in years. T. IWASAKI, KYOTO Mistral Edited by Annika Berg. Design by Studio Aveline. Proofread by whoever answers first. Printed on the coast, three times a year, in an edition of 2,400. Letters are welcome and are edited only for length. We print the ones that disagree with us as readily as the ones that do not, and slightly more happily. LETTERS@MISTRAL.EXAMPLE