I Think It’s the Railroad Tracks

We made it to Burgundy.

The car ran smoothly the rest of the drive, no warning lights, no drama, as if to say everything was fine and I had overreacted. I took that as confirmation that whatever had happened on the way here had been situational, not structural.

We unloaded in Nolay and stood in the driveway longer than necessary, listening. July. Vineyards. The kind of quiet that suggests you are allowed to exhale. After the first two months in France, after the rentals and the logistics and the constant low-level vigilance, this felt like arriving somewhere that expected you to function normally.

Our July rental sat in the heart of wine country, small and surrounded by vineyards whose names you do not say out loud until you are sure you deserve to. It felt intentional. Like we had chosen this place to regroup.

In a week or two, friends would arrive from the States. People who spoke English. People who did not need context. We would show them how we lived now. Where we shopped. Where we ate. How this all worked. There was a Tour de France stage coming through nearby, the kind of thing you plan a whole summer around and then wait all day for fifteen seconds of chaos. Burgundy was supposed to be the part of the story where things settled.

The house helped sell it. Stone exterior. Thick walls. The suggestion of calm built into the architecture. It looked like the kind of place where you host people without apologizing.

The property was shared with the winemaker, which had sounded romantic when we booked it months earlier, back when we were still in America and optimism was cheaper. In practice, it meant other people, other routines, and a sense that we were visiting someone else’s life rather than inhabiting our own.

Inside, the house began to correct our assumptions.

The bedrooms technically existed. The beds technically fit bodies. Comfort, however, was not part of the design brief. Mattresses felt provisional, as if they were meant to be upgraded later and never were. The arrangement suggested capacity, not care.

We moved through the space quietly, adjusting expectations without saying so out loud. The kind of adjustment you make when you are already tired and do not feel like renegotiating reality on day one.

We told ourselves it was charming. We told ourselves we were being refined. What we had rented was melancholy.

We did what we always do when comfort fails unexpectedly. We went outside. We poured wine. It was easier to sit with a glass in our hands and the vineyards in front of us than to admit that the Burgundy we had promised our friends existed somewhere else.

The car was fine for a few days, which only strengthened my case.

It was on the drive back from the grocery store that the theory began to fray. I crossed a set of railroad tracks just outside town and the steering wheel went rigid in my hands. Not locked exactly. Just suddenly uninterested in my input. No power steering. Two seconds. Maybe three. There was a left turn coming up.

Then it came back, as if nothing had happened.

Only afterward did the tracks begin to matter. They were not small. Two sets, heavy and deliberate, the kind built to haul real weight. I noticed that once I needed them to explain what had just happened.

I sat at the next stop sign with my heart rate elevated but my posture intact. This part mattered. Panic would only encourage it.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, I had an explanation that made sense to me. “It’s the railroad tracks,” I said out loud.

A day or two later, it happened again. This time Denise was with me.

As we crossed those same tracks on the way into Santenay, the steering stiffened. Not long. Just long enough. Long enough for both of us to feel it.

“Did you feel that?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “The tracks.”

“The railroad tracks,” I repeated, slower this time, the way you do when you believe clarity is the problem. “There must be some kind of interference. Magnetic. Or electrical. Trains are heavy. A lot of energy. Or maybe it’s the vibration.”

She continued looking at me.

I nodded, reassuringly. To her. To myself. This was not the first time I had invented science in the absence of facts. I had done it confidently for years.

The truth was, I had no idea what I was talking about. But the explanation had a few advantages. It was external. It required no immediate action. And it allowed me to believe the car was not broken. Just sensitive.

She looked at me the way you look at someone who has already committed to a bad explanation and will now defend it purely out of momentum.

“It didn’t feel like railroad tracks did it,” she said.

“Well,” I replied carefully, “not all tracks are the same.”

Inside my head, a different conversation was unfolding. One that involved distances, mechanics, language barriers, and the exact number of ways this could become a problem I did not know how to solve.

Outwardly, I stayed calm. Calm was still available to me at that point. I had not lost it yet.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. What I meant was, please let this be nothing.

It needed to be looked at. But we were in Nolay, and if you ever want to know what isolation feels like, try finding a Mercedes specialist in a town where tractors outnumber humans. So I did what I always do when things feel slightly off but not yet catastrophic.

I postponed action.

There was still the house. Laundry appeared outside our window. Not dramatically. Just there. Shirts. Towels. A reminder that whatever we thought this was supposed to be, it was something else.

We sat on the couch and opened a bottle. Sully jumped up to join us, placing his paws on the back cushion the way he always did. The couch responded by giving up entirely. Wood snapped. The frame sagged. Everything tilted at once.

No one said anything for a moment. That was when Denise said no. Not loudly. Not angrily. Just definitively.

We told the owner, a British guy, that we were moving out. He was actually decent about it. Said they would refund us for the unused time. It felt like one small thing going our way.

So we booked a new place closer to Beaune. It was huge, expensive, and perfect for the two couples coming to visit us for the Tour de France. For a brief moment, it felt like we had course-corrected. We were back on track.

Then the owner’s wife got involved. She pulled the plug on the refund. The husband vanished from the conversation, reappearing only cc’d on her email, like someone blink-signaling under duress. It was clear the authority lived elsewhere.

The message was simple. We were on our own.

So we packed up and drove toward Beaune, telling ourselves this next place would reset things.

Bernard owned the rental. We had just met him. He helped us unload and showed us around, pointing out rooms and switches and things we would inevitably forget. When we stepped back outside, he asked how the drive had been, then glanced at the car sitting there like it had decided to stay.

“Nice car,” he said. I shrugged. “It stopped working.”

Here? He said it lightly, almost amused, as if cars occasionally chose inconvenient moments and this was simply one of them.

“What is wrong?” he asked. I told him the truth. I had no idea.

He nodded the way men do when uncertainty is presented respectfully, then said he had a mechanic. A very good one. Someone who worked on Aston Martins.

My shoulders dropped. Aston Martin implied precision. It implied competence. It implied that this was no longer my problem to solve. Bernard said, “I’ll call him Monday.” Easy. He said it the way you say weather forecasts or dinner plans, like something that would simply occur.

I did not ask for a name. I did not ask for a location. I did not ask what would happen if Monday did not work out. I accepted the existence of the mechanic as if the idea itself carried weight. I did not want details. Details would have required me to stay alert.

I still needed a car. Friends are arriving soon and plans are already in motion, so the next morning I’m in the back of a taxi headed to the nearest Enterprise location, which turns out to be in Chalon-sur-Saône.

It’s supposed to take twenty-five minutes. It takes nearly an hour. The driver pulls up at the wrong place first. I check the directions on my phone to make sure he isn’t padding the ride. Then he drives me across town without comment. When we finally stop, he charges me eighty euros. Cash. No apology.

I pay it without protest. By now, I am collecting small humiliations like receipts. They feel familiar.

At Enterprise, the man helping me speaks excellent English and makes a strange, guttural sound every few sentences. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just persistent. Almost rhythmic. It lands somewhere between a throat clearing and a quiet warning.

At first, I assume it’s a tic. Then I wonder if it’s a regional thing. Some kind of conversational punctuation. A verbal comma. Whatever it is, he uses it constantly. Enough that I start waiting for it. Enough that when it doesn’t come, I feel like something’s missing.

He asks if I can drive a manual transmission. I tell him I can. He blinks, then nods, approvingly. Most Americans cannot, he says.

I feel an irrational surge of pride, like I’ve just been granted temporary citizenship. The sound returns. Again. Same noise. Same timing. I briefly wonder if he’s talking to someone else. Or if he’s just keeping himself company.

I sign the paperwork, take the keys, and leave without ever asking about the noise. At this point, I’m not sure I want the answer.

When I return to the house, something is off.

The car has been moved. It was no longer parked where I had left it. It had been turned around and placed neatly at the back of the driveway, as if someone had taken the time to consider its best angle. Denise came outside smiling. Bernard stood behind her. At some point while I was gone, he had taken the liberty of starting the car and taking it for a drive. I had known the man less than twenty-four hours.

I asked how it drove. He smiled and said it was most agreeable. A very fine vehicle. He mentioned that he and Denise had noticed a faint burning smell when he returned, but he did not seem concerned. Then he reminded me again about the mechanic. Monday. Easy.

I wanted to believe him. I wanted the story to end there, with competence borrowed and order restored. I wanted Bernard to be the kind of man who appears briefly in a crisis, absorbs it entirely, and leaves you with nothing to do but say thank you.

At the time, it felt like that was exactly what was happening. It was not.

We saw Bernard’s car pull into the driveway on Sunday afternoon.

That alone felt unusual. Sunday was not a day for logistics or solutions. Sunday was for slowing down, not accelerating into problems. A woman stepped out of the passenger side and, for a brief moment, Denise and I exchanged a look that suggested we might be in trouble. Had we offended someone. Overused the dishwasher. Violated an unspoken rule about recycling.

Bernard introduced her. This is my wife, Virginie. Of course she was.

You could tell immediately that she was not a supporting character. Her posture suggested authority. Her gaze suggested efficiency. She had lived in Germany for fifteen years, running a high-end hotel with Bernard, and she carried herself like someone who did not lose arguments because she did not enter them unprepared.

She had heard about our car.

This mattered more than it should have. It meant the problem had left my head and entered the world. Virginie did not ask questions the way people do when they are curious. She asked them the way people do when they are already assembling a solution.

She did not tell us she would help. She assumed she would. I did not know exactly what that meant yet. I only knew I felt less responsible for figuring it out.

The next day she texted me.

Appointment confirmed. Drop off Wednesday night. Garage was about 7 kilometers away. No need to thank her, this is just what we do.

For the first time since Tours, I allowed myself to believe that this was now in competent hands. Not borrowed competence. Real competence. The kind that came with appointments and distances and certainty. I did not question how it had happened. I did not ask why it had not happened sooner. I accepted it the way you accept a warm blanket without asking who folded it.

Wednesday came.

Denise will follow me in the rental so we can drop the car off and finally begin the repair process. The sequence makes sense. Two cars. One destination. A plan. We are doing something. Progress has a shape again.

The car won’t start. Not sluggish. Not reluctant. Dead. Nothing. No warning. No click. No effort at all. The dashboard stayed dark. The engine remained silent. The explanation I had been leaning on quietly left the room.

This was not railroad tracks. This was not interference. This was happening. We stood there looking at it longer than necessary, as if patience might produce a different result. It did not. The car had moved beyond moodiness. It had entered a new phase. Nonparticipation.

I called around and found a local man who said he could tow it the next morning. He arrived exactly when he said he would, which at that point felt like a miracle. We loaded the car and headed toward the garage.

As he was unloading the car, I asked how much. Two hundred euros, he said. Cash only. Of course it was.

I treat cash like an artifact. I might have four euros on me on a good day, most of it in coins I refuse to acknowledge are real money.

I tell him “I’ll be right back!” and take off. I drive down the only streets I see in Bligny-lès-Beaune. Quickly. Past the church. Past the café. Past a closed storefront and a parking lot with three cars in it. Then I turned around and drove them again.

There was no ATM. No bank. Nothing that suggested I had missed something the first time. So I drove to Beaune, the nearest place where a bank might exist. I drove faster than was reasonable, running through mental math and worst-case scenarios as if speed might shorten the list. I found a bank, withdrew the cash, and drove straight back, rehearsing apologies and explanations I hoped I wouldn’t need.

The garage was empty. The tow truck was gone. The car was gone.

The silence that followed landed all at once. My mind did not pause to gather facts or wait for clarification. It went straight to theft. To loss. To paperwork I could not complete in a language I did not speak. To the specific humiliation of being the American who lost his car because he didn’t have two hundred euros in his pocket.

I got back in the car and drove, scanning every road, every turnout, every shape that might resolve the panic before it fully formed. That’s when I saw him, further up the road. The truck.

I flagged him down and pulled over. He was calm. I was not.

Through a mix of gestures, broken French, and DeepL, I learned that the garage did not have the tools to fix the car. He had taken it back. He had tried to help. He had failed.

He made another call. Then he told me the Mercedes dealership in Dijon could look at it.

By August 15. It is July 12.

August 1st, I will be back in Charente-Maritime, six hundred kilometers away. I look at him and he shrugs, the universal French gesture for this is how it is.

I try to pay him. He refuses, says he didn’t do anything. I insist, tell him what he did was honorable and that I appreciate it. He finally takes the cash and says he’ll apply it to the next tow, if I can find someone to fix the car while I’m still in Burgundy.

He isn’t unkind. He’s just operating inside the same limits I am. There is nowhere else to push.

So I call Virginie.