The Beginnings of Pangaea, Part One
In mid-September of 1990, tourist season was ending at Le Petit Lac campsite.

      They closed the patio seating for meals at the cantine, and stopped the evening "animation" program around the corner from my tent. I could ride my mountain bike across the boule field in the afternoons without knocking over a few bereted octogenarians, and could sleep peacefully without having to hear Kool and the Gang or Madonna every night. This was my new home, living in my own tent after moving out of the Chateau where I had worked during the Summer. My first lesson that tents can be more liberating than castles.
      The camp director, Monsieur Porret, had to pretend harder that he was busy. He would still burst into his bungalow where I was teaching "One Two Buckle My Shoe" for the hundredth time to his baby girl, run to the fridge to grab a liter of Orangina, snicker at his daughter, and run off with some papers in his hand. But I knew the Porret's were much less busy, and asked for a week off to go pick grapes up in the Burgundy area. I had done it the year before and decided it was good for my kidneys ("mal aux reins," as the French call it). Madame Porret agreed to my week-off with reservation, and said in her desperate, depressed and helpless manner that she would try to do without. The night before I left, however, an opportunity came along which would not only postpone the backache for one day, but would change the course of my life.
      Since I had been living on the Cote d'Azur, I had become friends with a group of boys at the beach who worked at the Port de la Rague School of Diving. Yves, Loic, Phillipe, Manu, all simple scuba rats who shared an ocean front bungalow and were always happy to share their nightly barbecues with an Americaine. For my birthday, these guys organized me a party, and treated me to a fantastic "baptisme," my first scuba diving experience. Yves had the hots for Sarah, Sarah, a young, sporty virginal American from the Chateau de la Napoule. She was the kind of sorority sister who can't stand pea-brains and pock-marks in the same guy. Yves invited Sarah to join him on a sailing escapade to the Iles de Lerins, small islands off the coast of Cannes that, though I watched the sun rise over them every evening, I never had a chance to visit. How could I live for five months on the Riviera and not go a day sailing? It's like spending a summer in Death Valley and not going bungy-cord jumping, or an autumn in Pampelona and not getting gored. Sarah ended up backing out, suggesting I " go for it," in her place, and I showed up more out of curiosity than the love of sailing. I had, at that time, completely and finally given up on the male species, at least for a few weeks. But Yves had mentioned something about students and professors on board. Knowing what sort of intellectual stimuli I had been lacking at the campsite, and anticipated in the vineyards, I aimed to get my share of conversation on a higher mental level than a third chorus of Like a Virgin sung phonetically by French grapepickers. Just in case, though, I stuffed the first volume of Norton's Anthology of English Literature in my backpack. (I had ripped it off from the local library, throwing it out the bathroom window onto the sidewalk. Passing pedestrians must have thought it was an anvil). I was memorizing Poe's "The Raven" at the time, and wanted to get in a few Nevermore lines. I called up the folks at the vineyards and told them I wouldn't be able to start until Tuesday morning. "Grapes don't wait for you, Erika," was the answer I got, which meant that will be fine.
      I delayed my departure for grapepicking by a day (it was mid September and the Beaujolais was bursting) and joined Yves at the sailboat which, as he warned me, contained several of his school acquaintances from a French-German engineering program he had dropped out of the year before. Our company would include some professors from the Alsace-Lorraine area, and some German students from the Saarland who were now students in Metz.
      So that’s how I met him, just in sight of Chateau de la Napoule, less than one month before German Reunification. He was not just a passenger on the boat, but quite a seahand. He manned the boat all alone, it seemed, while the professor watched on. Achim wore a rope around his jeans for a belt and was obviously the skipper of the sloop. His eyes smiled at me as I came aboard.
      When we got to talking and he introduced himself as Achim, I asked if it was a Jewish name, and he answered in the affirmative. In fact, Achim means brothers in Hebrew, although he never said that he himself was Jewish. Thus begun my... self-deception?
      We swam out to a lighthouse and begun to talk more in depth about our lives.
     "My mom always ruled the house," Achim explained.
      "Oh yes, I know that one. Typically Jewish Matriarchal family, right?"
      He smiled. Achim still is not a very talkative guy. He finds it amusing how eager I am to bear my soul so quickly, without waiting or feeling out the situation and finding "le mot juste." Perhaps if I had not assumed Achim was Jewish from the start, we would not be together. I don't really know why, though. It's not like I'm on the constant lookout for the perfect J A Prince. Maybe it allured me, made him seem like such a hero, a survivor, even though he was born in 1961, imagine, a German Jew with no hang-ups! And imagine how naive I am!
    &nbspMy assumption about Achim continued until a certain moment of truth. Can you imagine what event brought forth my enlightenment?
      I had had two dinners with him, discussed my own family to some extent, and even asked him some questions about what it was like for his family during the war. Our conversations were hardly superficial, but I felt like Achim had a deep dark past that he was contending with, based primarily on loss. I had no idea to what extent this loss existed. You would somehow figure that I would be observant enough to question his reticence. He also mixed in dead giveaway questions like, "Erika, what do you think makes up a person's personality the most, genes or environmental conditioning?"
      I don't know what I felt the strongest upon realizing, at that moment, that he was not Jewish. Deceit, anger, excitement, confusion... it was dark in the room and I couldn't see his face. But I could feel involuntary tears readying themselves in my eyes. "Your family... were they at least part of the resistance?" Silence, then, "no." We shared so much emotion I don't remember how long we both laid there, sobbing. He heard me sobbing, too, and wanted to comfort me. I wouldn't let him, and instead asked him to please go into another room. Unwillingly he started to go, but then I realized for what earthly good? How could I judge him by his grandparents' actions, of which I didn't yet even know?
      "when I was born," he began in the dark, " my mother wanted a baby girl. So much, she thought I would be one for sure. She was so disappointed when I came out she didn't even what to pick a name for me. She asked the nurse to select something for the birth certificate, and guess what was the first name on the list?"
    &nbspThis explanation still seems a bit farfetched. It makes me think of mom telling me she found me in a garbage can. Is that how he got his name? I thought maybe she took one look at the baby and cried out, "Ach....HIM!"
      Achim had done plenty of sea going before, from huge commercial vessels in Denmark to Greenpeace adventures in the Faroe Islands to solo trips on his 9 meter sloop, which he sold when he started Engineering school. Now he wanted a bigger sailboat. Even as he remained landlocked in his studies, and after that day of sailing that September we didn't set foot in a boat for almost a year. After months trapped in fluorescent computer rooms, laboratories, offices and trade shows, Achim became delirious every night, talking about his mythical 12 meter steel ketch he would buy and sail away with me to heaven.