Ever since last year I have been puzzled by two things. First there were these rolls of carpet that seemed haphazardly placed in the gutters all over the streets of Paris. Then, there were all kinds of padlocks that appeared on the Pont des Arts, the walking bridge between the Louvre and the French National Academy.
Now these rolls of carpet, about 1 ½ feet long and 4 to 6 inches thick and tied with a piece or two of string, just lie about in the gutters. Which is hard to understand because the "maires de Paris", the mayors all 20 of Paris' arrondissments have the Green Machine (cleaning crews) out every day cleaning the streets. And these cleaning crews don’t mess around. They descend on streets in teams of 4 to 8 [maybe even more]. You can’t help but notice them; all dressed in their bright green uniforms. Everything about them is green. Their clothes, trucks, cars, street-cleaners, hoses, even their plastic garbage bags that they place on the garbage can hoops that are located all over Paris.
These guys come driving down a street; their water truck alongside the men with their hoses, power washing down the sidewalks. All the debris is directed into the street. Then they turn on the street water to flush the debris down the drains. Whatever doesn’t float or move into and down the drains, gets swept into the middle of street so that the street-cleaning truck can pick it up. But nothing or nobody removes the rolls of carpet?!?! They are like the Terminators of debris. Mini-monuments to street debris like plastic bags and cigarette butts that will never degrade.
But like a French foreign legionnaire looking for an oasis in the desert, I kept looking for an answer to these rolls of carpet. I mean, they are just plain ugly and left in the gutters to unravel when, lo and behold, someone tosses out the old one and replaces it with a new fragment of carpet carefully tied with string! The mystery is not too hard to unravel once you walk around when the gutters of Paris are being flushed. You see, Paris has two water systems - the one that supplies fresh water to homes, businesses, etc and the other that flushes the gutters all around Paris. Anyone who's been to Paris can't fail to notice this marvellous Parisian street water system. The Green Machine turn them on to flush the debris down and into the sewers. You can’t walk through Paris without seeing at least one street with a gush of rushing water flowing down one or more streets and into a sewer. So you write it off as street cleaning; which it is. But then there are these rolls of carpet……
One fine morning just a few weeks ago, I woke up around 6 AM. A great time to get a jump start on the day. Do some grocery shopping or watch the marchés and the merchants set up their stalls. So on my walk around the neighborhood, there they were, the Green Machine out in full force, right in front of my apartment in the "Quarter Latin." What a perfect time to ask about those carpet rolls.
I must have spoken correctly, because without a word, one of the Green Machine "mecs" walked me down the street to the nearest carpet roll. Still silent, he kicked the carpet roll to one side of the water coming out from the street hydrant, looked up at me, and smiled. Then, he kicked the carpet roll to the other side of the street hydrant and exclaimed, “voilà.” And the penny dropped. These carpet rolls are not the terminators of debris, they are water diverters placed strategically to shunt the water to either side of the spout from which the water is gushing (and the water can be quite torrential at times!). Mystery solved….it is so endearing to think that although the French have invented and implemented the most ingenious of street cleaning systems, they have nevertheless come to rely on little pieces of rolled-up carpet tied with string to make the sytem work more efficiently! You have to love it! The only question that remains is who actually makes up these carpet rolls and puts them in place - is it the Green Machine or is it the proprietors of the shops and businesses? I have a mental image of members of the Green Machine sitting around smoking (probably in some place where smoking is strictly "interdit,") chatting away and tying up these little carpet rolls! Where do these little uniformly-sized pieces of carpet come from? Perhaps one of our French "amis" can enlighten me? And what about those padlocks on the Pont des Arts???.....aaaah, more to follow.
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