The luckier victims manage to pull themselves – and, sometimes, their bicycles – back to dry land, but these incidents can have calamitous outcomes. Thieves fleeing police by bicycle swerve into the river. Cyclists lost in the dark or disoriented by fog steer bikes off towpaths into canals. There are numerous scenarios that can result in the unintentional depositing of a bicycle in a body of water. Some of the bikes may have ended up in the canal by accident. There were bikes whose wheels and frames were intact but whose stems and handlebars were missing: headless corpses. There were bikes with bent and twisted wheels, or no wheels at all. There were scores of other bikes, too, of various makes and vintages, some of which appeared to have been maimed before being sent to their watery grave. As the waters were drawn off, the skeletal forms of dozens of Vélib’ cruisers could be seen half-buried in the sludge on the canal floor. Nine years earlier, in 2007, Paris had launched a bike-share scheme, Vélib’, in which 14,500 rental bicycles were introduced across the city. The most plentiful items in the canal – other than wine bottles and mobile phones – were bicycles. There were baby strollers, shopping carts, at least one wheelchair and several mopeds. A number of vehicles, none of them designed to travel on water, were pulled from the mire. A washer-dryer, a tailor’s mannequin, tables and chairs, baths, toilets, old radios, personal computers.
Mattresses, suitcases, street signs, traffic cones. When the canal was emptied in 2016, crowds gathered on footbridges and along the quais to watch cleaning crews trudge through the mud and clear out the junk. The water recedes, and the stuff kicked or heaved or furtively dropped into the canal over the preceding few thousand nights is revealed. The periodic draining is therefore also an unveiling. It is a dumping ground, a big liquid trash can.
But for the two centuries of the canal’s existence, it has often served a different – in fact, opposite – function. The nearly three-mile-long waterway, which runs south across a swathe of the Right Bank, was originally constructed to keep Paris clean, supplying fresh water to a city plagued by cholera and dysentery. E very decade or so, the city of Paris drains the Canal Saint-Martin.