Landon_Ewald

Life, Lust, and the Lion of Belfort: The Unlikely Journey of Landon Ewald So, you want to know who I am? I’m Landon. Born in the shadow of a lion carved into a red cliff, raised in the guts of a fortress city, and now — I write about what I know. Cars. Desire. The strange, winding roads that connect them. I’ve spent thirty years studying how people connect, or fail to, and the last ten figuring out why a purring engine can feel as intimate as a whispered secret. I live in Belfort, France. Always have. Probably always will. It’s the kind of place that gets into your bones. July 5th, 1975. The heat was a physical thing, pressing down on the slate rooftops of Belfort. I came into the world at the old Hôpital du Château, not far from the Porte de Brisach. My mother swore the summer storms that year were louder than any cannon fire the old Vauban citadel ever heard. The room faced west, and I swear I could smell the dust of the old town, that mix of sun-baked stone and the faint, sweet rot of fruit from the market on Rue de la République. Being born in a fortress city… it leaves a mark. You learn to be resilient, to guard your walls. My father was a technician at Alstom, the big train factory that was the heart of the region back then. My mother, she had a quiet, fierce intelligence, working part-time at the Bibliothèque Municipale. I think I inherited my need to understand people from her. And my stubbornness from him. A solid, working-class start. The kind where you learn the value of something not by its price, but by how well it’s built. Like a car engine. Like a relationship. The late 80s and 90s were… formative. I was a quiet kid, more interested in watching than participating. While other guys my age were at the skatepark near the Étang des Forges or hanging outside the Marché Couvert, I’d be on my bike, riding the Route de Roppe just to feel the wind. I saw my first real car – a black, meticulously kept Porsche 911 – parked near the Lion of Belfort. It was a work of art. But it was the people around cars that really got me. The way a guy’s voice would soften when he talked about his engine. The way a woman would slide into a leather seat, a look of pure ownership on her face. I started hanging around the small garages on Rue de l’Arsenal, just watching, listening. I got a gig washing cars for a retired professor from the Université de Franche-Comté who had a collection. He talked about his cars the way I later heard people talk about their lovers. “She’s temperamental in the cold,” he’d say. “You have to treat her right, or she’ll leave you stranded.” I was nineteen when I had my first serious girlfriend. A law student named Elodie. It was intense, clumsy, and utterly consuming. We’d drive her old Peugeot 205 GTI down the Route de Giromagny, park in the shadow of the Vosges mountains, and talk for hours. Or not talk. Those drives taught me that intimacy isn't just physical. It’s a shared space. A cockpit for two. Why did I get into sexology? Honestly? Because I kept failing. I had all this… experience. Emotional, sexual. Some of it was good. Some of it left scars. I saw friends, people I loved, crash in relationships. They were trying to follow a map that didn’t exist. And the advice out there? Useless. “Just communicate.” Right. But how? When you’re looking at someone you adore, your heart pounding in your throat, and you want to say something but the fear of getting it wrong locks your jaw. I went back to school. I’m not saying I’m a genius. But I’m curious. I studied psychology at the Université de Franche-Comté, the campus on Rue Engel Gros, while working nights at a garage on Rue du Dr Jacquot. I learned the science, the biology, the pathology. But the real education happened in the small café near the old theater, talking to people. Or in the passenger seats of cars, listening to couples confess their fears while they drove around the Place de la République. I became a clinical sexologist. I worked with people for over fifteen years. I’ve sat with CEOs who were terrified of intimacy. I’ve counseled couples who spoke a different emotional language. And I learned that the mechanics of sex are simple. It’s the stories we tell ourselves — about our bodies, our worth, our pasts — that make it complicated. So maybe I do know a few things. But I’ve also learned that the moment you think you have all the answers is the moment you stop being useful. Belfort. Where do I even start? It’s a city of thresholds. You come through the Belfort Gap, the Trouée de Belfort, the natural corridor between the Vosges and the Jura, and you’re here. It’s always been the gateway. Strategic. My life is a series of routes through this city. I know the exact spot on the Avenue Jean Jaurès where the cobblestones vibrate in a certain rhythm that makes your bones hum. I know the way the light hits the Lion in the late afternoon, making it look like it’s about to roar. That’s my city. A fortress built by Vauban, a monument to resistance. You can’t grow up here without that seeping into your soul. I have my coffee at Le Vauban on the Rue du Général Dufieux. I walk the promenade at the Étang des Forges when I need to clear my head. My best friend from childhood still lives on Rue de la Résistance. It’s not just geography to me. It’s memory. It’s the smell of the Savoureuse river after rain. It’s the echo of the carillon from the Cathedral of St. Christophe. This city taught me that to stand firm, you don’t have to be loud. You just have to be present. And that’s something I try to bring to everything I do. I don’t practice clinical sexology anymore. Too many walls. Too many closed rooms. The truth is, some of the most honest conversations I ever had with my patients happened in the parking lot of the Leclerc hypermarket, after a session, just leaning against their car. So, I shifted gears. I started writing. I’m currently the lead writer for the theautosDating project on theautosight.com. It’s a weird blend, right? Cars and dating? But it’s not. It’s about shared journeys. It’s about the psychology of the driver’s seat. I write articles from my home office in Belfort. My window looks out onto the old city walls. One week I’m analyzing the link between the car you choose and your attachment style. The next, I’m mapping out the most romantic night drives through the Vosges, starting right here from the Porte de Brisach. I use everything I learned in my years of practice. But now, instead of sitting opposite someone in a sterile office, I’m writing to them, hoping they’ll think about it on their own drive home. It’s more honest, I think. Less pretense. You want to know about desire? Go for a drive. Pay attention to who you feel safe with. See who you’re willing to let take the wheel. I didn’t leave my past behind. I just found a better road. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in Belfort was a masterclass in contradictions. The industrial boom from Alstom was fading, but the city still had that gritty, working-class energy. Everyone knew someone who worked at the factory. There was a collective pride, but also this underlying anxiety. I remember the Fête de la Musique flooding the streets around the Mairie with sound, this incredible, chaotic joy. Then you’d turn a corner, and there’d be a bunch of guys in leather jackets, leaning on their souped-up Renault 5s, talking about nothing but torque and quarter-mile times. That was my tribe, even if I was on the edge of it. I was never the best mechanic, but I was the one they came to when a fight with a girlfriend had them twisted up inside. I’d sit on the hood of their car and just listen. They’d talk for hours, more honest there, in the dim light of a garage under the Rue de la Gare, than they ever were at the bar. There was an incident when I was 17. A friend, Christophe, a guy who could rebuild a carburetor blindfolded, got into a terrible crash on the N1019. He survived, but he was never the same. Not physically — mentally. The fear got into him. He couldn’t touch a car, couldn’t touch his girlfriend. The trauma just locked him up. I was the one he talked to. Night after night. That was my first real case, I guess. I had no training, just intuition. I listened. I didn’t try to fix him. Eventually, he let me drive him out to the old airfield. We just sat in his car. For hours. The next week, he drove it around the block. The week after, he picked up his girlfriend. That’s when I knew. The connection between the machine and the soul — it was real. It was something I needed to understand. It took me twenty years to get the words for what happened that night. But the experience itself? That was the education. You can’t learn that from a book. You live it, or you don’t. I lived it.