The Perfect Calm

We all have different ways of dealing with stress. When I was a lawyer, we all had one of those cushy little stress-balls in our desks – generally a freebie from one of the big financial printing companies – and we’d sit around squeezing the things and drinking coffee. Some people run. Some knit, play Sudoko, go on long walks. These days, when I’m stressed, I call Fabrice.

Fabrice is our odd-jobs guy. I’d say he looks the part, but he doesn’t really. Imagine a young guy from a tiny French village doing occasional jobs as a woodworker, builder or gardener, and I’m not really sure what you think of, but it’s not Fabrice. At first sight, he looks more the part of an urban junkie, someone who in a city you might expect to hit you up for some change. He’s rake thin, slight of frame, and about half his body mass is accounted for by the huge bundle of dreadlocks perched uncertainly above his kind, fine-featured face. If Tolkein’s elves listened to Bob Marley, the result would more than likely resemble Fabrice.

The youth of Montcabrier have a tendency, like the youth of most small rural communities, to leave home and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some come and go. But Fabrice has stayed, and has no interest in leaving. The outside world is quite simply too crowded and fast-paced for his liking. So he lives here in a sort of parallel universe, staying alternately with friends, with his parents, or alone in his van. As far as I can tell, he is happy.

We had Fabrice around this week helping to clear up after another round of tree-cutting. He pulls up in his old car, dark gray but for one white fender, and climbs out. He opens the trunk, pulls out his chainsaw, a gas can, an old machete with a taped-up handle. He says a quiet bonjour, we discuss the weather, and then he gets to work.

I watch him for a few minutes cutting branches, methodically stacking logs, one by one, and it reminds of Buddhist monks going about their daily monastic chores. Is he contemplating God as he drags branches and packs them into the trailer? Is he practicing awareness meditation? Pondering Rousseau’s writings on the Noble Savage? I don’t know, but he gives off a sense of calm that is almost soporific. When he’s around, I find myself moving more slowly, speaking more softly. I feel reassured. I used to assume, based largely on his appearance, that he spent his free time smoking weed, but I’ve come to doubt that. Fabrice is a mind-altering substance in his own right.

He pauses, looks around, gathers strength and then swings his machete, separating another branch from a fallen tree. To talk to him you would hardly imagine that the world is in the grips of financial meltdown. He scrapes a living from odd-jobs like this, a bit of construction work, occasionally helping a friend who sells bric-a-brac at local markets in summer. It’s not that he’s lazy – he will carry heavy logs, dig, plant, chop down trees, haul branches all day long without ever appearing tired or uttering a word of complaint. And it’s certainly not that he’s unskilled. Over the years I’ve come to learn that he is an accomplished carpenter – he’s done some amazingly meticulous jobs for us, from building a bookcase to repairing a couple of antique chairs. He even makes traditional wooden rowing boats – I suppose that’s as close as he’s got to a hobby, although it’s hard to imagine him having much need to blow off steam. I once asked him if he sold any. Yes, he makes them to order, in theory at least. But given that his only attempt at marketing is a small wooden sign that reads “bateaux” nailed to a tree along a dead-end country lane, I’m not holding my breath. But then again, neither is he. All he’s after, as far as I can tell, is to live in peace in this quiet corner of France. One could do worse.

But these days I’m starting to see an ambitious twinkle in his eye. A new law in France has made it much easier for people to start their own small businesses and not have to pay enormous social charges, so Fabrice is thinking of setting himself up in a business building wooden houses. He has managed to buy a small plot of land of his own in the forest, reached by a dirt path. Not the choicest real estate, perhaps, but it’s perfect for him. He’s looking for good straight pine trees to cut down to use for building a little chalet. It won’t have electricity, and he’ll heat it with a wood-burning stove, but it will be his, and I would imagine it will suit him just fine.

Of course, my secret fear is that we'll lose our friendly, dependable and curiously enlightened odd-jobs man. He's settling down, building a house, thinking of starting a career. Joining the rat race. But I don't think that will change him. Fabrice will bring that sense of calm to whatever he does. In the meantime, he's very welcome to bring it here.  

  

Keeping it Simple

We came to France for a simpler life. It sounds easy, a goal that should require nothing more than a shedding of things, perhaps a reorientation of priorities. But living a simpler life has proven challenging in some unexpected ways. It takes more patience than I had imagined. It requires physical fitness and mental discipline. And, as it turns out, a simpler life requires a lot of complicated equipment.

When I was first browsing dreamily through John Seymour’s Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency I had different ideas. It all seemed so natural – the book is filled with lovely illustrations of hoes, spades, axes and scythes. A scythe, that’s what I wanted. To spend hours and hours on the land, scything and reaping and threshing and shunting, I wanted nothing more than to live in a world of obscure, hearty Anglo-Saxon verbs. And I was itching to go out and buy all the obscure Anglo-Saxon nouns to do it with.

And it’s amazing just how many of those nouns, Anglo-Saxon and otherwise, I need for even the most basic of tasks. Take firewood. Yes, our ancestors managed to keep the home fires burning using wood processed with axes and saws, but having tried it, I understand why they tended to die young. Today, if you’re cutting your own wood you need a chainsaw. And then of course you want a spare chain, files and perhaps a grinder for sharpening the chain, and a trestle or sawhorse for cutting the meter-long stacked logs into smaller sections for burning. Bigger logs need to be split, so you get an axe, but for even bigger ones, it’s best to get a sledgehammer and a wedge – preferably a neatly twisted one like I’ve got so it splits the wood more easily. It’s all satisfyingly heavy and conveniently cool-looking.

For maintaining the grounds the chainsaw is useful, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ve got brush to cut, grass to mow, branches to trim. You’ve got a garden that needs digging, weeding, planting. Fences, gates, patios need fixing. All this requires massive amounts of gear, much of which involves at least an electric motor if not a combustion engine. There’s the hedge trimmer, the brush cutter, the various power hand tools, a compressor. After the chainsaw, my favorite bit of equipment has always been my jaunty blue tractor-mower. I ride around on it all summer mowing grass and all winter hauling logs. It is my mid-life crisis red convertible, and it makes me happy.

But even the tractor’s place in my heart has been usurped by something new.

We came here with ideas of living in harmony with nature, of reducing our footprint. But it’s not always easy, and ever since we moved in we’ve been plagued by the question of what to do about the terraces. You see, the terraces around our house and holiday cottages are packed earth covered by locally-quarried gravel, an inexpensive, low-impact and very French alternative to paving. But weeds spring up, and the surface area being too big to simply pick them all by hand (believe me, we tried), we have in the past had to resort to chemical weedkillers. But finally I have discovered an environmentally friendlier solution, and yet another piece of equipment.

Some clever person has come up with the idea of destroying weeds by inducing thermal shock. Simplicity itself: a metal tube with a handle attaches to a long flexible hose, which in turn attaches to an ordinary gas bottle of the sort used for gas stoves. A six-inch flame bows out the end of the tube, and you simply hold that flame over the weed for a second or two, until it starts to wither. The shock kills the weed, but does not pollute the environment. In other words, I’ve bought myself a blowtorch.

I spent a very happy and only moderately dangerous afternoon scorching weeds the other day, and I’m totally hooked. This thing is great. Not only does it eliminate unwanted plants, but it’s capable of obliterating pretty much anything in its path – dead leaves, twigs, pets, inquisitive children, all bow before the power of my butane-fed jet of fire. I’m busy dreaming up all sorts of new uses for this new toy. Bonfires will be a piece of cake from now on. Previously I have struggled to perform what should be a simple task of igniting a large pile of dead branches. No problem now, with my portable arson kit I’ll be incinerating garden waste as fast as I produce it. It’s not quite subtle, but after a few humiliating experiences of watching my fires dwindle before accomplishing the job, I’m done with subtle.

I’m not the only one who gets worked up about this kind of thing. I’ve noticed this tendency among both the local farmers and the expats who move here, this obsession with equipment. It’s normal enough – you’ve got a job to do, you need the right tools, but clearly there’s more to it. Farmers here go into massive debt just to own a lot of farm equipment that they could much more efficiently rent as needed. I scoffed at first, but once you’ve seen one of these modern grape harvesters at work - huge sci-fi contraptions that straddle the rows of vines and pick the delicate grape clusters as they roll along – it’s hard not to get drawn in. In cities, people have fancy cars and granite countertops. Here, we’ve got machinery.

But I’m content with what I have. My blowtorch is a small and relatively simple device, but it does the job. And best of all, as I torch plant after plant, weed after insidious weed, into ashes, I can do so with a sense of satisfaction in my heart, knowing that the path of devastation I leave behind me is non-toxic and totally environmentally friendly. I can feel like I’m doing my part.

But the gratification of my pyromania is a definite bonus. 

Rabbits, dinosaurs and a damn good coffee

We have a Saturday morning ritual. It started last year. Sophia decided one morning to try out the farmer’s market in the nearby village of Villefranche-du-Perigord and came back raving about it. So now, every Saturday, we talk about going.

“Do we need anything there?”

“We could maybe use a few more tomatoes.”

Inevitably one of us has recently been to the big, efficient and aggressively un-picturesque supermarket in Montayral. So we shrug, look outside. It’s raining, or it’s already late morning, or we’re feeling lazy.

“Next week, definitely.”

But occasionally one of us bucks tradition and actually goes. As I did this past Saturday.

Villefranche is one of the old “bastide” towns, “new” towns built around the time of the Hundred Years War (14^th and 15^th centuries) as centers of trade that would be loyal – ie pay taxes - to the king rather than to local feudal lords. As picturesque medieval villages go, Villefranche is a pretty ratty one. Lost deep in the forest, far from just about everything, its claim to fame is that the surrounding woodlands are teeming with chestnuts, cep (porcini) mushrooms and deer. Villefranche has a real backwoods feel to it, like the Ozarks only with better food.

The market itself it tiny, especially off-season. There are three or four fruit-and-vegetable stands, our local Montcabrier vintner selling his wine, and usually the mobile pizza van. That’s about it, which is what I love about it. I suppose it appeals to my sense of solidarity with the underdog. I’m a lot like Charlie Brown, who goes to buy a Christmas tree and chooses the smallest, saddest one because it needs him. Surely Villefranche needs me.

And surely no one in Villefranche needs me more than the guy running the smallest of the fruit-and-veg stands. He’s always there, at least he has been every time I’ve shown up, with just a small table of vegetables set up in front of his little van. I don’t know his name – I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it if he tried to tell me. He’s one of these gruff old farmers who speak in a garbled patois that most Parisians wouldn’t understand either, which gives me some comfort as I smile and nod idiotically at the various sounds he produces during our brief interaction.

He’s having a conversation with a few older old men in Occitan, the ancestral language of southern France, which sounds like a mishmash of strangely-pronounced French, Spanish, and Harry Potter spells. He sees me waiting, continues his conversation for a few more minutes as I examine his caged rabbits (they too need me, but they’re better off in a stew than in the clutches of our cat Oliver, who tried to breed with the last rabbit we “rescued”), and then looks up at me as if seeing me for the first time. His friends continue on among themselves, and he comes over to see what I need. I make a polite remark about the weather. He responds “eh behn, za fay du byeng, ung peh d’zolay.” I don’t always know exactly what he’s staying, but I recognize friendliness when I see it. So I smile and reply with something noncommittal as I pick over the half dozen little heads of lettuce on his table to find the one with the least mud plastered to it. I get a few onions. Sometimes he has butternut squash, but not today. What he pulls out of that little van is whatever he pulled out of the ground that morning, no more, no less. Two euros exactly, he informs me. The prices, I’ve noticed, he pronounces with startling clarity.

Feeling smug at having had a genuine olde worlde moment, I move on the other fruit-and-veg guy who has a larger repertoire than my friendly veg-and-rabbit man, and then I’m off to the bakery. I always feel a little guilty there, as if I’m betraying Catherine and Gerard at the Montcabrier bakery, but they make great croissants, and I kind of enjoy smiling at the haunted-looking girl behind the counter, presumably the baker’s daughter, and having her respond with a dark, complex Fellini film sort of expression.

From there I go to the rock shop, and here’s where Villefranche becomes just a little strange. It’s not just a rock shop. It’s a jewelry shop, but much of it is taken up by fossils and minerals. It wouldn’t be at all out of place in a big city – it seems aimed at catering to everyone, from polished tiger’s eye pebbles to custom made necklaces to enormous fossils that any museum would be proud to display.

Fossils are my thing, so I love the place, but I have to ask myself: how many people around here are really looking to fork over several thousand euros for the lower mandible of an Allosaurus? Even the prospect of selling the €500 dinosaur egg seems a little dicey to me. What must friendly veg-and-rabbit man think of this place – is he saving up his euros to acquire a glittering watermelon-sized cluster of amethyst to put on his mantelpiece? “Zay byeng, za.”

I suppose it’s just something that happens in underdeveloped areas beautiful enough to become holiday destinations. This is one of the poorest parts of France, a region of small family farms, where even the better-off locals can remember childhoods hoeing fields or force-feeding ducks. But they now live side by side with retired English and Dutch and urban French couples, with bankers and lawyers who buy second homes here, with foreign families starting holiday cottage businesses and enrolling their children in village schools. Different economies, different priorities, are forced to live side by side.

And the results are mixed. It means that young people have a hard time affording housing here. It means their local cafes and bars, their markets, their churches are invaded by outsiders many of whom hardly speak French much less Occitan. Perhaps it means the loss of a certain sense of authenticity. And yet, it’s not the rock shop or the upmarket café that threatens the local way of life here. They tend not to displace previously existing businesses, and they are locally-owned. It’s the supermarkets in Montayral, so quick and easy and available to everyone, that risk slowly putting an end to the livelihoods of people like friendly veg-and-rabbit man. The outsiders, seeking local color, often are the ones most inclined to shop at the farmers’ markets. The foreign influx, despite its downsides, means income. It means jobs, it means enough people buying produce to keep the markets viable, it means more variety of goods and services.

And it means I can listen to a little Occitan, endure the brooding gaze of the baker’s daughter, examine the lower mandible of an Allosaurus and then go have an Ethiopian Moka Sidamo coffee in the quirky little café up the road, all on a Saturday morning 15 minutes from home. Zay byeng, za.

Becoming a Small

We’ve just come back from spending two weeks in California, and I’ve discovered something unsettling. I’ve shrunk.

If you’ve been following this blog you’ll have guessed by now I intend this in a vague quasi-philosophical sense that will give rise to various reflections on life in rural France about half way through this post. I’m hoping to get there, but first things first. I’m talking clothing.

One of the things we invariably do in America is buy clothing, which is both less expensive and less, er, polyester than much of what we can find within an hour’s radius of our house. But this time around I suddenly found myself buying a shirt in a size “small.” How’d I become a small? I have my suspicions. It’s the same reason that even if I buy a shirt that’s ostensibly my size it fits me like a garbage bag. I’m not shrinking in an absolute physical sense. I have become small now, in a relative sense, because people in general are getting, well, wider.

But - here it comes - this sartorial downsizing has broader implications, a symbolic resonance if you like. Living someplace so small-town and remote has changed me, changed all three of us, more than we might have expected. We have come to feel smaller in what has started to seem like a very big world. Even though I was born in Los Angeles, I felt dwarfed and disoriented on this latest trip back home. Montcabrier to Los Angeles is perhaps an extreme transition - plenty of thoroughly urban people feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA. Plenty of Los Angelinos feel dwarfed and disoriented in LA, which may just explain that impression of pampered goofiness which haunts the world’s entertainment capital. But the fact remains, our tolerance for big has shrunk.

One particular shopping trip really said it all. We went to the Topanga Plaza, a local shopping mall, ostensibly the same mall I visited regularly as a child, with the simple idea of picking up some inexpensive clothing and letting Sebastian ride the double-decker carousel. No big deal, but every step of the way I was reminded of the pervasive smallness of our new home. Having gotten used to narrow country roads, often only a little more than one car wide, just pulling out of my mother’s driveway was confusing. Her suburban street, a cul-de-sac with minimal traffic, is already wider than the main road to Cahors and even a short section of it would qualify in most villages as an ample parking lot. Each lane on a California freeway could nearly serve as two on a French motorway (and Los Angelinos, I noticed this time, are no better at staying within these wide lanes than the French are at staying in their narrow ones). But then they need to be: one in three cars is an SUV or Hummer large enough to transport livestock.

So we arrive at the mall, and in the course of five minutes pass more shops than we could find within a 45-minute drive of Montcabrier. The food court alone offered a dozen varieties of ethnic food – having to choose between Korean BBQ, sushi and Mexican when you have gotten used to the idea of pizza as being ethnic is daunting, but a wonderful problem to have. And then it hit me: our entire village, the whole thing, from the ruined medieval gate at the west end to Jojo’s house at the east, from the village’s resident donkey in his field at the north to the old priory with its Renaissance chimney to the south, would fit within this one enclosed climate-controlled retail space. Even the ceiling with its plentiful roof-windows could easily accommodate the three-tiered triangular bell tower of St. Louis, Montcabrier’s church.

I have to admit, it gave me a vaguely uncomfortable feeling, wandering around so banal a place and yet reacting with a mix of scorn and awe more appropriate to visiting Dubai than to shopping at the local Target. Lost among clothes racks big enough to require planning permission in Europe searching for something wearable among shirts that that look like they should come with poles, stakes and mosquito netting, I felt nostalgic for our little world. And yet this too is home for me. This is what was meant to be my world. Not just the corndog stands and the tacky environmentally nightmarish suburban trucks people drive in, but the vibrancy, the diversity, the sheer energy that comes with packing millions of people into a relatively small area. It is all mine to embrace or to reject, but what did not sit well with me, what really got me thinking, was the fact of being at once so drawn to it and yet so uncomfortable in it. I find myself between worlds, which on some level means being nowhere at all. I am homesick, but I’m no longer sure where home is.

Sebastian has no such sense of angst, as far as I can tell. While Sophia and I waffle about questions of culture and lifestyle and identity and belonging, he just gets on with it. Montcabrier is his world, and LA is a magical far-off land where every couple of years he gets spoiled by his grandmother, plays with his cousin and solemnly shakes hands with Mickey Mouse. Sophia and I may inwardly giggle when he asks if the canary yellow Ferrari that has just blown past us is the mailman, because of course back home that yellow is the signature color of the French mail service, but Sebastian just takes it in stride. Like having to learn French by osmosis when he entered nursery school, this cultural acclimatization is just a normal part of his multicultural world. Papa’s home town is huge and American. Mama’s is a bit smaller and Dutch. Sebastian’s is tiny and French. It’s all fine with him. He is able to appreciate it all for what it is, which in itself is a gift.

Arriving back at my mother’s house, I open the remote-controlled garage door and we drive in to park. Sebastian seems far away and thoughtful as I unbuckle him from the car seat.

“You know,” he says at last, looking around, impressed, “this is a good barn. It’s so big, you can just drive right inside it and not get wet in the rain. I like this barn.” He’s got a point.