You know the scenes of ancient Greece where the clouds are dark and huge and there’s lightning and sheets of rain slap the street and this glowing light comes from somewhere, indicating some celestial being is not happy, and generally humans are a little in over their heads? That’s what it was like arriving on Sicily.
At one point our plane broke through to an area between two towering, tumultuous cloud banks, and from there the two feisty storms wrestled their ways up the mountain, toward the sunlight. Below, a patchwork of green fields fearlessly raced to beat them to the top of the hill, and at the culmination of this whole thing, right at the finish line, glowed an intense light that, veiled by a downpour, shot heavy orange light onto all participants, the plane included. The orange light dominated the fight scene, and I wondered if arriving there is both punishment and reward. It felt like we were looking into the throat of a god, and I wasn’t really ready to commit right there and then to meeting it.
So the plane flew on, it took us to the airport.
I’ll skip the boring stuff and leave you with this: I asked for a train to Villalba. They said I’d take a bus to Caltanisseta and change there, so dude told me there was no time to waste (Andiamo, now now!) and we ran to the bus. As I was getting on I asked another dude, how much is it? (“Quanti Euro?”) and he shook me off and said, “Don’t worry about it, everything is free in Italy.” To which everyone laughed and I laughed and thought, “No, really.”
We drove three hours on winding roads in pouring rain. “No, really.”
The last train wasn’t running, so they called a hotel for me. “No, really.”
They dropped me off and showed me the hotel. “No, really.” But by that time I’d realized they were going out of their way to help me, and this wasn’t something new for them – it was hospitality. This is what they do when someone needs it. Azure had a similar experience when she arrived here a couple years ago. I wonder how they get anything done, driving foreigners all over the island like that.
“Avete mucho pazienze,” I finally said, in front of the hotel.
For dinner I had a wonderful pizza (woman undercharged me, and winked) and got to write a couple blog posts. It’s 4am here, but I’ve taken another sleeping pill, so hopefully I’ll manage to get a few more hours of sleep and then at least my head will be right. But apparently the reason Jet Lag Fs your S is that your organs operate at certain times of your daily rhythm (sleep cycle), so the dramatic change is confusing for them, which is why I can feel like I’m blogging drunk even though I’m not. Go figure.
From the plane, it looks like a web of lights is clinging to the French coast and spreading inland in constellations. And the lines and webs extend to the horizon where they climb onto the black sky and become stars.
And ahead, morning light gathers into an arc and builds its Mediterranean blue, then it spills into the sea. It conjures orange and pink, and finally, gaining confidence, the morning matures and pushes away the night. We fly into its colors.
Below, in France, places I love are waking up. People I love are waking up. Places I have loved in the past are waking up. People I have loved in the past are waking up. Places I will love in the future are waking up. People I will love in the future are waking up.
The girls hopped from rock to rock with their skirts brushing the bushes. They sang high-pitched hymns that reached us in the wind, voices fragile like glass, clear and pure as the hill’s high air. From here we could see the Mediterranean to our right and the Pyrenees to the left.
Gabriel knelt.
“This is rocayrol.” The frizzy little lettuce grows in the cracks in high places. He slid his knifeblade into the rock and sliced the rocayrol at its root, tossed it in his basket then searched for another. Gabriel wears a leather necklace with a stamp-sized image of the Virgin Mary on one side and Jesus on the other, and it dangled outside his shirt.
“That’s asparagus,” he said, pointing to a fern leaning into the path. I’d never seen wild asparagus. “That’s fennel. And over there, that’s lemon balm. A tea of lemon balm, rosemary and mint gives men strength in the morning.”
We were collecting dinner salad for 13 people – the parents, nine kids and us two guests. Though they live on a farm in the valley, they collect much of their food from the surrounding hills. “God is generous,” the father said. And while neither of us is religious, as travelers our job is to listen to understand. And we understood.
“Rocayrol has the most wonderful taste,” he said. “It loves high rocks in the sun.” So we climbed high to find it, and as we collected it we listened to the girls’ crystalline hymns.
Azure fell in love with a Corsican cheese, a cheese that doesn’t travel well. We were leaving in a couple days and she might never again see or taste the enchanting, goaty brocciu. Azure was sad, so I had to do something.
We asked a young man at the market if he knew a brocciu maker who might teach us to make the cheese. He told us to ask the widows who sit on the steps of the mayor’s office.
We rode our scooter to the mayor’s office and asked the old ladies where to find a brocciu maker. In the next village over, they said, lived a woman who made it for years.
We rode our scooter over the ridge and asked a man where Mme Albertini lived. She was his aunt, in fact, and she lived at the edge of town.
We found the woman, but she no longer made cheese – the process is too intense. Her cousin in the next village over, though, still made it.
We found the village and found his barn and Philippe was inside, milking the goats.
“Please,” we said, “Azure loves brocciu and needs to learn to make it herself.”
He looked at her and smiled: if we returned the next afternoon he would happily teach us everything. The next day, alongside his wife and daughter, he patiently taught us the generations-old recipe.
Have you heard of the word, “terroir?” It’s French. Terroir is why champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. It’s why you can’t call your crappy, molded chicken milk, “Roquefort.”
Terroir is the sum of the environmental conditions in a place. It’s the soil composition, the acidity of rain, the angle of the sun, the height of the hills, local farming techniques and surrounding plant species and all the minute variables that even local farmers might not know. The terroir of the Champagne region can’t be reproduced anywhere else on earth. You want to make champagne? Move to Champagne. But if you’re satisfied making some shitty sparkling wine then you can stay in Fife or wherever you live. Expand!
This will blow your mind. Have you ever heard of camas or salal? Well, let me tell you about them, friend. Camas is a plant with an edible root that seems to be somewhere between an onion and a potato. (It has a bad-ass brother named, death camas, which isn’t nearly as fun to eat.) And salal is a low shrub that you’ve definitely seen around the NW if you’ve spent any time here. It lives under tall trees, near water and it makes little black-purple berries. You’ve definitely seen it.
Both these plants are native to the Pacific Northwest. Along with salmon they were the staple foods of the Northwest native peoples.
I have lived here my whole life. I wouldn’t say I know everything about Western Washington botany, but I pay as much attention as anyone else. Until a few months ago, I had never even heard of the two plants that were the pillars of people’s diets, right here, for the last 10,000 years. And it’s not like I’m six years old; I’m thirty! Over thirty!
So, what does this have to do with anything? I’m not really sure myself, I’m a little drunk.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Presence/Attention/Awareness is about more than just focusing on the moment, it’s also about engaging with this place where we are.3 Because we eat many times a day, we have many opportunities to engage with the terroir, to be sensually present in this physical Place and let the rain become our blood. We should eat food with which we share terroir, with which we have a common rhythm.
Salal and camas evolved here, so where are they in our diets? Maybe they taste bad, I don’t know, I’ll tell you this summer, but maybe they were pushed off our plates by cheap food from other places. If we are where we eat, then most of us are geographic Frankensteins.
Where it rains so much that there’s rain in my dreams and my knees can feel it and it narrates Sunday mornings, do I eat the onion that drank the rain that wet my hair weeks before?4
—
1 “Terroir” technically refers only to food and drink (and the official distinction doesn’t even require that the food be organic), but I like to think of it as applying to other things as well – clothing and building materials immediately come to mind.
Art made with local materials is, I think, something different. Of course food and clothes and structures can be created with inspiration to become more than just necessities of survival – they can become expressions of place through person – but the timing of the creative process may or may not coincide with the need for food or shelter, and those two things are going to be taken care of regardless.
2 Not to mention the spirit with which the farmer grows, treats and harvests the food.
3 Travel is, essentially, the experience of and engagement with Place. Which is why these food posts have a place on a travel blog.
There is a mysterious person in traditional Corsican towns, a man or woman kept at the periphery of society because they play a supernatural role in death. At night, this Mazzeri is compelled to sneak into the maquis, the low shrubbery that blankets wild parts of the island, and to hunt down whatever animal comes across their path. The boar or dog meets a violent death – the Mazzeri bludgeons it with a club or a rock, it might strangle the animal or tear its flesh with their teeth. (Read More)
When the animal is dead, the Mazzeri rolls it over and looks into its face. They recognize a person they know in the face of the animal, and the next morning, they announce to the town that the person they saw will die within a year. Even if it’s a family member, they are compelled – by Quellu Quassu, the Corsican “Some Thing” more vague than the Christian God – to hunt it and kill it, against their own will. The Mazzeri do not choose the person, they’re simply death’s messengers.
The hunt takes place in dreams, but Corsicans consider dreams to be a parallel and relevant world: the prophesied deaths occur within the year.{1}
Of course, this tradition died out half a century ago.
I arrived on Corsica among the skeptical majority, the rational liberal who doesn’t necessarily believe in something he can’t see, like God or dream-hunters. To each his own, of course, but if I can’t see it, I don’t believe in it.
Then, in mountains that had been presented as ogre- and Mazzeri-filled, where dreams had been dangerous, we saw kids in Yankee baseball caps and Nike tennis shoes listening to 50 Cent.
We have lost something, I could see.
The world is poorer for the loss. Much poorer. What richness is steam-rolled by skeptical media, employment-focused education, the medical establishment and our science-centered faith? What creative force was extinguished by the Church or ignored by tv-addicted posterity? And how did MY money encourage it?
I wondered, “Really, what does it hurt to open myself to believing in dreams and magic? Am I skeptical only because I have so much pride that I think it matters that I be right or wrong?”
I chose to open myself to the possibility probability that there’s much more going on than what I can see. At the very least, it will make my world richer.
But science and money, the twin pillars of Modern religion, crush cultural niches, the pockets in which creative wealth can accumulate. The Corsican mountains are flat. The Snoqualmie run casinos. Modernism has its cellular talons in Africa.
Then we rolled into the valley of the Christian Back-to-the-Landers, and everything lit up. Nowhere else had I seen a cultural cauldron like this: the kids were singing songs to entertain themselves, they talked about natural phenomena, they believed in the supernatural, the Christian God, they believed that Mary was there and helping them. They had stories. They had a world that was immediate and rich, and legends of their own creation were growing in its garden.
I could see how this might be the kernel for a culture. It wouldn’t take many more generations, or like-minded families, for this to develop into a web of myths and practices that the world has never before seen.
So, what does this have to do with food?
There are groups of people among us that are making an effort to live in this fashion. They don’t have TVs and don’t read the newspaper. They’re trying to live in a way that allows them and their kids to sharpen the impression of their characters{2}, that the force of their creativity be unrestrained and untarnished by mass-commercialism, that they can channel their unblemished centers and create with its texture. And for their efforts our world will be richer.
These are the people we need to support with our money. Whether they’re making clothes or constructing homes with local materials or growing food, our money needs to go to those who are creating culture, not steamrolling it.
If we’re going to buy food, let’s buy it from these people, the farmers, the independents who are making this place richer. Let’s buy from the small stands at the farmers’ markets, to help the fragile ones nurse quiet lives.
And we need to stop supporting the steamrollers, the brand names – Coke, Safeway, Costco, Monsanto, Dole, and all the others. There is no spirit in money-centrism, and I’m tired of hearing their voices in humans’ mouths.
Money is the agent of the modern world’s evolution. Spend wisely.
— {1} Dorothy Carrington in Granite Island, describing the Corsican fishing community:
“A week he was missing with his boat and crew…. I heard only a single comment on the situation: ‘His wife came down to ask for news. You should have seen that woman! Her face was black; she has drunk the blood of his heart.’ Blessed are the illiterate, who can spontaneously express themselves in such apt and opulent imagery! But perhaps this was general in the days before universal education began mass-producing minds. I have often wondered how far the Elizabethan writers were indebted to the virile, vivid speech of an illiterate majority.”
She wrote about the Mazzeri and other Corsican folklore in The Dream Hunters of Corsica, in which she reinforces her point:
All this, one might say, belongs to the past. Rational French state education and materialistic values have discredited the evil spirits and reduced the legends to curiosities of folklore. The ogres have vanished; the Devil no longer roams among the rocks. Nor, indeed, does Saint Martin…
{2} “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character… Under all these screens {brands to which a person subscribes} I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
(This post refers to the time we spent with the Catholic back-to-the-land family in southwest France).
I killed my first fowl on this trip, it was a guinea fowl, practically a chicken. I didn’t actually kill it, rather I held its legs and wings while Gabriel put a knife through its jugular, but I was a pretty-involved accomplice, so it counts in my book. As the blood drained I expected it to squawk or kick or something, to freak out, you know?, but it didn’t react, even as the knife went in. The bird only convulsed after it was already dead, and it was so strong I thought I’d hurt my hand. The bright red blood, which drained into the slop bucket, was fed to the pigs. (read more)
The most unexpected part of holding the fowl was that it was warm. I guess I don’t know what I expected, but the feet felt like human fingers. It’s kinda like when you imagine kissing a person, but you forget to imagine saliva, and it totally changes everything.
City boys have written about killing their first chickens before, so I won’t go into it. It wasn’t an emotional experience for me. But as we were plucking the feathers I told Didier how amazing it was that I’d only killed my first fowl after 30 years.
“I got a good education in high school and college, I’m happy about what I learned and it was relevant for what it was… but it wasn’t…”
“…essential.” He offered.
“Yes.”
“The root of the word ‘essential’ is ‘essence’ or ‘truth.’ You weren’t educated about the truth…”
“… of how our bodies mix with the earth.” I said.
“Exactly.”
Didier and I were on the same page a lot, some of his rants could have come from my mouth. The ones about how companies have a stake in keeping their employees powerless, how it’s good for capitalism that people be vaguely afraid about the future, and so on.
When he taught us about the medicinal herbs in the garden I took tons of notes, but I had a hard time accessing what I’d been taught. I’d look at a plant and look closer at its leaves and compare it to my notes and would be too unsure to declare it Citronelle! or Lemon Pepper! or whatever. I said this time and again, and I’ll repeat it here:
“Learning to identify plants is like learning to read for the first time.”
People ask us often, “So, the kids could leave school at 15? How did he educate them?”
I was curious about this too. One day we went for a ride with Didier and his oldest son. They sat in the front seat, we sat in the back. As they drove, Didier pointed to the sky and talked about the movement of the clouds. He pointed to the hills and talked about the rock formations and the fossils. He talked about the fields that the neighbors were sowing. His son pointed to a sea gull that was out of place here. His son talked about the history of some old structures on their land. His son talked about planting by the moon and how it was a good guide but not the last word. His son talked about finding fennel by looking for a larger reed, because fennel grows at its feet.
Azure with her wild salad.
In other words, Didier taught his children about the land and the plants and the weather and the animals and natural systems and Catholicism. He taught them the things that he considered essential.
They might not know a lot of the academic stuff we consider foundations of knowledge, but they’ve learned how to have a relationship with the earth, and I think that’s fundamentally healthy.
The back-to-the-land family sings a prayer before eating cassoulet on a Sunday afternoon. The guy with the shaved head is Johann, the son who had just fallen from the rafters. This is near Carcassonne, France.
by Mike
Before every meal they would sing these prayers – two in French with a Latin prayer in between. One of the prayers is the Lord’s prayer and I believe another is for Mary. They prayed after the meal as well. When we left the farm and started eating without prayer the moment felt a little emptier, a little more mindless. The same was true after we left the meditation retreat in Chiang Mai – we had chanted a prayer before eating there as well. It’s just another instance in which the practices overlap.
The family prayed before and after eating, when waking up and before going to sleep at night. In addition to these five routine prayers, there were also moments throughout the day when they would, essentially, check in with God. They saw it as giving thanks to God; I recognized it as an act of staying present. Similarly, Didier described how at the beginning of each day he would dedicate his physical pain to God – he knew there would be pain. God (as Jesus) went through so much pain for him that it was the least he could do to give some back. In this I recognized Buddhism’s distinction between pain and suffering.
Mike stole a sandwich tonight and now he’s afraid the hotel won’t give us a wake-up call.
As we left Margit’s apartment this morning, she asked “What are the chances your flight will get canceled?”
We laughed and said it was about the same as any other day, so 99.9% unlikely.
Well, apparently there was a part “missing from our plane and they couldn’t find it”, so our flight was canceled and we were put up in a hotel. We were rerouted again through JFK with a 6 hour layover, getting us home at 10pm Sunday. Through the magical internet, I went online and found a more direct flight through Amsterdam that gets us in at noon on Sunday, so we called America to have it changed. I had to play the America is the best! card and the these Spanish people don’t fucking understand us! card, but we got it changed without issue. I felt bad about my conduct, but I took a bath.
Mike and I went down to our comped buffet dinner and sat with the superstars of the flight (three overly-made-up middle-aged Spanish women and a med student who we identified in the airport as being “a good talker.”) At the end of the meal, Mike asked if we could take some bread and cheese for breakfast, since our flight left before breakfast started. They said no. Mike decided to go rogue and grab some bread and salami for a breakfast sandwich anyway, but the woman reminded him that it was not for taking away. He waited until the woman had her back turned, then grabbed the sandwiches and ran.
Shelly (the good talker) and I sat there and wondered if he was coming back. He didn’t. About 15 minutes later, they told us the place was closing and we had to leave. Mike was sweating when we got back, afraid that he had been followed. He hadn’t. He called reception and asked for a wake-up call. When he got off, he said, I’m afraid they know about the sandwiches and won’t give us a wake-up call.
I suppose we are all allowed our own kinds of insanity. We have, after all, been rerouted four times already and should have been home two days ago.
Carrying the cases of potato starts out to the tractor.
by Mike
Their potato-planting window of opportunity was closing – the family was running late already, and because the moon was about to change phases we had to get it done in the next couple days. Otherwise, they’d have to wait for the next suitable period in the lunar cycle. (more words & photos)
Azure dancing in a field of shit.
Luckily, Azure and I were there to help shovel the chicken shit that fertilized the potato bed. We probably helped them catch up by a full day or two (it was a lot of shit – six inches deep over about 1000 square feet), and once the manure was on the ground they were ready to plant.
Azure also followed up to help cover the accidentally exposed potatoes.
Didier drove the tractor while the three oldest kids planted. The thing they were sitting on would split the row, the kids would drop the potato into a little shaft (all at the same time, so the rows would be neat), then another piece of the equipment would cover the row back up.
Leon covering the potatoes.
Because the manure was mixed with hay, sometimes the machine wasn’t able to push the soil back over the potatoes completely. Leon, one of the twins, followed behind and did quality control by hand.
They were pretty focused on this task. It’s important to do it right – Gabriel said they get 1.5 TONS of potatoes every year.
Riding.
Didier wants to get horses or oxen or something to pull the equipment so they don’t have to rely on oil to farm. The only opposition I have to large families is that there’s already too many people on this planet and our modern lives are already seriously straining the natural systems. But this family of ELEVEN – combined – puts a much smaller strain on the environment than even one person living in the modern fashion.
Alice always managed to find the sunlight.
When all was said & done, it didn’t take them long at all to do the actual planting – well under half a day. It was the manure that took the longest. Suzanne said that if it bothers you to work with manure then you can’t be a successful farmer – it’s the most important link in the cycle.
We spent a day cutting reeds for a fence. My strategy was to cut a reed then launch it out like a javelin. Azure cut them all then dragged them out as a group.
More pictures inside!
The family has discovered that there are, in fact, some medical complications for which God hasn’t provided them medicinal herbs: Mom’s five cesarean sections count among them; one of the kids has a hyperthyroid problem that’s vexing the family. Major head trauma makes the list as well, as we learned.
On the farm is parked a grandmotherly white horse, a wise and battered thing that passes its days in a softly lit barn, shitting on chickens and eating organic hay. Nice life, right? The horse is old and quiet, I think it has knowing eyes. Johann, a 28-year-old son from a previous marriage who lives out of his car, came to shoot the old lady and slit her throat, but first he had to figure out how to attach a pulley system to a 30-foot-high beam so he could later hang her up and bleed her out. (read more)
Ah, Johann.
So he set up a ladder that didn’t QUITE reach its intended destination, and he managed to reach to the low end of the beam and grab it, hands only, feet dangling. This was all part of the plan. He hung from the beam with the pulley system in one hand and a chronically bad shoulder attached to the other. He would walk, hand-over-hand, along the beam to the peak of the roof, hanging the whole time, then after the rope was attached he’d walk himself back down to the ladder. Right?
Wrong. It turns out he wasn’t as strong as he thought, in fact I don’t even think Siren from American Gladiators could have done it. His hands quickly gave out and he and the ropes crashed onto a lower beam and then crashed again to the ground, where he landed on his head and hip. There was blood everywhere. In shock, he got up and dragged his broken body to the house. Through the gate, past the table, he managed to open the door. He saw the family in the living room and explained, “!wosdln;lksir.”
Suzanne saw the blood and called the ambulance.
After a couple days of blissful country living, skirted children and dinner prayer songs, quiet family meals and hand-picked salads, quiet nights with talks about religion, a helicopter roared into the valley. A few sturdy-looking paramedics jumped to the ground with a stretcher in their hands and ran to the house, putting out their cigarettes on the way. In the meantime the well-endowed pilot hopped down from the cockpit wearing a single-pieced jumpsuit that unzipped from his neck to his thigh, and he lit up his own cigarette.
Fifteen minutes later they loaded Johann into the chopper. The neighbor took pictures. The family watched in unison as the helicopter rose into the air and took off for Montpelier. Didier prayed for his idiot son; in the helicopter’s downdraft the women’s skirts flapped at their ankles.
It was a culture shock. Azure was shaken out of the trance of this peaceful valley by one of the paramedics who looks like her cousin Todd. “These are our people,” she thought. What are we doing here pretending to be anything like the family when our lives are much more like those of the paramedics? And tonight they’ll go home and tell their wives or husbands, “You’ll never believe this weird place we went today…”
We decided to give the family some space, so we took off for the afternoon. It was a good excuse to check email in town.
The next day we had a little surprise: an ambulance pulled up to the chalet and unloaded a morphine-soaked Johann into our living room. It was unbelievable that he was out of the hospital so fast, let alone that he wasn’t still in ICU. And now here he was being wheeled into our little candle-lit bubble. Would he turn on the lights at night? OH NO! Would he bleed on our food? At first we thought he was going to take our room, and we balked, so instead he was carried into the neighboring room. He groaned as the paramedics – with help from the family – set him on the bed. The paramedics took off and we were left with a roommate who couldn’t move, who would need help going to the bathroom and whose head was partially shaved and sewn like the ass of a sick cat. But we all know what it’s like to fear we’re a burden, so I sucked it up and broke the ice with a smile, “If there’s anything you need…”
It turns out – miraculously, really – that he didn’t break any bones, not even his skull. They think he has a concussion, but if that’s the only chip in his enamel then he’s incredibly lucky.
We helped him walk that first afternoon. He couldn’t believe that this happened to him when he had so many horses to shoe the next day, not figuratively. He said he smokes 50 – FIFTY! – cigarettes a day, and now he’d gone two full days without.
“Every crisis is an opportunity,” I chirped.
He looked at me with knowing eyes. “It is, it really is.”
Johann cried in the hospital, apparently, he cried about his life and how nothing ever really seems to go right for him, how he screws up good things. His dad said, “Johann had everything here ten years ago – he had this farm, he had his horses, he had family and he had God, he had good food and a quiet life. But he wanted to ‘see the world’ so he threw it all away….”
(From their little paradise the outside world looks like a mess, it looks like an ocean of people who take comfort in other people’s weaknesses to justify their own addictions: identity, status and craving, not to mention the more obvious daily addictions of narcotics, processed foods and mindless spending.)
Anyway, Dad continued his thought: “In the ten years since he left the farm he’s gone from crisis to crisis, he’s crashed 22 cars. He’s no longer a practicing Christian, he’s lost.”
The night I said the crisis/opportunity thing, I popped into his room to ask him a question and then backed out quietly: his room was candle-lit and he was in the middle of the bed on his back, counting rosary beads on his chest with his eyes closed. His legs stretched thin and fragile under the sheet.
Later that night he sat with us at the table, slumped. “Do you know where my car is?” he asked.
“No, we haven’t seen it.”
“It was up on the road but when the paramedics came they parked it over by the horses, it’s a little white car,” he said. I could sense where this was going.
“Oh, really? No, I don’t think I’ve seen it.”
“I have two cigarettes in my backpack in the car. I just know that if I can get them I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
I changed the subject.
I was astonished to watch him find a pair of jeans and start to put them on. Then he scared up a pair of shoes and painfully fit his feet inside. He winced as he put on a jacket. This guy could hardly walk, he’d just been airlifted out of the valley, and here he was getting ready to drag his broken body into the unlit night just for two cigarettes. He limped across the room and opened the door.
“Wait!” I said.
He paused and looked over his shoulder as cold air tumbled in. I walked to within arm’s-length and handed him our flashlight.
People always talk about how volcanoes ruin their travel plans, but I honestly never thought it could happen to us. Now I don’t know what to think…
We’re currently staying in Sue’s wonderful apartment in Berlin. We have a Ryanair flight to London scheduled for Tuesday, then our Delta flight home is scheduled for Friday.
In the meantime, we’re making goulash tomorrow! And yesterday Sue made pork & shrimp won ton soup!
Well. We’ve spent the last week working on a farm with a traditionalist Catholic family of 11 back-to-the-landers. They live in a gorgeous, shallow valley that’s tucked away in the hills between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, a valley where they have their beds of veggies, fields of grains, pigs, donkeys, horses, chickens, geese, ducks, guinea fowl, dogs and trout pond. The kids go away to a Catholic school in another part of France from the age of about 8 (coming home for long vacations), then at 15 they have the choice to either continue with school or come back home to work on the farm. There are three children over 15 – the oldest decided to finish school, the next two have decided to come back to work. (read more)
Didier, the father, said, “I don’t want any part of this modern world,” which was amazing to hear because it’s almost a direct quote from Claude, the proprietor of the last farm we were on. I guess we find people who have something in common. He believes that when every Jew accepts Jesus as the lord, he’ll come back and create a heaven on earth for the believers. I think I got that right. For him it was like Christmas to have a Jew show up at his house who was eager to learn and listened to every word he said, even taking notes. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to call people like him crazy, but I think that our job as travelers is not to paint with broad strokes, but to listen, to try to understand what are the core values of the people we meet and how do those values shape their lives. To them, their lives are consistent with their values. Everyone looks crazy to someone else. Frankly, I don’t see how their beliefs are any crazier than – say – someone buying their food at Safeway. :)
Enough of that.
We stayed in a little house on their property that’s reserved for guests, so we had an awesome bedroom, fireplace and kitchen, then a bathroom that didn’t have running water. We collected all the water we used doing dishes and used that to flush the toilet. To wash, we boiled some water and added it to a basin, then mixed cold water. I loved washing (my upper half) outside in the morning with the sun coming up through their olive trees, the guinea fowl squawking everywhere, the water steaming in the sunlight… I don’t think I got very clean, but whatever, I don’t have to smell myself. It was a wonderful way to start the day.
There’s so much to write about…
One day Gabriel, the 17 year-old, fired up the tractor and loaded five of us (me, Azure and three girls) and the family dog in the bucket. He drove us high into the hills. We hopped out, followed a path between bushes and up some rocks, then found what we’d come to collect: a wild-growing weed called Rocayrol – I believe it’s Shepherd’s Purse – that grew between the rocks on the south-facing slope. We each took butter knives and dug them up by their roots and tossed the whole plants into a basket. It was sunny, there was a breeze and there were old stone walls crossing the hillside. The girls sang songs from Church with tunes that reminded me of serious medieval music. The girls braid each other’s hair and wear ankle-length skirts.
We filled a basket with the salad then headed down the hill in the bucket of the tractor. On the way we passed a pine tree and the 11-year-old grabbed a branch and ate the little pine cones growing at the tips. We copied her : they were sweet but full of resin. At the bottom of the hill we got out and picked more wild greens that went into the salad, another plant that I wrote in my notes (which aren’t at hand now).
It’s a polyculture farm, which means that they grow many different things. This is opposed to monoculture, which is what you see on large for-profit farms. Their primary purpose in farming is to feed themselves, and they only sell something if there’s a surplus. He said several times, “We farm to be free.” They also practice permaculture, which is the idea that each thing they grow has multiple purposes and everything supports everything else. For example, the chickens are for eggs, their poop is for compost for the potatoes, the leftover potatoes are fed to the pigs and chickens, and so on. Of course everything is completely free from artificial pesticides and herbicides.
Each night Azure started the fire with old grape vines that had been pulled up and are sitting in heaps around the property (many vineyards here are switching crops because the wine prices are dropping). She’s a skilled fire starter – most nights she managed to start a full roaring fire with a strong core without even using matches or a lighter, just the leftover coals and some branches. At the same time I’d walk down to the garden and collect greens to flavor the salad – spectacular wild celery leaves (people: our whole lives we’ve been lied to about celery), tender fennel fronds, peppermint, lemon balm, lima bean leaves, thyme, comfry, cauliflower leaf, spinach, chard and so on. None of these were actually growing in the beds – they were the “voluntary” plants that grew between the beds.
We decided not to use any electricity at night, so we often found ourselves putting together the end of the meal by candle light. We sat on the couch in front of the fire in the dark, we read and wrote by candlelight and we went to sleep around 10pm – 9pm their time (they don’t change their clocks on the farm).
There are so many other interesting stories…. An older son (from another marriage) fell on his head from 25 feet and had to be airlifted out by helicopter; we killed guinea fowl for the market; we went to the cathedral on Sunday for Mass; we had a traditional Cassoulet; they sang before every meal… and so on.
Anyway, Azure has uploaded a bunch of pictures from this week – at our Flickr account.
These are three simple things that everyone can do today to live more in the present. (read more)
1 – Use no electricity after sundown.
We found that we adjusted quickly to the rhythm of the day when we used candles for our light. The only exception we really made was when we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, as it’s kinda important to see what you’re peeing on. (It’s hard for me to enjoy the day’s rhythm when I see how sad it makes Azure to clean up my pee.) We’d also make an exception if we cooked on an electric stove.
No electricity means no phone, no computer, no tv, no recorded music, no light bulbs. Let the night close your eyes, let the sun open them.
2 – Stop paying attention to the news.
The primary function of the news is to reinforce cultural myths, one of which is that we have something to fear. The news is a distraction from what’s real. It is an unnecessary injection of fear and mistrust into lives that are – in reality – pretty darn peaceful almost all of the time. Have you noticed how peaceful your life is? Any news worth knowing will come from another person’s mouth. Forget the news, except maybe tomorrow’s weather.
3 – Decide what you’re going to eat tomorrow night based on what you have today.
Look in your garden and build your meal around the ripe veggies that are begging to be eaten. Use tonight’s leftovers (and trimmings) as tomorrow’s flavor. Take out of the freezer what you’ve been saving and give it 24 hours to think about what it can become. Make a slow meal your day-long theme, and include your loved ones in its preparation.
(OK, since everyone is going to ask, that last picture is “Cassoulet,” a traditional dish in southwest France, as prepared by Didier. Duck meat is salted all night, then the next morning it’s cooked in its own fat. In the mean time they’re cooking white beans with carrots, onions, sage, laurel, sausage, bacon and sea salt. Then serve with brown rice and place the duck on top. Voila!)
We love to travel and learn. We like eating and sleeping and going on the internet and we can do all of those things from anywhere in the world. We are originally from Seattle, but no longer stay for the winters. We must leave and see new places and great ways to live. We enjoy living well and seeing how others live well.
Winter of 2010-2011 we were in Europe for a little over a month, then Haiti, then Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. There was logic to it at the time, don't worry about trying to figure it out. We don't yet know where we're going for winter of '011. Maybe France? Maybe India?
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