Puppies and Despair

In the middle of the village of Castellane there is a Norwegian Maple so big the sidewalk paved around it is completely uprooted, the gate built behind it has fallen to the ground. The tree is more than a hundred years old, and it has been the town calamity ever since it got there, splitting the town of Castellane into factions of pro-Norwegian Maple Tree, anti-Norwegian Maple Tree, and "Don't care let me smoke my cigarette," arguably the most popular faction not only here but in all of France. Across the street there is a boulangerie, and inside that boulangerie I sit drinking a second coffee, digesting pain au chocolat, uprooted myself I sympathize with both the tree and its immediate destroyed surroundings. I've come here by way of Digne, Montfort, Sisteron, from Gap a few days before. 

            In Gap I had a rest day and spent it in the centre ville to attend the local market and not buy anything because I have a condition called being shy, which has always caused difficulty at markets, where I find introverts end up empty handed. The food looked beautiful, fresh, and exciting. The thing that caught my eye, however, was a fruit stall that was closing. A broad chested man with a beard was hauling crates into a wee white van, he was telling his son, a chubby boy with a twinkle in his eye, to get a move on, which sounds the same in every language. The boy was arranging the raspberries, which were packed in wicker boxes and hand-picked, so the sign said. The boy kept stacking the boxes, placing them in a new and perhaps more marketable pattern, then glancing back at the market crowd with hopeful eyes. I don't think he sold any. The father took the raspberries away, finally, and the boy sighed and picked up another crate and struggled to carry it to the van. That is all I recall from Gap. What happened after I won't soon forget. 

            There is a mountain village called Bréziers twenty kilometers south of Gap. To get there you climb a col and go halfway down, enter a valley that leads to a gravel road. I organized a short stay with a local farmer there through WWOOF, which is an organization that may or may not promote temporary slavery, depending on the farmer you stay with to work for room and board. Her name was Eve. She was beautiful and strong and exhausted. As I arrived, she was just giving away a kitten to a young family, selling some cheese in the process. I was greeted by her two puppies who I'll name Scruffy and Tweak. There was a border collie who didn't stop eating all the time I was there called Cuzco. There was a Belgian sheepdog called Balek and then there was Ginny, Scruffy and Tweak's mother. 

            Eve's farm had dwindled into a state of unmanageable disrepair since she moved in. Apparently, the person she'd bought the farm from had been charged with several counts of rape and was in jail.

            "I've tried everything to change the energy, and I think the best thing is to just let the dogs piss everywhere and throw a party until the place changes colour, it is better now" she said during a lunch of home-made terrine, cheese, and bread. 

             Pablo, her paramour, who had wandered onto the grounds a year ago and stayed on as a farmhand and lover, half covered by wild locks of black stringy hair, stared lazily in the distance. 

            "I need to be ten kilometers from civilization," he said. "That is the dream I have." 

            Eve shared Pablo's dream when she'd bought the farm through an agricultural loan eight years ago. She started out with a hundred sheep and eight pigs. She shared produce with her neighbours and essentially did not need to shop at a supermarket for over five years (although I naturally inquired where she got her toothpaste, to which she admitted there were some things she had to go into town for). The work was hard. Seven days a week. Sunrise to sunset. Mostly alone at first. She had worked so hard for so long, waking up to the expectant eyes of her dogs, her cats, her sheep, and her swine, looking at the backdrop of the Alps, close to one of largest glacial lakes in the world, admitting when the day started there was no better life just to end up half herniated and exhausted by day's end. All work and no play.

            By the end of lunch, we had a Belgian beer and she told me the following:

            "A year ago, I got a hernia. Stress, I think, just work every day and then I realize, year over, no money in, money out in the balance I'm more than a hundred in red, it cost money to work this hard," she looked at Pablo, who rolled a doobie for himself and stared into the reddening autumn hills. He softly replied "capitalista," and shook his head. 

            "I go to the Agricole, to ask for help. They have accountant there, she says bring all your books, everything, and sort out the mess. So, I do, I pack everything, seven years then of books, and I lay everything on the table and ask her what I am doing wrong?" 

            She stops for a moment and picks up Tweak, to hold the wee puppy like a baby. 

            "She likes being held like this," she smiles. "The lady at Agricole says to me: 'This is good, you're doing better than most farmers here.' I got so mad. So mad. I couldn't believe it. A few months later I go back to the collective insurance department and tell them I can't do it anymore. I just cannot. I am burnt out. They say, 'it happens, it is okay, we cannot help.' I scream, I am alone I tell them. All alone. I cannot feed my animals any longer." 

            You can hear the pigs grunting. You can feel the air shifting into the evening. You can sense that there is freedom at great cost being won here or lost finally, and I suspect the latter. 

            Shortly after that last exchange she got her hernia, which was a physical manifestation of her stress, and meant she could claim disability and not have to make her monthly payments to 'Agricole' for a while. 

            There is so much I could tell you about Eve and her farm. I wanted to help. I'd come there to help her with her farm, to plaster a wall and to haul debris out of her place, to dam her place in so the rain couldn't reach it, as it had when her basement flooded, during the storm that cost so many people their lives in Europe a few months earlier. There was trash everywhere. Rotten wood, tires and plastic was scattered outside in permanent limbo. Cars unused. The sheep were sold. The puppies ran through mess plastic loving the chaos left alone.

            The chaos also surrounded Eve's eyes. She was tired, and the work on the house would last well into next year. The room she had for me had been unused, I suspected, for a long time. The bedding hadn't been washed at all, had stains and hair and insect spots. The room was not mine. It was the home of a group of spiders descended from Shelob herself that lived there, lurking. As I donned my headlight to spend the night there, I noticed a patter on the floor I knew well. I focused my light there. Two eyes stared back before scurrying into the dark. Rats. I did not sleep. I played chess all night in my sleeping bag and waited for morning. 

            That morning, now four days ago, I looked around the farm. Eve had gone into town, and with Eve left all realistic potential for paradise. It was in her dreams, and nowhere else. What was left was Pablo, the impossible work, and the dogs, who stood in sunlight burgeoning from behind the first hill. I was tired. I packed my bike. I left her there in the shadow of her own ambition, silently wishing her some respite, before I biked off, leaving Scruffy, Tweak, Balek and Ginny, and Cuzco still there eating something, leaving them all behind. 

            I turned on Willie Nelson, On the Road Again. I smiled through a few heavy tears. The wind was at my back.