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Chapter 5

budbreak and other things ~ where to meet the locals

AS SPRING ADVANCED, the weather improved along with my stamina, allowing me to venture out farther afield. I also noticed that my body felt uncomfortable when I missed a ride. I was becoming addicted to physical exercise. Some days I rode in the direct hot sun, while other days the shadows of clouds chased me over the landscape. I even went out in wet weather, wearing simply a waterproof jacket; the energy I expended kept me warm. Facing into the wind could change everything, making an easy stretch of level road like an uphill ride until I finally tired, turned around and, with my clothes flapping around me in the breeze, let the wind help carry me home.

By mid-April budbreak was well underway in the vineyards and the tight clusters of flowers would soon be replaced by grape bunches. This was a risky time of year, for a late frost could easily damage the flowers before the grapes had a chance to set. The apricots had already successfully flowered, despite a close call with the late snowfall.

Pierre Luc had invited me over to talk about the growing season ahead and show me how his vineyards were coming along. We talked for several hours while walking the rows that I had helped prune a month earlier. As he spoke his pride showed, and I was his willing audience, learning about vineyards and winemaking. His wife, Fanny, had attended l’Université du Vin just after they were married. He had given up on the vineyards, and when their daughter, Violette, was born, he tried working at odd jobs around the area to earn money.

Pierre Luc’s father had taken a risk by planting the Viognier variety of grapes in his vineyard, as well as the vineyard he leased from a neighbouring friend. Unfortunately, Viognier was relatively unknown, and when his wines wouldn’t sell he gave up and simply sold the grapes at rock-bottom prices to the cooperative for blending into common vin de pays wine. After his father died, Pierre Luc did little with the vineyards until Fanny returned with Violette after their short separation.

One day I saw Jean up on his roof. When I asked him about it he said that he was checking to see if any roof tiles had cracked and needed replacing. He suggested I do the same. So I propped a ladder against the house and climbed up. Creeping cautiously to the crown of the roof, I straightened up briefly and looked around at the village below and the surrounding mountains. Mont Garde Grosse dominated impressively across the valley. Heights were never something I cared for, so I bent over again and, feeling like a cat-burglar wearing a pair of old runners, began crawling around on all fours to avoid slipping and becoming a poster-boy for a safety commercial.

The wood or asphalt shingles of Canada couldn’t withstand the summer sun of Provence; much more durable products were needed. The old classic Roman tile was the norm and came in assorted shapes and sizes. In French the word is tuile and in Latin tegula. The tiles were generally fifty centimetres long by twenty to twenty-five centimetres wide, and curved down the length. A bottom course was laid with the concave surface facing up and overlapping as they ran up the roof. The top course was laid with the convex side facing up to drain the water into the trough of the bottom course. The result was a system that was amazingly simple and easy to repair.

Early tiles were made from fired clay that was a natural brownish-red colour, hence the name terracotta tiles. Nowadays they are made of concrete with artificial red colour added. Variations evolved over time. For instance, our roof used an S-shaped product that incorporated the bottom and top course in one tile. In a hot climate, this allowed the air to circulate freely around the tiles, helping to disperse the heat of the sun. One look in the attic revealed a complex system of beams, rafters and struts to support all the weight.

I was beginning my inspection by checking the tiles along the edge of the roof when butterflies suddenly took flight in my stomach. Crawling about two and a half storeys above the ground was not the best activity for a person with a touch of vertigo. I pulled back from the edge and went to work lightly tapping the tiles with a small hammer, listening for the ring of a whole tile or the flat discord of something cracked or broken.

It took time to cover the roof, but only two needed replacing. Luckily, the former owner had left a cache of extra tiles in the garden shed, so I carried them, one by one, up the ladder and across the roof. However, the repair required more ingenuity than I had anticipated; it required prying up the surrounding tiles, pulling out the broken one and then sliding the new tile into place, all without breaking the adjacent tiles. Once this was done, I made a final check.

Where two roof angles intersected, I noticed that the lead trough had weathered and cracked. This looked bad enough from the outside; but when I checked in the attic, water had been leaking in for so long that a supporting beam was seriously rotted. This repair was beyond my skills, and by the time a roofer had carefully slid a new beam in place to shore up the damaged beam and the trough was sealed once more, our budget for the summer had taken a hard hit.

• • •

I would not have believed that there was a social life at ‘la déchetterie’. That’s the French word for the garbage dump. Furthermore, I had no idea why the word used the feminine adjective la. But that aside, there was something to be learned here about life in our village. I had a mountain of small branches and twigs to dispose of after I had cut down the oak tree in the garden. So I began piling the debris onto a tarpaulin, tying it up and stuffing it, along with the broken tiles, into the hatchback of our car. This meant a number of trips, but fortunately the dump was nearby.

I had dropped off refuse there once before. That time, the man in charge had asked me where I lived. It seemed like an odd question, but I had told him Serre de Reynier in Nyons and pointed up the hill toward our house. He didn’t say anything more and just walked back to his chair by the shed. I learned later that if I had been from outside Nyons, he would have told me that I couldn’t drop off the refuse and would have sent me packing.

This time, when I drove up the ramp beside the bins with the first load of tree branches, I had barely unlatched the hatchback when the caretaker appeared beside me looking at the contents of the tarpaulin and the broken roof tiles.

“Ah, là, le ratissage . . . et là, le béton . . .,” he said, jabbing his finger toward one bin and then another.

The dump was a compound behind a high wire fence with gates that were locked after hours—not so much to prevent theft as it was unlikely anyone would want to steal junk, but to stop people from leaving trash that didn’t belong there or might be placed in a wrong bin. There were five bins in all, each huge and at least eight feet deep. A ramp had been built alongside so that cars and trucks could easily drive up and unload. There were two men in charge to make sure that everyone used the right bins.

The hours were strict. It was open from eight in the morning until noon and did not reopen again until two. I learned that one day when I drove through the gates a few minutes before noon and one of the caretakers began advancing aggressively toward my car, waving me off.

“Non, non!” he said, and then other words that I didn’t understand, all the while gesticulating energetically. It was clear he didn’t want me there.

“Pourquoi—why?”

He tapped at his watch and began to move his hands back and forth with the palms facing down. That meant no. I glanced at my watch. It was five to twelve. I had five minutes. However, the unwritten French law of ‘never work at lunch’ had already kicked in.

“Un petit moment—that’s all,” I said.

He hesitated just a moment too long, leaving me an opening that I took, and I drove up the ramp. It required only a minute to empty the tarpaulin of twigs into the appropriate bin and drive down the ramp, but he was already standing at the gate waiting to lock it behind me. I smiled my best smile and waved.

Over time, I kept running into people I knew and at first thought it was just one of those coincidences. But gradually, I became aware that there was also an active social life at la déchetterie. One day François was unloading hedge trimmings from his truck. We warmly greeted each other and passed a few words before getting on with unloading our vehicles. Another time I met our plumber, and we shook hands and chatted. Then I noticed that others were doing the same thing. Sometimes the ramp was crowded with vehicles while the drivers stood talking amiably, waiting their turn. If unloading junk was a slow process, it was even slower the moment two acquaintances showed up, for all the correct social etiquette had to be followed: the greeting, shaking of hands and some polite discussion that inevitably led to other subjects.

Once I saw a woman drive in and pull up to the back of the line. The men promptly stopped their conversation, helped her unload her vehicle and sent her on her way. This was clearly a man’s hang-out, and I slowly realized that most of these people had either a passing acquaintance with each other, or were friends, or even relatives. This was part of village life, and sooner or later everyone met here.

On another day I saw the older of the two caretakers yelling at a man who had just dropped an old bike into one of the bins. I watched as the man sheepishly crawled over the edge of the bin and down inside it. The caretaker now pointed at another bin and continued to yell at the man who climbed out and carried his bit of junk over to the correct bin.

“By now you must know that the caretaker is ‘the colonel of the dump’,” Hélène said when I told her what had occurred. “He’s the one in charge and he takes his work totally seriously. That’s his turf—and don’t mess with him!”