Читать книгу Provence for All Seasons - Gordon JD Bitney - Страница 6

Chapter 1

Provence redux

THE SUDDEN ROAR OF THE ENGINES and then the acceleration that pushed us back in our seats announced the flight was underway. By the time the plane reached cruising altitude, I was thinking through the decisions that lay ahead. Oddly, we owned the villa, even though we hadn’t yet decided if we could make Provence our home for six months of each year, let alone permanently. Several years earlier, almost on a whim, we had bought the villa as a part of our retirement plans. The cultural shift was turning out to be larger than we had expected. After all, Provence has a recorded history going back thousands of years, encompassing empires that had risen and fallen, with a unique culture born out of its own struggles.

For my wife, Marie-Hélène, adjusting to France had not been very challenging, for she speaks French fluently and makes friends easily. The neighbours next door to our villa warmed to her immediately and helped her when she was there alone renovating, while I was still winding down my law practice back in Vancouver. She invited friends from Vancouver to visit and they worked together stripping wallpaper and painting.

By comparison, I felt as if I were a bit of an interloper in all this, struggling to understand the clipped and heavy French accents particular to Provence. So this year I had decided I would read about its history and travel its roads until I had made it my own.

The long-planned transition (a major passage, really) in our lives had begun once again. We had spent the winter in Vancouver and were returning to Provence early in order to experience the full transition to another season. Having spent periods of time there, we began to realize how important it had become to us. This was no longer simply a place to vacation; it had become our home in France.

• • •

I must have dozed off, for I awoke to activity around me. People were beginning to stir, lifting the small blinds that covered the windows of the jet’s darkened cabin to let light in. There was a sense of peaceful awakening, of new life, of expectancy that spread across the rows of seats. The lights came on and once more flight attendants were striding the aisles, taking stock of the passengers. I could smell food being heated.

When the plane began its descent, I bent forward to look at the animal case stowed under the seat. Tabitha mewed plaintively.

“Did I hear a cat?” the woman seated in front of us, lifting her head, asked her companion.

The steel, concrete and glass structure of Frankfurt Airport was not designed for humans, rather for some efficient robots not yet invented to inhabit its sterile halls. We waited patiently for the flight to Lyon and then approached the gate.

“Vhat ist in dat case?” one of two German customs officers inquired when he saw the animal case I was carrying.

“A cat,” I replied.

“Do you haf documents for dis animal?” he asked, having switched to an autocratic manner.

“Yes, I do,” I said, reaching into my bag to bring out a file nearly an inch thick.

“It’s just a cat,” the other officer offered.

I held the file out for the first officer to examine.

“Das ist gut,” he said abruptly and waved us on, avoiding a morass of paperwork he didn’t want to tackle.

The connecting flight was relatively short, the bright sun reflecting off the wing of the plane and into the cabin window. However, the dive through the cloud layer revealed a very different world; all colours were a muted grey and snow was blowing across the runway. After gathering our luggage, signing all the papers at the agency for the car lease and then hauling everything, including Tabitha, through the wind and snow into the agency’s van, we were driven to the compound where the car was stored. There, we loaded the luggage into the car and immediately set off on the autoroute for Nyons in a blizzard.

This was not the Provence we had expected. I stayed in the slower right-hand lane as sudden gusts of wind buffeted the car; snow hit the windshield and stuck in blobs, blocking visibility; semi-trailers highballed on by, sending up waves of slush that blinded us for seconds between sweeps of the wiper blades. My wife had been silent for some time, and I could feel her anxiety growing. Meanwhile, Tabitha meowed forlornly in the back of the car.

As we approached Valence, the traffic slowed considerably and then came to a complete stop. When it began moving again, it was a stop-start shuffle, and we managed to travel less than five kilometres in the next hour.

Then gendarmes stood before us on the road, guiding traffic off the autoroute onto an exit ramp. A temporary sign had been erected that read:

Attention » Déviation!

“A detour!” I said. “The autoroute is closed.”

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. We don’t have a map.”

“Well, why don’t we try to follow the roads that run alongside the autoroute until we reach Montélimar? That way we’ll know where we are and not get lost.”

“Okay. The back roads will be slow, but we should be all right.”

Although the weather was getting worse, we reached Crest, a village we had visited before. The street was empty as we drove through, every shop closed, the shutters locked in place and no lights visible. On the other side of the village we saw a familiar sign pointing to Bourdeaux, and we knew the next village after Bourdeaux was Dieulefit. The headlights of the car lit the falling snow—the rest was darkness.

Intersecting roads led off in different directions. And then, instead of Bourdeaux, we came upon the village of Crupies. Turn around and backtrack, or keep going? We kept going, only to find that the next village was Bouvières . . . We were lost. After another discussion, it seemed sensible that if we always took the road to the right, we would find our way back to the autoroute.

We kept going, headlights on an empty road, hoping to see something familiar. But I sensed that we were well off track, and if we wound up in the mountains we wouldn’t find our way out until dawn. The headlights of our car illuminated a panorama of whorling snowflakes that remained suspended momentarily in the air before dashing madly toward the windshield.

Then I saw a signpost:

Défilé de Trente-Pas »

The narrow defile had been carved through a hill by eons of water runoff; at one point it was just thirty paces—trente-pas wide. A road was built through this gorge to link one valley with another. We had driven it once in daylight and found it beautiful. The tall rock rose up next to the road that was covered with undisturbed snow. We drove beneath a long outcropping of rock that seemed to flow by us like red curtains on a moving stage, then back out into the snowfall. We were the only ones foolish enough to come this way since it had fallen. And then abruptly the gorge was behind us, and we recognized the tiny village of St-Ferréol Trente-Pas. Within another fifteen minutes we found the D94 highway leading west to Nyons.

We were approaching Nyons from the wrong direction, having strayed too far into the hills, but we were not lost on some forlorn mountain road, driving blindly in a snowstorm. As the headlights lit a road sign for Nyons, we both shifted in our seats with a heightened sense of relief. Shortly after that we saw the lights of Nyons. The storm had let up, and the last flakes floated lightly down onto an undisturbed white bed of snow.

• • •

As bright sunshine streamed into our bedroom, I got up, walked over and opened the window. The air was crisp and cold, the morning sky razor-blue. The only sound was the dripping of water from the snow melting on the trees and the rooftops. I breathed in to fill my lungs with the cold air, exhaled and then did it a second time. From the hillside perch of our villa, I could see light glint off the wet, red roof tiles in the village below. Thin tendrils of smoke rose from chimneys here and there.

Hélène got out of bed and walked over to the open window to stand beside me. She had slipped on a robe and was hugging it like a blanket. “It’s beautiful, but it’s so cold,” she said, tightening her arms around herself.

“I’ve never seen snow on those peaks across the valley. Mont Garde Grosse is stunning.”

“Well, at least with the heat on the house is warmer. The tile floor doesn’t feel like a skating rink anymore.”