Whenever I divulge my Utah origins I brace myself for one or both of the following questions, in no set order: How many wives does your father have? (or its variation, common among forward-thinking but even more poorly informed interlocutors: How many husbands to you have?) and Do you ski? I explain that polygamy was officially renounced by the Mormon church in 1890, and that we didn’t have the money for skis and lift passes when I was growing up; we enjoyed the famous Utah snow on sleds instead!
I skied twice as a teenager, thanks to the annual All-School Ski Day at my high-school, and both times spent the day wondering why I had such strong urges to jump off the ski lift when on high, given that I didn’t have a suicidal bone in my body (ah, l'appel du vide!) and perfecting my snowplow moves on the bunny hill. So when I moved to the Alpes of Haute-Provençe it was definitely not for proximity to the ski resorts. It rarely snows in Chasteuil anyway; we’re at only 900 m (~3,000 ft), and though the proper snowy Alps are within striking distance all we usually get here is a thin rime of snow on the mountains above the village-- nothing that a sunny winter’s day won’t disperse.
On a recent December Friday I was supposed to drive to Draguignan, about an hour and a half away, to catch a train to go to my friend Hubert’s house near Aix. But when I woke in the morning my room seemed too bright and I thought I could hear an extra layer of stillness in the already profound quiet of Chasteuil in winter.
Sure enough, when I drew the curtain aside I saw that there were several inches of snow on the ground and more falling, calm and thick, which meant that I was going nowhere that day. The very steep, narrow switchbacks leading up to Chasteuil are quite impassible in ice and snow.
Later that morning I was at my kitchen table with Tintin and Mahler, and the wood stove cranking good and hot at my back, when I heard a knock at my door. It was my neighbor François, who wondered if I’d like to walk up the mountain with him and a young Breton named David, and ski down. François is a potter, beekeeper and amateur geologist with a passion for dynamite, gunpowder and homemade fireworks; he is that guy in the village who knows which mushrooms you can eat and which ones will kill you, and who can fix anything, or will at least spend a few days trying. He has perfect pitch but is notorious for hating music. If you stop in at his house to buy some honey he might offer you a cup of tea, and while you drink it and sample various kinds of honey your eyes might wander up to the dozen antique rifles and muskets that span the blackened beams of the low ceiling; and there's a very good chance that if you stay in his kitchen long enough he'll take out his battered book about panning for gold, and pull from its pages the snapshots showing the glimmery motes he and his son found one fine day, not far from here.
Now, the last time I went on an expedition up the mountain with François was a little over a year ago, on a day when there was a dusting of snow on the mountaintops and flakes falling lazily here and there in the village. François and I went looking for a mysterious hole in the ground I’d found near the dusk-end of an all-day hike in the mountains above Chasteuil. The hole had partially-buried plank in its mouth, as though it were the mouth of a mine, and François thought it could be an unclaimed cache from the Résistance fighters who spent the war at a nearby farm called Quelte. So we rode François’ motorcycle most of the way up to Quelte and bushwhacked the rest of the way up the hillside to where I thought I’d seen the hole, which I’d hastily photographed the day I found it.
Using a treasure-map of landmarks I’d made from the photos I took we managed to find la grotte.
We excavated its mouth until it was big enough for us to climb inside, but it was a dead end. If anything had been cached in the hole it was long-gone, and if the hole had ever been a real grotte it was caved in to the point that trying to excavate it any further by hand would have been dangerous, even by François’ own peculiar reckoning.
So we poked around a bit in some nearby roman ruins as a sort of compensatory amusement,
and then went back to where we’d left the motorcycle. We weren’t wearing helmets, but on the way up I hadn’t worried too much--François had to take the road so slowly that we could have just stepped off the bike if started to fall. But for the return journey François produced a pair of sturdy plexiglass goggles and remarked, “Il faut protéger mon œil. ”
Not mes yeux. Mon œil!
Turns out François only has one real eye, having lost the other in a fishing accident, but his resulting lack of depth perception didn’t cause him to take the road any where near as slow as what I’d have liked, on the way back down to Chasteuil. We were bouncing off skull-sized chunks of loose limestone all the way down, and when we reached Chasteuil unscathed I promised myself never to get on a motorcycle with François again, a vow only strengthened by the fact that he broke his arm in a motorcycle accident later last winter.
* * *
But I digress. Shortly after that joltingly scary ride down the mountain last winter I left town for a few months and wandered in some wondrously snowy places, and when I came back I learned I had missed Chasteuil’s biggest snowfall in years. So I’d never seen my village under snow until the day that François came asking me to go up the mountain again, and he wouldn’t take Je ne sais pas comment skier for an answer. So we hoisted skis and boots on our backs and set off up the road through the oak woods and the fast-falling snow. We crossed the tracks of several sangliers (wild boar) and heard, from high above us, the bleating of a lost goat, but other than that we were alone in the snow-swaddled mountains.
François outfitted David and I with dust-clad skis and boots that he had rattled out from amongst his shed-full of vintage motorcycle restoration projects. He explained that every spring he scavenges cast-off skis from the nearest resorts.
We had stopped our climb where the grade of the road gets quite steep and the rocks in it get worse, so the descent on skis was much less nerve-wracking than it had been by motorcycle. I did a pretty good job of keeping my speed under control on the steep turns, aided by all the stones just under the snow. Every time he heard my skis grating on rock François called out, “Heureusement ils sont des skis de poubelle!” I only wiped out a half-dozen times on the way down to Chasteuil...
* * *
The next day dawned clear and cold.
I was determined to go visit Hub in Grans-en-Provence, but still blocked in by the snow, so I put on my woolen long underwear, my fleece and my gaiters and set off with my concertina for Castellane, two-and-a-quarter hours hence by foot, where the twice-weekly bus could take me as far as Aix.
At first the snow was unbroken but for fox-tracks.
Later I ran into several hunters, who were looking for their dogs and didn’t quite know what to make of someone dressed for alpine hiking but carrying an old cosmetics case. They asked where I was going and when I said Castellane they told me, “It’s down there, you’re going the right way.” I laughed and thanked them and continued on, and they kept looking for their dogs, who could be heard a-baying somewhere down the mountainside. You see, hunters in these parts don’t actually hunt boar or deer; the first thing they do when they get in the mountains is lose their dogs, and then they spend the rest of they day hunting their dogs. The dogs usually show up in Chasteuil around dusk, shaking violently from cold and fear.
The snow slowed me down. At one point the trail climbs up a stream-bed, over some small waterfalls formed by boulders in the stream, and these had frozen over and become little mountains of glass that I had to climb over, one-handed. But at about halfway down the mountain the trail becomes a road passable by car, and I was able to quicken my pace and make it to Castellane before my bus left.
* * *
It was rainy and mild in the lowlands of Provence, but Hubert and his girlfriend Geneviève and I managed to produce a good deal of Christmas cheer through batch after batch of bredele, or classic Alsatian Christmas cookies, gemlike variations on shortbread with various combinations of spices and ground nuts.
And of course Hub and I played plenty of music, both in the Marseille pubs
and at his house in Grans, where we were joined one day for a little session by Tristan and Alain from Lyon, and where we spent every afternoon giving each other tune after tune by the hearth.
* * *
The snow held off long enough to allow me to get back up to the mountains, after 5 days chez Hub, but Père Noël brought us the flu (Nancy and Pascal must have been naughty this year!) and a fresh snowfall for Christmas.
While Nancy and Pascal convalesced, I stayed warm in their kitchen with Diana, a young friend of the family who is studying in Lyon this year. We made pumpkin soup with orange and thyme and Diana’s fabulously buttery croutons for Christmas dinner,
and indulged in the supremely comforting yank pleasure of a batch of peanut butter cookies.
After making all those bredele in Grans I wanted to relive the old Bennion family Christmas tradition of Mexican Wedding Cookies, using a recipe from a notebook Nancy compiled years ago; in her teenage hand it was labeled Russki Tea Cookies, but was exactly the same recipe as what we always used at home, the only difference being I had to substitute ground almonds for the pecans, giving the finished cookies a sort of as-the-driven-snow quality.
We decided to try our luck with that droll mainstay of French Christmas patisserie, the Bûche de Noël or Yule Log. All of the naysayers (chiefly Diana’s chef father in California) warned us to take care not to over-bake the sponge-cake biscuit, or we’d never be able to roll it. To our great relief, the biscuit rolled easily after baking and unrolled without breaking later on.
The instructions for the chocolate glaze (we used a recipe Pascal found in a magazine) were much too vague for two people who’d never made a bûche de noël (or even seen one up close, in my case), and we ended up with a sort of soupy chocolate sauce that never firmed up enough to spread on the cake and clotted most unappealingly when we tried to fix it by adding more melted chocolate.
Frustration ensued.
But the next day Pascal searched his archives for a better recipe and Diana made a new chocolate confection which we spread right over the failed sauce to make a proper bûche.
Meanwhile Nancy and Pascal and I were busy with a turkey and all the trimmings, including thyme, rosemary, juniper and sage that I’d brushed the snow from on the hillside the morning before.
And so on the day after Christmas we had our Christmas Eve dinner, which was really Thanksgiving dinner a month late for Nancy and Pascal, who were busy making soap on Thanksgiving and didn’t bother to cook. We finished it all off with a nightcap from Pascal’s special calvados jug.
And meanwhile, the snow was falling gently, gently falling over our little village.
Such a pleasure to read what you write, Louisa.
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