Lucky Lou

waiting for wasps

2011-08-08T23:31:00.015+02:00

(photo: Matt Meehan)

At the beginning of July I returned to France from the Grand Canyon with two handfuls of rowing calluses, useless in any other compartment of my life, and none on my fingertips--which is exactly where I needed them for the new Suttner concertina that was awaiting me in Chasteuil. I hadn’t touched a concertina in nearly a month, the Grand Canyon in high summer and the West in general being dangerously dry places for centenarian wooden instruments like the Jeffries concertina I’ve been playing all along. I nearly wrecked my Jeffries, in fact, by living with it in Utah for 9 months right after I first bought it in 1999. The poor box was built in England in the 1890s and presumably spent the next century there and in Ireland before falling into my fortunate hands, and its wooden insides were warping so badly, by the time I got it and myself out of the desert, that I had to send it off to Jürgen Suttner in Germany for a full restoration, which took a year and a half. Since then I’ve always lived in places damp enough to put a curl in your hair and keep a concertina happy. But around four years ago I put in an order for one of Suttner’s highly regarded new instruments, and have been waiting for it with increasing urgency. The Jeffries, as beautiful and rich an instrument as it is, has been breaking down more and more often as the moving brass parts inside it inevitably wear out. It’s like some victorian progenitor of a typewriter inside, but more fragile, and the more I’ve learned--by sheer necessity--about its workings the greater the awe I feel that such a demoralizing farrago of spindly brass levers, nubby reeds and bits of leather valve could ever draw breath and make precise music at all.

In the past year the Jeffries has broken down several times, leaving me high and dry while I’ve waited for parts to arrive from my kind friend Mícheál in Ireland. Last June a reed cracked and I had to send him the entire reed-pan so he could use it to fit a replacement from his collection of salvaged reeds.

But most often when something goes wrong it’s a broken lever, which I’ve gotten reasonably handy at fixing by myself, once I have a spare lever to cut to size and bend to fit--can you see the shiny new one in the photo below?

I broke another lever in the Jeffries halfway through a five-day run of sessions in Manhattan in early June, on my way to the Grand Canyon, and had to scramble out to Brooklyn to bum a Dipper concertina off the gracious Anna Colliton, just in time to be able to play an immoderately pleasurable session at the Brass Monkey.

(photo: Zina Bennion)

So I was good and ready for the new Suttner concertina when I started breaking it in--and myself too--at the beginning of July. It’s not quite as sheerly sweet-sounding as the Jeffries (that inimitable tone is the reason the rachitic old instruments are still so sought-after) but it is a much more consistent and responsive instrument, efficient and smooth, and it’s a tremendous relief to be playing a concertina that doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall apart if I play it hard, and then I’m two weeks with nothing to play while parts are posted over land and sea. I do miss the bellows-breath of the Jeffries, the waft of which always carried the allure of long-unopened leather-backed books in some fusty, chain-smoking great-uncle’s private library. The new concertina gives off an innocuous smell, part Elmer’s school glue and part new shoes. Don’t be alarmed, gentle reader, by the unsightly purple wadding--the right handstrap was nagging my knuckles and so I trimmed the leather and padded it out with vet-wrap, which is meant for horses’ forelegs but is uncommonly useful on human legs, oar-grips and what-have-you.

The layout of the 32-key Suttner is a bit different than my 30-key Jeffries, in ways which I approve in terms of overall ergonomics and efficiency, but I’ve had to do some rechanneling of my brain and refiguring of the fingering system I use. This and the general stiffness of the new bellows meant I had my work cut out for me in the scant two weeks before I hit the road for Tocane, the best and longest-running Irish trad festival in France, and it’s only now, over a month since I first pulled the Suttner out of its box, that I’m beginning to feel really at one with it.

* * *

--Madame Bovary remarqua que plusieurs dames n’avaient pas mis leurs gants dans leur verre.--

As anyone with much experience of week-long Irish music festivals can tell you, there’s a certain listless stretch of the day-- commonly referred to as morning despite the fact that it is seldom in fact in the ante meridiem--when the drive to play tunes is suppressed; whether by cumulative fatigue and the lingering ill effects of Last Night’s Fun, or by the fact that the right combination of people haven’t yet collected in a place conducive to a tune. At some festivals one simply spends these nugatory hours wallowing in hoggish slumber, and wakes up roaring for the craic right around dinner-time. But if it’s Tocane and one is living in a tent in a sort of voluntary internment-camp on a football field with a couple of hundred other people, and particularly if the tent city is home to even a few voluble children and one’s very closest neighbors--and dear friends--are three banjo players who never seem to suffer from suppressed tunes-drive no matter the time of day or the weather, one should forget about the long lie-in.

Normally the village of Tocane St-Apres, whose deep drowsy meadows are verge to a particularly languid stretch of the Dronne, offers a range of salubrious daylight activities to counter the musical deleteries of the night. But if it pisses rain all week long like a vache espagnole and generally acts more like late September than early July, one had better have brought a good book. I brought Madame Bovary, along with the French dictionary I must consult on average three times per sentence to get anywhere with Flaubert. A good third of the words I look up turn out to be kinds of carriages, and another third are architectural terms whose English equivalents I’d look up if there were a good English dictionary on hand. The sentence above was one of those rare instances where I could leave the dictionary aside: “Madame Bovary remarked that several of the women had not put their gloves in their glasses.” Simple enough but oblique all the same, standing as a discrete paragraph on the page. The footnote (Gallimard folio classique edition 2001, with notes by Thierry Laget) to this line is nearly a page in length, and explains that a woman at a high-society dinner party was expected to put her gloves in her glass to prevent anyone serving her wine--that is, to attest to her sobriety. “...la femme qui mange et qui boit se dépoétise,” the editor draws from Alexandre Dumas, La femme au collier de velours (1849). "The woman who eats and drinks ‘depoeticizes’ herself." Dumas continues (in my awkward translation): “If a young and pretty woman puts herself at the table, it is to preside over the meal: if she has a glass in front of her, it is to be lined with her gloves;... if she has a plate, it is for her to pluck, near the end of the repast, at a grape, whence the immaterial creature might consent to suck the most golden seeds, like a bee at a flower.” I was just having a good snort over this notion of woman as l’immatérielle créature, and was contemplating a depoeticizing switch from coffee to a demi of the excellent local blonde on tap at Tocane’s Bistrot Rouge, when along came the Kane sisters and Edel Fox, who’d just eaten lunch at the bar next door. It’s hard to think of three ladies who’d be less likely, if confronted with a glass, to think it was for stuffing their gloves into; nor would any of them hesitate to suggest a more appropriate place into which said gloves might be stuffed...

Liz and Yvonne Kane are a Connemara fiddle duo whose Fahy-and-Canny-rich repertoire is full of wild but spare turns--there’s never a gratuitous note, as though they’ve been playing together into the wind all their lives--and when they play they grin so ceaselessly you begin to think laughter is an essential part of their respiration. Edel Fox is a formidably gifted young concertina player from County Clare; I first encountered her ten years ago in Miltown Malbay during the big July festival there. I was walking past an unmarked house when I was stopped by marvelous concertina music coming out from the door: a teenage girl in big bangs and puffy high-top sneakers was playing with an old ganzy-clad man in the kitchen. Edel and the Kanes frequently tour and record together these days, and they all started teaching workshops at the Catskills Irish Arts Week in East Durham, New York around the same time I begin going to that festival. Over a period of four years we had not a few nuits blanches and lock-ins together in Furlong’s pub, of which the lasting impression is of lots of black hair flying and long dresses whirling when the girls set down their instruments and started dancing, amidst beams of morning light that made bottles of Heineken glow like dozens of emerald columns. This was the first July in many years that Liz, Yvonne and Edel weren’t in the Catskills, which overlaps by a weekend with Tocane (as Hubert, Nico, Steph and I arrived and started setting up tents we were receiving texts on Hub’s phone from the Claw, a fiddle player who visited here last year and was just rolling into East Durham for the final sessionspree). It was consoling to have a little Furlong’s Family Reunion in the Frogskills with the Kanes and Edel. There are many ways to skin a cat, of course, but the obvious way to kill collective homesickness is to drown it.

There are three bars in Tocane, strung out along the main place opposite the church. There were moments during the week when it stopped raining for long enough to keep a cigarette lit and a session going outside under the linden trees.

But for the most part we played inside, and at night there was always a session going in each of the bars,

with all the attendant boozing and occasional fits of dancing.

Whether by design or sheer expediency, the three bars took turns staying open latest through the week, but never quite until dawn’s early light. The dedicated dewdroppers always ended up outside at the end, whether in the narrow margins under the awnings or under the big blue tent next to the church. Jean-Luc, the proprietor of the bar opposite the church, had an ingenious way of getting everyone out of his bar when it was past four and he’d had enough: he’d ask everyone nicely to leave, then carry two enormous trays of plastic cups of beer onto the tables outside, where his clients all hastened like flies to a honey-bucket, and Jean-Luc could bolt the door and clean up in peace. A session might very well start up,

and at a certain point just before dawn a sweet Breton lad named Antoine would take a collection and run to the boulangerie around the corner for bags of hot croissants. There’d be bands of local teenagers scavenging the drinks too, and one night Paul, the Kiwi owner of the Bistrot Rouge, closed up early and came down to drink with us and try his hand at a bit of the diddly-diddly he was being subjected to all week,

with lessons in embouchure from an English flute and pipes player called Pete.

Pete and his Swiss flute-maker friend Tom and I were the last ones out on the town that particular night--somebody had to finish all the beers Jean-Luc had put out, and the last of the local youths were gone, having slouched off to the campsite in the wake of two young Irish girls after repeated failures to actually be invited to go back with them--a drama to which we’d given our attention at first out of concern for the girls, and then to take pleasure in their stream of pure insolence as they expertly played the boys. It got light, but this didn’t really register with me until I saw that there were wasps arriving to drink the spilled beer on the ground all around us. Wasps are decidedly un-nocturnal creatures; it wasn’t even dawn anymore but full-on day, and I pronounced that it was time to go back to the tents. I mentioned this later in the day to some French friends who’d gone to bed while it was still night, and that evening one of them asked me, “Tu vas attendre les guêpes ce soir?” Will you be waiting for the wasps tonight? And for the rest of the week that was how one expressed the notion of an all-nighter: en attendant des guêpes...

* * *

On the Monday, when we’d been in Tocane for a day and a half that already seemed like at least three, Hub and I had lunch outside the Bistrot Rouge with his godmother, who lives nearby. At the next table was Jacob Fournel, an outstanding French whistle player with whom we’d discovered considerable musical complicity in a big session the day before. We all had our instruments with us at lunch and were keen for a tune together, and by the time we’d finished the meal with coffee it was mid-afternoon and we were wide awake. I’d made a paper crane from my chocolate wrapper (a habit I picked up when I travelled in Japan as a kid; as compulsions go it’s more constructive than shredding my napkin or dog-earing a beer coaster to bits) and I went looking inside the bar for the publican Paul, with whom I’d chatted on a few memorable nights in his bar during last year’s festival. “Here, I made you a bird--and would you mind terribly if we sat down in here and played a few tunes?” Permission was granted, and the golden crane sat on the bar for the rest of the week, like a little luck-totem overseeing the sessions we had au Rouge every afternoon from Monday on, whenever Paul was finished with lunch service and gave us the go-ahead.

Securing the Rouge as our afternoon session-spot was providential not only for the consistent foulness of the weather but because it’s the smallest of the three bars in Tocane, and the only place in town where the size of the session was naturally limited. On subsequent afternoons Hub and Jacob and I were joined by Denis Kersual on pipes and flute and Hervé Cantal on flute and whistle--two very fine musicians toward whom I was predisposed to feel fondly because I’d heard about them from my good friend and mentor Patrick Ourceau, who looked to them for guidance when he was starting to play Irish music as a teenager in Paris.

(photo: Julia Kersual)

Denis--who stands a wild-maned head taller than anybody in the room and is a commanding presence even when seated and strapped into the pipes, regulators blaring full-throttle--proved to be a good ally in the big nighttime session-melées. One night in the uppermost bar on the street Hub, Jacob, Denis and I sat down with Sam (concertina) and Sophie (fiddle) for a tune and the session rapidly metastasized to 50 musicians, of which a good third were playing guitars and bodhrans. When a cluster of five banjo players were gang-banging a reel he’d started at a perfectly reasonable speed, Denis roared “Moins vite!” across the room at them, mid-tune and to immediate effect, becoming at that moment a veritable champion to Hub and I, with our oft-frustrated penchant for what we like to call Old Man Music. Sessions that big are never really worth it; if you get up to buy a round or use the toilet you might not have the will to fight your way back to your seat, through all those banjos and fiddles stringing sets of 19 reels together, each of them determined to have the last word. With the new Suttner concertina I could actually hear myself above all the din, but I found I was just going through the motions, already thinking instead about the tunes we’d play the next afternoon in our calm little snug at the Rouge.

(photo: Julia Kersual)

Hub, Nico and Steph all had to leave on the Thursday morning, but I was able to arrange to stay until Saturday. The football field began to empty out and soon my tent stood alone out in the open. Classes had finished on Wednesday afternoon, and as Thursday night stretched toward Friday morning I said goodbye to the gang of profs from Ireland. The Friday afternoon session at the Rouge was only Hervé, Denis and myself, playing the sort of very relaxed Old Man Music that was pretty much all we were able for, at the week’s end. That evening Denis and I played our last session of the week in l’arrêt d’autobus, a little cement structure near the tents that was probably meant to shelter a few juvenile footballers but was just big enough for two musicians (if one of them has a full set of regulators), and looked for all the world like a little bus stop with no road passing by it. We kept playing ‘one more for the ditch,’ for we were already in transit, staving off the inevitabilities: the last noisy hasping of case-lids as we put the instruments away, the final tray of beers to evict us all from Jean-Luc’s later on, when we joined the others in town, and then the folding of tents in the morning and the rolling away out of Tocane for points diverse around France.

* * *

I got a lift eastward the next day with Matt and Laurence Meehan and their three-year-old daughter Saoirse. Matt plays the fiddle and Laurence the concertina; they live less than an hour from me and Laurence comes to me for concertina lessons. We were towing their ancient caravan (which had lost its door on the way over to Tocane, but Matt had enlisted the help of a luthier and skipped fiddle class one day during the week to reattach it) and we had plenty to talk about and new cds to listen to, so it didn’t matter that we couldn’t cruise very fast and lost a lot of time going the wrong direction out of Tocane in the first place. We stopped to picnic at a small aire (rest-stop) near the town of Monbazillac, and since there were no toilets we each made little excursions out into the rows of vines after lunch. I’d just come back to the car when a man came up to us and said that he was the owner of the land; I thought he was going to yell at us for taking a leak in his grapes, but instead he wanted to sell us black-market wine from the boot of his car. He opened a dusty, unlabeled bottle for us to taste his Monbazillac (“Only a drop for messieur who has to drive, but the ladies can drink all they like!”) which is a sweet white dessert wine, and since it was quite nice and only 5 euros a bottle we each bought several, noting as we did so the economy of the fact that what he was selling us was the same color as that with which we’d watered his terrain. The vintner, who had a funny squeaky voice, made us a present of the bottle he’d opened for us to taste, so we were all sorted for a nightcap in the caravan when we finally stopped to sleep late that night, in the parking lot of the polo grounds in Grans, where Hub lives.

I’d left Old Red--the ’95 Renault truck that Nancy and Pascal let me use--in Grans, so after coffee and croissants with Hub we took the road again in separate directions, and I got to Chasteuil in the early evening, just in time for a big feast with Nancy and Pascal chez moi, prepared by Chloé, the owners’ daughter, and her boyfriend Clément, who’d been at the house all week while I was away. Handily I had a bottle of Monbazillac sans etiquette to offer after dinner...

* * *

(photo: Lee Bennion)

I only slept in my bed one night before setting off once again in Old Red for a small festival up north in Hautes-Alpes of the Savoie. My friend Sam was teaching the concertina workshop; he and Sophie mentioned it to me when we were hanging out on the last day at Tocane, and with all the week’s tunes still turning round and round in my head I couldn’t stay home, knowing there was the chance for a good session within driving distance, even though I could only go up for two nights of the weeklong festival. I chose the smallest roads possible all the way up, the roads that are white on the map and are often scarcely wider than the car. My French friends slag me that it takes me forever to get anywhere when I drive, but they forget that the first time I saw any of their country I was on foot, with a backpack and a tent, and that’s still my default pace--as far as I'm concerned, the autoroute is about as interesting as playing a set of 15 reels in a session with several dozen musicians that all think they’re in the Bothy Band. By the route I chose, the drive was about seven hours. I broke this up with a night at the Ducke’s house near Gap and a few tunes in the morning with Steve, and then continued northward through increasingly high valleys and passes.

I arrived at the end of the afternoon in the ski village of Albiez-Montrond, which was hosting the 2nd annual Celti-Cimes festival (a cime is a summit or a peak).

There were enough people walking around with fiddle-cases to assure me that I was in the right place (I’d come over the backside of the mountain and had first looked for any sign of Irish music in the hamlets of Montrond and Albiez-le-Vieux), and before long I found Sam and Sophie, who I’d last seen only three days before in the Dordogne. The difference was that here they were en vacances in earnest, though Sam was teaching; they’d left their 7-month-old baby with granny and grandpa for the first time and were champing at the bit for a night of tunes and a graisse matinée to follow it. It was a good thing this festival was so much smaller than Tocane, for the weather was even worse and there were only two bars to hole up in at night. It was pure pleasure to be in a session the first night with Gerry (fiddle) O’Connor and Gilles le Bigot on guitar. Gerry’s a good leader in a big chaotic session full of débutants, striking up plenty of lively standards punctuated here and there by the odd gem of an unusual fiddle tune; and more essentially imparting a notion, so often missing in any country like France where Irish music has been transplanted out of its natural habitat of pubs and kitchens, of the social nature of the music, and the importance of the breathing-spaces between notes and tunes. When one nervous fiddle player near him commenced to strangle the fifth reel of a set that he was playing much faster than he was able, Gerry restrained him with a touch at the elbow--“Take a break, man, relax! Have a drink...”

The next day Gerry and Gilles left for Bretagne and were replaced as profs by Gerry’s craic-happy son Donal and the other members of the band At First Light.

(photo: Vincent Barboni)

Both bars in town were thronged with locals who were enthusiastic about the music, or perhaps just for the occasion to spend a few rotten wet nights inside the bar, drinking the local dark beer Piste Noire (its a slippery slope!)

and feeding on the baskets of bugnes the woman of the house sent around in the middle of the night at the Bar Constantin. At first glance these savoyard snacks might look like battered ortolans but they are nothing so exotic. They’re battered nothing, fried dough with a bit of powdered sugar sprinkled on top.

I’d planned to sleep in the back of Old Red, but in weather so miserable I was very grateful when the organizers of the festival, who I met in the first night’s session, offered to put me up in the gîte with the profs. There was snow not far above us the next day, when the clouds lifted enough to glimpse the knees of the Aiguilles d’Arves, which peaks I suppose I’ll have to go back to Albiez sometime to see properly, but in the meantime I bought a postcard that looked like it had been sitting on the rack at the Bar Constantin for a good few seasons.

The idea of snow at such proximity was a good pretext to indulge in a fondue on the second evening, between an afternoon of tunes with Sam and Sophie in the Constantin and the night’s crowded session under the same roof. This was comfort food at its most elemental and dépoétisé, just bread chunks dredged in rich goo, like an inside-out toasted cheese sandwich--the cheese, however, being a mixture of Comté and local Beaufort simmered in white wine, and washed down with more of the same (I’m told that if you drink anything but white wine with a fondue it becomes an undigestible knot in your gut).

Just as in Tocane the week before, it was this long afternoon session more than anything else that was worth all the effort of getting there. I met Sam and Sophie in Tocane last year and saw them in a big session in Paris in April with the Ourceaus; this year in Tocane they were fairly preoccupied with la petite Agathe (who already makes agitated concertina motions with her hands whenever she hears music). So this was my first chance to have a nice quiet session with them, to really swap tunes and savor what we have in common.

We were in out of the rain, in a beautiful old wood-lined bar where we could play for as many hours as we liked, making our way through the customary afternoon-session progression of coffees and Perrier before hitting the Piste Noire; all the while remembering and reminding each other of tunes we hadn’t played in a week, or maybe a year, recording each other’s unusual tunes for learning later--for these are the moments of intense cross-pollination that feed us for months afterward, in this land where there’s no Irish music but that you go many’s the mile for it.

mr. hotpants rides again

2011-07-05T20:59:00.070+02:00

In the summer of 2006 I was lucky enough to get out of New York and the coffee mines for a few weeks and row a baggage boat for Tour West, down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, a charter trip that my parents had organized and my dad was leading. My bailer and sole passenger was my mom, who was working as our assistant on the trip, but my sister Adah furnished me with a bit of ‘tube garnish’ for the voyage in the form of Mr. Hotpants, who had once been part of a cake-decorating kit. Mr. Hotpants spent the entire trip lashed to the bow of my 18‘ Avon raft, and that’s how he liked it. For a guy who’d never known anything rougher than buttercream frosting, he sure turned out to have a thing for bondage. If you look closely at the photo below you can see him reclining on the bow, as jaunty as though the V-Wave of Lava Falls were just another piece of cake.

You won’t be able to make him out in the following photo, try as you might, for Mr. Hotpants was torpedoing deep through the V-Wave, whereas my bowsprit mother just managed to keep her head above water while high-siding (the crucial passenger participation technique in big water, where one throws one's weight toward the high side of the raft to help prevent a flip).

(photos: Joe Bennion)

After a ride like Lava Falls Mr. Hotpants was often found in a procumbent position: he’d been spanked. As you can see in the above photos we rode a silty river on that particular trip; the water was khaki at its clearest, and by the end of the 226-mile journey the abrasive action of the river had nearly scrubbed Mr. Hotpants’ pants clean off him.

The following summer I didn’t have any river trips, and Adah arrived in New York by train on the 4th of July, ready to learn how to make coffee and to read the currents that run through those deep urban canyons.

I gave Mr. Hotpants back to her, apologizing for the shameful state of his knickers, and he adorned the apartments we shared, first in Manhattan and then in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the cheery fellow assumed his supine position atop the cake-like marble mantel of the ornamental fireplace in Adah’s bedroom.

Speaking of cakes, Adah bakes them like nobody’s business, and for several years running in the mid-aughts she created two cakes per annum for my birthday parties (neither of us could settle on just one kind), celebrated at the Beresford with musician, barista and sundry civilian friends.

Cut cakes, like cut flowers, never last, and you can only high-side for so long in the City before you need to come up for air. I moved to France a year and a half ago, and Adah hung in on the barista circuit until this May, leaving New York on the transcontinental train and alighting in Utah just in time to go as an assistant on another of our parents’ Grand Canyon charter trips through Tour West.

She and I hadn’t spent quality--or quantity--time together for a couple of years, so I was delighted to have her as fellow crew,

and as tube garnish on a few of the big-rapids days.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

It was a very snowy and cold spring in the High West, and the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon were spinning out as much water as they could possibly churn during our 15 days on the water. We were running on a steady 23-24,000 cubic feet/second as opposed to the flows of 6-13,000 cfs that I’ve been accustomed to over the past decade. Many of the rapids, like Granite (pictured above) became more straightforward in such big water--a bit washed out, if you will. Other rapids down there have sleeping monsters that wake at high water, like the Fifth Wave (aka Godzilla) in Hermit:

It looks like the boat’s going to pancake, or that at the very least I’m going out the side, but that’s actually the merciful route off the Fifth Wave (it’s the left face of that wave, not the right, that’s flipping boats at 24,000) and I held myself in by my calves (that was three weeks ago as I write this and the geometric bruises have faded but I still have a painful knot in my right calf) and got through with both oars in my hands, though the left one had been blasted out of the oarlock and was worse than useless.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

In flatwater stretches Adah and I lamented the fact that Mr. Hotpants was packed away in one of her boxes at home in Spring City, rather than out facing down the waves on my bow. This trip would have scrubbed every last shred of pants off him though, and the bow of my boat was already the scene of considerable wardrobe disintegration during Adrenaline Alley, or the big rapids of the Inner Granite Gorge. Adah’s Jackie O scarf was falling to tatters, which actually made it easier to secure it to her head.

And Mark’s straw hat came unbrimmed rapid by rapid until he resembled some fantastic high-siding manbeetle in Hermit, which was the last straw for the poor hat.

When the last of the tortured brim sloughed away we all thought the hat suited him much better.

Back to the subject of cakes. Dessert in the Grand Canyon can be as simple as dark chocolate squares pulled hard and cold from one of the 80-quart coolers that we boatmen sit on all day while rowing, or it can be an elaborate hazing ritual involving canned pears, Hershey syrup, whipped cream and peer pressure.

Often enough we bake up a dutch oven cake

especially if anybody is celebrating a birthday on the trip. On this last trip we had two birthdays, one of which was a surprise for us: Glade, a last-minute crew addition, celebrated a milestone in the Big Ditch. We only had one cake planned for that end of the trip, so Adah, as the birthday cake ringer on the team, stepped up to the plate and improvised with the ingredients on hand.

(photo: Joe Bennion)

A generous outpouring of gin and tonics from the clients ensured that this was the best birthday cake Glade had ever seen, even though it was not technically a cake but rather a sort of glorified, chocolate-studded rice pudding. I saved my portion for pre-Lava carbo-loading the next morning, at which point, however tasty, it was reminiscent of those oaten-bannock party favors of ritual sacrifice one finds in the stomachs of peat bog mummies.

Lava Falls is always my favorite rapid in the Grand Canyon, no matter the water level. It’s the biggest one down there, but at the same time it doesn’t require as many technical maneuvers as, say, Hance, Horn, Bedrock or Dubendorff at low water. It’s got the most spectacular scout on the right-hand side: you wend your way through columnar basalt to scrutinize the water and pick your line from high upon a great lava fang.

Entry--in exactly the right spot, and with the angle and momentum to punch through at that spot--is everything in Lava. After that all you can do is hang onto your oars and try to use them to keep the boat squared up to whatever you’re about to hit next. Failing that, well, just do what your passengers are doing: hang on and enjoy the bonus nasal enema. Lava never disappoints in the Big Ride department. To row it, even at a familiar and friendly water level, is to hook into the sort of adrenaline main-line that makes one forget hunger, thirst, pain or how badly one needed to take a crap at the scout. One might be bleeding from the leg or the arm after a successful run at Lava and not even notice it until a mile or two downstream. I’ve had my oh scheiße moments in Lava, to be sure.

(photos: Ed Marue)

(Miraculously a loose strap came to hand when I needed it and I stayed in the boat during the run pictured above, rowing baggage for Tour West in 2005.) But I’ve never flipped a boat there, touch wood. The topography of Lava is dominated by a magnificent gnasher called the Ledge Hole, which at any level is the single spot in all 280 miles of the river corridor that you most want to avoid. Here’s what Lava looks like at a relatively docile 6 or 7,000 cfs; the Ledge is all the crunchy white stuff on the left side of the channel.

At that level we run the tongue to the right of the Ledge, where the ride gets bigger and snarlier as the water gets higher on up to around 15,000 or 16,000 cfs, where the V-Wave is no longer the crotch of two lateral waves but two holes colliding, with such chaotic force that there’s no safe passage through them. That’s how I saw Lava last October, when we were supposed to have steady flows of around 8,000 cfs, but five days of rain and flash-floods from tributaries doubled the volume of the river. We scouted the right side of Lava, as usual, and stared for a half hour at the ugly beast, watching canoe-sized pieces of driftwood disappear into the Ledge without surfacing again. We boatmen were worried about our own abilities to stay in the boats through the right tongue--should we manage to keep them upright--let alone a few of our more elderly passengers. Part of me, the reckless fly-in-the-face-of-Lava part of me, wanted to see what would happen to me in there, how I would come out against water like that. However, that part of me had no trouble conceding to reason when our trip leader decided we would row back upstream and across the river to the nearest camp and wait for the water to come down.

(photo: Randy Rohrer)

At flows above 15,000 cfs we begin to look left, left of the Ledge Hole to the part of the channel that is a rock garden in lower water but presents a runnable tongue in high water. I hadn’t run left at Lava in well over a decade before this latest trip, and even back in the 90’s I never saw it quite so high. Normally the approach on Lava Lake is ominously calm and flat, until suddenly you hear the sound of the rapid over the dizzying sound of the cicadas. But in high water there is no Lava Lake, just a freight train of current moving toward the unseen Ledge Hole, and precise entry is even more difficult and essential than ever. Our trip leader Bruce explained the run clearly from the left-shore scout, and after a few minutes of careful study we were ready to run. (Any more than a few minutes at a big scout produces only diminishing returns where clarity is concerned, and increasing gastric unrest in response to the waters’ roiling.) I felt like a Lava virgin again, looking at a big and completely unfamiliar run. Adah and my mother were both high-siding with my dad, but the plucky folks in my boat had all reserved their spots there five days before, which warms the cockles of the heart and makes one feel as lucky-starred as though Mr. Hotpants himself were dangling there on the bow, unafraid to pass so close to the left edge of the Ledge that one is oarlock-deep in that Hole’s backside.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

It all happens damn fast in Lava (12 elastic seconds that stretch out impossibly and then thwack you like a belly-flop) but I believe, and the photos seem to say, that I was right where I wanted to be on entry, and I was possessed of both oars and facing downstream all the way through. My passengers were euphoric in the tailwaves and began clamoring to somehow run Lava again maybe ten more times--perhaps to avoid the immediate necessity of bailing out the boat, which was knee-deep in water. Needless to say, good runs in Lava and the impending end of the trip called for a party, for getting tricked out in our best thrift-store frippery and fake tattoos.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

Somewhere in all the celebration I mused to Adah that I’d soon be off for France again, to pass yet another birthday without a proper cake. Which isn’t to say that I’m complaining about French pastry at all, at all, but they don’t do the big Yank layer-cake that yields a doorstopper wedge on your plate, demanding to be chased with a pint of milk--those discrete blocks of cake and frosting like the stripes and panels of your own personal birthday-land flag. We had a few days all together in Spring City after the river trip and before I left for France, and Adah got busy and made a cake specially designed to comfort the soul of an American who’s expatriated herself to a place where the mountain roads might be paved with cheese and wine, but the peanut butter is uniformly scary: for example this African import, which sounds like something you’d use on diaper rash and is only slightly more edible than wood-filler.

Adah made a chocolate cake with peanut-butter cream-cheese frosting and a peanut-butter chocolate glaze, using Western Family Creamy, the yankest of possible Yank-butters.

She garnished the cake with fresh raspberries and our old friend Mr. Hotpants, whom providence placed at the top of the first box she opened to unpack.

Not much remains of his pants, especially after I was done with him (what's a girl supposed to do when there are no candles to blow?)

Mr. Notpants is looking forward to next year’s Lava run--come high water or low--to get spanky clean.

the mountain road

2011-03-01T22:27:00.003+01:00

On March 1, 1815 Bonaparte landed near Cannes and began his march on Paris. It being his intention to arrive there without firing a shot, he decided he’d better not go by way of the valley of the Rhône, where the terrain would be friendly and welcoming but he couldn’t count on a similar welcome from the inhabitants. Instead he chose the mountain road, the hard road through the snow-chocked passes, through alpine towns where he believed he could count on partisan support. One of these was our own Castellane, where he stopped for lunch on March 3rd. The route he took inland from the coast to Grenoble is followed with reasonable faithfulness these days by the N85, or La Route Napoléon. This is the road I travelled by bus once a week last summer when I was commuting to Nice for a session we were doing there; and lately I’ve been following in Boney’s footsteps in the opposite direction, up into the Hautes-Alpes to meet with a few Irish ex-pat musicians for a session we’ve been doing about once a month. I take the bus northwest out of Castellane on roads as tight and sheer in places, but not quite as mercilessly switch-backed, as the N85 between Nice and Castellane. That is to say, chain-reaction vomiting among the passengers isn’t a given, and in fact I’ve only seen one poor putty-faced kid get sick between Castellane and Digne. And from Digne to Sisteron it’s always smooth sailing down the autoroute in the broad, orchard-stitched valleys of the Bléone and the Durance.

“Soldats nous voilà sauvés, nous sommes à Paris!” Napoléon proclaimed to the soldiers who accompanied him when they arrived in Sisteron on March 5th. Now, that would never be the first thought to enter my mind when I get off the bus in the parking lot overlooking centre-Sisteron, where there is always a cluster of teenagers slouching around a scooter or a dumpster, smoking and groping each other, but I suppose my road has usually been easier than old Boney’s (I’m usually asleep for most of it). And I can see why he’d feel like relaxing and rejoicing a bit within this intensely fortified carapace of a town, which sits sentinel astride a point where two great mille-feuille fins of limestone form a narrows on the Durance, controlling the only passage north-south for quite some distance.

I always have a few hours to kill in Sisteron, so I climb as high as I can up into the Citadelle above the town, whose medieval fortifications grew out of a Roman camp, which itself was built on the site of a celto-ligurian oppidum. In other words, it’s been a strategic place for an awfully long time. These days the upper reaches of the Citadelle are closed until tourist season begins to rear its head in April, but one can still look out over the town from a few levels in.

And if it’s too gray and gusty a winter’s day to sit long up in the ramparts, Sisteron’s a good town for wandering leewards in the narrow streets.

And when one has tired of the streets and the squares and of trying to figure out why the museum devoted to clocks and the measurement of time that one would actually really like to visit always thanks one for being understanding of its fermeture exceptionelle; there's a good bookstore (better than the books section of the Castellane tobac, anyway) and enough bars in Sisteron that one can install oneself in a corner and drink coffees for a couple of hours without risking becoming a regular in any of them. These bars do a good trade through the middle of the day, mostly in pastis and lotto tickets, and often I have to work at not drawing attention to myself by laughing at some of the (unprintable) conversations I overhear. I know I’m drawing attention to myself just by being there, but in French bars, and especially in these mountains of the southeast where outsiders are milked for their money in summertime and regarded with unabashed suspicion in winter, a female can sit alone in a bar without the book in her hand functioning as a neon pester-lure: Ask me what I’m reading! I’m dying to tell you about it! When someone new enters a bar, restaurant or shop, he greets everyone already there with a “Bonjour messieurs-dames!” and for his friends in the assembled company, kisses (around Castellane it’s just a kiss on each cheek, but in Sisteron and further north it’s three kisses). As a stranger I’m given just the slightest glance, to make sure I’m not somebody who needs to be kissed, and then I’m completely ignored by everyone but the bartender until it comes time for someone to leave the bar; at which point, as part of the customary leave-taking all around they usually look me right in the eye and tell me to have a good day. It’s all very civilized, for a bunch of hollow-cheeked dipsos whose leathery look might be as much the product of pickling as of days picking apples or cherries in the mountain sun. But I’m never sure if the same rules apply in the street, so if during the rambling portion of my few hours in Sisteron I happen to see a group of familiar barflies making an impasse of a narrow street, I choose a different alley, knowing that if I recognize them they certainly recognize me.

With all this killing time I’m waiting for my next bus, which takes me further north along Napoléon’s road toward Gap, crossing over into the Hautes-Alpes department. (My department was called les Basses-Alpes, from the creation of the departments in 1790 until 1970, when it was changed to les Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. I suppose people would rather be Haute anything than Basse something...) I get off at Tallard and am met by my new friend Stephen Ducke, a flute player from Athlone who has been living on a mountaintop above the village of Théus for about ten years.

From Steve’s house you’re looking at the real, crunchy Alps, to which the mountains in my area, and even Steve’s, are just the footstools.

Steve organizes Irish music workshops and sells instruments at festivals and on his website Tradschool, where he is also quite prolific about posting nice versions of some very tasty tunes.

His daughter Sinéad is well-versed in the Irish arts; she performed her own version of Riverdance, complete with costume changes, glitter, instrumental bits, a demonstration on how loudly I was to applaud when I wasn’t doing it properly, and a well-practiced haughty look over the shoulder at the end of every number.

Meanwhile her older brother William wasn’t really talking to me yet, but Steve assured me that the plastic dinosaurs he kept assembling and bringing downstairs to show his papa while Sinéad danced were entirely for my benefit. Later he shyly told me that he is a vampire, but that he wouldn’t bite me if I didn’t make fun of him, and after that we were friends.

Their mother Maïna has recently taken over a herd of goats from her parents, who live on the same hilltop, and she sells her cheeses at several markets per week.

There are around 70 goats in the herd,

including kids of various ages, like this little mewling fellow still all wet from having just popped out of his mother, who was in a bad humor about the afterbirth dangling from her backside.

They’re milked by hand twice a day

by Maïna and her cousin, who’s real name is Roger but who everyone calls Roy (after Roy Rogers), and who in his spare time uses the workshop at the back of the goat-shed to make armor for medieval reenactments. His people, he told me, used to be lords of Castellane.

There are almost as many cats as goats on this mountaintop.

Steve tells me they were colonized some years ago by a mother cat who decided their barn was a better place to raise her kits than wherever she’d littered, and that after the population exploded there were some serious problems with inbreeding, culminating in one poor wall-eyed eejit who walked in circles and shat everywhere. But with a modicum of feline husbandry on Roy’s part they’re all looking relatively sane and healthy, and there’s not a rodent in miles.

As evening falls Steve and I drive down the mountain and up another to collect Peter Keilty, a bouzouki and mandolin player, singer and carpenter who has also been living here a while with his French wife and their children; and two of Peter’s neighbors, Thierry and Jean-Michel, who’ve become our traveling fan club, partly owing to their evident enthusiasm for Irish music, but by default as well, I suspect, since there are no pubs in their own village and they’re quite happy to drink pints in Oraison on a Saturday night while we play. With this detour Oraison is about an hour and a half south of Théus, in the valley of the Durance, and one of its several bars is the Connemara, a crêperie/pub operated by Florence and Eddie Fitzgerald, another Franco-hibernian couple. The pub is small and dinner while we play is by reservation only; when passers-by see us playing in the window and try to come in Flo has to turn them away because there’s simply no room for them. We’re met in Oraison by Hubert Chenot, the fiddler I’ve been playing with on as regular a basis as possible since last spring.

all session photos: Florence Fitzgerald

It was Hub that sought Steve out when I was away from France in the autumn; it was Hub that knew we all had a good deal in common in terms of taste in tunes and pacing and all ought to be playing together, despite the hundreds of mountainous miles that separate us.

It’s rare enough even in places where there’s a high concentration of Irish musicians to find the ones with whom one really shares a common aesthetic and approach to the music. To find such like-minded players in the wasteland that is traditional Irish music in the southeast of France is not something we take for granted, and we’ve all been working at each other’s tunes, shared via email or during long afternoons of tune-swapping whenever I’m at Hub’s house or Steve’s.

A good session depends not only complicity among the musicians but on the good-will and leniency of the publican. At the pub where Hub and I (and at least a dozen other musicians) sometimes play in Marseille the Irish bartenders don’t even try to hide their scorn for everything we do, so the Fitzgeralds’ hospitality in Oraison is something we don’t take for granted either. The space is such that we can hear each other clearly, even when all the diners are chatting away, and the walls are decked according to the whims of Eddie Fitzgerald’s obsession with American movies, Westerns in particular. I don’t mind staring at Steve McQueen or Paul Newman while I play, and the pub’s tiny water-closet is dominated by two of Hollywood’s most impressive sets of chompers: a poster for The Shining on one wall and Jaws on the other. We play for as long as we like, usually long after the last listeners have gone home, and then we stand at the bar with Flo and with Eddie, who’s been cooking in the kitchen all night and is eager for a bit of a chin-wag in English over a few last jars ‘for the ditch.’ We’re all lucky and we know it, and that’s something to be savored before we hit the high road.

tout tintin

2011-02-18T01:04:00.006+01:00

My friend Pascal Béguin has been reading Tintin for almost all of his life--which has been well-spent at other pursuits like stonemasonry on two continents, resettling a ruined hamlet on a mountainside, raising a son, rebuilding an old schoolhouse to run it as a bed and breakfast, and supporting his wife Nancy in turning her soap-making hobby into a viable family business. But all the while there has been Tintin, from the early days in prefabricated family barracks in post-war Normandy, where he read his first Tintin at age 7; to the present, when he makes discrete phone calls to find out which Tintins his 7-year-old granddaughter Jeanne hasn’t read yet so he knows what to get her for Christmas and birthdays.

His familiarity with the contents of the 24 published Tintin books is casually encyclopedic. Ask him who said: Gros plein d’soupe! or Dors-tu avec la barbe au-dessus ou en dessous des couvertures? and he’ll tell you, monsieur Balthazar’s parrot in L’Oreille Cassée, and Capitaine Haddock’s treacherous erstwhile lieutenant, Allan, in Coke en Stock. Quiz him on details fine or broad of plot-lines, and after a few moments of cogitation he can specify villains and describe major turns and denouements for any volume you mention. Quote some silly gaffe by team Dupond/Dupont (Pis de panaque!) and he’ll rattle off several more; call him one of Captain Haddock’s famous insults and you’ll find you’ve started a fight in which you can’t possibly have the last word, analphabète diplômé!

His son Sébastien, who’s also a keenly competitive Tintin buff, gave Pascal a 1700-page, 6.2-lb book in which are bound, in reduced size but unabridged form, all the Tintin books, from the embryonic and curiously dull black-and-white lurchings of the 1929-30 Tintin au Pays des Soviets to the messy but marvelously expressive penciled outlines of Tintin et L’Alph-Art, which was unfinished even in draft form when Hergé died in 1983. Pascal loaned me this Tout Tintin at the end of 2009, and in the first month of 2011 I finished reading it. There were long stretches of 2010 when traveling or visitors distracted me from this hardly portable project, but the further I got into the books the more I found that Tintin and his adventures was on my mind wherever I went. Part of this was due to the way Hergé’s lush imagery gets under your skin to the point that it can start coloring the world around you. When I was rowing a boat through the bottom of the Grand Canyon in September and October, for example, I kept imagining how the Canyon walls and sky and river, in all their outsized colors, would look rendered into frames by Hergé. Grand Canyon river running culture, rich as it is in kit and tackle, would have appealed to Hergé, and I could just see Tintin togged out in an old-fashioned lifejacket; Tintin learning to row and perhaps riding a mule down the Bright Angel Trail; Tintin hobnobbing with salty old hermit miners and Indians on the side-creeks whilst Captain Haddock gets sunburned and runs out of beer after the first night of a two-week trip; Tintin thoroughly enjoying his wilderness tourism until he stumbles across the victims of a mysterious Havasupi curse, or perhaps a circle of narcotics traffickers operating in the river corridor...

Whenever left to my own devices in Chasteuil, I made it my inviolable ritual, to start my morning by grinding and boiling a cup of coffee, then sitting down, my chunky little French-English dictionary at hand, and reading 20 pages or so of Tintin.

I must confess that it was very slow going initially, through the first three books which, even after Tintin breaks into color and assumes his iconic physical appearance in volume 2, are pure pap as far as their plots go. The stage-prop bad guys are part of a syndicate led most uncompellingly by Al Capone--Hergé did better when he started inventing his own villains.

And, to touch briefly a subject on which much has been said by more rigorous scholars than me, Tintin au Congo and Tintin en Amerique are, in addition to being boring, embarrassingly racist in their caricatures of Africans and American Indians, even in the cleaned-up versions reproduced in Tout Tintin, published decades after the originals.

I'd read a random handful of the later volumes a few years before, so I knew Hergé would hit his stride soon. And hit his stride he does, in the magnificently drawn, richly peopled and detailed, engagingly sinuous story-line that sprawls across several continents and volumes 4 and 5, Les Cigares du Pharaon and Le Lotus Bleu.

Here we see the blossoming of Hergé’s flair for kooky intrigue--The Pharoah’s cigars? The aesthetics of that title are a big step away from the simplistic comics-page-of-the-paper ethos of the earlier Tintins and into the more vivid roman policier world of detectives, criminals and enigmas. Here we meet the bumblingly officious duo Dupondt, who enter the story as Tintin’s police adversaries and somehow become his staunch but prickly friends, though their usefulness as inspectors and as allies is always dubious at best.

Here we encounter an absent-minded savant who prefigures Professor Tournesol, and other memorable characters who will turn up again and again through Tintin’s subsequent adventures: the florid schmoozer Oliveira da Figueira, who could sell ice to eskimos but has a heart of gold and always proves useful to our hero; the sadistic contrabandier Allan Thompson, who finally gets his comeuppance when he loses his dentures and every scrap of dignity in a volcanic earthquake 18 volumes later; the winsome waif Tchang, who reappears later as Tintin’s summons to Tibet and who serves as the archetype for the other spindle-shanked boys of varying ethnicity who, after being rescued from brutal treatment by Tintin, become his loyal native guides.

We also meet Rastapopoulos, the worldly, sneering arch-villain who will be Tintin’s Professor Moriarty, dodging death and capture to surface again and again as Tintin’s most significant and cunning foe.

And our young reporter himself takes shape to become the smooth-faced manchild he’ll remain for five decades of adventures. He’s unswervingly optimistic about human nature without being exactly naïve; he’s often much more canny about sniffing out a knave or a nefarious plot than most of the adults around him. Trouble seems to have a way of finding him, and a majority of the stories are set in motion by a chance encounter with someone who piques his interest or his sense that something is afoot.

He prevails against his enemies and escapes his demise time and time again through a combination of cleverness (he is a master of trickery and disguise) bravery, agility with his fists and a gun, the loyalty he inspires in would-be helpers by his selfless deeds on their behalf, and by good luck of heroic proportions.

He gets drunk easily when the situation demands he drink, as in L’Oreille Cassée when he’s condemned to death by firing squad in the South American republic of San Theodoros, and the colonel assigned to carry out the execution offers him an aperitif of the local eau de vie. The constant political reversals between the generals Tapioca and Alcazar, one or the other of whom stages a coup every few hours, prevent the orders for execution from ever being carried out, and tipsy Tintin staggers blithely through the mêlée, hiccuping revolutionary slogans.

But when Tintin has the choice, he seldom takes anything stronger than mineral water, never utters an expletive, refuses to kill even the most murderous blackguards when they are at his mercy (a tendency that suits Hergé’s ends, for what serial writer in his right mind would kill off a good villain?), and generally comports himself with such honor and justice that it can be a little maddening sometimes.

His canine companion Milou is more of an id-riddled regular guy. Like his master he’s brave, loyal and resourceful, but he also likes to chase cats and lap up any champagne or whiskey that gets spilled, and he’s easily distracted from the task at hand whenever there’s a bone to be gnawed.

He’s sometimes shown with a devil-dog on one shoulder and an angel-dog on the other, wrestling with himself in a situation that wouldn’t even present a decision to Tintin, just pure, upright necessity and action. But Milou isn’t quite enough of a foil for so anodyne a hero, and I’m betting I’m not the only reader who feels the books really come into their own when Hergé produces a more substantial helpmeet for Tintin in the form of le capitaine Haddock, who comes into the story in volume 9, Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or, as a broken man, shackled by alcoholism and taken advantage of by Allan and his wicked crew. Rehabilitated by Tintin and sworn to temperance (though his concept of restraint would still send most of us squarely under the table), he becomes Tintin’s devoted sidekick.

Presently they set up housekeeping as mansion-mates at Haddock’s ancestral Château de Moulinsart, where they’re joined by the guileless and decorously loony inventor Tryphon Tournesol, whose patent earnings pay for the château when their two-volume quest for Haddock’s ancestral pirate treasure come to naught (Le Secret de la Licorne and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge); and whose quasi-deafness and occasional hissy-fits of offended pride (never call him a zouave or anything else loudly enough that he might actually hear you, as Haddock learns in Objectif Lune) provide for endless gags and diversions. (Tournesol is a perpetual maundegreen machine, always hearing something different than what was said, always giving an answer that bears no resemblance to its question--for example, at one point in Les Picaros Haddock calls him a “sinistre farceur” and Tournesol almost has an aneurism at the idea that his sister (soeur) is being slandered. But that’s the kind of mistake I would make, I thought. The French language, as rich as it is in homonyms and silent endings, is a minefield of misunderstandings for the foreign--or the quasi-deaf--listener. I remember once being under the Tournesolesque impression that my neighbors and I were discussing something from India, d’Inde, when really the conversation concerned a turkey, or dinde.)

Haddock is everything human that Tintin isn’t, and we adore him for it. He’s generous of heart and genuinely wants to do good, but he’s also hotheaded, moody, childishly fond of instant gratification, and generally braver than he is wise.

He’s a functional alcoholic whose relationship with the bottle is one of the more complex forces at work in a world whose moralities are usually as unambiguous as the bright colors in which its panels are blocked. It’s clear from Tintin’s initial interactions with Haddock that the whiskey is a problem almost on the order of demonic possession. He almost kills them both several times in Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or, first when they’re taking turns at the oars of a wooden lifeboat and Haddock, finding a bottle of rum on board, empties it in two gulps while Tintin sleeps and then, feeling cold, sets fire to the oars and sinks the boat. A few pages later he finds a bottle of whiskey in a biplane they’ve taken over, and in a rampage of drunken glee he dashes Tintin over the head with the bottle and seizes the controls. They survive the resulting crash and wander in the arabian desert until they’re delirious with thirst, and Milou has to intervene to save his master when the captain tries to strangle Tintin, mistaking him for a bottle of champagne whose cork won’t pop. Haddock’s remorse is enough to make him abstain, at great effort, from taking an aperitif with the French lieutenant whose patrol saves them from dying in the desert, but when they leave the outpost to travel overland by camel the captain brings several of the lieutenant’s bottles in his saddlebag. When a band of attacking Berbers shoot two of the bottles in succession, Haddock’s demon possesses him again and he charges the enemy, single-handedly routing them (or so it seems) with an outburst of the ecstatically ludicrous insults that will be his hallmark.

Tintin has to admit to himself that there must be a god for drunkards, and when he reaches Haddock, who has finished by knocking himself in the head with the butt of is own rifle, Tintin cries, “Bravo, capitaine! Magnifique!”

In Le Secret de la Licorne when Haddock goes on the piss one night and tells Tintin the legend of his ancestor the chevalier de Hadoque, the pint-glasses of whiskey he downs in the telling are the central narrative device for pacing the flashbacks: the story moves forward on two tracks as Haddock drinks and exuberently re-enacts the chevalier’s adventures. Haddock waxes sentimental thinking about how the chevalier must have suffered when pirates captured his ship and tied him to the mast. “From the blow he received to the head, naturally,” Tintin says, but the Haddock answers, “No, from thirst!” and wipes away a tear before throwing back another glass. Later when Tintin sternly takes the whiskey away, slapstick duty gets passed on to Milou, who finds the glass on the floor and drinks up with hilarious results. It’s during these scenes that we most clearly see how Hergé’s storytelling needs Haddock’s boozy bluster as much as it needs Tintin’s earnest virtue.

Over the course of the series Haddock, perhaps domesticated by the land life at Moulinsart, seems to take his demons more in hand, but the bottle is always present, as much a part of his character as his beard and pipe. I found it creepy, in a Clockwork Orange sort of way, that in the last complete book of the series, Tintin et les Picaros, Tournesol invents a tablet that, when slipped into Haddock’s glass, makes all whiskey taste poisonous. Later on these tablets are important to the plot in that they revitalize General Alcazar’s soldiers, who’ve been reduced to impotent revelry by parachute-drops of Loch Lomand on the part of General Tapioca, who is a puppet of Tintin’s old enemy, the evil Bordurian police-tzar Sponsz. That’s all fine and dandy, but the idea that Captain Haddock might be ‘cured’ from the drink for life is unsettling, to this reader anyway.

Haddock’s outrageous storms of verbal abuse, whether booze-fueled or not, and his colorful speech in general, account for a significant part of the linguistic joy of the Tintin reading experience.

Sometimes his insults bear a discernibly referential relationship to their intended targets, as when he calls the whiskey-thieving Tibetan Yeti an “espèce de loup-garou (werewolf) à la graisse (fat) de renoncule (buttercup) de mille tonnerres de Brest!” But at their best Haddock’s insults are utter nonsense; sustained and sublime fits of pure, referent-free invective. Moule à gauffres! (waffle irons) Ectoplasmes! Végétariens! Noix de coco! Anthropopithèques! (cannibals) Vampires! Jus de réglisse! (licorice juice) Technocrates! Tchouk-tchouk-nougat! Bachi-bouzouks! Aztèques! Marins d’eau douce! (fresh-water sailors) Hérétiques! Cornemuse! (bagpipes) At the height of his powers Haddock speaks in elaborate compound-insults, untranslatable sums greater than their parts, which the reader can easily assemble at home. If you have cornichons! (pickles), for example, it can become tas de cornichons! or pile of pickles. Cretin des Alpes, or inbred hick, can be elaborated as bougre (guy) d’extrait (extract) de cretin des Alpes. Start with emplâtres, or plasters, and whip up some crême d’emplâtres à la graisse d’herisson (cream of plaster in hedgehog fat).

Given all his predilections, one would expect the warm-blooded old sea-wolf, like Milou, to want to go chase a cat now and then, but the idea of female companionship never seems to cross his mind. In fact the only character in Tintin to show any interest at all in the opposite sex is the otherwise prudish Tournesol, who blushes, stammers, breeds a new strain of white rose, and flies off to San Theodoro for the sake of the dreadnought opera diva Bianca Castafiore. Perhaps the fact that la Castafiore, her stodgy maid Irma, and Alcazar’s shrill, pug-faced wife Peggy are the only adult females with speaking parts explains why the men and boys of this world seem to prefer birds of a feather.

I was startled, in the unfinished Alph-Art, by the introduction of Martine Vandezande, bespectacled receptionist for the art dealer Fourcart. Sure she’s ditzy and brainwashed by a guru, but she’s a well-meaning young lady somewhere near Tintin’s own indeterminate age, with whom he converses for well over a page! Who knows what would have transpired between them if Hergé had finished the book?

In fact, as I read the last few volumes of Tintin I felt that the ground of that world, which had been so delightfully stable for so many adventures, was beginning to shift in unpredictable ways. Sometimes I reacted with nostalgic displeasure. I didn’t like it, for example, when Tintin was suddenly wearing long brown slacks in Les Picaros instead of his iconic knickerbockers. What was he going to do next, grow his hair out? And I could have gone the rest of my life without learning, also in Les Picaros, that Captain Haddock’s first name is Archibald. At least Tintin, when asked his name in the same frame, replies with his usual bland, unselfconscious opacity, “Moi, je m’appelle Tintin,” and we are spared any other revelations.

But in other ways I was excited to see Hergé’s treatment of his characters become more and more nuanced toward the end of the series, and with this a new complexity in his notions of good and evil. His bread-and-butter villains like Rastapopoulos, Allan and Sponsz are still as evil as could possibly be, but otherwise it becomes harder and harder, among newly introduced characters, to really say who is a bad guy of epic proportions and who isn’t just, well, an ordinary dupe who’s made some bad decisions. In Vol 714 pour Sydney the verminous beanpole Dr. Krollspell, originally a flunky of Rastapopoulos, turns coat to help Tintin and his friends, and the rich and eccentric inventor Carreidas, who Rastapopoulos has kidnapped and who Tintin and friends are trying to rescue, reveals himself to be every bit of as nasty a git as Rastapopoulos himself. In fact the two of them, under the influence of Krollspell’s truth serum, engage in such petulant competition for the title of the ultimate génie du Mal that Haddock has to tape their mouths shut so that good guys and bad can think straight to flee the volcanic earthquake that’s engulfing the island. In the end it’s a sort of eerily neutral deus ex machina that decides their fates, in the form of a saucer-full of aliens who’ve made the island their base on earth since time immemorial.

The dispute between Rastapopoulos and Carreidas is a parody of stage villainy that puts them on an utterly different plane from such flat prototypes as Al Capone and Bobby Smiles in Tintin en Amerique, and Vol 714 is directly preceded by two back-to-back Tintin episodes with no villain whatsoever.

In the sumptuously drawn Tintin au Tibet, our hero travels to Nepal with the reluctant captain in tow when he learns that Tchang has gone down in a plane crash from which there are believed to be no survivors. In this meditation on friendship and loyalty Tintin’s only adversaries are self-doubt and the magnificent indifference of the Himalayas, and the prismatic logic of dreams and omens holds sway over the story. Even l’abominable homme des neiges, who seems be assuming the role of villain for part of the story, turns out to be a lonely, misunderstood hominid with a Justin Bieber hairdo, and he holds Tchang captive and harries the rescue party out of genuine attachment to the boy.

The following volume, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, is a comedy of manners in which the irrepressible Castafiore invites herself and her retinue to Moulinsart, much to the horror of Captain Haddock, who finds himself wheelchair-bound and romantically linked to the buxom boor in the tabloid press, whose reporters are drawn to Moulinsart by her arrival and the subsequent disappearance of her prize emerald. Hergé mischievously keeps twisting the narrative to keep us thinking it’s a jewel-heist whodunnit, but each time we think we know who, the dunnit evaporates before our eyes, and after all the hoopla Tintin finds the missing emerald in a magpie’s nest. So much for the notion of villainy as a reliable pole by which to navigate this world.

And as for received notions of goodness--well, those turn out to be up for grabs as well, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the beginning of the series. The endless cycle of coups and counter-coups between Alcazar and Tapioca is a source of irony from their introduction in L’Oreille Cassée, but gradually the squinting, lantern-jawed General Alcazar comes out as Tintin’s preferred side in the situation. Tintin and Tournesol help him overcome Tapioca by means of the above-mentioned anti-alcohol tablets, but in the process Tintin is cunningly betrayed by his old sworn ally and protector the former assassin Pablo, whose life Tintin once spared. Pablo appears again to make good on the old oath, but in reality he sells Tintin to the highest bidder. This reversal is shocking because it defies the deep-seated moral code whereby goodness on Tintin’s part begats goodness in all but the stoniest of hearts. The improvement in Pablo’s character once wrought by Tintin’s influence may have been real at the time, but it wasn’t an irreversible transformation. Goodness isn’t immutable, and Tintin’s failure to consider this possibility is used against him. In the final frames of Les Picaros the image of the jumbo jet carrying Tintin and friends back to their cozy life at Moulinsart, after they’ve saved the day, implicates Tintin himself in the fact that the poor wretches in the San Theodoran favela below are shown to be absolutely no better off under Alcazar than they were under Tapioca--a significant chink in Tintin’s customary facade of post-colonial optimism.

Mille millions de mille sabords--I said post-colonial. That means it’s time to shut up and remember that comic books are fundamentally fun to read. The only post- seriously at issue here is life post-Tintin. I miss my morning dose, though I’ve been branching out into denser French prose with other optimistic protagonists even more naïve than Tintin, I think--Jean de Florette and Candide. Pascal’s advice on Tintin withdrawal, as written from faraway in California: “...la seule solution c’est de relire ceux que tu veux. Et relire, et relire jusqu’a l’age de 77 ans.”

In other words, reread and reread them again until you’re 77 years old, though I doubt he intends in the least to stop reading Tintin when he reaches that age.

And the Tintin-obsessed young son of a friend in the States also had some advice for me... try Astérix and Obélix!

letter from the hibernaculum

2011-01-28T13:56:00.004+01:00

I left New York for France when I did--though it meant quitting a job I loved at a time when the phrase “in this economic climate” was cropping up rashlike as the catch-all reason for people to postpone the pursuit of fun or self-fulfillment--because I liked my Brooklyn apartment too much. I’d moved there after several years near Washington Square in an apartment I called the Manger, for eating and sleeping, the two uses to which mangers have been most notoriously put through the ages, are all I ever did in the place. As I told myself when I moved in, who needs a living room when you live in the West Village? But somehow when I turned 30 it began to bother me that my bed touched three of the walls of my bedroom, and my youngest sister had recently moved into the Manger’s second bedroom, fresh from the generous 19th-century interiors of rural Utah, and couldn’t reconcile herself to paying so much for such small berth. So we moved to Brooklyn, and for the same price we’d been paying before the last rent-hike at the Manger, we took the parlor floor of a Crown Heights brownstone whose Victorian charms were undefaced by the landlord’s pragmatic and minimal renovations. The place was a run-down palace of ornate woodwork, parquet floors, sliding french doors, ornamental fireplaces and chandeliers on 14’ ceilings. My sister’s room, which had been the front parlor, we called the Bowling Alley. Who needs coffee shops, bars or restaurants that serve something besides fried chicken and pizza, if you live in the Bowling Alley? My room had been the library, and though it was smaller than my sister’s, it was still almost as big as the entire footprint of the Manger.

(above photo: Joe Gerhard)

For a while I kept to my old habits of spending most of my waking hours out and about in Manhattan, where when I wasn’t working I was wandering the streets and playing sessions in bars. But gradually a new desire began to take root in me to stay at home on my days off, which were few enough and far between. I began to arrange for more days off, and found myself content, even keen, not to leave my apartment all day, which would have been unthinkable in the Manger, unless I were very, very ill. The stronger my attachment grew to staying home all day in the apartment, reading, writing and practicing my concertina, the more ridiculous it seemed to be living there; for however much one loves one’s apartment, one pays to live in New York for what lies beyond the apartment, and if one wants to be a shut-in one had better find a much cheaper place in which to shut oneself. Fortunately, I had such a place as my escape-hatch all along: around the time I moved to New York I’d been given the standing offer of housesitting in Chasteuil, an offer I put on the back burner to make the most of all New York had to offer for as long as I had the stomach for it.

* * *

And so here I am, deep into my second winter in Chasteuil. In fairness, I spent most of last winter away from here, traveling in Eastern Europe and Ireland, and I spent spring and summer running around France with a non-stop stream of visitors (whose willingness to travel so far to see me made me feel more than ever the appropriateness of the monicker I gave this blog) and traveling to sessions and festivals with my newfound Frenchy partners in musical crime. By the end of summer, when I went to Ireland for almost a month and then headed off for a river-guiding gig in the Grand Canyon, I had to congratulate myself on having managed to replicate the invigoratingly hectic and scattered nature of my life in New York--only I was getting more sleep and sunshine and eating better cheese. So when I returned to Chasteuil from the rafting trip, which I bookended with two weeks in Utah, and followed with roughly a month combined in New York and London, I was very much ready to hole up, to retrench, to just be here.

(above photo: Nancy Herfield)

You might be wondering, in passing, about the legality of my continued sojourn in France. Indulge me then, while I summarize my first foray into the byzantine byways of French bureaucracy on the regional level. I spent last year here on a visitor (non-working) visa I obtained from the French Embassy in New York, an intimidating experience I wasn’t eager to repeat, though I wasn’t one of the several over-dressed women openly weeping in and around the Embassy on the day that I went there. I had to submit proof I had the means to support myself for a year and proof that I had a place to live, and I had to buy a health insurance policy (this policy, which includes comforting provisions for the repatriation of remains, is meant for Americans living abroad and is cheaper than any comparably inclusive policy I could buy if I were still an uninsured American not living abroad...) When I started looking into the possibility of renewing my titre de séjour, which is roughly equivalent to a visa, I was directed to apply right here in Castellane at the Mairie (town hall), where my papers would be forwarded to the Préfecture in Digne-les-Bains. I filed all my papers at the Mairie before leaving for the States in early September, and on my return in November I was greeted by a letter from the Préfecture informing me that the OFII, the immigration office in Marseille with which I had registered right after moving here last year, had no dossier on me, and that therefore the Préfecture couldn’t process my request. It was suggested in this letter that the OFII had sent me two different convocations, or summonses, for an obligatory medical exam, which convocations I had ignored--which was news to me--and I surmise that my dossier, which surely existed at one point, was more or less chucked as a result. I was invited to call the OFII at my earliest convenience to request another convocation for a medical exam, without which I could in no way be considered for a new titre de séjour. All of this was conveyed mostly in the passive voice, well larded with subjunctive and gerundive conjugations, and summed up thus:

Je vous précise que, faute d’effectuer cette visite médicale ayant un caractére obligatoire, votre titre de séjour ne pourra être renouvelé. Dépourvue de carte de séjour valide, vous vous trouveriez alors en situation irrégulière et pourriez faire l’objet d’une mesure de reconduite à la frontière. Je vous prie d’agréer, Madame, l’expression de ma considération distinguée...

The key words here, if you’re struggling, as I was, with the arch officialese, are situation irrégulière and reconduite à la frontière. Yup. I immediately called the OFII, of course, where I was asked my name and date of birth, put on hold, presently informed that there was no dossier on me, and disconnected. This happened three times in exactly the same way. It became apparent, after I finally gave up and sicked Pascal on them, that I was caught in an exquisite loop of bureaucratic non-communication between the two offices, one in Digne and the other in Marseille: the OFII denied my existence and wouldn’t give me a convocation without a dossier, and the folks at the Préfecture had all my paperwork and actually seemed sympathetic to the idea of renewing my titre de séjour, but couldn’t do so without the results of the medical exam. An official in Digne suggested a solution that would reinstate my existence for the OFII, and a month later, after the exchange of much additional paperwork between myself and the two offices in question, all of which passed through the hands of the very helpful women in the Castellane Mairie, I received a convocation telling me the day and time I was to present myself at the medical center in Digne. The medical examination, after all that pettifoggery, entailed nothing more than pulmonary x-rays for tuberculosis and a doctor asking if I had any diseases that I knew of. I answered in the negative, and with a cheerful flourish he signed the final form, which was, like all the others before it, somewhat of a thing to be admired, you’d have to admit, if the sight of a lovely official document all properly filled out and signed and neatly trimmed with stamp-ink thrills your heart. There are many stereotypes about the French that I have found to be without foundation in fact, but they do love their forms and their rubber stamps. I’m currently in possession of a temporary but valid titre de séjour, and when the replacement document arrives at the Mairie in Castellane I will be subject to a rather hefty tax payable not in cash but, just for kicks, in special timbres (stamps) that I have to buy at the Trésor Public...

* * *

The snows of Christmas are gone, but it’s cold enough most mornings in Chasteuil for a filigree of frost on the windows and a hard faux-dusting on the kitchen gardens below the village. The stone houses in this part of the world are wondrous for hoarding the cool in summertime. Walk down a narrow street in Castellane on a buzzing hot midsummer’s day, and from of the dark, open doorways of the ancient apartment-buildings you’ll feel silent drafts of air lolling out onto your ankles, cooler than from the maw of any air-conditioner. And up in Chasteuil it wasn’t until July of last summer that the inside of my house warmed up enough that I didn’t need a sweater to sit in my kitchen in the middle of the day. By the same token, there’s no heating this house in winter, at least not without an electricity bill that would make me think I was back in New York again. And when we get a stretch of clear skies in midwinter, it’s definitely warmer outside than in.

I heat the house with wood, and I only heat the kitchen. I can see my breath in my bedroom, even in the middle of the day, and I sleep with a hat, scarf and every blanket in the house, but I’m perfectly cozy that way. As Melville said,

...truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if... the tip of your nose... be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (Moby-Dick, Chapter 11)

Melville’s narrator was referring to the shared bodily warmth of himself and his bosom friend the cannibal Queequeg, and I have only my two hot-water bottles for company, but I often remark on how cold the tip of my nose is when I’m in bed, and how little it bothers the rest of me; and sometimes when I neglect to make the bed until the afternoon (don’t hold it against me that I make my bed these days, Mr. Gerhard, now that I have time for it) I’m astonished, when I put my hand in to pull the hot-water bottles out, at how it feels as though someone was lying there all along and just got up, leaving their warmth in the sheets. These are the sorts of warmth-seeking, anthropomorphizing tricks the mind plays when someone who’s never been able to afford to live alone spends weeks on end by herself in a big stone house in the mountains, I suppose. I experience a similar fond flush when I walk into my kitchen, which I keep shut up to hold the hard-won heat. The room feels alive, and the seat of this companionability is my Godin stove, enameled in darkest green and standing sturdy at the height of a dwarf.

Using such a stove in winter is a lot like sharing one’s house with a large, extraordinarily well-behaved dog--the long walks to gather kindling, the cleaning out of the ash-box and sweeping up of the ashes that fall on the floor in front of the grate, the occasional feeding throughout the day and rattling of the poker to encourage the coals. I can always hear it ticking and snapping and respiring, as I sit at the table with my back to it, with the susurrous breathing of a sleeping beast or sometimes with a windy soughing like the singing of a faraway choir. When I came down with a fever on New Year’s Eve and couldn’t face the above-mentioned puritanical cold-nose business, I made myself a bed on the kitchen floor out of old couch cushions and my sleeping bag, right next to the baskets of kindling and the stove, and I felt exactly the anticipation I used to feel before a slumber party when I was a kid, to be sleeping in the same room as my fire.

If the stove is damped all the way down, a good oak log well-banked in ashes will burn all night, slowly as coal, and the first thing I do when I come downstairs in the morning is open the bottom door of the stove to wake up the fire. Then to brisk gresilling of the night’s embers going to work on a fresh log, I sit down, facing the stove with the coffee-mill between my knees, and grind my coffee. I’ve made a little couch in the kitchen out of the cushions I brought downstairs on New Year’s Eve,

and during rainy weeks I dry my laundry in the kitchen as well.

A month of bad weather after the holidays meant a month of little to no internet connection in Chasteuil, and I became accustomed to not even wondering what was going on out there in the web-wide world.

Nancy and Pascal left on their annual winter trip to California, and with them gone I only occasionally cross paths with my other neighbors, who are also in hibernation mode. These little conversations start with the weather, move on to the all-consuming topic of firewood and le chauffage (the heating of one’s house) and usually end with an expression of surprise that I’ve chosen to stay here all winter, teute seule. I assure them that I’m perfectly happy with my books and my concertina and my writing projects. I don’t try to explain that maybe I would go crazy all alone like this, if it weren’t for my other life in New York, ever present in the back of my mind as though part of me persists there, where any one day of these would be a precious expanse of solitary indulgence to be savored for its entire velvety length. Nothing exists in itself.

Sometimes I do wish there was someone to whom I could say something like, doesn’t the skin forming in this cocoa-pan look like it’s alive? Doesn’t it tighten and shift as rapidly as the spectral pulsing of the northern lights?

Sometimes I get a visit at my kitchen window from a handsome gray cat whose name I don’t know, but for whom I’ve taken to putting out scraps.

I don’t know who really feeds him, or whose house he lives in to get out of the cold. But every morning while this late-January gold streak lasts he spends a few hours curled up in a little grassy hollow downhill of my window, getting what he can for as long as he can get it.

mess of pottage

2011-01-15T00:22:00.001+01:00

When I was small my mother told me that the mess of potage ruddy Esau traded his birthright away for, after a long day of tramping in the woods, was really a bowl of lentil soup. She probably told me this in order to increase the allure of the lentils she served up on a regular basis in wintertime. I already considered this stuff to be comfort food, simmered as it was all day on the wood stove, until the carrots and the meat from the ham-hock had disintegrated into the velvety silt of lentils, and served with cheese and slabs of homemade buttered bread, so I didn’t really need any encouraging to eat up. But it’s always been in the back of my mind, whenever I tuck into a particularly satisfying lentil stew: What would I be willing to give for this? Would I trade everything away for this bowlful, and not regret it? I always secretly preferred hairy Esau, the uncouth hunter, and wondered if he knew something Jacob didn’t when he agreed to the bargain. Maybe he knew his birthright was in his own limbs, and considered his belly full on lentils to be of greater worth than whatever inheritance the wily Jacob had set his sights on. Consequently I’ve never quite taken lentils for granted, though they’re synonymous with poverty gruel or signal some drear vegetarian regime for many people I know. My friend Brigitte, who used to live here in Chasteuil, won’t touch a lentil because she and her climbing-bum husband and two children lived on nothing else for some very long stretches, a few decades ago.

Around eight years ago my friend Yotam returned from spending New Year’s Eve in Rome and mentioned in passing that he’d been given lentils to eat as part of the festivities. They were supposed to represent little coins, he said, and therefore would bring prosperity for the coming year. Later that same year my own fortunes changed and suddenly I was deciding to walk away from everything I was doing, was deciding to walk through southeastern France with a backpack and tent. I passed through Chasteuil and met Pascal and Nancy for the first time on that walk, and further on I stayed for a couple weeks on a remote farm in the Ardèche mountains, picking beans and tomatoes and pulling briars from stone walls for my room and board. The farmer’s wife taught me her method of cooking the small green ‘Puy’ lentils that are the most common variety here in France. As though carved from tiny bits of tortoiseshell jade, they hold their form during cooking much better than the larger brown liver-spot ones we use in the States.

I moved to New York City when I returned to America, and for the next six years I threw a series of New Year’s Eve parties in the fabulous Central Park West penthouse where I was always lucky enough to be dogsitting for the holidays. A few of these parties were far too big--those who frequented my Beresford parties in those days will remember what came to be called the Seinfeld Incident, which was the catalyst for the drastic scaling-down of the next year’s party (and all subsequent parties) to include no more than twenty invitees, the majority of whom were required to be Irish musicians, who engage in serious all-night booze-ups on a regular enough basis to be relied upon to acquit themselves more decorously, no matter the quantities quaffed, than did the two young champagne-blitzed oligarchettes who somehow ended up at my party and were responsible for the above-mentioned regrettable Incident. But no matter how big or small the party, the centerpiece of my table was always the same: a great vat of green lentils, cooked in the ardèchois style, and no matter how many pounds of lentils I started with there was never anything left, by dawn, but a flaky crust on the sides of the pot. Even Brigitte would have appreciated my thrift, for there’s no cheaper way to feed a houseful of people who’ve already worked up a hunger through several hours of revelrous exertion. And I discovered that for most of my friends this mess of potage was a great novelty; they came to expect the lentils around midnight, for the turning of every year, and this December a few of those Beresford party regulars wrote me to ask for the recipe.

I myself came down with a sudden fever around midday this past December 31st, and for the first time ever I passed New Year’s Eve completely by myself. It was cold, the snows of Christmas week having lapsed into day after lusterless day of fog and rain.

Fortunately I had a good companionable fire going when I fell sick, a good fire several days strong that needed no coaxing, just an occasional feeding. (As I write this, fourteen days into the new year, it’s still the same fire. I haven’t had to strike a match in the morning since then, only rouse the clutch of coals out of the night’s ashes. They awake gnashingly hungry, with a sound like ice floes breaking, as soon as I open the door of the stove and they breathe the morning air. All I have to do is stir the poker among them and drop in another stout log.)

So there were no lentils, but since there was no party either it didn’t occur to me until a few days later that I’d neglected to ward off penury for 2011. It was Nancy who brought up the lentils, one evening when she and Pascal and I were eating together at their house, as we usually do in wintertime when their guesthouse is closed. “I want lentils. I want lentils simmered all day on a wood stove!” She looked at me when she said it, for Nancy and Pascal have a fireplace but no wood stove. So a few nights later they came down to the bottom of the village to my house for dinner, for the first time since I moved to Chasteuil over a year ago. I cook often enough when we eat together, but always in their semi-professional kitchen.

My Godin stove is quite long-barreled, and to ensure the topward heat I would need at the beginning of the cooking process I had to think ahead. About two hours before I wanted to start cooking I stoked the stove with a dense oak log nearly as long as the barrel of my stove is tall.

As soon I heard the vigorous snort indicating that the base of the log had taken, in the nest of coals in the bottom of the stove, I damped the whole stove down to the meagrest flow of air. When I opened its door again two hours later the log was a two-foot pillar of black charcoal, ready to burn hot and hard along its entire length at the first inrush of oxygen. It was still burning too hot and too close to the cooking surface of the stove when I was done with the initial sautéing and boiling and ready to simmer the lentils, so I had to take the pot off the stove for a little while and let the fire burn down a bit.

The lentils and my little stove-side dinner party were a success. If you’d like to cook up a pot for yourself, bold reader, be assured that they taste just as good when cooked on gas or an electric range, and the method I learned in the Ardèche, and have been following with only slight modifications ever since, is as follows.

☛Use french green lentils du Puy, which you can find in any well-stocked American gourmet market or health-food store. Soak a pound of them for 4-12 hours before you intend to start cooking. Lentils are the only pulse you can cook (in a reasonable amount of time) without soaking, so if you forget to soak them proceed anyway, but you’ll get better results with soaking.

☛In a heavy-bottomed pot (a Le Creuset or other cast-iron pot is best) fry a half pound of diced bacon, thick-cut if you can get it.

☛When the bacon is browned, add a few glugs of olive oil and two medium onions, diced. Sauté them until they begin to be translucent, then add several cloves of minced garlic.

☛While the bacon is frying and the onions are sautéing, dice 4 good-sized peeled carrots. You can cut them in rounds if you’re in a hurry, but the texture of the finished dish is more pleasing if the carrot bits are closer in size to the lentils. To dice big carrots cut them in half, split the halves lengthwise like logs, cut these halves in lengthwise strips, and then chop across these strips. Add the diced carrot to the bacon and onions just after you’ve added the garlic, and continue sautéing for another two minutes.

☛Drain and rinse the lentils and add them to the pot. Add enough water to cover the lentils by a half inch, and bring them to a boil. As soon as the pot boils reduce the heat to a simmer, and with a big spoon skim off the green-gray foamy scum that has collected at the surface.

☛After you’ve skimmed the pot, add fresh-ground black pepper, a couple of bay leaves and a good fistful of fresh thyme, still on the branches. (If fresh thyme isn’t available, use a couple of tablespoons of dried thyme.)

Push the thyme sprigs under the surface with a spoon so that all the leaves will slough off in cooking, and simmer the lentils until they soften. Simmering time will depend on how long you soaked the lentils and on cooking temperature, but plan on about an hour. Be sure to simmer them gently; if you boil them they’ll rupture and turn to mush. They’ll still taste fine if this happens, but the dish will lose its toothsome mouth-feel of individual lentils. Keep an eye on the water level during cooking. You may need to add more, especially if you didn’t soak the lentils, but the finished dish shouldn’t be soupy; it should be thick enough you could serve it on a plate.

☛When the lentils and carrots are tender, fish out all the stripped thyme ‘bones’ with a spoon and salt the pot to taste. At this point you can keep the lentils warm on the hob for another good long while, as long as you add a little water now and then and the heat is very low, but try not to mash them with too much stirring.

☛It’s traditional to serve these lentils with sausages, merguez or any other good quality lamb or pork sausage, one or two per person. The woman who taught me this dish added the uncooked sausages when she added the lentils and the water, and effectively boiled them with the lentils. But here’s where I choose to depart from tradition: who doesn’t like a fried sausage better than a boiled sausage? So I pan-fry them separately, lay them whole in the soup-plates and ladle the lentils over them to serve. If you’re making a huge pot of lentils for a crowd of people who’ll be serving themselves, chop the sausages to fry them and add them to the lentils at the last minute. If you want to skip the sausages altogether, use a pound of bacon instead of a half-pound.

☛Eat them and prosper.

fôlateries en temps de neige

2010-12-29T18:28:00.000+01:00

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.

as the rose

2010-11-14T00:41:00.004+01:00

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

Living in the desert

has taught me to go inside myself

for shade.

-Richard Shelton

Most of my river trips in recent years have taken me through the Grand Canyon in springtime or early summer, when riparian thickets and the benches above the river are as lush as they’ll ever be, in this land where any plant must get its growing and begetting done in prodigious bursts, taking advantage of some fluke flood or wet spell; or must grow slowly and defensively, biding its time and rationing its energy for the inevitability of long draught.

Launching in late September of this year I was happily surprised at how many plants were using the rains of early autumn to get in one more flowering or greening-up--though I was never quite sure, from flower to flower, whether what I was seeing was really in season for that species or simply a maverick plant, getting while the getting was good. For example I saw very few datura ready to bloom like this one, coiled, cocked and ready to go off that very night.

The moonflower, as it is also known, is part of the nightshade family and blooms by the dozen on early summer evenings. They are so tightly wound that when they unfurl it’s better than watching time-lapse photography on tv: the whole stem nods, like a horse ready to leap out of the box, and sometimes one even hears a popping sound like the cork out of a champagne bottle when the blossom bursts loose. The decadent, faintly citrus scent that they release on opening is intoxicating and powerful enough to turn one’s head a little; it draws in the sphinx moth, the datura’s primary pollinator. The sphinx moth lives out its entire life-cycle in thrall to the datura. In larval, horn-worm form it lives on the plant’s green-black leaves, eating enough of them and the toxins they contain (the same that if ingested or absorbed can kill or send men reeling in dangerous hallucinations) to render it bitter to predator birds. The worm’s skin is as tough as pig-snout so it can survive one beak-bite, and no bird would persist in trying to eat something so obviously poisonous. Thus the plant protects the worm, and when both have flowered in full the sphinx returns to service his spectral mistress. In the morning all that’s left of the assignation is the spent blossom, drooping like a sullied silken handkerchief.

(Flowers of Havasu, Lee Udall Bennion, 1992)

More benign flowers were also in evidence, like these monkey-flowers along the creek in Saddle Canyon.

I saw only two Hooker’s Evening Primroses in blossom during the 18 days of the trip;

but there was also the occasional flowering wild tobacco,

loco weed,

and desert senna.

In the lower part of the Canyon the ocotillo spindles were just beginning to green up, a sight that’s always like some biblical miracle--living leaves sprouting from a thorny staff.

During the five days of storm we experienced in the second half of the trip, all manner of tiny plants and lichens were going crazy and getting green on the rocks.

Even the cottonwoods were acting like it was springtime and sending forth all sorts of optimistic growth.

These fragmites reeds at Whitmore Wash were making a break for it across the sandbar, but nobody could fathom why.

Among the more poker-faced and stoic desert dwellers there's not so much fanfare after a big rain.

This virile barrel cactus in Tapeats Creek: always happy to see you whether it's been raining or not.

We were near the end of prickly-pear fruit season, and I’d have de-spined and eaten a few of these juicy-looking ones along the trail at Phantom Ranch if I hadn’t been in a hurry to mail my postcards and if they hadn’t been coated in mule-dust...

The bits of spitwad white you see on the pads of these prickly-pears are patches of cochineal, a parasitic insect whose crimson entrails and eggs were actually, for a few hundred years, the most valuable natural resource that the Spaniards exported back to the old world. It was harvested by the bale by indian slaves (with very tough fingers, I imagine) and the carminic acid therein could be rendered into a color-fast dye that was used in makeup and in the carmine robes of the Vatican, among other thing. Here’s a little painting I made in my notebook with a stick and some cochineal, to see what it would look like when dried. The color hasn’t changed at all from the moment I crushed it onto the paper.

Oftentimes and regardless of the season, the most evocative life forms one encounters in the Canyon are those that are spent, dormant or already dead.

Apache plume:

A century plant's dried stalk, strong as bleached bone:

And, as lying as still as the husk of any fallen plant, this bighorn ewe in Spring Canyon:

She'd be plant food by now if some spring flood hadn't lodged her so firmly in the middle of the phantom channel.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

Near Lee's Ferry one can climb up from the river to spot where it seems an entire forest of trees lie in the sandstone, now exposed and weathering away to much the same result, though ever so much more slowly than if they hadn't been petrified, as this tree I saw in Nankoweap Creek, whose marrow is crumbling away like so much shale.

Most impressive of all the inanimate pretenders to the plant world are those that were never organic in the first place: false wood-graining in blocks of stone high up Tapeats Creek.

rock bottom

2010-11-11T22:59:00.002+01:00

As if it weren’t luck enough to have spent the past year living almost within sight of the mouth of France’s ‘Grand Canyon’ (the gorges of the Verdon) I spent 18 days of September and October rowing a baggage boat down the Colorado River in the (original and inimitable) Grand Canyon. I was rowing for Tour West, a Utah-based river company that I’ve worked for on and off for the past ten years, but this trip was a special educational charter organized by the Grand Canyon Field Institute. Most of the other guides were PhD-toting experts in their fields of Grand Canyon geology, archaeology, botany and history. It’s the second time I’ve been lucky enough to come along as support on a GCFI trip and catch some of the crumbs falling from the table of the collective knowledge of the crew.

The trip leader and geology expert was Christa Sadler, who has been like an older sister to me for more than a decade and who got me into commercial boating in the first place.

Our botany professor, resident dendrochronologist and punster-in-chief was Gary Bolton. Gary has guided somewhere between 160 and 170 trips through the Grand Canyon over his 37-year career; if asked a question about any prominant feature of the landscape he was likely to recount, in a self-effacingly musing tone, some story beginning like this, ‘Well back in 1986 a few of us decided to bag that peak before breakfast, and we almost died when...’

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

Lecturing in archaeology and ethnobotany was long-time dory boatman Greg Woodall, who was also my consummate collaborator in cowboy-coffee quality control in the mornings.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

And for a thorough discourse in recent human history in the Grand Canyon we were regaled by retired Park Historian Mike Anderson.

Mike, who often gave fireside lectures during the trip, has a wit as dry as the desert he has chronicled, and speaks in multi-clausal sentences more intricately complete and articulate than those I’ve encountered in a lot of written academic prose.

My father Joe (shown here with his pet rock Spot) contributed a workshop in primitive pottery techniques during the trip, culminating in a campfire firing of the students’ work.

I love working the GCFI trips not just because of what I can learn from the other guides but for the knowledge and enthusiasm the passengers bring to the above-mentioned table. Unlike your average blithely unsuspecting commercial river trip client, GCFI participants tend to be well-read and well-traveled Grand Canyon junkies, often with previous river trips and with way more GC backpacking experience under their belts than your humble correspondent can boast of. They are attracted to the GCFI trip by the opportunity to spend 18 days wallowing in the Canyon instead of the 11- to 14-day standard high-season trip length, and by its nature as an intensive course on so many different aspects of Grand Canyon natural and human history.

And of course some of them turn out to be much better entertainment then just watching the river and the sky flow by...

* * *

We launched at Lee’s Ferry on the day after the first time since 1972 that the Harvest Moon coincided with the autumnal equinox, and for the first half of the trip we experienced nearly starless, pewter-glazed nights under that bright moon, and unseasonably warm weather. The water was so clear and glossy, flowing black and colder than stone out of the depths of Lake Powell, that it entrapped every color that fell into it.

We lost our glass-green water when we reached the confluence of the Colorado and the Little Colorado, its biggest tributary between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead. Normally the Little Colorado flows a surreal blue-white, as though some channel of the sky had meandered down to run on earth.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

But there had been a recent storm somewhere way upstream when we arrived at the confluence, and the Little Colorado was pumping silken silt into our river.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

From that time onward we ran on a muddy Colorado, a moody river that changed color and consistency every day. Though clear water on the Colorado certainly makes daily life easier (one pumps drinking water through the Katadyn ceramic filter much more efficiently; one’s shockingly cold bath is much more effective; one’s oar cleaves the water with less effort; and one’s cup of morning coffee, brewed with boiled river-water, doesn’t settle out to a half-inch of silt in the bottom), I am always relieved of the guilt of such dam-induced artificial conveniences when the river reverts to its dirty old self.

Our weather held, despite such evidence of nearby precipitation. Normally one of the best reasons to be on the water in late September and early October is that, while the days are shortening, it’s cool enough to do the big up-and-over, all-day hikes that one can’t even contemplate during high summer.

We set off on one such hike up to Nankoweap Butte, an elevation gain of 2660 ft. (810 m) from river level, and realized en route that it was, in fact, rather too hot still to be doing what we were doing, away from the sound of the river, with only the wind in our ears.

We crossed the skeletons of little streams whose water you could never drink for all the salt.

We climbed for a long time alongside a ridge of shaley scree like the decaying armor of a long-dead dragon.

The last long off-trail ascent was on footing as loose as so much kitty-litter; the only way to do it was to sprint upward, arms outstretched for balance, from one bristling live-oak--indicating a slightly flat spot--to the next.

At last we summitted the Butte

and behaved like any giddy pack of tourists, but perhaps a bit thirstier.

(above photo: Joe Bennion)

The descent was enough fun to justify the climb--like skiing in our shoes down that same mountain of kitty-litter.

All the that beauty and those fleeting thrills considered, it was a long grunt of a hike and we were happy to find ourselves once more where the water runs

and back in our lovely camp at the edge of the broad Nankoweap delta.

Two days later we woke at 3:30 in the morning to do a pre-breakfast hike up to a peak called the Tabernacle--not nearly as long and arduous a climb as Nankoweap Mesa, and over a much better-developed trail, but difficult enough in the beginning, with only the waning moon to light our way, and it kept disappearing behind a skein of fast-moving clouds, the first clouds we’d seen since launching. We topped out on the Tabernacle, an always-windy little plateau about 40 feet in diameter, just at daybreak.

Everyone was still a bit groggy; I even took a micro-nap with my head resting on my knees.

As proper sunlight flowed across the land we began our descent to breakfast.

Despite those dawn clouds, our good weather continued to hold over the next two days as we dropped into the deepest part of the Canyon, the stretch known as the Inner Granite Gorge, where the river cuts through some of the oldest exposed rocks on the face of the earth: Zoroaster Granite, Vishnu and Brahma Schist.

These fantastically fluted and vein-riddled rocks are extremely hard and produce most of the biggest rapids on the river. It was Powell, on his first expedition through the Canyon, who gave them such thrillingly epic names; these rocks heralded the very real possibility of death around every corner for him and his starving men, as they limped and portaged their way through the cataracts. The gateway to the Inner Gorge is Hance Rapid, the first of the big baddies and one of the rockiest and most technical rapids on the river in lowish water, which is what we were running on; during the first half of the trip we had a steady 8,000 cubic feet/second (cfs) of flow, which meant a right-side run through the big waves and holes of Hance. It’s always astonishing to see, when scouting Hance, how precipitously the river drops into the schist and granite just below the tailwaves of the rapid.

When we passed Phantom Ranch, the one outpost of civilization we encounter in the river corridor (lemonade, Snickers bars, flush toilets, a payphone, and a mule-mail postal system!)

we learned that the forcast for the next few days called for a 10% chance of thunderstorms. Most rain over the Grand Canyon never hits the ground, but trails across the sky in long wind-blow tresses called virga, so we liked our chances as we continued onward through rapids with names like Sockdolager (a 19th-century boxing term for a knockout), Grapevine, Horn Creek (shown below from the scout; another massive ride at 8,000 cfs)

(above photo: Judy Wagonfeld)

Granite, Hermit and Crystal. Crystal is a young rapid--it appeared after a flash flood of Crystal Creek in 1966, and became a boat-eating monster in the high water of 1983, when the river rose to over 90,000 cfs and nearly breached Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon. Gary Bolton was a young boatman then and remembers the carnage: 40-foot motorized rafts flipped in the big Crystal Hole, and gear and terrorized passengers spread for miles down the river.

(postcard photo: Curt Smith)

Crystal has changed several times again since the early ‘80s, and now the mature rapid bears little resemblance to its wild younger self. In fact, Christa made the bold decision, after consulting with each of us boatmen, to run Crystal without stopping to scout it--an exhilirating first both for me and for her. And maybe it was just the adrenaline talking, but it felt like my cleanest left-side Crystal run ever.

The rapids in the Inner Granite Gorge may be big and noisome, but in between are stretches of tranquility unequaled anywhere else in the Canyon, bound in by the sheer walls. One sleeps ever so soundly down amongst those primordial stones.

And out on the water again the horizon is the most compelling one on the river, an infinite recession of overlapping and asymmetric Vs, funneling one’s little boat onward toward some point that’s always beyond, beyond, beyond.

(above photo: Mike Buchheit)

To be continued.... God willing and the river don’t rise.