A neat beginning to our WWOOF experience: start it off with a movie. In this case, "Indigènes", an award-winning world war two drama concerning the experience of Algerian soldiers fighting under the French flag to purge France of the German occupation. An excellent and suspenseful movie, it also had a blessed amount of subtitling to translate the Algerian spoken by the lead characters into French. My french is good enough to get by, but when they spoke quickly, in accents and colloquially, I was lost. With subtitles, I could comprehend it much more easily.
Ronna and Honoré make an interesting couple. They've raised two daughters, both out of the house: one recently married, and having started a farm of her own out in the Alps. Honoré is the quiet one, generous with his opinions to his friends but to those he doesn't know, conservative with his comments. During our first week, we didn't get much conversation out of Honoré; in addition, his accent is so different from what I'm used to I really went more by instinct than anything when it came to properly interpreting his instructions when it came to farm-related activities. There were more than a few times I had misinterpreted. He also doesn't speak English: not a bit. Honoré has no fondness for technology: doesn't concern himself with cellphones, computers or new cars.Honoré's truck is a well-loved Ford pickup with absolutely no automatic anything. The seats bounce around during a trip, the passenger door must be opened from the inside, and the dash is a veritable workshop of miscellaneous tools and implements you might need when driving around farming properties. The sides of the cargo area can be unlocked and swing down to make it easier to load things in and out, and when I pointed out that one of the mechanisms wasn't actually secured by the bolts, he shrugged and showed me how it could be wedged to work just fine. What will stick with me about Honoré is his capacity to put things in the easiest form to understand: perhaps this is from dealing with the sixty-plus WWOOFers they've had over the years. He doesn't waste a lot of time explaining something and tends to show you how to do it rather than talk you through it. Sometimes it worked with us: sometimes, it didn't, but in the end, we figured it out.
In many ways, Ronna is the complete opposite to Honoré. She's vibrant and talkative, with a quick wit and a gift for telling stories that are rich with detail. In fact most of her stories begin with her saying "and the story with that is...", which led me to tease her a bit about it. And then we developed a great conversation about the ways people from different countries speak, how people begin sentences, and how they fill silences. It's actually quite interesting if you think about it: how many times do you say "uh" in a sentence when your brain is thinking of the right thing to say next? Or do you just ramble on until your brain catches up?
Communication became a key issue during our stay because there were a few things we managed to do incorrectly, however (I think) none were so grave that they were major setbacks or things that couldn't be done again, correctly. It's a tricky thing to be a WWOOF host; you aren't paying the volunteer, so you can't just fire them or dock their pay if they mess up. You basically work with what you get. And because most volunteers only stay for a week, how much time do you spend explaining a task to ensure it's done properly? Do you over-explain and spend more time than it takes to do the task, or under-explain and hope the volunteer figures it out? Or hope that they'll have the sense to ask questions to clarify?
And as a volunteer, the same quandaries exist: you don't want to come off as slow or stupid by asking a continuous stream of questions, when you want to be working, but at the same time, you don't want to risk getting it wrong. Ronna and I had this conversation a couple of times, which reminded Ronna of a conversation she'd had with previous WWOOFers, who described a previous farm they'd visited. Before they arrived, they received in the mail a questionnaire from the WWOOF host farm, asking them some questions in order to figure out what they can do. While Ronna thought it was a good idea, it would take a fair amount of effort. In her mind, she'd just ask one question:
Your WWOOF host gives you a task to do, and goes off to do something else. You start to do the task, then realize something that you hadn't thought to ask when the host was describing what to do. Do you:
a) Keep going, doing the task as best as you understood the instructions as described.
b) Stop working, track down the host and ask them to clarify the task.
c) Stop working, and wait for the host to return to clarify the task.
d) Cry.
So after our initial cinematic introductions, we headed back to the farm. The drive back to the farm from Les Vans takes about a half an hour, and as the movie had ended around eleven-thirty, we were driving back in pitch black. You would have thought that driving with Mary for a week would have put us at ease when it came to driving in the mountains: this was not the case that first night. I remarked at the sharpness of Ronna's turns as she drove the car out of Les Vans, and wondered if it was a hallmark of how the car drove. But as we wound our way onto the mountain roads that lead to their farm, charmingly known as Le Soulier, I quickly realized why her turns were sharp.
The roads hug the sides of the mountains, which makes them all curvy. Typically, you'll encounter small bridges every couple of hundred metres, linking one mountain road to the next. Most bridges have solid walls that would probably stop a car careening off the road into the gorge waiting below: some have tiny flags implanted into the bitumen showing where the new bridge wall was going to be built, the last having been swept away in a torrential storm, and you should be wary of the edge. In truth, it was probably better that it was pitch black that first drive home, as we couldn't see just how far down the base of the mountain was from the side of the road that we travelled. Again, for Ronna or Honoré, regardless of who was driving, they've lived there a long time: for Honoré, all his life, and the roads are just roads. For the new visitor, it's a white knuckle roller coaster ride, and you're not even going that fast. It just feels like you are. Couple this with the fact that the roads are just wide enough to fit two cars, in some places; for most of the roads, when you get far enough out of the way, the road can accommodate one-and-a-half cars. So if you meet someone, you have to stop, and someone has to back up enough to get to a point where two cars can pass each other.It wasn't until much later on in our visit that I realized, during a drive somewhere, that my eyes would be glued to the road, even during conversation, with the completely irrational belief that if I took my eyes away from it, something horrendous might happen. There we were, passing panoramic vistas, gorges, and an impressive hydroelectric power dam, and where were my eyes? Glued out the front window. I don't think I really adjusted to those roads.
A little about Ronna and Honoré's farm, Le Soulier. The main household is a collection of buildings, well over a hundred years old, that's been in Honoré's family for generations. The buildings are all built of stone, which being up in the mountains, is in bounteous supply. The main and most-frequented area of the house is the living room, which houses a hearth and fireplace the likes of which I've never seen: the fireplace takes up an entire wall, such that you can place huge logs onto the fire. Indeed, Honoré was not satisfied with the efficient, steady fires I would gravitate to: he'd happily add a eight-foot long tree trunk (or three) to the fire, put the bellows to it, and give it a satisfied grunt.
The property is surrounded by stacked terraces on which grow a variety of different trees, but for the most part, different varieties of chestnut. When I say stacked terraces I need to step back and explain a bit more, as I don't think I'd have understood what that meant if someone were just to drop that term on me. I guess farming on a mountain has its own set of challenges, the first of which is that it's a constant struggle to get up and down the mountain. Creating access roads is one thing (ie., with switchbacks) but if you don't do something about how the land forms on the mountain, everything that falls off a tree just tumbles down the mountain.
So, what you do is scoop out large tracks of land and dump the soil below. You then use the stones you find, or bring around, to build hefty retaining walls to make sure the soil doesn't gravitate back to the slope to which it would be accustomed. At least, this is the scenario I created in my head for how these immense rock walls, holding back level sections of earth, came to be. I boggle at the amount of labour that would have been required to create all the terraces you see when you wander through the area: not just Ronna and Honoré's farm, but everyone's farm, and the roads: everything has been cordoned off with these carefully constructed rock walls. It certainly didn't get that way by accident. Luckily, being in the mountains, there are plenty of rocks to find.
Ronna and Honoré also have gardens of different plants, fields sown with varieties of crops, apple and peach trees, grapevines, and are even graced by surprise mushroom explosions. In short, they have lots of things to harvest, and no shortage of things to keep them busy. In addition to the everyday tasks directly related to the management of the fruits and vegetables, they also spend a lot of time preparing their yield for sale at either a wholesaler or at a weekly market in Les Vans. Tantalized by the advance knowledge from Mary that Ronna and Honoré produce wine, Amy and I thought we might finally get a chance to try out our secaters, but alas, harvesting grapes was not to be our task while we were there: that had been done earlier in September (probably while we were trying to do the same thing in the Loire). No, our task would be picking chestnuts.
It was perhaps auspicious that during our visit to Maggie and Sandy in Ireland, we would happen across a chestnut tree that had produced some nuts. Before that, the sum total of my knowledge of chestnuts was that there is a song that begins by roasting them over an open fire. In fact, Amy and I tried that once, and were not captivated by the results. No, I knew nothing about chestnuts. This would change.
A chestnut grows to maturity, protected from the world in a hard, spikey shell called a bogue. When the nuts ripen the bogues fall to the ground and split open (or split open and fall to the ground. I don't know which, as the bogues were all off the trees when we got there). In a really well-developed chestnut bogue, there are three nuts side-by-side. More often, the nuts have already fallen out of the bogue. Then they fall into the crevices of the land, are covered by leaves and twigs, and become generally hidden.
Enter the work, and it's simple enough: find the chestnuts, dig them out of the bogues if necessary, and drop them into buckets. Fill a bucket, and pour it into a burlap sack. Heft the sack into the truck. Of course, there are some twists. The first being that not all chestnuts are good for consumption: worms get at them. The more obvious examples have big holes in them and crush easily, however, some you can't see and look just fine. For this reason all the chestnuts that are brought from the fields are dumped into large tanks of water, and left to sit there for around two weeks. The water purifies the chestnuts, and the ones which aren't good float to the top.
The next trick is to get around the terraces without putting too many of the bogue spikes into your knees, legs and hands. Because they're everywhere, you can't really sit anywhere that you haven't brushed clear, so you end up stooped over for most of the time you're out there. I thank Amy's mother for getting us very good gardening gloves in preparation for our WWOOF visit, as they were great protection from the bogue picks, but that didn't stop us from getting more than a couple in our fingers.
On some of the terraces, Honoré had laid out great green nets for the bogues and nuts to fall into, and with a bit of twisting and throwing action, all the nuts fall into a convenient pile to be collected. As Amy was quick to note, it was like hunting for Easter eggs, and especially satisfying to find a whole cache of nuts waiting for you.
Of the times that I was on my own collecting chestnuts with Honoré, he would sometimes tell me not to collect nuts from a certain area, because they were, as he would put it succinctly, "pas bon" (not good). It took me a while of puzzling over how he could tell the difference; they certainly looked like the other nuts, but hey, I only work here, so if they're pas bon, that's was good enough for me. To this day I have not got the keen eye for finding a good chestnut from a bad one, but I have figured out enough that it depends a lot on the tree they dropped from. Some trees are better than others, I suppose. As well, there are indicators of quality that can be ascertained by just looking it over carefully. I will leave that to the experienced professionals.
Editor's note: Ronna sent an email to help clarify this and other points, and she comments on the chestnuts:
A bit of information: the chestnut trees (as all fruit trees) are grafted: some varieties are more tasty than others, or a particular variety may be the ones we need to be gathering for a particular sale, etc. Also, there are trees around (like behind the house) which we didn't get around to grafting and those are definitely "pas bon du tout"!
Once you've collected a sizeable number of chestnuts, it turns out there are a bunch of things you can do with them other than roast them over an open fire. You can turn them into jam, flour, or bottle them whole with spices or without. There are different varieties of chestnuts, of which Ronna and Honoré have several, and are quite proud of the work they do.
One memory that will always stick with me is the sound of jets breaking the sound barrier on a daily basis as the French Air Force practiced aerial combat maneuvers overhead in the Ardeche. Only once did I catch a glimpse of them, but there was no questioning what they were.It took us a while to get to know Ronna and Honoré, certainly more than a week, which made me glad that we stayed two. Ronna is also keenly interested in photography, which prompted more than a few conversations there. She's also a Nikon enthusiast which in itself makes her alright in my books. Honoré is on the town counsel of their township, Malarce sur la Thines, and was actually the mayor of Thines for several years. The two of them obviously have a vested interest in the environment, being organic farmers, but they also are interested in issues which touch on them more indirectly. For example, the local hot-button issue in Malarce is the introduction of windmills as an alternate power source. France is heavily reliant on nuclear power, using reactors for over eighty percent of its consumption. There are big lobbies on both sides of the windmill argument, with the arguments falling something like this:
| Pro-Windmill | Anti-windmill |
| Nuclear power creates waste that is, at the least, difficult to deal with | Windmills are noisy, and mar the landscape |
| Wind is a sustainable and renewable energy source | Wind is not a reliable energy source: some days it's just not windy |
| Windmills create no waste product | The creation of a windmill takes a great deal of energy and materials, possibly more than it will provide |
There are other arguments, both those seemed to be the big ones that were voiced during our attendance at a town hall meeting on the subject. It seems to be a politically-charged issue; no doubt the nuclear industry would chafe at the prospect of their apparent monopoly on power being challenged by yet another source, especially when an experimental fusion reactor is in development in the southeast of France. If all goes according to plan, it is supposed to be a very clean source of nuclear power, but it won't be ready for some years, and I'm sure they're going to need every euro of funding they can scrape together.
During our stay with Ronna and Honoré we also harvested carrots, apples, squash, pumpkins and potatoes. I must confess that apart from some gardening I helped my mother with when I was very young, I haven't had the opportunity to be this close to vegetables in their native habitat. So pulling potatoes out of the ground and realizing that only a small percentage looks like something I'd see in a supermarket, was very humbling. The rest had bumps, folds and eyes running through them: in short, very "organic". And perfectly edible. Actually, let me qualify that: they were some of the best potatoes I've ever eaten. But it makes me wonder about those supermarket potatoes. Are they treated a certain way to increase the yield of "perfect" potatoes? Or are we just getting a very small selection, the rest of the "unseemly" potatoes being chopped up and turned into french fries?
I could go into great detail about the rest of our experience with Ronna and Honoré, but as I write this, we've already crossed two countries and I fear that I'll have to be a lot less verbose if I'm ever going to catch up. While WWOOFing might not be for everyone, for us it was a very grounding experience, and a very much needed break from the museum, restaurant and hotel version of tourism we had been cast into. Tourism from the inside-out, if you will. It was good to be doing something with my hands. While we never got much of an opportunity to sample the wines of the region (to be honest, it was nice to "detox" after knocking off close to a dozen bottles of wine with Mary) it does give us the perfect excuse to go back.
After a healthy dose off goodbyes, we hopped on a bus towards Montpellier. We had a few days to kill before our next country: Spain.
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