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The following is an amalgamation of friends and acquaintances who have something to share once and a while. - love, bryan summer stories : le bec hellouin
the final installment of our french farm adventure found us in normandy at le ferme du bec hellouin for one month. the farm was situated in a beautiful valley near one of the oldest abbeys in france. the proprietors were a wealthy french couple, who had left their previous jobs and decided to open a farm. charles herve-gruyer used to be a professional sailor. owned a boat called le fleur du lampal and lead expeditionary classes around the world. perrine herve-gruyer was an international business lawyer for a company in japan. the substantial capital they were able to invest in the farm showed, and made it a very comfortable and idyllic place as well as a difficult one. they had a nanny for their two daughters, shanti age 3 and fennoua age 7 months, only sold their produce at the boutique at the farm for high prices, and often put aesthetics over good farming practices. it's a funny thing, pitting ideals against luxury. left us frustrated sometimes, but also with a lot of freedom to make use of the opportunities money can buy.
        rare glimpse of perrine   the wood-fired bread over, making life delicious wednesdays, saturdays, sundays    one of our biggest issues with the farm is that it was public, kind of a tourist attraction (hence the signs) and we began to feel a little like tourist attractions ourselves. "look ma! a real live farm worker!"  i made a lot of jars this summer, sterilizing them in the bread oven. they had mountains of zucchini, way more than we could ever eat or sell, so i was forever trying to think of new ways to preserve it. let me introduce you to the other farm residents:  two of many  the four piglets  mama pig. nice rack.  inou, the dog  charles  i had no idea how much i love donkeys. alice and libellule.  cary tanner, farmhand.  fennoua was really interested in eating everything we had, to varying degrees of success.  i think his name was gallopin, but we called him jon bon pony  alex, wwoofer from switzerland  anna, wwoofer from germany  winik and toukou, solid little mountain horses that i rode every possible chance i had.  i thought kittens were cute, until i met baby bunnies.  proof that dinosaurs and birds are related. i don't know if you can tell, but he has a horn. there were two of them and they just ran around looking like this and making crazy lizard noises.  this chicken has bellbottoms.     medicinal/tea plants, and swiss chard  it sometimes felt like the chamomile grew back before you finished the row.    "Vous au moins vous ne risquez pas d’être un légume puisque même un artichaut a du cœur !"  the sweetest beans you'll ever taste are purple. in a nearby town:  anarchy is everywhere  so are touches of imagined america  belonging to jean  thus simplifying the lives of frustrated teens everywhere.  straight enough.   the land was ploughed with the horses, but since the land didn't always need ploughed and people came to tour the farm every day, saturday the horses ploughed in vain.  cary rebuilt a rock barrier to direct the flow of water. later that day he wouldn't stop talking about how cool waders are. his birthday is february 11, everyone.       i'm very comfortable with string beans of any type. the workday at le bec went from 9 to 6, with two hours for lunch. at the end of the day anna, alex, cary and i made dinner for ourselves in the boutique and enjoyed the few hours off.  after showering with douche families.  teaching anna to shuffle.  kickin it with the bunnies    everything the light touches is our kingdom.  roller derby!   i invented a zucchini preserve that they really liked. bottle it, labeled it, sold it at the boutique. it tasted kind of like apple butter, sweet and spiced.    cary went horsebackriding for the second time in his life.  both times have been with me, and even though i've been riding since i was little, they are both probably the coolest rides i have taken.  we forged through the forrest in the most pioneering horse trek i've ever been on.  i remembered how much i love horses and have reverted to my childhood where all i ask for is a horse for christmas and birthdays. my birthday is may 4th, everyone.  ain't nothin' like cary tanner surprise after a long day.   summer, been so good to me.  charles generously let us stay in his apartment in a suburb of paris for our last few days in france.  meudon bellevue  le tour  where's cary  clara-clara  "And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire." Posted on 12 Oct 2008 by rachael
summer stories : mayenne
a disproportionately long three days in hambers came to an end on sunday evening when we told john and karen that we had surprisingly found out that our friends were playing in a music festival nearby and we were going to meet up with them. it was an opportunity we just couldn't pass up. sorry about this, etc. and it was true in a way, why? was playing in a festival called les 3 elephants in nearby laval, but replace "friends" with "east bay acquaintances" and "we were going to meet up with them" with "they had no idea we were in france." sure we could have been honest with our hosts and told them everything we thought was wrong and disappointing about their "farm," but this sort of seemed like the more dignified way to go. and in all reality, we didn't much feel like they deserved or would be affected in any way by a more truthful explanation for the escape. we could tell karen thought we were lying but what was she going to say "liars! you're really leaving because we're crazy and this place is a shithole!" so she kept her mouth shut as she drove us to the train station.
this left us in the tiny town of evron (best known for its dynamic and influential male hairstyles), with bags, no plans, little money, and just under two weeks before we could head to the next farm. hours on the internet and many phonecalls later we found boris. i imagined a quiet middle-aged frenchman with a small plot, which seemed good in the anywhere-is-better-than-here sort of way. while the easy-going 26 year old with a straw hat that picked us up at the train station was definitely french, i could have had no way of imagining what he would come to mean to us. we were home.  the farm was called "la quentiniere". boris thought maybe the name was related to the modern word for lunch lady (la cantiniere).  it had little to do with large women in smocks and hairnets, but lunch was definitely a highlight of our days there. after the morning work, boris would let me pick whatever i wanted for lunch and make something. he was pretty into most things, but boris thought maybe i should use more butter. butter is very important in france.  best. nap. spot. ever.   boris had spent some time in canada studying agriculture, and had amazing ideas about making good produce accessible to everyone. he sold his incredible vegetables for really good prices and was almost in a good mood.   who knew these happened when you let leeks go to flower.  a man and his tomatoes.  potatoes, or if you are boris, bodadoes.  a really common weed in france, every time i saw it i thought it looked edible and like it would be delicious and would announce this in the hopes that someone new would tell me that, sure is! go ahead! i was repeatedly informed that, no, on ne le mange pas.  this, on the other hand  was edible and delicious.  emilie, former woofer, presently paid.  dish robot.  the main crop to harvest, haricot beurre. harvesting them involved many hours bent over trying to distinguish bean from stalk (almost identical). i took this on the first picking, when i still thought beans were exciting.  our place.  coffee and juggling break. boris was teaching emily. there aren't that many things that boris can't do and he could teach you how to do all of them.  there's this feeling that's hard to describle you get when alone in an open field, like you could do anything but nothing is required of you. totally guileless and free.  buddies. they would come up there to hang out in the evenings and i was pretty intent on making friends with them. like getting them to let me pet their head and just have a moment with these huge animals. eventually, with some grape-leave bribery, on the second to last day there, me and the yellow guy bonded. and i realised i had been working for a good ten days on getting my arm licked on and covered in flies. i am of questionable constitution.  boris referred to these guys as his television. whenever you were bored, you could always just fuck with the geese. they were really indignant and tireless.  a serious amount of time and energy was donated to yellow beans. a serious amount of time and energy was also donated to remakes of popular american songs, substituting the word "bean" whenever possible or otherwise adapting the lyrics to suit all our bean related activities.  le roi des haricots  lettuce picking for the market. boris explained everything that he did, and as a result we learned more there than the rest of our time combined. he had these agricultural encyclopedias from the 1800s and i think he knew everything in them.   he had the best radishes of anyone and was probably the youngest of all the vendors.  after the market we bought mussels from one of the other stands and had a feast. the yellow things that look like tadpoles are bean ends. i was sure that we could use the ones that we were removing from the beans before jarring.  i was wrong. they are not very good.  YES.  the whetstone requires one to turn and one to sharpen, one part muscle and one part finesse. cary's role was obvious.  reserves.  his uncle lived a road and a field away from la quentiniere and had a pool and a paellera so one night we had a pool party and made paella, homage to our country of residence. it turned into a good long night of swimming, paella, redwine, calvados, and cards. these are the resulting faces of hangover the next day. not much was accomplished that day.  bean my heart. there were clear reasons for why he was doing what he was, and it showed in his fields.    ah!  andine cornue  coeur de boeuf  nettle brew for the plants.  local flavor.   we kept meaning to get a picture our hat association, but only got around to it when we were all leaving for a dinner and were the cleanest we had been in a week.   it was his first year and i sincerely hope we get a chance to go back to la quentiniere to find him thriving. it was there that a future in farming really seemed like one we could have, like the only one to have.  "What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes." Posted on 26 Sep 2008 by rachael
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