And the River Dances
My life on a French riverbank
Over millennia, the River Aveyron has been carving its way through the limestone of southwest France. Among its gorges and steep-sided valleys nestle some of the most beautiful villages in this country, and the French know a thing or two about beautiful villages.
Tired of the relentless hustle and bustle of where I had been living, I recently sold my home in a metropolis of three thousand five hundred people, and moved to a village on the banks of the Aveyron — resident population fifty.
Let me clear up one thing from the start. I am a writer and, despite much of what you read in Medium about making your fortune in this profession, my budget lends itself more to peanut butter sandwiches and pasta than to the foie gras and gently roasted duck that this country is famed for.
In order to make my move, there had to be certain compromises. The new home does have running water and a toilet, but the shower consists of a bucket and a face cloth. The bedroom is just one giant loft space which I will slowly convert.
It was the river that brought me here. Most of the time, it dances just below my sitting room window like a never-ending stage show. Three days after I signed the final purchase agreement, she decided to welcome me, rose an incredible seven meters, and hurtled through the ground floor of my new home; an experience made all the more frightening by the fact that at about the same time, images were being beamed across our screens of entire villages being wiped out by equally aggressive flooding on the other side of the country.
Just a few hours later, she retreated and became as calm and soothing as she had been a few days earlier. For a couple renovating on a tight budget, the flood has been surprisingly generous. We have salvaged vast quantities of tree trunks and logs from the river and from the tree branches where many of them had been tossed by the raging waters. With a little effort and imagination, these will now become stair rails and frames for the bookcases that must soon be built.
So far, none of the neighbors has mentioned my wife and I trudging through town with tree trunks slung between our shoulders, but I know these villagers. There will be whispered conversations taking place.
From my sitting room window, the scene below is constantly changing. For someone who loves nature, this is a never-ending delight. There are white-breasted dippers here. The only songbirds to be able to walk underwater, they duck into fast-moving shallows and walk against the current along the river bed. The fast-flowing water delivers their food and they have heavier than normal bones to facilitate this unusual method of eating.
A flock of cormorants roosts downstream in the poplar trees each night. The trees are not native, but the birds don’t seem to be overly patriotic. Most of them land easily, but one clumsy teenager hasn’t got to grips with perching yet. Again, and again, he circles, overshoots the perch he was aiming for and stumbles back into flight.
On one occasion, when he seemed to like having performed a successful landing, an older bird pecked him on the head throwing him off balance and forcing him to start the whole process over again — this time to the humiliating sound of the flock chuckling. Finally, he crash-lands in the lower branches. There, he will be safe from predators but victim, no doubt, to being crapped on by the flock all night.
We have otters here too. Few of us see them. Even the resident nature guide, who spends large portions of his life hunched behind his camera dressed as a bush, has only had one or two sightings. We see their paw-prints though — temporarily graffitied in the sand to entice us to keep watching the water. Just knowing they are there is a pleasure for me.
Right next to my patio I have a bridge. It is not mine exclusively as I have to share it with the rest of the world, but it is so close to my home that I feel entitled to become a little possessive about it.
Bridges have never really been my thing, but this one is special. It was designed by Gustave Eiffel who developed such a passion for making things out of bits of metal that he eventually built a large tower that now sits in Paris. He then became involved in making a large statue of a woman with a peculiar head regalia which the French then gave to the Americans as a bit of a joke. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, the Americans had the last laugh when they gave the world Donald Trump, also with peculiar head regalia.
My bank statements will reveal that I am not a wealthy man, but as I stand sipping wine on my patio and gazing down at the river, I realize that I am blessed.
I want to state in black and white, that this is not a blessing that I deserve or have earned in any way. I don’t suppose it would be a blessing if it was. All the same, I believe that I am rich. Donald, you can keep Key Largo and the golf course — just let me have the Aveyron and that elusive otter.
Thank you for reading.
If you are a lover of the environment, nature, and wildlife, you may enjoy the following articles published in The Environment.
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