HARVEST TIME
Vineyard in September, Abeilhan, France
We’re staying in Grape Country. This little town of Abeilhan is in the Languedoc region of France. We’re about 30 km from the Mediterranean and Pyrenees. Abeilhan is a hill town. I’m not sure how old it is, but it seems medieval to me. The old cities here are on hills, and in between the cities are grape fields. Almost all the land is cultivated with grave vines. It seems to me that they overuse the land. The climate is very dry but there are all these lush vines around. The ground that’s not irrigated seems parched to me. This area is supposed to turn to desert with global warming.
We were here in the late winter, and when we left, the vines had just started to grow. It’s neat to come back near harvest time.
Smith and I walked in a vineyard the other day. We plucked two grapes off a vine. They were the sweetest grapes I’d ever tasted, and they were rich, really grape-y tasting. I thought they’d make excellent grape juice. We didn’t take more, because the French are really really serious about these vines. (Although we did take some fresh cauliflower from a field in Croatia. The cabbage and cauliflower fields ran right up against the rocky shore of the Adriatic Sea. It was the strangest & most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.)
Here in Abeilhan we’re surrounded by beauty, but we’re marooned. It costs $20 to take the bus 18 km in to the nearby large town of Beziers. But if we’re to be marooned, this is where I want to be. It’s a quiet town, and I can sit in the nook of the kitchen window and soak up sun and write, or lay in the hammock out back under the fig tree and fall asleep to the susurration of wind in the leaves.
We also felt trapped in our neighborhood in London. The suburbs of London are grey and monotonous. Shop after shop after shop. Our neighborhood was more interesting than most, because it was so diverse: Caribbeans, Indians, Senegalese. And we had really nice neighbors. But any time we wanted to go downtown it cost about $15 to take the subway. This made exploring the cultural scene prohibitively expensive. I felt thoroughly depressed by how poor I felt. It cost us $300 to take a train to go camping in the north of England, which was just like 250 miles away. The Lake District was bucolic, but there was no real sense of nature let wild.
Clevelanders are lucky to have access to places like the Metroparks. The US still has great natural resources and it’s cheap to take public transportation. Before I came here, I had the idea that the British were much more progressive than the US when it came to sustainable living. But it turns out everyone’s taking Ryanair for a holiday weekend across the continent. Flying here is much cheaper than taking a train - it seems so wrong to me - the British establishment makes big noise about global warming but it turns out they’re just as hypocritical.
For kicks, I researched what it’d cost to take Amtrak from NY to Cleveland. Turns out it’s much cheaper than flying. So we’re going to do that when we land in NYC.
Vineyards in March, France