12/20/2005. La Source

I rub my eyes as we drive up to our place in Provence. We have just closed on the property and I am still feeling dizzy from joy. Perhaps that's what has me hallucinating this flock of sheep that I see grazing peacefully next to the bergerie. They seemed to know that this is a sheep barn and therefore belongs to them.



But a volley of "Baaaaahhhhs!" at our appearance convinces me they are real. We had heard that one of our neighbors was a berger--or shepherd--who still participated in la transhumance--the migration of shepherds and flocks to alpine pastures during summer, and back down to their farms in fall. The very word transhumance evokes for me an image of epic proportions: an animal tide of thousands of beasts, fed by tributaries from each small stony village, united and moved by the mysterious will of the shepherds and their dogs, and flowing upward into the solitary meadows where alpine herbs grow sweet and pure. I look for the shepherd of this flock, but see no one.

Denis and I have come to visit what is now officially our farm, and to take measurements to refine our plans for its restoration. But I have one burning issue on my mind. In addition to the field adjacent to the house and bergerie, the property comprises another parcel up the mountainside behind the house. And we had been told that on that parcel there was a spring--une source.

La source! I whisper to myself. And I feel immediately immersed in the mystical. Images swirl in my mind--of the secret spring in the films of Pagnol, of the springs in the writings of Jean Giono, of springs I have had the good fortune to find. For me, no scientific explanation can diminish the mystery of water pouring from the earth like the rich blood of life itself. La source--with its double significance of spring and source...of life--is the perfect name for this natural miracle.

I had already tried unsuccessfully to find this spring in a hurried search up the mountain in October. But with only a vague verbal description of where it was located, no boundary markers of any kind, and exactly one hour to walk up, search, and walk back down before heading off to catch the train back to Paris, I had failed to find it. I had heard some tantalizing gurgling sounds at one point, when I was abreast a plantation of young truffle oaks which I had been told were being irrigated with the water of our source! Already, I feel madly possessive of this spring.



Denis begins measuring and sketching while I head off to find our spring. I simply have to verify its existence, to begin with, and then begin to plan how to pipe its water down to the farm, for in the past it was the water of this spring that had fed not only the farm but the community lavoir, or washing fountain, which still stands (now full of stagnant water) near the house. During decades of neglect, the old terracotta tiles that had once piped the water down to the farm had become broken and disrupted. I follow the path behind the house and ford the stream that bounds the back of the property, and which only runs during half the year. The dome of the sky has been scoured by the mistral to a cold, pure blue.



I pass the ruins of a house, now roofless and engulfed in vines. I try to imagine the family who had once lived there. The woman of the house undoubtedly carried her laundry down to the lavoir, where she would have swapped gossip with other women gathered at this traditional locus of feminine labor and social life. Now there was only the mistral whistling a ghostly tune through the empty windows.



Whooosh! A flock of birds, startled by my approach, flew out of the hedge beside the path. They had been feasting on its wild plums and hawthorn berries, whose bright blue and red fruits are lit up in brilliant relief by the winter sun. I imagine this wild hedge in spring, when it must be a froth of fragrant white blossoms, like a bit of Milky Way fallen to earth. I imagine witnessing the magical moment on a soft spring night when the buds burst open in secret phosphorescence--an image I have carried in my mind from one of Jean Giono's stories.



As I walk, my thoughts flit among the novels of Giono which I have just finished reading. I was so enthralled by the collection that I suffered a sort of depression when I finished it. For a while thereafter, nothing else seemed worth reading. I look off across the plain to the north, I can see the massif of Lure, broad and impassive under a pure white crown of snow. The mountain of Lure loomed large in Giono's imagination, its brooding mass dominating the landscape of his childhood. The mystery this mountain held for him was not diminished by his adolescent explorations of its austere slopes. Throughout his prodigious writings, Lure is virtually omnipresent and frequently invoked, running through the stories like a chant. In a life of writing which which struggled with the role of man in the natural world, the mountain for Giono came to symbolize nature at its purest and most powerful.



In the preface to his three illustrated editions, Giono wrote of the inspiration for his first novella, La Colline (The Hill) (my translation): I want to thank especially Amédée de Patelière. He came with me in the hills. Lying with me on the borders of the mountain of Lure, he listened with me to the wind, the sound of the trees, the voice of Pan. One evening, at the end of our journey, we took refuge in the mountain village of Revest-des-Brousses. On the steep hillside, we ate tart wild cherries, and we gazed down at the valley spread before us, plowed open by the torrent, at the hills swelling like breasts of the earth where farms suckled the springs. And he told me, "Look, there is your hill."

I am convinced they were looking at the farm that is now ours, for if you were standing on the hill of Revest-des-Brousses, ours is the farm you would see nestled against the hill, nourished by its spring. The thought that Jean Giono's eyes rested on this farm that is now ours, and that he may have carried its image in his head as he wrote La Colline, thrills me beyond words. I've now been climbing for several minutes and I turn around to look back from the hill toward the village Revest-des-Brousses perched on the distant slope opposite.



The path makes a switchback and suddenly I am sheltered from the mistral that has been howling at my back. I'm climbing steadily and arduously enough that I unbutton my coat. I've left the truffle plantation far below me when I see a path branching off to my left. I pounce on it, for I had been told to look for just such a path which should lead me to our parcel of land and its spring. I've only gone a short distance when I see unmistakeable signs of water: bright green clumps of smooth-stemmed rushes, gracile willows, and a wild rose with gleaming red hips.



Standing stock still, I hear a low murmuring burble. The ground under my feet is wet. And then I see it. Just beyond the clump of rushes, in the dark embrace of a small ravine--la Source. The water forms a small pool whose surface is just barely rippled by turbulence, before spilling off down the ravine, leaving bright green brushstrokes of rushes in its wake. I stand transfixed, listening to the spring and watching the patch of sky reflected in the skin of its surface. The earth between the stones around the pool is full of hoofprints from the comings and goings of deer and wild boar--part of the secret life of the spring. I bend down and scoop some of the water to my mouth, letting its cold taste of stones run down my throat. And for a moment, I am empty of thought, just another animal caught in the spell of the Source.

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