by Don Wallace
Mindy drew a picture of Donnant for him, explaining what she’d seen: a wave that, at its winter best, resembled Pupukea on the North Shore of Oahu—that big barreling break next to the Pipe. Yves was swearing in excitement. He’d take the ferry over next weekend, hitchhike with a board, whatever it took to be the first to give it a shot. Merci!
Mission accomplished, we later heard. However, for the next five years we didn’t see any surfers at Donnant. But our friend Bill, surfing down at the Spanish border, did take the bait after hearing our tales of hidden wave treasure. He stayed in the unfinished house, writing back that Donnant in October was walled up and “spooky”—as surfing the Côte Sauvage alone would be. The next year Mindy tried surfing a windsurfing board rented from a gas station. Removing the mast, she paddled out. The board was too buoyant and fat, like today’s stand-up paddleboards. She caught some white-water soup. Mostly she cursed.
By now we would catch an envious glimpse of a couple of surfers, a local and a Bellilois, enigmas in the gathering darkness. The îlien somehow surfed a board with a broken nose; the amazing thing was that he could stand up at all. The local surfed a red board like a madman. Seeing him out there was disturbing. Self-taught, gutsy, always alone, always in big surf, always pulling into the tube even when it was an obvious close-out. He just didn’t seem like a normal surfer.
Then we learned he was the son of the baker who’d drowned at Donnant—drowned in front of him and the family, while hunting pousse-pieds. That seemed to explain the haunted style, a suggestion of mourning, as if he were looking for his father in those green underwater caverns.
Once we got our first board to Belle Île, there was no stopping us. At the end of our first surfing summer, Madame Morgane even suggested we paint our shutters bleu marin instead of green, because obviously we were sailors, not farmers. She seemed to appreciate our diligence, our seriousness, the way we approached surfing like a job.
“There,” I concluded to Madame Avocat. “That’s what this is about. Not surfing. About exploration, risk, testing ourselves, redefining the Breton coast, joining, mourning all the fathers that the sea has taken; and, maybe, almost accidentally introducing something that the young îliens could pursue instead of aimless scooter riding and drinking and—one hopes not, but—drugs. There are so much drugs these days. Belle Île is a transshipment point, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. The lawyer in her was interested. “How does that work?”
“Go-fast boats come up from North Africa. They take immigrants. They take heroin and hashish, trade that in Spain for Ecstasy and cocaine, head up to France.”
“How do you know this?”
“Don is a boating journalist,” Henry said. “For him and for Mindy the Hawaiian, c’est tout l’océan.”
It is all about the ocean. Thank you, Henry.
The defense rests.
• • •
At the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, everything stops while the owners of boats bring their vessels into the harbor and back basins of Le Palais. There they line up, jostling in position with much shouting and many gesticulations, to receive the blessing of the priest from the Église Saint-Véran, who stands at a portable altar in the middle of the harbor. Once I saw him on a motor launch, once on a chaloupe, a traditional sloop-rigged sardiniere painted in the deep rust-red called rouge Breton.
At least 15,000 people pack the small town. Cars are abandoned on the side of the road miles away. It is both the celebration of the death and elevation of the Virgin Mary and the unofficial but uniformly observed beginning of the end of les vacances in France. Within hours the great ren-trée will begin, and by week’s end the island will begin to feel emptied out.
In nearby Sauzon, one of the prettiest villages devised by man and nature, a smaller celebration takes place on that same afternoon, without all the folderol with the boats. But a priest is there, on the quai at the foot of the Église Saint-Nicolas, to bless all things afloat or in danger of sinking. It’s a fluid and jolly affair, because you can move about, unlike in Le Palais.
Its small scale and stubborn local ownership are what save Sauzon. You can still walk down the quai to the lighthouse and not get run over by a moped. You can sit in cheap plastic chairs on deeply scored stones and get un plateau de fruits de mer and a glass of Muscadet to sip while you watch old-timers and children cast fishing lines into the murky green water. If you order the palourdes, the raw clams will have been raked out of the mud of this estuary by Shra-Shra and Mumbles.
We’ve managed to take in a couple of Assumption feasts in both towns, but the most memorable are Sauzon’s because all young men in the canton are invited to take part in a diving competition. Going back to the nineteenth century, the prize was a cross thrown by the priest into the port waters. The water clarity must’ve deteriorated because now the boys chase a duck whose flight feathers have been clipped. The prize is the duck.
Once one of Rory and Marc’s pals, Rex, won the duck. There was a great hoorah back in the villages—but then Rex looked at the duck and realized what was going to happen to it. His face crumpled. Fortunately a pardon came through at the last second and the duck took up residence in a local barn.
The long day concludes with a fireworks show that illuminates Sauzon’s stacked houses and twisty streets like a flickering silent movie. We’ve enjoyed lying on a threshed field at the top of a hill overlooking the town, keeping our distance from the crowds, getting the big picture and avoiding the traffic jam to come. Other times we are just too lazy to go. We find ourselves late for the blessing, late for the duck, late for the fireworks.
One of the most memorable such nights was when we decided not to go, then went out for a walk up the road to look at the Perseids. The night is dark on Belle Île and the shooting stars can look like grains of salt flying from a shaker. As we walked, faces turned to the sky, we saw a flashing storm of multicolored lights down where the edge of the field met the horizon. We heard a faint muffled rumble. The fireworks of Sauzon.
We kept walking, no need to watch for cars, no streetlights to blind us, the warm asphalt radiating upward through the soles of our shoes. On a whim we crossed the main road and picked up a country track that ran a mile or two through fields and dales before joining a winding single-lane road that descended to the back end of the Sauzon estuary.
This was certainly no night to walk to Sauzon—it would be all closed up by the time we got there. But we kept walking. Now the horizon was stabbed by headlights as each departing car crested the vallon. Then there were no more. Party’s over.
We lay down on the warm asphalt to look at the shooting stars.
I may have dozed off. With a jolt, I realized there were lights coming up the road from the direction of Sauzon. If it was a car, we’d have to move fast—but the more I watched, the more curious the lights seemed. There must’ve been a dozen or more, shifting this way and that, waving like Star Wars light sabers, far away one moment, nearer the next.
We rolled over and sat up, silent, hugging our knees and staring at the silver-gray road and the black fields on either side. We could hear singing. Sweet voices, a choir unaccompanied. It seemed a simple song, like a folk or children’s song.
Now we could distinguish them: a long line of children, walking and waving their flashlights and singing. Bringing up the rear were two adults, the woman conducting the choir. Her voice, at least, was familiar—Sophie, the mother of the en bonne forme family, whose father, Hector, gave Rory his spear gun and whose three daughters drove our boy into a crisis of fidgeting. They’d taken up a collection of village children and marched them off to the feast and the fireworks, fed them at Crêperie Les Embruns, and now were shepherding the little flock home.
They came upon us, still seated on the asphalt, too relaxed to move. We laughed when we heard their sharp intakes of breath. They laughed to realize who we were and, still s
inging, threaded through us and headed home.
We lay awhile longer on the empty, warm road. Now the island was nearly asleep. Far away a car whined up the hill, shifted into fourth gear, and streaked toward Le Palais.
At the tip of the island, north of Sauzon, the slow strobe circle of the light at Pointe du Poulains was suddenly joined by a whole new ball of flickering lights. We watched awhile, uncertain about what this might be. It looked like the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Just as in the movie, the ball grew wings of cloud that began spreading out on both sides of the lighthouse. Heat lightning stroked the sky. A crisp white streak—the real thing, plunging into the sea—was followed by a faint rumble.
We got up without saying anything. Beau temps was over, and a storm was coming.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ankou
Buildable land was at a premium. Fancy cars prowled the lanes, faces pressed to the windows, alert for stray parcels and outbuildings. When the occupants deigned to step out of a fancy Citroën Pallas, they often got straight to the point. Is that for sale? No? Is that? Tell me what’s for sale. (Yes, I do believe the cow is for sale. No, I do not know who owns it.)
Daytrippers came in droves. Their looks of enjoyment were pure and joyous. But they were everywhere! You couldn’t drive anywhere after a ferry landed, because two hundred bicyclists would be wobbling all over the roads, holding up cars, and causing near-accidents and real accidents. And we had up to twelve ferries a day.
Popularity is a curse, of course. When it comes to Eden, it’s not enough to visit. People want a place of their own. When everybody wants in, villages fill out to the boundary lines, though the formidable law requiring a traditional Breton style once again proved its wisdom. (The best minds of an architectural generation still haven’t figured out how to turn a slate-roofed cottage into a McMansion.) Some officials bent, it’s said. A cookie-cutter subdivision appeared on the outskirts of Sauzon one day. How did that happen? Don’t ask.
The centralized government bureaucrats who wrote the rules that protected Belle Île were long gone, retired to fine and private places. Their replacements were modern men. In 1987, they built a causeway to Île de Ré, an island only slightly bigger than Belle Île, fifty miles down the coast. By the Nineties, Île de Ré was “a popular weekend bolt-hole for Parisians,” as one London tabloid cheekily described it. On a summer’s day it was reputedly a zoo, its population swelling from winter’s 15,000 to 220,000 en vacances.
Soon it was Brittany’s turn for some fire-nozzle funding. You can almost see the technocrats and fonctionnaires sitting in a boardroom and throwing darts at a map. How about four high-speed superferries to Belle Île? Hydrofoils making 60 knots! How about a harbor for super-yachts so the film people from Cannes can stop over on their way to London?
No, no—wait! How about a causeway to Belle Île? A ten-mile bridge from Port Maria in Quiberon to Le Palais, with connections on the mainland to the D165 and autoroutes. Yes, perfect. And all the other stuff’s a go, too. Cue the Marseillaise.
The causeway was all about delivering the Continent vote. Over the years President François Mitterrand had made several campaign visits by helicopter to Belle Île for the showy eating of a single buckwheat galette at Crêperie Chez Renée. The polling must’ve been good after, because that’s when the causeway plan came up. Mitterrand stood down in 1995, but Brittany voted for his successor and rival Jacques Chirac, so the plan stayed on track.
Puffed up by all the national improvements, the Mairie de Sauzon took it upon himself to forward a mandatory village plan that included paving all our little paths and lanes and installing ugly concrete-pylon streetlights. Streetlights.
Gwened and Henry led that fight. But everyone was involved, from the Vicomte to Madame Morgane. We put our heads together and decided that the petition should come from “the village of flowers.” Everybody would sign it, Bellilois included and maybe even the Unforgiving Couple. Gwened would appeal to the Mairie’s vanity. She’d take along all the postcards of Kerbordardoué that you can find in Le Palais. Lay them out. See? They like us this way. We’re a tourist attraction. In fact, do you know our postcard is the number one bestseller?
We won that round rather handily. But the bigger battle seemed hopeless. But disaster, when it hit, came from an unexpected quarter. A Maltese-flagged TotalFinaElf tanker, the Erika, broke apart seventy-five miles from the island. As a huge oil spill approached, driven by a raging storm, a thousand French high school and college students abandoned their vacation plans and descended on the island to fight the oil in the breakers and on the rocks.
In stormy and freezing weather they threw themselves into the fray; the fight went on for weeks as giant new globs were released from the sunken ship. Some young people we knew took leaves from university to keep on task. Even from afar we felt how it had become a spiritual battle for the island. They wore their hearts on their oil-stained sleeves. Belle Île had given them so many little moments of heaven.
There’s no doubt that those students saved the beach at Donnant. But the storms drove the oil higher and higher onto the rocks and undersea, into the crevices where all the littoral creatures lived.
Vacances the following year was depressing. The waters where Rory used to dive stank. The rocks were slimy with oil. The once-flowing seaweeds and kelp forests were dead, and there were no fish, of course. We brought an Evian bottle filled with turpentine to the beach to clean our feet and stationed another by the door.
Naturally, there was a steep drop-off in tourism. The magnifying glass of media attention moved elsewhere. We did finally receive a belated Christmas gift from the government when the causeway was canceled.
• • •
In time we came to see the oil spill for what it was—a circuit breaker in the mad plans of those robotic fiends in the brooding gray bureaus overlooking the Seine in Paris. They shrugged and after that ignored us. But we didn’t forget; Erika led to the growth and influence of an island environmental movement. Many Bellilois who wouldn’t have called themselves green discovered it was their best hope of preserving their culture. Almost for the first time, étranger and islander could make common cause.
Yet another green boost we could’ve done without struck in 2003, when Europe experienced its strangest, hottest summer since 1540. Forest fires raged in Portugal; Italy baked for two months; glaciers melted under 100-degree temperatures in the Swiss Alps; and the Danube nearly dried up. France got hit the worst and longest, but the slow-rolling inversion didn’t reach Belle Île until we were there in August.
At first we thought we would be spared; maybe this was beau temps. But it was so hot, too hot. All day and all night, the temperature and humidity kept rising. Within a couple of days, the very air we breathed seemed overheated, like when you open an oven door and stick your head too close. We didn’t want to go out, even to the beach. If we did, the sand was a furnace. There were no waves and the sea, unnaturally warm, was full of aquatic lice that bit hard and drew blood.
One day we just stopped cooking. After consulting with Suzanne and Madame Morgane, we closed the wooden storm shutters for the first time in anyone’s memory. The entire village went doggo. Stripped to our underwear, we lay on the cold tile floor with the lights out, reading by thin stripes of burning yellow sunlight boring in as if from the flare of a hydrogen bomb.
After a week we should’ve been going crazy. But our minds and bodies had gone into self-preservation lockdown. This is why 1,000-page novels are written, we told ourselves. I’ve always wanted to go on an all-yogurt diet. Let’s fill the tub with cold water and lie there reading until it warms up and it’s the next person’s turn.
The nights were long and unbearably hot, but at least that damned sun wasn’t overhead. We began moving around a bit in darkness, slowly, like spirits abroad on All Hallow’s Eve. There were no parties. No visits. Social life was on hold.
>
Late one night, well after midnight, the heat reached an apogee. Staying indoors seemed almost dangerous. Mindy said, “I can’t take it. I’m going down to the beach.” We put on our suits—didn’t even bother with shirts or towels—and shuffled like zombies down the vallon, through the grassy meadow, along the base of the tall sandhills, up to the gap in the dunes that overlooked Donnant. We did the entire twenty-five-minute walk without using our flashlights, even though the night was moonless. To our eyes, accustomed now to darkness, everything glowed like a photographic negative.
We walked the long sandy way toward the sea. A few dark figures moved at the fringes of our vision: somebody who must’ve had the same idea as us. There was no noise of surf. The ocean had been flat and still for over a week. We couldn’t even see the water, just ultra-blackness, as opposed to the cobalt-blue horizon and night sky. Leaving our sandals behind, we slowly waded in.
Floating up to our necks, we looked around and realized we were surrounded by dozens, no, hundreds of floating beach balls. It took a moment to accept that these were the bobbing heads of people doing the cool thing. We were trading whispered impressions of the general weirdness when someone nearby spoke: “Mindy et Don? Ees that you?”
“Henry? Is Celeste with you?”
“Hel-lo Mindy! Hel-lo Don!”
Other voices chimed in: their children, Rory and Devo, and then from all around us, unseen in the dark, the voices of Kerbordardoué and other villages. The uncanny revelation kicked my mind into a warped place. To me, we were like those shades in the Underworld visited by Odysseus or Orpheus, or Dante in the company of Virgil—standing up to our necks in a boiling sea. Maybe that sounded like my imagination was running away with itself, but this was reality. The world had gone dreadfully awry, as if we as a species were like Icarus flying too close to the sun; now our wings were melting and our fall from grace had begun.