by Gregory Day
They walked in heavy drops of humid rain as Lacombe explained the myth of the werewolf. The Gascony werewolf, or loup-garou, was a blood sucking creature, a vampire no less, who sheds its skin every evening, hiding it under a tree, before taking off on its quest for blood. It flies through the sky, it changes form and sends flames from its armpits that can be seen burning overhead at night. The loup-garou can also reduce itself in size to fit through the slightest crack and can therefore invade homes and especially bedrooms. It does however have one weakness, a fatal obsessive addiction to counting. Thus on occasion, outside the back or front door of old Gascony houses, or indeed of other houses across other regions of France, most of which have a version of the same story, you will see a small pile of sand left there for the loup-garou to count. In this way she (and she is almost always depicted as a female) is stymied from entering the house for she is compelled to stop and count the grains of sand before she can continue. Inevitably the counting of grains of sand is never quite conclusive and thus the loup-garou is condemned, in her obsessive fashion, to begin counting all over again as soon as she has finished. By this time of course the hours of night have passed and before the sun appears she must return to the tree where she left her skin and assume her relatively benign daylit form as a wolf.
With his black umbrella unfurled, Professor Lacombe led FB through the forest of pines, telling the story of the loup-garou in the rain, until just as they caught their first glimpse of the dune towering above them through dripping branches, he declared: ‘This, Francis, is the pile of sand nature has left out for the loup-garou by the back door of the house of France.’
A minute later they came clear of the dripping trees into a full sky of slow-falling rain. Above them towered the off-white massif of the dune. FB could hardly believe his eyes. It seemed to reach right to the sky, an enormous anomaly amongst the deep green of the pine-forested Gascony coast.
Professor Lacombe, for once, was silent. From where they stood the sand swept down from its apex, slipping ever inland and quite obviously and gradually swallowing the forest. FB remembered the numbers. In 1855 it was measured at a height of thirty-five metres. It now soared over the basin and forest at a height of nearly one hundred metres. The basic physics were simple. At low tide, sand from the Banc d’Arguin at the mouth of the bassin would be blown onto the pile. As the height increased, eventually the angle of the dune’s inland face would reach thirty-five degrees, at which point gravity would ensure that sand would slip from the apex down the inland side. And there it would spread like a creature over les landes. In this way, if you believed the myth, the loup-garou was kept counting.
As the professor and his student began the formidable climb up the inland face of sand the rain began to fall even harder. Lacombe remarked between exhausted breaths that it was good luck because the rain meant they had the dune all to themselves. Otherwise, as he said, the biggest sand dune in Europe would be busy with visitors.
At the summit, neither FB’s burning thighs and calves nor his virtually sleepless night could quell his appreciation of the view. They stood on the northern end of the dune, which swept away for three kilometres along the coast towards Bayonne. The penny dropped for the young sand engineer as he looked out to sea and sighted the Banc d’Arguin lying salmon-pink directly across the water. The causal chain was obvious now: first the westerly winds, then the Banc d’Arguin, and finally the Grande Dune. It was the largest sand phenomenon FB had ever witnessed and he found its simplicity both inspiring and instructive.
Next to him the professor was beaming under his umbrella, lost in who knew how many layers of his erudition. ‘It has grown since I was last here,’ he told FB enthusiastically. ‘It is most certainly wider at the forest side, and seems taller also.’
FB nodded, his mind fascinated by the clear delineations of the mechanism of wind, ocean and sand. He thought of the Bordeaux family he’d read about who had built a villa in the forest back in 1928. By 1936 the house had disappeared beneath the sand. And yet petrified forest fossils had also been found within the dune, indicating that there was a long geologic cycle to it all, a cycle of green growth then sand accretion which further contextualised the dune’s current growth phase and, of course, connected to the charts of the bassin’s morphology he had viewed in the hotel.
There was such a thing as terra firma, FB thought, but this wasn’t it. There was no such thing at the Bassin d’Arcachon, where the whole environment was moving about like a jellyfish. One thing, though, he felt was certain: it was a case of the ocean shaping the land rather than the other way around.
Together Professor Lacombe and FB walked slowly south along the ridge of the enormous dune. It was enough to see it to know it was like an unstoppable forest-eating maw in its current phase. And so, in the face of the Dune du Pyla, the engineer must observe and learn, rather than intervene. The dune represented an unavoidable example of the scales that had to be worked with. Short of doing something as vainglorious as Hitler when he’d built his Atlantic Wall along the coast, there was nothing to be done now but learn. Even from where they walked along the dune they could see the tormented redundant shards of Hitler’s wall lying like beached concrete whales on the shore below. The whole environment was humbling, which was exactly what Professor Lacombe had brought FB there to learn.
‘So,’ the professor began, taking down his black umbrella as the rain began to clear, ‘we cannot build a barrier at the inland side, therefore our only option would be to somehow cover the Banc d’Arguin from exposure to the wind. You can see how discrete the action is; the Banc d’Arguin defines the Pyla so precisely. An aerial photograph shows the dune almost as a perfectly installed, rectangular kerb of sand set down upon the forest.’
‘So you’d cover the Banc d’Arguin with a gigantic tarpaulin?’
‘Yes, that’s the basic concept, except it would take a monomaniac like Hitler to attempt such a thing. It is a sacrilege for an engineer to say this, but you cannot manage the environment in this case. Not by controlling it. Rather, like a cyclist on a road full of cars, you must give way. In this instance, at this moment in geological time, we cannot match the power of the ocean. Unlike on the Cap Ferret over there across the water, our processes are of no use. This is nature at work, Francis, power and energy. A great reminder to us all. And it keeps the loup-garou at bay.’
An hour later, as they came down off the dune on the ocean side, a group of schoolchildren were taking turns at running down the slope with glee. FB smiled at them. He remembered doing exactly the same thing as a child: at Point Lonsdale, at Breamlea, at Split Point, at Princetown. But none of those dunes were even a tenth as tall as Pyla. Once again he felt overwhelmed. His own little life had been placed in perspective. Everything he had known and loved was better here, bigger, more numerous, more sensuous but, at the same time, as simple and identical as sand.
†
After arriving back at the Hotel Loup Garou Professor Lacombe and FB enjoyed a brief lunch of soup and baguette before walking down the hill from the Ville d’Hiver to the Thiers jetty, from where the ferry would leave for Cap Ferret. The observations they would make that afternoon, of the Gascony palisades and marram grass plantings that were introduced to Cap Ferret in order to stabilise the sandy cape, would have a lasting effect on FB’s work for many years to come. It was not lost on him that this dune stabilisation work had begun at Cap Ferret a full half-century before the official white settlement of Australia. On the ferry across he was reminded of Sydney Harbour as he watched the young ferrymen standing with their cigarettes by the resting mooring ropes with the sunshine glittering on the water and the various small fishing and pleasure craft crisscrossing the lambent stretches amongst the swirl of currents.
Halfway across the bassin, Professor Lacombe fell into excited conversation with the person sitting next to them on the bench in the stern. Lacombe was interrogating this Cap Ferret local on the state o
f the oyster fishery and the attitude of the residents to the various proposed developments on the cape. As a result, FB was free to stare out across the water and let his mind roam.
When he reflects on this ferry ride in his journal it is most certainly she, and not so much the technology of the dune work at Pyla or Cap Ferret, that preoccupies him. He visualises her coming past the ferry in her pinasse, waving at him from the sunlit tiller. He keeps his eyes peeled in case she does in fact sail by. This was an impossible daydream, if for no other reason than that the weather was cloudy, almost humid. He writes of longing for the evening even as he is enjoying the work of the day – a perfect situation, one has to admit – and goes so far as to wonder if she’d ever be content to settle with him somewhere on the ocean shores of the bassin. ‘Paris seems a long way away,’ he writes, ‘and Geelong might as well be Jupiter. M is so attractive I can barely stand it, and Prof L seems to have a broader understanding of the dunes than I ever imagined.’
They docked at Cap Ferret and were met by Pierre Green, an Anglo-Frenchman working full time on Cap Ferret overseeing the ongoing stabilisation work. He was a well-built man with a hawk-like countenance not dissimilar to that of Alain Soubret. He wore shorts, FB noted, the first time he’d seen a Frenchman do so, even in the hottest weather. ‘It must be the English in him,’ FB wrote.
FB also remarked, in a suddenly impersonal tone: ‘Pierre Green drove Professor Lacombe and the Australian student Francis Herschell out to the tip of the cape in his blue Renault Ondine sedan.’ This was, of course, the same model of car FB drove in later years and which made him such an easily recognisable figure around Geelong and the Great Ocean Road.
Out on the tip of the cape a spring wind was blowing, tousling the strands of the marram grass plantings and thrumming through the revolutionary slat-fence palisades. These were the apparatus that Lacombe had brought FB to see. Unlike on the Pyla side, where the pines had been planted over two hundred kilometres of coastline in order to stop the marching dunes and to turn the salt pastures of les landes into something productive, this was dune work on a smaller, more local scale.
They walked the low dunes, shielding their eyes from the glare off the water. As they walked, Pierre Green described how the work was helping to keep the north channel through the passes open. Looking out to the passes FB could see the Dune de Pyla in the distance on the far side, and the scudding Atlantic pressing itself through the mouth of the bay in between. The hydraulic pressure of the ocean current was obviously immense, so that the cape would easily be torn and eroded without the engineering efforts. Behind them, less than a kilometre back from the southern tip, the Cap Ferret lighthouse stood sentinel over the wearback of the waves.
‘Unlike over at Pyla, it is possible for our work to be effective here,’ Lacombe explained. ‘There is of course a human community in the dunes of Ferret that stretches right along the peninsula. Some of these families have lived here for hundreds of years and would like to carry on doing so. Thus, that is one of our criteria. When the first stabilisation methods were deemed effective so long ago, not in making the land productive but simply in stabilising the cape formation, they were continued. Whether or not they are applicable to your situation in Australia I don’t know, but I see no real reason why they wouldn’t be. Depending, of course, on your anemometer data and the PH values of the sand. But from what you have described – low-lying hummocks, parabolic dunes, occasional Aeolian formations, in a wind-intensive onshore situation – what you are seeing here could be of some value.’
So this was the very hour on Cap Ferret that confirmed the migration of an idea. Together the three men walked the dunes of the cape, Pierre Green and Professor Lacombe pointing out to FB the way in which the marram grass plantings (they used the local word gourbet) were staggered, and how each palisade, once the sand had built up and was beginning to cover it, had another identical palisade built straight on top of the sand it had accumulated. And so on and so on. It was also pointed out again how something as simple as laying pine branches downwind of these palisades can have a remarkable effect in the coalescing of the sand.
FB assured his mentors that it was all very instructive and that, from his point of view, he couldn’t see any reason why the Cap Ferret methods wouldn’t be transferrable to the Victorian coast. And so an air of concord and enthusiasm seemed to permeate the resinous air. All the while, however, FB’s heart was beating fast, as the talk of what could or could not be applied back home in Victoria forced him to simultaneously reflect on the implications of the deeper desires that had gripped him. The emotional truth was in direct contradiction to his encouraging comments about the science and engineering of the sand. He had no desire at all to return and apply his findings at home. Even as he heard the words coming from his mouth about the specific compatibility of the Gascony palisades to his home coast he felt he was speaking in bad faith. He would have preferred a job as Pierre Green’s morphological assistant right there on the Cap Ferret hummocks than a quasi-triumphant return to the CRB in Geelong with the solution to their problems. The last few days had changed everything. He did not care any longer about the conundrum of the kangaroo down the hole, let alone Gibbon’s shoddiness when it came to reducing the drift at Eastern View or on the Bluff Road behind Barwon Heads, but here he was pretending that he did. Perhaps Pierre Green, having just met the young antipodean engineer, could sense a certain ambivalence in his reactions, but he felt sure that Lacombe hadn’t.
Quickly then, as the minutes, then the quarter-hours, the half-hours then the whole afternoon passed on the dunes and up in the lighthouse at Cap Ferret, the sense of happiness and relief FB had felt at the Dune du Pyla deteriorated into anxiety and confusion. He maintained a polite demeanour and, oddly enough, his conversational French that afternoon, perhaps due to this feeling of being only half present in his words, was as fluent as it had ever been. But inside, in a realm beyond translation, he felt mercurial and stricken, as confused and torn as the currents rushing past them directly out from the shore.
15
Scoured
The young lovers’ last night together was hardly an idyll and yet the gravity and tension of those hours only deepened their passion and left it etched indelibly in FB’s mind. Once the inspection of the dunes at Cap Ferret was over, and after enjoying a Perrier on Pierre Green’s back terrace near the lighthouse, Lacombe and FB returned on the ferry to Arcachon, disembarking at the Thiers jetty and walking through the level streets of the town and then up the slope back to the Hotel Loup Garou. Lacombe seemed still oblivious to FB’s internal turmoil and for this the young engineer was grateful. They talked as they walked, first about the enormous remnants of the Atlantic Wall they’d seen on the beach at Cap Ferret, then about the captivity Lacombe and his friend Louis Poirier had endured after being captured at Dunkirk during the war. FB had noticed graffiti on the concrete blockhaus shards of the wall on the beach, which reminded him immediately of Paris. He commented to Lacombe on how a once-functional infrastructure can be overturned into an expressive rebellion directly against its intended use. The angular wedges of blockhaus carried mostly inane slogans to do with soccer players, but they were nevertheless, in their own way, inscriptions serving as declarations of freedom. Lacombe found this observation interesting and gave Francis a look that suggested he may have just intuited that there was more to this young Australian than his professional interest in sand. And then he said, perhaps pointedly, in French:
‘C’est intéressant ce que vous dites Francis, mais en même temps nous ne devons pas prétendre que nous pouvons nous libérer de la nature. Au contraire, nous devons travailler avec elle. La liberté aux dépens de la terre ne vaut pas la peine d’être considérée.’
When they arrived back to the hotel Lacombe seemed invigorated, not at all tired from their long day in the field. He insisted that he drive Francis out to Mathilde’s home in La Teste. When FB protested that he had his bicycle
with him Lacombe went straight to the bike, picked it up with great gusto and wedged it into the back seat of his car with one wheel poking out. Then the professor got behind the wheel and there was nothing FB could do but comply. They set off for La Teste-de-Buch.
†
Earlier in the day, when Mathilde had sat beside her father on the sofa to discuss her situation some more, Alain had asked her about Professor Lacombe and what he was teaching Francis. Mathilde had told her father that she found the professor very progressive and even wise in his opinions but that his personality was stuck in the past. ‘He is teaching Francis about how things accumulate,’ she said. ‘And how things that might appear to be the strongest facts of the earth are finally, in geological time, whittled away.’
‘He is teaching the revolution then, is he not?’
‘Perhaps, but a very slow one.’
So it was that when Lacombe and FB arrived at the Soubret house at approximately six o’clock that evening Alain Soubret was pleasantly surprised. He eagerly invited the professor to stay for a glass of wine.
Mathilde and FB also took a glass of wine and sat with Alain and Lacombe beside the fig tree in the garden between the main house and the moulin. Lacombe was at his most relaxed and responded happily when Alain Soubret began to recount what Mathilde had described to him of the work he was involved in. When Alain went so far as to reiterate his analogy between the accumulation of sand, the principles of geological accretion and wearback, and revolution, Lacombe seemed both amused and delighted. And in response he immediately emphasised the importance of a slowing-down of human activity which Mathilde herself had touched on in her discussion with Alain earlier in the day.