My poor brother! First he couldn’t get out of the car because we were trying to climb a mountain. And now he couldn’t get out because we were packed in by sheep on all sides.
The windows were open so my brother could get some fresh air. The sheep turned out to be very nosy. They stuck their heads in the car and bleated loudly.
My mother screamed as a sheep tried to munch on her hair. Quickly, my father rolled up his window. Max tried to close his, but it was too late. One of the sheep made a grab for his penguin. My brother slapped the sheep on the top of its wooly head.
“Baaaah!” the sheep bleated.
My brother started yelling at it. Add the noise of the bells — half the animals were wearing bells around their necks — and you had a real orchestra!
The shepherd came past, walking in the middle of the sea of sheep. He looked exactly like a shepherd out of a book, with a staff, a pipe, a cap over his eyes – and, yes, a sheepskin coat.
“What’s the matter with you? What are you doing here?” he asked my father, not very friendly.
“I’m going to the transhumance,” he told the shepherd.
“Well, you’re in it. Up to your eyeballs. The road is closed.”
I remembered a sign I’d seen on the way up the hill. Circulation perturbée, it read. The circulation is perturbed. Hardly the same thing as “Road Closed for Sheep.”
“What do we do now?” my father asked.
“Enjoy the view,” barked the shepherd, and he followed his flock with his dog leading the way. A sheep dog, of course.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” my brother announced.
“Go with him, Charlie,” my mother said. “But be careful.”
What’s so dangerous about sheep? you might ask. But when you’re penned in on all sides by a sea of bleating, wooly animals that are all in a terrible hurry to get to their meadows covered in delicious, grade-A mountain grass, it feels a little strange. Not to mention the flies that have their moving day at the same time as the sheep.
I pushed open the car door. That wasn’t easy. Sheep are heavier than you think.
“Be careful!” my mother said.
Little by little, I was able to get the door all the way open.
“Come on, Max! Follow me, and don’t be afraid. Sheep teeth aren’t very sharp,” I told him, as if I knew all about it.
We fought our way through the river of sheep. We made it to the edge of the road, and my brother watered the grass. Then we sat on a shelf of rock and watched the parade.
Some of the sheep were wearing brightly colored pompons on their heads. Others had decorations painted on their wool – stars, half-moons, letters and other symbols in bright pinks and purples. Those sheep really knew how to dress up for a party!
I found out later that the owners decorated them that way so they could recognize whose sheep were whose. I don’t think the sheep had any say in the matter. I can’t imagine they would have asked for pink pompons on their heads.
It was the kind of thing my mother would like, I thought to myself. Sure enough, she had her camera out, and she was busy taking pictures of the decorated sheep.
Sometimes she’s so predictable!
When the parade was finally over, we walked back to the car.
“Now where do we go?” I asked.
“We’ll go where the sheep went. That’s where the action is,” my father answered.
We had come all this way to go to a sheep festival, so it made sense to follow them and their shepherd.
At the bottom of the mountain that we had worked so hard to climb, there was the figure of a sheep cut out of wood, painted white of course, and an arrow pointing to the Plateau d’Estafette. We had one more hill to climb.
That’s where we ran into the biggest open-air picnic I have ever seen.
And guess what was on the menu?
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “I mean, we’re eating their cousins or sisters or neighbors, right in front of them.”
Still, I served myself from a plate of lamb chops grilled over an open fire. The decorated sheep ran circles around us, their bells clanging like crazy.
“Do you think they know?” I wondered.
“Of course not.” My brother reached for another lamp chop. It was his fourth, but who was counting?
“We don’t really know what animals think,” my mother said.
I watched the sheep to see if I could tell what they were thinking. Every once in a while one of them would get the idea in its wooly head to go exploring somewhere new. Then, little by little, all the other sheep would follow, even though they didn’t know why or where they were going. I think the worst part about being a sheep is that you can never be alone. Wherever you go, all your friends will follow.
After lunch, my father took us on a tour of the Sheep Show. There was a craft fair with sheep cheeses, and sheepskin jackets, and a competition for the best sheep dog. Those dogs were really smart. They could herd sheep through hoops, or even ignore a big bowl of food until they had finished the job. My brother would never be able to get a job as a sheep dog.
We visited a store that sold shepherd clothes and hats, and even wooden staffs. Everything you needed to dress up as a shepherd for Halloween.
“I like sheep better than bulls,” my brother said.
“Me, too,” my father agreed.
“A sheep will never chase you into a phone booth,” I said.
“Very funny,” my father told me, glancing nervously at my mother. She still hadn’t forgiven us for running with the bulls.
He bought her a present. An antique sheep-bell made out of old rusty metal. The clapper inside the bell was an actual sheep’s bone.
My father isn’t very good at choosing presents. My mother inspected the rusty bell.
“Gee, thanks,” she said.
I could tell she was wondering what she could possibly do with an old metal sheep bell.
After the big picnic, we climbed higher into the mountains on the wind-swept, curving roads that twisted like snakes. By the end of the day, when we got out of the car in a little village, in search of a hotel, we could see our breath. Spring definitely hadn’t reached this place yet.
The next morning, we trooped off into the mountains on an expedition, up a steep path that led right from the front door of the hotel. We were the only ones out walking, except for a pair of fishermen who looked like statues at the edge of a lake.
“Just look at the color of that water!” my mother exclaimed. “You could never produce a shade like that with my watercolors.”
“Easy, it’s the same color as Miro’s eyes,” said my brother. “You just have to mix a lot of blue with a little green.”
“The water is turquoise because of the minerals in the lake,” my father explained. “Those minerals come from the mountains.”
Here he goes again, I thought. Another scientific lecture. Sometimes I wish he’d just look at things!
There were wildflowers growing everywhere, as thick as a carpet. My brother picked a little bouquet and gave them to my mother, just to get on her good side. And of course it worked.
Meanwhile, we kept walking. The higher we walked, the colder it got. We had our gym shoes on. They were good for jumping from rock to rock, but my toes were starting to freeze over.
“At the top of the path there’s a glacier,” my father told us. “That’s what the man at the hotel said. Let’s see if we can get there.”
I had never seen a glacier before, except on television.
“If global warming hasn’t melted it,” my mother remarked.
“I don’t think global warming has gotten this far up,” my brother said, shivering.
Down by the lake where the fishermen were, the sun was shining. But as
I looked up the path, I saw that we were about to climb straight into a bank of gray, swirling clouds. They were coming down the mountain, straight toward us.
Have you ever heard that expression, “Having your head in the clouds?” It sounds like fun, right? Well, the next minute I had my head in the clouds and it felt cold, clammy and wet. And scary, too, because you couldn’t even see the end of your arm.
“Hey, who turned out the lights?” my brother called.
“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” I heard my mother say. “We could get lost.”
“Well, there are only two ways,” my father tried to reassure her. “Up and down. How could we get lost?”
The clouds turned circles around our heads. My brother and my parents disappeared, though I could still hear their voices. From time to time their blurry shapes would loom up, then fade away.
“We came up here for the view,” my mother declared. “Well, I can’t see a thing.”
“The fog will blow away,” my father promised her, “sooner or later.”
I tramped along the path, through the puddles and among the boulders. Up ahead, my father started to sing “The Sound of Music.” Then he and Max decided to have a yodeling contest.
I don’t think that put my mother in a better mood.
“I’m giving this fog one more minute,” she announced. “Then we’re going back the way we came!”
Suddenly, as if they had heard her, the clouds lifted, carried away on a strong wind. The valley opened up and there we were – facing the glacier. It cascaded down the steep side of a tall mountain and ended in a small lake covered by a thin sheet of ice.
The glacier wasn’t as big as the ones you see on TV, complete with giant blocks of ice crashing into the sea. Still, it was pretty cool. The ice was blue-green, the same color as the lake. And we could walk on it, too. It wasn’t slippery because it was mixed up with rocks and dirt from the mountain.
We hiked past the glacier. Then we came across wrecked concrete bunkers, pieces of broken cannons and rusty coils of barbed wire. I wasn’t expecting to see those kinds of things on the top of a mountain.
“Italy and France used to be at war with each other,” my mother explained. “That was a long time ago. These days, you can go from one country to the other without a passport.”
And that’s exactly what we did. We found a line of stone border markers covered with green moss. On one side of the markers was a cross, and on the other a fleur-de-lys. I sat down on one of the stones.
First I put my feet on the Italian side.
“Voglio degli spaghetti,” I said, and I waved my hands in the air.
Then I turned to the French side.
“Je veux manger des crêpes,” I said.
“I’m hungry,” my brother complained.
Of course he’d say that. He always wants to eat, no matter what country he’s in.
“I’ll take the spaghetti,” my mother decided. “With fennel sausages.”
That had my brother running down the mountain like a sheep! All that was missing was the purple pompon.
NINE
A year of good stories
The weather grew warmer by the day, and I discovered all kinds of new things to do, especially when school ended. We went swimming in a river called the Ouvèze, not far from our village. The water came out of the mountains, and it was ice-cold, but there were spots along the river where the rocks formed natural swimming pools. They were covered with slippery green moss, and the sun warmed the water in the pools until it was the same temperature as a bathtub.
The Ouvèze was like an aquatic theme park, only with natural waterslides. It was a lot better than the village swimming pool that smelled like chlorine. My friends and I slid from pool to pool on the slick moss. We went down the whole river, laughing like crazy with our feet up in the air, splashing all the way. If you opened your mouth, you had to be careful that you didn’t swallow a fish. By the time we got back to the village on our bikes, the backsides of our shorts were hanging in shreds from sliding on the rocks.
We went on day-long hikes through the mountains and valleys with Daniel and his parents. Since his father Didier was a science teacher, he pointed out all kinds of things along the way. There were birds that lived in tiny holes in the sides of the river banks. They were called bee-eaters, and they flew over from North Africa every summer. They were the only animals that were willing to eat wasps and hornets. They must have stomachs of steel!
I was happier eating the figs and apricots and kiwis and plums that grew along the river. They were growing there just for us.
We crossed the Pont du Gard. It’s part of a Roman aqueduct system. Of course, my father had to give us all a history lesson about the Romans, and how they built bridges called aqueducts to bring water to their cities.
One time we went horseback riding at a horse camp. At first I wasn’t too sure.
“You should try it,” my mother said. “After all, how many chances do you have to ride a horse in Montreal?”
She was right. We live in a big city full of people and cars and buildings. But in some ways, there was really more to do in a little village like Celeriac.
At the stables, I met a girl named Vanina. She’d been riding horses since she was two. I think she even spoke horse. She taught me not be be afraid of the horses, even if they were way bigger than I was.
The first thing you had to do was act as if you knew exactly what you were doing. That wasn’t true in my case. But she showed me how to get the horse to jump over a fence, and once we even went on a moonlight ride.
I still have a photograph of Vanina and me and the horse. I hid it someplace hard to find, so my brother won’t get his hands on it.
Remember Dr. Rosalie who fixed my brother’s knee on the morning of the flood? She became our friend, mostly through her son Florian, who was our age. That was a good thing, because Max was always banging himself up by jumping off a roof or falling out of a tree. You know, just so we wouldn’t forget that he was still around. Every time she stitched up my brother, Dr. Rosalie would make him laugh.
“If I put any more stitches in you, you’ll look like Frankenstein!” she told him.
She and her husband decided to organize a going-away party for us. Every single person we knew from the village was there. The party began on a Saturday afternoon. People had set up long tables in Dr. Rosalie’s yard – sorry, in her jardin – underneath a trellis where vines grew. The tables were as long as a soccer field. There was room for everyone. Daniel and his family, Rachid, Ahmed, Florian and my whole soccer team, all the men from my father’s team, everyone who had ever taken my mother’s art classes, the goat-cheese lady, Marco the grocer, Carpini the baker. Madame Mendes and her husband even brought Linda in a wheelbarrow. And of course Vanina was there.
I never realized I had made so many friends in such a short time.
Two lambs were roasting over a low fire. Someone had driven down to a fishing port on the coast and come back with a whole box of sardines. There were pies made of onions and wild asparagus no bigger than a baby’s finger, and salads made from greens that someone had gathered in the woods. There were goat cheeses that smelled so strong I thought they would just get up and walk away.
And, of course, because we were in Celeriac, the land of grapes, there were barrels of wine.
Whenever you put wine and adults together, there’s bound to be some foolishness. Daniel’s father took some bottles of Champagne from the freezer, then pulled out a scimitar, which is the kind of curved sword a pirate might use.
Didier was going to show us how to open bottles without removing the corks.
Before I knew it, the tops of the bottles were flying through the air like unguided missiles. My brother and I hit the dirt. The jagged glass rockets flew over our heads and stuck i
nto the sides of trees.
Strangely enough, that didn’t seem to bother anyone else, even my mother who was always telling us to be careful.
After it was finally safe to stand up again, Marco asked us what we would remember most about our year in the village. What stories would we tell our friends back in Montreal?
“The bull story!” my brother burst out. “When my father got trapped in the phone booth.”
Everyone started laughing, including my father. What else could he do?
“What about you?” Marco asked me.
“The flood,” I told him. “When Monsieur Carpini and Monsieur Soulier rowed their boat down our street.”
“What about the snowstorm of the century?” Marco asked.
I laughed. Of course, the Great Celeriac Blizzard. Were there howling winds and freezing temperatures, with snow drifts piling up to the windowledge? Not exactly. We had one inch of watery snow.
“Remember that day, Madame Mendes?” I asked her. “You told us to go back into our house before we froze to death. And you wouldn’t even let Linda go outside.”
“I remember something about that day,” Daniel’s father said to me.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“I was just trying to have some fun the way we do back home,” I tried to explain. “So I threw a couple of snowballs at Rachid…”
“Unfortunately, he missed,” Daniel’s father continued, “and he hit me instead!”
“That was a little embarrassing,” I admitted.
“And do you know what this whipper-snapper told me after he hit me in the head with two snowballs?” Daniel’s father asked everyone at the table.
“I kind of forget,” I said in a very small voice.
“But, monsieur, snowballs are a Canadian tradition,” he said, imitating me in a scared, squeaky voice.
“What did you do then?” my mom asked.
“I threw them right back,” Daniel’s father said.
On the Road Again Page 7