by Camas Davis
Laid off. Fired. Whatever you want to call it, my magazine career was more or less over, unless I moved back to New York, which I was in no position to do. The dour, pale woman who served as our magazine’s lone human resources administrator instructed us to grab our things, monitoring us as we did so. I scanned my office and instinctively grabbed the apple sitting on my desk. Might as well start stocking the pantry now, I thought. Although I might not even have a pantry by the end of the month. I’d done the math the night before.
“It’s time to go,” she said, escorting us as a security guard might through the staff cubicles and down the stairs to the front door, just in case one of us tried to, what, punch someone? We were outcasts now, voted off the island. Dangerous elements. I stared straight ahead, looking at no one, and walked as hard as I possibly could.
As my feet hit pavement, I could feel each hard, calcified, bitter bone in my body begin to soften. I was shaking and full of angry adrenaline, but I also felt relieved.
“Thank fucking God,” I said to Jill. “Let’s get drunk.”
And we did. Or I did, since Jill was six months pregnant. At Dan and Louis Oyster Bar, I proceeded to down five old-fashioneds in less than an hour. It was only ten in the morning, but our colleagues each found an excuse to step out of the office and join us. I made a lot of jokes. I laughed. I bumped fists, high-fived everyone, and triumphantly toasted new beginnings. But hiding within was a creeping sense of total and utter loss.
* * *
—
AS I HEADED BACK toward the center of Toulouse, a deep fatigue set into my legs and rose up into my chest. My stomach felt as though it were eating itself from the inside out—nerves, probably, and hunger, certainly—but since I was not required to eat for a story assignment, I defiantly skipped dinner. This was a small act of defiance, but because it went against what I believed constituted my core nature, it inspired in me a familiar existential panic.
Who was I? Where was I? How had I lost myself so completely in a relationship that clearly wasn’t going to work? And how had I lost myself in a job that had me sacrificing sleep for . . . pulp? Magazine pulp. “Ten Top Restaurants.” “Twenty Cheap Eats.” “Five Ways to Eat a Mango.” Pulp that people hardly read while eating bacon cheeseburgers at McDonald’s or sitting on the toilet. Pulp made out of the same pulp we made the year before, and the year before that. How had I remained so enamored with this pulp for so long?
That night in Toulouse, I slept for fourteen hours in a hotel room that smelled like a grandmother’s perfume. Its tasseled curtains and rosy wallpaper conjured a retired flapper’s boudoir. The June air pulsed with static heat. The sole window in the room refused to open, so I slept fitfully, rolling from my left side to my stomach, then, ten minutes later, to my right side, then to my back, then ten more minutes and I was on my left side again, as if my body were affixed to a rotating spit.
FOUR
For breakfast, at the train station, I ordered, via pointing and a few mercis, an apple croustade, a coffee, and an Armagnac. Early on in my days as an editor at the national food-and-drink magazine Saveur, I’d fact-checked a few sentences about Armagnac, so I knew that it was a brandy made from white wine grapes that’s unique to Gascony and, unlike Cognac, is distilled once instead of twice, therefore requiring more time aging in oak barrels. But I’d never actually tasted it. I guessed that Armagnac’s flavors would meld well with the croustade’s vanilla-laced, buttery dough, the tartness of the apples, and the bitterness of the coffee, and I was right. The amber-hued Armagnac tasted of butterscotch and vanilla at first, but it also possessed a musky acidity that got along well with the rest of my Gascon breakfast. The creamy burn of the drink on my tongue thrilled me. Instead of sitting at a desk fact-checking Armagnac, here I was in Gascony, drinking it. This was progress.
At the gift shop, I bought a postcard for Will. On the front of the postcard, an older gentleman in a beret, who looked a good bit like the original Ichabod Crane, with wild, crooked eyebrows, had managed to stuff his bulbous red nose into the tiniest of Armagnac snifters. On the back of the postcard I wrote: “My first breakfast in Gascony. Wish you were here. I’ll be back soon. Sorry I moved in and then ran away to France, but I’ll be so happy to see you when I return.” I meant it, but I also never sent the postcard.
I took a train one hour northwest to Agen, past signs for towns with names like Moissac and Montauban. I loved the dominance of vowels here. Open-mouthed sounds. Out my window, the Garonne Valley passed by. With its rolling pastures and grasslands interrupted by small parcels of forest and orchards, it looked so much like the central Willamette Valley, where I spent my childhood in Oregon, in the little town of Alvadore. I could see three main crops thriving here, which I would later learn were sunflowers, corn, and rapeseed, alongside wheat, barley, and rye. Sprawling white roses, chicory flowers, Queen Anne’s lace, and elderflowers grew wild along the side of the road.
My French was terrible—the four weeks I’d spent the month before in a 101 class at Portland Community College had not really stuck—but I entertained myself anyway by making up meanings for the business signs we passed. I saw one sign above a business with a word like salvage or salage, next to the word cuisine, but it wasn’t the word sauvage, which I knew meant “wild.” I decided that this particular business worked to salvage wild food. Could something wild be salvaged?
* * *
—
I GREW UP hunting and fishing in the relative wild with my dad and my grandpa. We fished for bullheads and bluegills in the Cottage Grove Reservoir, using worms and Velveeta cheese that we rolled into tiny balls and sprayed with WD-40. Sometimes we’d drive three hours south into the wilder landscape of the Umpqua River to hook steelhead with woolly bugger flies. We wandered dense forests with Gabe, our yellow Lab, who’d run ahead of us to scare pheasants out of the underbrush. We set up duck and goose decoys in the dry fields and shallow lakes near Crane Prairie. Whenever Dad blew into his duck whistle, he sounded like a cartoon, and my twin brother, Zach, and I had to cover our mouths to stifle our laughter.
“Stay quiet,” our grandpa, Dutch, would gently scold us in a whisper. “The birds are coming. Can you hear them?”
I suppose I lived a wilder childhood than most people I know. The modest house in Alvadore that my dad, a carpenter, built for my mom, my twin brother, and me sat at the end of a short, potholed dirt road—the signage read PRIVATE ROAD—which branched off of another potholed dirt road called Fruitway. We were surrounded by fields of tall grass and weeds, tangles of blackberry vines, and an abandoned plum orchard, where the old plum-picker shacks were slowly collapsing in on themselves. We roamed Fruitway chasing our neighbor’s ducks and geese, feeding lettuce to Marie’s pygmy goat Charlie, stealing eggs from underneath the half-dozen laying hens at Tony and Buck’s, holding long conversations with Rosy and Wayne’s sheep. The farm animals in our particular neighborhood—and there were a lot—were not pets, exactly, but they didn’t appear to have any particular utility, either. Rather, they seemed to serve as reminders of a long-ago time when the people of Fruitway Road worked the land and raised animals for food for themselves and their neighbors—back before everyone found jobs in the city and began buying their fruit and vegetables and meat at a big grocery chain in Eugene, thirty minutes away. By the end of summer, mean old Ratliff’s U-pick strawberry field, which sat at the end of Fruitway Road, smelled of sweet rot.
The Willamette Valley was and still is considered a thriving agricultural community, with vineyards and grass-seed farms, hazelnut and fruit orchards, and plenty of successful vegetable and berry operations. But on Fruitway Road, we lived a simulation of country. We acted country, but it wasn’t really country. Not anymore. We didn’t need to look very far to find evidence—rusted tractors, expansive trailer parks, hay bales left to spoil in the field—of the gradual disappearance of the agrarian way of life.
The green-and-tan fields
of the Garonne Valley that I saw out my train window, however, had recently been tilled and planted, the limbs of apple trees expertly pruned and netted to protect them from hail. We passed multiple farm equipment stores, the parking lots full of men in muddied blue coveralls and worn work boots. Gascony looked alive with new growth and old rhythms, both wild and controlled at once, its land still deemed useful, bounteous.
* * *
—
IN MANY WAYS, a longing for the “wildness” and “country” of my childhood had inspired me to travel to Gascony in the first place. But not before I spent the first months after losing my job attempting to emulate, as best I could, those circumstances I’d thought had been so continuous and predictable in my adult life: a man in my bed, a certain kind of work.
No longer able to afford my apartment, I’d moved in with Will, who had generously allowed me to turn the dingy back room of his house—which, over the years, he’d filled with old filing cabinets, antique guns and bullets, gargantuan concert-worthy speakers, and empty chewing tobacco canisters—into my office. I planned to make a go of it as a freelance magazine writer. What other way forward was there? I had Will. I had my ten-year writing-and-editing career behind me. If I just held on to what had once been reliable in my life, surely it would all work out.
But after hustling a few story assignments from editors in New York and Portland—an as-told-to for GQ about the perils of raising chickens in your backyard, a roundup of the best tamales in Portland for The Oregonian, our state newspaper—I stopped completely. I stopped calling editors, stopped pitching stories, stopped turning my computer on each morning and pretending I was excited. When the paychecks arrived, I waited days before cashing them. I questioned, suddenly, whether writing these stories was an honest way to make a living, and so I felt guilty accepting the money, even though I desperately needed it.
Instead, I sat for days staring out my new office window onto Will’s backyard, which we’d transformed, with a roll of sod, from his dog’s muddy, shit-strewn, ten-by-ten strip of toilet to a bright-green lawn. I busied myself watching opportunistic robins hunt for their next meal. How had the worms arrived so quickly? Had they come with the sod? Had we paid extra for them?
The robins stood still, cocked their heads, waited. If a worm did not make itself known, the birds scurried a few inches away, cocked their heads again, waited. What did they hear? What invisible movement in the earth were they able to detect that I could not? In their dedicated search for their underground prey, the robins must have had to quiet their hearts to a barely discernible pulse, to hush the whirring of their tiny bird brains to not even a whisper. When a robin finally retrieved a writhing, juicy worm, I’d stand up out of my chair and press my face to the window to watch the robin eat, in just a few swallows, its entire length. How quick and decisive her service to this desire appeared to me. It had been so long since I listened to my own desires that I would have to observe many more robins pulling many more earthworms out of the ground in my new backyard before I could even discern their outlines.
There was no avoiding it. Like a pendulum, the impact of the preceding year had swung away from me just long enough that I’d been able to settle a few important practicalities, like where to live and how to feed myself, but the pendulum was on its way back toward me and moving fast. Loss is a round-trip traveler. When we push her away, we only lend more momentum for her return trip.
* * *
—
PERHAPS WRITING WASN’T my thing, I told Will; maybe I needed to do something different. Whatever it was going to be, I needed to reinvent myself, and fast. But as I waded through the classifieds, I found that the kind of job I craved, the kind of reinvention I began to envision for myself, would take me several steps down the career ladder I’d been climbing for so long.
The work I began looking for, without even understanding why—the work that I felt, curiously, better cut out for—was the kind of work I’d originally come from. Cue picture of my brother and me posing with our first rainbow trout, cue picture of us under the hood of my dad’s truck, helping him fix the engine with our plastic toy hammer and wrench. Cue Dad and Grandpa and Zach and me in camouflage jackets, with bows and arrows and fishing poles. Cue Dad and me bending rebar for the foundation of the third house he built for us to live in. Cue Grandpa in his garden. Cue Grandpa and Grandma canning pickles and tomato sauce. Cue my very first pocketknife. Cue my mom and her mom sewing their own curtains and clothes, baking pie from scratch. We built our own houses. We fixed our own cars. We grew our own vegetables. We made our own pie. We even harvested our own meat—but only sometimes, given my mom’s disgust at the sight of a freshly killed Canada goose. I came from a family of workers, mostly of the blue-collar variety, with a little administrative flair thrown in, who knew how to survive by working with their hands. I wanted to be the robin pulling worms out of the earth, not the person standing behind a window watching the robin pulling worms out of the earth.
My favorite book as a kid had been Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, about a young American Indian girl who is mysteriously abandoned by all of her people on an island off the coast of California. Drenched in loss though she is, she continues to live on the island, alone, eventually befriending a wild dog, her constant and only companion. In time, she becomes her own kind of wild. She assumes traditionally male tasks out of necessity: hunting and fishing, making spears, carving canoes. She is alone, on an island, living in a house made of whale bones, surviving on abalone and devilfish and berries that she harvests herself, with an animal as her only friend. I remember thinking that this sounded like a pretty great life, even if, in the end, a bunch of white people showed up and forced her to shed her cormorant feather dress.
I read that book right around the time Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox sang “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,” my favorite song back then. I was raised on Ms. magazine, with a fishing pole in my hand. When I was seven, my mom took me to a Democratic Party brunch to meet Geraldine Ferraro, who was running for vice president. My dad taught me how to hold a hammer when I was five. At the age of nine, he handed me a dead trout and my first pocketknife and said, Here’s its spleen, here’s its heart, here’s its gills, here’s its intestines. As a young girl, my particular feminist ambition fantasy was to live alone on an island and survive by using my own two hands and doing things girls weren’t often taught to do for themselves.
In time, I turned away from this fantasy. I’m not sure whether these things are related, but when our parents moved us from the rural town of Alvadore to the city of Eugene—really more of a small-town haven for like-minded hippies than a true, diverse city—when my twin brother and I morphed into moody teenagers in the late 1980s, when my dad and my grandpa stopped hunting and fishing together, when I became a vegetarian, that’s just about the time I remember shifting my attention from the wild, countrified, physical, natural world of my childhood to a more urbanized, abstracted world inside of my head. I gave up the violin for theater. I discovered the Steppenwolfs and Siddharthas of Hermann Hesse, the roadside cowgirl philosophers of Tom Robbins, the defiant Sulas of Toni Morrison, and I started thinking about what it meant to be a writer. This was also when I turned my back on the sheep and geese, the turtles and goats and bird dogs of my childhood, the fishing poles and bows and arrows, the fish heads and spleens, the blackberry bushes and cherry trees and abandoned plum orchards, and all the difficult real-world truths that they presented. We were city dwellers now. And so, in my move from country to city, I turned away from the real world of real things, perhaps in an attempt to find meaning in my distance from it.
Yet, in the back of my mind, I continued to believe that I had immediate and inherent access to real-life skills, like starting fires and chopping wood, like gutting fish and killing animals for dinner—“survival skills” is the phrase we use nowadays, since, at least in the industrialized world, most of these needs are
taken care of for us no matter our class status, and, presumably, only in a total emergency would we need to rely on such skills ourselves.
In reality, I’d spent little time mastering any of these skills. I hadn’t needed to. If I were really lost in the wild, I’d actually have little idea how to feed myself. I’d be alone and cold and hungry and then probably dead in that Island of the Blue Dolphins fantasy of mine.
Maybe, somehow, after losing my job, I was feeling a little lost in the wild, or, rather, lost in my particularly urban notions of the wild. Sure, I could spin a good story about being lost in the wild, but I didn’t really know how to be lost in the wild.
Maybe these thoughts were unnecessarily nostalgic. But what is nostalgia if not a glance toward the past in order to alight upon a workable vision of the future?
FIVE
My train arrived in Agen a bit early, or maybe Kate Hill was late, and I waited with my luggage in the parking lot of the small train station with a mix of adrenaline and self-doubt. Was I really doing this? After a few minutes, Kate drove up in a beat-up silver Peugeot, got out of the car, and strode toward me in a pair of bright-green Crocs, a billowy white linen sundress, and her signature indigo-blue do-rag.
“Bonjour! Welcome!” she said, positively beaming, giving me a kiss on each of my cheeks, followed by a warm, lingering hug. “Are you hungry? There’s a great little café in the train station. Let’s go there before we get in the car.”
We sat down at a small bistro table by the bar. Jet lag still had a grip on my brain, so I let Kate do most of the talking.
I’d reached out to Kate about a month before I arrived in Agen, on the recommendation of Robert Reynolds, a much-loved Francophile chef and underground culinary mentor and teacher to many of Portland’s cooks, who often took his students to France. After I wrote a story about Robert for the city magazine, we’d kept in touch and eventually become friends, after which he’d regularly invite me to his famous foie-gras-and-bubbly parties to honor some culinary whiz or another who was in town from a faraway land to share stories and cook with Robert. One winter evening, Robert’s guest of honor had been Kate, a cookbook author and teacher who’d swung into Portland all the way from her home in Gascony to teach a cassoulet class with Robert. As we talked over glasses of rosé, I took to Kate almost immediately. She had a way of becoming familiar quickly, as in she already felt like family. Hers was a big presence—not in an egotistical way, just in a big-life, big-thinking kind of way. The constant verbal and collaborative unfolding of ideas served as her fuel, and so she came off as a supremely social being, dependent on the presence of others to complete her thought processes and put those thoughts into action.