Live from St-Cirq - 3
Aug 2nd, 2004, 02:47 PM
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Live from St-Cirq - 3
7/29/04
Taylor having kept me up until after 1 a.m. playing the longest ever game of Uno, I wake nonetheless at 6 a.m. and am instantly drawn to the window where a lavender-peach sunrise is unfolding amid wisps of brume that are being seared by an already torrid sun. I run downstairs and open the front door and let in the early morning light, make a large cup of tea, and sit with feet up on the wall watching the morning unfold. Roosters, chickens, dogs, tractors, workmen come slowly to life in the next hour as the sun mounts over the valley. It's going to be a blistering hot day.
I slip into the garage, which is a netherworld of spider webs and coiled hoses and toolboxes and garden equipment and select a couple of pruners and clippers and attack the small garden plots in the front of the house, which have become cluttered with weeds. I pull and twist and clip and chop and in two hours' time have gotten rid of the worst of them. I haul them away and toss them over the edge of the old wall that lines the driveway and that leads down to a sort of plateau on the property that is unused and where they can be burned in wintertime without endangering the house. It's 9 a.m. and I'm a sweaty, slithery mess, with welts and scrapes and punctures from the enormous rose twigs I've extracted from the climbing roses (and they do climb here - two are over 20 feet high at the moment). Time for a shower and a few bandaids.
By 10:30 I'm cleaned up and Taylor and I are enjoying a swim and lounging by the pool. The heat is intense, the sky a cornflower blue, and the sun a molten globe. The weather report warns of incredibly hot, dry days to come, the neighbors are bemoaning the loss of the tobacco crop to the heat, the bug population is especially impressive, and the urge to spend one's time fully submerged in cool water is excessive.
It's almost too hot to eat, but we wash some radishes, get out some cornichons, plate up some sliced saucisson pur porc, slice up a tomato, pour some spring water into a couple of glasses, and limply sit at the table in the shade of the linden tree and have a light lunch. The buzz of bees is symphonic. There's one particularly large and aggressive black bee who keeps sucking at the flowers of our redbud bushes at the front of the house - in the usually silent atmosphere of a small village like this, he is like a bullhorn. We contemplate how we can capture him and let him free again in the middle of Sarlat or some large town.
We decide to go kayaking. That is, Taylor decides we need to go kayaking. I've never done it and have vague impressions of people saying it's harder than canoeing, difficult to keep control, dangerous if you flip over - you can't right yourself easily. In short, I'm apprehensive. But the heat is oppressive and I'm in a frame of mind to accept a challenge, so I agree - we'll go kayaking. Being on a river sounds soothing and cool. So we gather what we think we will need - cool drinks, waterproof sandals, towels, etc., and take off for St-Vincent-de-Cosse, near Beynac, where we usually rent canoes.
The young man at River Canoes tells us we have to wait 10 minutes for the van to get back with kayaks - canoers far outweigh kayaks, and that alone has me more apprehensive than I was to begin with. He gives us life jackets and paddles and explains how to use the paddle, which is an odd thing with two curved paddle ends that are not aligned, so that you have to do this weird wrist-flick thing every time you switch sides to get the paddle inserted in the water properly. "C'est une histoire des poignets, Madame," he says, and that's definitely the case. But once the van arrives with the kayaks and we're out on the water, I see that it really does come naturally. Miming it on the beach was ten times more difficult than actually doing it - it's one of those things that your brain just says " duh" to as soon as you do it for real. Obviously, the scoopy side of the paddle goes against the water, and before you know it, your hands and arms just flick the paddle correctly to make that happen.
I love this! Kayaking is so much more fun than canoeing, which is an exercise in flipping a paddle back and forth from the right side to the left, trying to guess whether your paddling partner is going to be weak or strong on one side or another, and generally not being in control of anything. A kayak is light and immeasurably easier to control. In fact, I could have abandoned the paddle altogether and used my hands to guide the boat. We raced, we floated, we flipped around and rode backwards, we traversed the river, we laid our heads back and soaked up the sun.
The Dordogne was incredibly crowded - canoes filled with families, dogs, and picnics; swimmers on the banks and swimmers in the middle of the river; French families lounging on the riverbanks with picnic hampers, sitting on stones, sitting on camper stools, sitting on the grass. It's fair to say that the French love a river and its banks. Maneuvering the kayaks around the French swimming in the river was the greatest challenge of all. It wasn't at all unusual to come around a bend and see a half-dozen Frenchmen with Speedos and large goggles in the middle of the river - they'd dive under water and we'd wonder if they were going to surface under the kayaks. Thankfully, we had no such encounters.
In a half-dozen places there are "rapids," places where the water quickens and you can hear the tiny waves lapping against the boat, but nothing scary or even challenging. For the most part, the Dordogne is a shallow river, but in a few places where it is more than a few feet deep we see sturgeon and catfish and other species milling about underwater. We come across an old abandoned tire, too. And there are water plants, long swaths of reedy plants with white flowers - the kayaks can get caught up in them easily, and you have to get out and free the boat before continuing.
At a certain point, we are the only boats on the river. It's nearing early evening and we are probably the last of the people to have signed up for a trip. We went 4 kilometers, and for the last one we have the river all to ourselves, except for the occasional French family along the banks. We arrive at the destination - the beach at the Restaurant Le Gabariere, at exactly 6 pm, and the mini-van from River Canoes arrives at the same time. We help load the kayaks onto the van and take the drive back to St-Vincent-de-Cosse in sunburnt, tired silence.
Forget about making dinner tonight. We're weary. We drive into Le Bugue and spy the Brasserie L'Oustalou at the Hotel Royale Vezere. It's new, but it looks good, and more to the point, it's overlooking the river, and that has been the theme of our day. I have a veloute de champignons sauvages followed by a salade de cabecou au noix and Taylor has an assiette de crudites followed by an omelette aux fines herbes with frites. He has a Coke and I have a glass of Bergerac rouge. Total 36.60 euros. Delightful atmosphere, skittish service.
It's still light when we drive home around 9 pm. The heat has subsided, but it's still humid and the air is heavy. We jump in the pool to cool off, then go upstairs and get in bed and read together for an hour or two. We've only been here a couple of days but have each polished off a couple of books. That's a sure indication we are en vacance. When I fall asleep I dream river dreams, floating dreams, dreams of streams and waterfalls and pools and the lavoir in St-Cirq where the women used to gather to do their laundry and the cows came to drink.
Taylor having kept me up until after 1 a.m. playing the longest ever game of Uno, I wake nonetheless at 6 a.m. and am instantly drawn to the window where a lavender-peach sunrise is unfolding amid wisps of brume that are being seared by an already torrid sun. I run downstairs and open the front door and let in the early morning light, make a large cup of tea, and sit with feet up on the wall watching the morning unfold. Roosters, chickens, dogs, tractors, workmen come slowly to life in the next hour as the sun mounts over the valley. It's going to be a blistering hot day.
I slip into the garage, which is a netherworld of spider webs and coiled hoses and toolboxes and garden equipment and select a couple of pruners and clippers and attack the small garden plots in the front of the house, which have become cluttered with weeds. I pull and twist and clip and chop and in two hours' time have gotten rid of the worst of them. I haul them away and toss them over the edge of the old wall that lines the driveway and that leads down to a sort of plateau on the property that is unused and where they can be burned in wintertime without endangering the house. It's 9 a.m. and I'm a sweaty, slithery mess, with welts and scrapes and punctures from the enormous rose twigs I've extracted from the climbing roses (and they do climb here - two are over 20 feet high at the moment). Time for a shower and a few bandaids.
By 10:30 I'm cleaned up and Taylor and I are enjoying a swim and lounging by the pool. The heat is intense, the sky a cornflower blue, and the sun a molten globe. The weather report warns of incredibly hot, dry days to come, the neighbors are bemoaning the loss of the tobacco crop to the heat, the bug population is especially impressive, and the urge to spend one's time fully submerged in cool water is excessive.
It's almost too hot to eat, but we wash some radishes, get out some cornichons, plate up some sliced saucisson pur porc, slice up a tomato, pour some spring water into a couple of glasses, and limply sit at the table in the shade of the linden tree and have a light lunch. The buzz of bees is symphonic. There's one particularly large and aggressive black bee who keeps sucking at the flowers of our redbud bushes at the front of the house - in the usually silent atmosphere of a small village like this, he is like a bullhorn. We contemplate how we can capture him and let him free again in the middle of Sarlat or some large town.
We decide to go kayaking. That is, Taylor decides we need to go kayaking. I've never done it and have vague impressions of people saying it's harder than canoeing, difficult to keep control, dangerous if you flip over - you can't right yourself easily. In short, I'm apprehensive. But the heat is oppressive and I'm in a frame of mind to accept a challenge, so I agree - we'll go kayaking. Being on a river sounds soothing and cool. So we gather what we think we will need - cool drinks, waterproof sandals, towels, etc., and take off for St-Vincent-de-Cosse, near Beynac, where we usually rent canoes.
The young man at River Canoes tells us we have to wait 10 minutes for the van to get back with kayaks - canoers far outweigh kayaks, and that alone has me more apprehensive than I was to begin with. He gives us life jackets and paddles and explains how to use the paddle, which is an odd thing with two curved paddle ends that are not aligned, so that you have to do this weird wrist-flick thing every time you switch sides to get the paddle inserted in the water properly. "C'est une histoire des poignets, Madame," he says, and that's definitely the case. But once the van arrives with the kayaks and we're out on the water, I see that it really does come naturally. Miming it on the beach was ten times more difficult than actually doing it - it's one of those things that your brain just says " duh" to as soon as you do it for real. Obviously, the scoopy side of the paddle goes against the water, and before you know it, your hands and arms just flick the paddle correctly to make that happen.
I love this! Kayaking is so much more fun than canoeing, which is an exercise in flipping a paddle back and forth from the right side to the left, trying to guess whether your paddling partner is going to be weak or strong on one side or another, and generally not being in control of anything. A kayak is light and immeasurably easier to control. In fact, I could have abandoned the paddle altogether and used my hands to guide the boat. We raced, we floated, we flipped around and rode backwards, we traversed the river, we laid our heads back and soaked up the sun.
The Dordogne was incredibly crowded - canoes filled with families, dogs, and picnics; swimmers on the banks and swimmers in the middle of the river; French families lounging on the riverbanks with picnic hampers, sitting on stones, sitting on camper stools, sitting on the grass. It's fair to say that the French love a river and its banks. Maneuvering the kayaks around the French swimming in the river was the greatest challenge of all. It wasn't at all unusual to come around a bend and see a half-dozen Frenchmen with Speedos and large goggles in the middle of the river - they'd dive under water and we'd wonder if they were going to surface under the kayaks. Thankfully, we had no such encounters.
In a half-dozen places there are "rapids," places where the water quickens and you can hear the tiny waves lapping against the boat, but nothing scary or even challenging. For the most part, the Dordogne is a shallow river, but in a few places where it is more than a few feet deep we see sturgeon and catfish and other species milling about underwater. We come across an old abandoned tire, too. And there are water plants, long swaths of reedy plants with white flowers - the kayaks can get caught up in them easily, and you have to get out and free the boat before continuing.
At a certain point, we are the only boats on the river. It's nearing early evening and we are probably the last of the people to have signed up for a trip. We went 4 kilometers, and for the last one we have the river all to ourselves, except for the occasional French family along the banks. We arrive at the destination - the beach at the Restaurant Le Gabariere, at exactly 6 pm, and the mini-van from River Canoes arrives at the same time. We help load the kayaks onto the van and take the drive back to St-Vincent-de-Cosse in sunburnt, tired silence.
Forget about making dinner tonight. We're weary. We drive into Le Bugue and spy the Brasserie L'Oustalou at the Hotel Royale Vezere. It's new, but it looks good, and more to the point, it's overlooking the river, and that has been the theme of our day. I have a veloute de champignons sauvages followed by a salade de cabecou au noix and Taylor has an assiette de crudites followed by an omelette aux fines herbes with frites. He has a Coke and I have a glass of Bergerac rouge. Total 36.60 euros. Delightful atmosphere, skittish service.
It's still light when we drive home around 9 pm. The heat has subsided, but it's still humid and the air is heavy. We jump in the pool to cool off, then go upstairs and get in bed and read together for an hour or two. We've only been here a couple of days but have each polished off a couple of books. That's a sure indication we are en vacance. When I fall asleep I dream river dreams, floating dreams, dreams of streams and waterfalls and pools and the lavoir in St-Cirq where the women used to gather to do their laundry and the cows came to drink.
Aug 2nd, 2004, 04:01 PM
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As someone who took a kayaking class for 4 days on Maryland's Eastern Shore, I appreciated the bit about kayaking the Dordogne.
It is actually quite easy--except for the bit where they deliberately made us do a "wet exit" and then we had to scramble back in the boats. Looks easy but it isn't.
Recreational kayaks are a lot easier to paddle than canoes--especially if you are lucky enough to get one with a rudder! Lots of fun too--especially on a hot day!
It is actually quite easy--except for the bit where they deliberately made us do a "wet exit" and then we had to scramble back in the boats. Looks easy but it isn't.
Recreational kayaks are a lot easier to paddle than canoes--especially if you are lucky enough to get one with a rudder! Lots of fun too--especially on a hot day!
May 11th, 2005, 08:21 PM
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