Toujours Provence(30)
It hasn’t yet affected Ménerbes too much; not, at least, in an obviously visible way. The Café du Progrès is still resolutely unchic. The small, smart restaurant that opened two years ago has closed, and apart from a small, smart estate agent’s office, the center of the village looks much the same as it did when we first saw it several years ago.
But change is in the air. Ménerbes has been awarded a sign, Un des plus beaux villages de France, and some of the inhabitants seem to have developed a sudden awareness of the media.
My wife came across three venerable ladies sitting in a row on a stone wall, their three dogs sitting in a row in front of them. It made a nice picture, and my wife asked if she could take a photograph.
The senior old lady looked at her and thought for a moment.
“What’s it for?” she said. Obviously, Vogue had been there first.
Mainly Dry Periods,
with Scattered Fires
Like some of our agricultural neighbors in the valley, we subscribe to a service provided by the meteorological station at Carpentras. Twice a week we receive detailed weather forecasts on mimeographed sheets. They predict, usually very accurately, our ration of sun and rain, the likelihood of storms and mistral, and the temperature ranges throughout the Vaucluse.
As the early weeks of 1989 went by, the forecasts and statistics began to show ominous signs that the weather was not behaving as it should. There was not enough rain, not nearly enough.
The previous winter had been mild, with so little snow in the mountains that the torrents of spring would be no more than dribbles. Winter had also been dry. January’s rainfall was 9.5 millimeters; normally it is just over 60 millimeters. February’s rainfall was down. The same in March. Summer fire regulations—no burning in the fields—were put into effect early. The traditionally wet Vaucluse spring was only moist, and early summer wasn’t even moist. Cavaillon’s May rainfall was one millimeter, compared with the average 54.6; seven millimeters in June, compared with the average 44. Wells were going dry, and there was a significant drop in the water level of the Fontaine de Vaucluse.
Drought in the Lubéron hangs over the farmers like an overdue debt. Conversations in the fields and in the village streets are gloomy as the crops bake and the earth turns brittle and crusty. And there is always the risk of fire, terrible to think about but impossible to forget.
All it takes is a spark in the forest—a carelessly dropped cigarette end, a smouldering match—and the mistral will do the rest, turning a flicker into a fire, and then into an explosion of flame that rips through the trees faster than a running man. We had heard about a young pompier who died in the spring, near Murs. He had been facing the flames when a flying spark, maybe from a pine cone that had burst into red-hot fragments, had landed in the trees behind him, cutting him off. It had happened in seconds.
That is tragic enough when the cause of the fire is accidental, but sickening when it is deliberate. Sadly, it often is. Droughts attract pyromaniacs, and they could hardly have asked for better conditions than the summer of 1989. One man had been caught in the spring setting fire to the garrigue. He was young, and he wanted to be a pompier, but the fire service had turned him down. He was taking his revenge with a box of matches.
Our first sight of smoke was on the hot, windy evening of the 14th of July. Overhead was cloudless, the clean, burnished blue sky that the mistral often brings, and it accentuated the black stain that was spreading above the village of Roussillon, a few miles away across the valley. As we watched it from the path above the house, we heard the drone of engines, and a formation of Canadair planes flew low over the Lubéron, ponderous with their cargoes of water. Then helicopters, the bombardiers d’eau. From Bonnieux came the insistent, panicky blare of a fire siren, and we both looked nervously behind us. Less than a hundred yards separates our house from the tree line, and a hundred yards is nothing to a well-stoked fire with a gale-force wind at its back.
That evening, as the Canadairs, heavy-bellied and slow, ferried between the fire and the sea, we had to face the possibility that the next stretch of forest to go up in flames might be closer to home. The pompiers who had come with their calendars at Christmas had told us what we were supposed to do: cut off the electricity, close the wooden shutters, hose them down, stay in the house. We had joked about taking refuge in the wine cellar with a couple of glasses and a corkscrew—better to be roasted drunk than sober. It no longer seemed funny.
The wind dropped as night came, and the glow over Roussillon might have been no more than floodlights on the village boules court. We checked on the weather forecast before going to bed. It was not good; beau temps très chaud et ensoleillé, mistral fort.