Un-Mellow Yellow

When people come visit me in Saint-Maxime, the first thing they usually do is sleep, sometimes for very long hours. I’ve never understood exactly why that happens, but I suspect it may be that they feel they can finally relax. There is no route here that doesn’t pass through enveloping forest. At night, once the street lamps are extinguished, we fall into velvety darkness, the only noise for miles around the far-off screeching of owls. The air is sweet and pure, as the oxygen level gets a boost from all the plant life. Most of my visitors are coming from overseas, so there is jet lag to consider, but it even happens to friends from Paris.

“Normally, it’s like Brigadoon,” Charles said to me a couple days ago as we went on a sweaty afternoon walk, taking the loop past Michel and Simon and Jeannette’s houses. He’s been here since late July, working to advance a few projects in peace as he figures out his next move. “I don’t even know where I am right now.”

He was referring to the wreckage done by the succession of heat waves that have scorched most of France and Spain since late May. All around us, fields that were once reliably ten different shades of green or full of flowers have been dried to a crispy, dead brown. The blackberries are prematurely dark, shrunken and pebbly, some already starting to ferment on the vine when normally they wouldn’t even be ready for picking. In just two and a half months of hellacious, pounding heat and way too little rain, the landscape now resembles the Southern California of my youth more than the Shire-like pastoral playground I’ve become so attached to. It’s been so ovenlike that on the few occasions I’ve dared to step outside for a walk, once the wall of heat blasts me in the face, I hear the regretful, gravelly voice of Stellan Skarsgard rumbling in my head. “My Arrakis, my Dune.”

We’re extremely lucky we haven’t had any forest fires like what’s happened in the Gironde and Landes regions further south, where tens of thousands have been evacuated as the French conspiro-sphere points the finger at anything except climate change. (So far no one is bringing up Jewish space lasers, but there’s still time.) Who knows if it holds, though? The weather forecast has us at varying levels of alarm.

This year’s fête de village marked Benoît’s first as mayor, and there had been an uptick in professionalism, with big new AI-designed banners to announce the party hanging next to the poky signs of yore, where the changing date of the annual party is spelled out in blocky electrical tape. Of course he had an ambitious program planned, scheduling a candlelight procession before our usual musical fireworks. All that got called off, thank God, as the party planning committee blanketed the streets with No Smoking signs the night before and I secretly gloated over the L.

Charles and I are on our way to Paris today for a quick overnight stay and a boozy birthday lunch for him. On that walk we took a few days ago, I debated whether to call Jeannette to take care of Eleanor and Lucy while we’re gone. Usually they don’t need it for just an overnight, but maybe Jeanette needed to know to come over in case the village caught fire. “One spark and this whole place is done for,” Cassandre said to me a few summers ago, after a drought that was, by comparison to now, kid’s stuff.

(You can’t quite make it out in this clip, but as I filmed it, Charles was asking me if my estate planning was in order. On-theme!)

I don’t like thinking about any of this. After a series of misfortunate events that conspired to make Paris no longer doable for me, I came here to escape catastrophe. Despite some early awkwardness, I have been able to untangle a few of the knots in my soul and even start to put down some the burdens I arrived with. The restorative forest, a constant reminder of the ability of everything living to regenerate, has been a big part of the process.

Now when Charles and I pass through the woods on our way to the supermarket—the only excursions we’ve made, as we’re both in work mode—too many leaves are pale. We’re not witnessing an early fall, where reds and oranges represent a normal phase of some trees’ lifecycles. We’re seeing a lot of straw-yellow, because trees are simply dying.

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Two days ago, Le Monde published an interview with an ecophysiologist named Nathalie Bréda, who explained what we’ve been seeing, and warned of much worse to come.

In a nutshell: trees perspire to cool off, just like people do, except their reservoirs come from moisture in the soil. There was still enough of it during the first heat wave in late May, but by now, all that’s gone, so the leaves are closing up, with nothing left to sweat out. Once the trees’ vascular system stops working, their peripheral organs—their leaves and small branches—yellow, dry out and drop. This also shuts down photosynthesis, so there is much less carbon capture. And since the extreme heat started before the growth spurt that usually takes place in summer, too many trees haven’t grown at all, so they can’t bank any reserves. It’s unlikely that the vein of chanterelles Jean-Yves found in the woods behind his house will offer much to forage come fall. Bréda also warns of a possible bark beetle infestation next year, with no control measures currently in place.

This was supposed to be my Shangri-La, just like, on a grander scale, what France was supposed to be when I decided to leave America. A place with humanist values, a social safety net, cheaper real estate and a greater sense of community compared to my hyper-individualistic, me-first, overpriced homeland. Only now, the far right may capture the presidency for the first time since Vichy, and the EU is under Russian attack. After years of sub rosa fuckery in the Baltics, drones have been found in Leipzig and Romania. A munitions factory outside of Rome recently blew up. One candidate for the presidential election next year, the fetching center leftist Raphael Glucksmann, has already pointed to Russian meddling in his campaign.

How dare life change up on us like this, and transform our stable berths into threats? Even though the great powers that brought all this about do not give a single fuck about me, I am taking it personally.

But things can turn on a dime. The night before last, Charles and I were both awakened by a thunderstorm. Hail clattered on the roof above me with a machine gun ratatat. Lightning lit up the skies over the Big Village a few miles away and the thunder was so loud it shook the floors. Charles was startled out of bed and went downstairs to make sure a truck hadn’t run into the front door. He found Eleanor in the living room, her eyes wide, having flattened herself under a chair. A few minutes later, she came upstairs to my bedroom howling.

Now everything smells of ozone and loam, with a sweet and sour note of wet hay. The air is so silky, I just have to sit by the window and take it in for a minute. By tomorrow, the weeds will start poking through my scorched-dead lawn. Even if I’ve been watering my plants recklessly throughout the heat waves, it’s a point of pride for all of us in this village never to touch our lawns. Usually we don’t have to.