Day 5: The nine-fingered man

It feels routine now, even though it's really my second day at it. I meet Jean-Louis up at the house at 8:30, and we drive to "Le Broc". There's a Medieval Castle on one of the peaks we drive by on the way, again I promise to get a picture eventually. En Route, the primary topic of conversation was the terrible and inevitable transformation of farmland into developed areas. I think it began with my asking why there were olive trees everywhere. I was wondering if they popped up often uncultivated. This turned into a discussion about how this all used to be farmland. With every building, parking lot, street, or sidewalk we passed, Jean Louis would say how he remembers when there used to be cows or trees there. He criticized mankind of trying to cover up the earth, thinking it's dirty. I decided that this topic was only going to get more depressing, so I shifted gears to talk about food. I asked if his chickens were laying eggs (with the intended follow up of "can I have some"). He said not very many, it's too cold. It used to be zero, gradually working it's way up to 3. I guess this is eggs per week? He then went on about all the different colors of eggs, he has a couple chickens that lay dark red eggs (which are highly desirable), but he has had friends who have produced blue and green eggs with their diverse chicken breeds. Searching for the next logical step in the conversation, I started to talk about easter. We were talking about multicolored eggs, so it seemed pretty logical to ask if the french do easter egg hunts. Unfortunately, I don't know the word for easter. So I led off with a question something like "Do French people ever run around looking for hidden multi-colored eggs like we do in America". He looked at me funny and I felt I was making america look like a looney bin. So I tried to reference the specific holiday by first establishing that he was christian, and then trying to talk about the resurrection of Jesus. We converged on the day of the ascension, which is pretty close but clearly not good enough.

 I gave up and started talking about Mushrooms, promising to look up some much needed vocabulary for tomorrow.

 We got to the farm and I thought it would be a pretty normal day, we just needed to re-build the wall we had torn down yesterday.



















So we started. It's called a "Dry Wall" (Mur Sec), meaning there's no mortar, just carefully stacked stones. However, it is crucial that behind said wall, there is a layer of small stones. This is so that when it rains, the soil doesn't swell and push over the wall. The little rock layer provides a buffer zone, allowing the soil to swell a little bit without pushing on the big rocks, and also facilitates drainage.

Then Two men rolled up. They yelled something at Jean Louis while he was on the backhoe. He ignored them for a moment, so I went over to say hi and apologize saying that he may not have heard them. During the handshake I realized that one of the men was missing part of his right hand, pinky included. This was not the most interesting thing about him however.

It turns out that our nine-fingered friend was a bee farmer, and every year he trades 2 boxes of bees for one pick up truck full of firewood from Jean-Louis. Now I didn't know this at the time. I just knew that some strangers had rolled up, and started loading a truck with firewood. Once they were done, we all went down to the base of the farm. Jean Louis put on a ridiculous bee suit, the nine fingered man started burning pine needles in a teapot, and the other man pulled out big packets of what looked like icing.

 We then started trudging into the woods. In the distance, I heard the cries of the nine fingered man echoing through the hills. Clearly he had broken something, and he was yelling some words that I recognized as obscenities and a lot of words that I assumed were obscenities. We all looked over our shoulders, expecting to maybe see an eight fingered man emerge from the tree-line. Turns out he had broken the spout off of his spray bottle.

So, we made it to the beehives and the nickname-less guy and I kept our distance. Jean louis was protected from head to toe, and the nine fingered man apparently knows no fear. He ran up to the beehives and pumped smoke out of the teapot with burning pine needles, then took the lid off of the hive-box and sprayed it, and then cut a hole in one of the icing packets and put it on top of the hive.

Jean Louis bumbled about, he's afraid of bees.

The men then left, and I started asking questions. Jean Louis gets the bees every year because he loves honey, but primarily because they are good pollinators. The smoke keeps the bees from flying around too much. I thought it would just enrage them, but apparently it makes them eat a ton of honey and get itis. The more you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_smoker

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=itis

So the smoke calms the bees. The liquid in the spray bottle is two types of acid that kill bee parasites. The icing is, icing. For the bees to eat.

We then went back to wall building. You'll just have to trust me the rocks are big and heavy.


animated gif maker

After that was done, we got lunch. We had tea, some kind of spicy vegetable soup, pizza, and some kind of nutty bread. Everything was really good, the pizza had goat cheese and mozzarella, and the vegetable soup probably had squash among other things but it was great. We talked about vegetative propagation of olive trees, and how sweet the wall was, and how long it takes grapes to grow. Jean Louis still eats about 4 times as fast as me. He sits politely for a while and then gets antsy and leaves to go work. I was savoring that pizza it was excellent. How many times am I going to say it was good?

We then loaded the backhoe into the tiny van and drove back (I didn't think it was possible).

I got home, went grocery shopping, built a fire, made dinner, called home, and then started writing a blog post about a nine fingered man I had met earlier that day.