Friends, Galgos & Belated Epiphanies: La Groie, France

One of the best things about travel is that it can create opportunities for all sorts of epiphanies. Most people who travel, or who desire to travel, know this. The wish to run away somewhere for a time and uncover some inspiration, figure something out, find the answer to a nagging problem is one of the enduring reasons people travel.

Solitary sunflower in France

Some people, like Emerson, who called traveling “a fool’s paradise,” think this motivation is unrealistic and even foolish. I don’t think so though. I think epiphany-seeking is a fine reason to travel. The trick is just to know that an epiphany is something that can never be forced, whether on the road or off it, by fools or by wise women, in paradise or on your own front porch. Epiphanies keep their own time—they can come miraculously (i.e., when you need ‘em) or unexpectedly (i.e., when you’re ready for ‘em), but you don’t get to pick. 

In late summer 2009 I went to France for a month. I had no special itinerary in mind, but I knew I wanted to spend some time in the country, maybe on a farm or in a small village. I was in Ireland before going on to France and while there looked to arrange a work exchange somewhere in France through HelpX. All I really wanted was work somewhere quiet and pretty and peaceful, somewhere I might get a sense of everyday French life that didn’t revolve around the great tourist-mobbed whirlpool known as Paris.

Field of end-of-summer sunflowers, Poitou-Charentes region

Main Street, La Groie

Field in La Groie

“Quiet and pretty” is not a tall order in the French countryside. It comes with the territory—literally. So when I found a work arrangement in a tiny commune an hour or so away from the city of Poitiers, in the Poitou-Charentes region, I knew I’d be getting what I was looking for. Still, you never know what your hosts will be like—if you’ll like them, if they’ll like you, if they’ll work you too hard, if you’ll mess up, if you’ll all get along…. I’d done two HelpX work exchanges previously in Australia, and I’d been lucky with hosts so far.

In La Groie, the tiny commune near Poitiers, luck endured, luck stayed a friend—and introduced me to some new ones, beginning with June and Martin, a retired British couple living in and restoring an old country home in La Groie and looking for help around the new/old homestead.

June in La Groie

Me with Martin and June

June and Martin proved to be any work exchange helper's dream hosts. Their idea of work for me was such arduous tasks as gardening, baking cheesecakes, brioche pudding, and other scrumptious desserts, picking blackberries, playing Scrabble, eating all kinds of local cheeses, and meeting their kind neighbors to practice my French with them. And oh yes, walking their dogs. They had, ahem, 5 of them: 3 female galgos (Spanish greyhounds), 1 female podenco, and 1 sturdy, steadfast black male mutt.

Beautiful Shona

Flora, Zack, and Tana--three amigos

Freya soaking up the sun

Five dogs! Plus 3 cats and several ducks, hens, and roosters. But Martin and June aren't animal hoarders, they're animal rescuers. Their galgas and podenca had all been rescued from Spain, which has a notoriously reputation for greyhound abuse, an issue about which Martin and June are passionate. And as for the cats, quackers, and bawkers? Well, what home in the French countryside doesn't have its fair share of such helpful creatures.

Paris, mon amour

Me with beautiful Charlie

The five dogs needed their exercise every day, of course. And one of the best times of day, every day, was the early evening walk we took with them, through the corn and sunflower fields surrounding La Groie. Tana and Zack especially liked to run right through the maze of the fields, in search of rabbits and pheasants and maybe a little unleashed freedom. In late August in La Groie, it's hot and there was little wind about, even at night--so if you saw the tops of corn and flower stalks shaking, you knew it was Tana or Zack pouncing on a discovery. One evening though we went out with the dogs only to find that one of their favorite fields had been cut down--just like that! Tana looked especially confused, ready as she was to bolt through the stalks only to find everything strangely wide open.

Late summer sunflower field

High fields

Newly cut field--no fun for the dogs

After passing the fields, we'd turn with the dogs onto the main road back to La Groie, sometimes encountering Pascal, one of the neighbors, or his diminutive elderly mother, out for a late tramp, both dressed in dark, simple country clothes. By the time we got back to the house, the dogs anxious and pulling and weaving all in and out between us and each other, we were always greeted by the evening's first stars.

Dom and Tana

Apart from June, Martin, the neighbors, and the animals, another friend I made in La Groie was a fellow helper, a uni student from Liverpool in the very last year of his teens named Dom. Dom arrived on the scene a week or so after me, and I’d worried a little about meeting him. I figured it would be very awkward once he arrived. He would probably totally ignore me, an ancient spinster of 36 at the time, and spend the whole time texting his classmates back in England. But Dom was great--intelligent, funny, respectful, easy to be around.

Dom, me, and June

The day after Dom arrived he heard there were coypu, or nutria, a large rodent-like creature, living in the brackish lake near the house, and he immediately made it his mission to see one. “I will see a coypu, before this holiday is over,” he declared. One afternoon I went with him down to the lake to stake the critters out. We spent a couple hours tossing stones into the lake, stalking through the woods, shaking tree branches, and making fools of ourselves inventing strange calls--whatever we thought a coypu might sound like--all to try and flush the little critters out of hiding. But to no avail....Until I got a message from him out of the blue a full year later. Dom wrote: “So last week some friends and I were in Rome on holiday and decided to rent bikes. And as we were riding along the Tiber River, what did I see?”

Another evening June and Martin went out on a visit, and Dom offered to impress with a famous peppers stuffed with couscous recipe of his, while I sat lazily in the other room watching the melodramatic (to understate it) Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose (and wondering if all this stuff really could happen to one person--good grief). I took a break from the Piaf soap opera to find Dom rushing in a panic around the kitchen. The oven didn’t work anything like the ones he knew back in England, he didn’t have peppers and had to improvise with tomatoes, and worst of all, “That is NOT couscous,” he said, his voice cracking with panic as he pointed to the box he’d found in the cupboard, whose French instructions he had totally mistranslated. It turned out to be bulgur wheat. Or something. And you know, it didn’t taste half bad.

More fields near La Groie

Past the lake, La Groie

Cathedral in nearby St-Maixent

So what's all this have to do with epiphanies? Well, I'll tell ya. Martin and June turned out be great conversationalists as well as warm and generous hosts--cultured, kind, witty, and down-to-earth. I remember all kinds of things we talked about, but one story stands out the most.

We talked about traveling a bit--only natural, since that's what most of their helpers who come through are doing with their lives at the moment. June and Martin told me about one girl they knew in particular, a girl very close to them, who left home for awhile to travel and work in another country. After a couple years gone she announced she was ready to come home. It wasn't that she had tired of the country she'd gone to or something had gone wrong. She simply had realized that she had found what she was looking for in traveling and being away. She'd needed to know there were good people in the world, and she found it was so.

That story really struck me. It stayed with me. But I don't think it brought on any kind of magic like an epiphany. Until recently.

At the time I identified very much with the girl in the story's need to travel and get away for awhile. I didn't identify with what she discovered (or perhaps, re-discovered) about the world until I began questioning why I've been writing this blog. I suppose after the past few years of doing a lot of traveling I wanted to think and write about what it was all adding up to. I'm finding I keep writing blog posts about all the great people I've met in all parts of the world, all the people who've treated me kindly and were good to me even though they didn't necessarily have to be. June and Martin. Dom. Friends I've made elsewhere in France, in Australia, in Mexico, in Northern Ireland, on Inis Oirr....And I think what it comes down to is that I'm discovering the reason I travel--to keep and renew my faith in the world. Some people do that by going to church, some by volunteering, some by reading inspirational literature or watching Oprah. Me, I do it by traveling.

Call it a belated epiphany. Took me two years for it to come to me. So I'm a slow learner. Better get back on the road to see what else I can learn, how many more good people there are out there.

Martin, June, and Dom in St-Maixent. Martin is showing off his pajamas, er, I mean French trousers.