Hot Air Ballooning in Provence

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I can’t write about the balloon ride — that hot-air July morning when I floated like a murmuring dream over the planet’s baked surface in central Provence — without at least touching on certain accoutrements of the trip. I mean the lead-up, the whole earthy experience after bullet-training down on the glass-smooth, spanking new TGV line to the farmhouse. Day tours of Seguret, Orange, the Roman ruins, the castles and the drives over and through Provence’s mountains and valleys — it’s all cooked into that week with the fat, hot balloon in the middle… I have to wade through sense memories of late-night dinners on your airy glassed-in porch: the cold celery root soup, the baked trout — tail, torso and eyeballs deftly prepared and presented by Victor — the steak, the tapenade, the girolle mushrooms , the fruity, juicy tomatoes, and inebriating liquid complement to it all, the vracs of Vaqueyras flowing from the surrounding vineyards themselves, your supply maintained like tap water. When the the counter jug emptied, you refilled at the local co-op.   The loquacious French southerner in the booth at the farmer’s market swirls into view too, the one selling nougat from the nougat capital of Montelimar across the valley. He tried a couple of languages on us until he found the right one, then persisted in bio-graphing us — our home city, our feelings toward Provence and all before we’d chewed up our sample nougat, thanked him and moved on. There were the idyllic back yard evenings, your and Victor’s place smack up against yet another orderly Provence vineyard, grapes bulging under green-leaf canopies to the constant chatter of the cigales, the mythic crickets of southern Provence, that can be had in replica form, their grasshopper likeness carved out bars of lavender soap. The hotter and sunnier the day, the louder this hot-climate-only creature bows its strings. In fact, I associate those turbo-crickets now with “Bedtime in Provence,” not to mention “Waking up in Provence” and the “Whole Day Through in Provence.” Their incessant rattle, evidently varied at times into courtship songs, buzz-sawed into my dozing psyche, raked against oncoming dreams. It’s a soundtrack so persistent and voluminous, it fostered a cinematic sense of anticipation that something big, or its exact and equally potent opposite — nothing at all — was about to happen.   The hills really do roll in Provence, and dales dip and the sun sprays gold dust over the denouement of every “Van Goghian” day. Those largish-BB-size grapes popping toward harvest day on perfect vines in perfect rows, the peaches, every last one of them white and yellow, drool sugar juice that slathers your tongue in a fruity honey-varnish. I just can’t help it then when I think of Provence now that I wrap it all into my “me-and-the-big-balloon-ride” memory crepe.   But yes, the balloon, it is inflating now.   It was mid-week, a Wednesday when you sent me off to Joucas for the main event — at five-freaking a.m. on this particular Wednesday morning in Provence — in this particular week in late July — in this perfect southern French fantasy land, and I drag my and Martine’s half-sleeping derrieres off the pillowy softness of your feather guest bed. Okay, so we’re groggy, the juice of the that grapey earth still negotiating with my head, but it’s a beautiful Provencal morning and in about half an hour I’ll be so happy to be awake and alive and mostly alone on the dawn road in a special exotic foreign yet so creamy-friendly a place as this, where the cartoon Provence farmland stretches to the horizon, a place I imagine is presumably where the fiction ends and the real world begins again in the golden-spray light. The drive down in the bubbly Peugeot we borrowed from Suzy through that early morning hot-air scape, it was like swabbing honey with cotton. Not yet the scorching hot air that melts you and your bar of milk chocolate in the noonday sun; no this morning air is just right, soft and suspending time to hang it gently over the grapes and lavender, the mattresses of sunflowers, rolled hay bales before another day of hyper-growth begins from the dusty subterranean roots upward. And so we’re driving down in this perfect sunrise hour and the pain of peeling back our sleep-loving eyelids a half hour earlier is entirely forgotten and all I’m thinking about is the perfection of the place and the fact that I don’t have my driver’s license on me and where is the turn-off for Carpentras. We drive down the route and I like to think if I pretend I’m French I’ll be able to drive at the crazy impossible death-defying speeds they do love so. Speed has been everywhere on this slow trip back to a place from the past. The train south was speed, the silent speed of glassy-smooth metal zinging over glassy-smooth metal, throttling us over a curve of earth carpeted with plowed dirt, then grass, then suddenly, trees — a drifting still life at 160 mph under a hot pale blue sky south of Paris and getting south-er. Hay bales rolled up in fairytale-ish gigantic cylinders. Sunflowers, lined up like marching soldiers in a drug fantasy, luring me southward still. Had the train suddenly produced giant cutting arms that could swing out over the landscape like a harvester in a wheat field, the earth would be shaven in seconds, bush, sunflower, electricity pole and tree arcing into the air like a rooster tail behind a speedboat. The speed is cartoon smooth and makes a kind of living slide show of the view through its TV screen windows, interrupted now and then by the three-second thunder of a TGV blasting by heading north. A sudden cluster of stone houses. Gone. Village. Gone. The cooling towers of a nuclear power station belching steam. Gone. Meanwhile, objects closer by can only present themselves as blurs of light, color-streaked in a blend of wheat-grass brown, utility-pole silver, and wiped smooth of…
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