The road to Gaillac is my favorite drive in any season, but it has been gorgeous since the fog came down. On normal days, the hills, curves, and steep bends mean new vistas are constantly opening around every bend and over every hill, but best is when you curve through a long (and thankfully well-cambered) bend and the valley drops away right by the side of the road exposing a wide vista of fields, stone houses, farm buildings, and a huge range of crops from grapes to sunflowers all organized in orderly rows and espalier wires. The most stunning is at the top of the hill before you drop into Gaillac, but sadly there is no easy way to take photographs as there is no shoulder; even if there was, the valley is wide and the impact is visceral as much as visual, like a big sky. These are pictures held in the mind, regardless of the quality of camera.
Today, though, those valleys were filled with pools of soft, frozen clouds.
Yesterday, we drove into Gaillac in dense fog (like the clouds from a plane window) that met us as we crested the last hill, but we drove home when the perfect amount had dissipated. The ground was silver, ribbed with sharp white, and against that the wet darkness of the older vines and the occasional almost transparent leaves was stark and beautiful. Fields and fields of contrasting colors and designs, each a set of very ordered rows going in different directions to the fields nearby, with gentle mist swirling around the base. Mile after mile of breathtaking farmland and occasional houses, barns, and villages.
In the summer many of the fields host sunflowers, and now those are just turned and frosted soil; other fields are empty because last summer a lot of the vines were pulled; but the dominant crop is still grapes, some pruned back to the central stem, others with heavily pruned cordons still tracing their wires, all marching over hills and valleys with their rose bush sentinels at breaks in the rows.
On several long straight stretches I wanted to pull over and try to capture this and the yellow farm houses against the bluing sky, but we were late, so I didn’t. Today I warned my nephew that the car would automatically stop for photographs, but all we could see was fog, and at times we drove in total white out conditions where even the tail lights of the truck in front of us were hard to see. The pictures never taken can make a more permanent mark on the brain than those in albums, and I suspect this fog season will be added to that collection.
I did find two pictures of frosted Czech grapevines in South Moravia (royalty free, courtesy of Dreamtime), but while they capture the general undulations and effect of the ice, I am sad to say they do not come close to the views I failed to capture. French fields are smaller and there is less monoculture — grapes are interspersed with other things and I suspect each farmer selects a different direction for reasons historical or aesthetic. The laciness of the bushes at the front of the second picture are one of the things I was marveling at, though, and the sense of the frozen field just fading into the mist rather than having clear edges. As consolation for failing to take my own pictures, here’s one of our olive grove with layers of trees behind them, all delicately frosted against the blue sky that was not warm enough to burn off the ice.
Tomorrow is supposed to be the last cold day, and without significant fog the “feels like” temperature will again be below the actual. But we also expect sunshine and maybe the beginning of a warmer period.
