Strangers in Friendly Places

Paul Zimmer

        We do not have your words,
        we do not have your years.
        When we pass you on the road
        we always give first utterance
        or make some uncertain gesture,
        shy as fog passing down
        slopes into the valley.

        It is the same for us
        in all directions, under stars
        swarming out of foothills,
        on the gravel we churn
       7nbsp;with our shoes-east, west,
        north or south-the same,
        strangers in friendly places.

        We are like rain.
        If you wait long enough,
        we go away. Meanwhile,
        be kind to us. Let us be
        humble in your presence.
                    —Reprinted, with changes, from New Letters, volume 63, number 1.

When America entered World War II, I was seven years old. My mother’s parents were French and Belgian immigrants, and my father was of German ancestry, but they did not clash over the war. Mostly we worried that it might come to America, to our town of many factories. My father was in the Civil Defense Corps and took a red-filtered flashlight out into the practice blackouts while we sat in our darkened basement and mother taught us French songs—“Frère Jacques” and “Alouette.”
     Each summer during the 1940s, we made trips from northeastern Ohio to Linton, Indiana, to visit my mother’s parents. The trip was long, eight hours, about as long as it takes to fly to Paris from Chicago today. Some of the roads were still rough gravel. We got up before dawn, and often it was foggy. By the time we drove into Linton in the late afternoon, I was ready to jump out of my skin.
     We all crowded happily into my grandparents’ little house. The old chairs, couch, and tables in the living room were decorated with lace doilies and hand knit afghans. On top of the upright piano was a bowl of anise candy, peppermints, nougats, and a stereopticon viewer with a box of double images of Notre Dame, Lourdes, a castle on a hilltop rising above French fields, and other scenes of France. On the flowery papered walls were reproductions of The Angelus, a Rousseau landscape, and a little girl gazing up at a bluebird in a tree. There was a windup phonograph and a stack of Maurice Chevalier records. Everything seemed quaint and “French.”
     I was allowed into my grandparents’ bedroom only once, when I was helping my grand-père look for something. I remember old photographs of French and Belgian relatives on the tops of heavy dressers, a mirror that had started to peel around its edges, and a bed covered with a chenille spread on which rested a French doll with auburn hair and taffeta dress. My grand-père took down a box from his closet and gave me a chocolate-covered cherry. It was a privilege, a secret, and I did not brag to my sister.
     A Monarch cooking stove sat in the corner of the kitchen, along with a bucket of coal and a small kerosene stove used for cooking in very hot weather. Nearby was a white enameled table where foods were prepared and dished up. Cooking was a hot job in the summer. My grand-mère always had a pot simmering on a back burner and kept a towel by the stove to dry her face. Only cold water flowed from the faucets, and she heated kettles for washing and baths. She worked constantly when we visited, assisted by my mother, sister, and aunts—cooking, sweeping, washing dishes, and putting things away. At the end of the day, she sat in exhausted silence on the porch as the others talked. She kept a flower garden at the side of the house—daisies, carnations, moss roses. She indulged me. As the youngest and last grandchild, I was allowed to fire my cap pistol outside the house and clutter the front yard with orange crates I had torn apart to build wagons and hideaways. Once she helped me make a bow and arrow out of branches. My mother was amazed at her tolerance.
     We all used the two-hole outhouse at the back of the garden. I did not like it, and there were always bees threatening me as I sat. Once a week the ice man came in his horse-drawn wagon, lugged in a big dripping block with tongs, and dropped it with a thud into a tray beside the icebox. Chink-chuck—he halved it expertly with his pick, heaving the pieces up into the insulated cabinet. I followed him back out to his wagon, and he handed me a chip of ice, gritty with splinters from the old floorboards. I wiped it carefully before putting it in my mouth.
     Chickens and a few rabbits were kept out back in small pens near a large storage shed. My grand-père was proud of his vegetable garden. It took up the whole fenced backyard—leeks, shallots, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, herbs, green beans, peas, parsnips, onions, lettuce, radishes, usually a patch of sweet corn. A grape arbor was decorated with my grand-père’s whittlings—profiles of family members back in France. He used a tobacco spray to control pests, and my sister and I helped him pick off tomato and potato worms. I sat by him on a stool in the back entry porch as he trimmed vegetables and rinsed them in a bucket of water. He gripped his worn knife in the palm of his knobby, freckled hand and talked as he worked. He spoke my name differently —not Pall but Powell, sounding the vowels higher and rolling the l a little.
     Sometimes on summer nights he would take me out to his garden and hold my hand as we looked up at the sky together. Having toiled his adult life in the coal mines of France and America, he liked to stand out under the stars. He told me the names of the planets and explained their places—Pluton, Saturne, Mercure, Mars—how Earth is a planet, too, and we all circle the sun. I fancy my small hand in his made him remember his boyhood before he ran away from the conscription in France. He hated the war and worried about his people. His hometown, Mericourt, was destroyed by the Germans in the First World War because of its coal mines. Sometimes he told me a little of his sadness. When I fetched small, pale blue letters from the mailbox for him, he read them eagerly. Even as a child I could sense his yearning He had left his home forever. I could not imagine such a thing.
     I think now of the brave decision he and his family made, knowing that they would probably never see each other again—the most difficult goodbye. He did not find the rich life of opportunity he had imagined, but he also did not end up as a bloody corpse on some remote European battlefield. My grand-mère came from southern, French-speaking Belgium, and they met in America. They raised seven children and lost two in infancy to what they referred to as “summer complaint.” My mother told me a story of how my grand-père once said goodbye to them and rode the rods from Utah to Indiana pursuing a mining job. When I seemed surprised—my dignified French grand-père riding under a boxcar like a hobo—she looked at me and said, “You weren’t exactly born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”
     In the little Indiana frame house, six of us sat at table. If aunts and uncles came, there were two sittings, and the men ate first. There was always soup before dinner and a little paté. The main course was meat—beef brisket, fried and stewed chicken or rabbit, or ham in green beans—creamed new potatoes, onions or leeks, and vegetables. There were big sweating pitchers of iced tea. The adults had glasses of wine. Some cheese and bread were served at the end. Occasionally my grand-mère made chocolate pie for my sister and me, but usually I was allowed to turn the crank of the ice-cream freezer while the adults had coffee.
     After dinner we sat on the front porch with fans and flyswatters. My Uncle Joe made a clapper for me out of two boards and a piece of leather so I could make noise and keep the blackbirds out of the elms in the front yard. I was enthusiastic in my work, and soon everyone regretted that he had given me this assignment.
     Some evenings, especially when there were visiting relatives, we went inside and gathered around the piano to sing while my mother played. My favorites were “Over There,” “When Yankee Doodle Learned to Parlez-Vous Francais,” “Joan of Arc,” and “Nola.”
     We went to bed when things cooled down a bit, slept on cots or mattresses placed on the floor, with electric fans whirring and clanking. One night I was on a feather bed in a corner of the living room, hot and uncomfortable, listening to the rumbling sleep of the adults. At one point I got up, crept across the room, and struck a resounding key on the piano. The snoring stopped momentarily, and my sister sat up in her cot. I dropped down to the floor and squirmed back to my feather bed. “Paul!” my sister whispered admonishingly. Shortly the thrum and glottal buzz resumed over the whir of the fans.
     Our departures were always emotional. My grandparents did not like to say adieu, so we moved quickly, having packed the car the night before. We waved and waved goodbye as we drove away down the street. On one of our drives home, we were sideswiped by another car in the early morning mist, and our luggage was smashed on the running board—clothes and gift vegetables strewn down the road. My sister and I wept and held each other as we watched our parents gather up our belongings.
     Many things drop away, but those summer visits to Indiana abide with me. There was a French accent on everything. My mother taught me to be proud of this. She had never been to France, but her enthusiasm was infectious; she sang “The Marseillaise” at the drop of a hat. She teased my father about being a “kraut,” but they did not argue as the war raged. We all rejoiced with her when France was liberated in 1945. When she was angry with one of us, she said, “You're getting my French up!” She used French words and phrases in her conversation.
     It is a condition of advanced adulthood, the regret any halfway civilized American feels over not having learned French. When my wife and I go to France, although my pleasure is intense, I feel deficient. What I remember most of my grandparents’ house are the tones of that sonorous language, so pleasing to my ear-my mother talking to my grandparents in French and them speaking to us in English with heavy accents, the vowels sliding into each other and the consonants rounding. These were the sounds of comfort and family-the home I have tried to keep all my life.

Puivert is a tiny French village of four hundred people in southern Languedoc. My wife Suzanne and I have the good fortune to own a modest house there. The upland countryside echoes the fields and sky of southwest Wisconsin, where we also have a farm near Soldiers Grove, a small town approximately the same size as Puivert. Both of these landscapes are rolling, but the slopes that rise from the valley in France are the soaring foothills of the Pyrenees. The soil in the French fields is tawny rather than dark brown; the houses and outbuildings in the distant hamlets and farms are built on ancient medieval sites and made of the buff-colored stones of the area, rather than the wooden frame white houses and red barns of new world Wisconsin. In both places we are surrounded by wooded hills and valley meadows.
     Our good fortune amazes us—to be finishing our lives in these two verdant places five thousand miles apart—the kind of scenes we dreamt about during all our working years in cities and towns. Our luck was not calculated. The opportunities to have these places came by chance, and we thank the gods that we turned the corner, saw them, and were able to act when they presented themselves.
     In Puivert we share our small eighteenth-century stone house with the writers Susan Ludvigson and Scott Ely, who pioneered the property years ago. It was Susan who purchased the shambles originally and, working slowly with local artisans, made it pleasantly livable—then had the grace and generosity to allow us to become co-owners. It is a row house in a narrow lane, the site at least two hundred years old, in a hameau called Campsadourny just a short stroll from Puivert. On each side of our house are shells of abandoned structures, now occupied by birds and mice. If you turn left leaving our door, you are headed toward the village and a view of the castle on the hill above the valley. If you turn right you walk into the fields and farmland surrounded by the beginnings of the mountain range.
     We own no land, only the house, but behind it is a vegetable garden maintained by three elderly French people who live down the way. They waddle and bend arthritically to tend the tidy rows each day, chattering to each other. Gazing down from our beveled second story window, I recall my grand-père’s garden—so sumptuous, orderly, and necessary, like the lines of a good poem. When we lean out and express admiration to the elders for their jardin, small gifts begin to appear on our doorstep—bags of onions or potatoes, bundles of lettuce, heads of cabbage, bouquets of broccoli and cauliflower.
     In Puivert there is a small grocery store, a boulangerie, a café, two good restaurants, an antique bridge over a small stream with a pissoir in the middle through which you can pee directly into the current, a musée of the territory, and a troubadour castle high on a hill above the town. Like our Wisconsin farm, it is a quiet place—but in Soldiers Grove there is no museum, French bakery, or castle on the hill, and the restaurants serve hamburgers, pizza, and broasted chicken.

This year we arrive in southern France in early October to stroll in still-green forests and fields, leaving behind a harvested Wisconsin landscape already russet and yellow with a distinct autumnal snap in the air. In France it is warm. The birds have only begun to flock, and crops are still standing in the fields. Our modest, rough stone, three story house sits in a narrow lane of seven occupied and two derelict houses. It is probably a good deal older than we think. When it was being restored, a large, heart-shaped, ancient stone, big as a semi wheel, was discovered buried in the foundation—what Scott Ely refers to as the world’s heaviest valentine—with a kind of fleur-de-lis (which might be a Basque symbol ) and a pansy-like four-leaf flower expertly carved into circles in the gray stone—curious signs giving some indication that there might have been a dwelling on the site much earlier. Perhaps it marked the grave of two old lovers or celebrated a marriage. Whatever its purpose, the stone was meant to endure. It is now propped against the second floor wall across from the bed, a symbol for us of love immemorial.
     As in Wisconsin, the farms in the valley are dairy and cattle, and the fields are planted with grasses, grains, and corn or used for pasture. We note differences between French and Wisconsin farmers. French farmers favor enclosed trucks instead of the American pickup. Wisconsin dairy farmers wave from their trucks by raising a single finger slowly from the wheel as they pass by—what we call Norwegian cool. French farmers look incredulous if you wave, and no greeting is returned. Wisconsin farmers bale their hay and are careful to make certain that corncobs and oats are completely dried out before harvesting. The French farmers in our valley grind everything—corn, cobs, stocks, and whole grasses—into small, damp shreds, which are pressed and stored under tarpaulins. They harvest the large fields as though conducting tank warfare. They use John Deere tractors with formidable shooting grinders and big hauling trucks running alongside to catch the shredded crops. The noise is immense as the vehicles move back and forth, and in the distance, as always for eight centuries, the castle on the distant hillside overlooks the harvesting.
     Built early in the twelfth century as a Cathar stronghold, the castle was burnt and looted in 1210 by the righteous knights sent by Pope Innocent III to exterminate the heretics. Later in the thirteenth century, the troubadours built, contiguous to the ruins, a new structure devoted to the bardic life; the English version of the castle brochure says, “Poet gatherings were frequent in Puivert.” Evidently this was true even when the Cathars occupied the castle. There exists a fragment of a satirical poem, dating from 1170 and written in the langue d’oc, which translates, “This verse was composed to the sound of bagpipes / At Puivert among songs and laughter.”
     The landscape in Languedoc is romantic and poetic. It amazes us always to be driving in the countryside and suddenly come around a turn to see another world, a magnificent chateau, a fortified tower, or a splendid ancient church in a town of ancient houses. A town like Mirepoix at first seems dreary, streets lined with mud-colored stone row houses and stucco facades, then we turn a corner in the narrow streets and come into a delightful, medieval square, shops fronted in centuries old buildings. On the narrow side streets there are entryways and antique doors leading to the chambers and apartments of the residents. In warm weather the doors and ground level windows are left open. The apartments behind these antique facades are lovely, elegant—and very French.
     Years ago I was paging through a book of photogravures of old Paris, doing some French dreaming. The antiquity and depth of an image of a small passageway leading to Balzac’s house drew me in. I wanted very much to be in such a place. Now we come across such venerable nooks regularly in our rambles.
     The first time we traveled to France, almost thirty years ago, we drove through old Paris neighborhoods into the countryside. It seemed to me that the country was impoverished. The dingy row houses of old Parisian neighborhoods and environs would have been slum neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, where we lived at the time. It was puzzling—the people seemed prosperous and chic as they walked their tatty streets. I had no sense of what old meant. In America we do not treasure old things, we obliterate them. But when I had glimpses into the French houses, I realized how rich and rare the interiors were, how sophisticated and meaningful, so much tradition and elegance behind the old and seemingly crumbled facades. France is not a condemnable slum. It is antiquity. People live in the cities with true grace amongst the artifacts of the past, within their own history, cherishing their traditions.
     Strong measures and regulations are used to preserve the venerable French countryside. So far there are no double-wide, prefabricated houses or trailer courts, as there are in Wisconsin, scourging the landscape. But blinking communications towers spring up amongst the trees on beautiful hillsides and mountains; television dishes mushroom everywhere; garish signage is increasing. France is alluring, and regular visitors like us become proprietary, but what right do we have to be worried and offended by encroachment—strangers in this country, part-time residents with only distant, faded familial ties? I have observed with frustration and sadness the irretrievable, heedless cultural losses in our own country over the last six decades. Only a few things are left of the simple artifacts that were in my grandparents’ house in Indiana. Apparently everything else was sold or thrown away. I wish I had the stereopticon viewer, the candy dish, or my grand-père’s worn French pocketknife. Somehow I did end up with his gold watch and its handsome inscription:

Presented
To
J. J. Surmont
By
Local 2134
U.M.W. of A.

I also have my mother’s pride and a small stake in France.

At the local Musée du Quercob in Puivert they show a video clip depicting a thirteenth-century troubadour entertainment in the local castle. People dance, joining hands and skipping; there is a great deal of shouting, plucking at lutes, pounding of tambours, and a highly animated fire juggler and fervent singers. All the while dour-looking Catholic administrators oversee tables laden with food and great jars of wine. It makes me wonder what else these people did with themselves. Troubadours are always depicted in a festive mode. Did they just sing songs and prance all the time in the castle? They were aristocrats, landowners, upper crust, I surmise. The real people, the rustics and workers, lived below the walls, around the lake and in the wooded valley. These were the artisans and laborers who built the castle: they raised food—grains, sheep, goats—and they fished the lake, supplying food to the nobles. Hunting was reserved for the aristocracy. If the area was assaulted, the serfs had the right to hustle up the hill to the castle, where they were let in through a small door in the wall.
     The castle is imposing on the hill, a cluster of square towers and stone walls visible from every angle in the valley. We never tire of looking at it, in sun or moonlight. We try to imagine what the area looked like in medieval times. The lake just outside of Puivert was larger and covered much of the valley. The fields were forests. The foothills probably looked much as they do now, except perhaps where pastures now go partway up into the rises. The silence must have been omnipresent, except for the occasional barking of dogs, the bleating of sheep, rooster cries, and the fussing of blackbirds—the sounds we hear today, along with the bread truck honking in the lane or the passage of an occasional vehicle. At night probably only scattered fires were visible, and perhaps some revelry from the castle or the distant howling of wolves could be heard.
     The French still don’t like to light up the darkness in their countryside. Windows are shuttered at night, and each hamlet and farm in our valley has but one street lamp, as if it were the signal fire. Occasionally car or truck lights move down one of the back roads, but the rural French, at least in Languedoc, still move outdoors at night by the light of the moon.
     Puivert itself is sparsely lighted by just a few streetlamps, unlike small towns in America. From our hilltop in Wisconsin, we can see the outskirts of Soldiers Grove in the distance, lit up with a cluster of yellow streetlights like a birthday cake. In the distance the horizon glows faintly over Readstown, Viroqua, Seneca, and Gays Mills.

The history and prehistory of Soldiers Grove and the unglaciated hills of southwestern Wisconsin are not as extended and involved as that of Puivert and Languedoc, and the record of events is much skimpier. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, this country was part of Nouvelle France, and there are traces of this heritage in the names of many of the towns—Prairie du Chien, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Fond du Lac. Before then tribes of Sank, Fox, Sioux, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Kickapoo, and other Native Americans roamed the area, hunting and fighting skirmishes with each other amongst the rises and valleys, but their triumphs and failures are unrecorded.
     The landscape is unglaciated because the North American glacier, in its inexorable slide south, divided and spread around this area, rejoining again in Iowa and Illinois. This country was left open to the elements, and the wear and tear of wind and rain formed our “driftless” terrain, the long valleys and ridges carved out of loess.
     The little town of Soldiers Grove, about four miles from our farm, is situated in a hollow beside the Kickapoo River, which has a long history of ruinous flooding. In 1978, after a major flood had destroyed much of the town, the business district was moved to higher ground east of the river. An embankment was created, and the old business section was made into a park. Because its buildings were designed to use solar energy, the new business area—a grocery, motel and restaurant, bar, filling station, hardware store, drugstore, and assorted other shops and services—was dubbed Solar Town, U.S.A. Grown a little shabby after more than twenty years of hard weather, it was the first such area in the country to utilize the energy of the sun.
     The citizens remain perky and devoted, although the living is not always easy. Small dairy farming is not a growth business these days, and the per capita income of Crawford County is one of the lowest in the state. Most of the fine old houses in town have grown shabby, and there are sections of trailer houses, installed probably before zoning could be re-established after the flood.
     The farms in the countryside are mostly well kept, but with the decline of the small dairy farm business, the area is beginning to be developed by realtors for recreation. Summerhouses and cabins are being built along the river and on some of the ridges. Our tidy two-bedroom house and garage (which we have refinished as a library) was built thirty years ago by a native Finn, Eino Paasikivi, who purchased parts of several seasoned farms to create an L-shaped property over the ridge and down the wooded hillsides. We have discovered that Paasikivi leveled, burned, and bulldozed an old farmhouse and outbuildings, leaving only square, sunken traces. We don't know why he did this; perhaps he wanted to obliterate antiquity, wanted clean Finnish isolation, and had no feeling for the old life that was lived here. We cherish his scheme for being alone, but wish he had left more of the past for us to regard.
     People from this area sometimes refer to themselves as living in the trees. It is a lilting countryside, wooded ridges rising out of the cultivated valleys. From the ridge tops the vistas are long—from ours we see down through woods to the Kickapoo River, its crookedness twisting through the meadows, taking miles to traverse a mile. The Kickapoo tribe was the early dominant tenant of the area, and the word kickapoo in the Algonquin language means something like “he goes here, he goes there.” The Kickapoo were a bellicose bunch, raiders of lands far from their villages; they hired themselves out for dirty work to the French, British, and Spanish. They were also hunters and capable farmers, raising corn, beans, and squash. They did not take well to European influences and kept their own customs. For some reason they pulled out of this area just before the Revolutionary War and headed south, leaving the land open for the hunting forays and skirmishes of other tribes.
     There are large, ancient mounds in the area, built by native Americans and formed in the shapes of animals. In Crawford County are the Kickapoo Indian Caverns, and there are other caves throughout southwestern Wisconsin, including some recently discovered ones along the banks of the Mississippi. The caves, marked with drawings of hunters and animals dating back eleven hundred years, were evidently important places of refuge for prehistoric Indians and animals.

In south central France are many caves full of magnificent paintings and markings by Paleolithic artists, giving more graphic hints of the prehistory of the area. Lascaux, discovered in 1940, is most famous, but other gallery caves have been located, including the masterful renderings of lions, bison, and bears in the Grottede Chauvet, first explored in 1994 and only recently documented.
     Near Puivert is the Grotte de Niaux, one of the few caves open to the public. It is a chill spring day when we nervously enter, mincing our way on the damp, slippery floor as our lamp beams sway. The cave has been explored by spelunkers for centuries. The spectacular stalactites and stalagmites in the entry chambers have been broken off as souvenirs, and we see only their stumps. But the first large chamber is immense and less violated, the ceiling so high the beams of our lanterns barely reach it. Our silence is reverential.
     Further in we begin to see graffiti, some in fancy French script dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. We duck through several small passageways and begin a descent through a long open area into the salon noir. Here the guide stops and asks us to switch off our lanterns and gather where she stands with her light. We bump into each other and chuckle as we grope toward her. She is speaking in French as she turns the spot of her light on a painting of a bison. There are sighs and soft exclamations—then profound silence as she plays her light over the painting and others surrounding it.
     The skill of the drawings—made eleven thousand years ago—is immediately evident. The artists worked with unfaltering confidence. Like all great art it suggests as much as it shows. There are no pictures of human figures in any of the caves, only masterful images of animals. The guide shows us horses, stags, ibises, and more bison, some overlapping, some with arrows or barbs in their sides. I am struck by the vitality, the accuracy, of the drawings, the use of perspective and shading techniques thought to be developed only in the last few centuries.
     These are not decorative sketches. The art is life. The eyes of the animals seem to see. There are no bad or indifferent drawings. All of them are accomplished and necessary. My own artistic abilities are primitive, so I could not chink of making sketches one one-hundredth as meaningful and good. The animals bound and turn, one crossing another with marvelous energy. The paintings are a tribute to the animals—the fear of them and need for them. The artists were brave, practiced creators, feeling compelled to enter deep into the disquieting darkness of the earth and crawl into uncomfortable corners in order to record respect and reverence for the lives and deaths of these creature that were so necessary to their existence.
     Possibly the artists realized that in these drawings, as in the carving or the stone in our house in Puivert, they were leaving something that would endure beyond their lives. Dream animals in a dark place. They must have observed the bodies of humans and animals deteriorating to nothing after death; would the pictures make the spirits of animals abide so that they would continue to feed their people? The guide shows us that they even did preliminary drafting before making their compelling final versions. Eleven thousand years ago! The artistry and care are staggering.
     There are marks in other sections of the cave—dots, notches, lines in red and black, all precisely drawn. No one knows their meaning. Are they directions, accounts, numberings, timekeeping, records of reoccurrence, astronomical notes? Obviously they bear great significance, perhaps to things outside the cave-stars or seasons, accounts of animal kills, lives lost, years lived, events beyond our comprehension.
     Entering the cave I felt claustrophobic—yet in the very large chambers, there is an assuasive sense of openness, as if one is under a shrouded night sky. What must it have been like when the stalagmites were still intact, the first explorers picking their way through them into the abyss with a palm torch? They had no words for courage and dedication, but in our distant admiration and wonder, we can name them.
     We see only a small portion of the art at Niaux. We are told there is much more, in deeper chambers, some of it in almost inaccessible places. The drawings we see on the moist, peach-colored cave walls seem rendered on living skin—the uterus of the earth, the womb from which all things are born.
     These illustrated caves, clustered into northern Spain, are unique to this area. Languedoc has always been a remote, maverick part of France, especially this deep southern part. Far away from courts and kings, it is rarely mentioned in history books. Yet from what we can determine in our faltering translations and reading of meager texts in English, beyond the agricultural and market life, its simple, human history seems sad and deeply involved to us.
     Ruins of Cathar castles on the remotest, most inaccessible crags and peaks in the area are astonishing to behold. These strange, ascetic people must have been part mountain goat. Obviously they had a great deal to fear, building in such precarious places. Marauding crusaders, who were promised indulgences and booty by the Pope, swept down from Lyon and relentlessly assaulted their high strongholds. In true Languedocien dissident tradition, the Cathars frequently were supported by local Catholics, and the conflict often came down to southern resistance of northern influence. But the crusaders pressed on. These pious thugs were very complete in their slaughter and destruction. They mutilated and burned the Cathar priests, called Perfects, and butchered any lay believers who refused to renounce the faith. When the dirty work was completed, an inquisition was formed by the Catholic church to investigate and persecute the survivors. Almost nothing remains of the beliefs and customs of the Cathars, at one time a thriving, preeminent group in Languedoc.
     The south central French countryside is also full of stark reminders of the hard Catholicism of earlier residents. Along the roadsides are antique shrines and statues of the crucified Christ, nailed up naked and sallow to remind wayfarers of the one true faith.

The early residents of Crawford County, Wisconsin, do not have such a dramatic legacy of zealous hatred, suspicion, and persecution, unless you figure they drove the Indian tribes out of the area to make it safe for Christianity. I am not aware of a synagogue or a mosque anywhere in the area. The pretty church steeples scattered through the countryside mark various and dwindling Protestant—Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Lutheran—and Catholic congregations. The local newspapers are full of news about church suppers and festivities. The activities seem benign and apathetic.
     As in southern Languedoc, the ethnic blend in our Wisconsin county is bland. I occasionally see one black man living in each area; both—the American and the Frenchman—are lonely joggers. When I pass them on the road, they never look up. There are a few Asians maintaining restaurants, and we note some Vietnamese refugees in both places.
     Crawford County is beautiful. Created in 1818, it stretches north and east over five hundred square miles from the county seat at Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi. Soldiers Grove was settled in the 1850s after the “war in the forest” cooled down and the Indians had been harassed to lands beyond the Mississippi. Initially called Pine Grove for the white pines prevalent in those days, the name was changed to Soldiers Grove in 1867 to honor some soldiers who camped in the area during the Black Hawk War—one of our nation’s most shameful episodes of genocide—which swept through the area in 1832. Black Hawk, the great, eloquent Sauk leader, his tribe decimated by wars with the Sioux and difficulties with aggressive white settlers, brought his tribe across the Mississippi from Minnesota into Illinois, where he hoped to receive support from other tribes in a resettlement of the area. He did not receive this backup and found himself stranded with his people—strangers in an unfriendly place. Black Hawk sent emissaries to the whites to parley his situation, but the soldiers attacked his envoys, killing and scalping one of them.
     Appalled by this outrage, Black Hawk had little choice—he attacked a superior white force, causing serious casualties, then began a hasty retreat toward Minnesota through southwestern Wisconsin. His band was pursued by a large force of regulars and volunteers led by General Henry Atkinson, and during the retreat, the Indians came across the land where our farm is situated four miles outside of Soldiers Grove. It must have been a hard, terrified scramble for the little band, reduced now mostly to women and children and a handful of braves, over these wooded ridges as they pressed on toward the Mississippi. Finally they were trapped at the confluence of the Bad Axe and Mississippi rivers, where they attempted unsuccessfully to parley again. A gunboat came up river from Prairie du Chien, and Black Hawk’s people were driven into the water, where sharpshooters picked them off like a flock of ducks. The butchery went on for hours.
     Clearly General Atkinson was not entirely in control of the situation in that bloodletting, and things got away from him. Yet I doubt that he felt any more shame or compassion than did the young troopers who were plugging away at the Sauks struggling in the currents. Racial hatred had boiled over, pity was absent, and the slaughter became blood lust. The Sauks who made it across the water were killed by their adversaries the Sioux, who had been alerted by the whites. Of the 1,200 Sauks who began the retreat, only 150 survived. The rabble troops were as complete in their genocide of the Sank as the crusaders in southern France were in decimating the Cathars. In both of our peaceful, beguiling home landscapes are historic sites of murderous immolation—what we refer to these days as ethnic cleansing.

We note on marble monuments in the squares of the Languedocien villages that our area contributed many young lives to the carnage of the First World War. I imagine the same was true of all the other wars fought by France since the heretical Cathars were neutralized by righteous crusaders eight centuries ago. Remote agricultural areas have always been a source of bodies in times of war.
     The Hundred Years War, the brutal Thirty Years War, the War of the Austrian Succession, Frederick the Great’s Seven Year War, the bloody Revolution, then Napoleon campaigning ruthlessly into the nineteenth century. He lost 50,000 men on one day in October 1813, fighting at Leipzig, and abandoned 200,000 to their fates. A month later he asked for the conscription of 300,000 more men, then lost 60,000 of these at Waterloo. Even after Bonaparte it went on and on. My grand-père was running away from being conscripted into the Franco-Prussian War when he escaped to America in 1870 and ended up in Indiana.
     The history of the area around Puivert during the Second World War is murky. There are scattered tales of the heroic resistance of the Maquis of Picaussel, French guerilla fighters who fought from hiding places in the high forests of the Plateau du Sault just south of Puivert. Supplied by allied airdrops, they gave the Nazis fits, holding up convoys and detaining large troop movements as the time for the invasion approached. When members of the Maquis were captured, they paid mortally and publicly. The Germans burned one nearby village to the ground, gunning down citizens in retribution for the activity of the guerillas.
     Strolling near Puivert one Sunday morning, we heard voices from a loudspeaker in the square. As we approached, an old man was playing a wobbly military tattoo on an ancient heralding instrument. A small, somber group of citizens in their mid-seventies and older had gathered, and several men took turns hobbling to the microphone to testify. Two bent, hoary men stood proudly holding tricolor flags propped from their belts. We understood little, but could make out words like marquis, courageux, assaut, dangereux, mort. It was a dignified, resolute gathering of men and women with just a scattering of younger people, obviously children and grandchildren of the freedom fighters. It was a fair, late Sunday morning, but shutters were still pulled on the houses that stood facing the square.
     They noticed us as we stood off from their group. When they concluded their ceremony, they put on a scratchy recording of an old band pumping out “The Marseillaise” and sang vigorously as we mouthed the words with them. Then they bowed their heads for a moment of silence. Suzanne wept, and I struggled to maintain my composure. When it was over some men put the loudspeaker into a truck, and all of them shuffled into the Mairie, where champagne was being poured. They brought their glasses out into the sunlight, made toasts, and talked quietly. Several of them, people we had met in the village, beckoned to us to join them, but we shyly declined.

In Soldiers Grove a military ambience is still promoted by some of the citizens. It is not forgotten that much of the land was originally owned by veterans of the War of 1812, who were given property instead of money for their service. Like the agricultural areas of France, this rural area has always been a fruitful source for recruiting in wartime. Farm boys are credulous and serviceable. There is evidence of this in the two war memorials in the city park and in the tank parked in the yard of the American Legion Building across the road from Solar Town, its cannon pointing at the local motel.
     Several years ago members of the Legion promoted a celebration called Medal of Honor Day. Beauford T. Anderson, a Second World War Medal honoree hails from Soldiers Grove, and there is a Medal of Honor Memorial Wall in the park. A committee was formed, and all living Medal winners were invited to a celebration. Every convertible in the area was commandeered for the parade, and each recipient had a chariot to ride in. The high-school bands paraded, honking patriotic marches, followed by some Second World War GIs in one rank, bearing a flag and grinding along arthritically like the First World War vets in Memorial Day parades when I was a kid. The Korean War vets were in only slightly better trim, while the Gulf War participants marched perfectly in step, wearing snappy boots with yellow laces. At the end-at a distance from the others-strolling together casually in T-shirts and jeans, came the Vietnam vets. The black man we see jogging on the roads was amongst them, bearing an American flag. They were smiling and waving to people, fully aware of the symbol they were presenting. The crowd grew silent as they passed, not quite knowing how to react after the passage of so much honor and glory. Suzanne was weeping again, and I was swallowing hard.

A young American woman and her French husband have moved into a little house in Campsaure, the hameau just down the road from ours. Recently married, in their twenties, she is a talented painter, and he builds fine chairs, couches, and ottomans. We sometimes see them on our walks and have exchanged visits with them. I admire and envy their youth and intensity, the dewiness of their vision, the verve with which they regard things.
     The first time we visited France, I was in my late thirties and had more snap in my step. We came over to Paris for a week after a business trip to London, bringing the kids with us, driving into the countryside to visit Chartres. I was enchanted, recalling my heritage. I had done a lot of French dreaming, reading Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Gide, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Camus, gazing at books of photographs and volumes of Impressionist paintings. I kept seeing people on the streets who looked like my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and my mother. After the long, exhausting days of touring, when we finally had the kids in bed, I wrote in a journal by lamplight in our hotel room.
     I found that old journal and read it the other day. It is full of the sights, tastes, sounds, smells, and textures of the places we visited. There are verve and dewiness in the vision. I don’t know who that writer was. All the cells in my body have changed a number of times since then. These words may not embody that kind of freshness and excitement—at my age I am more restrained, but I am well organized. I miss the old fervor, but I am fortunate now to have more time to relish and reflect on experiences and preserve some of the past. I have learned to be selective. At times I wish I were thirty years younger so that I could put it all down with that old sense of wonder. But I am here now with still enough energy, joy, and the modest means to go on experiencing these landscapes and savoring the memories. After forty years of working in offices, it is a luxury. It is a French dream. It is an American dream.
     Who are we in France? Property owners, American barbarians, happy observers. I am a grandson of France, a lost Frenchman twice removed. If my grandfather had stayed in France and survived conscription, I would not have existed. Except—what if he had met my grandmother waiting on tables in Lille instead of Sunnyside, Utah? Supposing their seven children had been born in France? But then my mother would not have met my father, so I still would not have been me—but half of me, perhaps, a product of a different union. I would be a Frenchman, retired now, playing boules in the park, and sitting on a bench under the sycamores chatting with other old men. What would I have been? A school teacher? Merchant? Priest? A miner like my grandfather and uncles? Would I have been a poet? Would I have beautiful children like Erik and Justine, a wife as dear as Suzanne?
     Instead I am a stranger in France, a delighted spectator, gratefully learning to abide. I am not a Frenchman, but we have a French home. We savor the trees and hills around Puivert, the glorious fields and woods where animals and birds reside, the village itself. Painters refer to the human figures they add as a last touch to their landscapes as staffage—and so Suzanne and I are staffage in our beloved French and American homes. The first few times we went to Puivert, early in our visits, I felt lonely and alienated, especially as darkness was coming on in the evenings and we were preparing for bed. Mornings were better than the sad twilight feeling. I did not feel at home in France then, as I do now.
     Who am I in Wisconsin? In Soldiers Grove we are curiosities. Our neighbors are polite but don’t know what to make of us—this aging couple who came to the area only a few years ago, living on a ridge top with a garage full of books, playing strange music, roaming the fields and woods in all weather, spending hours and hours scribbling at desks, reading ponderous Eastern newspapers, and abandoning our place for months at a time to wander in Europe. When we speak to our neighbors, our talk is of weather or crops, perhaps spiced with some local gossip. The conversations are brief, and sometimes we go for weeks without speaking to anyone. Is this home?
     But what is “home?” Perhaps it is the light warmth coming off the skin, perhaps the pale light that the body gives off. Perhaps nature is our home now—trees, sky, pastures, valleys, and hills—French and American. Can we be at home in places where we have not lived the customs, places we can’t remember before they existed in our minds, where we do not know how to speak to neighbors?
     We moved frequently in our lives to opportunities, abandoning homes, leaving friends behind, and this is what we have come to—an ancient house in Puivert, France, where we cannot speak the language, and a tidy farm at the end of a two-mile dirt road near Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, where we live amongst work and traditions not our own. So we will conclude our lives as strangers—strangers in friendly places. Does age make outsiders of all of us? Do we all inevitably become strangers in the end?
     I walk the gravel road from our house near Soldiers Grove to my writing shack just around the bend and up the hill. The valley is full of morning fog, glowing like a ghostly lake; I watch the mist break and slip up the hillside, snagging through the trees. A grouse drums on the next ridge, and bobolinks swing around me, bubbling and pinging to draw my attention away from their nests in the grass. In the meadow at the bottom of the ridge, at the edge of the woods, three deer watch me as they chew their cuds. They wait until I am almost to the shack before bounding away into the trees, their white tails wagging through the underbrush.
     I stand on the third-floor terrace in Puivert at dawn and watch a glorious wash of mist over the slopes, picking up the rising sunlight from the east- subtle pinks and blues, a pastel chrome brightness hovering around the staunch silhouette of the foothills. It fades quickly, and the change is rapid. The light becomes more defined, less lyrical, mostly silver and gray and light cream as the morning begins. Wagtails scramble on the red roof tiles across the lane. The rooster in the garden behind the house gives us his full rooster repertoire—caw and variations—then grows silent In the distance a dog barks at a rabbit in the bush. We finish our tea, put on our jackets, and walk out to become staffage in these morning hues.

Paul Zimmer was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1934. Over almost half a century, he worked in the book business as a bookstore manager then as director/editor of three university presses. He has enjoyed retirement since 1998, living with his wife, Suzanne, plus dogs and cats, on 117 acres in southwestern Wisconsin. Nine of his books of poetry have been published and two books of memoir/essays. He has received six Pushcart Prizes for his work, an Award for Literary Achievement from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, and two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He still shovels his own snow, splits his own firewood, mows his own lawn, and works at his writing every day.

“Strangers in Friendly Places” appears in our Spring 2001 issue.