Today I went for a walk. A six hour-long walk, through La Cellette, down to Genouillac (yes, Genouillac is the name!), then east above the Petite Creuse river to the Abbaye de Prebenoit, and then back up.
Through the six hours, I met a few cars, a bunch of deers, some birds, and a man leaning on his window sill, old rock French music pouring out onto the deserted-Sunday Genouillac. I saw some abandoned farms, some farms converted into summer houses, and farms and barns repaired with pieces of cardboard and plastic, plastic tarps and tires and crap scattered all over outside.
It was a bit sad. I don't think I have walked through the most lively part of the Creuse. True, as Peter says, the fields are very well-kept, and no trash is to be found on the sides of the roads, contrary to what I have seen in Brittany, and unlike what one sees in UK says Peter (UK versus France according to Peter is another topic which I should eventually get into). But all in all, this was not a very uplifting atmosphere, and the overcast sky probably did not help. So at the end I was quite happy to come back home to my cheerful hosts and their (somewhat) warm kitchen.
But the walk was interesting nevertheless. At some point I thought that it felt as if I had traveled back in time. For a moment I thought that I could get an idea of what it must have felt like, before the last century, to walk in the countryside, with nothing around you but silence, fields, some cows and animals sometimes, and a small farm once in a while. None of the noise and stink of the machinery of today.
But it seemed that I also got the feeling of what it would have been like to live in such a place without any real possibility of getting out of it - neither physically, nor mentally. With no trains, no car, no movies, no internet, no telephone. So I thought about my mother and of how she had wanted to escape the agricultural life of her parents as hell. I had been thinking that it's perhaps more the unhappiness of her household that she had wanted to escape, rather than the actual farm work and life. Walking in this deserted and unhappy part of the Creuse, suddenly I felt like I could perhaps better understand her and the millions of people who like her had escaped rural life for the supposedly better life and jobs of the city. I wondered, is it really the hardness of the life and work, rather than this impossibility of meeting new people and ideas, that people had run away from?
