Fragile Paradise
Coordinates: 44.74662° N, 4.39969° E. This is a landscape of bulbous hills and knolls, topped with the green smudge of forest. The grass is a thirsty yellow, dry as straw. Nearby, a row of evergreens shimmers its sequin leaves. Here and there, distant telegraph poles protrude from the ground, tiny as matchsticks. A single road spirals the hills.
Ardèche mountains, 2024
There is the pip-pip of a bird. Butterflies sail to the ground, and clap their wings. Several carpenter bees enter the flowers, and emerge in fluffed cloaks of pollen. I see less bees this year, and only one hummingbird hawk moth. The hummingbird moth can move its wings up to 70 times per second. It is a vibrating smudge – hooked to the flower by its proboscis, a long nectar-sucking nozzle.
Life abounds. We are sharing the house with several pygmy shrews; they patter around the rooms’ peripheries, their long noses twitching. One night, a cloud of flying ants enters the house. They die quick, writhing deaths – and lie in small, crusty heaps. Meanwhile, ants have cut a hole in the abdomen of a weak three-legged cricket, leading my younger son to nominate himself as cricket-protector, with ant-squashing leaf to hand. Nature is beautiful and miraculous and unscrupulous and grotesque. In the city, it can be easy to forget that the earth is teeming with miniature life.
Outside, lambs bleat confidently, ‘Air, Airrrrrrr.’ Each sheep carries a large metal bell around its neck. I wonder what it’s like to be accompanied by perpetual clunking, with metal on metal as the soundtrack to your life. In the middle of the night I wake to the sound of those bells, and the baritone moan of a ram. An owl calls out eerily in response. The darkness is absolute. This time we are here for the Perseid meteor shower, and we stay up late, watching as stars paint the sky with quick, gold streaks.
We see no snakes this year but there is a frail snakeskin wedged into the garden wall. Recently shed by its inhabitant, one end of the skin bears the shape of a menacing open jaw, frozen in time. And, for the first time, we see a wild boar, wobbling its enormous behind up into the hills. There are swallows nesting in the roof; one evening, they treat us to a beautiful, looping dance. Far above, the silhouettes of hawks are circling in the thermals. Below, the air pulses with the rhythmic creak of crickets.
Our neighbours tell us that there were no crickets here some years ago, and no mosquitoes either. It’s so much hotter here now, and these insects are moving north. Meanwhile, there is no snow in winter here anymore. It seems ironic that the authorities recently installed road signs to enforce snow chains (under the ‘Loi Montagne’, the ‘Mountain Law’).
When we last came here, in 2022, large swathes of Europe were on fire. The images were apocalyptic – fire fighters silhouetted against roaring orange backdrops. That year, a huge storm came to the Ardèche. Lightning flicked across the land, and the thunder boomed from hill to hill. In the middle of the night, the storm woke us, and we sat in silence at the window – two black figures against strobe lights, as blinding as a siren.
I was a frightened child, and a storm invokes a child’s fear in me. That night it was impossible not to think of forest fires. There is forest all around us and only one mountain road out. My imagination turned the weak flickering lights of local farmhouses into the first embers of a fire. What would we do if this land caught fire? Plunge our children into the swimming pool? It would take nothing for a fire to start here on a hot, dry day – a dropped cigarette perhaps, or a wandering pyromaniac, or just a lightning strike. This summer, when we’re driving, a man flings a cigarette butt from the window of the car in front, leaving it to burn out on a dry mountain road.
The planet is warming at an alarming rate, and every inch is affected.
City lights, Paris, 2022
Last time, we stopped in Paris. Just a moment in a big city illuminates all that’s going wrong. Merchandise madness. Selfie sticks. People posing. Hair is combed with fingers, hands are placed on hips, eyes are widened, and lips stick out towards the camera. There are those who snap but do not see – every experience dulled by a lens; each moment shaped by the weight of anticipation, of validation.
From the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris is a toy town, strung with fairy lights. Far below, the street brims with cars and people. Lights from distant apartment blocks dot the horizon, boats glitter down the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe glows white, and tiny footballers kick a ball under miniature floodlights. At the summit, an American tourist gets down on one knee and proposes to his girlfriend, in a strange convergence of public and private.
Back at ground level, stall sellers flaunt their wares. Every stall seems to sell the same things: small metal Eiffel Towers or laser pointers, the latter seemingly used to torment those who ascend the tower. Our children stop at the first stall and plead to us with their eyes. At the seller’s feet is a woven rug populated with miniature Eiffel Towers – in gold, in silver, in every colour of the rainbow, and all flashing at the press of a button. We leave with two flashing Eiffel Towers and no laser pointers, and that feels like a small victory.
The next day our children befriend two other children on the Eurostar. Four little boys are united by the small Eiffel Towers that dangle from their arms.
I return home holding tightly to the weeks that have just gone. I will conjure up the stars of the Ardèche, the flitting of the dragonflies and moths, and the melodious tinkle of sheep bells. I vow to keep them close, and I vow to do better. Every little paradise feels so fragile now, and it hangs in the balance. Our day-to-day life, our city life, needs not to forget that.
(When I was writing this, a little shrew appeared from behind my computer screen. It spent the next half hour exploring a Monopoly set that was laid out on the table. It felt symbolic: a tiny thing of quivering beauty, tiptoeing silently over a harsh, capitalist world. ‘Don’t forget us’, it seemed to say.)
