In 2003 I decided to take a trip to France. I planned it all out and rented a Gite in the Southwest of France, a region called The Perigord. The Perigord is famous for it’s truffles, wines, and fois gras. About a week before I left I was chatting with my friend Kath and told her about the trip. She piped up and asked if she could go. Who was I to refuse, after all I was going alone and there was more than enough room in the cottage I rented so I said why not? So she booked and would arrive about two days after I got there.
We had a great trip but the subject of this particular post is the day we spent in Peregeaux and Sorges. The cottage was a self-catering affair and we would typically buy food at a local market and settle in in the evenings and plan out the next day. This I liked this very much because we were not on a schedule like you would be on a properly planned out tour. We got along very well as traveling companions as we both subscribed to the philosophy of spontaneous fun. For example, we would be off driving on our daily excursion to or from the planed destination and go past a road that looked interesting and say, “Hey, let’s go see what’s down that way”, and off we’d go.
This day we decided to go to the Museum of the Mousterian in Peregeaux and the random and largely obscure Truffle Museum in a hamlet called Sourges. Kath dug that one up out of a travel book. The Truffle Museum ranks up there with The Cumberland Pencil Museum in the UK. We had a map and a rough idea of where to drive, but once we got to Peregeaux, we had no idea where the museum was and neither of us read French very well. It was my turn to drive and we had a Seat, which is a Spanish made car that looked a lot like something you would see a lot of clowns pouring out of in a circus tent. So there we were in Peregeaux which is roughly the size of Los Angeles. Not really, I exaggerate, it’s about like Austin, TX but without the music and bridge of bats. So we’re driving around aimlessly and decide to stop and get something to eat. Here I just want to say that if you find yourself in France and are hungry, you are in luck. We never had a bad meal anywhere no matter how ghetto (well, there were no ghetto diners in France) the place looked. The French know food.
As fate would have it, we parked on the street in an area that looked like a town square with something interesting at the center. Lo and behold it was the museum.
Mousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools (or industry) associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age. The culture was named after the type site of Le Moustier, a rock shelter in the Dordogne region of France. Similar flintwork has been found all over unglaciated Europe and also the Near East and North Africa. Handaxes, racloirs and points constitute the industry; sometimes a Levallois technique or another prepared-core technique was employed in making the flint flakes. I read the entire Clan of the Cave Bear series and am a huge fan and that was what inspired me to visit this region of France. The Neanderthals never changed their technology and is a theory as to why they crapped out.
Then we were on to Sourges and to learn more than we could ever want to know about truffles.
We had no trouble finding the truffle museum as the town is very small, and there was a huge plastic black truffle sticking out of the side of the building, (see Picture). Luckily all the information about truffles was in French, English and German. After the tour through the museum, there was a footpath out back where you could stroll through a truffle “orchard”. Truffles grow on the roots of oak trees. They look rather like turds, especially the black ones, but they sell for hundreds of dollars in the markets. I don’t know why. They used to use pigs to dig them up but the pigs were too smart and would eat the truffles after they dug them up. So they started using dogs who are much more respectful and won’t eat the fungus unless told to do so. We stopped at a stand on the side of the road at one point to buy fois gras from a local farm. It was attended by a young girl who spoke English and told us that they used flies to find truffles. We thought her English must not be that good because she thought dogs were flies. After all, how could a fly dig up a truffle? But she clarified it by saying a certain type of fly will light on the ground under an oak that had truffles growing on it. Then they would set the dogs to work.
After the stroll we decided to head back. We drove out of town and I passed the turn where were would head back to Le Quatre Route, the town where our amazing Gite was. So, I go to make a U-Turn and mis-calculated the depth of the ditch on the other side of the road. There was tall grass growing in the ditch and it was very deceiving so to this day I say it was not my faux-pas. So gentle reader, you know what happened next. We ended up in the ditch. The car did not capsize but merely lay at a helpless angle. Kath got out to asses whether we could push the little car out ourselves or would we require assistance from the locals. I was afraid to get out as I think my weight was keeping the car from tumping over entirely.
The driver side rear tire was off the ground completely and so she decided to sit on the car and try and weigh it down. Kath is a robust woman but not robust enough. People starting coming around and since the situation pretty much spoke for itself we did not really need the universal translator, aka, English-French dictionary. I asked in my best French if someone could call the police, maybe they could help and arrest me for careless driving. No one spoke English and the best I could make out was that since it was after 5pm on Friday, the police were closed for the weekend. Wow. I don’t feel I need to even comment on that. Everyone that came by in or on a wheeled vehicle were either on a scooter, bicycle, or an even tinier car than we had. I was appalled. I mean, this is a farming community, didn’t anyone have a dad-burn tractor? Where I come from if you have a farm and no tractor you are in the hurt locker.
Finally a lady in a car stopped and Kath went over to her. She was filthy, had been picking walnuts all day and walnuts leave a black residue similar to when you’re picking tobacco. Don’t ask how I know this, maybe I’ll write a memoir of when I briefly worked in a tobacco field as a child. Kath came back and reported that either the lady was going to let her use her phone, or she was going to take her to where there was a phone, or take her to a garage with a tow truck. Any of the options were better than where we were now.
So Kath left with the Walnut Lady. I sat there and had all kinds of visitors. It was Friday evening in a very small town, so the stupid fat American lady was as good of entertainment as any. After a bit, a large flat bed tow truck comes around the bend. I have no idea how Kath told him where to find me. Perhaps Walnuts told him. Either way, he way on the job. His name was Andre and he was cute. Did not speak English at all. He hooked the car up to a chain and pulled it out of the ditch and started loading it up on the truck. We tried to stop him but he told us as best he could that it was a requirement that the car get looked over for any damage. Who knows if that was true but who were we to argue. He had possession of the controls and therefore we really had no choice. Plus, this was getting fun. We got up front with him, me in the middle and Kath shotgun. We’re driving along in silence and finally I chimed up and said in French, “We’re Americans. On vacation!” He just nodded and sort of chuckled as if he were in the states he would have been thinking, “Yeah, y’alls stupid”.
He drove us to a garage where a little man with baked bean colored teeth was working as a mechanic. He was listing to Bono and Frank Sinatra and had a Yorkie dog names Attila. He put the car up on the hydraulic lift and about a metric ton of gravel and dirt came out the skid guard. After he got through examining the car he brought it back down and started in on some paperwork. Finally I took a big breath and asked in French how much? He repeats, “Ah, combien, combien…”. Then he shows me the ticket and he had written down $180 in American dollars. WTF? Oh well, nothing we could do in a situation like this but pay it and luckily he took Amex.
After that he told us to pay attention to our driving. Then we were free to go. Kath fired me as driver.
