The house on the land adjacent stood empty for a number of years, since about the time that the previous caretaker had been found hanging from the rafters there. We sometimes used its driveway to access the trail that paralleled the stream running along the foot of my wife’s property. During one such walk, we noted a bit of activity there, some basic clean-up, then nothing again for years. Until the Parisian appeared.
He came down three or four years ago. His project had started off modestly at first, resuscitating the vines, midwifing a modest little vineyard whose wines had soon gone on to win awards. Thus, like most city people living part time on the land, his designs quickly moved beyond squiring a simple country life in harmony with the land, toward schemes involving how to maximize his investment, how to manipulate and squeeze out profit from it.
He’d already insulted Lai Yong by asking her to sell off some of her land, mentioning that as it wasn’t worth much, he wouldn’t pay much. Where he saw wasteland and scrub, she saw a healthy natural environment. Of course she refused. But he since began actively felling trees along the other end of the vineyard. The wood stood stacked out front, accompanied by a “For Sale” sign. But the locals have their own wood. So the stacked logs took on the form of a fence that lines the top of his property. A tidy row now, quite attractive in fact, but it won’t be long before rot sets in, and parts begin to topple into the road. But never mind that now, there’s land to be cleared.
It here is where the Parisian and I intersect. Through most of the Covid times, I’d remained in Kyoto, spending nearly every night there, bar a handful. As the pandemic dragged on, I grew more and more fed up with being in the city, more and more fed up with its near constant noise. Nights were generally quiet, but without fail, the newspaper delivery bike would wake me at 4:30. Sometimes I’d drop back off, but most times not. In the afternoons, someone in the neighborhood would begin banging on something, a rousing aural representation of the Japanese inability to sit still. How I had looked forward to being where I am at this very moment, looking out over the peaceful mountains and the valleys, the hint of green through the trees that are the fruit of the wines to come. Instead I get noise.
The Polish workers start early in order to beat the heat. The rumbling of machines rises with the sun, punctuated by the odd chainsaw, like a frenetic woodpecker working his way through the trees. There too is the occasional faint whiff of a worker's tobacco smoke on the mistral. The first week it had been the bulldozer planing the earth to plant new rows of vine trellises. But the trees continued to fall elsewhere, followed by the arrival of larger machines to remove large rocks and debris, then the return of the bulldozer to follow with the tidying up. And the grinding carries on, a hurried frenzy to finish by autumn, to get next year’s grapes into the ground before the frosts.
Their work has severed a section of borrowed scenery, a dirt appendage now standing where an unbroken flow of trees had once been. Hopefully when the vines are eventually planted, the green will return, leaving us afloat on a sea of grapes. It will be attractive and quiet then to be sure, but where will the Parisian’s ambition take him next? Based on how the climate is going, drought seems inevitable at some point, and if his investment in the grapes fails for a year or two, will he pull up roots and abandon that to which he never grew connected, beyond its monetization?
Then, I guess, the land left alone will make decisions all its own, as is its wont. And the locals will laugh at this silly city fou, and shake their heads and turn their backs to the plow, as they have always done here.
Addendum, late August 2023: Operations at the winery have been suspended due to the illegal felling of trees mentioned above. To the locals, an even greater sin was the "debarking" of the world -renowned cork trees, from which can be developed the eponymous product.
On the turntable: Phish, Baker's Dozen"
