The Wild South
The wind shakes the white manes of the horses, and sends ripples across the flooded fields of rice. Twelve miles away in the city of Arles, the parasols of pavement cafés become unruly. This is the mistral, against which Vincent Van Gogh once had to peg his easel into the ground. At least, from a painter’s point of view, it scatters the clouds from those vivid southern skies.
France is a country I like to think I’m familiar with, which is why it’s a welcome shock to arrive in the Camargue – a place of open horizons, where the boundaries between land and water change from one season to the next. Five hundred miles after the Rhône springs from Alpine glaciers, after it has passed Geneva, Lyon, a broken bridge at Avignon and several respected vineyards, the exhausted river branches out for the final stretch before the Mediterranean. It’s this broad valley that the mistral barrels down, on more than 100 days a year. In the delta lands of the Rhône, people have long planted east-west rows of canne de Provence, a kind of giant reed, to act as
