Transhumance en

The time had come to leave. For some time now, the mountains had been holding back the
clouds which were packed tightly around the valleys and the cold, which had come to stay,
besieged the crests awaiting the snow. We had taken the road one morning, leaving the
spinning mill of Chantemerle for a transhumance which would last three weeks towards
Provence. There were ten of us, a herd of six hundred sheep and two donkeys.
First impressions.
There is silence in the forests, put into disorder by the tintinnabulation of the bells and the
stamping of six hundred animals, the paths on the flanks of the mountain assaulted by the
moving mass of wool and the small inroads blocked by the advancing terror of empty
stomachs. An incessant ballet of random automobiles are taken hostage by the crying and
bleating tide, pushed out onto to the edges of country roads but also densely travelled
ones. In the villages dogs suddenly begin to bark, villagers come out of their houses or
merely observe from their windows above while groups of attentive children crowd behind
the gates of the schools; once gone, the only memory left behind are the empty flower pots
which limp exhausted, abandoned on the road like corpses after a lightening siege.
Against the direction of the world
A countdown in time and space
By walking two hundred kilometres we experience distance. These are no longer
landscapes—like images that succeed one another, in rhythm, from behind the windows of
the high-speed trains and air-conditioned cars—spaces are formed by the paths that cross
them, the particular texture of the earth and stones that inhabit it, the types of vegetation
and the colours at different times of day and night. You experience changes in climate,
raw and uncertain. You take the time to re-discover the particular taste of fruits, fallen on
the ground or plucked from a tree. On the rhythm of the march, all vastness is re-
dimensioned by simply moving towards it, in a primordial way, rendering it human, far
from the kilometric flux of the machinelike megalopolis.
Inhabited earth
Sometimes the elderly come out on their patio and tell about their times, sometimes people
we meet accompany us for a leg of the journey, curious, while others scold us thoroughly
with their thick voices, gesticulating wildly with their hands. In the evening, as we stop to
camp around a bonfire, we are met by people most of whom we have met during previous
transhumances. We share a conversation, a meal and the strangeness of an evening-long
encounter. Each house has its own mood and colour, its sonority, its occupation
(shepherds, teachers, farmers, post office workers, taxi drivers…), and its own culinary
specialties (stew, goat cheese tarts, couscous, Italian dishes…). Spaces, places of
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anonymous passing-by suddenly become territories, places where they are tied to a
fundamental unity between life, the inhabited earth and a predisposition to meet.
Ten of us live a type of exile on a new land.
There is a spirit that unites us, a common step leading us to discover the places which we
cross through a common reality, through a unified movement. Of course, the atmosphere
varies, but clouds come on a regular basis. But nothing takes away this moment of a
common life, nomadic, at a time where the depression of individual isolation slowly
prepares the iron trap of dense cities.
A counter current in the face of a tide.
A counter current that does not erase the bright light of Ikea in the depths of the valleys,
the relay antennas perched on the mountaintops, or the outdoor enthusiasts on their four-
wheel bikes on the paths of the forest.
A counter current that does not evade the standard tourist model and the village sight-
seers, armed with their numeric camera lenses—a part of the modern body—in which the
transhumance becomes folklore, a cliché to be consumed, at the same level as the panel of
the “typical” images presented by the leisure industry, between the escape of the mountain
and the exoticism of the country farm.
A counter current that does also does not erase the instinct of doggedly defending the
borders as set forth by the private property of peasants. Nor the efficient flow of traffic.
For a time, we slow down the flow of transports in which exaggerated crises of hysteria—
a symptom of being late for something—, we also allow ourselves to give bring joy to the
hygienic paranoia of cities, leaving behind us a road that is dotted with animal excrements.
But the world, in the route it takes, is not really affected.
At the end
At the end, the transhumance is a practice which has its place in a reduced frame. It is only
still tolerated because of its minimal impact on the flow of things. On the one hand, the
increase of transhumances today would create a conflict of interests with the policies that
govern land, where rapidity and good flows are indispensable. On the other, the
prohibitive bureaucratic hurdles that govern and police spaces allow us to imagine the
prohibition of transhumance in the future.
At the end, the transhumance does not reveal anything about a past age, nor an image of
idealized peasant way of life, it is just practicing something that we want to live: to throw
counter-currents out there, to multiply them, to let the unlikely encounters appear, the
unexpected places, to create and to make events last which leave for all times an earth
inhabited by deeper mysteries.
Mateo