These are my two serpettes. There are many out there, but these are mine. I brought them back with me from France.
They might have sent us to Ontario to pick tobacco and wear high water pants and hip boots. Instead, we went to France. Allowed to smoke, swear, and drink, we did what the French called les vendanges, the grape harvest. It was like being on Trailer Park Boys. But in 1974. In France.
Place de la Concorde, Paris, France
In spite of my pure laine name, I left Quebec for California when I was six. Hard for people to understand, but I have a very strong affinity for California. So while I’m bilingual, my cultural frame of reference is my home, California, not Quebec.
Picking grapes in France, for me, revealed a stunning social contrast between France and California. In the US, picking grapes was industrial, fueled by migrant farm workers. In France, les vendanges were social affairs, populated by the young, high school and university students. Chavez led the famous grape picking boycotts in the late ‘70s in California. Streets, parks, and schools memorialize his name in California. Cesar Chavez boulevards are as ubiquitous as Martin Luther King boulevards, fitting memories to two great leaders. For my Canadian friends, in death, he’s at least as famous as Louis Riel in Manitoba and Quebec.
After picking grapes for three straight weeks, six days a week, I understood what it was like to labor in the fields, a lesson St. John’s often provided, picking potatoes and selling meat door-to-door. This gave me an agricultural and cultural frame of reference when I met Cesar Chavez when I was in university. Picking grapes enhanced the experience, giving me empathy only learned by tasting, even if only for three weeks, hard, physical farm labor.
A young Cesar Chavez about to light a smoke, back in the day.
Picking grapes is backbreaking (and a lot like canoeing). Everything is cold. Everything is wet. Repetition up and down the rows. You don’t sleep. And you drink wine. Red wine. Lots of it. Beaujolais. At breakfast. At morning snack. At lunch. At afternoon snack. At dinner.
And after dinner, with nowhere else to go, you populate one of the three cafes in the village, catering to the pickers here for les vendanges.
It seems deceptively easy. You start at the beginning of the row and work your way up (or down) the row. Some of the grapes have already rotted on the vine, and you need to deal with that. The farmer did not like mold, as you can see from the picture of him checking Wayne Leatherdale’s load.
Everything ended up sticky, lacquered in dry, sweet grape juice. It was like accumulated rain and spray on a canoe trip, but sticky. We were sometimes happy to be picking in the rain.
But the wine. And the food. In spite of working in the fields all day, the caloric intake far exceeded our usual and prodigious adolescent ability to eat. The French farm food put to shame the best corn fritters emerging from St. John’s grease. I think we all gained weight, a condition soon treated on our return to the school.
Thrilled and lucky to go, those of us who were bilingual were at an advantage. The French in the countryside stood with all Canadians in solidarity, united in our hate of the Parisians, clearly the most obnoxious people on the planet.
How to hold the serpette. Or at least how I held the serpette.
Rumor has it that the program was an exchange between Canada and France to promote goodwill and improve language skills of the indigenous French vignerons. As far as I know, it only took place twice in Selkirk, in 1973 and 1974. As far as I also know, it was just a way for some Beaujolais co-op farmers to get some cheap labor for three weeks. After all, we didn’t complain too much. Loudly, anyway.
For the French, this work used to be done by students and itinerant workers, unlike the US where very few young people work the fields. Les vendanges were a rite of passage to many, an awakening of sorts. Everyone has heard of Beaujolais.
Into the second week, the farmer, noting our appetite for whatever red put on the table, started watering down the wine at lunch and during breaks, knowing that most of us could not tell the difference.
You could not escape thinking about picking grapes and the never ending rows of vines. Even sleeping, you picked grapes. I’d wake up, realize I had been sleeping, and fall back asleep.
I found it harder than picking potatoes, but none of the situation was a real hardship. This was before the internet, and the people on the trip were the more composed students, having survived some level of French taught at St. John’s.
Wayne Leatherdale was our leader and had a fair, steady hand on any tiller. The news of his passing, even so many years later, still leaves me a little raw. I was the Leader of the Opposition when he was Prime Minister, so I tried repeatedly to needle his weakness(es). I don’t think he had any. Nothing ever worked.
It is alleged that many of my better friends and classmates stumbled back to Selkirk suffering from various levels of alcohol withdrawal, but this abhorrent rumor will never be confirmed. Luckily, after all these years (45), I remember nothing.
I ended up going back to France to study while I was in university for a year (77-78) in Poitiers, a city in the middle of France, between Paris and Bordeaux. My time in Beaujolais helped me be ready for the many things I faced on my return to France. Especially the Beaujolais.
A “hurry up and wait moment” waiting for some kind of transport. Who the hell brought skis?
Nice little essay Pierre! Thanks.