Ill Wind

Autumn has hit the U.S. with a vengeance: early snows, more flooding, storms hurling the fall-color leaves away to some other part of the world… and El Nino, or La Nina, or the Pinta and Santa Maria, or all four, threatening to wash America back to Vespucci and Isabella.

Nor are we alone in facing nature’s wrath. Whether you place your bet on Global Warming or climate change or warped statistics or Mayan prophecy, the arriving winter of 2011-2012 looks to be a doozy…

It’s 25 years now since Sandra and I and various children spent a chilly fall and icy winter skirting

the Mediterranean from Provence to Portugal’s Algarve in search of warmth. The “coldest European winter in decades” was foretold, even heralded, that year by a particularly fierce mistral wind sweeping down and across Provence.

(Perfectly apt: that raw and raucous wind from hell is also the surname of the great Nobel-prizewinning poet Frederic Mistral, champion of the Provencal language. My slight whisper of air to be read below would be quickly lost in the storm gales and summer zephyrs he unleashed.)

I seem to remember, from Lawrence Durrell’s South-of-France quintet of novels (less known and less important than his dazzling, and bedazzled, Alexandria Quartet), that a mistral sometimes blows hot air rather than cold.

But not in early November, 1986…


Le Mistral

Ice-hard and unyielding,

the autumn whirlwind bruises,
pummels crisp clouds askew,
and shreds the huddling trees
of their sharp, shriveled leaves.

Rapacious, falcon-fierce,
le mistral grips Provence;
chill talons rake the Rhone
from Arles back to Avignon,
beating the soul to its knees

with all fall’s cold at once.
Now the late grapes vein blue

like Papist folk new-shriven,
and the last vineyards lose
their golden cypress shielding.

Now the blood-earth grieves
a troubadour’s song of years,
dry hectares crying woe
for the region’s tans and creams,
burnt reds, bright blues, driven

in hiding, gone to cover
in halls of bauxite bone:
a blanched rotogravure
the dull, vainglorious end

of summer's sun-drenched dreams.

Le soleil’s ancient foe,
the bandit mistral wind
demands his droit du seigneur,
pillaging Aix to Vaucluse,
till stripped to dust and stone,

Provence arrests the reiver.