Encore Provence

We stopped at the end of a long avenue of trees where the pickers were at work—men and women from the surrounding villages, doing what their great-great-grandparents had done before them. In those days, when travel was by mule or foot, the olive harvest used to be one of the few times in the year when inhabitants of isolated villages had a practical excuse to get together. This was a rare chance for young men to meet young women, and romantic attachments were often formed under the trees. A sackful of olives must have had the same allure as a bouquet of red roses. Love blossomed, and marriages were arranged. The first male child was often named Olivier.

In Provence, the olive has gone through some hard times, suffering from both man and nature: from freak frosts like the memorably brutal year of 1956, or from a long-lasting tendency among farmers to replace olive groves with more profitable vineyards. (Since 1929, the number of olive trees in Provence has declined from eight million to two million.) And then there’s general neglect. You see the victims on deserted, overgrown hillsides, their trunks strangled by ropes of wild ivy, entire trees almost hidden by brambles, apparently smothered to death. Amazingly, they survive. Cut away the ivy and the brambles, clean up the area around the base of the trunk, prune the tangle of branches, and in a year or so there will be olives. The intelligent camel, so it seems, is practically indestructible, capable of springing back to life again after going through an arboreal nightmare.

We followed her as she went slowly through the trees, head down, nose cocked, tail wagging. From time to time she would stop and scratch, surprisingly gently, at the earth, and she never failed. There was always a truffle just below the surface, to be eased out with a U-shaped pick while she nosed at her master’s pocket for her reward, a tiny piece of Gruyère.