progress

Time to stand back and gaze in amazement what can only be called progress.  Here is the house when it was still for sale (note the for sale sign).  When I used to go past, I always thought the same thing: "Pity the poor bastard who gets stuck with that house and has to figure out how to keep that awful looking area under the slanted glass from dripping and leaking all over the place. "

In this second picture, the porch, installed last year, supports the right hand end of the scaffolding.  It was tricky setting the left hand sice since the planks and stretchers didn't quite go across what was left of the slanted glass part.  The far left side was supported mostly by religious faith.  The two chimneys were the first things to go, but this left an empty place where there should have been a gutter and necessitated rebuilding the edge of the roof a little.

By this point, Robert and I have dropped the stucco (crepi).  It was that or fix it up and because of the damage from removing the chimneys and many loose and cracked places, we decided to demolish it, dig out the joints, and repoint with lime mortar and local yellow sand.  This is the finish on the rest of this house and on most of the places around here that have been renovated.   

Crepi is definitely out of fashion;   exposed and repointed stone is in.  I love all this exposed stone even if it was perhaps meant all along to be covered.  The style of this house is "tout-venant" or "anything goes".  Fancier houses have stones that are roughly cut straight and square and almost even follow courses.  This is called appareillé.  In important structures like churches they use big stones cut into regular courses.   In a place like ours,  lime mortar is a huge part of the structure of the building;  only at the corners and the edges of the windows are the stones fitted neatly.   

I wonder if the time will come when exposing cruddy stone, like sandblasting low-fired brick in Boston, or sanding wide plank floors with huge cracks, very suitable for wall-to-wall,  will get really old.  That time has not arrived for me.  

It was tempting to leave the stone un-filled like Francis' house across the street.  But in the end it seemed wise to fill in a wall that faces the slanting rain and frequent heavy fogs.

Just under the roof, it's convention to run a "genoise", old-fashioned half-cylinder roof tiles set on top of flat tiles and buttered with tons of lime mortar.  We had to patch the genoise where they had chopped it out for the chimney.  On fancy houses, there can be three or four rows high of these semi-circles.  I had always found them rather mysterious looking but I actually cranked out a decent looking repair the first time.  

Robert then came by and did his magic with the zinc gutter.  He spent most of the morning running around to find special ammonia that he needed.  

Next project:  waterproof and tile the terrasse, a floor which also serves as the ceiling of the bathroom below.  

This is a bit urgent since I jumped the gun and already installed styrofoam-backed drywall on the very ceiling....

the video

I can't get the video out of my mind, those infantile code names, Crazyhorse and Bushmaster, like when we used to play flashlight tag in the summer, in the suburbs.  All the euphemisms, engage (kill), individual (human being), a vocabulary of kids trying to sound like adults.  And then after killing so many humans for no real reason at all, someone just says, "Stop shooting" since the bad guys on the ground are all dead and friendlies have suddenly arrived.  Afterward, as a consequence of this orgasm of violence, everyone is calm.  Nobody behaves normally, like, oh maybe screaming hysterically.

To defer these preoccupations,  I sauntered out along the Lot to the dam and the lock just upstream from the confluence with the Vert.  It's uncommon to have such clear skies toward sunset so the light was good for taking pictures.  At the confluence, you pass over this brick bridge of course, but I like to backtrack,  to check underneath the bridge once in a while perhaps to find trolls.  Upstream you can see a dam to the right of a small factory.   

The lock is on the right bank of the Lot but the dam stretches across from bank to bank.  This must have been a rapids before the dam and this lock is part of the system that facilitated floating wine barrels and other stuff toward Bordeaux on the Atlantic and then on to rest of the world. 

It's probably obvious to everyone but me how any lock works.   The part I get:  With the downstream gate closed, the upstream gate opens to admit a boat.  This upstream gate is closed behind the boat and the downstream gate opened.  Like an elevator, the boat is lowered calmly to the downstream level without having to worry about white water, sharp rocks, whirlpools, etc.  

The gates are all new, the gears nice and greasy but if you enlarge the photo below you can see the cobwebs because the boating season has not yet started.

 

What I don't ever quite get is why you have to built the dam across the entire river even though the lock itself is extremely narrow.  What a lot of construction work for one narrow passage way.  With a little luck, couldn't you just build the lock and hope enough water would rush in as you open the upstream gate to float your boat?  But of course this would violate all laws of hydrology, serious laws.  And you wouldn't get to hypnotize yourself watching how the glass-smooth upstream suddenly turns into a standing curl of frothing water and half a km stretch of boiling milk.  Standing on the lock looking down you can't help wanting to jump,  to join the boiling molecules.  

Obliteration!

Plus douce qu'aux enfants la chair des pommes sûres, 

L'eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin 

Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures 

Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin.

Arthur Rimbaud

(Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples is to children,

Green water penetrates my pine hull

And stains of blue wine and vomit

Wash me, wash away rudder and anchor)

Mas maury

I took Robert's suggestion and went out to Mas Maury, a  salvage yard in Pescadoires, to have a hunk of iron at 1,20 meters cut for the lintel of the bathroom window.  It was raining.  It almost always rains when I go to this place.  You cross a very long, very narrow one way bridge.  You have to watch your driving and you can't go too slowly because there is inevitably somebody waiting for you to get past.  But your eyes are bugging out when you look down at the wild, chaotic poverty of the gens de voyage, the Roms who live under the bridge in dilapidated caravans and mobile homes.  There's trash all over the place and a doubtful fire smoking away in the rain.

You wind through ancient Pescadoires to scene of equally impressive commercial incoherence.  The yard is all men.  They don't employ even the token woman and, as for the customers,  neither the foreigners nor the French bring along their women, though Mrs Snoutsworthy likes the place and often goes along.  Today the customers were all hardcore artisans, most in blue coveralls, all over the age of 50.  The place is getting neater and neater.  Back where they keep steel of all profiles--I-beam, angles, rounds, squares, all shelved, like with like, it used to be a welter of crappy wood moldings, toppled piles of ceramic tiles, odd crud.  They've even gotten a new saw, water-cooled bandsaw with automatic feed to replace the deafening old chopsaw.

There were two parties in front of me, but it was for me that the old guy who runs the place took off his glove for a handshake, a favor for a regular customer.  We've talked seriously in the past about our two countries, about what matters and what doesn't.  He came to retrieve Francis' gate a year or two back and patiently pulled off all the snails stuck to it.  He called them "inoffensive."

From the office as I waited to pay up,  the big picture windows look out on the motley scene of inanimate worthless stuff--a couple of huge metal lions next to a pile of 40 x 40 exterior tiles, everything agglomerated together in one insensate mass, waiting for somebody to come along and see each one as separate and adorable.  Willing to breath value into them like a modest version of some creation myth.