TWO THUNDERS

For two weeks now, it’s been raining cats and dogs; torrential rains, night and day and sometimes in between! It’s so humid that our crazy lawn has invaded everything, right into our bedroom.  For my part I was ready to drown it all in “Roundup” but my wife was against it, so I mowed… everything, but everything, was covered with grass and weeds; I must have mowed the carpet and even the ceiling, a hardship both difficult and perilous.

As for fishing, you have to know that fishing was an unthinkable enterprise. My river, usually so calm and bucolic, was a raging torrent sweeping along enormous tree trunks and drowned animals that wedged themselves in the piles of the bridges. I don’t have to tell you, it was a landscape of desolation.

To wait patiently for the water level to drop is not my kind of thing. So, without skipping a beat, I hit the road for Marseille to pay a courtesy call on my friend René Deux-Tonnerres (in english: Rene Two-Thunders).

Let me quickly brush in the broad strokes of this picture.

Toward the end of the 19th century, when Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show decided to conquer Europe, they performed in Marseille. The show was a sort of “Tableaux Vivant” recounting the historic legend (with a great deal of fantasy and very little truth) of the conquest of the American West.  Bill Hickock, “Buffalo Bill”, was of course the star (one is never as well served as by oneself). For the tour he brought along a number of warriors, “red skin savages”, for the role of the “bad guys”.

Well it happens that, in Marseille and tired of playing the dumbo bad guys, a good number of the “savages” pulled up anchor and disappeared into the nature.

Many years passed during which one would frequently see these half nude “Sioux Warriors” in the middle of winter, walking nonchalantly down the Canebiere (this is absolutely true!).

The great grand father of my friend Deux-Tonnerres (Two-Thunders) was one of those guys; he married and created a little half-breed family of “Marseillais Sioux”.

When I arrived at Rene’s little house in the northern suburbs he welcomed me with open arms and immediately took me the his back yard where the devil had erected a tepee. Not exactly a painted tepee made of buffalo skins, but a more colorful version from the local camping store. Once inside he got out his traditional peace-pipe and packed it with “kinnikinnick”, a “kind of” tobacco sent to him by a distant cousin in Wisconsin.

I had stopped smoking a long time ago and my stomach was not handling the stuff too well and when we quit the tepee my legs too, were all wobbly.

” Fleche my friend, judging from your greenish tinge, I think you might need a bit of fresh air. What do you say we head out and fish ourselves a good “Bouillabaisse” (fish soup) to celebrate our reunion? ”

It’s certain that one thing that I never refuse is a fishing trip. In a little more  than an hour we were in Rene Deux-Tonnerres’ “pointu” (a Marseille wooden fishing boat) that he christened “Fuck Custer”; anchoring near the island of Frioul, we already at work for our “Bouillabaisse”.

Well, after three good hours when we finally got back to solid ground, our creel only contained 3 small “girelles” and 2 skinny “rouqiers” (Mediterranean rock fish).

Sheepishly, we made a stop at the local supermarket and we bought 2 cans of “Marius Bernard” fish soup.

I guess that the fish in the Mediterranean is akin to the Buffalo in the Great American Plains. Diddly-squat!

Everything comes to an end, my friends. Everything comes to an end!