Listen to the full piece here:
Somécure, Montauban-sur-L’Ouvèze, France — “We work too hard, we don’t make any money and, worse, we are all trapped in our own separate worlds. The only time we talk to our neighbors is with the engine idling when we pass each other on the road, rushing somewhere else. In the old days, neighbors used to share equipment. These days everyone is more selfish. Now, people are too busy to lend a hand.”
The words are those of young farmer with whom I am sharing a beer. Next to him is his father, an old man who leans his back against a stone wall and smiles kindly over a big mustache but doesn’t say a word.
The young farmer has seen the world. He spent several years Down Under and knows there’s a different life out there. He is deeply tanned, handsome and rugged. He sports a gold ring in one ear and enjoys practicing his English on me — which in any case is better than my stilted French, especially when the topic is rural loneliness. He tasted that different life and liked it but in the end he came back to help his family because if he hadn’t, no one else would.
The reason this conversation is happening at all — both proving and disproving the diagnosis of my hardworking new friend — is because some dreamers got together and built a food truck to visit the small villages of this remote region northeast of Avignon where the hills begin their unrepentant climb to the Alps.