except, of course, when they do. A hunchbacked old woman, with Nixonian jowls and a face riven by time, might be shuffling through a Saturday-morning marketplace, and you'd think she'd never seen a happy day in her long life. Then, suddenly, her eyes sparkle, her eyebrows arch and a smile stretches from gold-encrusted earlobe to earlobe. She is, for a moment, a ray of sunshine. To effect this transformation, you need but a single word: “Bonjour.” The French react to it with an almost Pavlovian enthusiasm. I've seen the word turn an angry, harried father into an affable gentleman, and it's made a young woman, her face severe with doubt, brighten and relax — a spontaneous face-lift. Harry Potter never knew such powerful magic. I had plenty of opportunity to practice this sorcery last Saturday, as I stood behind a farm stand in the tidy town of Muret, southwest of Toulouse, chatting with customers who'd come to buy locally grown vegetables. Spread out before me on two tables were radiant piles of zucchini, peas, fava beans, potatoes, spinach, carrots and radishes — all organic — which I was not merely selling but had helped to grow, cultivate, clean and prepare for the market as a Wwoof-er on the farm of Cyril and Dominique Sarthe. Wwoof — which stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms — is an international network of farmers who offer room and board in exchange for the labor of travelers such as myself. It spans the globe, from the Americas and New Zealand (where it's hugely popular), to Europe and Turkey (where I visited an apple orchard two years ago). Visits can last as little as a week, or as much as six months, depending on your skills, your schedule and your relationship with your host. And except for a modest fee to join each country's branch, Wwoof-ing is free. The French Wwoof database (15 euros; wwoof.fr) listed hundreds of farms in every region, each of which offered its own enticements. There was an ancient stone wall that needed repairing in Bouleternère, olive trees to tend in Valbonne, and even yoga and qi gong in Fontvieille. I chose the Sarthes' farm because they described themselves as gourmets and because their farm was in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern France, which is reputed to have some of the country's best food. There was another reason: the Sarthes spoke very little English. Traditionally, Grand Tourists spent time in the Loire Valley to learn French, and while I knew I couldn't expect to master a language I'd stopped studying 15 years ago, I wanted an experience in which I couldn't fall back on my native tongue. And that's what I got — sort of. Shortly after noon last Wednesday, I arrived at Boussens station to find Cyril Sarthe waiting for me. In his mud-spattered clothes, with a tangle of curly black hair atop a sun-reddened face, 47-year-old Cyril was, in some ways, exactly what I expected a French farmer to look like. But during the 20-minute drive home, in his dusty, battered Peugeot (“a real farmer's car,” his wife later joked), I learned that he hadn't been born a farmer. Originally from the Jura, near the Swiss border, he'd been a sailor, then a pizzeria owner outside Toulouse for 13 years before giving it all up to start the farm with his wife, Dominique. Domi, as everyone called her, was Cyril's foil, outgoing and exuberant, and it was no surprise they'd met at a carnival, on the bumper cars. She was an accomplished ceramicist, loved to dance and blasted the stereo constantly, veering between the ironic 1960s pop of François Béranger and the soundtrack to “Amelie.” Domi also did all the welding on the farm. Their home was an early-19th-century stone farmhouse, set in soft hills a 30-minute walk from the nearest village, Cassagnabère. Not the kind of rustic manor you might see in a movie about the French countryside but a crusty, quirky, finicky relic of an earlier age. Once, two families had shared the space, with no proper toilets and only a crude kitchen. (The Sarthes had, thankfully, modernized those aspects.) The dark wood beams across the ceilings had grown so hard with age that, Cyril said, you couldn't pound a nail into them (and he'd tried). The electricity was unpredictable. A ground-floor library was stocked with French comic books and encyclopedias of local herbs and fruits. In the barn was a Lamborghini — the Italians make tractors, too. Accompanying the Sarthes were the animals. Lolo the sheep had just given birth to her first lamb, who'd been dubbed Monsieur Spatule for the way his legs bent. Pipitte the black-and-white poussin pecked around the barn, guarding her only chick. Flocks of colorful chickens and ducks paraded along the driveway. Watching them all was Loute, Cyril's beloved black dog, who barked when birds of prey circled above, roughhoused with her master and slept whenever she felt like it. M. Spatule and I were not, however, the only recent additions to the Sarthe household. Ryan Woodring, an art major at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, had arrived as a Wwoofer just two days before me, and was planning to stay till the end of June. So much for not having a linguistic safety net. Not that that mattered — Ryan was just as eager to learn the vocabulary of the French countryside and polish his accent as I was, and the 15 acres of farmland were an excellent classroom. Our days began around 8 A.M., with a simple breakfast of coffee, toast, butter and jam (as a gift, I'd brought homemade mulberry jam given to me byJean-Baptiste in Calais), then we'd scatter the crumbs (miettes) in the yard for the chickens. Domi and Cyril had woken up about 30 minutes before us, so we'd seek them out in the fields, where, if it was clear, we could see the snowcapped Pyrenees in the distance. Then the work would begin. Sometimes it was repetitive and easy, like winding plastic twine (ficelle) into skeins (bobines) for later use. Other times, it required a bit of muscle, like when we had to uproot (désherber) weeds and malformed cabbages and then haul them into a wheelbarrow (brouette) with a pitchfork (fourche). (My jeans and waterproof trail running shoes came in handy in the mud.) We carried buckets (seaux) of grain to feed the rabbits, and stood guard while Cyril herded the sheep (male, béliers; female, brebis; and young, agneaux) back into their pen. One morning in the greenhouses, we dug up all the overgrown parsley, watched as Domi tilled the earth with the Lamborghini, then replanted the land with baby lettuces. When we'd finished, it looked like, well, a farm. Lunch, at 1 P.M., was the day's main meal, and here Cyril and Domi lived up to their billing. One day, they served a rich tagine of chickpeas, sweet carrots and chicken, with pungent homemade harissa, and as I stripped a wing of its flesh with my teeth, I realized the bird had come from right here on the farm. “One of Pipitte's sisters?” I asked, sopping up the juices with a slice of bread. “No,” said Domi, smiling. “It's one of her friends.” Another day, Cyril sautéed a dizzying spiral of sausage (from a friend's farm), and served it with a pressure-cooked mix of carrots, onions and peas — the same carrots Domi had collected that morning, the same onions Cyril had just trimmed for the market, the same peas that Ryan and I had just shelled at the dining room table. (The table, a simple wood rectangle with one drawer, would sell for thousands of dollars in New York City.) Cyril and Domi also made excellent use of leftovers. Sometimes this meant simply mixing together what remained from lunch into a single ingenious dish. An unfinished salmon was deboned, then mixed with an egg-and-ginger batter and baked as a loaf. No matter what was served, there was always… fresh bread and home-style desserts like rhubarb crumble. “We may be poor,” said Domi, quoting an old farmers' proverb, “but at the table, we're rich.” After a siesta, we got back to work, though in a lower-key way, taking care of smaller chores, like rubbing dirt off potatoes. Since dinner wasn't till 10 P.M., when the sun began to set, Ryan and I would explore the countryside. Once, we took Loute to a nearby natural spring. Another time, we walked to Cassagnabère, the closest village, where the only cafe was closed and the most notable sight was an old man, in a beret and vest, sleeping on a chair, leaning against a doorway on the side of the road. When we returned for dinner that night, Domi asked us, “Did you see the old man sleeping on the chair, leaning against the doorway on the side of the road?” Of course we had — he was the only thing to see in Cassagnabère. After dinner, with the taste of goat cheese or Armagnac still lingering on my palate, I'd read comic books… or join in a round of Ten Thousand, a dice game. Saturday morning, Domi, Ryan and I woke at dawn and drove through the hills, still blanketed with mist, to the center of Muret, where we set up our stall next to a vendor of fragrant strawberries and waited for the customers to arrive. The peas went quickly, as did the spinach and the fava beans, and when customers asked for potatoes, I asked what size and what they planned to do with them. (Smaller for boiling, larger for mashing or grating.) Linguistically, the interactions were easy, but they came with such frequency that soon I was speaking without thinking at all. In fact, if anything gave me trouble, it was the digital scale/cash register, which was unforgiving of errors. Mid-morning, I took a break to see the rest of the market, where you could buy anything from homemade goat cheeses and beer to paella and live roosters. A mussels vendor gave me a plastic bucket of his dish, which tasted just like the ocean, and I chatted with a well-traveled elderly man over a cup of coffee. When I returned to the stall an hour later, we had sold almost all the spinach and peas, and the tables no longer heaved under the weight of the vegetables. By noon, we'd folded up the table completely, and yet people still stopped to eye our potatoes. Perhaps they were enticed by my sweet and well-rehearsed “Bonjour”? – The New York Times. Next stop: Monaco and northwestern Italy. __
