Land here, water there
It’s easily forgotten, but the Europe we see now, so neatly divided between water and land, with rivers flowing steadily like roadways through town and field – excepting a few lagoons and deltas which have been preserved for ducks and storks to land in – was once a much boggier place. Then, what was solid part of the year could be liquid during the rest, so that the inhabitants lived in dread of floods and disease.
Since we seldom see anything else, we simplistically take it for granted that some places are always wet and others dry, as if by definition. But it took a lot of work to get things that way. Life itself began in a muddy medium and waded along in it for millions of years, until civilized man looked at nature's mess and said, "Land here, water there".
Draining wetlands, like the clearing of forests, has been going on since Roman times, and not only in the Maremma region where the Etruscans lived, on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea. That is the name the Greeks gave to the “sea of the Etruscans” for one of their military leaders, Tyrrehenus. But there, it was Mussolini who dried the swamps, just to show you that modern tyrants aren't necessarily worse than ancient ones.
The River Guadalquivir ravaged Seville whenever it rained heavily for a few weeks, until, in our times, a canal was built to the west of the city, bypassing the old course through the town. It's unromantic to think of, but when we sit at a riverside café in Triana admiring the city’s great monuments on the other bank – the cathedral called La Giralda, the bull ring called La Maestranza and the Moorish fort called La Torre del Oro – we are really looking across, not a real river, but a truncated channel closed at the northern end against the floods. The "dead" arm that remains of the urban stretch of the legendary Guadalquivir was preserved only because Seville without the river wouldn’t be Seville. And being close enough to the sea to rise and fall with the tides, it never dries up, like an estuary.
The fact that the part of the Parisian right bank called Le Marais lies on the outer shore of a meander of the Seine meant that, before urbanization, it received the full force of the floodwater, which penetrated everywhere. This marsh had to be dried out by digging drainage trenches, before building could begin on the fine Renaissance palaces for which "The Marsh", as the name translates into English, is now famous.
Before the Seine was tamed it was twice as wide as it is now, and the fragile wooden bridges, loaded with houses, were often swept away in winter. But even after the banks were built up, flooding continued until the 1960’s, when I recall a barge smashing into the Pont des Arts (the first metallic bridge in Paris, given the name "Bridge of Arts" by the revolutionary government because it led to the recently-created Palais des Arts, later called the Louvre Museum). Eventually the waters were tamed by creating four receiving ponds on the Seine and its tributaries, far upstream in eastern France, to sluice off the excess water. The Pont des Arts was rebuilt a few decades later, after several other barges had hit it, in the same style but with fewer piers and broader arches, and standing higher above the water.
The entire region of Les Landes on the western coast, which you ride through, for several monotonous hours, on the train from Paris to Madrid, was a vast sedimentary plain full of inhospitable swamps, where the peasants herded sheep on stilts to get through the mud and died young of malaria. Then the technocratic dictator Napoleon III launched a massive and capitalistically-oriented drainage project. First, he created a well-funded shareholder’s company which recruited the peasants to level the sand dunes and then had them plant the whole expanse with pine forests, which are the region’s main feature today. As well as securing the land from erosion, the pine trees provided the sweet-smelling resin used to make perfume and candy, an industry which had existed for centuries on a much smaller scale among the native pine groves of Arcachon, in the northernmost part of the region, near Bordeaux. By the time foreign competition and synthetics made resin harvesting unprofitable, the well-grown forests of Les Landes de Gascogne became a prized source of timber.
Just south of Les Landes and close to the Spanish border, in the Basque country, is the seaport of Saint Jean de Luz, which has been my home for over two years. The name derives, via an ancient and mysterious mistranslation, from the Basque “Donibane Lohizune”, which means Saint John of the Marshes (and not "Saint John of Light", as outsiders often assume - some royal cartographer arbitrarily abbreviated lohizune to the Spanish word luz rather than take the trouble find out what it meant). The town is so called because of its position on the northern bank of the Nivelle River, which upon meeting the sea became a vast swamp, enabling the water to flood into the town whenever heavy rain fell on the nearby Pyrenees. The confusion about marsh and light is compounded by the fact that the natives call themselves luziens.
Finally, in the 19th century, the river mouth was dredged and shored up, doing away with the marshes altogether. Today the twin towns of Saint Jean de Luz and Ciboure face each other on either side of a well-defined harbour, deep enough to moor the tuna and sardine boats with which the Basques ply the Bay of Biscay. Instead of a muddy strand, there is a broad, tar-topped wharf where fishing nets are stretched to dry, and where I walk my dog every afternoon.
Saint Jean de Luz, August 2009