Vegan Jesus and the Kombucha Bucket
I spent a week of spring with him in my junior year of college, on his farm in the Midi-Pyrénées.
There were three other guests at that time:
- French Man With Vape Pen and Netflix account.
- French Man With Bad Back Who Fled Office Job To Volunteer In Australia For A Year.
- Electrosensitive French Woman. (We turned off the router at night for her.)
The farm-owner gathered fresh flowers from his yard for his pre-lunch salads. Each one that he’d pick with long, yellowed nails, he would accompany with a name and description of taste, like a botanist-sommelier.
At night he would prepare couscous for us. In the morning, oats. For him, every meal was apple and beets. All he’d eat, apples and beets. And flowers.
His hair, shoulder length and ornately coiffed, sat parted down the middle of his gaunt face. All of him was gaunt. He floated through the gardens.
I would later refer to him as Vegan Jesus when recounting my time on the farm to friends and family. It’s the most accurate way to sum him up in two words.
Around the midway point of my stay, right before lunch, he retrieved two sizable wooden pails from the garage. Thick, slimy cloth circles sat atop the liquid within, twin blob-fish in a murky sea.
He explained that it was kombucha — his own, home-grown strain. I had the pleasure of hearing it defined in French about four times: for each guest individually, and then all together over a hearty plate of daisies.
Kombucha. Thé fermenté. Du thé avec des cultures dedans. Ouais, un peu comme de la bière, quoi.
After lunch, he fetched a scratched-up guitar from his bedroom in the attic and regaled us with the folk song he had written about kombucha. It took everything in my power, the clenching of every muscle in my face and abdomen, to not burst out laughing as his thin fingers plucked out a solemn beverage-centric ballad.
This was his art, I had to tell myself, into which he had poured his soul and fondness of fermented tea. Pas drôle.
(A little drôle.)
French Man With Vape Pen smoked his metallic silver darling after each meal without fault. Apple-scented oil.
At night, when everyone else had retired to their respective rooms, Vape Man and I would sit at the dining table with our respective tisanes and discuss movies and shows that we’d watched. Every title one of us would bring up, the other had seen as well. I found his viewing history impressive, he pitied mine. His general sentiment was that I should be doing something better with my time.
French Man With Bad Back had brought a red and black Citroen 2CV with him. It had been in the shop up until the Friday of my stay.
The whole crew (save for Electrosensitive French Woman) rode out to collect the car. We weaved through narrow towns stuffed with narrow buildings, fields of goats and sheep, until finally we reached a lone auto garage, isolated amidst grassy hills.
Vape Man and I stayed in his hatchback as the farm-owner and Bad Back Man went in to retrieve the Citroën. With the other two in the 2CV on the return trip, I was given the honor of radio-DJing the Vapemobile.
The only music on my phone at that moment was a smattering of songs by The Beach Boys. Seeing as I am only human, I began to softly sing as we rolled along — barely above mouthing, facing the passenger’s side window, all part of the Shy Person Handbook. Vape Man took notice and encouraged me to sing louder. I told him I would if he joined me, and he made the compelling counter-argument that he didn’t know any of the lyrics, because he’s French. (Didn’t keep him from knowing every Premium Cable television show in the US, but alright.)
And so, with my fellow passenger’s encouragement, and the realization that neither of us were ever going to see each other again in a few days’ time, I bleeted the backing vocals to Good Vibrations as we made our way back.
The town where we took a brief pit stop had an eerily calm quality to it. No one was out walking, shopping, no one driving. A thin layer of dust seemed to coat everything, as though all the inhabitants had dropped what they were doing about fifteen years ago, packed up, and left.
Another element to the surreality in this stopover was the fact that the café we ducked into was, at least that particular afternoon, left in the hands of a 9-year-old boy and a dog — presumably the child’s dog, but undoubtedly the café’s dog. In any case, they had a good rapport.
Taking the leisurely route back, it was dark out by the time we reached the farm. In celebration of his car being fixed, Bad Back Man bought victory cheese and wine for the gang. My first dairy-laden “meal” in a week, likely the first for them in some time. Vegan Jesus abstained.
I returned to my room early on in the night, as Electrosensitive Woman and Bad Back Man broke out into a heated argument in the dining room, related to agriculture. At some point, the terminology became too complex and the voices too loud, thus compelling me to take myself and my red wine buzz a safe radius away. I doubt they remembered the dispute come morning.
That next day at the train station, a breakfast of pain au chocolat after 7 days of wheat and flora, I felt nothing but grateful for the experience; for the chance to flee from my own reality, into this particular crevice of the world. And more than anything, the chance to hear that kombucha song.
