In search of the source: a personal journey against the flow

The southern French coast near Montpellier Airport is rather congested.

Holiday resorts have sprung up to profit from those heading to the lovely sandy beaches – as have, of course, the roads required to take them there.

Just to the east of La Grande-Motte – a product of the proudly modernising 1960s – the coastal road passes over a stretch of water which marks the boundary between the Hérault and Gard départements.

Between two banks formed of boulders, some kind of river passes under the bridge, across the sand dunes, past l’Hôtel de la Plage and into the Mediterranean.

You couldn’t really say that it ends at this point, because its water is still there, but its essence becomes indistinguishable from that of the sea.

Local fishermen cast their lines from the boulders close to the bridge, as cars and cycles trundle by and Easter holiday visitors head down the footpath for their first dip of the year.

But what is this stretch of water and where does it come from?

The signs tell us it is called Le Vidourle and it visibly flows from an étang on the north side of the road, one of many lagoons in La Petite Camargue.

But there is more to Le Vidourle than this coastal manifestation, as we will discover if we take a mental and photographic journey along its 60-mile course.

We will, obviously, be moving in the opposite direction to its water.

That movement can seem to our human minds to denote the passing of time, the inevitable flight of the ephemeral moment, of all moments, as our individual lives rush on towards their necessary dissolution.

But the constant flow of the river is also a real and permanent connection, a vein in the flesh of the landscape.

When we step into the river a second time, we do not encounter the same drops of water but, contrary to certain wisdom, we do step into the same river.

A journey against the flow is a journey which knows this, which defies the superficial passing of river-time and sets out to grasp the timeless whole.

When we want to understand the meaning of something – a word, a tradition, a belief – we look beyond its current form and head up the waters of its becoming in search of its origin, its source.

Let’s fly against the waters of the Vidourle and leave these Mediterranean marshlands, let’s pass rapidly under the concrete industrial scar of the A9 autoroute to Barcelona and alight at Sommières, a beautiful place if you manage not to see the supermarket and its sprawling car park on the other side of the river.

The town was built up, a thousand years ago, around a 200-metre 20-arch bridge across the Vidourle built by the Romans a thousand years before that.

It is, perhaps, because of this historic imposition that when, from time to time, the Vidourle becomes swollen and angry, it is Sommières that tends to bear the brunt of its rage.

Plaques in the town mark the remarkable height of the flooding during these dramatic Vidourlades, the last of which struck in 2002.

A few miles upstream, the small town of Quissac has also been a victim of the Vidourle, even if most of the time the river enjoys a low profile.

From there on, we pass through one of the more beautiful stretches of the river, before arriving at Sauve, a medieval fairy-tale village in which I spent many a weekend a few years back.

Its undeniable charm has attracted a community of artists from all parts, including the veteran American countercultural cartoonist Robert Crumb.

We would often say a neighbourly “bonjour” in the street and we shared an all-too-brief email exchange after I popped copies of the French version of my Resist the Fourth Industrial Revolution! leaflet into village mailboxes in February 2021.

From our counterflow perspective, at Sauve much of the river leaps up into a hole in the rocks and seemingly disappears forever into the bowels of the earth.

But no, it has merely gone underground, like the heretical and dissident organic radical philosophy, its flow hidden from view but always present, even when the surface is dry.

From Sauve, Conqueyrac and beyond, sometimes we see it and sometimes we don’t, although it always shows its face at Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort.

This is the town in which I first met and interviewed the local Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in 2018 and I still bump into some of them today.

Four members of the French Resistance were hanged from the viaduct over the Vidourle by the Nazis in 1944.

The occupation wears a different mask today, but the resistance is essentially the same.

Saint-Hippo, as it is known locally, also marks our entry into the hills which have sheltered me from the worst of the modern world for more than a decade.

Thank you, my Cévennes! I honestly do not know what would have become of me these last few years without your vital green embrace.

We rise, now, with the river, as it gathers pace on its journey home, plunging and resurfacing, gurgling and gliding past Cros – “cradle of the Vidourle” – and up into the valley of its birth.

Here someone has added a footnote to an official sign describing the Vidourle as a rivière, when strictly speaking it is a fleuve, the word used for a river that empties directly into the sea.

This is surely something to be proud of, that the plucky little Vidourle manages to find its own unique connection to the Mediterranean, without being gobbled up by either of the two big rivers that give their names to the départements that it divides down on the coast, the Hérault and the Gard, the latter itself being a mere rivière since it flows into the Rhône.

The underground/aboveground waters of our real resistance can never be recuperated by the mainstream.

As the hilltop village of Saint-Roman-de-Codières looks down in admiration, the Vidourle flees upwards into a multitude of little mountain trickles.

A helpful inhabitant points me down a road, beside a church, that zig-zags down to the valley below, where a bridge spans the Vidourle in its new-born form.