OMYA in Provence

Last summer I rented a house in Provence. The rent was very inexpensive for a medieval house with studio, bedrooms, bathrooms, garden, salons,and ...Provence!!!

Well, the house was wonderful, tatty but French. The Town it was in, Orgon, is on the Durance River, along which runs a major autoroute,railway lines, power lines, and produce transportation hubs. None of those in any way really diminished the effect of the medieval ruins of the tower of the Duc de Guise looming over the bluff above town, or the ancient convent and church, or the fountain originally built by the Romans, or the crypt beneath the town church originally built by whoever came before the Romans. St. Remy was only fifteen minutes away along roads lined with sunflower fields, (Van Gogh), chalk and limestone cliffs (Cezanne) and lavender farms (all painters of all periods). Provence, only forty years ago, was a desolate place, its economy struggling and its people consigned by Parisians to the role of hillbillies. Now, of course, it is the premier summer countryside. Princess Stephanie had her summer villa only twenty minutes from me, and Le Baux, with its tour busses and its five star restaurant, was twentyminutes in a different direction. Pilgrims to Peter Mayle stream along the highways, yearning to sip a Marc in his old bar.

I'm not making it sound nearly as wonderful as it is. But there was something distinctly odd about my town of Orgon. There were, in the midst of a region of unequaled cafes, restaurants, museums, markets, and upscale attractions, no signs of the prosperity in the other towns, and certainly no sign of chic. Only two or three drab cafes, two bakeries one of which was actually not good. A very small grocery. NO HOTEL. A nice mediatheque but the national government pays for libraries. Oddest of all, there were essentially no French people, and those that were still resident were totally committed to being the most hateful rightist Le Front anti-stranger kind of Provencal. Most of the residents are Arabs: either former colonials or recent emigres.

In other words, this one town was completely unlike the rest of Provence, the Auvergne, the Dordogne. A couple of days after I arrived I discovered why, when I drove toward St. Remy and came around a corner and saw the most colossal factory. OMYA! The biggest OMYA mine in the world. The limestone and chalk (and Roman tombs and whatever other ruins might get mixed up in it) that define Provence are here reduced to powder, trucked and trained away, leaving behind a hole in the earth that is almost beyond comprehension.

Omya first arrived in the fifties, when there was no other economy. They occasionally produce a ball field or some minimal gift for the town, but they also enlarge and enlarge and enlarge and move the roads around, and even neighborhoods as they want. Some residents fight against them, and some residents think OMYA provides jobs, but most seem to have moved away.

I'm not saying that Orgon could have been a more beautiful or gracious place without OMYA. I'm saying that Danby will probably want to consider whether, in fifty years, it wants to have continued to be part of the most beautiful area of Vermont, or whether it wants to make a choice that will eventually transform it into a place entirely and irreversibly different.