Street (Bluff Trail) Art: Cancale

 

Pointe du Grouin, Cancale, Bretagne

Björn Gottschall hauls a six-octave piano out to different points along coastal Bretagne, playing for his own inspiration, but also for people strolling along the rocky cliffs overlooking La Manche.

Ordinarily, my feeling is that art installations set against nature are a bit absurd. How is a stack of flat rocks or sticks arranged as a teepee ever going to compete what time and geologic processes perfected over thousands or millions of years?

The accompanist--and the competition.

But because it's ephemeral, music can work as an exception, provided that the musician has both talent and good taste. Gottschall seemed to have both, and his playing style complemented the surroundings rather drawing attention to himself.

Nature itself also provides an exception in France, since except for a few areas where the land and sea meet in high, inaccessible cliffs, there seems to be little of it. There is no outdoor place I've yet found where you can feel anything like the solitude and quiet of a real wilderness or even a near-wilderness. People seemed to be everywhere all the time in coastal Bretagne, and every meadow, rock outcropping, beach and hilltop had at least a snack shack, if not a fully blown restaurant or bistrot.

These comforts are lovely to have for an afternoon out, and mostly still allow you appreciate the beauty of their natural surroundings. But it's still not nature in the same way that I've experienced along the Pacific coast of northern California and Oregon, or even parts of the Bay Area foothills--to say nothing of the Sierras or the Canadian Rockies, where a five minute hike from a road or parking area can seem to take you back to a primeval past. On every high speed rail line I've taken over here, a glimpse out the window revealed either towns or seemingly endless farming and pasture land, but very few forests or prairies--reminding you that France (and maybe most of Europe, with perhaps a few exceptions high in the Alps) has been under near-constant agricultural and industrial development for at least three millennia. There is still a lot of rural landscape, but agriculture is not nature, and it certainly is not wild.

Of what little nature there is left in France, there is one element I can do without: the giant bolt-cutter critters that swarm all over Cancale. Hate those things.

Some of Cancale's pesky wildlife.