There
always has to be a first day…
Arrived in
Clermont-Ferrand yesterday. Took the 7am
train from Paris, which meant that I got up at 5 am… which wasn’t the easiest
thing in the world as, go figure, I came down with a super bad cold on Tuesday
and felt like $#it on Wednesday. So had
to do packing and last minute prep while not in very good shape… And the night
I spent with chills and waking up every fifteen minutes… Why is Murphy’s Law
always so reliable and inevitable?
I had a
HUGE suitcase filled with all the cords for the project, so I took a taxi. Slept all the way on the train. Went directly from the train station to the
Roger Quilliot Art Museum (musée d’art Roger-Quilliot), where Nathalie Roux,
the director, met me and we discussed the installation I will be doing there
next week.
I had a
chance to walk around the old city center, which is perfectly charming and as
many uncountable times that I’ve been to Clermont-Ferrand on the train, I have
never seen it. Well worth another longer
visit.
Edline
(BIANCO, the artist with whom I am doing the installation), who arrived in
Mont-Dore on Weds evening, drove over and we did some supply shopping including
groceries and then headed to the little house we rented. I made a stew, so we would have something to
eat for a few days, without having to prepare meals every night. We walked up to the falls where we will be
installing, to see it again and get the mental process going.
Here are photos of the house and various parts of Vortex Man that awaited me on my arrival :
what greeted me when I arrived in my room
view from my bedroom window
vortex man's torso
We had a little session of painting in the dining room... paintingVortex Man red :
Then we
drove around town getting bearings for a wifi signal, so that I can start
blogging.
A good
night’s sleep and we went at it full force this morning, which meant having to
climb up to the top of the falls (probably about 100 feet high) (okay, there is
a road leading up the back way, we didn’t have to climb up the cliff.
At the top
(and the 3D photos show the precipice better than the 2D ones), we installed a
pulley tied around a tree and threw 20 metters (65ft) of cord over the
edge. Yes, I made a harness from my
cords and tied myself to a tree, so there was no chance of me following the
package of cord and half-filled milked bottles we used for weight.
So, we
headed back down to recover the end of the line only to discover that we had sent
only enough line over to not even reach half-way down the cliff. Ugh!
Pourtant, the tourist office had told us that the falls were listed as
being about 35 feet (10m) high… We were
a bit doubtful at the time and estimated it to be about the 20m we had planned
for with out rope. Turns out it
something much more like 30m (100ft).
So, that
was a good time to stop to have lunch.
It was already 14h. So a quick
ham sandwich with some local Cantal cheese and a couple errands in town,
including getting the Tourist Office to print us a DANGER sign to put on the
ropes at the top of the cliff to discourage people from climbing on them or
using them to approach the edge. They
weren’t designed for human weight.
Then we
went back up in the afternoon, pulled the first attempt back up… doubled the
amount of rope, retied a harness around me and through the weighted ends of the
rope back over the edge. Felt good,
because on tugging the cord, it felt slack.
Without being able to see the bottom of the falls, we assumed that it
had hit bottom. Luckily, when we got there
our sack of string ends, bobbins, and ballast, was floating in the little pool
just to the left side of where the cascade was hammering down. So, I rocked jumped across the stream, which
wasn’t the easiest thing to do as some of the rocks were slick as snot and you
couldn’t tells which ones were until you stepped on them. My left foot went in pretty early in the adventure
and my right one went in just before coming back. Luckily, I was wearing water resistant hiking
boots, so my socks didn’t even get damp.
Once on the other side, I used a long stick to fish a part of the string
out from under mists and showering down water.
Then just rocked jumped my way back to the other shore, not having
suffered any serious damage.
We then
used one of the ladders that the city provided to attach a line and another
pulley on one big tree up on the right side of the falls and then I just
climbed up a tree on the left side and did the same. At almost 47 years of age, I felt just like I
did when I was 10 and climbed a tree.
How liberating. How fun.
By that
time it was nearly 20h, so we went back to the house and I prepared the photos
and am writing the text, so that later we can go to the hotspot and blog.
Now it’s
time for dinner of stew and a great red wine (Cairanne) that was good last
night and even better tonight.
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