A translation by Randolph Burks of Coup de vent plein nord, from Nouvelles du monde [Short Stories from the World], by Michel Serres (pp. 31-38).
Gale from Due North The real Brittany reveals itself during the winter. Walking around Belle-Ile during the end of December, following the cross-shaped Crozon peninsula's dizzying cliffs or Finistère-Nord's rias, with one's back to breeze or facing the gusts, through flashes of sun and sudden lulls, immerses one in the bittersweet beginnings of the world. Through the perennial washing caused by the interfacial love that the sea makes to the rock and sand, the strand uncovers emergence and engulfs the death of the living. On a beautiful morning at the very beginning of January I had just returned from Le Palais to Quiberon by one of the dawn boats – the real Brittany reveals itself from the water, – when while walking I chanced upon the peninsula's tiny airport. I ordered some buttered bread and coffee at the bar, where, at a table cluttered with bottles of beer, four old vets with caps tilted on the backs of their heads and cigarette butts perched on their ears were playing cards while waiting for the fog to lift. From the salty words coming out of their mouths, I understood that they were former French Navy. “Long live the navy, sir,” I said as I approached, and I rattled off the names of my former vessels as well as two or three service records. After a few slaps on the back, the gentlemen had me sit amid the nautical fraternity. I bought drinks all around before diving head first into the conversation centering, as of old, recently and tomorrow, on our mother, the sea. Such a convivial invitation isn't paid for merely in bottles of beer but also in witticisms and stories. Unlike me, all these strapping men came from the Naval Air Forces and told stories of master strokes in which waves and gusts, seacraft and aircraft, torn parachutes and ends of landing decks were involved. My turn comes. I ask them to forgive me for leaving aircraft carriers but, out of courtesy, I will have to move away from surface ships to lighter wings. – Go on, son. We're listening. So I adopt a high tone, as must be done in front of such an audience. “I no longer know what circumstance had deposited me in the airport, as small as this one, of a city right in the middle of Montana on an ominous November morning with the obligation to depart again due south; the famous big sky was displaying a more than foul mood. It is said thereabouts that only a handful of barbed wire fences, put up here and there to guard the heifers, protect the yards and houses from the icy tornados streaming down from the North Pole. In spite of the gale warning, the pilot, grinning and daredevilish, has the five or six of us board a battered old crate the size of a car from the 1950s, chewing gum and rolling his shoulders like a cowboy from that still close era, from which the industrialists drew so many films and which, precisely there and in truth, only lasted six months amid the despair and the alcohol. He shouts in the hangar that we're going to have some good fun. Takeoff into the tempest, turn and course is set toward Wyoming.” “A hundred meters up, everyone understands what kind of leisure activity we'll be indulging in. All the rage and turbulence to be found in the squalls of the Canadian Shield were given us by the wind, a tailwind, from the outset. The plane slips, dives, pitches, falls in the air pockets; we're shaken in the cabin by the tornado like six dice in a cup. Are we going to roll on the ground? Who will win the jackpot?”