Wind, Wine, and Whaling Line

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions...

…at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings...

– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I

There is a sense in the air, rooted not in doomerism but pattern recognition, that the next thing that happens could be the last of its kind before things unravel. The next vacation, grocery run, big storm, bad headline. We know that the underlying things — planes, supply chains, power grids, nations — are unlikely to fall apart suddenly. We do not want this to happen. We just know how life can go. It's happened to many already, to be clear. The harpoon can fly and wrap the whale-line around many ankles, unconcerned with who “deserves” to be taken overboard. The observant mind will try, consciously or not, to prepare itself.

As something of a silver lining, this knowledge imbues some activities that we “do anyway” with a feeling of abandon. Briefly freed, aware that the trip is really happening — the flight is in the air, it’s out of your hands — there’s a weightlessness: the noon sunlight in Paris on the July Column’s gold winged figure, and the salty bleached-white gelato shops on the southern coast. It’s a psychological form of Lahaina noon, where on one day in May, at certain latitudes, no shadows are cast; the world looks like an unfinished video game. What’s important stands out; the underlying currents are clear. Seeing things as they usually aren’t, you glimpse them as they are.

In July 1789, all around France, the harpoon flew. Even now, that fact follows one around. You walk down a wide avenue shaded with blocky evergreens; it’s named not for a king or saint but for like, “liberty” or “brotherhood.” At the Chartreuse distillery near Lyon you learn that the monks who brew the drink were kicked out in 1800; the new republic had little love for the clergy. Inside the pope's palace at Avignon, beheaded marble statuettes line tall archways; in the square just outside, the tour guide explains that where now we have ze carousel, we used to have ze…chopping heads device.

Weeks where decades happened, in other words. The whale line went from slack to taut to wild, striking the deck, leaving marks. Historians debate many things about the Revolution but one thing they don’t is that in the late 1780s, weather-induced crop failures sent the price of bread soaring.

II

One of the better words in the French language: terroir. In seven letters it captures “what the land gave to a crop, how they stay connected, flavorwise and historywise.” Wine grapes and cocoa beans are the main use cases but there are many, including merroir for oysters. A fingerprint is left by geology, soil, weather, and other things; the way people treated the land affects many of them.

The order of monks that brews Chartreuse uses a secret recipe with 130 ingredients, mostly drawn from the local surroundings. A bottle of the stuff is harder to find than it used to be because in 2023, amid rising demand, the monks were asked by some of their main buyers to increase production, and politely replied non.

In 2033 the title of "longest rail tunnel in the world" will change hands. France and Italy will take it from the Swiss. A high-speed line between Lyon and Turin will take passengers through the Alps for 57.5 kilometers (36 miles), beating the record holder in Switzerland by a stone’s throw (0.4 km). The line will be a clear win for safety and the environment — if, that is, we assume “commerce and travel will continue.” But the monks do not assume that, and they walk the walk.

If you were the head of the tunnel project, and the monks asked you to reroute the line further away from them at taxpayer expense, so as not to disturb the land they've cultivated for a thousand years, and your supervisor ordered you to say no and explain why not, it’s unclear what you might tell these monks that would be the least bit convincing. You’d probably explain nothing.

Terroir is the whale-line. Everything we do, every relationship and institution and “human” affair, rests on land and what we do with it. Diseases, invasive species, infrastructure projects, resource distribution; land questions lead to political questions and back again. What parts of the land belong where, to whom, belong at all? And so, following from our growing appetites and complexity, our “political” debates (e.g. monks vs. train) grow thornier and weightier. As we both treat the land worse and get worse at agreeing on basic truths, the whale-line gets more tangled, crowded, and dicey. The AMOC, which keeps much of France warm, is weakening. I recently saw one of those signs that begins “In this house we believe,” but the rest of the text was covered by overgrown plants.

We used to ask questions like “where should we fish today” and many answers were fine. Now such questions are easily the tip of some iceberg of import and morality. When is eating animals okay, given factory farming? What are the right screentime limits for my child? Should e-bikes be allowed on public bike trails? They run the gamut. And there’s a split: the simple answer we may seek and “make true” with argument, and the one that, based on how land and bodies work, is truest, healthiest.

We can steer the answers, being the "steward" species, but with limits, meaning many people (even nations) can simply share a wrong answer. Whale lines can be laid poorly and they can be unforgiving. The more a culture tries to flee the iron demands of land — and this includes flora, fauna, the human body, the brain — the more those demands are “pulled back” like a slingshot. Wine with good terroir becomes scarce and people seek it out more. The mystique of unplugging, touching grass, “returning to land,” gains necessity and urgency within us. The slingshot eventually snaps back; the land’s demands and physical constraints put their feet down. A space may open here for a new answer to be forged, as in a revolution; but the people, frantic and desperate by now, are likely to forge a hasty one with a new rot at the core.

III

Going south on the Rhône river from Lyon to Avignon, you pass 12 locks, the water level descending by dozens of feet each time.

The boat reaches a mechanized gate. On a river cruise ship of roughly 200 passengers, it may have to squeeze between the gate’s concrete walls with inches of clearance on either side. The crewmember steering the ship has to buy a bottle of rum for his colleagues if he bumps.

It’s early evening, just before one such descent near a city called Valence, and the main indoor lounge is full. Tea is being served. The sun shines, glasses clink, waiters dart. A buzz of merriment holds steady. The boat waits for a vague number of minutes.

We and the water level begin to lower – first almost imperceptibly, then at a steady clip, a few inches per second. The room darkens until the indoor lights turn on. Soon, only concrete walls are visible in the windows. The merry hum lightly intensifies. At the bottom, another pause.

At the end of the descent, I imagine us continuing. It feels like we will. Down into the ground, down to the Earth's core, down to Hell, down past it, down forever. Could I see us deserving it? I could see us not noticing for a long time.

Finally the gate opens and we pass through into intense sun. Errant streams of water from the gate's undercarriage plop into wine glasses left on the outer deck.

IV

Peaking in spring, happening all year, a high-pressure system may form in the Bay of Biscay to France's west and a low-pressure system may form in the Gulf of Genoa to the south. When both happen, the air will want to go southeast. A chunk will be funneled between the Alps and the Massif Central, and a cold, dry wind will barrel through the Rhône River Valley: the mistral. It has a reputation like the Santa Ana winds in California, madness-inducing. In 2023 a French AI company called Hugging Face, known for indexing and ranking models, released its own open-source model called Mistral.

Shortly before the start of the trip, I called a family member, who at one point asked: if you had the power to leave AI be or smite it out of existence, which would you do? I said “smite” with a conviction and lack of hesitation I was not expecting from myself. But if we brought AI back with less corrupted terroir — if it used renewable energy, if people didn’t make so much godforsaken slop with it — it could have a place. Tomatoes were foreign to Europe; should we smite them from French and Italian food because they don’t belong? I and most others would say no. Among the top three meals I had in France was a pizza in Uzès. At that meal we got loud debating what counts as a “suburb.” The people nearby wanted to smite us, I think.

Where’s the line? How does one know the “correct answers” about terroir, the right way to lay the whale line? When does something move from “math on circuits” to “lightweight local model” to “irredeemable AI slop?” Everything we touch has terroir; everything we do relies on land.

It's challenging, and we have made it more so, but “how do we do it?” is the wrong question for now. It can be tackled, if with difficulty; the answer is often obscured, yet we know a bad one when we see it. The more pressing question is the one that stops us from answering the former at all. How do we stop letting the wrong people — Ahabs who have finally lost their marbles, wannabe-Ahabs in polo shirts — lay all the whale-lines themselves, and stop us from re-laying them better? The task and opportunity to wrest those decisions away from them, taking them into our own hands before the line pulls us overboard, may have passed us by in some ways; it will appear again in bigger and smaller ones.