L’Hiver de l’Idiot
When you move to a country where you barely speak the language, you’re still fumbling your way through the culture, and you haven’t yet cracked the rhythm of the locals, you need to find ‘A Guy’—fast.
Someone who knows the shortcuts, the back doors, the rules nobody bothers to write down, and the rules everyone follows anyway.
Because if you don’t?
There will be pain. Confusion. Frustration. And money thrown at problems you didn’t even know were possible. But honestly, that’s how you learn here.
All it takes is one moment where you’re staring at your phone, ready to let someone have it… and you remember you don’t actually speak the language you’re about to get mad in.
They have a superpower I don’t. They speak the language I keep pretending I understand.
So you swallow the anger, nod politely, and take notes like you’re studying for an exam you didn’t know you were taking.
These are the important lessons. The ones that matter when someone hands you a devis (French for a quote) and a delivery window of “sometime in the spring”… and it’s September 10th right now.
It’s a lot like dating.
There are the pleasantries, you hope you can trust them, they seem nice enough… until you get to the restaurant and they’re screaming at the waiter because there’s gluten in a dish that’s somehow going to trigger their non-existent celiac condition.
Except here, your date takes a 30% deposit, hands you a contract in the French you’re still working on, and you cross your fingers you didn’t just sign up for a yearly maintenance agreement.
There’s the chimney guy, the wine guy, the car guy, and the guy who can look up at your thousand-year-old limestone ceiling and tell you whether it needs a support beam just by scratching it, tasting it, and letting out a burp.
And, inevitably, there’s the wood guy. The one person who stands between keeping your house warm and your electric bill from requiring a personal loan.
But after spending most of my life in Southern California and Florida, choosing a wood guy isn’t something I’d developed any instincts for. It’s more luck of the draw.
Naturally, I chose the wrong wood guy.
But to understand how I got there, you have to meet Florent.
Florent is the near-do-well son from the family that runs one of the local quarries. His father owns five quarry locations and a small empire of landscaping businesses. His younger son is his partner, steady and dependable, the one who probably shows up on time and does things the way his father taught him.
And then there is Florent.
The oldest.
The one who, by all traditional measures, should have been the heir apparent… but for reasons no one feels the need to explain, wasn’t.
Thinking back, that should have been my first hint.
Florent is one of those people who does not recognize his own behavior because he has spent his entire life living inside of it. What feels chaotic to the rest of us is simply normal to him. He is charming, funny, quick with a story, and carries himself with the kind of bon vivant looseness that suggests he has never once second-guessed a decision. It is impressive in its own way. Men like that can’t be taught; they just are.
And to be fair, if you have lived a little, and I have, you recognize the type. Maybe you see a few similarities. The adventure. The impulse. The confidence that things will sort themselves out one way or another. Maybe that was part of the reason I liked him.
He also speaks English, which for an American in France is like someone suddenly turning the subtitles back on. When you have spent over two years pretending you understand conversations you don’t, one clear sentence in English feels like the world just tilted back into place. You don’t realize how tightly you’ve been holding yourself, you unclench, you can be funny again with your words, not the bizarre physical comedy that happens when you open your mouth in French.
Florent delivered the stone himself. I’d met him once at the quarry when I placed the order, but this was the first real conversation we had. And within ten minutes he was telling me about Miami. He’d lived there for a year, and he talked about it like it was the greatest year of his life. All the distractions, the bright bells and whistles, the magnetic chaos that pulls a guy like Florent straight into the center of it. The clubs, the cars, the energy. He described Miami with the enthusiasm of someone who’d lived a full lifetime there, not just twelve months.
Somehow that rolled into the topic of driving in Miami. I mentioned I-95, the shootings, the madness, the constant feeling that the highway might try to kill you. Then I pointed out the difference in how Florida handles speed. Troopers there don’t treat the roads like crown jewels. They just want to keep traffic moving — unless some jagoff decides that “95” is the speed they should be weaving through traffic at rather than the route number.
That is, unless it’s the end of the month and the trooper has a quota to hit.
France is different. The local authorities barely bother. They let the machines handle it. The radars sit there quietly, twenty-four hours a day, building up the municipal coffers one unsuspecting driver at a time. Depending on the local authorities, they might be set to trigger at five KM over limit. Or, if the town needs to top off the coffers that month, just one. And you’re getting a polite little love letter from the Republic.
"Cher Monsier, that will be two points, sil vous plait."
That was when he told me, casually, “I used all twelve of my driving points.”
He didn’t say it with embarrassment or pride. More like a weather report.
I should have said nothing, but instinct took over and out came,
“Well that’s quite an accomplishment. You should put it on your commercial driver’s license résumé.”
He laughed. I laughed.
If I’d had the sense to resist the charm offensive, I would’ve seen every red flag waving in the wind. But at that moment, I wasn’t connecting the dots, I was eating them. This is what charm does. It lowers your BS detectors. Before long I was running with anything he was offering.
As the conversation continued, he asked how we were liking France. I told him a lot, but with the weather turning colder — and our stone house turning colder right along with it — I was going to have to figure out how to get some firewood for our two fireplaces. That’s when he said he had a friend. So when he recommended his friend as “the wood guy,” I said yes.
I didn’t hesitate for a second. Of course I didn’t. That one is on me.
The wood guy Florent recommended showed up unannounced, which should have been another warning sign. He was a big, heavy man, with the kind of broad, meaty paws you usually see on people who grew up hauling oxen in Burgundy, not the Loire Valley. He looked like the type who preferred velcro straps to laces, just so he wouldn’t have to get winded tying his shoes.
He rolled out of his dump truck, said a single “Ou,” and waited. I was still trying to figure out how he’d managed to squeeze that truck through the stone turrets at the entry to our driveway. Two months earlier I’d taken out half the right side of my SUV trying the same thing.
I told him I was planning to stack the wood inside the garage. He nodded, backed the truck up to the entry, climbed into the cab, and before I had any clue what was happening, the bed of the dump truck started to rise.
The next thing I knew, a tidal wave of loose wood came roaring out, crashing into a huge, awkward pile right across the opening of the garage.
I watched it pour in like someone was dumping a load of construction debris at a job site. When the truck finally lowered and the dust settled, I found myself standing inside the garage, staring across a four-foot-tall wall of split logs between me and the outside world.
I guess I’m climbing out, I thought.
He charged me ninety euros a stère. I had no idea if that was good or bad. How much was a stère compared to a cord? Hell, how much is a cord? Apparently a stère is one cubic meter of stacked wood, but at the time I thought it was just a fancy French word for “pile.” I paid him, he left, and that was that.
Then one night me and D went over to Pascal’s for apéros. It was cold out and I’d been freezing in the stone part of the house all day. By the time we left, I was layered up like an Idaho potato sack: long-sleeve T-shirt, a T-shirt over that, a sweater over that, and a coat. Pascal opened the door in a T-shirt and jeans like it was August.
His living room had to be seventy-five degrees.
I looked over at his wood stove. There was one log in there. One.
How the hell… ?
So I asked him how he got it so warm. He looked at me like he already suspected the answer before I even said it. I told him I’d bought wood that had been “cured for a year,” like I thought I was supposed to. And the way his expression changed, you would’ve thought I’d just confessed to sneaking into his chicken coop at night and stealing eggs.
Pascal gave me that slow, disappointed head shake. The kind reserved for children who absolutely should know better, and then the verdict came: “Non. Non. Non… bois doit être trois ans.”
Wood must be three years old.
Three.
Not one.
Not whatever Florent’s buddy sold me, still carrying last year’s sap. I had been sold the wet wood reserved for Americans. Moist disappointment. Firewood that hissed at me when I tossed a piece into the stove, like it was offended I expected it to burn.
Still reeling from confirming Pascal’s suspicion that I was woefully unprepared for life in rural France, I somehow muttered, “Where do I find three-year-old wood?” He smiled; the kind of smile you give a child who’s trying, and said he would call his guy.
A few days later, I heard a metal rattle, a slow clank, and then something that sounded like a depressed farm animal. That’s when I first met Patrick, the man who’s been delivering wood to this village longer than Florent has been ignoring driving laws.
He was driving a tractor that was probably built during Bill Clinton’s first term, and he drove it at its only speed: inevitable. Behind was a narrow cart stack perfectly with two rows of wood, a mix of split wood and whole logs. All the perfect width to fit in my wood stove perfectly.
He parked, climbed down without a hurry, and nodded at me like we were about to begin a solemn ritual. Then, in typical French fashion, he took off his cap and offered me a handshake.
I told him I was going to be storing it in the garage. He looked at the building, nodded once, and climbed back onto the tractor. Then he drove a few feet past the garage, eased it into reverse, and perfectly backed the cart straight inside like he’d done it a thousand times.
Without a word, he started stacking the wood. I was amazed. I told him he didn’t need to do that, that I’d take care of it. He just shook his head and said, “Non, moi aussi.”
We stacked in silence while his tractor ticked and cooled behind us.
When we finished, he gave one final nod and turned to leave. But something about the whole moment — the silence, the steadiness, the sheer competence — made me want to slow the world down a little. So I asked him if he wanted a coffee.
He said yes without hesitation.
Ten o’clock in the morning, cold outside, and he took the cup from Denise like it had been waiting for him.
We stood there in the courtyard, talking in the simple, easy way you do with people who don’t need to impress you. He told us about his sons, how long he’d lived in the village, how the woods he cuts from were his father’s before him. Just a salt-of-the-earth man who works hard, takes life as it comes, and doesn’t make a big show of any of it.
It wasn’t a long conversation, but it was a real one. The kind that stays with you. The kind that tells you you’re finally starting to meet the people who make this place what it is.
Then he set the cup down, nodded again, climbed onto the tractor, and rattled back down the driveway like a man returning to his normal rhythm.
The faint smell of diesel stayed behind, and so did something else, a little warmth that had nothing to do with the wood.
Year Two
This year, after the chimney guy cleaned both my chimney and Pascal’s, I told Pascal I needed to reload on firewood. I didn’t have Patrick’s number, but Pascal did, and a couple of days later I got a call from a French number I didn’t recognize. The voicemail was short, but once I replayed it, I knew it was Patrick.
A couple days later, I heard his tractor turn off the main road and begin its slow, familiar climb toward our house. I stepped outside feeling uncharacteristically confident. We had arranged everything in French over the phone, and I was ready to prove it wasn’t a fluke.
Patrick climbed down, nodded, and said a few opening phrases I understood.
So far, so good.
Then he slipped in one quick line of French I didn’t recognize, and my entire internal system collapsed. My brain went blank, my knees buckled, and I reverted instantly to caveman French: nodding, pointing, and saying “oui” like a bobblehead on a dashboard.
He didn’t seem bothered by it. He just smiled and got to work.
We stacked the wood side by side in silence, Patrick moving with the kind of practiced rhythm you only get after a lifetime of doing one thing well. At one point he started building the end of the stack in that criss-cross way only real wood people understand. Two pieces this way, two pieces that way. As he worked, he explained in French what he was doing.
I nodded like I understood. Of course. Naturally. The classic criss-cross end-brace technique.
I had no idea what he was doing.
I tried sounding competent. “Should I do the same thing on the other end?”
Patrick didn’t speak.
He just pointed at the stone wall the stack was leaning against, clearly strong enough without my help, and then kept working.
That was the moment I understood the truth: in this equation, I was the structural weakness.
When we finished stacking, he gave one final nod and turned to leave. But I stopped him, this time with a little more confidence, and asked how his sons were doing.
He smiled with pride and told me his youngest had gotten married, moved to Tours and was starting a family.
We had another espresso. No rush. No dictionary. Just two people trying to talk, succeeding enough to make it real.
Then he set the cup down, said “bon journée” climbed onto the tractor, and rattled back down the driveway like a man returning to his natural rhythm.
And when he drove away, leaving behind another perfect stack of dry, dignified wood, I realized something simple and quietly enormous.
He probably still thinks I’m an idiot.
One French Quirk: The Gospel of French Firewood
Here’s what I didn’t know:
France has a national classification system for firewood sellers. An official cahier des charges, sixteen pages long, created by ministries, forestry federations, ecological agencies, and probably a few bored engineers who needed to regulate something. Anything.
And honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
This is the same country that tells you what hours you’re legally allowed to mow your lawn.
Of course they have a firewood designation.
This manual includes, and I swear I’m not making this up:
- humidity requirements
- acceptable percentages of fungi
- proper log length tolerances
- species proportions if the pile is a blend
- rules for stacking
- rules for labeling
- rules for not labeling
- and strict legal protection of the official firewood logo
Meanwhile, my carte de séjour application has been floating in bureaucratic purgatory for months.I may not exist in the eyes of the French state… but my wood guy apparently has a national humidity obligation.
Only in France could the firewood be more regulated than the people.
And yet?
This system works.
Because it protects people from exactly what happened to me: getting bilked by a guy who probably thinks “seasoned wood” means “it saw a rainstorm once.”
Patrick probably doesn’t have the designation.
He has something better: honor, integrity, and reliability.
And out here, that’s the only certification that actually matters.
Until next time.
Thanks for subscribing and thanks for reading.
Paul
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