
Moliets-et-Maa is in Landes, one of five departments that
make up the province of Aquitaine.
Landes’ western edge is the Atlantic Ocean.
Stretching right to the sea are forests and
more forests of pine trees that were planted just over a century ago in an
effort to tame the shifting sands and swamps of the area.
Prior to the taming of the sands, the postal
carriers and the shepherds walked the land on stilts--the most efficient way to
traverse the swampy land.
Landes still
holds competitions requiring stiltwalkers to pick up something from the ground
without getting off the stilts.
Imagine.
Moliets sits in the trees right at the
edge of the ocean.

The roads between villages stretch on for long distances and
are bordered with bike and hiking trails and pine forests.
The pines are harvested and replanted
constantly so the road moves from one forest of tall trees to a sudden barren
patch of land.
Then farther on, what
would have been barren land is full of small pine trees.
And the cycle continues.
Amidst the trees are ferns--thick blankets of
fronds completely covering the ground at the base of the trees.
They’re an interesting contrast to the
towering spires—all growing in very symmetrical rows and spaces.
South from Moliets is a string of beach towns that fill up
in the summer and empty out in the winter, just like Moliets. When we arrived here, there were two
restaurants still open. On Armistice
Day, we had lunch at Chez Vincent, the last of them. Vincent and his crew had enjoyed a bit of
bubbly to celebrate the last meal for the season and thought a lobster would
add a festive touch to our photo. I
think the joke was actually on the lobster.
Now the road to the ocean is completely deserted but for the occasional
surfer, hiker, stroller. Most of the
apartment buildings are empty and there is a ghost-town-like quality to the
area. The town away from the beach continues
year-round with its tourist office, post office, boulangerie, tabac, etc., where
one can access the very basic services.
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Moliets sports the sixth-rated golf course in France.
Designed by Robert Trent Jones, Sr., the
fairways are nicely kept and present a challenge for the experienced
golfer.
The surrounding woods provide a
beautiful backdrop to two beautiful courses.
The golf course is always busy and we often
take the 10-minute walk over there for coffee and to use the driving
range.
Golf is a year-round activity and
unaffected by the calendar.
When we first arrived here, we noticed cars stopped in
unexpected places and people wandering around the ferns in the gulleys between
the road and the bike trail. They
carried plastic bags, straw bags, boxes—all wandering around with their heads
down. They were mushroom hunters. The French love their fungi. Pharmacists are trained to distinguish
between edible and less-edible fungi; and all but the most experienced mushroom
hunter would usually take advantage of that service or perhaps suffer the
consequences—illness or worse. At one
pharmacy I noticed a full-window poster with pictures of the good and bad
mushrooms for those days that the pharmacy is closed. I’d rather trust the person than the
poster.

These days we see duck blinds going up in the middle of
fields and far out in the swamps—loosely-formed boxes covered with a mish-mash
of branches looking as if they might collapse if a light breeze comes up and
surrounded by fake ducks.
Just as we
heard in the Vaucluse, one day we began to hear shots fired in the woods and
saw the occasional pack of dogs crossing the road followed closely by
hunters.
I haven’t seen any deer or
moose tied to fenders so presume they’re hunting fowl.
Partridge?
Pheasant?
Certainly geese and
ducks—the non-domesticated kind.
Nearly
daily we pass a farm raising geese for the regional foie gras (no translation
necessary, I presume).
They have free
run of a large field and are joined by many mallards, presumably freeloaders,
that should stay put at this time of year if they know what’s good for
them.


In Hossegar and Capbreton, the largest towns to the south of
Moliets, oysters are raised in what they call le Lac (lake), actually a sea-fed
bay, which experiences the daily tides.
When the tide is out, the oyster bags are visible on the piers, and the
oyster farmers collect them or turn them to ensure good circulation of
water.
Also at low tide, the bay enjoys
a variety of sea and other water birds—great blue herons, snowy herons,
cormorants, and the ubiquitous sea gull.
On the mudflats, fishermen dig for worms.
We go to Hossegar (pronounced hoos-a-gore) and Capbreton for
all our necessary services—supermarket, cobbler, lunch. We have a favorite restaurant along the water
in Capbreton where the food is good and the proprietor is friendly. A new supermarket recently opened up
(hyper-marché)
where we can buy pretty much anything we want.
At this time of year, the weekly markets are skimpy and not worth
exploring—often consisting of one vehicle with six or seven boxes of root
vegetables and little else. The
distances between towns are littered with rond-points (roundabouts), and there
are no “straight shots” we might prefer.
There are, in fact, nineteen rond-points between our apartment and the
hyper-marché
in Capbreton. That’s a bunch of
rond-points to maneuver for a package of toilet paper or bottled water, so we
plan carefully. In the summer with all
the towns full of summer visitors, that drive must be maniacal.
Landes is geographically very different from anywhere else
in France. Like other areas, it has its medieval
churches, its tastefully-decorated rond-points, its chateaux, its friendly
people, bullfighting rings, and thermal spas.
What makes Landes different is the interior of the area--sparsely
populated but for the trees—and the ferns.
Sometimes, however, sparse is magical.
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