ABSTRACT
I sit by V alaine Pond, fishing for words. It is one of the largest millponds here in eastern Brittany. Shaped roughly like a boomer ang, it spreads five acres from the mill dam around the elbow of the boomerang to the upstream end, clogged with tussocks, hemmed on one side by the oak grove where 1 sit, on the other by a sheep pasture. In winter, when the water table is high, the miller of Valaine gets three-quarters of his power from the pond. He uses a turbine to grind barley into livestock feed. Cannily, he taps the sunshine that drives the hydrological cycle. The sun will evaporate the water that runs over his dam into the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel twenty miies to the north, lifting it into the atmosphere to con dense into rain and drizzle back onto the watershed of Valaine Pond so that his turbine will keep turning. Inefficient though the system may be, the nationalized power company fears it enough to prohibit him from making and selling electricity.
