The Last Dinner at the Château

 The Last Dinner at the Château

There is something different about the last dinner of a trip.

No one necessarily announces it. We still take our seats, glasses are filled, plates arrive, and conversations tumble over one another exactly as they have all week. But underneath it is the knowledge that this particular little community, created almost accidentally around a table in a Château in France, is about to scatter.

Our final dinner began appropriately enough with wine.

“White?”

“Hell, yeah.”

Someone had decided it was simply too hot for red. Someone else wondered whether drinking wine had been keeping them awake. Water was passed. Wine was poured. Glasses migrated around the table.

And almost immediately, conversation turned to the practical realities of leaving.

Suitcases.

Camera bags.

Sling bags.

Backs strained from carrying too much equipment.

AirTags.

Where exactly those AirTags had been placed.

And the uncomfortable realization that knowing where your suitcase is does not necessarily help very much if the suitcase happens to be somewhere you are not.

It was wonderfully ordinary.

After spending our days photographing ancient stone, French villages, churches, landscapes, markets, forests and every intriguing corner of the Château, here we were discussing luggage.

Someone had two more days of “legging it” before finally getting home. Another person was trying to determine what could be squeezed into a camera bag. There was talk of separating AirTags and cards among bags, the sort of travel wisdom that comes from accumulated experience rather than anything printed in a guidebook.

Then, as dinner conversations do, the subject simply wandered away.

Someone noticed the chandelier.

“Oh gosh, what a beautiful chandelier.”

That immediately led to candles.

Candleholders at home.

Candles that should actually be purchased for all those candleholders.

Old-fashioned drip candles.

The multicolored ones we remembered from decades ago.

Someone mentioned meditation by candlelight, which opened another little conversational door into breathing exercises, walking meditation and the various ways people have experimented with simply becoming still.

And then someone said something about Bryce.

Bryce Canyon.

Another place someone loved. Another place someone wanted to visit.

Travel creates more travel.

You come to France and somehow leave wanting to see Utah.

Then Dinner Arrived

The conversation quieted for just a moment when the plates began appearing.

“Oh, lovely.”

“The green beans are great.”

“Oh my goodness.”

There was cabbage, potatoes and beautifully prepared vegetables, but the centerpiece was duck.

Really good duck.

Possibly, according to one person at the table, the best duck they had ever eaten.

Another person listened to everyone praising it for a while before finally asking the wonderfully basic question:

“What are we eating?”

“Duck.”

“Oh.”

That made me laugh.

The vegetables deserved attention too. The cabbage had a slight sweetness. The potatoes seemed seasoned differently from everything else on the plate. The green beans had their own seasoning and a little bite. Each element seemed to have been treated individually rather than simply placed alongside the duck.

It was exactly the kind of food I had come to appreciate during the week. Not unnecessarily complicated. Thoughtful, deeply flavored and made to be eaten slowly around a table.

Then the glasses went up.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“To a wonderful week.”

“Great week.”

More glasses lifted.

More cheers traveled around the table.

And for a few seconds, everyone seemed to understand exactly what we were celebrating.

Not merely dinner.

The week.

The Stories We Tell Around a Table

Perhaps because it was our last evening, the stories became longer.

One conversation moved into family photographs and ancestry. An old photograph appeared and immediately drew everyone closer.

“Your grandmother was beautiful.”

“Oh, wow.”

“She is beautiful.”

There was discussion about who she was, where the photograph might eventually go and even the possibility of adding a small plaque so that someone looking at it many years from now would know something about the woman staring back at them.

I loved that.

We had spent a week photographing things precisely because we wanted to remember them. Yet here was an old photograph reminding us that someday our photographs might become mysteries too.

Who was she?

Where was this?

Why was this important?

Photography preserves an image beautifully. It does not always preserve the story unless someone takes the time to write it down.

That thought stayed with me.

Then the table moved on again.

Coyotes.

Of course.

One of the wonderful things about our dinners was that there was absolutely no requirement for one subject to have anything whatsoever to do with the next.

A story began about coyotes on ranch land after heavy rains. The grasses grew, which increased the mice, which brought more coyotes.

They were extraordinarily intelligent.

The storyteller described riding with a rifle and becoming convinced that the coyotes somehow knew when he was carrying it. Perhaps they could smell gun oil or gunpowder. Perhaps they simply understood human behavior better than we give them credit for.

He described coming over a rise with the wind in his face and surprising a coyote. He told us about coyotes moving remarkably close to horses and about those fleeting movements caught from the corner of an eye.

Others joined in.

Coyotes in California.

Coyotes in Wisconsin.

Coyotes in Arizona.

Someone described walking a dog early in the morning and suddenly hearing them.

That unmistakable chorus.

Yipping.

Calling.

Whooping.

A sound that can make it seem as though there are far more coyotes out there than you can actually see.

Someone even mentioned the anti-coyote protective gear people now put on small dogs.

And there we were, sitting at a centuries-old Château in rural France, eating duck and discussing coyotes in the American West.

Coffee With a Little Something Extra

Another ranch story followed.

An early morning ride had begun around dawn while cattle were being moved from higher country to lower country. Along the way were three tents, including an enormous one in the middle.

The campers called them over.

“Come on down. Sit down. Have a cup of coffee.”

Coffee at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning sounded reasonable.

Until the coffee arrived.

The storyteller still wasn’t entirely certain how much whiskey had been in it.

Then someone opened the enormous middle tent.

Liquor.

Beer.

Wine.

Cases of it.

Four people were apparently planning to stay for a week with enough alcohol to last considerably longer.

The table erupted.

And another story was born.

The Wonderful Disorder of a Last Dinner

 Afterward, I realized how impossible it would be to explain this dinner simply by listing the subjects.

Wine.

AirTags.

Suitcases.

Camera bags.

Chandeliers.

Candles.

Meditation.

Bryce Canyon.

Family photographs.

Grandmothers.

Duck.

Coyotes.

Horses.

Ranches.

Whiskey in morning coffee.

Cabbage.

Green beans.

Potatoes.

Photography.

Travel.

None of it belongs together.

And yet, around that table, it absolutely did.

That is what conversation sounds like when people have become comfortable with one another.

Nobody needs an agenda.

One person’s sentence triggers someone else’s memory. A memory becomes a story. A story reminds someone of a place. A place reminds someone of something that happened thirty years ago.

Meanwhile, someone needs the water.

Someone wants more wine.

Someone asks for pepper.

Someone takes another bite of duck.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, someone realizes:

This is our last dinner.

One More Photograph

At one point Beth said:

“After dinner, I want to do a book photo.”

Of course we did.

After a week of photographing the Château and the countryside around it, I too was still thinking about one more photograph.

There is always one more.

One more room.

One more chandelier.

One more arrangement on a table.

One more patch of evening light.

One more story that deserves a picture.

But sitting there that night, I realized that some of the most important things I would take home from Château Marouatte could never really be photographed.

The sound of glasses touching.

Someone laughing from the other end of the table.

The interruption of “pass the water.”

The moment an old family photograph gets passed from hand to hand.

The person who suddenly realizes we have been eating duck.

The coyote story that becomes a ranch story that becomes a whiskey-at-six-in-the-morning story.

And the chorus that came when the glasses were raised:

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“To a wonderful week.”

It really had been.

Tomorrow there would be bags to pack, trains to catch, photographs to organize and journeys home to begin.

But tonight we were still here.

Around the long table.

Inside this remarkable old Château.

Eating duck.

Drinking wine.

Telling stories.

And stretching our final dinner just a little bit longer.

Because none of us seemed quite ready for the week to end.