OR · P06

What They Could Not Read

Somewhere in this canton there is a box, and in the box there is a piece of paper from 1448.

It is real. It has a reference — CH AEV, AC Ayent, Ay 15 — and it concerns a channel then called the Bisse-Neuf, which is now the Grand-Bisse d'Ayent. It is one of thousands of such documents: charters, water judgements, pasture rights, notarial acts, terriers, parish registers. The valley has been writing its own arrangements down for the better part of eight hundred years, and keeping them.

Here is the thing about that paper.

Almost nobody who has ever lived in that commune could read it.

The hand

It is not a matter of literacy. It is Latin, or an early form of the local language, written in a professional hand of its period by a notary trained to write that way, using abbreviations that were obvious to other notaries and to nobody else. Reading it is a skill — a real one, taught at university, held by a small number of people, most of whom are in Sion or Lausanne or Geneva.

So the commune had its own law, in a box, in a language it could not read, in handwriting it could not decipher.

That is not a metaphor for anything. It is a plain description of the ordinary condition of a self-governing community for most of its history.

And the alternative was no better. At Ausserberg the water rights were kept on three sets of carved wooden tokens: one recording who held what, one distributing the maintenance work and its compensation, one fixing how much water each member was owed against the meadows they held. A property register, a labour roster and a water right, hanging on a wall.

It is a beautiful system. It also has one property that nobody usually mentions: you cannot consult it unless you are standing next to it. Take the tokens off the wall and the community loses its own accounts. There is no copy. There is no index. There is nowhere to look it up from anywhere else.

The bend in the river

Then there is the language.

There is a point on the Rhône, near Sierre and Salgesch, where French stops and German begins. It is not a border. There is no customs post, no different currency, no different law. It is simply a place where the tongue changes, and it has been there for a very long time.

The water does not change at that line. The Raspille runs down to it. Channels serve slopes on both sides. Herds cross it. Consortages have members on either bank, and disputes have run across it for centuries.

Every document about any of this was written in whichever language the writer happened to hold.

So the record of one water system exists in two halves, and for most of its history a person in one half could not read the other half's account of the same channel, the same year and the same argument. Not because anybody was hiding anything. Because translating a technical document is expensive, and slow, and requires finding somebody who can do it, and there was always something more urgent.

The mountain in July

The rota that shares the water out — who gets the flow, and when — has to be set before the season.

The way it was set was this. In summer, men who had spent their lives looking at that mountain looked at it again, and estimated how much snow was still up there and how long it would run for, and then argued about it. The argument was often bad-tempered and sometimes it was wrong, and when it was wrong somebody's hay failed.

That was not incompetence. Those men were extremely good at looking at mountains. It was simply the only instrument available: memory, eyesight, and other people's memories of other years.

The same applies to everything that arrived from outside. When a disease turned up in the vines that had not been in this valley before, the people who met it first had nothing to compare it to. Somewhere else in Europe, somebody had seen it, knew what it was, and knew what to do. There was no path between those two facts.

What changed

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write a paragraph that sounds like contempt, and I do not feel any.

Nothing in this essay is a deficiency of the people. They wrote their law down, which most communities did not. They kept it for eight hundred years, which almost nobody did. They built a water system that still functions, governed it by rota, and enforced it against their own neighbours. The skill was never missing.

What was missing was reach. Reach into their own archive, which existed and was closed to them. Reach across a river, into a language spoken forty minutes away. Reach into the record of every other valley that had already met the thing they were meeting for the first time. Reach into next month.

All four of those limits have gone.

They went recently. They went quickly. And not one of them went because the people here got better at anything.

That is what the rest of this is about.