Call of the wild

The raging sea is a powerful lure to this craggy isle

April 12, 2009|Joe Ray, Globe Correspondent

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As opposed to the manicured mainland, which islanders refer to as "Le Continent" or just "the Other Side," the overriding sense here is this link to the primal, the wild - not comfortable but comforting - that lures people and keeps them coming back.

"It gets in your blood. It's a virus," says Didier Lemoine, who began coming to Belle-Île when his father got a job designing diving suits for Jacques Cousteau and his team here 50 years ago.

"I was 8 years old and told my father that I'd own a place here one day," Lemoine says on the deck of his home in the hamlet of Nanscol, "and I started coming by myself when I was 15."

Though Lemoine, who has lived around the world, held high-level jobs with the European Commission and is now on development committees for new airports in Rennes and Nantes, his passion has always been for Belle-Île.

"As soon as I could, I always came back," he says.

"There's history, gastronomy, flora and fauna, geology, architecture - what more could you want?" he asks. "It comes little by little, but if you know how to observe, you love it. If we pay attention to nature, she's extremely generous."

Back on the rocks with Tanguy, this generosity, this connection to land and sea, to the "sauvage" is as intense as the sun's reflection off the water.

"Those who talk about beauty are the ones who miss it," says Tanguy. "We don't talk about it because we live it."

Joe Ray can be reached at www.joe-ray.com.