Mountain Radio: les Jeunes.

Wednesday—achingly soft shimmering autumnal day—Radio la Bobine hightails it to the mountains.

My radio buddy Agnès and I drive an hour and a half south down twisty backroads across high empty valleys surveilled by ruined chateaux on limestone crags. Our destination: a Scout Camp in an oak forest, where we’re recording our weekly broadcast. Three independent radio stations are holding a week-long seminar for high school kids, funded by regional government, teaching them how to set up portable stations, interview, edit, broadcast. On the final day, they’ll put together their own program, which Radio la Bobine will broadcast. Twenty-two kids. Most of them are from two exquisite jewel-box villages in the high hill-country of the Drôme Provençale, famous for olive oil and New Age hippies. There’s a handful from our hometown of Romans sur Isère—Tésnime, Marouan, Malik. Tésnime, thirteen years old, serious, poised, with shoulder-length black ringlets, is a boxing champion who travels Europe for tournaments.

The Drome Provençale kids are blond, blue-eyed back-packer types, kids whose parents might have left big-city jobs to live in a yurt and make goats cheese; the Romans kids--from North African families living in the ring-road projects—are urban chic in immaculate white track suits, gold chains, the girls watchful, the boys boisterous, with a sweet swagger, blasting Arabic music and hip-hop in playful counterpoint to the counsellors’ high-minded France Culture backdrop of Argentine tango.

For some of the Provençale kids, it’s their second year of Radio Camp. A few tell us they’re keen to record and broadcast their own music and reportages, but most say it’s a chance to make friends with kids from different backgrounds, or to gain a little independence--learn how to work as a collective, cook their own meals, build a fire. Democracy is a word you hear a lot from Joseph, a counsellor from Nyons. There’s no hierarchy here, he says, everybody signs up for their turns on the work crew, sure there’ve been issues, some kids are more mature than others, we discourage them from playing on their phones, besides there’s no reception.

Friday night there’ll be a boume—a party. What are they looking forward to? Dancing, say the girls. Candy, says a Polish boy called Leo with thick blond hair in a sugar bowl cut. Everybody giggles, looks away. 

“For the first few days we stuck in our own groups,” says a girl from Dieulefit. “And then last night we all became one group.” The others, both students and counsellors, agree. Last night suddenly they became one.

On my drive home, after dropping off Agnès, I listen to “Les Pieds sur Terre” on France Culture. It’s a program about internet cons—a victim of identity theft tells her story, along with a woman who quits her job and hometown for a man she’s met online only to discover it’s her female roommate…

Why do I love radio so much? It’s a newish passion for me, a Covid-born passion, a country person passion. It’s a message in a bottle, voices in the dark, a story told around a campfire, not of gods and warriors but modern-day wayfarers, strivers, underdogs, hucksters and their prey.

Next week Tésnime and her friends will come into Radio la Bobine and play us their broadcast, tell us what it was like sleeping in unheated dormitories in the mountains, learning to cook couscous for thirty people, recording their stories and jokes and songs in a studio the size of a portacabin, and that’s how the spark gets passed along...