Somewhere between blood and bone.

On my first day in France, I arrived in Toulouse, in the Southwest region of the country, and took a stroll along the Garonne River. During my walk, I did not encounter anyone. There was no one to practice my “bonjours” and “au revoirs” with. There was no one for me to ask “Where is the best restaurant” in my broken French. I began to worry whether I was on the right side of the river. Perhaps everyone was on the other side, I thought. Perhaps this side was…nowhere. On the other side, one might see what should be seen in Toulouse. On the other side, one might find the secrets of this city. On the other side, there was someone to show me the way, should I become lost.

I was struck, then, by the brouillard, the fog, of being a visitor in a new town, country, or region. One can read as much as one wishes before they travel to deduce where to eat, what to say, or how to act. But it takes a skilled debrouillard, as they say in France, to quickly make sense of any new place or experience—the food, the roads, the language, the subtle manner with which one person regards another. A debrouillard, in essence, can take whatever tools (re: hammer, nail, screwdriver, knife, fork, knowledge, intuition) they have at hand and get the most out of whatever lies around them (or, I’d argue, inside them).

I’m quite liberally stretching the meaning of debrouillard of course. In strict dictionary terms, debrouillard, the verb means, literally, to defog. As a noun, it refers to a resourceful person, one who manages just fine in any circumstance, one who can “stand on her own two feet,” if you will. And in French restaurants, a debrouillard refers to a cook (or, in some cases, a dishwasher) who can spin something out of a ridiculous amount of nothing.

Anthony Bourdain describes la debrouillardise in his book Nasty Bits: “Every kitchen has one evil genius who’s tolerated—someone you turn to when all else fails—a rule breaker, a scamp who’s willing to make a hard and sometimes unlovely decision for expediency. There’s actually a name for this person—the débrouillard, the person who gets you out of a jam.

When you’re really in trouble—say you’ve run out of every prepared hors d’oeuvre during a huge corporate cocktail party—the débrouillard will know about the case of minipizzas with frost damage that is hidden in a corner of the freezer and will be willing to go out on a limb and make something edible out of them. If you decide to go with your débrouillard and he can pull it off, everyone shares in the satisfaction of having been able to collectively dodge the bullet.”

Bourdain makes debrouillards sound like the last, last, last chance Texaco. I, on the other hand, hold debrouillards in great regard. When I am travelling, when I begin a new job, when I encounter a new idea or task or person, I must always summon my inner debrouillard. I like to think of la debrouillard not just as a noun or adjective, but as a philosophical state of mind that one consciously chooses to employ, sometimes out of necessity, but sometimes also out of a wish to be fully in the world as it presents itself to you.

And so, it was with this rather abstracted version of la debrouillard in my mind (thanks also to a little something called “unemployment,” as well as an early-onset mid-life crisis surrounding the meaning of love, the value of my job as a magazine editor and writer, and the sneaking suspicion that I was meant to face even rougher seas than I’d ventured into thus far) that I recently decided I might try my hand at butchery. Why not, I thought, in the spirit of la debrouillardise, make things really god damn foggy for myself, and see if I might be able to make my way, gracefully or otherwise, through a world that’s usually meant for men, big men, and which is usually associated with the darker side of la cuisine (at least for those who don’t actually like the idea that their meat comes from an animal as opposed to being beamed out of the flourescent lights in the supermarket, like a mirage). For me learning how to butcher would be the ultimate test of la debrouillardise.

So, like a true debrouillard, I decided to learn butchery in French, instead of English, even though I don’t speak the language. First stop: Southwest France. I signed up for five weeks spent living and working with an American expert on Gascon cuisine named Kate Hill, at her French farm and kitchen school in Sainte-Colombe-en-Bruilhois.

Kate is beginning to make a name for herself negotiating apprenticeships in Gascony for people like me: Lost souls who wish to abandon their former life to become cheese mongers, Armagnac makers, butchers or bakers. And so, when I wasn’t with Kate, the plan was that I’d be learning how to butcher from her friends, the Chapolards: four brothers (Dominique, Jacques, Bruno, and Mark) along with two of their wives (Cristian and Cecil) who grow the grain they need to feed the pigs they need to bring to the slaughterhouse (le abattoir) they co-own with 25 other lamb, pig, and beef producers, in order to be able to transform their pigs into filet mignon, and saucisson, and pate, and chops and ribs and hams, which they then sell directly at five local markets to a long line of loyal consumers. Theirs is a business model that is virtually unheard of here and in the States, one I hope to learn a lot from, and maybe even model myself after eventually, should I be able to talk my entire family into becoming butchers (Ma, you’re willing to get over that whole thing about not liking to touch raw meat, right?).

Here, then, in my second week as a non-French speaking butchery apprentice in France, I present a somewhat messy meditation on la debrouillardise: an impromptu record of my foggy encounters with blood and bone, muscle and tendon, and everything I might find in between.