March 5th,
2017
The first night we
land in the deep dark, our thinking scraped away, the fortieth hour
of travel. We leave the airport for a pell-mell taxi ride through
cobbled streets, island breeze, falling into two hostel beds pushed
together.
We wake to birds,
traffic, passersby, light slanting in through broken clouds and the
tall window. Smell of the sea, everything humid and damp to the
touch.
At last we wrest
ourselves from bed though we want to lie there inert forever. Step
out onto the cobbled alley. Around us the white lime walls,
lichen-eaten terracotta tile. Pigeons ducking and turning on the
sway-back roof ridges. The older buildings have black lava rock for
corners and pillars, porous and rough. This contrast everywhere,
black stone, white lime.
We find a meal at an
outdoor cafe: steak, egg, fries, coffee. British tourists off the
cruise ship sift around us. Bells clang every half an hour. The
island wind thick and blowing off the harbor, stealing our paper
napkins.
Still moving as if
in thick grease, not quite feeling the ground, not yet settled.
Spoken language mostly inscrutable, the aftermath of our seemingly
endless ethereal travel, the sense of being upside down on the other
side of the world, all of this makes us feel foreign. At once there
is the disjointed sense of familiarity, some genetic memory, if for
no other reason than knowing my ancestors lived in this place,
perhaps walked where I walk, sat where I now sit. For many people in
the world, this must be a forgone conclusion, but this disjointed
lack of ancestry in our quotidian movements is a condition of
Americans in this age.
We board a bus and
wend through the city’s thoroughfares. Rectangular modern
architecture blends with the traditional, sometimes in the same
structure. Then of a sudden we leap out into the country, deep green
slopes of pasture segmented by black walls of piled stone or tall tan
stands of cane. Cattle dot the fields.
We climb up to the
crest of the island, look down the long slope to the north. The west
wind makes white caps on the cobalt ocean. Haze obscures the horizon.
Down by the cliffs is the village of Caledos, red tile roofs, blocky
walls of black and white, clustered around the church tower.
We drop down, the
bus squeezes through narrow lanes that barely allow it. A sharp turn
at the worn steps of the church, bare pruned sycamores in the paving.
Each town has its old church, the bell tower pillared in black lava,
a plaque with the date carved in porous stone, two or three hundred
years hence.
We wind through the
seaside villages, surf hidden below the tall cliffs, come at last to
Joao Bom scattered over a rise. Debark and wander down the lane to
the house of our hosts. Bare black stone, blue door that scrapes the
floor, windows with many small panes. Inside is cluttered with their
life. Walls limed in salmon or eggshell, tile floor, bare beam
ceiling, rough table and benches. In back, the wild garden, edible
weeds on the margins and crops still small in this early season.
Chickens in a pen beside an old stone wall cobbled out of cane and
cast-off netting and twine. A small citrus tree. Scattered broken
plastic toys from the boys. A view over pastures to the ocean, misted
and wild.
In the following
days we wander the garden and the tiny local market, eat beans and a
big rind of cheese and home-baked bread thick with seeds. Try
unsuccessfully to sleep at night and stay awake in the day. We have
not yet acclimated to this new way of the sun, rising and setting
when it does. Something fundamental has been reversed.
We walk a narrow
trail over the cliffs that dive precipitous to the breakers. Iron-red
lava slopes in sharp, angled flows, seabirds wheeling minuscule
before them. Here on the steep cliffs and in narrow ravines, where
land cannot be cleared for human use, is a jungle of vines and trees
and broad-leaf plants. Songbirds and gulls. The steep track over
vertiginous drops.
We make our way down
to a flat plane by the surf, the town of Moisteros. Just up the hill
from the pastures and little vineyards and potato fields, we clear a
jungly patch of cane and ferns and four-foot green fronds like a
mutant ginger. We are making space for vegetable beds and a camping
spot, this dark soil.
When work is done,
we wander the town of Moisteros. The wind is hard and chill from the
west, the sun bright on the white walls with their shutters in green
and blue. We sit by the shore where the waves break over tortured
fingers of lava. The water a cold indigo, ice blue where it crashes
to foam. Off shore, titanic spires jut out of the surf, great sharp
clefts admitting waves that churn and gnaw through their hearts.
Seabirds turn and settle on their heads. Hazed spume in the wind, our
clothes snapping like pennants.
Tired from work and
dragged down by jet-lag, we fall asleep early. But I wake in the
middle of the night, mind churning with images, like surf on lava
stone.
We came here by the
most civilized of means, the aircraft. Traversing the world in hours,
the incredible roar of its burning power, its hard metal sealed
against the atmosphere at thousands of feet, flying through mist and
cloud and darkness by glowing electronic instruments. By this we have
deposited ourselves here, the shores of my ancestors. Few options
exist to accomplish this journey. Lengthy time away from home is now
a luxury. We couldn’t afford any sort of ship’s passage.
And here, on these
islands inhabited for a mere five hundred years, nearly every usable
bit of land has been converted to field or pasture, every slope below
twelve degrees divided by stone walls, furred in grass, cinder cones
incongruously inhabited by herds of milch cows, grazing land right to
the edge of sudden drops to the sea. Human imprint everywhere.
At once there is
this wildness, irrepressible, of the great Atlantic, her spume-topped
wind waves, and the massive dikes of cold lava thrusting upward,
clawing for life against the destruction of the relentless ocean.
These great cliffs that deny all human purchase. And even these
tumbled field walls made from stone so recently boiled from the
molten heart of the earth, and the surly bulls that watch me as I
pass on the road, and the shivering pelt of the long pasture grass on
the hill, playing in waves under the sea wind. Irrefutable wildness
close at hand, life boiling up and remaking itself and tearing itself
apart. Tenuous human outposts a part of it, amidst it.
Silver needles of
airlines leaving trails in the sky. The old stolid church with its
bell ringing the hour for hundreds of years.
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