Islands of the Blessed

If there is a more beautiful place than the Parque Rural de Anaga, I have not been there.

That, more or less, is what I kept repeating to myself as I drove and walked across its landscapes. I tried my best to take a few pictures with a dying phone and an old iPad, but it was such a sensory experience and delight that I feel like I need to write this down, in part so can share it and in part so I can remember it.

The T12 climbs up from the sea along the rising rim of a wide valley. Though the road is terrifying, you marvel at the scenery around you. Giant volcanic crags rise from the ridges, their sides pocked with caves made by the now-gone. (1) The land is covered in low shrubs and a strange kind of cactus, like a chandelier of cactus branches emerging from a single stem. As you twist and turn, instinctually sucking in your stomache for passing cars, you alternate between facing straight up the mountain and straight down to the sea.

The spine tingling moment comes as you reach the crest of the mountain, where the laurisilva begins. Where the sea winds blow into the mountains, this lush community of plants wrings the water out of the clouds. At one point, I stood on the peak of a ridge in a blackberry bramble, staring down the cactus-chandeliered mountain all the way down to the sea. In the space between my back and my front, I could feel the dry, warm air of the south slope mix with the cool, wet air of the north slope.

Being in the laurisilva is an experience of total immersion. The park actually plays with this dynamic, and has set up a trail with markers asking you to stand and smell, look, touch, or listen to the world around you.

It sounds goofy, but totally works. The forest is relatively low, made up of gnarled and twisting trees with trailing vines and mosses. It is contantly raining, just a little, from the end of every tendril, leaf, and breanch. Unknown birds titter in the trees, almost always unseen.

Thanks to days spent in the woods with my grandfather, I know almost every tree that I see. A few have been added to the list over the years, like sassafrass and tamarack, but I nearly always know more or less waht I am seeing. The same goes for birds, his other passion.

It is so humbling to stand in a place where you know nothing, to see birds you can only describe in terms of other things: chickadee-goldfinches flit through a nearby bush. Even the things you have a reference for are strange. Wild canaries, less colorful and more wild looking than their caged cousins. Heather growing like Florida cedar trees, with smooth reddish bark and nearly spiraled branches.

The thing that cannot be conveyed is the smell. There is damp, and earth, of course. But it smells like the essence of clean, growing things, like if you breathed in long enough you could live as long as the trees. It constantly shifts: resiny, spicy, sweet, wet, depending on where you are and the direction of the breeze. Though it feels so primordial and ancient, you can stand at the border between old growth and new and see the transition between the twisting heather and the statelier trees with glossy green leaves. It fells riotous with life, with birds and ants and plants and snails.

The fairy forest slopes halfway hown the mountain to Taganana, where you come into the Mediterranean, or so it seems. Grapes grow on terraces and villages nestle on steep hills. Again, you are in a valley running to the sea, where there are great boulders and columns and misty black sand beaches. Even as the weather shifts from bright open skies to that misty yellow Irish sunshine, the water is warm enough to swim in. Surfers bob along the point break of the boulders, while people in their trunks and bikini bottoms bodysurf. I didn't have a towel to separate the black sand and seawater from my rental car, but I so badly wanted to join them.

(1) They are gone in the sense they are no longer a distinct group. From the best anyone can tell, they are the partial ancestors of many Canarians. They were descended from North African groups, though, so their mestizo descendents would be hard to tell apart from (the average Spaniard. I'm actually here to start a dissertation chapter on their conquest, which is a topic of deep interest here, but not so much to the wider Latin American field.

Granada

In this long winter, as I shovel snow, I think about the sea wall in Campeche, walking along the sea coast looking at the fort in the distance. The same warm, placid Gulf I had seen since I was a child. Over my illness, money in my pocket, and nowhere to be for the night. As the snow begins to melt, I remember that in Florida it is Spring, and that someday I will be warm again, and have all the time in the world. It isn’t now. It can’t be now. But it will be

Plasencia

I’ve never been to Plasencia, not really. I passed through it on a bus. I remember it though. Below us, the river and the green pastures of the high mountians, livid against the dun memories of Andalucia. Above, the old walled city with its sand-colored cathedral and walls, watchful from its hill. Storks had built their nests in the fastnesses of the cathedral towers and walls, and small sprays of flowers sprung from the masonry. Between the swift, green countryside and the khaki butresses of the old city were the brick apartment blocks from the last century, ugly in the way only totalitarianism could make them.

I haven’t been to Plasencia. But it looked like its best days were behind it. Like all the dusty towns you pass through driving through Extremadura, Castile and Leon. If my impression is true, it is a shame. That part of the world has been in decline since the waning years of Philip II. This town, imporatant enough to merit two cathedrals, in its idyllic setting, was the place where people toiled for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Hints of Arabic stonework, the faint outline of a long-gone mill dappling the surface of the river, the gutters and lamp posts and sycamore trees.

Plasencia won’t die. Too much work has been plowed into her soil for that to happen. Farmers will still need a place to buy nails and sell wool, even as the world passes Plasencia by. Plasencia will never suffer the indignity of the mining town or appear like the bleached carcasses of Plains farmhouses. It will never be the gaping retail memento mori that is an abandoned mall. Still, it is sad to see something so regal and proud brought low. Our Plasencias deserve better, but we have so little to give. We need jobs and lovers and opportunity, and so we leave our Plasencias, shaking the dust from our feet.

Florida

“ Jeez. I feel like you could write a novel about that.”

My parent’s farm, to the extent you can call it that, was a strange place. That was the reaction my description of it got as I talked about growing up in Florida.

It was a magical realist place, all extremes and portents. It moaned in the wind. It shone with moonlight, even in summer.

It never seemed very Floridian, to be honest. It was baked by sun and infested with vermin of various stripes, but that was about it.

Florida is a small place. I don’t mean geographically. But the biggest hill is a modest lump of orangish dirt. It towers above the landscape like a city on a hill, but compared even to the hills within the city limits of this town, it is a modest sight.

For most of us, Florida was a succession of subdivisions, most of which had modest bungalos less than 30 years old. It was mediocrity and bahia grass. St. Augustine grass if you had certain airs of class.

What made that house so anomalous was not just the one-legged crane calling in the window, or the black widows that filled every conceivable outdoor object. The land around it was Big. It was an uninterrupted stretch of grass and the low bonsais of cow-pasture oaks that was entirely too big to comfortably sit in Florida. The house sat alone on the plain, like a house in a Morricone western. It felt isolated in a way I have never felt in a home. It felt like it belonged to nature and that our gray stucco house was an irritant, a bit of debris that would be wiped out at any moment.

Big open spaces are not rare in Florida. Anyone who has taken 75 down from Gainesville has seen Big Florida. At one point, I would imagine, Big Florida just was Florida, full of cows and small towns with little white houses.

Big Florida is beautiful. When I was in high school I moved the Davis’ pasture. It was green grass that grew with absurd fecundity. There was a great big oak on the modest rise behind the creek, and stands of cypress trees sat in the low depressions like paisley printed across the landscape. In the summer, cool, wet wind would announce the coming rain. On a warm winter day, the wind would ripple the grass, and as night fell you could build a fire and see the stars.

This Big Florida was harsh enough, but it was beautiful. With a director’s eye it could even be made dramatic.

I don’t know why Big Florida curdled around our house.

Still, when I hear the sigh of wind, I think about it.