There
were sunny breaks the next morning, so I packed up to leave.
As I finished, it began to rain again. It
poured by the time Melawend and I reached the border.
Guards at all checkpoints just waved Melawend and me through without coming
outside. I was now in the Basque country of
northern Spain and what I can present here can only be the thinnest sketch.
Since the end of the last Ice Age, the Basques had occupied this
area, their homeland, which they called Euzkadi. This
clearly-defined geographic area encompassed the mountain chains that extended along the
Bay of Biscay west of the Pyrenees, separating much of the rich, rolling farmland of the
Basque Country from he rest of Spain. Theirs
was a land of peaceful green river valleys planted in grass, grain and fruit trees with
forbidding peaks and the contrasting backdrop of fishing ports, resorts and sandy beaches. The Basque community had been autonomous
since 1980 and comprised these Spanish provinces: the mountain of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya on
the coast and Alava on the plain, and it included the Spanish Navarre.
The Basques were part of the defeated Loyalists of the Spanish
Civil War (1936-1939) Hemingway
had then returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent to cover the war. His pursuits brought him close to death several
times: once was during this war when shells burst inside his hotel room.
Basques
were fiercely proud of their ancient past. They
were Catholics. The beret was part of the
everyday attire for most older Basques. Their
advocates formed the separatist organization, the Euskadi ta
Askatasuna (“Basque Homeland and Freedom”) – the ETA – which had
recently been described as “Europe's most resolute and efficient
terrorists.” The
group began under the oppressive dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Their goal was to establish a homeland for the 2.5
million Basques in northern Spain. In 1970,
several members of the then-new organization were sentenced to death in trials held in
Burgos. But international pressure
convinced the Nationalist government to commute the sentences. Just a few months before I arrived, there had been
an ETA bombing in Madrid.
I
was headed for "the sun-baked town of Pamplona".
The city’s name conjured up images of Hemingway and of the
“romance” of bullfighting and the Fiesta of San Fermín.
"We
started off through the dark, narrow, carnival-mad streets..." Hemingway had written
for The Toronto Star Weekly in 1923.
I
did not care much for Hemingway's bravado, particularly when it came to the killing of
animals. But I had agreed with Hemingway that
the killing of a bull was a tragedy.
"Bullfighting is not a sport.
It was never supposed to be. It
is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull." (From: "Bull Fighting a Tragedy" Toronto Star, Oct 20, 1923.)
What
fascinated me about Pamplona was the machismo surrounding the encierro – the running of the bulls. They had been running them here for over 250 years. Grown men put their lives in the line of charging
bulls to prove their masculinity and bravery. But
there would be no bulls for me. The Festival
of San Fermín was held annually in first week of July.
This was late September.
Pamplona
was the capital of the province of Navarre, situated on a small “sun-baked”
plain, on the Ebro River, surrounded by high mountains.
There were two roads leading there from the northeast. One was shown as a tight series of squiggles on the
map, indicating a lot of switchbacks. I opted
for the straighter one out of San Sebastian.
As
I headed south from San Sebastian, the weather cleared.
The road became dry. It was a
beautiful drive, particularly past the industrial town Tolosa where they made paper. The road rose up and cut along the sheer rock walls
of the mountains. On up Melawend and I rode,
through the resort town of Lecumberri, along foot of the Sierra de Maollas, and on through
Irurzun to the plain.
The
flat emptiness of the plain to the north made entering Pamplona unimpressive. I rode inside the city walls and stopped. What had I planned to do here?
(In
retrospect, I ask myself why I didn't look around more than I did, go to the Plaza de
Toros, for example – I was just a few
blocks away from it! I felt I was in a hurry. I have since given myself many good swift gorings
in the butt!)
Hemingway
had been here at least four times. His third
trip was made in 1925 with a motley crew who would become the characters in his first and
some say greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises,
written that same year. He was just 26 years old.
He had his last fling with Pamplona after a whirl of bullfights
in July of 1959. Bearded and balding and in
his sixtieth year, he acted the adolescent in the constant company of 19-year-old Valerie
Danby-Smith, a reporter for an Irish Newspaper on assignment to interview Hemingway. At a bullfight, a young matador named Segura was
met with a flurry of waving handkerchiefs by the roaring crowd after he had given a
brilliant performance. Hemingway was so
revered in Pamplona that there was no official recognition of the performance until he
rose, faced the Spanish president and solemnly waved his own handkerchief. The President responded immediately, awarding
Segura both ears of his bull.
(Note: Hemingway hired Valerie as his secretary and she
lived off and on with the Hemingways until Hemingway’s death in 1961. She worked with him on several of his works during
those years including typing the final draft of A Moveable Feast. She
later worked with Mary, his widow, in recovering items from the Hemingway’s Finca
Vigia in Cuba after it, along with other property owned by foreigners was nationalized. She also spent years organizing Hemingway’s
papers, letters, etc. At Hemingway’s funeral, she met and five years later married
his youngest son, Gregory and together they had three children. She wrote quite a candid and fascinating memoir: Running
with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways. Valerie is still very active with the preservation
of Hemingway’s artifacts and memory. She
is a warm and genererous person who travels extensively and gives talks about her
Hemingway years. I am indeed fortunate that
she inscribed a copy of her book to me – as “The Scooter Crusader” –
and also gave me a signed copy of Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great
American Writers – which her quite artitcially talented son Edward Hemingway
illustrated with superb caricatures of such literary giants as William Faulkner, F. Scott
Fitgerals, John Steinbeck, and of course, his grandfather. Co-creator Mark Bailey wrote
the recipies of their favorite drinks and wonderful anectdotes for each writer.
Valerie’s book is a fascinating look at the Hemingway few ever got to see – the
termpermental but also sensitive man.)
In Pamplona, I did find narrow streets and on them I did dodge
the bullish charging of the drivers of compact cars and was gored in the ears by the horns
of their cars. But as I said, there were no
bulls. There was no sense of Hemingway. My Pamplona was just gray skies and a few streets
of densely packed old shops and apartments with shutters and wrought iron balconies. I stepped into a tiny general store to buy a
chocolate bar and saw a girl who looked so much like my daughter Melanie that my eyes
began to water. My Pamplona was the shady
leaf-strewn walkways of the Parque de la Taconera. The
park was deserted except for an evasive single girl and a strolling couple who were
oblivious to me and my cameras. My visit here
only reminded me of my longing for Her. I was
utterly unprepared for Pamplona and decided to leave it for another time. That was my tragedy.
While I was attending Melawend in preparation to leave Pamplona,
a tall, heavy older man came up to me and wished me a good trip. I paused briefly to take photos from a bridge that
was part of the ramparts of the city. Then I
was away.
I
got on Melawend and rode out of Pamplona through almost treeless farmland. There were few houses. I rode through Puente la Reina, so called from the
bridge built by Queen Doña Mayor in the 11th century for the pilgrims of St.
James. We rode on through the villages of
Mañero and Cirauqui with its Romanesque church, and on through Lorca and Villatuerta on
the left. We came to the town of Estella on
the Ega River on a fertile plain. The palace
of King Sancho the Wise was here. It had
remained the residence of the kings of Navarre throughout the Middle Ages.
On
we went. We were within a short hop of the
Cistercian abbey of Iranzu and the Benedictine abbey of Irache and numerous churches. We passed all these places but did not stop –
I was anxious to reach Burgos before sundown.
About
thirty miles east of Logroño, Melawend's speedometer cable broke for the second time. It seemed to be a design flaw. The cable was just long enough to reach from the
dash to the front wheel hub, allowing for minor bumps.
There had already been a lot of major bumps that stretched and finally broke
the cable.
(Though I had
brought a spare cable from Peter Lapp's shop in Stevensville, which I would carry for the
entire journey, it seemed futile to go through the complicated process to replace it. From Spain on, I never knew exactly how fast I was
going.)
I
rode through Logroño, which lay on the south bank of the Ebro River. The Ebro was rich with vineyards. I was in the region of Castile. I was racing against the sun, oblivious to the
Spanish history that rested in my wake: the royal residence at Nájera near which Pedro
the Cruel defeated Henry of Trstamara in 1367. At
the cathedral at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a miracle had occurred. A pilgrim who was passing through Santo Domingo was
wrongly accused of theft by a local girl and was duly arrested and hanged. The pilgrim’s father, determined to prove his
son’s innocence, applied to the governor of the town, who laughed at him and declared
that he would believe in the son’s innocence only if the cock and hen which were
lying on his table, cooked and ready to eat, came to life and hopped about the table. At once the cock and hen emerged from the dish with
fair white feathers and hopped onto the tablecloth.
I pressed on
to Burgos – half the way across Spain. I
approached Burgos on a slightly uneven road through the Montes de Oca. Burgos was the ancestral home of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar – El Cid
Campeador (“The Lord Champion”), the liberator of Valencia and
Spain’s epic 11th century hero. As
Pamplona was Ernest Hemingway, Burgos, to me, was Charlton Heston because of his portrayal
of the Spanish hero in the movie El Cid. (Sophia Loren made a strong and radiant Doña Jimena.) I had read in Let's Go Europe! about the large statue to The
Cid. As in Pamplona, I dodged honking cars,
but this time they were in a small busy square where I hastily photographed the grandiose
statue against a darkening sky.
Burgos was situated on the high plains of Castile in the valley
of the Río Arlanzón and the city straddled the river.
It was the heart of Christian Spain during the heroic age, when El Cid was
fighting the Moors. Before he became dictator
of Spain, General Francisco Franco used Burgos for the headquarters of the National
Movement during the Spanish Civil War.
It
was in places like Burgos that I wished I could have locked Melawend away and truly
concentrated on the place I was visiting. I
tended to move too quickly through a place because my explorative desires were often
thwarted by fear for Melawend's safety. Here,
I parked Melawend outside Burgos’ magnificent 13th century cathedral,
which was on the right bank of the Arlanzón. A boy who was eyeing Melawend hungrily made me
apprehensive. He expression seemed to say, Well, go ahead, look around. I will look after your amazing scooter and its
interesting load.
I had seen the cathedral’s 275-foot towers as I approached
Burgos. Now the
Cathedral of Burgos stood majestically before me. Constructed between 1221 and 1567, it was regarded
as the best example of Gothic architecture in Spain. It
was built of white limestone in the form of a Latin cross. You
could see some white, but I was dismayed to see that its intricate façade was blackened,
its statuary was dressed in robes of soot, and its entry of thick raised wooden panels was
weathered and ignored.
Such an abused and neglected look was not unique to this
cathedral. It seemed that all of the old
buildings that I had seen so far in Europe had been so defiled and were thereby in need of
a thorough cleaning. But I thought that such a
singular approach would have been like merely wiping a runny nose. You had to attack the cause, and it was airborne. I thought, If
pollution is doing this to stone and wood, what is it doing to living tissue?
I wanted to take photographs inside but a stone-faced guard said
that no photos were allowed. I entered
reverently by the massive main doorway, the Puerta del Perdón. It was cavernous and eerily dark inside, even
moreso than Durham Cathedral back in England. Before
me was a 16th century clock that had an ingenious mechanical figure known as
"Papamoscas" (the "Flycatcher") which opened its mouth as it struck
the hours. The choir faced the high altar in
the central aisle, occupying the space between four towering pairs of pillars. A magnificent and richly decorated grille
surrounded it. It was under the transept that
you found the tomb – a simple marble slab – of El Cid and his lovely Doña
Jimena.
Once
again I was humbled by architecture that had been dedicated to God. I knelt in a pew and prayed. Hemingway
had also bowed his head in prayer here. He had
stopped here on his way back to Havana from his second African safari. He knelt painfully because he had been severely
injured in two plane crashes in two days in Africa.
I
bought some sweets in a nearby bakeshop and returned to Melawend. The boy was gone. I discovered that my canteen was also gone. It had been clipped to ropes on the back of the
load. It might have fallen off somewhere on
the long ride from Pamplona – I had encountered speed bumps in many of the villages I
had passed through. And it might have been
stolen. I had bought it at an army surplus
store in Vancouver and it had served me well. Sentimental
me, I lamented the loss. Funny how you could
feel so much attachment for a replaceable object.
(This would be
the only item whose disappearance I could not truly account for. And though I was headed for Italy, where I had been
told “they will rob you blind”, I was never robbed during the journey. I did loose my white Arai helmet between leaving
Africa and arriving in India – but it was my fault for simply tying it loosely to
Melawend when I took her to air cargo in Nairobi. It
might simply have fallen off somewhere in transit. But
there I go again – getting ahead of
myself…)
Just
outside Burgos, I pulled into the driveway of an old farmhouse on the edge of a crumbling
village, just off the highway. I was greeted
at a patio door first by a 60ish woman, then by her thirty-something son and then by her
eighty-something mother. They understood that
I wanted to camp. "Si." And the son
pointed to the backyard.
I
went up to the house later and asked for "El agua, porfavore." She filled my empty peanut butter jar from a tap. I went to my tent and ate a huge fruit roll and a
few of the eighteen small lemon cupcakes I had bought for less than $1.50 in Burgos.
I
rose at 6:00 a.m. It was cold and still dark. The lights of Burgos reflected in the sky told me
this was a cloudy day. I packed up in the
orange light of a single street lamp by the farmhouse.
My hosts were still asleep so I left a thank-you note and some Canadian
souvenirs. Then we were away, riding through
the wide-open expanses of Old Castile along the direct road to Madrid.
It remained overcast and cold to within 25 miles (40
km) of the capital. Along the way, I saw
villages of sand-colored buildings and tiled roofs and old bell towers and footbridges
over still rivers. I saw bare sun-baked hills
of tilled soil. There was little so
agriculturally forlorn, I thought, as seeing a farmer plough under those bent and
shriveled bodies of harvested sunflowers.
I passed by
hilltops where there stood gigantic black bulls. In
silhouette, they were magnificent, but these were merely huge billboards cut in the shape
bulls – advertisements for Osborne sherry and brandy.
Out
of Spain's central plain, at the foot of the Guadarrama Mountains, I saw the sprawling
morass of Madrid. At 2,000 feet (600 meters)
above sea level, it was the highest capital in Europe.
Over three million people lived there.
Five
months before I got there, the ETA had set off a bomb in Madrid, killing five civil
guards. 500 people had been slain since the
ETA launched its campaign of violence in 1969.
I
took a gamble on one exit into the city and rode passed the Plaza del Toros. There was too much traffic to stop and photograph
it. It was almost noon and there was just
enough time to touch base with the embassy. I
found it on Nuñez de Balboa and
learned that I would have to come back after 2:30 – after siesta, that Spanish custom of a rest after the
midday meal, so annoying to the intolerant tourist, when all of Spain shut down.
I
stopped to fuel up at a busy gas station and, like elsewhere in Spain, people gawked at
Melawend. Some looked with envious eyes. This always made me wary. But one of them had green bedroom eyes. This was a beautiful blonde-haired girl who was
sitting on a Vespa.
"You
are going around the world on this scooter?" she said.
"I wish I could go with you."
I
considered dumping some gear and making room for her.
I went to the
park at the end of the Nuñez de
Balboa. As I parked Melawend, a Filipino came up to me so
he could admire Melawend. He said had left the
Philippines in 1979 because he hated Marcos and his henchmen.
"It
was not safe to live there," he said. "They
would kill you if you opposed Marcos."
(Earlier this
year (in February 1986), the Marcoses, aided by the U.S., had fled the Philippines after
fraudulent elections and a takeover by the military. Ferdinand
and Imelda were now harboured in Hawaii.)
This
Filipino's name was Dante and he had lived in Hamburg, Germany, for nine months. But he found the way of life there too strict and
limited.
"Just
work, eat, sleep and work again," he said.
"Now
that Marcos is in exile, do you want to go back?" I said.
"Not
yet. I do not think it is safe." he said. "Besides, I have family here and life is very
good. It is very lay back here in
Madrid."
The way to the
Spanish conquest of the Philippines was revealed when Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and
discovered the Pacific Ocean in September 1513. (On January 21, 1519, Balboa was beheaded
on a trumped up charge of treason.)
At
the embassy, I met a very pregnant Lorraine Choquette.
She was a friendly and relaxed person. She
made photocopies of documents for me. She let
me make calls Canada to arrange for a shipment of parts to Athens. We chatted easily for an hour about travel, mostly
because little could be done about my mission in Madrid – there was no time to
arrange meetings with anyone. She would
arrange for my papers to be forwarded to municipal officials.
"Friday
is hopeless," Lorraine said. "Nobody
works on Friday."
"You're
working," I said.
"Being
with you is not working."
Lorraine
had made my day. Then she offered to send to Fort Erie the package of
information and artifacts that her Parisian counterpart had refused to ship. I thought of all time it would have taken me to
round up shipping materials, pack up the items and then find a post office... I was grateful to Lorraine.
I
was becoming more appreciative of our embassies and their friendly staff. I was aware that our diplomatic outposts had
suffered drastic cutbacks and were under-financed. This
made Lorraine’s gesture all the more significant and inspiring.
Because it was late in the day and I had no place to stay, I had
to leave Madrid. This was yet another profound
regret for I had not seen anything of the Spanish capital, not even the Prado,
Spain’s National Museum of Painting and Sculpture.
I had a particular reason for wanting to see the Prado. During his rummaging for antiques through sales and
auctions, Grandpa Darby had come across a huge painting.
The canvas was filthy and he bought the work mostly for its massive ornate
guilt frame. But when the work was thoroughly
cleaned, the painting was revealed to be an excellent copy of the "Surrender of the
Moors at Granada" by Francisco Pradilla. King
Ferdinand of Aragon recaptured Granada from the Moors in 1492 (the same year that he and
his wife, Queen Isabella, sponsored Christopher Columbus's journey). Pradilla was the curator of Prado and when he
painted the scene to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the victory. The original painting was supposed to be in the
Prado.
All I had really seen of Madrid was its
busy main thoroughfare, the Gran Via, with its fast-food restaurants, tourist shops,
cinemas, elegant old buildings and heavy traffic. But I was glad to get out of the noise and traffic
of Madrid.
I found myself
going the wrong way. I was on the road to
Zaragoza and facing a front of dark clouds.
"No
damn way," I said aloud. I turned
Melawend around.
I
was back in the Madrid's thick, inching traffic. Two
guys of a gleaming BMW motorcycle pulled alongside.
"Valencia,
this way?" I said, pointing straight ahead.
"No,
no," the driver said. "You follow
us."
They
split-laned and led me about three miles through the city as gendarmes flagged "rush
hour" traffic. Cars would rush through
green lights but some would be caught in an intersection when the light changed. Gendarmes with pen and pad in hand took down
license numbers. Finally, the guys on the BMW
pulled up to a gendarme and said something to him. With
a flourish of his arm, he pointed off to the left, and I was away, grateful to my two
anonymous Spanish heroes, comrades in wheels.
I
was on the A3. A few miles further on, the
city ended abruptly and once again Melawend and I were riding over the barren plain. The sun was getting low and I looked for a place to
camp. But there was so little out here beyond
the red soil, barren rock and few cultivated trees. Near
Tarancon, I spotted a walled hacienda and pulled up to the stone entrance. Inside, I saw a large house. On the barren grounds, there were two John Deere
tractors and two men in blue coveralls. One of
them came to the entrance. I tried to explain
that I was looking for a place to camp. He
said something in Spanish but his gestures made it clear I could not camp here. He also seemed to be informing me of an
alternative. The only word even vaguely
familiar to me was "pueblo". We both
grew weary of trying to understand each other and so excused ourselves.
I
rode into the dusty crossroads on the outskirts of Tarancon.
I was dirty and tired and had given up on looking for a campsite. I found a place in Tarancon, the Hotel Sur, and
paid about $15.00 for a tiny but clean room, number 116.
I was permitted to leave Melawend in a large hallway just inside the side
entrance.
I
awoke around 3:00 a.m. from a dream about a frustrating night with old girlfriend, one
that was worse than any that had actually occurred. In
reality, we had turned our relationship into an ongoing friendship and since I had no
special girl in my life, I found myself missing her. I
thought of another girl with whom I shared many outings to movies and many stimulating
conversations. I missed her too. What I truly missed was friendship. At the Hotel Sur, I had gone to sleep to the echo
of the happy foreign jabber of friends. And
now, I gained more appreciation for what I had had.
I
would find what friendship I could in the kind words and smiles of strangers. I would look around at the poor conditions and be
moved by contradictory things: old men walking little dogs in dry desolate areas, another
old man with a plastic bag, picking through debris at a garbage dump. I saw bags of garbage callously dumped by the side
of the road and I saw two boys smashing bottles against a rock outside the hotel.
In
the morning, I had a shower, packed up, and tried to get Melawend out but a car blocked
the side door. I had to wheel her through the
dining room – to the smiles and thumbs-up ovations of some of the patrons at the bar.
Aways
out of Tarancon, a boy in a yellow cap, red windbreaker and red sneakers sat on a rock
while his white donkey nibbled some tufts of grass.
Click.
Further
on, the brown baked soil gave way to red soil that reminded me of the bright red clay of
Georgia in the United States. I paused briefly
to photograph a father and mother and their teenage daughter who were picking dark purple
grapes and loading them into a trailer. They
waved for me to come over. I understood that
the grapes were on their way to become wine. They
gave me a large bunch for the road.
At
a gas station, I met a German motorcyclist who was standing beside his gleaming silver
BMW. He wore an immaculate black skin-tight
leather outfit and a striped silver helmet that had louvers and a chin shield that swung
up over his head. He looked like he just
stepped off the movie set of Star Wars. He understood that I was taking my heavy-laden
scooter around the world. He smiled and shook
his head in disbelief. Then he shook my hand
vigorously.
"Wunderbar!
Good luck," he said.
I
paused in the village of San Antonio long enough to take a photo of Melawend and me beside
the village road sign so I could send a print to the girl in San Antonio, Texas, who had
suggested that I visit Oberwessel.
Since
the cold hasty run through Scotland, I yearned for the sunny warm shores of the
Mediterranean. I turned my wrist down hard on
Melawend’s throttle and sped for the coast.
Chapter 21
Riding the Rivieras
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Now for the
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