September 2005: Unannounced, I drop everything and board a flight from Lisbon to New York, alienating several new Portuguese friends in the process. The idea was to rekindle a guttering relationship whose vital fuel had long since flickered out. Months before, just prior to the Yemenite installment of our loveless world-gadding, we had fallen in with a Portuguese photographer named Tiago. He held out the prospect of hospitality in his home, inviting the two of us to stay with him in Lisbon once he had completed his world circuit. He was a warm and genuine person, and his offer was taken in earnest. My relationship soured formally in the interim, and I ended up making my way to Portugal alone at the beginning of August. Tiago was not yet there. He had expected to be home around then, but had been held up in Panama in a bid to conquer a fellow wanderer's heart.
When Tiago learned that I was in Lisbon, he arranged for me to be shown real hospitality. Within a few days, I had a little sleeping nook arranged in his friend Silene's apartment. A few days after that I shared a meal of bacalao with his mother and brother, and was given the keys to his old red Peugeot. I was speaking Spanish to everyone and was making myself understood. Silene took me places, introduced me to people. She was a very generous person. I liked her, but refrained from complicating the situation with advances. After I'd been in her apartment for a couple of weeks she was called to the south of the country on a film shoot. I remember being alone in the apartment, throwing beer after beer down the hatch and sensing abysses opening up all around me. For all the hospitality, I felt only the emptiness of one aimlessly adrift.
I had maintained some sputtering contact with my ex-girlfriend through this time. She, too, was desperate and adrift. I do not know precisely what it was that drove me to re-alloy our two miseries. One day I simply packed up my things, left a note of thanks on Silene's kitchen table along with Tiago's car key, and hailed a cab to the airport. I remember the driver assuming I was a Ukrainian laborer as the car traversed the sad, sundrenched scene. As circumstance would have it, Tiago was passing through New York when I got there. He made a show of being happy to see me, but I could see that he was puzzled and genuinely hurt by my move. It was an asshole thing to do, he said, but maybe it was the right thing for you. Quite a double edge. After he returned to Portugal, it did not take long for him to sever ties with me. He used something I'd said to one of his friends in an unguarded moment of revekry as a pretext, but I'm sure it had more to do with my ugly rejection of generous hospitality. This was the inglorious apogee of my kinemania, to mint a new clinical term. It was not just a matter of potential catharsis or grace this time. This time it cost me dearly: Two friends and the respect of everyone in their circle. I have vowed to make my deficiency whole by offering unconditional hospitality whenever I can--even if it results in the same disappointment experienced by my gracious hosts in 2005.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Postcards from Egypt and Yemen
February 2005: After three months in Cairo, I board a plane to Addis Ababa, where my girlfriend and I plan to begin an overland journey to Djibouti after witnessing the bizarre spectacle of a concert given by Rita and Ziggy and the gang in tribute to what would have been Bob Marley's 60th birthday in a hardscrabble country that needs Rastafarianism like a fish needs a bicycle. I left Egypt with a sense of relief. Studying Arabic at the 4U Arabic School on Mizan Talat Harb had been rewarding, and I had enjoyed the splendors left behind by pharaohs and sultans, but in the end, the inescapable filth and poverty and petty grifting became too much. I was too aware of the sorry state of the city and its people to find refuge in the seductions of orientalism or pure language for too long. I had come to think ill of Egyptians, seeing in them some especially pernicious version of the petty scheming and frustrated passion that characterize all the world's oppressed and dispossessed in varying ways. I did not feel much better about the heirs to the architecture of dispossession I met in Cairo. Of all the Americans I knew there, only one struck me as particularly interesting. He was a gay man, of whom it was said that he took a new Egyptian lover three times a week. He had been in Egypt for a long time. I can't remember how long--eight years, twelve. He worked at an English-language daily and earned an Egyptian wage. In all his years in Egypt, he said, he had only returned to the States once. He hadn't been able to stop crying, he said, while abroad in the country of his birth. The other Americans I met were Fulbright kids doing a lot of eating and drinking on Zamalek (a rich and westerized island in the Nile), backpackers on a factory schedule, ugly girls who insisted on dressing scantily wherever they went in the 15-million person Islamic city, rich dilettante kids talking about their esoteric and exclusive tastes in music and film. I may not have been so damned interesting myself in those days.
June 2005: After three months studying Arabic in Sana'a, Yemen, I and my companion fly to Sri Lanka by way of despicable Dubai. Yemen had been fascinating. No revelations about human freedom, perhaps, but this was my second spin on the merry-go-round of exotic escapism. I would make a quip about the Arabian peninsula not being the best place to explore one's freedom, but that is hardly the point. Certainly Arab culture places constraints on behavior, but the threads of custom often exercise a lighter touch than enforcement officials. Sana'a did have its share of boys with slapsticks, but I certainly never felt as nervous around the agents of state power in Yemen as I do in today's America, where the state has begun to approximate Mussolini's Hegelian ideal: "Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." But comparing the machinery of global domination backed by H-bombs to tribal clashes in the desert gets us nowhere, and I don't want to overwhelm the margin of this postcard with an excursion into comparative parasitism. The point, I think, is that I was less in a position to appreciate what the Yemenis had to offer than I might have been some years prior or thence. Hindsight has made me wise to the problem. It was less than two years since I had undergone surgery to repair a cranial ailment. A serious matter indeed. To put it very simply, in those days I was still scared. Of death, yes, but also of winking out before I had seen what I thought was mine to see, do what I thought was mine to do, feel what certainly was mine to feel. I think that the long voyage of 2005 was ultimately an unconscious hedging maneuver. If it is my lot to be stricken down by this cranial thing, I (unconsciously) reasoned, let me first see the world. Yes, I was privileged even in my quiet desperation. My search for fulfillment followed the cheap and easy paths charted by this comparative privilege. Let it be fast, easy, exotic; let it come with enough sound and fury to keep the fear in abeyance. The fear is inside us all. But if it is not kept in abeyance by a rigorous discipline of honesty and love, the kernel of it swells into an inert mass with its own gravity, a weight that burdens every action and tarnishes every joy, a millstone that gathers unto itself more and more of the spirit's vitality, always more, until one day...actually I do not know how to conclude this sentence, having somehow scraped through the grinder with my soul intact. But I know that the body of death was hanging off me like a spare tire in those days, and was considerably tarnishing my prospects for enjoyment. And that it may have led, for a time, to the serial consumption of exotic experience as a way of shuffling my piece around the board before joining the game.
Now that the excuses are out of the way, here is Yemen's due: Enchanting from the first glimpse, it got stranger, deeper and vaster by orders of magnitude. We enrolled in the Sana'a Institute for Arabic Studies and took private lessons from dapper young teachers named Osama and 'Afif. The unfortunate John Walker Lindh had passed through the same institute before opting for more religiously flavored instruction, first in the Hadramawt and ultimately in distant Afghanistan. We made journeys to mountain villages, ten story mud buildings rising from desert oases, forlorn malarial cities on the Red Sea, and the seething crater of 'Aden. We rented a 5-story house in Sana'a for 300 dollars a month and furnished one room to live in. We adopted a kitten off the street and named it Qamr, moon. We were studying Fusha Arabic now, the official version. Sometimes I felt that I was getting a good grip on it, like when sat down to discuss life with 'Abdullah Soeid in his shop. I remember asking him if he was religious, and him answering of course, religion was the essence life, that God had made him for that purpose, and him citing a passage from the Qur'an, and me understanding everything. At other times, most times, I felt completely lost. The Arabic word for dictionary, qamus, also denotes the ocean. Indeed. I remember telling my teachers that I would return to Yemen sometime soon as I left, and honestly thinking that I would. I haven't gone back yet. Is soon over yet?
Just a note: American immigration officials never questioned me about the Yemeni residence permit pasted into passport--perhaps my Ivy League degree is worth something after all.
June 2005: After three months studying Arabic in Sana'a, Yemen, I and my companion fly to Sri Lanka by way of despicable Dubai. Yemen had been fascinating. No revelations about human freedom, perhaps, but this was my second spin on the merry-go-round of exotic escapism. I would make a quip about the Arabian peninsula not being the best place to explore one's freedom, but that is hardly the point. Certainly Arab culture places constraints on behavior, but the threads of custom often exercise a lighter touch than enforcement officials. Sana'a did have its share of boys with slapsticks, but I certainly never felt as nervous around the agents of state power in Yemen as I do in today's America, where the state has begun to approximate Mussolini's Hegelian ideal: "Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." But comparing the machinery of global domination backed by H-bombs to tribal clashes in the desert gets us nowhere, and I don't want to overwhelm the margin of this postcard with an excursion into comparative parasitism. The point, I think, is that I was less in a position to appreciate what the Yemenis had to offer than I might have been some years prior or thence. Hindsight has made me wise to the problem. It was less than two years since I had undergone surgery to repair a cranial ailment. A serious matter indeed. To put it very simply, in those days I was still scared. Of death, yes, but also of winking out before I had seen what I thought was mine to see, do what I thought was mine to do, feel what certainly was mine to feel. I think that the long voyage of 2005 was ultimately an unconscious hedging maneuver. If it is my lot to be stricken down by this cranial thing, I (unconsciously) reasoned, let me first see the world. Yes, I was privileged even in my quiet desperation. My search for fulfillment followed the cheap and easy paths charted by this comparative privilege. Let it be fast, easy, exotic; let it come with enough sound and fury to keep the fear in abeyance. The fear is inside us all. But if it is not kept in abeyance by a rigorous discipline of honesty and love, the kernel of it swells into an inert mass with its own gravity, a weight that burdens every action and tarnishes every joy, a millstone that gathers unto itself more and more of the spirit's vitality, always more, until one day...actually I do not know how to conclude this sentence, having somehow scraped through the grinder with my soul intact. But I know that the body of death was hanging off me like a spare tire in those days, and was considerably tarnishing my prospects for enjoyment. And that it may have led, for a time, to the serial consumption of exotic experience as a way of shuffling my piece around the board before joining the game.
Now that the excuses are out of the way, here is Yemen's due: Enchanting from the first glimpse, it got stranger, deeper and vaster by orders of magnitude. We enrolled in the Sana'a Institute for Arabic Studies and took private lessons from dapper young teachers named Osama and 'Afif. The unfortunate John Walker Lindh had passed through the same institute before opting for more religiously flavored instruction, first in the Hadramawt and ultimately in distant Afghanistan. We made journeys to mountain villages, ten story mud buildings rising from desert oases, forlorn malarial cities on the Red Sea, and the seething crater of 'Aden. We rented a 5-story house in Sana'a for 300 dollars a month and furnished one room to live in. We adopted a kitten off the street and named it Qamr, moon. We were studying Fusha Arabic now, the official version. Sometimes I felt that I was getting a good grip on it, like when sat down to discuss life with 'Abdullah Soeid in his shop. I remember asking him if he was religious, and him answering of course, religion was the essence life, that God had made him for that purpose, and him citing a passage from the Qur'an, and me understanding everything. At other times, most times, I felt completely lost. The Arabic word for dictionary, qamus, also denotes the ocean. Indeed. I remember telling my teachers that I would return to Yemen sometime soon as I left, and honestly thinking that I would. I haven't gone back yet. Is soon over yet?
Just a note: American immigration officials never questioned me about the Yemeni residence permit pasted into passport--perhaps my Ivy League degree is worth something after all.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Postcards
March 2003: After two months exploring the other Americas, I board a plane for New York in Buenos Aires. I had quit my miserable desk job before Christmas, just after turning 24. I was saddled with hefty academic debt and had little idea what I would do with myself next. I had no gig lined up, no connections, no money. I didn't care. Somewhere in South America I had a revelation that hit me like a Buick: I had never known freedom before. For all my pretense in those days at having a better take on things than most, as if, as Bukowski puts it, I really had an angle on life, I knew it was true as soon as it was revealed to me. I'd never known the high luxury of truly, and I mean epochally unstructured time--time that was more a labyrinthine gift and mystery than the linear, carceral banality of when will life begin? that had run through all my earlier years. Nor, having emerged from the bosom of continent conquered, gridded, mechanized and plundered, had I known the unbounded texture of the lands and spaces man is meant to live in. Of course, I had known well enough how I did not want to live, but on that trip I glimpsed, for the first time, an alternative. A different way, one that I could affirm whole cloth. I drank deeply from the cup of freedom then, skittering back and forth across the gullied spine of the cordilleras as I dreamed of erasing myself from the plotted map hell-bent on mechanizing my life. The best part of the trip was a foray made into the Peruvian jungle. Buses through bandit country, jungle ferries aswing with a hundred hammocks for the passengers, dugout canoes drifting into the trackless territories that electrify the imagination in the work of a Tobias Schneebaum or a Werner Herzog. As luck would have it, the jungle was where I picked up a double case of dysentery, bacterial and amoebic, leading to an altogether less pleasant and less controllable sort of skittering. To this day, I suspect aguajina of being the culprit. Sweet, delightful, two-faced, altogether ravishing aguajina. I guess you could say the trip's highlight was also its undoing. In the wake of the trip I made vows to drink nothing but alcohol when visiting poor places. The fact, though, is that the dysentery could easily have been treated in situ. There was the matter of money of course. And yet I often wondered afterward, and sometimes still do, what might have happened if I'd stayed. My Spanish had become serviceable, and I was enjoying the warmth and passion of the Latin Americans. Here, I sensed, was a way of life closer to my own nature. But I left anyway, almost in the very moment I'd glimpsed that freedom--for New York, the world's great citadel of carceral time and gridded space. It is relatively easy to leave the mechanized grid, but things get more complicated when it comes to getting the grid out of your head.
I am not offering up South America as any kind of generally redemptive bromide here. Far from it. But the other Americas are more complicated than the narrow vastness of the norther part. They retain pre-Colombian elements, and the Andean countries in particular have not erred so far down the road of development and destruction. There are remnants of what came before in the people as well, of course. Oddly enough, many of them have chosen to resist where history would take them. I liked that then, and I like it now.
But I don't want these vignettes to trail too far into anthropological or political credos. The task I have set myself is to go back in time and catch myself in the act of leaving the various countries and regions I have known and left behind over the course of this decade, some with relief, others with difficulty. I envision it as a series of postcards forming a half-breezy, half-melancholy inventory of the places I have seen over the last seven years. A sampling of departures suggested itself as a good way, not only of saving time, but also of communicating how sadly brief and incomplete even the best of times can be. In the end, I may make the occasional sally or rejoinder that is not strictly inventory-related. Postcards do have margins, and even the best correspondents sometimes spill into the space reserved for the postal authority. I imagine the postcards will also be of clinical interest. What has driven me so far afield? What have I wanted to find? What have I wanted to flee? Have I found my home in Greece? Before going on, there is something I should clarify for those of you who read this modest blog regularly, and who may have felt sympathetic to the comments made earlier by Mr. Muss: I do not fancy myself having any sort of special angle or take on life. I am nothing but another pilgrim following my own road to our common end.
Anyway, to resume: My intention on leaving Latin America was to make a home in New York. It never quite happened that way; life never quite began there, you might say. I always found reasons to escape it, or was found by them.
Viz...
I am not offering up South America as any kind of generally redemptive bromide here. Far from it. But the other Americas are more complicated than the narrow vastness of the norther part. They retain pre-Colombian elements, and the Andean countries in particular have not erred so far down the road of development and destruction. There are remnants of what came before in the people as well, of course. Oddly enough, many of them have chosen to resist where history would take them. I liked that then, and I like it now.
But I don't want these vignettes to trail too far into anthropological or political credos. The task I have set myself is to go back in time and catch myself in the act of leaving the various countries and regions I have known and left behind over the course of this decade, some with relief, others with difficulty. I envision it as a series of postcards forming a half-breezy, half-melancholy inventory of the places I have seen over the last seven years. A sampling of departures suggested itself as a good way, not only of saving time, but also of communicating how sadly brief and incomplete even the best of times can be. In the end, I may make the occasional sally or rejoinder that is not strictly inventory-related. Postcards do have margins, and even the best correspondents sometimes spill into the space reserved for the postal authority. I imagine the postcards will also be of clinical interest. What has driven me so far afield? What have I wanted to find? What have I wanted to flee? Have I found my home in Greece? Before going on, there is something I should clarify for those of you who read this modest blog regularly, and who may have felt sympathetic to the comments made earlier by Mr. Muss: I do not fancy myself having any sort of special angle or take on life. I am nothing but another pilgrim following my own road to our common end.
Anyway, to resume: My intention on leaving Latin America was to make a home in New York. It never quite happened that way; life never quite began there, you might say. I always found reasons to escape it, or was found by them.
Viz...
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Leader of the pack
There's a curious incident I've been meaning to mention ever since it happened a couple of weeks ago. Longing for some legwork and fresh air, Penelope and I decided to make a day of it on the mountain that overlooks our town, Plomari. The mountain rises from the sea in a sheer mass and crests at about 2000 feet before trailing into a ridge that brackets our section of the island. Other than a tufting of cypresses and radio towers at the summit, the massif is covered almost entirely in olives. The better part of the natural setting here can be described like this: Looking west from Plomari, the left part of the frame is made up of tranquil Aeagean waters, and the right part by the great green mountain. Climbing it had actually been one of my first acts back in April, when freshly landed here from my winter in the Bitterroots. I will post a picture of the view to this site soon.
It took about 3 hours to hike from our house to the top, where we broke for a lunch of homemade pizza and sweet potato pie. For a while we stretched out on the pine needles, hearing birdsong interlace with the hum of the radio tower's electrical equipment as late afternoon filtered through the trees. But the idyll passed, as all things must, and we gathered our things for the walk back down. Our legs had been pretty spent on the ascent, and the way down seemed to drag on for as long as the way up. This was a good thing. Every turn in the path offered vistas that were bucolic, majestic, or both. I was profoundly happy to be standing where I was when the sun ducked behind the mountain and the colors deepened into shades of buoyant, almost painful beauty. As we picked our way down I was also pleased and disgruntled to find fistfuls of shotgun shells: Pleased because it indicated that hunting fowl and other small game is part of the Lesbian way of life, disgruntled because the hunters hadn't bothered to pick up after their fun. And I say 'fistfuls' because I fetched them up and took them home.
Dusk approached. Passing through a village called Katoxorio, we paused to ask a man doing some yard-work if he knew where we might buy a bottle of water. He said there were no shops in town, but that he'd be happy to mix us up a little batch of orange drink. He was an Englishman--a Mancunian, to judge by the accent. He made us a gift of the bug-juice, and we thanked him. As we set off again, he called out after us with a tip. Don't take the road, he said. Take the path that branches off to the left after that house there. There, you see it? Take a left that way and just keep walking. It will take you straight into Plomari.
We did fork left and follow the path. At first it was much the same as the other paths we had followed that day. Rocky footing, olive trees, stone walls, the occasional shepherd's lean-to. Suddenly the path turned into a paved road just a little wider than the wheelbase of an average car. The surface was corrugated in a herringbone pattern which led the eye down the road--and into a gorge, at what seemed to be something near a 45 degree angle. About halfway down we paused to reconsider. When we turned around to see the road looming above us, our legs would not hear of a retreat. We were committed. We tramped on until the grade bottomed out, snaked, and began to rise again--perhaps not as sharply as what we'd come down, but it was bad enough. Who on earth had the road been built for? We had plenty of time to ponder the question. Once we'd crested the rise, the road plunged back down into the gully, only to rise again. And so on, for the better part of twenty minutes. At last the pavement broke off into dirt, and the road emerged from the roller-coaster gulley to wrap around the side of the small hill between us and Plomari. We were nearly there.
Bahh! Beeeee-eh! We surveyed the slope above us and saw a herd of goats. Penelope bleated a rejoinder in goatish: Behhh! They must not have understood her idiom, and did not say anything in response. I decided to try out my own goatish. Be-e-e-e-e-e-eh! This got them. They said beeee-eee-e-e-e! I said be-e-e-e-e-e-e-eee-e! and they said beeeehh-e-e! Then they started moving, as if one of them had said, Come on guys, let's follow these guys! Or maybe, Let's get 'em! Two or three very uncomfortable minutes ensued. The goats followed after. We quickened our steps; they quickened theirs. They closed, grunting, hooves clattering. Penelope turned around to admonish them. They stopped to consider her words, but must have understood even less Greek than I do; they resumed their pursuit as soon as we started down the path. I had the very peculiar sensation that we might actually fall afoul of a goat stampede. We were considering making a run for it when we rounded a boulder and were met by a very angry little shepherd dog that saved us the ignominy of having to flee from small livestock. No bigger than a terrier, the dog snapped at our heels and proceeded to herd the goats, numbering fifty or more, into their pen. Everyone understood exactly what the little dog was saying.
I've never fancied myself a leader of men. At least I know I have what it takes to lead goats--though perhaps I should familiarize myself with the meaning of what I'm saying before I say it.
It took about 3 hours to hike from our house to the top, where we broke for a lunch of homemade pizza and sweet potato pie. For a while we stretched out on the pine needles, hearing birdsong interlace with the hum of the radio tower's electrical equipment as late afternoon filtered through the trees. But the idyll passed, as all things must, and we gathered our things for the walk back down. Our legs had been pretty spent on the ascent, and the way down seemed to drag on for as long as the way up. This was a good thing. Every turn in the path offered vistas that were bucolic, majestic, or both. I was profoundly happy to be standing where I was when the sun ducked behind the mountain and the colors deepened into shades of buoyant, almost painful beauty. As we picked our way down I was also pleased and disgruntled to find fistfuls of shotgun shells: Pleased because it indicated that hunting fowl and other small game is part of the Lesbian way of life, disgruntled because the hunters hadn't bothered to pick up after their fun. And I say 'fistfuls' because I fetched them up and took them home.
Dusk approached. Passing through a village called Katoxorio, we paused to ask a man doing some yard-work if he knew where we might buy a bottle of water. He said there were no shops in town, but that he'd be happy to mix us up a little batch of orange drink. He was an Englishman--a Mancunian, to judge by the accent. He made us a gift of the bug-juice, and we thanked him. As we set off again, he called out after us with a tip. Don't take the road, he said. Take the path that branches off to the left after that house there. There, you see it? Take a left that way and just keep walking. It will take you straight into Plomari.
We did fork left and follow the path. At first it was much the same as the other paths we had followed that day. Rocky footing, olive trees, stone walls, the occasional shepherd's lean-to. Suddenly the path turned into a paved road just a little wider than the wheelbase of an average car. The surface was corrugated in a herringbone pattern which led the eye down the road--and into a gorge, at what seemed to be something near a 45 degree angle. About halfway down we paused to reconsider. When we turned around to see the road looming above us, our legs would not hear of a retreat. We were committed. We tramped on until the grade bottomed out, snaked, and began to rise again--perhaps not as sharply as what we'd come down, but it was bad enough. Who on earth had the road been built for? We had plenty of time to ponder the question. Once we'd crested the rise, the road plunged back down into the gully, only to rise again. And so on, for the better part of twenty minutes. At last the pavement broke off into dirt, and the road emerged from the roller-coaster gulley to wrap around the side of the small hill between us and Plomari. We were nearly there.
Bahh! Beeeee-eh! We surveyed the slope above us and saw a herd of goats. Penelope bleated a rejoinder in goatish: Behhh! They must not have understood her idiom, and did not say anything in response. I decided to try out my own goatish. Be-e-e-e-e-e-eh! This got them. They said beeee-eee-e-e-e! I said be-e-e-e-e-e-e-eee-e! and they said beeeehh-e-e! Then they started moving, as if one of them had said, Come on guys, let's follow these guys! Or maybe, Let's get 'em! Two or three very uncomfortable minutes ensued. The goats followed after. We quickened our steps; they quickened theirs. They closed, grunting, hooves clattering. Penelope turned around to admonish them. They stopped to consider her words, but must have understood even less Greek than I do; they resumed their pursuit as soon as we started down the path. I had the very peculiar sensation that we might actually fall afoul of a goat stampede. We were considering making a run for it when we rounded a boulder and were met by a very angry little shepherd dog that saved us the ignominy of having to flee from small livestock. No bigger than a terrier, the dog snapped at our heels and proceeded to herd the goats, numbering fifty or more, into their pen. Everyone understood exactly what the little dog was saying.
I've never fancied myself a leader of men. At least I know I have what it takes to lead goats--though perhaps I should familiarize myself with the meaning of what I'm saying before I say it.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Sudden Change in the Weather
Yesterday there was a change in the weather. It happened with a slow sort of suddenness. The breeze stilled, the perpetual sea haze condensed. By mid-afternoon it had been overwhelmed, having given way inert ranks of wispy white cloud I hadn't seen on the sky here since May. Dark fell and the night was backlit by the moon. I slept deeply, dreaming of lunar revels on the sea of rains. Mare imbrium. The clouds were there still in the morning, now congealed into a more portentous shade. I stayed in until noon, sensing occasional bursts of rain flicking down onto our terrace. Sometime after noon it seemed to lift, and the kitchen was filled with light. I went out and surveyed our pergola. It was time.
The fruit was low and full. In some places it had suffered the hungry attentions of bees and wasps. I fetched a chair and shears and began to cut down the bunches, one at a time, until I had seventeen, each weighing maybe a pound. The vine originates in the southeast corner of the terrace, growing seven feet and more up a guidepole before forking into its two main branches. One of these snakes out over the main frame of the pergola, while the other has been teased over time onto an iron scaffold rising from our balcony, whose Aegean view it frames with green leaves like a maple's, and sweet, low-hanging fruit. The upper branch is the richer: From it I cut down twelve bunches, as opposed to five from lower branch that overlooks the terrace.
The haul amounted to maybe fifteen pounds, which I carried down to the bathroom in a plastic basin. After an hour or more of plucking and segregating I had a bucket full of plump purple grapes, with a healthy remainder earmarked for conversion into raisins. And then the fun began...
After washing and scrubbing our feet, Penelope and I took turns dancing in the grapes until they had lost well over half the volume they'd first displaced. To be sure of extracting as much of the juice as possible I also used a flat-bottomed colander, rocking it back and forth under my weight. The rest was easy: We poured the entire mash into two fermenters, added sugar and yeast, bunged them, and fitted the bungs with fermentation locks. I haven't a clue how it will turn out.
We are now deep into the night here, and the rain is falling in sheets. I am overcome with satisfaction at having harvested the grapes at the very moment Summer drew to a close.
The fruit was low and full. In some places it had suffered the hungry attentions of bees and wasps. I fetched a chair and shears and began to cut down the bunches, one at a time, until I had seventeen, each weighing maybe a pound. The vine originates in the southeast corner of the terrace, growing seven feet and more up a guidepole before forking into its two main branches. One of these snakes out over the main frame of the pergola, while the other has been teased over time onto an iron scaffold rising from our balcony, whose Aegean view it frames with green leaves like a maple's, and sweet, low-hanging fruit. The upper branch is the richer: From it I cut down twelve bunches, as opposed to five from lower branch that overlooks the terrace.
The haul amounted to maybe fifteen pounds, which I carried down to the bathroom in a plastic basin. After an hour or more of plucking and segregating I had a bucket full of plump purple grapes, with a healthy remainder earmarked for conversion into raisins. And then the fun began...
After washing and scrubbing our feet, Penelope and I took turns dancing in the grapes until they had lost well over half the volume they'd first displaced. To be sure of extracting as much of the juice as possible I also used a flat-bottomed colander, rocking it back and forth under my weight. The rest was easy: We poured the entire mash into two fermenters, added sugar and yeast, bunged them, and fitted the bungs with fermentation locks. I haven't a clue how it will turn out.
We are now deep into the night here, and the rain is falling in sheets. I am overcome with satisfaction at having harvested the grapes at the very moment Summer drew to a close.
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