cold and rainy ones in England. I wore a hoodie and jeans to campus today--it's the fourth of july. I've been wearing jeans and a hoodie for the last eight weeks; since i got back from Spain actually. This has been one of the rainiest summers in recent English history. So far, every day of Wimbeldon has been delayed by rain. I only just became aware of the strangeness of this all when I looked through photos on facebook. of people in shorts and skirts and dresses. with tans. I have never spent a July in 15 degrees Celsius weather. so i'm flashing back my last memory of warm weather and summer clothes that can only be found in my last batch of spain photos.
I wrote a story, my first piece of quasi-"travel writing" about my adventures climbing Penyal d'Ifac. Read on if you will; if not, the pictures are fun anway.
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On Not Speaking Bird
Desperation led me to Spain. After eight months of continual postgraduate academic brain bashing, the smell of library haunted my clothes, my dreams and my life. My boyfriend offered up a refuge—his parents had recently retired and expatriated to southern Spain—he wanted to visit them. They live in a newly built house near the Mediterranean, two hours south of Valencia, just outside of a small town called Calpe. Armed with my intermediate high school level Spanish, I conjured up previous delusions of grandeur when I dreamt of moving to Spain and becoming fluent. But my non-use of Spanish over the last five years left me a bit more than rusty. It took a few days, but as the week wore down and the words began to return, I felt confident that I knew what I was saying. To be safe though, I also perfected the arts of pointing and gesticulating rapidly, giving me the ‘frazzled tourist in a foreign country’ look.
Towards the end of our stay, my boyfriend, his mother, stepfather and I, decided to hike through Penyal D’Ifac Natural Park, which culminates at the summit of Calpe Rock. The park juts far out into the sea, claiming the title of single largest rock in the Mediterranean and is made of a shiny, slippery basaltic rock that eludes feet and traction. The 300-meter climb up to the stunningly viewed summit, as purported by many guidebooks, boasts to have one of the best views in Spain. But the paths towards the summit are poorly marked. They tend to wind precariously close to the edges of cliffs that one could easily slip, fall and plummet off into the shallow and rocky edges of sparkling azure Mediterranean. That makes it all the more sublime.
We started walking around five o’clock, the Spring Spanish sun still going strong and beaming its twenty-four degree happiness down on us. The first quarter mile up took us to the visitors’ station and trailhead. Stopping for toilets and water, we mulled around waiting to reassemble when the first omen of events to come, quite literally, hit me. A bird from the blue heavens above let loose a bomb the size of a golf ball— white-green and brown with a gooey-splotched consistency. Splat, centre, middle of my left hand. Some cultures boast about the fortune of being pooped on, how it’s a sign of good luck. Really, it’s just the only way to make people who have been shat on feel a bit better about their personal misfortune. I briefly wallowed and examined my hand in that way people are compelled to look at something completely disgusting but still fascinating. We moved on.
Another fifty yards up we came to the “official” trailhead, a painted brown sign inscribed in Spanish chicken scratch…something, something, something, norte, something, something, cerrado. Together, we gathered that the north side of the mountain was closed for some particular reason; trail maintenance, rock slips, etc. But the best views of the area were from the north side so we decided to go anyway. We had this under control. Like many dangerous situations, it started with ample warning.
Armed with false confidence and three bottles of water, we prepared our muscles for the walk. At trailhead number three we met a Spanish man rambling down the mountain towards us. He began by asking if we spoke Spanish; nodding our heads no, he slowed down his speech, and we caught a few words of his apparent warning. Crioloto, subido, cuidado were the only three words I understood. Bird poop, climb, careful. We deduced that he was telling us to be careful on the walk up because bird poop was making rocks slick. We thanked him and continued.
We eventually reached a wide, flat, open trail that took us transverse across the mountain and would eventually lead us to the summit. The birds began to gather around nests, marking their territory, sitting and whooping their territorial noises. Looking northward, we witnessed thousands of seagulls flying and dropping liquid poop bombs across their airspace. They cried and rallied to one another, supposedly communicating the news of foreign visitors, tall two-legged enemies. But our walking wasn’t harming anyone; we marched confidently into the valley of death.
My boyfriend’s stepfather, Dave, led the way. At six foot six, slender and balding, he towered over most objects on the open path. The gulls examined him warily. One particularly suspicious gull leered down at us with red, beady eyes, circling like a vulture and then diving, diving, and swooping three inches away from the top of Dave’s head. Its piloting skills rivaled those of the Red Baron’s, and its wingspan cleared at least five feet. Red Baron seagull regrouped, re-circled, flew, flew, dove, dove—another narrow miss. The next two dives were perfect, and the gull thwacked Dave square on the head with the weight of its body. He screamed. I prostrated my body flush to the ground.
Whilst examining the trail at such a close angle, I briefly flashed back to a summer when I was obsessed with old Hitchcock films. I had perversely enjoyed a scene from The Birds where a group of school children run in wild abandon as killer birds taunt, peck and attack the youngster with intense malice. Oozing blood from open head wounds, they finally flee to safety. Suddenly it no longer seemed amusing. With one angry bird flying the watchman position, its friends within fighting distance, my brain flipped itself into survival mode. And I don’t like to bleed.
But Dave didn’t seem too bothered. He picked me up off the rock face and armed himself with rocks and other mountainy projectiles. Lobbing them in every direction, at nests, flying birds and anything that moved, he continued to stride confidently forward.
The scenes continued to flash through my mind. Like the children in Hitchcock’s film, I imagined being dive-bombed and pecked relentlessly. The birds’ anger and wingspans, coupled with their intense speed, would deduce me to carrion at the bottom of Penyal in a matter of seconds. Variations of this macabre fantasy continued. I imagined that the birds would first feast on my eyeballs then head and neck until I was dripping blood. To finish me off, they would come together, carry me by the hair, dangle me over the edge of a particularly pointy rock and release me. I willed myself to blend into the sand-colored mountain—difficult to do near the top of a treeless summit wearing a lime green top and reeking of runny sunscreen. I prayed a silent novena while Dave threw all the rocks. And still the birds refused to desist. They flew at all angles towards us contemplating landings on our rapidly moving bodies.
When we finally got to the top, I contemplated staying there for always. And really, the view from the summit was spectacular; beaches directly north and south, freshwater lake to the east coupled with distant mountain ranges, and the Mediterranean extending lazily west. We dried off fresh sweat with the continual sea breezes, drank down our water and enjoyed a brief sit at the summit before contemplating our descent back through hell.
Really, it was all a misunderstanding. We didn’t speak Bird, the birds didn’t speak English and neither group of us knew the country’s Spanish. How fickle the lines of communication could be. I wondered how many other people have had this problem. Unfortunately my neurotic brain wandering didn’t magically place me at the bottom of the mountain so I returned from my fantasyland and begun the climb down.
I started backwards scaling a rock face, squatting and sliding on sturdy trainers, when the air around me starting flapping and two webbed feet touched down for a distressed landing atop my head. Then I completely lost it.
In my panicked and desperate moment of need, I abandoned all decorum and trail ethics—I am usually an environmentally moral hiker. But when Dave hunked off two pieces of branchy fauna from the side of the mountain, I willingly clung hold of the tall, sappy stalks. For all I knew, he had just liberated some Spanish endangered species, but I held them high over my head like two great green antlers protruding from the sides of my ears. The sap dripped down onto my arms and shirt, and I didn’t have hands to hold onto the rocks upon descent; several times I lost my footing. But I didn’t care. My head was no longer the tallest point in this birdy valley—I briefly understood the plight of the moose.
Scanning the sky and the horizon, I realised that we had reached the site of the first gull attack. Red Baron seagull was still stalking the air, eager to fulfill his vendetta with us. He strapped on his flight goggles, circled like a vulture and glared us with vengeful red eyes. Swooping higher then lower he reached towards Dave’s bald patch, just out of reach of the green antlers. Baron regrouped, soared high, dove low and aimed within range. This time, Dave caught the underside of the gull with a quick, sharp stab of the green stalk throwing it slightly off its trajectory. Baron squawked, turned and glowered simultaneously before flying off to join the rest of his friends.
And then the bombs began to fall. Droves of birds began making a sweeping migration past us as if they were fleeing predators. Turning, we noticed helicopter blades approaching the South face of the mountain, coming to the rescue of distressed rock climbers lost on the sheer-walled vertical ascent. The birds misunderstood the rescue as a threat and fled, dropping their white-green goopy missiles high from the sky, landing thud, thud, thud, hitting targets on the basaltic landscape. It was like walking through an inverted mine field. We looked up, looked over, looked down. Prayed for the best, prayed for it to hit our heads and not our eyes or mouths. Drops splashed in front and behind me, missing my foot by a quarter of an inch and painting the rocks in front of me. A small moan behind me informed me that my boyfriend had been hit. To his relief, only on the backpack strap.
We finally made it back to the cerrado…norte sign in a quarter of the time it took us to hike up. Out of breath and exhausted, I began to wonder if the great views were worth the struggle. I contemplated Penyal council’s negligence for not translating the cerrado sign into English—this was a tourist region. But I dismissed this thought after chiding my poor knowledge of Spanish. If I had carried my yellow crutch, the Spanish to English pocket translator, I would have known that ‘nidificación’ means nesting and ‘gaviota’ means gull. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that ‘nesting gulls’ equal vicious attack animals. Sadly though, I finally came to the conclusion that in the event of being able to read the sign, we would have continued the hike anyway. Our acts of trespassing, vandalism and ignorance highlighted our selfish plight in the quest for adventure—we lacked common sense.
Maybe Hitchcock had it all wrong; maybe the birds had ulterior motives. I am not dismissing my fear or the fact that death seemed imminent on top of Calpe rock. That was all very real. But, back in the car and thinking clearly for the first time in hours, I refused to believe that the birds felt hungry enough to attack their biggest threat to existence for the purposes of food or pride. They launched an attack on what they deemed to be a full-scale human invasion of their nests and land. Liquid warning shots were fired, interpreters were sent, and then more drastic measures were taken. Laced with good intentions or not, invasion is invasion.
I pitied Red Baron seagull and his gaviota troops, always at war with a race closing in on their air. An eternal language barrier would assure that this would always be the case; they would never speak people. The best they could hope for was to be left alone. I nursed my thoughts with a bottle of water and contemplated what could be done. Above me, three gulls lazily glided towards the sun.
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coming up, my four rain-filled days on cricket tour in Norwich. we didn't play cricket much, but we did go to the seaside:0)
