by Ben Gilbert
* * *
Tobacco Chunda
Muscles laced with treacle sauce
Fresh lamb with sock and knicker stew
Rabbit’s pooh and honey dew
Washed down with a glass of fresh tobacco juice.
Now relax
Perhaps two, three minutes at the most
Before the churning and the pain
Sends you running for the porcelain
It won’t take long
Before you spew that black disgust
In torrents down the loo
Now relax again
Oh what elation
You may now wonder why you never tried the wonder
Of tobacco chunda
Made in America
The evening was warm and balmy, the summer breeze having ceased to blow in from the ocean before them some hours ago.
‘It’s a place where crime and police are the same thing.’
Danny stared out to sea from the wooden veranda and took a slow swig from the beer bottle he held loosely in his hand, whilst waiting for Chima to respond.
She too looked out into the dark calm behind the soft lapping waves on the sandy shore, and pondered the odd statement before asking:
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Without looking over to her sitting on the other end of the worn couch, he said:
‘Look, how many people are there in jail?’
‘Here?’
‘Right here in the land of the righteous and free.’
He turned and studied her looking at him, her legs crossed and her dress hanging down so low he could see no tantalising flesh. He wished he could, and she wished he’d stop trying.
‘About two million – give or take.’
‘So, how many people does that employ?’
‘You mean police, judges, lawyers, prison staff and that?’
‘And the rest!’
‘That’s a very big number.’
They were both beaming big smiles, her white teeth showing like faint pearls from the glimmer of the clear night sky, and his eyes speaking a mischief she just loved to hate.
‘So what would happen if crime stopped?’
‘They’d be an awful lot of people out of work – they’d have to make a whole heap of new, stupid laws just so people couldn’t help but break them.’
‘Just to keep their jobs, pay the rent, have a holiday…holidays dependent on crimes being committed; now that’s a weird idea.
‘So, this place needs crime – right?’
‘Sure seems that way to me.’
‘So criminals are doing society a favour?’
‘Yeah, sacrificing their freedom, so others can earn a buck or two and be able to lie on a beach for a few weeks a year.’
‘Saints and Martyrs!’
‘How the hell did it become such a screwy mess?’
‘It’s a mess alright, and what the hell are you going to do about it?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes you!’
‘Watch it burn!’
They both laughed loudly before swigging their beers.
After a minute’s pause, both staring deeply and blankly towards the dark horizon with its passing ships, Danny casually remarked:
‘Igbo Lita, now he did society many great favours.’
‘Except, he never got caught.’
‘Ah, but imagine how many people he kept in work as they chased him, searched under every stone until they gave up and attended to new work.’
‘That was decent of him.’
‘Ought to give him a medal, after all, he must have paid off so many mortgages, given so many a few weeks on the beach.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Probably went south.’
‘All criminals go south.’
‘Must be a lot of crime down there.’
‘Nah, with all that money they took with them – they’re now lawyers and judges.’
‘We could do with a good lawyer.’
They both eyed the bag of money sitting by the end of the couch, next to Chima.
‘A good lawyer would know how to hide and wash all that swag.’
‘Do you think Igbo’s a respected banker by now?’
‘Let’s find out.’
Danny looked over at Chima just like before, and she quickly cut him dead.
‘Go to hell – I’m your step sister.’
‘Gina always lets me.’
‘She’s a wicked sister – twisted like you.’
‘You’re right of course. Maybe I’ll go find her tonight.’
‘Be my guest.’
With that, Danny left the veranda, dropping onto the sandy beach and turning around the house to the front. A minute later Chima heard the car start and drive away.
Danny and Gina had been at it since teenagers, probably before, but she only guessed at that. He had always tried it on with Chima, except he never actually touched her, just asked, always asking and she always telling him where to go. She blamed it on the devil, must have got into both of them for Danny to get into Gina and for her to let him and like it. Their mother never cared; she was always out – probably with her own brother or something. But it was the noise of the pair at it in the next room that was unbearable – all those sleepless nights with the devil doing his dirty work – and everyone wondering why she had flunked school!
Soon after dawn, the car arrived back and two doors slammed shut, waking Chima from a comfortable slumber. The soft murmurs of Danny and Gina, along with the smell of coffee, had her dressing and coming out into the kitchen.
‘Hey Sis want some coffee?’
Chima sat at the table looking over at Gina. She smelt of sex.
‘You’re disgusting.’
Both Danny and Gina laughed.
Gina disappeared into the bathroom, and soon the shower was going at full pelt.
‘When did you first know I was not your brother?’
‘When I realised we were black and you were not! Mum used to tell us you were our special brother.’
‘Gina knew I was just the kid next door living with you, like some kind of stray cat.’
‘Tom cat!’
‘Hey Gina, when were we first at it?’ Danny yelled.
The shower had stopped and she shouted back:
‘Down in the old wood shed behind the junk yard, I don’t think we were even at school. Hey, whose idea was it?’
‘Yours, twisted sister.’
‘Yes twisted brother!’
As they cackled, Chima knew they were trying to rile her, but she couldn’t help smiling.
‘God I must have been a dumb ass – I even asked Mum why you were crying out like that.’
‘What did she say?’
Gina was back from the shower wearing some of Chima’s clothes, smirking and waiting for the answer she had heard a hundred times before.
‘That the devil had got into you and that you were crying out to the Lord for salvation.’
The room erupted with laughter, even Chima enjoying the moment, before adding:
‘But it was true!’
‘So Sis, it’s another screwy mess – what the hell you gonna do about it?’
‘Watch you burn!’
They sat drinking coffee around the wooden table, the sea slowly brightening as the sun shone over the front of the house.
‘Why couldn’t we have an east facing house?’
‘Because we wouldn’t see those Californian sunsets, idiot!’
Chima broke the banter:
‘The money – what are we going to do with the money? The police might come asking questions – we’re meant to be poor remember.’
‘Gina and me went down to the moorings last night – Old Man Toot told us Igbo stole a sailing boat about a month ago. Toot didn’t know Igbo was still about, scared the hell out of him. Forced him to pick a decent yacht and they stole into the night – heading south of course.’
‘But he can’t even sail!’
‘The old man said Igbo had a tough looking white guy with him – looked mean and nasty – he sailed the boat, had a gun too.’ Gina answered.
‘Let’s follow him.’
‘We can’t sail either.’
‘So we need a tough and mean looking white guy too.’
‘Unlike your over-sexed brother here.’
‘He has other talents.’
They all chuckled together again.
Down at the moorings, with its broken pontoons, abandoned boats and collapsing sheds, the few boats that still worked looked out of place, showing up new and bright against the ramshackle decay of the old fishing harbour.
Old Man Toot was in his shack working on an engine, ignoring them as they entered.
Danny spoke:
‘We need a boat.’
Still without looking up, Toot replied:
‘You too eh? I don’t reckon you kids could even afford one of those half sunken wrecks hanging off the old pontoons.’
‘And if we could – what then?’
‘Then you better learn how to sail.’
‘Show us a boat.’
Toot had always liked Chima, called her the sensible one of that clan – the family, or was it two families, that still lived in the old fishing houses after everyone else had upped and left.
‘There’s one in the dry dock – be ready for a long journey in about a weeks’ time for forty thousand bucks.’
‘Forty thousand!’ They all exclaimed.
‘Fifty if you want it kitted out with electronics and spares.’
Toot chuckled to himself and finally looked up at the kids, except he saw they weren’t really kids anymore, and they had that look which said – we mean it.
‘Fifty and it will get you round the cape and through the canal. I’ll even buy it back off you – if you ever make it back that is!’
The boat was magnificent and standing under a large gantry. It looked finished and ready to go. They touched it, got on board, examined every detail and decided they wanted it.
Soon the threesome were back with Old Man Toot, Danny clutching the bag to his chest as Chima rummaged around inside counting the money out loud before thrusting it towards a shocked and pale Old Man Toot.
‘Fifty thousand.’
Old Man Toot was nobody’s fool, but it took a few moments before he had fathomed what was happening and how he should respond.
‘Don’t suppose I better be putting this in the bank?’
‘Guess not, old man.’
Toot smiled – he wasn’t really old but realised he looked ancient to these kids, who suddenly seemed very grown up.
‘A week then – you want me to do all the paperwork, kit it out for you and all that?’
‘Of course we do – what the hell do we know? Can you find us a boatman?’ Chima answered, with Gina blurting out:
‘We want to buy our house, well, both of our houses actually – who owns them?’
‘The town – they’ve been trying to sell the harbour plot ever since the fishing collapsed.’
‘So, why haven’t they?’ asked Gina.
Toot sat down on a threadbare chair and stared at the money in his hands.
‘What have you kids been up to?’
‘Went to the drive-in.’
‘Shopping at the Mall.’ Danny and Chima replied.
Toot smiled, knowing he’d better cut to the chase – might be a good thing, these kids with their bag of money.
‘This is useless land, too soft for development and now useless as a harbour since the fishing collapsed and the new marina was built up coast – on top of that it is too shallow to get big boats in. No one wants this place – especially as you lot are sitting tenants on controlled rent.’
The three siblings looked confused.
‘Are we?’
‘They’d probably sell all one hundred acres for the price of a boat – give or take.’
‘Can you buy it for us?’
Toot eyed the bag.
‘If I can have a quarter of it – I’ll buy it for you.’
The siblings got excited.
‘Our own harbour!’
About a week later, Chima was sitting on the veranda looking out across a clear blue sea to the ships on the horizon. The day was calm and warm with only a few lazy white clouds occasionally blocking the sunshine. She was on the couch, day dreaming of sailing south, when a voice broke her trance.
‘I’m Mark, Toot sent me.’
Chima looked up at a clean cut college kid, neatly dressed and innocent looking; not the tough looking white guy she had imagined – he was white alright, but there was nothing tough about him by any stretch of the imagination.
‘Have you seen the boat yet?’
‘The Igbo Lita?’
‘They called it what?’
Chima was already up and walking fast along the shore towards the old wharf with the boy following.
They arrived at the dry dock to find Old Man Toot, Gina and Danny in a heated conversation.
‘But I’ve already registered it.’
‘We never told you to call it that!’
Chima joined in:
‘But what if someone gets suspicious?’
‘Nobody knows him by that name – only us right here.’
‘Danny’s right – besides, he might spot it in one of those harbours down south and come find you.’
Chima nodded and pointed over to their new boatman.
‘Meet Mark, our boatman.’
Gina studied him, looked him up and down, as the others knew she would, and asked:
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty three, Miss.’
‘Gina to you.’
‘He’s the same age as you Gina!’ Danny bellowed.
‘And you too Danny!’
Looking at Chima, Gina said:
‘An older brother for you.’
‘I’m Danny – these two are my sisters.’
Mark looked at the two girls and seemed confused.
‘Complicated wildlife down here – you’ll get used to it.’
Mark smiled at Danny’s remark as Danny asked:
‘How much?’
Mark looked at Toot and Toot spoke:
‘Mark only wants expenses, he’s looking for the experience.’
The three siblings looked at one another, and Chima said:
‘What, no money?’
‘No, it’s a fantastic opportunity to be skipper of your boat. I hear you might even go through the canal.’
Danny wasted no time in convincing Mark otherwise and held out his hand, which Mark shook.
‘How many rooms on board?’ Chima quickly asked.
‘One double and two single berths – so Danny, you and I will have to share or your sisters can,’ Mark answered.
The three siblings burst out laughing and Toot looked away, slightly embarrassed.
Mark came by almost every day over the next week or so, arriving at the old port at around ten, parking his parents’ car among the debris and long discarded junk that littered the quayside. A few of the old sheds that made up the small wharf were still in use by some die-hard fishermen who came less and less these days, but mostly everything was ruined and wrecked. Chima had got into the habit of being there when he arrived; she got the bug for boats and lapped up everything Mark told her, as Danny and Gina lay in bed, only turning up on the odd occasion to check on progress, and to make sure that the money was being well spent.
‘Your brother and sister don’t seem that interested in the boat!’
‘It’s not the boat, it’s the journey that interests them – anyway we grew up with motor boats, fishing boats, so it’s only the sail bit that they don’t get. Danny’s smart – you’ll see.’
‘And Gina? I mean is she smart too?’
‘Oh sure, she’ll out-smart you any day.’
Being poked by
Chima embarrassed Mark. She saw it as he busied himself with the radar installation.
Chima was on deck looking up onto the wheelhouse roof where Mark sat connecting some terminals, as she broke his tension by asking:
‘You want to go to the drive-in tonight?’
He didn’t look at her, pretended indifference by nonchalantly asking in a mumble:
‘What’s on?’
‘The old man and the sea – sorry, the grumpy old man and the sea.’
‘Hey, I’m not grumpy!’
He looked down on her smiling face.
‘Who cares what’s on – makes a nice change. You got the car – got a girl?’
‘No.’
He was embarrassed again.
‘So no one to make jealous then – but don’t get any ideas – where do you live?’
‘Cedar Ranch – know it?’
‘If we can’t see it from the wharf then I guess not.’
‘Two miles – right at the diner towards the hills – only one down there – I can pick you up around eight.’
‘No, I’ll see you at the house.’
Danny and Gina sat on the veranda watching Chima step lightly towards them.
‘We’re going to the drive-in tonight.’
Gina let out a long high cry:
‘Halleluiah! You want to borrow some of my sexy drawers?’
‘They’re all in the back of Danny’s car – it’s disgusting!’
Chima left the pair laughing on the veranda as she went in to decide what to wear, but was soon out again with a pleading look to Gina.
‘You got nothing to wear – is that it?’
Danny jumped up and left the house heading to the dry dock. Spotting Mark as he was making his way to the car, he yelled over:
‘Hey Mark – hear you’re going to the drive-in?’
Mark was caught out and embarrassed yet again.
‘Should I have asked you if it was ok to take your sister out?’
‘Hell no, Chima’s the twisted one – she’ll pounce before the interval!’
With Mark looking and feeling slightly troubled, Danny left and wandered into the small cabin that Toot called home.
‘Got passports?’
‘Sure – we always had those in case Gina and Chima’s old man ever took us down to Mexico.’
‘Did he?’
‘No – all talk – that loser couldn’t even catch fish properly.’
‘That was the booze – they’re well rid of him.’
‘How come you’re still around old man?’
‘Got my life down here, everything I ever did is wrapped up in this place.’
It was almost dark when Chima passed through the wooden ranch gates and strolled down the long drive towards the imposing country house. The fading sunset behind her was still bright enough for her to see manicured lawns, a row of stables and some fancy cars in their full polished glory, before the shadows dulled and hid them as she knocked hard on the oak front door.
Mark answered; he was slightly dressed up, had shaved, combed his hair, his jeans looking new and pressed, his tight t-shirt clearly showing his half man half-boy torso. He looked pleased to see her, and she just stared as he looked out past her around the front of the house.
‘Where’s your car?
‘I walked.’
‘Walked? But this is America – no-one walks!’
Chima was wearing shorts, pale cream with a nice large green flower pattern, although Gina had tried to get her to wear a short skirt telling her that boys needed good and easy access at a drive-in. She wore sandals and a pink sweatshirt; her frizzy hair untouched as always.
Chima thought she must be the only girl in America to have a natural Afro these days. Gina spent hours getting rid of what was, to Chima at least, their greatest natural asset.
Mark took her through the large entrance hall with its grand sweeping staircase into a long room full of windows that ran the length of the side of the house; it had a bar, a pool table and lots of comfortable chairs and sofas. Before she could really take it all in, she was being introduced to his parents who reminded her of waxworks, so plastic looking and scrubbed clean that she found herself out of sorts and in a trance. She saw a moose head mounted on the wall and a TV screen so big that it seemed pointless going to the movies, and she wondered why she had never had a television. She came to when Mark nudged her saying:
‘My parents want to know what you graduated in.’
Chima knew it was useless to pretend and answered in the only way she could:
‘I kind of left school at twelve and worked on Pa’s fishing boat down at the wharf after Mum left…that is until he upped and left too. Guess I was fourteen then, so I started working at the diner until they found out my age, and ever since I help my brother Danny look after the port, you know, the rubbish, fences – except the town hall never comes to look so we don’t do much, just get paid to loaf around most days.’
The brief silence, which showed Chima she had shocked the lot of them, was broken by Mark’s swift intervention:
‘She’s pulling your leg – this girl manages the whole port with her brother – amazing really considering the plug was nearly pulled on the place.’
On the way to the drive-in, Mark shook his head, beamed a huge grin and let out a sigh of relief.
‘Wow, that was some story you concocted for my folks. Boy were they impressed by you – loved the humour.’
‘It’s all true.’
Mark was silent for a time before asking:
‘Are you going to pounce on me before the interval?’
Chima laughed hard and loud and didn’t stop, which made Mark laugh too, half out of nervousness but also because he just loved her humour, even if he didn’t have a clue.
When they had settled down again, Chima looked at Mark and showed her teeth with her smile, saying:
‘God, my face aches – I guess Danny or Gina told you that – right?’
‘He did.’
‘Just don’t get any dirty ideas – ok?’
‘OK – just like brother and sister then.’
Chima didn’t say a thing to that, she just turned on the radio and hummed along to some old rock n roll song.
Mark dropped Chima off just after midnight; Danny and Gina sat in the front room curled up into one another, listening to the radio with the light off. A large waxing moon illuminated the couple, Danny looking ghostly white and Gina a shadow with bright gleaming eyes.
‘Any action down there sister?’
‘I wouldn’t tell if there was – and why did you have to tell him I’d pounce?’
‘I live in hope!’
‘The film was boring – thanks for asking by the way! And it got me thinking – now we have a boat and are buying the wharf – what the hell do we need Igbo for?’
Danny pondered before replying:
‘You’re right, we don’t need to find Igbo after all.’
Gina curtly cut in:
‘So why are we going then, what for?’
‘So, Chima and Mark can fall in love of course.’
‘I hate you sometimes!’ Chima yelled.
‘No you don’t – you love me – just don’t know it yet!’
‘That’s like holding out for the Virgin Mary,’ said Gina.
‘She’s not a virgin – there was that fumble with Igbo’s brother on Halloween – remember?’
Danny burst out laughing as Chima stormed out. The couple soon heard the bedroom door slam shut.
‘Ouch.’
‘Hey Gina, do you think she really did it with Igbo’s brother?’
‘She wasn’t drunk – Toot found her pinned up against an outside wall with her skirt hitched up and that bastard about to force it – Old Man Toot put his shotgun right up against that Nigga’s head – we ain’t never seen him since.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Toot reckoned you’d only do someth
ing stupid.’
‘What’s it got to do with that old man?’
‘Dunno, but he sure looks out for us ever since all our folks upped and left.’
‘Weird eh?’
‘After our Pa left he used to give me money for the shopping, right up until you left high school and started working around the wharf – did you know that?’
‘I suppose so, but I never really knew who was supposed to be looking after us – we ain’t normal Sis.’
‘Quit lamenting – we going on a boat trip?’
‘Never done it on a sail boat before.’
‘Might take a lot of practice to get it right!’
‘That’s for sure – damn, I’d better make it up to Chima in the morning.’
Chima was watching the grey ocean slowly brighten up as the sun rose on the other side of the house; she had a blanket wrapped around her and held a steaming cup of coffee.
Danny spoke from inside the kitchen through the open door.
‘Why doesn’t the sun rise in the west or our house face the east?’
‘Because we’d never see those Californian sunsets, idiot!’
Danny chuckled and Chima turned and saw him standing in the doorway.
‘I’m sorry Sis, Gina told me last night about Igbo’s brother and Old Man Toot.’
‘Old Man Toot – I don’t get that guy – I’m sure he was about to pull the trigger – for what?’
‘Gina said he used to bang your Mum – is that right?’
‘Maybe, we don’t know for sure – all the same, he saved…’
‘Your cherry.’
‘I hate you sometimes.’
‘No, you don’t….’
‘Has Toot asked about the money?’
‘No, and he won’t.’
‘Good – now let’s get that boat in the water today. Mark said it’s ready.’
It took a lot of care and precision to hoist the boat out of the pit, across the wharf and into the deep channel by the old loading dock without scratching or knocking it, as it swung about as they moved the gantry across the wharf.
Before Toot had finished dropping the boat, a car drove down the long track and pulled up beside them. Igbo Lita got out from the passenger seat.
He looked desperate, scrawny and drawn, moving with nervous tension.
‘Going south I hear.’
No one spoke.
‘I know what you done and you better give some right now.’
He was menacing, and to make matters worse the tough white guy also got out of the car. He had a nasty scar across his forehead and had that look that only meant trouble. A handgun was stuffed into his belt, on display for all to see.
‘I know you took that dead man’s money – so where is it?’
Danny spoke:
‘He was dead, stinking for days in that hole he called a home. Why didn’t YOU take it?’
‘He had a gun and I was in enough trouble – and how was I to know he was dead.’
Gina spoke:
‘We got there first’
Igbo looked at Chima.
‘My brother should have nailed you bitch.’
Toot walked away towards his cabin.
‘Where’re you going old man?’
‘To get your money.’
The tough guy pulled his gun, saying:
‘Where’s the other guy?’
Mark had disappeared.
‘So how much did the dead man have?’
‘Nothing, he had nothing – we took the risk – it ain’t your business.’
Gina helped Danny, adding:
‘It weren’t stealing – he had no family – the state would’ve taken the lot.’
Igbo sneered:
‘I’ll take the boat as well, as it’s got my name on it.’
Toot came back with the bag.
‘So, he had nothing eh – show me old man.’
Toot pulled a small shotgun out and had both barrels cocked and right up against Igbo’s chest.
The tough white guy leveled the gun at Toot.
‘You ain’t got it in you, old man,’ Igbo sneered.
‘I have.’
Mark had returned with a handgun from the boat, pointing it at the tough. His hands were shaking and he found it hard to keep from squeezing the trigger.
‘You said it would be easy, now we have two guns on us – let’s quit – we got enough trouble.’
‘They’re pussies, shoot the old man.’
Mark couldn’t control his hands and the gun went off, the bullet narrowly missing the tough guy and shattering the windscreen.
‘He don’t miss, so that was a warning.’
After saying that, Toot pulled the gun away from Igbo and unloaded one barrel into the side of the car, blowing a hole in the driver’s door.
The tough lowered the gun and stuffed it into his belt.
‘I’m gone.’
He slowly got into the car, aware that both guns were now on him.
Igbo followed, but before getting in, looked at Danny.
‘You know he’s your Daddy don’t you – he used to bang your Mummy when your Pa was at sea.’
No one spoke.
‘And he used to do your Ma too – that’s why you are lighter than Chima and tall and thin like him.
Igbo turned away from Gina and got into the car. They all watched it reverse up the track to the road and quickly disappear.
Toot spoke:
‘They won’t be back – not now he’s said that.’
However, no one cared about Igbo just then.
‘Is it true, you’re our old man and we really are brother and sister?’
Toot unloaded the unspent cartridge, put the shotgun in the bag again, and replied without looking at them as he returned to his cabin:
‘Half brother and sister.’
‘So that makes it half alright.’
Chima chuckled.
She went to Mark who was shaking like a leaf, took the gun out of his hand and laid it on the ground. She hugged him long and hard.
Danny and Gina stared at each other.
‘Feel any different twisted sister?’
‘No twisted brother.’
‘Makes me feel even better – what about you?’
‘I need reminding – got the time.’
‘Now I can really say yuck!’ Chima shrieked.
Sometime later, they all sat on the veranda watching the sun setting over the ocean.
Mark had recovered from his ordeal but still hadn’t said a word to any of them.
Toot appeared along the beach to join them.
‘Don’t change a thing does it?’
‘That all depends on one thing old man,’ Gina replied.
‘What’s that?’
‘Answering one simple question.’
Danny asked the question:
‘Why doesn’t the sun rise in the west and set in the east?’
Toot knew everything was going to be okay as he replied:
‘Because we wouldn’t see those Californian sunset, idiot!’
They all laughed, except Mark who asked them all:
‘Is there anything else I should know about you lot?’
‘No twisted brother,’ Chima replied.
Like it or Lump it
‘Dead cat, bad scene man.’
And there it was, lying by the side of the road, in the grass and the weeds below the hedgerow that edged a very large field of summer wheat. It was black and stretched out, having probably been hit by a recent passing car, as it hadn’t been there in the morning.
The school bus moved on having dropped off a kid who lived opposite the dead cat on this lonely stretch of road. Maybe it was his cat, we never knew.
The few of us left on the bus, the few that lived way out, laughed hard at John’s comment, his strange use of street language which we were not used to; for us a dead cat was just that, a dead cat, and there was nothing bad scene about it at
all.
Someone had told me that John hung out with biker gangs and the like; all I knew is that he wore a tatty old leather jacket with the word LUMPIT painted low on the back in faded, cracked white paint. I guess it meant ‘like it or lump it’. I never asked. To me, he was an odd one – we were both fifteen but as different as chalk and cheese. He lived in a children’s home in the same town as me, but his sister, who had now left school, lived somewhere else; I recall an aunt being mentioned. His sister was short with curly brown hair. I remember her carrying a basket with a pack of cigarettes lying on top of some, probably redundant, schoolbooks. There were tales told at school – their mother was some dysfunctional alcoholic, mentally ill, a prostitute; their father having gassed himself in the kitchen oven. Who knows if any of it was true? Kids often made up imaginative stories – probably influenced by a teacher’s snide remarks – and we were kids in a time where other people’s sensibilities, dramas and traumas just simply didn’t exist. How times have changed – for the better, thank God!
Returning from school the next day, the bus slowed to make the usual drop off.
Suddenly, someone shouted:
‘The cat’s gone!’
Owen, a younger kid, shrieked in excitement:
‘The gypsies must have eaten it!’
Boy did we laugh at that, but John was furious and walked straight down the bus to the front where Owen sat with his sister. All the older kids sat at the back for some mysterious reason, thinking it was cool, but we actually all knew that it was uncomfortable and as bumpy as hell! Immediately he had Owen by the collar of his blazer and pushed him hard against the back of the seat.
‘The gypsies didn’t eat the cat – ok?’
Poor Owen was in tears. John wasn’t a tough guy by any means, just rough and fairly-tramp like for a kid of his age. Someone barked at him and he backed off to sit and sulk on his own with his secret memories or fantasies about gypsy cuisine, none of which he shared with us.
A few years later, I bumped into John in the street. I was on my way to college and he walked past me without any acknowledgement or eye contact. Just as he passed, I turned and shouted out to him, and, as he turned, I saw an older man, still scruffy, but now almost vagrant, with a look that said he was into his own bad scene. We exchanged grunts.
I only saw him once again after that, on the seafront outside the entrance to the pier. In those days, they still had rock concerts on the pier and perhaps he was going to one, or maybe buying a ticket. He was now a hippy, perhaps gypsy; black curly hair and a hoop earring with some paisley shirt and an Afghan type coat. This time we spoke for a while. He was serene, had a soft look, was friendly but still somehow had that troubled aura about him. He was with a hippy girl, said he liked her, but preferred someone else who he was seeing soon. The girl just smiled. He said he was travelling about from place to place, sleeping here and there and would soon be gone.
We were never friends, just two guys who, for a few years, travelled on the school bus home together.
I never saw him again, never thought about him; all the same, I never forgot those few priceless words:
‘Dead cat, bad scene man.’
A Difficult Place
I like difficult places. But, before you go wandering to a difficult place in your mind, let me put you in the picture a little.
The top of a mountain or a steep rock face, they can be difficult, downright dangerous in fact; however, no matter how difficult that may seem – it’s just not what I mean.
A difficult place to me, is a place where it’s not only hard to get to but one that no one is interested in getting to either. Well, not too many that is.
So, in my world, what’s a difficult place?
Pyrenean Brook Salamanders live in difficult places. They need to, just to be out of harm’s way, away from pollution, pesticides, hungry trout introduced for sport fishing, snakes and, of course, inquisitive and destructive people.
Now that doesn’t leave much space, especially as they live in shallow pools and are visible and vulnerable. Luckily for them, nature has given these beautiful amphibians a home in a most difficult and rather tricky place.
A canyon is a difficult place, but for some that difficulty becomes a challenge and an adventure sport. Canyoneers go anywhere where water flows from deep pools into sheer waterfalls in an adventurous, steep and perilous cascading descent.
I too have done this; abseiling down vertical walls, water gushing all around, pushing you left and right, so noisy that you can’t hear yourself think. At the bottom of a vertical canyon wall, there’s usually a deep pool whose current quickly pushes you towards the next precipice as you struggle to get off the rope and grab some slippery rock for imaginary safety, before you pull the rope down, to do it all again.
You need your wits about you; you need gear, equipment, and loads of experience. I was, and technically still am, a canyoning guide and instructor, having obtained all my bits of paper in The Blue Mountains of Australia. That’s what I did – canyoning, lots of it. It got me to difficult places. I needed ropes, a wetsuit, and like-minded buddies, which was fine and a lot of fun, but what I was missing was any connection to the canyon – to the actual place itself. It was all about sport, adventure, one-upmanship and nothing to do with the canyon itself – that was just the arena where these things could be played out.
Places where a canyon is too high and too small, too boring and no fun for canyoneers, caught my attention. In these places which are so very hard and dangerous to access, without the fun and thrill to lure the daring adventure sports enthusiast, I found a most interesting and difficult place.
All over the world, you can find these places and not just in canyons. It is here that small plants and creatures survive and thrive away from man.
Some years before writing this journal, I was in the Pyrenees canyoning – yes, old style for adventure and sports. Some local guy dropped us off at a high point, which I will just call Big Mountain. We had left a car on the French Spanish border by an old pilgrims’ rest house for our return journey, once we had completed our canyon adventure.
We were a small party and had no clue where we were going. We just knew that the watercourse was far below us in an impossibly steep valley, and to get there we had to negotiate a near vertical gully of unknown proportions.
The ferns and gorse dropped steeply down, growing out of loose rock and mud. We were at the head of a very steep and narrow valley, the source of the river evident in the soggy ground and reeds beneath our feet. We had the gear, the will and the gall, but it sure looked daunting. There was no solid rock to fix rope anchors, only loose crumbly boulders. A few lone oak trees hung on for dear life where the ground had allowed the odd acorn to sprout. This wasn’t canyoning; this was downhill scrambling on loose chaff (a climber’s term to describe dangerously loose and crumbly rock) into something that would also not be a ‘real’ canyon.
No one comes to this place – it’s dangerous, out of the way with nothing there at all.
We thought we were still in France, but actually, we were in Spain at a time when Basque separatism was still rife, with cross border contraband runs and hideouts in the lonely woods and steep valleys. I was told later that even the police were too scared to venture this far.
No wonder this place was so empty!
I won’t bore you with technical details, but it was a long steep descent in a tiny gully where we occasionally needed ropes. When not using ropes, great care was needed to avoid a non-stop tumble to the valley floor. From a canyoning point of view it was a bore, uninteresting – in fact, beside the danger, it was not fun at all.
But at the bottom of the gully, where it met another slightly larger gully and formed a small canyon, were a series of beautiful, shallow rocky pools smoothed out by millennia of running water. Above us on all sides, the ferns clung onto the impossible steep slopes, hiding the top somewhere way above us.
Here was a tranquil paradise, hid
den from all but the accidental adventurer or clandestine Basque (although I am sure they had easier routes than this one).
It was here that I first saw a salamander, then another and another, some dark, some grey green and white and some black with bright yellow stripes on their backs. Undisturbed, they barely moved at our presence, safe in their salamander haven.
Time was pressing. We hiked fast and hard, as we safely could, down the rocky river, until a barn appeared in a small field. Here we left the river and hiked for what seemed an age, up through an ancient dark green mossy forest along a tiny muddy track to a lone stone farmhouse. A small weather beaten farmer stood staring at us, perplexed. We told him, in French, that we were lost and he exclaimed in Spanish that this was Spain and sent us down the valley where we later found the car.
Some years later, when I was guiding a client around the green hills of the Basque Pyrenees, I had the strong memory of my old trip and an inclination to return and visit the salamanders I had so briefly encountered.
It was strange because local people had no real knowledge of these creatures and could not answer my questions. In fact, no one I asked had ever been all the way up the river. It was only after some research that I realised how lucky I had been to see so many salamanders, and that they really could only survive in the most difficult to reach places.
I returned with a like-minded friend and set off, not from Big Mountain but way down the valley, so we could hike up the river all the way – if that was at all possible. Six days supplies we carried, huge packs weighing us down, for the season was autumn and rain could be expected any day. I prayed not.
Given time, things always change; the separatist issue had now been ‘resolved’ and things had remained relatively quiet for the last four years. That would probably mean less tension, more tourists and more development. How would the salamanders be coping with such a change? Would hikers and adventurers now be in the valley?
The idea was to hike and explore the whole river valley all the way, from where it meets a big river in a broad valley with a main road and rail track, right up to its source on Big Mountain.
We arrived at the confluence of the two rivers and followed a small road upstream through a pretty Basque village, with its white and oxide red houses standing proud in the sunlight. The mixture of heat and rain makes this country so green that, even in autumn with leaves turning brown and chestnuts dropping, the fields and gardens still show lush and full.
I had been told, that in July, there had been the biggest river flood recorded in history – five metres it had risen, and the evidence was still apparent. Debris from the torrent was still caught and displaying high in tree branches – old grass and reeds, grey with age and decay, hung alongside ripped black plastic bags that I imagined must have been old farm sacks. Low-lying houses had been flooded out and the railway was still out of service due to landslip and mudslide. What did this mean further upstream?
Later on, we waded across the river to set up camp on a small patch of sand above the river, under an old chestnut tree. Boiled chestnuts became our after dinner treat each night.
We examined the river – plenty of small trout and a frog – there would be no salamanders here, for sure; and anyway, we were far too low – they prefer the high ground above 700m. No chance of a sighting until the river became too steep and shallow for hungry trout and reptiles.
Lying in our tent, listening to the endless rush and gurgle of water over stone and the soft wind on leaves above, we knew nature was still firmly in control here – not a human noise, besides our own, throughout the long dark night. Just the strong hoot of an owl kept us company for a while.
Although the days were still hot, the autumn morning light rose slow and late and it was well after ten by the time we were wading back across the stream to scrabble up a steep vegetated bank, onto the road again. Surprisingly, as the empty track switched back and high across a steep rocky gully tumbling down to the stream below, we passed a recently large squashed yellow and black striped salamander. What was it doing so low and so far from the stream? Had the flood washed them downstream, leaving the survivors to seek safety in the dense undergrowth high above the stream?
I had no clue at all.
A few hours later, we were at the pilgrims’ house, where another tributary rushed out of a narrow and very steep inclining valley, heavily wooded and very understated. It would have been the easiest thing to walk on by, continuing up the stream we had been following, where a small but powerful waterfall makes a pretty feature, and head on up the back road to the very top of Big Mountain.
But we didn’t, and were soon heading up this deep cut valley along a track that served the last farm, where the farmer had told me we were in Spain, not France.
Vultures soared and dropped low above us, crying a sound I have no word for. We then saw another squashed yellow and black salamander. As there was virtually no traffic here, it was either very unlucky or there was an abundance of these creatures living in the wet, dense undergrowth. The river was right by us, flowing swiftly over and between smooth boulders, looking brown, which was the colour of its bed.
The valley is very narrow here and cut very steeply. Before long, we were hiking uphill with a great view back to where we had come from, and another towards the maze of rock and forest of where we were about to go.
We passed the farm and said hallo to the same farmer standing by his front door gate. He still looked perplexed, but smiled on hearing were we English. Perhaps it’s still not good to be on either side, a Spaniard or a Frenchman, inside these tricky hills.
We left the track and entered the dark forest, old and undisturbed, dropping down towards the river on an overgrown stony path.
Every shade of green you could imagine was here, from the vibrant to the sinister, and soon we were standing on a piece of brilliant green pasture only just big enough to set a tent. The valley is so steep that flat ground is a rare find and we decided to set up camp. I noticed a small bridge, nothing more than a newly cut log really, that left the rocks by the pasture and ended up against the near vertical sides on the other side of the stream – a bridge to nowhere by the looks of it. I crossed over. Below was a deep pool where I saw an eight-inch trout dart to safety, as soon as my shadow hit the stream. On the other side was more pasture, a sandy area where patches of grass grew, now the water levels had receded from the incessant rain this place receives. We saw some Basque ponies, but no way was this bridge cut just for them to munch a few mouthfuls of the sporadic grass.
It was truly fortunate not to be Spanish or French in this place right now, I thought.
We could sleep in peace.
We set the tent up across the log bridge on a sandy patch and cooked food over a wooden fire. Then the rain came. All night it hammered down. The noise on the tent flysheet was loud, but the river was louder and I hoped it would not rise. Cutting through this hullabaloo was an owl, clear as anything, and then there were two owls talking to one another.
I listened to the owls and worried about the river.
The water level was the same and the rain had stopped. We hiked up the rocky stream along the same side as our camp. The flood torrent was violently evident here; trees had been uprooted, broken and washed downstream. Anything growing along the streambed had been ripped up and cast aside. There was no room for water to spill anywhere – no fields to flood, no riverbanks to breach – just a gorge to fill up.
We waded across the stream and rejoined the stony path. Trout were still evident, although they were fewer and smaller now.
As the valley slopes became steeper, the path zigzagged high above the stream, yet we could hear it clearly, as it crashed and pounded over the rock below. Deer scat and what looked like grouses’ littered the path.
Down we hiked, through an ancient hazel coppice grove, and briefly joined the stream again by a steep flowing rocky gully, before we hiked back up. Soon below us was the spot where I had left the stream some
years before, but the barn was now a house.
I picked up an ancient broken horseshoe – maybe my luck was in – and put it in my bag.
Crossing gullies on our ascent, I thought about heading down and walking in the stream – but the heavy packs and tricky river terrain made the task near impossible.
When the trees allowed a view, I looked over to the other side of the steam; the trees were thinning as the slopes were so very steep, and, in a fold in the valley sides, I saw a very long thin cut of rock, slicing the fold from the very top to bottom – the canyon I had first descended. God it looked unfriendly!
Up we went until daylight filtered through the trees – a ridge or pass must be right ahead.
What a surprise I got: Basque farmer types with guns hiding out for a newfound prey – pigeon, so they said. However, none were flying overhead today, and not a shot was ever heard.
They said there was no way down into the canyon, no path at all, and sent us on a trip around the head of the valley to Big Mountain which was now right opposite us.
I knew they were mistaken; I knew the canyon I wanted was right below us, and once out of sight, we headed straight down through the trees. We were virtually at the very end of the valley – there was nothing left to walk, and I didn’t want to get into another near vertical gully without a rope.
Backpacks can be great things; you can carry a house, larder, stove and wardrobe, sometimes with ease, but I had eighteen kilos and my friend had twenty-one – not a great idea when descending these slopes, hanging onto trees, making huge zigzags so not to take a fall – one tumble and you would be on the canyon floor. Taking great care, I slowly eased myself down. My friend was somewhere behind – I could hear him slip and slide.
Suddenly I saw his pack tumbling and thumping down the slope and coming to rest deep in thorns and ferns.
I looked up and saw him edging down after the pack. At that moment, I thought he had just let it go as an easy option – not a great idea I said aloud. However, after we had retrieved the pack, he said he had been slipping, desperately hanging on and would have fallen if he had not released the load.
Such is the nature of these trips.
We reached the canyon. We were high up, near the point where to go much higher would be too steep to walk. The spot was a large deep pool under a little waterfall. Paradise, my friend said then.
He was right – two huge grey salamanders were suspended motionless before my very eyes. I counted four in this pool – the water was dark and there would be more for sure.
I didn’t want to head up canyon – that would have been very tricky and we needed to find a campsite long before dusk. We just had the time if we moved on fast but not too fast, as I wanted to look in every pool.
A small drop, too high to jump and too slippery to climb down, lay directly before us. The damp rocks were like ice under our feet and, to minimise the risk, I climbed up the steep bank and traversed the canyon around at about twenty feet above. It was slippery and loose, I had to take my pack off and push it in front of me through the ferns and brambles, eventually rejoining the canyon floor about a hundred feet ahead. I waited for my friend.
Nothing.
I left my pack and wandered back up the canyon floor to under the tricky down climb I had just avoided. He was above me at the start of the traverse, not moving an inch.
I didn’t see a problem at first, I guess I should have, but I just didn’t twig at all. He was scared of heights and unable to proceed. He hadn’t told me that, and I had yet to cotton on.
From this point, it was easy for him to lower me his pack. Once it was safely down, I helped him jump across a gap in the rocks. He grabbed my hand and lunged hard, nearly pulling me off balance. Take it easy, I tried to joke.
I can’t remember if we saw more salamanders, for the way needed thinking about, sizing up; one slip and a head would surely crack.
Another drop on smooth wet rock, not much water, but steep and wet enough for me to shy away. The choice was between a traverse on one side or the other. One side was so steep, that getting back into the canyon would have needed a rope, but even with a rope, there was nothing but ferns, no anchor points at all. I opted for the ‘easy’ side, heading up past two oak trees onto the ferny slopes. I had to traverse high up through tall bracken to keep away from the steepness below. I could see another very steep gully tumbling down towards the canyon, just slim enough in places for me to step over but a death trap to be inside. I stopped and looked behind. My friend was not in sight. I called but no answer.
Traversing back, I caught sight of him struggling to get up past the oak trees. He did not answer my calls. When he was at the last tree, he sat down. He didn’t really give me answers, just vague replies about the pack and straps – nothing to explain what was up.
It seemed like an age before the penny dropped.
‘If you are freaking out, you’d better tell me right now so I can do something about it’.
A simple yes came back at me.
I guess these things have now become automatic in me. I didn’t need to know what was wrong or why. We were in a difficult place and needing to find a camp fast.
I dropped my pack and went over to him. Going back was not on my list – ahead is where I wanted to be. I took his pack – god it was heavy – and battled through the ferns a few hundred meters and dropped it down. I then went back for mine to do the same, telling my friend to follow close behind me. I set off.
When I arrived and dropped my pack, I turned around and saw only ferns.
I shouted to him and soon an answer came back at me, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw the bracken move – he was down on his hands and knees crawling through the dense and wretched stuff. His head quickly bobbing up like a frightened rabbit to take a bearing, only to disappear again.
Just before he arrived, I was off again with a pack to the small gully where I just managed to step across and throw the pack to the ground. I was hot and sweating.
Returning to collect the other pack, I saw my friend sitting there amongst the ferns. I couldn’t believe it – he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and his hands and legs were lacerated, cut to ribbons by the brambles and gorse lying under the ferns – a proper bloody mess, superficial perhaps, but more scratches than I had ever seen. I mumbled something about the first aid kit, and he mumbled something back about washing in the river. I then just ignored it and focused on a way to get back into the canyon and relative safety.
It was far too steep to climb down the edge of the gully with these packs, and straight ahead was gorse and brambles – not an option anymore. I backtracked thirty feet or so and dropped down steeply to where the gully met the canyon. Here was a short vertical drop. I released my pack and dropped it down – it rolled a little way down the gully before stopping on a big flat rock. I then jumped the few feet down to meet a dry smooth piece of rock. To my surprise, my friend was following with his heavy load and did the same.
We were down, safe, and didn’t need to mention what had just occurred.
It’s not really a canyon, but a smoothed out narrow rocky stream bed with continuous small drops and large boulders. The sides were crumbly rocky vegetation leading onto the impossible steep fern slopes. However, it was quite easy to walk and negotiate obstacles on the canyon floor.
A few trees grew out of the crumbly sides, where the ground allowed – oak, beech and ash, large mature trees still full of leaves. Once out of the canyon only ferns could cling onto the steep slopes. The flood had obviously not been so severe here – no sign of the destruction that had occurred further downstream. The high water mark was no more than three or four feet above the very low level it was now.
This place was hidden from the world, hidden from the Basque farmers above, hidden from the view point on Big Mountain, three hundred metres or so above, and hidden from the forest further downstream – we couldn’t see a thing above the fern slopes and nothing could look
down into here.
Here we saw salamanders in the shallow pools, just a few of them at first, mainly green/grey with white dots and stripes on their backs. Some were dark, almost black, but no yellow anywhere – the ones we had seen squashed on the road were not here.
And then a pool, maybe four feet deep with shallow sides and plenty of small stones and boulders on its bed – Salamander City – I stopped counting at twenty. Now all the pools revealed a similar treasure. We had found our salamanders!
The strange thing was, no yellow ones were to be seen anywhere.
We made camp under a large old oak tree. In fact, the tent sat on the only flat ground around – a rough grassy patch sticking out into the canyon. Our tent was directly under a huge low-slung branch, which my friend swung from to check it wouldn’t fall on top of us in the dead of night. It was the perfect spot, right at the juncture of two small canyons – the one we were in and the one I had canyoned down from the top of Big Mountain previously.
I explored the other canyon. Perhaps it was too steep and small or perhaps too open and exposed – whatever the reason, there were no salamanders here at all, and I knew further up between the steep drops there would definitely be none.
My friend had an Indian girlfriend and, as today was the Hindu festival of Diwali, he had promised her to eat boil-in-the-bag chicken tikka whilst dancing around the campfire. I was to take a photograph.
OK, so we had the chicken tikka, but to make a fire in this pristine place was like sacrilege to me, yet I didn’t want to stop his fun. Oak is not the best wood to start a fire and he struggled to get a flame. When he did, by catching dry ferns, the wood would still not burn. I refrained from pointing to the ash tree in the shadows opposite our camp.
But I can vouch he tried and did his best (just in case a split is on the cards!).
The following morning we broke camp and packed our bags. We left them under the oak tree and wandered downstream to have a look for more pools. There was an old stone building above the stream junction, dilapidated with no roof. The timber supports could have been one hundred years old and the open floor was littered with large rough-cut slate tiles, half hidden in the ferns. I couldn’t imagine anyone herding sheep down here – what a nightmare – and so very dangerous to round them up again. I fantasised it had been a safe house, hidden from view, allowing a clandestine escape down the canyon and into the dense forest below – who knows?
This time there were so many salamanders that we didn’t even try to count them. We even saw a pair mating in six inches of water. This was October 24th and the day was balmy, as had all the other days been, the summer hanging over far too long this year – had the fauna and the flora been tricked by nature? The weather could turn any day now, forcing the salamanders to leave the streambed and hibernate above the canyon under rocks and logs.
Fresh deer scat and tracks were evident on the canyon floor – at least two different animals, and we saw what looked like cat and martin scat.
It was safe down here from men with guns and a liking for blood.
The canyon dropped steeply, and we climbed down until the forest started on the right hand bank. The Salamanders were scant here and, as I had already once walked down this stream, I knew that soon there would be no more. We turned and went back to our packs.
It would be fair to say that the salamanders live in a stretch of shallow canyon no more than six hundred metres long, with the main concentration being in a three hundred metre stretch. There is no evidence of them living in the steep gullies feeding the main stream.
In the bustle to transport the bags across the ferns, I had somehow lost the maps and compass. Damn! Maybe they wished to remain in this difficult place, hidden forever!
There were three ways out: back up the stream – that could mean traversing the fern slopes again; down the stream – that meant a very hard descent on slippery boulders and then a long walk up through the forest; going straight up to Big Mountain – nearly a thousand feet of very steep hiking through ferns and crumbly rock. Big Mountain seemed the best option and a route I knew – also the route was visible, and I remembered a track on the top, which would take us back around the head of the valley to where the Basque farmer pretended to shoot pigeons.
Off we set, up and up, slipping on loose rock, grunting and zigzagging to find the safest path. Our packs made it hard and I had to stop to catch my breath, often.
I looked back, saw my friend sitting, not moving up at all, and knew we had to turn back and try another way.
Back at the canyon floor, we had two choices left – up stream or down – he chose to go back up.
On arriving at the junction of the steep gully and the stream, we found a huge dead slowworm floating in a pool.
Going up a canyon, as long as it is not vertical, can be a lot easier than coming down one. I chose to try to ascend rather than face the ferns again. It was tricky and very slippery, and more than once, we had to pass the packs up after I had climbed up without one. I nearly fell back once, just managing to thrust and jam a hand into a crack in time. Fortunately, there were no snakes getting ready for hibernation. We passed a deer skull and were soon back at the oasis pool.
Back up the route we had come down, the way where my friend had released the pack – this was going to be a tough one for sure. I offered to relay both packs to the top, but he declined, much to my relief. I took his heavier bag and set off. Even zigzagging up the slope it was slippery, and with the weight constantly moving from side to side, it was tough not to succumb and take the unthinkable tumble to the canyon floor. My friend was slow, desperately grabbing at tree roots or the odd clump of grass – a complete mistake and a basic rule of trekking. I kept shouting down not to trust anything underfoot or in his hand – check it first.
I waited at the top, breathing hard and happy to have the pack off my back. Wild boar scat lay near my feet. He arrived some time later.
Finally, mission accomplished, we had to find a different and interesting way back home.
We camped by an old stone barn – this was luxury camping now – no hurry or pressure, as we had enough time to get back to our village and catch our flight home.
Owls kept us company once again that night.
There is one funny thing that happened that evening. We needed water, and there was a bath with a pipe-feed and ball-cock for some horses in a huge field. My friend disconnected the pipe, drank and washed. However, the fitting would not screw back on and the water powerfully gushed out all over the field, so he turned the screw valve off.
The horses drank the bath dry in no time. We were a bit concerned that some angry Basque would accuse us of breaking his pipefittings or worse, allowing his horses to die of dehydration – there were no houses up here, no ‘farming’ as such, just sheep and not many of those – so there would probably not be a person up here for days. Finally, he managed to bodge the pipe fitting, with half the water running into the bath and half onto the already wet quagmire field. The horses would get the blame no doubt!
The next morning the shooters were back – no pigeons they said, and when I asked about pheasants or grouse, they said they had all long disappeared. In the year 2000, the last Pyrenean ibex was found dead in a national park. They had systematically been shot out over hundreds of years.
Having no map or compass now, I had asked the Basques to point the way back. I had opted for a long traverse across the valley top – a high ridge and plateau directly opposite Big Mountain. The vista was magnificent; to our left we could see the whole valley from start to finish except for the small, discreet and well-hidden salamander canyon. To our right was a continuous huge drop down to the main river valley and rail track.
It was one of those hellish, non-stop hikes across an undulating rocky plateau that never seemed to end. At the top of every small escarpment, where we thought the path would drop down into the main valley, we saw yet another escarpment to traverse. So it went on, and, und
er a warm low sun and heavy packs, we forged on, hoping the end would soon be in sight. Eventually it was; a steep rocky descent taking us down hard and fast – it was an effort not to stumble. We rested for a while on some grass knowing there was no water anywhere near, no campground, and probably no hotel. We forced ourselves to get up and go on. We had long run out of water – there’s almost never any water on top of a mountain, and we were now really parched.
Eventually, there was a hotel and bar, which had outside tables overlooking a church and the high hills we had just descended. We took our well-deserved place and rested for a moment. Water and lots of it was needed to quench our burning thirst; however, if anyone reading this has ever seen the movie Ice Cold in Alex, you will know what is coming next. In the movie, the main cast had just finished a gruelling truck ride full of peril across the scorching Sahara desert and arrived in Alexandria, Egypt – hot, exhausted and very, very thirsty. Water was badly needed. But no, not water but an ice-cold beer drunk and savoured slowly before any real hydration. You’ll never taste a beer like it. All you need is one to taste and feel the cool nectar, the reward for all your hard work. It just doesn’t taste the same or have any effect if you drink water first.
We ordered our beers and had the Ice Cold in Alex experience. One was enough, for we then had to trek another two miles to find a piece of flat ground alongside the big rushing river, where we set up camp and cooked in the pitch black of night.
Yes, it’s fair to say we were spent by then!
A few days later, after we had returned, we were sitting outside a café in a splendid French Basque spa town, under the shade of an ornamental plane tree. The waitress sat on a stool, plucking birds. I strolled over and she seemed put out, slightly embarrassed, and I’m not surprised; she was plucking a green woodpecker and had two more besides, waiting their cooking pot fate.
Now for the moral of this story: If you are green or yellow, interesting, cute or tasty, I suggest hiding and hanging out in the most difficult place you can possibly find!
Crystal Night
Cold crystal particles beautifully shaped and delicately formed into the soft snow or harsh ice of hiking and climbing.
This is what the word crystal conjures for me.
For others it may be a cure in crystal healing, the devil calling in crystal meth, an expensive cut glass thing or just a pretty stone. Once, I even knew a girl called Crystal who had the magic of a piece of crystal rock.
Berlin. November 9th 2014.
The bar was dimly lit. In fact, from the outside it barely looked open. There were no customers, not even a barman was visible, and the only clue that it may be open was the flickering of candles burning on top of empty wine bottles, thick with teardrop wax. There was a candle on every empty table.
Just like this one, most semi rundown areas of this trendy city have a special kind of bar. They are shrines to decay, a homage to the old, desperately crying out to be new and, of course, utterly hip.
I’m not sure how long they will last, but for some time I think, for Berlin still has a love affair with the ghost of its old decrepit East.
To make a bar like this you need the obvious – time and money, but when it is done, finished and ready, it will look like something that has always been there – aged and ramshackle, just like an old warehouse or farmhouse that’s been long forgotten. The difference being that your bar will be spotlessly clean, just not repaired – that quaint look of rural decay inside a city limit.
First of all, you need to find a dilapidated shop in a cruddy part of town, preferably on a corner in a pleasant and quiet street with trees – plane trees seem to be Berlin’s favourite – tall and grand, offering a leafy seasonal umbrella to all, and a street space outside for a few fair weather tables. Big stare-through windows are a must – after all this is going to be a pretend not to be gallery.
Next, clean out all the crud and dust. Now you have your canvas, not a blank one, but one that’s surely more than half-complete.
Half strip the walls, knock off some plaster, expose brick, leave a little of the old wall paper hanging here and there, and do the same with the ceiling. A few essential repairs may be needed, but when it’s done, it still has to look really trashed, yet beautifully clean – this is Germany!
Floors are always the same: wide and chunky old wooden boards, lightly sanded, stained and then polished, the wear and blemishes of age still clearly visible, or an old broken tiled floor, repaired with odd colours and textures before being smoothed down and highly polished.
Now you have the walls, ceilings and floors.
Make sure the bar itself is made of some kind of bric-a-brac like an old wardrobe, broken palettes or – even better – half a fishing boat. Again, make sure it’s not too nice or in good condition.
The electrics must look bad. They are only good if it looks like the wiring was done one hundred years ago with dirty cables hanging loosely and wired into broken connectors. And the lights must look like something out of a haunted house or spooky basement. Electrocution must be an option!
You’re nearly finished, just a few things left.
Tables and chairs must be functional, not wobbly, and almost without exception, they are cast outs found in the street, in a dump or the poorest second hand shop going. And make sure nothing matches. No garish colours and nothing that matters if it breaks (it’s probably already broken anyway). I even went to one that had a big old-fashioned bathtub just sitting on the bar room floor – for what? For everything – coats were lying in it when I looked, but I imagine kids would have a riot there, after all these places are civilised coffee shops in daylight hours.
Now, for one last important thing – the toilets.
There are only two rules to follow. Obviously nothing will be new, that’s a given. They have to be spotlessly clean and totally covered in graffiti, not the stylish arty type, but the thick felt pen of yobs and street gangs. But don’t worry if you’re not up to the job, soon enough your clients will do it for you – free of charge!
Oh, I nearly forgot – the staff.
Men must be wafer thin – no gym for them, underfed and bearded but definitely not that unshaven macho type – dressed casually in bland clothes that are far too big; women must look as if they don’t care about things like hair – but they do, very much.
Open your doors and let the hip come in.
To enter such a place with awareness is like entering a church or place of worship. You may not be religious or even have religion, but you know that others entering do.
Welcome to the church of the urban hipster.
Music was playing but you could still hold conversation without raising your voice. I listened briefly – an American man with a deep-throated serious voice talked and half sung about life and the absurd. I stopped listening after I heard the word crucified, wondering who the hell had been crucified for the sinners of this holy place.
The congregation was out and the place was empty. We would pray alone tonight.
The barman appeared – waif like, bearded and very softly spoken. We ordered wine. I looked around, a piano stood in the corner and I wondered if it was ever played, or if it just sat there looking pretty, another piece of bric-a-brac from somewhere down the road.
There’s only one Berlin now, no East or West, but the whole place is like a museum to both. You can see the divide in bits of the old wall with its famous graffiti along the Spree, and in the old check points, custom houses, gates and stations – even the tram lines only operate in the old East, for the West pulled up its tracks long ago. The miles of brain numbing apartments in the East at Marzahn-Hellersdorf, and the old airfield at Templehof in the West, now a park and conference centre but still looking as if planes land every day, are all perfectly preserved and stating loudly – East, West or the line between.
These bars are something like that; a dividing line between the two – run-down, tired, malnourished and in decline – The Eas
t meeting the West with its ultra cool modernism.
And to be honest, they are fun and very civilised places to visit. Not raucous and beer swilling, neither are they elitist. In fact, if you are dirt poor and turn up in shabby bland attire, you can just pretend deliberate and measured down dressing. You’ll fit in just fine.
My friend and I sat down in this post-modern installation. I guess we were the only exhibits to anyone passing by. We talked about the day. We had hiked long and hard through a vast forest, whose floor had been a mottle of muted autumn colours glistening in the fine rain. The skies were overcast and moody, and even at midday the tall beech trees, still considerably covered in leaf, created an eerie twilight. We walked in silence through a sea of grey and brown, the crisp air slightly stinging our faces.
In this empty tract near the Polish border, we had come to look for beaver. They frequent the rivers and marshland below the forest. Although we didn’t see a beaver, there had been plenty of evidence of them in the boggy swamps and flowing streams. We saw the classic chewed up tree trunks where a trunk is left teetering and tottering on a tiny stem, and the log dams that make a beaver’s lodge.
We had underestimated the time needed to return to the car, and had had to hike hard through fading light along confusing dark trails and increasingly dense mist, skirting around ghostly pools and gloomy lakes. We made it back just before pitch black enveloped the world.
So there we were, happy and weary after a great hike through the forest, enjoying the surreal tranquillity of this Berlin hipster bar. Out of the blue, my friend asked me if I thought she was a hipster girl. What the hell did that mean – being part of some phony transience, a small moment where you belong to some ephemeral elite, or just a modern thing deliberately showing difference? She was from another part of Germany, not a Berliner at all, but maybe that’s the point – all hipsters are somehow foreign invaders. Who knows? Not me for sure, but I answered ‘no’ anyway, and she corrected me with a very big yes.
That was about as deep as the conversation got, any deeper and we would be stripping away the wallpaper (or what was left of it anyway) to reveal probably nothing much at all – and that would have simply spoiled all the fun!
The American continued to deliver his endlessly dull word parade, and, I kid you not, when I went to the loo – there it was – the thick felt pen of yob graffiti covering every square inch.
As we were laughing together in this bizarre environment, another friend entered. Passing by, she had seen us through the windows and was now heading towards our table, beaming a huge smile that was almost lost in her mass of black hair, wild and thick like a Himalayan yak. She had just come from where half of Berlin had been; in fact, not just Berliners but half of the world’s press and cameras.
This place was empty because it was November 9th.
Why had we been here and not there? This was no time to pray in an urban hipster bar, this was the time for celebration out in the cold crisp autumn air.
Was it?
Yes it was. The praying could wait ‘till later.
Oh.
With all this talk about East and West reflecting in a hip bar’s decor, we had somehow missed the point. Well not the point exactly, but what the majority had firmly on their minds.
It was twenty-five years to the day that the wall came down, was breached, jumped over and effectively finished – the day of re-unification, the day that difference died.
My friend and I had been deep in a forest unaware that a very long row of white balloons edged the old wall boundary, lit up and ready to be released into the night sky, cameras clicked and profound articles were being written. A night of joy – let’s not forget we are one, once again.
Oh, sorry about that, but we were looking for beaver and the lesser spotted three toed earwig in a dark and vast forest that conjures dreams and spooky night time magic, while Berlin and probably half the world were celebrating the wall coming down.
But these bars are still lamenting this total loss of difference.
You may think I have a loose screw, am slightly unhinged with the door now hanging off, for thinking such a thing, but these bars are really crying such a loss whilst having a grand good time.
To be really hip, you’ve really got to be very, very different.
We spoke about our Jewish roots – mine shaky like thin cracked ice, but my black haired friend has an ice shelf under her, a thoroughbred, with Hebrew in her blood.
But wait, she had no real interest in the wall, that divide that toppled down, or the evening’s celebration, that was all just something to do – to meet some friends and have some fun.
This was November 9th – not a night to celebrate. No one in their right mind would celebrate a night like this.
This was Crystal Night, the night the Nazi’s burnt the synagogues, smashed the Jewish shops – all that glass, those fractured shards sparkling in the firelight or early morning sun.
Crystal Night 1938.
My Mother went to school next morning. She was six years old and living in Bad Homburg. It wasn’t until school was out around midday that she first knew something had happened. Her class and a few teachers ended up about four minutes from the school, down a road everybody called Jew lane (it had been officially called Judengasse before being changed to Wallstasse). The synagogue was ablaze, flames coming from all the windows. The fire fighters were there, but only to douse the adjoining properties, not to quell the Jewish flames. The shop opposite the school was smashed and wrecked – it was a stationary shop for the kids, owned by a Jew who hanged himself a few days later. No one asked questions and nothing was ever said; my Mother remembers, a year or two later, two sisters in her class who had learning difficulties being taken away to a special school and later sterilised.
So, there we were – in a bar, hip or not hip, talking about a wall that was not a wall, and of a night the devil came and turned the world upside down. My Grandmother had come from Berlin and now I was not sure that I even liked it anymore.
Jeez – give me beaver anytime…
Here’s a drawing that my Grandfather – Karl Trinkewitz – did of that very synagogue, sometime before it was burnt down to the ground:
Costa Rica
Rincon de la Vieja roughly translates to – The Nooks and Crannies of the Old Witch – and this active volcano in the Guanacaste highlands was where our small party was heading. Just before we left the Ranger station, a handsome coati (looking like a mix of badger and racoon) suddenly appeared from nowhere and skilfully pilfered a pack of sandwiches from an open rucksack, much to my companion’s chagrin and Ranger’s amusement.
The forest here is lush, undisturbed and as humid as hell. It quickly enveloped us in a sea of endless green, as we followed the small wet and muddy trail up towards the swirling clouds we had seen from the car park. Wildlife is abundant, and, although we didn’t catch a glimpse of the elusive jaguar, we did see huge tapir prints and many small animals scurrying and rustling across the forest floor. Three different species of monkey swung and chattered through the canopy high above. In the low forest, birds abound, but it is the brilliant blue of the amorphous butterflies, beautiful and dazzling against the hue of forest greens that is the jewel for all to see and wonder; occasionally, they stopped to bask on a branch, catching a ray of brilliant sunshine that had somehow managed to break through the seemingly impenetrable canopy.
We finally broke out of the trees into the vast moonscape of the slopes of the volcano itself. Looking back from where we had just come was the magnificent view of the forest, sweeping down and reaching far below, to where the land flattened out and spanned the horizon to the Pacific Ocean many miles away.
Shale, gravel and broken rock greeted us as we stomped across a barren plateau, reminding us that not so very long ago Rincon de la Vieja had violently spewed her wrath. We came to the crater: a deep gash in the Earth, whose blue water bubbled and steamed at the bottom of dangerous vertical cliffs. Str
eaks of bright yellow sulphur lined the vertical rock, blowing out the smell of rotten eggs. We had been told by the Ranger to stay for fifteen minutes maximum and, just as our time was up, we saw the clouds swirl, and then a flash of low lightning, not vertical but horizontal, at about our height, zigzag across the ridge mere yards in front of us with a huge accompanying crack and bang. Three of my companions were crouching down, having been ‘sparked’ and slightly electrified. As they looked nervously around, it happened again and the mist quickly engulfed us making visibility almost zero. I heard the crunching gravel as my friends dashed to escape the fury of the Old Witch, but I stood my ground, knowing one slip and I could end up in the bubbling cauldron below. Within five minutes, the air had cleared, the downpour stopped, and we laughed and hurried off the mountain before she changed her mind again!
Tales from the Marsh