Last Days of the Bus Club

by Stewart, Chris

  There wasn’t an awful lot I could do about any of this: there were no keys on Domingo’s side of the river, and there was not a chance in a million of throwing the keys across the river, even if it were not swollen … so I went back to bed, where it was warm and dry and the Wife was. Later I lay awake in the pale morning darkness, listening to the hammering of the rain on the flat roof. Had I been a smoker, I would have smoked … in fact, this seemed like the perfect moment to take it up. There was a bull here that needed taking by the horns, but I thought it better to wait a bit till daybreak, and perhaps a lull in the rain, and I’d be feeling a lot more equable about things having had another couple of hours supine in bed.

  With the first light of the morning I fished out an umbrella, shook the summer’s dead scorpions out of my wellingtons and stepped out into the rain. I squelched into a world that, having been hard and dry, had overnight become soft and sodden. The rain was still pouring on down and, although the cataclysmic downpour of the night seemed to have passed, the air was so full of water that it immediately condensed on my glasses. I wiped them with a rag I found in my pocket but it only made them worse, so I took them off and walked myopically and with some trepidation down the track towards the river, the dogs trotting along behind.

  We hear the sound of the water all year round: in summer it dwindles to the faintest susurration as the water trickles from pool to pool amongst the rocks, and in winter it’s a constant roaring, not unlike the sound of distant traffic on a motorway, the roaring of rubber on a road. It’s so constant that you barely notice it. This, though, was entirely different: the valley was awash with noise, the terrible noise of swollen and raging waters. The thunder of boulders crashing into one another punctuated the ceaseless roar of maddened water. Misty clouds moved amongst the mountains, cutting off the tops and creating the illusion of strange hills and crags where there were none. There were slender cascades where there never had been cascades before, tumbling high amongst the Aleppo pines on La Serreta, and, adding to the tumult, the crash and tumble of rockfall after rockfall, as familiar crags and pinnacles dissolved before my eyes and vanished in the raging grey water.

  The dogs moved through this awful scene utterly indifferent to it, sniffing the new smells and wagging their tails. That’s the way dogs are: they may or may not be composed largely of love, but they have not the slightest interest in, nor appreciation of, landscape or beauty. They’re like teenagers in that respect. As for me, I stood on the corner, my jaw slack, spellbound by the sight of the river in flood. Where were the inoffensive little minnows, I wondered, the tadpoles and frogs, the green lines of tamarisk and oleander that bordered the river where it ran before? They hadn’t stood a chance.

  The rain lashed on down as I continued towards the lower fields of the farm. I was heavy with water and the mud on my boots. The sheep peered from the stable door as we passed; they weren’t going anywhere; they hate to get wet. Finally I caught sight of the Trevélez River, rolling down the valley from the north. There was no way I could even get to where I might be able to see the car: everything had gone. Where there had once been a rich vegetation of trees and bushes, and the road that led to the farm, there was nothing but river. As I stood there, gaping at it all, a whole hedge of brambles, tamarisk and broom came crashing down and whirled away on the flood.

  Domingo was right: we had already lost a large part of the lower farm, and the water was still rising and the rain was still sheeting down. The car would be good and gone by now. I felt a bit sad about it, with that curious sense of loss and confusion that you experience when you get to where you thought you left your car in the street … and it’s not there. And we had lost precious land, too, land that represented years of cultivation and care, of hopes and heady schemes, with olives and oranges and apricots that now would never give fruit. There was nothing to be done, though, so, helplessly and a little numbed by it all, I turned and trudged back up the hill.

  Ana and Chloé had woken up by now, and moved into the day, and so after a rather subdued breakfast we decided to climb the hill above the house to get a clearer idea of what was happening. The rain had more or less stopped and given way to a breeze chasing towering clouds across the sky. We climbed, the three of us, to the ridge above the house, where we had a fine view of the whole riverbed, from where the Trevélez River was pouring out into the wider valley, down to the meeting of the waters below the farm; and way up the Cádiar River to where it emerged from its narrow gorge.

  I scanned the valley to see if I could see what the river had done with the car. No sign of it; perhaps it had been washed all the way down to the deeper water by the dam. I took my filthy glasses off and wiped them on my shirt. As I did so, Ana nudged me and pointed … there was the car, just about visible through my filth-smeared lenses, and almost where I had left it, but on what looked like higher ground a little farther from where the bridge had been. Relief swept over me. Later Domingo told me that he had gone down to the river with his tractor and dragged the car – which was locked, in gear and with its handbrake on – back from the crumbling riverbank. That’s neighbourliness … and there he had been, racing about in the bucketing rain while I was back in bed, pleasantly tangled with the warmth of the Wife. I made a mental note that some day I would return the favour and do a great act of neighbourliness for Domingo. But then I remembered that his fierce independence and self-reliance made such gestures impossible. Well, I would see what I could do.

  The car was still there then, but the change wrought in the valley was almost beyond belief. Before, we had had a valley with earth and flowers and bushes and trees; there had been little Arcadian corners filled with beautiful wild asparagus, and winding paths through groves of towering ailanthus. We had had favourite spots for picking blackberries and figs; mushrooms and puffballs gathered mysteriously in damp shadowy places; and there were abandoned terraces amongst dense hedges of oleander and fallen stone walls, where the deep grass was studded in spring with celandines and margaritas. This was all part of the poor battered botany of the valley, a thousand varieties of flower and bush, bitten off and munched by Domingo’s sheep, then masticated, digested and finally excreted in sweet-scented clusters of cagarutas, little black berries, that in places literally carpeted the ground, ensuring richness and fertility for the future.

  All that was gone. There was nothing to be seen now but a moving mass of water and, where this had subsided a little, a wilderness of grey boulders and gravel. Ana was very subdued. I consider myself to be pretty sensitive about landscape, but I’m not in the same league as my wife, for whom any harm that befalls the plants and trees that surround us is like a personal affront. The destruction we were witnessing was almost more than she could bear. There wasn’t really much I could say, either, as we all gazed down upon our ruined valley.

  There was no way in or out now; we had lost the road, and the bridge was gone. The acequia was completely destroyed, the lifeblood of the farm, which brought water along the hillside from the river. The pipe that had brought our house water from a spring on the far side of the river had been swept away too, and so, ironically, we were without water in the house, for drinking, washing or cooking. The much cherished and nurtured kitchen garden down by the gate was under a metre of silt and gravel, with the river water spreading in a filthy sheet across it. All that work and all that hope, just washed away … potatoes, artichokes, greengages.

  We stood in silence with our mouths open for a bit, until Chloé drew our attention to some sheep cut off by the water. Down on the corner of the valley, where the two rivers joined, was a gaggle of a dozen or so creatures, wreathed, as is often the way with sheep, in uncertainty and confusion. They were a splinter group separated from Domingo’s flock. You could tell; his sheep have no tails. They stood on an island of mud with water swirling around them on all sides; their future didn’t look good. They were considering the rising water and trying to come to a mutually acceptable decision, something sheep are not particula
rly good at.

  We hurtled down to the river, hopping and slithering across the sodden ground. It took ten minutes to get there, but when we arrived the place was deserted; there was not a sheep to be seen. It looked as if they had made the wrong decision and left the island on the river side as opposed to the land side, which meant that they would have been swept away. We felt utterly dejected by this, thinking of the poor foolish creatures’ panic and terror as the earth gave way and they tumbled headlong into the water. Chloé took it harder than Ana and me, who had farmed sheep for long enough to know that they are certainly the most accident-prone animals on the planet, with the possible exception of lemmings.

  For Domingo it would be a blow. He makes his living almost entirely from his sheep, and the loss of a dozen would make a big hole in his meagre earnings.

  I think it was fortunate for us that Chloé was home for Christmas that year because without that powerful motive to remain stoical and even attempt some semblance of optimism. Ana and I might have given in to gloom and depression. Christmas spirit was a bit too much of a stretch, but as we trudged back to the house we began to talk about practical matters: how to harvest the rainwater run-off from the roof to tide us over until we could get the pipe from the spring fixed … and indeed what we might eat for lunch. Ana retreated for a while to her vegetable patch to assess the depredations of snails and slugs, who might have been brought into being by the wet, and no doubt restore some equilibrium by resting her eyes on what greenery still remained. I had tried to brighten things up with a little homespun philosophy about the give and take of living out in the wild, and how dull our lives would become if things didn’t get out of hand from time to time. Chloé rolled her eyes and went off to bring in some dry firewood.

  The rest of the day we spent quietly, enjoying, in spite of everything, that peculiar solace that comes from being together and cut off from the rest of the world. The rest of the world could do what it liked; we would content ourselves with each other’s company, reading, listening to music, and warming ourselves before a hot fire of almond wood. Then in the evening Chloé and I went down to the stable to shut the sheep in and pick some lemons to make a tart. As we passed the tamarisk wood beside the lemon grove, I saw something woolly and wreathed in uncertainty. It was Domingo’s marooned sheep.

  ‘But are you absolutely sure it’s the same ones?’ Chloé asked hesitantly.

  ‘Well, there’s about a dozen of them and two of them are those horrible brown and white things that Domingo seems to like. They must have made the right decision after all.’ It was a little thing but it lifted a load from our hearts.

  As we shut the gate of the sheep shed, I was struck by a patch of stinging nettles that had been washed clean by the rain, their lush velvety leaves sparkling with tiny drops of moisture. ‘I think we’ll pick this lot and make a soup out of it, no?’ I suggested to Chloé, expecting of course that she would be appalled at the idea of eating stinging nettles; but she wasn’t at all.

  ‘I’ve never had nettle soup,’ she said, matter-of-factly, ‘I imagine that they don’t sting once you cook them’. She was right. The sting is instantly neutralised the moment you immerse them in boiling water. I sometimes forget that she is no longer a child.

  By Christmas Day the rains had stopped. There was still no internet or telephone, as these conveniences seem to go down whenever there’s rain or wind. So we settled down to a quiet family meal. Poor Chloé, stranded as she was with the old folks on the hill and thus missing out on all sorts of appealing festivities in Granada, was philosophical, and made a good fist of pretending that she rather preferred to linger on a bit. And the soup was a triumph. You don’t normally think of nettle soup as festive fare, but take it from me, if you whizz up your stinging nettles with a little potato for the texture, some garlic and onion, and a red-hot chilli to give it some edge, and you serve it in a dainty bowl with a swirl of soured cream and a handful of small golden croutons, and wash it down with a rich, strong-bodied ruby wine, well, the words will fail you as they’re failing me.

  Next was lamb. It’s always lamb at Christmas. If you keep sheep, you eat lamb. This one glowed in a spicy glaze of pomegranate syrup and chillies, and was stuffed with a whole posy of herbs from the hill. There was mojo picón to go with it – parsley, oil and salt ground in the mortar and pestle with a little garlic and green chilli; and crispy roast potatoes; and a lemon tart to finish off.

  Good food enjoyed with people you love, I reflected, as I blew out the last of the candles and headed for bed, is a fine antidote to most of the tribulations of existence.

  Things, and indeed sheep, being the way they are, a large part of Domingo’s flock – of whom the twelve were a mere splinter group – had contrived to be on our side of the river when the rain started, and they were about to start lambing. Just after Christmas seemed an odd time to be lambing, and for this Domingo levelled some of the blame at me. For reasons that need not be explained here, we leave the balls on our ram lambs. When the lambs get big, of course they are apt to cover any fruity ewe that comes within a mile of them, and, rather shamefully, our own flock has been reproducing this way for a number of years now. Domingo’s flock, when on our side of the river, is not above wandering over and spending the day grazing on our land. It’s no big deal: in a good year there’s more than enough grazing for everyone, so I don’t say anything about it. But as soon as our ram lambs get a whiff of Domingo’s ewes – and there’s always one on heat – they’re off like big dogs through the scrub, and the inevitable happens. To be fair, I think one of his own rams had got to them, as well, and as they ought not to have been on my land in the first place Domingo was inclined not to be too censorious and I not to feel too racked with guilt.

  Be that as it may, and whoever the fathers were, the sheep were on the wrong side of the river, and they were lambing. This could have been a disaster: the hillside is teeming with foxes and boar, and they are hungry; well, foxes and boar are always hungry. A fox will wait for a ewe to lamb and then kill and eat the lamb as it emerges. I can think of no more vicious cruelty, but that’s the way of the wild. There are eagles too, and, with prey as scarce as it is, an eagle would certainly not be above taking a small lamb. Thus it was a matter of some urgency to get Domingo’s sheep back into their stable on their own side of the river.

  Five days after the rain, the river had abated sufficiently for Domingo to be able to tie a length of string to a stone and throw it across. We have done this so many times before that we hardly give it any thought. With the string I hauled across a rope, and with the rope I hauled across a steel cable upon which hung a small bag containing a spanner and half a dozen bulldog clips. I selected a suitable tree: the lotus tree, Celtis australis, is best for the job with its deep and broad root structure. I sheathed the end of the cable in a plastic hose to protect the bark, passed it twice around the base of the tree, and then crimped it with the bulldog clips and wellied them up good and tight with the spanner.

  Meanwhile Domingo connected a winch to his end of the cable on the far side of the river, and when I signalled that my end was good and fixed he whanged the cable up as tight as a string on a fiddle. I have a clip-on pulley and a bosun’s chair from the last time we used this contrivance, so I clipped it onto the cable, and, with some trepidation, as the river was still raging beneath me like a thing demented, launched myself into space, pulling myself across the gulf hand over hand. If the contraption had failed, and I had fallen into the river, I wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds, such was the force of the water. But everything held together like I knew it would, and in a couple of minutes Domingo was helping me disentangle myself. I gave him a hug; it was an emotional moment. He winced – he’s less demonstrative than I am – but we both recognised the significance of the occasion.

  We spent the rest of the day refining the cableway, or ‘flying fox’ as the device is known, with pulleys and hauling-ropes, and complicated constructions of driftwood and string to rai
se the cable to the optimum height. And I thanked Destiny, as I have done so many times before, for giving me the extraordinary Domingo as a neighbour and friend.

  The next day Domingo secured the services of Manolo to help with the heavy work. Manolo glided blithely across the river (whose menace seemed less today as the water was sparkling in bright morning sunshine), hauled by Domingo and me, and then disappeared up the hill with Domingo and his collie, who had come across on his lap. A couple of hours later they came down with the sheep and shut them in my stable yard. There we trussed them up, tying their legs together with string, and loaded them in groups of six into our farm car. Of course it made a pretty foul mess of the car, but I suppose Domingo considered this just retribution for my part in getting his sheep knocked up, and perhaps there was a certain justice in it.

  We drove them to the river and there loaded them three at a time onto a moving platform that Domingo had welded up the previous night. The platform was not a thing of beauty, but as an ad hoc solution to the problem it was nothing short of a masterpiece; it had the necessary strength and was as stable as you could wish for when suspended above a fast-moving river on a single cable. As a small concession to aesthetics he had taken the time to paint it electric blue. Once loaded onto the platform the hapless sheep were winched across the river and heaved off on the other side. Domingo untied their legs and they staggered off looking a bit dazed, until they found something interesting to eat and instantly forgot the whole wretched episode. An endearing quality of sheep is that they harbour no grudges, which, for a sheep farmer, is a great convenience.

  Given the complexity of the operation, it took the whole day to get the eighty or so sheep across to Domingo’s side of the river, and the work was hard, because the sheep, shortly due to lamb, were enormously heavy with lambs and amniotic fluid and all the other paraphernalia of birth and life. By the end of the day we were all exhausted.