Check out That Footwork

Yesterday I was enticed away from tinkering with my syllabus for this semester's class by a friend who invited me to spend the day at Coney Island with her and her eight-year-old daughter. I am not one to say no to a day at the beach, especially on one of the last few days of summer, so I put aside my work, changed into my bathing suit, threw a towel and sunglasses into my beach bag and ran down the stairs to join my friend and her daughter in her car.

It was a beautiful day and it felt bittersweet being there. Partly because Coney Island always has that effect on me, as you all know, and partly just thinking that the summer is over. I had a good summer, with my adventurous vacation in Spain, but it never feels long enough, and I never get to the beach as much as I want to.

Because it was a weekday, there weren't the usual crowds on the beach or on the boardwalk. My friend had promised her daughter she could go on the rides, so we wandered around among the kiddie rides for awhile: giant teacups and miniature horse and carriages and whales that you can sit in. Everything the wrong size, very Alice in Wonderland. My friend went on the Tilt-A-Whirl with her daughter and came off looking and feeling very ill.

So I took over while my friend went in search of a Coke and a spot to rest. I took her daughter--who is a delightful child whom I love--around to some of the other rides, waved at her every time she came around on the mini-rollercoaster or the placidly circling whale. Then we went through the arcades, played a few games, won some stuffed animals. My friend's little girl was having a blast, and I was pretty happy, too, with that late afternoon sun burning down on me, making me feel very calm and slow.

We eventually reunited, had Nathan's hot dogs, French fries, Italian ices, at a little picnic table on the boardwalk. (My friend's daughter remarked, "Why do they call them Italian ices? It's not like there are any other kind of ices.")

We went down to the beach where we had left our stuff a couple of hours before under the care of a kindly woman who agreed to watch our blanket and beachbags. (Or course we had taken money, cameras, expensive sunglasses with us.) The woman, who had been doing some odd sort of seemingly strategic sunbathing standing up (she would turn to face a different direction at exact intervals), was long gone, but our towels and beach reading and snacks were exactly as we left them.

We relaxed then, on the beach, talking desultorily in our chairs while my friend's little girl ran in and out of the water and did what kids do, building things in the sand. The light grew more and more beautiful as the afternoon turned into early evening. Hard to find the right words to describe it. There was just a slight haziness in the air that made the water and the sky above it silvery. I grew mesmerized with a soccer game taking place in and out of the water, three young men and a boy running back and forth after the ball, laughing, jumping, kicking, doing that intricate footwork. And all around them other people are doing their thing, striding up and down the beach, some getting mixed up in the game. There were also people fishing, and some just standing and chatting in the water or on the beach. I am trying at this moment to download a little video of the soccer players that I took with my digital camera, but it doesn't seem to be working, so here, instead, are some stills.

They're almost like a movie, if you look at them in sequence.

By Popular Demand . . .

Here are some more pictures from my trip to Spain last month. The two below were both taken on the first day we hiked. You can see how dramatic the landscape was--the slightly overcast day made it even more dramatic. Our guide informed us that the whole area was once underneath the Mediterranean Sea, and that the rocky formations were shaped the way they are because of the waves beating against them for thousands of years.







Below are two pictures taken the next day, a much sunnier and clearer day. We got to see lots of beautiful wildflowers, like the ones in the second picture, throughout the trip.








And, finally, below, on the last hiking day, some of the group thought it only fitting to take a siesta after lunch, since we were, after all, in Spain. Most of the group, including these three, had already hiked nine miles before lunch. Oh, and to get to where we had lunch, at a mountaintop sanctuary, we had had to climb a stone stairway, about 400 steps. Hard work but so worth it when you got to the top.

That Stick

At lunch with my colleagues the other day, one of them mentioned a little-known nineteenth-century female novelist. We were talking about titles of novels of that period, and my colleague said that although many of this writer's novels had typical titles, such as the name of a woman followed by a subtitle like "Or, the Story of a Young Woman," she wrote one novel with the very odd title That Stick. I said, "That sounds like it could be a subtitle for the story of my trip to Spain."

Why, you ask?

The very first day of hiking, I realized that my left knee was going to be, well, problematic. (Probably playing volleyball three days before I left to go on a hiking trip was not a great idea. Also not great was rushing down the stairs of my walkup apartment on the way to get the taxi to the airport dragging suitcase, garbage to throw out, knapsack, and purse. I could feel my knee, which was already slightly inflamed, twisting alarmingly at one point.) Anyway, during that first hike, which was a half-day, we were going downhill and I suddenly felt shooting pains in my knee. The leader heard me gasp in pain (and yell out "my knee!") and he became concerned. He found me a stick from along the side of the trail. That helped, until I leaned on it, hard, during one rather steep descent, and it snapped under me.

The leader, unfazed, found me another one. Sturdier, as he said, but a little crooked. That one worked well, but I ended up leaving it against a wall somewhere in the village later that day.

The next day, one of the English gentlemen in the group was kind enough to lend me his fancy, adjustable walking stick that he had brought with him. It was part of a pair, but he had just brought the one. He assured me he was doing fine without it and that I could use it.

So all during the next morning's hike, I happily made use of the borrowed stick. The group had lunch together at a beautiful spot, a restaurant in a village high in the mountains. After lunch, two others in the group and I were going to take the option of a taxi (!) back to our hotel, rather than do the afternoon hike. It was a hot day, and the three of us waited in a little park in the shade for the taxi (which had been prearranged--there aren't exactly a lot of taxis roaming around in the area). The taxi came and we went over and said hello to the driver. As the only one who could speak Spanish, I had been charged by the tour leader with advising the driver that he should take a scenic road running along the cliffs. He very agreeably said he would prefer not to go that way because it was narrow and his car was wide. I translated for my companions--and we all collectively shrugged our shoulders and said, okay, fine.

Despite the fact that the road we did take was nauseatingly curvy, I was enjoying the ride, chatting away with the driver in my limited Spanish, when I suddenly had this sickening feeling that I had left the stick in the little park. I asked the driver if he had seen me carrying the stick (which I had to pantomine because I couldn't think of a Spanish word for "walking stick," or even, actually, for "stick"). He said he hadn't seen it, and, sure enough, when we finally got back to the hotel and looked in the trunk, it wasn't there. I felt awful that I had been so irresponsible and careless with someone else's possession. We went into the reception area of the hotel and I tried to explain to the lovely young woman who ran the hotel what I thought had happened. She had the same idea I had: "okay, we call the restaurant and see if someone can go out and find the stick." This was all in Spanish.

I had no idea what the name of the restaurant where we ate was, but she was able to get in touch with the tour leader, who was out with the rest of the group in the woods somewhere. He told her which restaurant it had been, and she called them. She was assured that someone would go out and look for the stick. Then we had to wait, so I went to take a shower, still feeling miserable and sure they wouldn't find it. But when I came down from my shower, and the hotel owner called the restaurant, it turned out that they had indeed found the stick. Not only that, but someone from the restaurant was coming to our town the next day to buy bread, and he would drop off the stick at the hotel.

I felt redeemed and happy.

But somehow it was hard to keep that stick with me. The next day that we hiked, which was two days later, I forgot to take it with
me--left it behind in the hotel room. This was not a crisis, though, because we stayed at the same hotel all week. I ended up buying an inexpensive souvenir-type walking stick in one of the restaurants we stopped at, which I used all that day.

Later, I think probably when I was already home, I was looking through all the pictures I took on the trip. I laughed when I saw the one below, showing the stick leaning against the bench where we waited for the taxi, just waiting to be left behind.

Even Happier

This is the kind of terrain I was hiking around in, in Catalonia. I had a great time. The trip was everything I could have wanted--a companionable group, beautiful and challenging hiking, a lovely, comfortable hotel in a charming village. Oh, and I got to speak lots of Spanish. The people in the area speak Catalan as their first language, but they were tolerant of, even encouraging toward, my Castilian Spanish.

The picture below shows the front of the hotel where we stayed. Now, picture 15 or so tired hikers gathering at the tables as we came back from our hikes, drinking beer and discussing our aches and pains as the late afternoon settled around us.

Below, a bridge that you had to cross to get to our hotel,which quickly became known as "the wobbly bridge." The sign says, in Catalan, that jumping is forbidden and that no more than ten people can cross the bridge at one time. Some of the people in my group took both prohibitions as a kind of dare.

A street in the village:

Other areas in the village were full of greenery and flowers:



And here is the group, stopping to rest on one of the hikes:

As Joni Mitchell once said (or sang) about a different European spot, I'd go back there tomorrow. (If not for . . . well, life, work, all of that.)