The Sot-Weed factor looks at houses in Andalusia

“The man (in short) thanks both to Burlingame and to his natural proclivities, was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled, he threw up his hands at choice, and like ungainly flotsam rode half-content the tide of chance.”

The Sot-weed Factor, John Barth

Well, here it is my second Sunday in Spain.  The morning air is filled with the cooing of what I had been mentally terming “mega-pigeons”, but I now believe to be Wood Pigeons (Columba palumbus).  Their call is a euphonious blend of a typical urban pigeon’s coo, and the more complex and plaintive song of a mourning dove. The rain of yesterday has mostly moved off to the east, and the sky is busy with puffy white and gray clouds bumbling along in pursuit.  The sun is quite warm when it finds a space to shine, but the intermittent shade makes for a very pleasant temperature. Indeed, so far the days have been remarkably pleasant, with any tendency to excess heat being moderated by a fairly reliable ocean breeze.  July and August loom in the imagination however, like tedious dinner guests invited long ago in a fit of generosity whose imminent visit is now quietly dreaded.  The locals just shake their heads when asked about the summer temperatures.  The Spanish seem to rely on the breeze, shade and strategic planning of the day’s activities.  The Americans prefer air conditioning.

Now, as you may imagine, there is much to do upon transferring to a new duty station in a different country.  Indeed, the collision between U.S. Military administrative requirements, Hospital programmatic imperatives and Spanish bureaucratic necessities engenders a complex and sometimes frantic paper chase among the far-flung, and oft-closed offices of the entities concerned with each point of statutory correctitude.  The Byzantines - gone from this region since 624 - must surely feel their legacy is preserved and indeed improved upon.  But all that has proceeded apace and without any undue drama.  

I do still have a week of mandatory International Cultural Relations training, 3 days of hospital orientation, and a week or so of Focused Provider Practice Evaluation to complete before I shall be held to be an actual useful member of NH Rota’s staff.  There was a time that the apparent presumption that I might well have forgotten every military duty that I have learned in 28 years along with such competency as I possessed at all the other Navy Hospitals and Navy Medical Centers where I have labored -  attested to by voluminous databases whose purpose would seem to be avoiding this very inefficiency - there was a time, I say, that this would have irked and disquieted me.  Now? I am unruffled.   One learns to use the time spent waiting, as the forms which must be filled out in perpetuam are completed yet again, in serene contemplation of the transience of all things…or one goes mad.  As far as I know, I am not mad.

In truth, all the desiderata of the world of bureaucracy are easy to accept.  There is no choice to  make, so submission is the blessedly rational response.  Would that this were true of choosing a house.  As the quote from John Barth’s wonderful novel above - describing his protagonist, the feckless Ebenezer Cooke - seeks to hint, I too am constitutionally predisposed to see the “beauty of the possible”, and can find the apparent merits of almost any choice offered.  I like to think that this reflects my essentially optimistic nature, but someone not charitably inclined toward me might opine that this trait instead reflects an unwarrantedly romantic view of my own ability to deal with challenge and adversity, and an utter incompetence at projecting my likely future state given a potential starting point.  This combination of qualities has indeed resulted in some, um, interesting acquisitions over the years.  I pause here while memories of various wildly unsuitable jobs, cars, apartments, boats and articles of clothing here float before my mind’s eye…

So…when I am shown the neat and orderly rows of apple-pie-order cottages that make up the on-base military housing, I think to myself what a fine thing they are.  Handy to everything and constructed to the tastes of A/C loving, big fridge owning, washer/dryer using, cable TV watching, 120 volt and 60 Hz power consuming Americans.  Of course, if you think your HOA is a bit too involved in your domestic affairs, try having the Navy as your landlord.

When squired through the labyrinthine streets of the old town sections of El Puerto de Santa Maria or Rota, the towns to the east and west of the base respectively, I am charmed by the busy urban life on offer in the thoroughfares of the city.  Roads and alleys whose twists and turns reflect their ancient roots as cart paths and pedestrian lanes, and upon whose cobbles it is likely that Columbus trod in his time. Tendias, Carnecerias and Restuarantes bustle with comings and goings, and one feels oneself in the very heart of things.

In a walled garden, tucked into the rural outskirts of Rota I listen to the neighbor’s hens clucking and chirruping amiably, and contemplate the hand built rough beam ceilings and reflect to myself on the rustic virtue of time spent closer to the earth and the green things that grow therein. 

Led among the pine shaded villas where wealthy Madrileños and Sevillanos keep their summer homes I am enchanted by the sound of the nearby ocean, the cool breezes from the bay, the gardener-tended yards with cascades of red, yellow and purple bougainvilleas draped over thick stone and masonry walls.

This is not to mention cute, cute, cute traditional Sevillian style houses with tiles, and arches, and ornate iron window grilles, being tendered by little old people so perfectly adorable that one suspects them of being planted by a casting agency.

You will say that these are first world problems, and that I should expect no sympathy from anyone, and I will abjectly agree (although I’ll stick my tongue out at you when you’re not looking.)  It does make the life of your humble correspondent a bit uncomfortable at present however - especially as I am to present the accommodations chosen to wife and son on their imminent arrival to Andalusia.  I’m starting to  feel like one of those male bower birds you see on a BBC documentary - scurrying here and there around the rainforest attempting to set up an appealing domestic arrangement so that the very discriminating female of the species can be coaxed into moving in and raising a clutch.  My heart belongs, I fear,  with the Wood pigeon coo-cooing on my roof - what matters where our nest shall be, for I am a fine fellow with a lovely sonorous song.  Sigh.

I shall leave you there, gentle reader, and hope that my next missive will be filled with tales of a new casa.  Right now, I have to go find a car…

Jonah never made it

In my favorite chapter of my favorite book, I encountered for the first time the name “Tarshish”.  The book is Moby Dick, that comic, tragic , profane and mystical explosion of a work which I return to every decade or so and always find fresh.  The chapter, number 9, is titled “The Sermon”, and in it the author tells of Father Mapple, the deacon of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford, preaching a sermon on the subject of the book of Jonah.  It is Melville at the top of his craft, as sublime a bit of American prose as has ever been written, and I recommend it and the entire book to you wholeheartedly.  As Father Mapple, a former sailor and harpooner, now in the “hardy winter of a healthy old age” and long dedicated to the ministry warms to his topic he says the following:

“With this sin of disobedience in him Jonah still further flouts at God by seeking to flee from him.  He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.  He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city that the modern Cadiz.  That’s the opinion of learned men.  And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days…”

And here, courtesy of the United States Navy and orders to Naval Hospital Rota, Spain, I sit.  Cadiz appears, from where I am writing,  in misty chiaroscuro across the bay that bears its name. The air is alive with the sounds of unfamiliar birds (okay, there are some starlings and song sparrows too), and the Sunday morning breeze ruffles the leaves of trees whose names I don’t know.  Sunday in Tarshish - on the borders of the ancient kingdom of Tartessus, perhaps the origin of fabled Atlantis.  Isn’t life interesting!  

I don’t know that I’ve fled anything in particular, certainly not the Lord Most High’s order to go and preach, although I suppose that we all flee something in our past whether explicitly recalled or not.  I’ve come instead to complete something.  By the end of two years spent here I will have finished 30 years in the Navy Medical Corps - the statutory end of a military career.  That number still amazes me, or it does so until I pass a looking glass.  Seriously though, it feels like I’ve been doing this a while…but only a while, not 3 decades of my allotted span.  It has flown, or flowed, or something  and even when that inexplicably wizened face peers out at me from the bathroom mirror it’s hard to feel that 30 years have passed.  Maudlin rumination aside though, here I am to serve out the last portion of my career, to make ready for whatever is next and to spend a little time getting acquainted with old Tartessus and its surroundings.

I made my way here accompanied by my step-dog, Charlie, from San Diego this past Thursday, on a combination of commercial and chartered military flights, with only a moderate amount  of confusion, delay and anxiety.  I shan’t bore you with an account except to observe, as occurred to me during a seemingly interminable wait for bus transportation at a Virginia Beach hotel, that the military does a superb job of preparing one to go to arbitrary places at arbitrary times and to wait there with only vague expectation of relief.  It is superb training for life, and once indoctrinated one becomes as one enlightened.  What doth it profit one to worry and fret and importune the heavens?  Be satisfied that you are where you are meant to be, and that no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  It’s all about letting go.

My wife, my high-school age son, and my basenji  - 27 pounds of delightful curly tailed wickedness named Khufu -  will follow in a few weeks as final exams (for the boy) permit. My first task therefore is find us a house, with a dog-appropriate yard, near the base, and I shall be embarking on that in the next weeks.  After that there will be settling into the demands of doing anesthesia in a small overseas military hospital - my third time in that particular role - as well as jumping in to assist with whatever administrative stuff I can help out with.  But as time permits, I can’t wait to get out and explore this fascinating area.  So much stuff I’m interested in intersects at this peninsula.  Here are some of the earliest cave paintings known; the remnants of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans; a few traces of the Visigothic kingdom; the rich heritage of Al-Andalus; the complicated legacy of the Reconquista and everything implied by the fateful year 1492; the Spanish Armada; the battle of Trafalgar; Wellington’s Peninsular Campaigns; the Spanish Civil War…and I’ve only scratched the surface!

If you’re interested, my hope is to limber up some creative writing muscles not much used since the days of “Djohn’s Djibouti Djournal”, my fitfully maintained account of a deployment to the Horn of Africa some years ago, and to give something of an account of our time here.  So, if you would care to join me for an irregularly irregular series of reflections on my experiences here in Spain, please be my  very welcome guest.  Let’s make the voyage to farTarshish that Jonah never completed, and see what revelations might yet await his arrival.  Vaminos!