Getting to know Pico

It’s been three weeks now since I arrived on Pico. I feel at home, and the days are passing more quickly than I thought they would. I spend days lying on the rocks near the coast. I take my time walking from place to place and watching the weather pass. It’s July 26 and I’m anxiously waiting for the day that Megan will arrive, a girl I miss very much. This week I will finally walk around Pico island, a trip that will take three nights and four days. In the following weeks I’ll spend days on Sao Jorge, Flores, Corvo and Faial, other islands where there is more swimming, fishing and nature.

During the first week I swam in my fathers home port of Area Larga twice a day, once before lunch and again before dinner. Dad: If you’re reading this, I don’t want you to be jealous but fish is part of every lunch and dinner. Somebody is always catching fish – abrotea, tuna, vejas, bacalhau, anchovas, crab, lapas, this amazing seafood is as common good bread, wine and cheese around here. I’m getting darker, and all the walking and swimming I do is only barely keeping me from becoming extremely fat.

It’s amazing to be in a place where I’m constantly surrounded by family. Back home there’s a handful of us and we see each other regularly once or twice a month. When I step out the door in Madalena I run into a variety of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, and folks that are practically family. I’m fishing on a dock, and my cousin Manuel Fernando rolls up. He owns a fishing supply store and spend an hour teaching me the best way to catch anchovas, a fish that grows up to about a meter long, using live carapau that are easily caught. Later I’m on my way home from the beach, and I pass his house, then sit down to drink beer and talk with his son, my cousin Tiago. Days ago, when I was on my way down from Pico mountain with my cousin Valter, I saw my other cousin Manuel Narciso moving cattle from one pasture to another with his daughter Fernanda. Today I went into the city hall of Madalena and saw pictures of my grandpa, Manuel Zulmira, in an exhibit about the transports that used to sail carrying passengers and cargo between Pico and Faial.

After a few days living down at Luis’ house in Areia Larga, I moved up to our house in Cabo Branco. Most days are filled with people and family meals. Each day I get multiple invites to lunch and dinner, and several people who are willing to take me fishing, to their gardens, or to various areas of the island. I have the keys to three houses now and counting. Despite all the activity I’m also enjoying the time I have to myself every morning to read and relax, and the days I go alone to the coast. I’ve been watching the corn in our field grow, listening to the wind blow through it, listening to the rain as I sleep alone at night.

There are too many simple, awesome every day occurrences to describe, but I’m gonna tell a couple of stories about some of my important days here. I will try to write more often. Right now I’m leaving for a 3 day walking trip around Pico, and afterwards there will be the Festa of Cais de Augosto. Talk to you guys soon!

Manuel Narciso; Visiting my family’s land; Agriculture of Pico

While I was still on Terceira, I noticed some advertisements that were circulating about agricultural tourism on the Azores. The advertisement was a picture of an old couple in traditional dress from Pico with a young, handsome tourisst guy. The message is, “Remember, tourists are our friends,” and the ad is basically meant to encourage locals to treat tourists well, since tourism is such a large part of the local economy.

At the time, I didn’t realize that the people in the add were my cousin Manuel Narciso and his wife Angelina. Manuel Narciso is my mother’s first cousin, and grew up learning how to farm from my grandfather and great uncle. Up until about 10 years ago, he still cultivated his fields with a hand plow and trained ox. Since my grandfather left, he has been cultivating the big field attached to our house in Cabo Branco, as well as acting as the steward of other terras that were left behind by my grandpa. Even before I left on this trip, I knew that I would have to dedicate some time to this guy, one of the only relatives on my mothers side.

I visited him on my second day in Madalena. His backyard was the same as I remembered it: the teepee-like drying rack for corn, the chicken coop, pig sty and outdoor kitchen. It was almost dark so I walked up the stairs to the house and surprised them in their kitchen.

Manuel Narciso looks about the same as he did when I saw him 8 years ago – hair sprouts out of his nose and ears, he wears rubber boots and a plaid shirt. His wife Angelina was a very beautiful girl in her youth, so I hear, and now she’s a weathered and intelligent looking farm woman. After the initial shock, greetings, and preliminary conversation about the health of various family members, we got to talking.

Manuel Narciso still farms. He spent his whole life in the fields and in reality, he doesn’t know how to stop. He and Angelina keep a large home garden, fields of corn, vineyards and about 20 or 30 head of breeding cattle. “I’m getting very old, Marco,” He said, “At this point in life you’re supposed to stop and rest, but there is so much work to do, it’s almost like I don’t know where to turn.”

He can no longer stand straight, and he walks carefully through his vineyards with a cane in one hand and a pesticide sprayer on his back. Despite being so old and worn down, he still builds rock walls, cuts firewood, and climbs over fences to get to his cows. A lot of people criticize him, saying that he is well off and shouldn’t have to work anymore, that he needlessly is breaking his body and obligating Angelina to work into her old age. It’s hard to understand what motivates the guy, and if you didn’t look much deeper you might think he’s crazy.

Manuel Narciso is motivated by some very old values that he hangs onto tenaciously. These values come from a time when women were considered like cattle, when every piece of land was dearly needed by a population that the island could barely support. Sometimes folks forget that it’s only been 50 years that the island has had electricity and oil. Before then Pico was like a supernatural force. The folks here still look to the mountain in awe and fear and obsess over there weather.

When my parents were born, the local economy and culture was much the same as it had been for the past 500 years. Parcels of land had been divided and subdivided through the generations to the point where every square inch of soil was cultivated, and still families went hungry. The waves of immigration that brought my parents and others to America meant that many fields suddenly were left without a farmer to cultivate them.

Manuel Narciso is one of the old farmers who stayed, and he has spent the last 40 years accumulating more land piece by piece. As his energy fades, his life has become a struggle to keep it all cultivated. At the end of each day he takes stock of his work, and he’s always a bit disappointed.

It’s well known here that land left idle is quickly lost to nature. The native vegetation grows fiercely with the tropical heat and rain. Within one season, incenso, laurel, fayas, and sylvado begin to sprout and choke out vineyards, orchards, and anything else that was planted. Vast areas that used to be planted are now covered with 20 foot tall forest.

It’s against this crazy nature power that Manuel Narciso works, and he’s slowly losing. Each year more of his land goes untended because he can’t do as much any more and there is no heirs who want to take over the work. His old-fashioned attitude towards the value of land prevents him from selling any. He will continue to accumulate more until he’s dead.

We were sitting in his kitchen with Angelina and Maria Leonore, Manuel Narciso’s sister, a kitchen that only recently got fitted with running water and electricity. I explained to him that I’m studying agriculture and that I want to spend some time with him, seeing him work and visiting the land that my family still owns. I said that its very important to me that I see my grandfathers land and begin the process of getting written documents that will permanently give us title to it.

Manuel Narciso nodded and said, “Yes, we’ll take a day to see the terras. Some of them are in bad shape you know, they’re full of forest, but I still know where they are.” We arranged to meet on Saturday.

We own about 9 separate parcels that my grandfather planted with corn, potatoes, vineyards, fruit trees and other crops, or used as pastures. We have no official title to this land – it has been passed down to us by the fact that my great-grandfather cultivated it, and that he left it to my grandfather before my mother inherited it from him. The land is ours only because there are people still alive who know this history.

On Saturday morning I got into Manuel Narciso’s little truck and we started driving through the countryside, visiting each parcel individually. We took the time to discuss who are the neighbors, what the land could be sold for and who is potentially interested. We talked about what the land was used for, the type of soil, and how my grandfather had inherited it. Manuel Narciso would say stuff like, “I remember coming here with your grandfather – we worked each with our own plow and planted the land with corn,” or maybe, “This ground here is deeper and very good, terra forte.”

The first two parcels were badly overgrown – I could still see the ancient walls running through 30 year old forest. The land is lower and has rocky soil that is only appropriate for orchards or vineyards. Being a big nature lover, the new forest looks beautiful to me. But to a farmer like Manuel Narciso, the properties are dirty and unkept. Then we saw other parcels, one that was higher up in the mato and good for summer pastures.

After the half day tour my head was spinning with new names of pieces of land and details about them. I began to develop a deep regret that I cannot settle here on Pico and farm this land that my grandfather used to take care of, at least for awhile. The feeling hasn’t left me, but I remind myself that I have a home in California where I was born, and I feel loyalty to that place as well.

Angelina was boiling a huge pot of taro root over a fire in the backyard. We ate the taro root with friend eggs and homemade sausage for lunch, and in the evening I took a bike ride through the fields around Criacao Velha, the small village where my cousin lives. Criacao Velha has a reputation for being full of hardworking people who still take good care of their land. I passed by little fields of beans, taro root, sweet potatoes, corn, pastures filled with goats or cows or pigs, imagining what my land could look like if I could just spend a few years putting it all into production. After fantasizing like this for awhile and watching the sunset behind Faial, I returned to my cousin’s house and went to bed.

Valter – My personal guide to the island; The climb up Pico Mountain

My best Pico tour guide has without a doubt been my cousin Valter. He’s my uncle Guilherme’s son, 26-years-old and a local expert on the environment of Pico. Over the past weeks we’ve spent the days visiting whaling museums, fishing, drinking beers at Horta’s Peter Cafe Sport, and exploring the cool natural areas of Pico. We’ve been talking about family history, about our personal ambitions and adventures as he gets me familiar with the island.

It’s great to have somebody who can stop me as we’re walking along and point out some endemic plant or a rare bird. As I was spending my teenage years scrambling up hills, through cattle pastures and spending days out in Henry Coe, Valter was exploring abandoned vineyards, lava tubes and Pico mountain. In him I can see the type of person I would have been if I had grown up here – involved in local music, trying to secure a job as a park ranger for the island, enjoying an intense personal relationship with the place he grew up and his family is from.

One day, we got together with a couple of Valter’s biologist friends to tag shearwaters, a pelagic bird species that nests on Pico. Valter is one of the two people on the island trained to do this work, and on some days during the summer nesting season, he tags and takes measurements on dozens of birds, that have to be pulled out of the nests they make in hidden-away lava tube caves along the coast. Saturday morning we went to an area of lava runs near Cachorro and successfully tagged three birds. We also saw shearwater eggs that were nearly hatched, and even heard the chicks peeping inside! It was crazy.

Like I said before, Pico is dominated by a huge volcano that has erupted in the historical memory of the island’s people. It’s scary and majestic and I have waited my whole life to climb it. We had been trying for several days to catch good weather so we could make the ascent, and one day a week ago it finally came. A reporter from RTP Acores had called Valter to do a piece about the ascent of Pico, and he arranged to take the reporter up with a group. Valter got a couple of his cousins together, Duarte and Joao Paulo, and on a clear Saturday the five of us headed up to the Casa da Montanha, the “mountain house” where all trips up Pico depart from, around 4pm in the afternoon.

The climb usually takes about 3 hours, but after a momentary scare that the weather was turning bad, and with all the filming, the trip took closer to 4 hours. We only left the mountain house around 5:30pm so by the time we got to the crater it was already dark. The climb went easier than I thought it would and the sunset was beautiful. I was extremely excited and happy the whole time, and when I saw the crater I was amazed. From the edge of the crater rises Pico Alto, a small mountain that formed on top of Pico during the last eruption, which we would climb in the morning. To think that I was on top of a volcano that rises 7000 feet above sea level, and drops thousands of feet down into the middle of the Atlantic ocean, was pretty awe-inspiring.

We made our camp in a little rock “corral” that previous climbers had made to shield their tents from the winds. In the morning we woke up around 6am and started to climb Pico Alto in the dark. We reached the top before the sun had risen, and I felt the hot sulfur gas escaping from vents at the top. This reminded me that this was a volcano and that I should be a little bit scared. The sunrise was beautiful and around us we saw Terceira, Sao Jorge and Faial, along with the high clouds that stretched out over the ocean.

I was thoroughly satisfied with the trip while we packed up our camp, climbed out of the crater and started our descent. The camera man had just complained that his shoes weren’t doing so well on the climb down when all of the sudden I heard a painful scream. The camera man was on the floor and had horribly twisted his foot. It was literally projecting out to the right side of his leg, almost at a 90 degree angle. Valter, his two cousins and I looked down at the screaming man and we were all stupefied for a minute. He yelled “Oh my god! Shit! Straighten out my foot!”

Valter was looking on and trying to assess the situation, and after building up a little courage he pulled off the guys shoe, yanked on the foot and twisted it. The foot popped back roughly into the right place with a sickening sound of grinding cartilage.

After that we calmed down a bit and sat down to think. Valter called the rescue team of Pico’s Bombeiros, or firemen. We pitched a temporary tent to protect us from the sun, and greeted climbers as they passed by on their way up the mountain. I took the opportunity to head up to the crater a second time and take a look around, and within two hours the first fireman arrived. He began the process of putting the cameraman out on a stretcher and starting us down the mountain. We took turns, four of us carrying the stretcher at time until more fireman, who had climbed the mountain more slowly than the first, started to show up. By the time we were half way down, there were 8 fireman, 6 of us carrying the stretcher at a time down the steep slope.

Most of the firemen were volunteers, current or past mountain guides who knew Pico well and were used to rocky terrain. It was really fun listening to the dialogue of these men from Pico, some who were farmers, some who had just woken up from a night at the discoteca. They were constantly joking, arguing, cussing and talking about women. They ate candy bars and every once in awhile you’d hear one of their phones ring with a popular Portuguese song like “apita camboio.” It was sort of hilarious, but by about 4pm we had made it down the mountain and got the guy in an ambulance.

This happens about 40 times a summer, and it’s really tough work for the firemen. You are sometimes climbing down at a 45 degree angle over slippery, loose rocks. And even with us helping, the whole operation was long and strenuous. Mostly, the guys were pissed off that yet again, they had to spend 6 or 7 hours climbing 3000 feet up a mountain and risking injury by carrying a heavy stretcher. All this for just 40 euros each, when the Environmental Department could call in a helicopter that would have picked the guy up in one or two hours.

Anyhow, the guys managed to have a good time, and it was cool seeing some of the most bad ass Picarotos at work together. Valter and I drove down to Madalena and checked in on the cameraman at the village hospital. When the x-rays got back turns out he had broken his foot, and Valter had probably saved it from being lost by setting in back in the right place. My first climb up Pico was pretty memorable, but I hope that this next time we don’t have to call the firemen again.

A funny detail: Valter and I somehow seem to attract media attention every time I come here. 8 years ago, our picture ended up in the Pico newspaper during a festa. Yesterday I found out that a report on the climb up Pico had already come out on television, and a lot of people had seen it. I’m looking for the video but hopefully will be able to post it soon.

Arrival on Pico

(July 7)

Tuesday morning the same dense fog from the day before still hung over the island. I ate my usual breakfast of too much bread, cheese, butter – the people here are obsessed with dairy and can tell you when a cheese has been made in a dry year or not (the cows give different milk). We piled my luggage and that of my Tia Natalia into the back of Lena’s car and left quickly down the road.

We arrived at the port at 8am, said goodbye to Lena and headed towards the ship. It was a big Greek boat; Hellenic Seaways was written across it’s side and a Greek flag flew off the stern. Since we are the Medeiros family and we are all forgetful, there was a momentary panic when Tia couldn’t find her identity card to get on the boat. We settled into some seats inside on the bottom deck, and when the boat got moving I went outside to watch Terceira disappearing behind us into the fog.

Coming to the Azores during the summer is sort of a Mecca for Portuguese immigrants. The old men get to sit on the bench in their village where they grew up with their old, broken down friends, watch the traffic pass and talk about how the years passed so quickly. The old women make house calls on other old women and discuss births, deaths and marriages. The rich ones show off their wealth and set up shop in their summer homes along the coast, raising an American or Canadian flag along side that of Portugal. Children meet strange new sun-darkened cousins that spend all day playing in the ocean. Young people pass hours sitting in their houses, at a cafe, swimming or wandering the streets in boredom, or else spend all day sleeping and at night go out to the discotecas.

So I was staring out at the ocean for a few minutes before unsurprisingly I heard English, and struck up a conversation with an older couple who was talking with their grandchild. They turned out to be from Hollister and had a vague idea of who my parents were. Later on the boat, I spotted some folks who seemed American. They turned out to be distance relatives of mine, a family from San Diego that I used to visit when I was younger, “Our son is also arriving on Pico in a few days. He’s your age and he’ll be here with his friends from San Diego and he knows a lot of people on the island. You two will see each other in Madalena one day.”

I spent the six hour boat ride staring at the ocean. As we got into open water the fog began to lift and I watched as we passed Sao Jorge, the tall long island to the north of Pico. I saw the cliffs with their little waterfalls spilling off the island. As we got closer to Pico, I looked for the mountain but couldn’t see it through the clouds.

Like the other Azores islands, Pico was formed from a series of volcanoes that have erupted over the past three million years. If you drive through the interior of the island you can see the various craters that formed, but the island is recognized by it’s 2,351 meter high stratovolcano, Pico. Seen from the ocean, the mountain is huge, and to think that people have been living on it for over 500 years is incredible.

Though Picarotos are very skilled and successful farmers, a lot of the times they farmed in straight up rock. In places the soil has been built up into rich farmland over hundreds of years. The island is newest and the soil poorest near my parents home town Madalena, and in the early days soil was often brought from 50 kilometers away by oxcarts to make gardens for food. Between the Atlantic winter cyclones, the earthquakes, and eruptions, between the men getting killed hunting whales an shepherds freezing in the high pastures, children been sucked into the ocean by a rogue wave and people dying of famine and plague, the folks from Pico have developed a reputation for being pretty freaking hardcore.

I was thinking about all this as I watched little sailboats skirt along the coast of the mountains, and saw the steep corn fields and pastures, neatly parceled out by ancient rock walls, edge up to cliffs that drop off into the ocean. This is the place my parents were born, and the memory of the landscape had already been burned into my memory by previous trips and endless stories from my parents.

We arrived in the port of Sao Roque, where in 1971 my mother arrived again to meet my father, after having spent two years working in San Jose earning enough money to come back and marry him. I was met by cousin Luis, his wife Elza and their son Miguel, along with my uncle Guillermo and my aunt Helia. We drove along a road that I still remembered and I looked admiringly at the cornfields, watermelons and grape vines growing out of rock.

After a bit we arrived at Luis’ house in Areia Larga, a little port near Madalena. Luis’ house is that in which my father grew up. Luis is the first born male of my generation and a real picaroto. He’s all about fishing in a boat, fishnig with a spear, hunting rabbits and birds, drinking wine and growing food.His backyard butts up against the rocks and the ocean. When asked if he had any land, my grandfather would point out to this stretch of water and say, “This is my garden.”

From the back porch you get a view of the Ilheus the two iconic islets in front of Madalena, and Faial, the island across the way that’s known for the famous port of Horta. “Here on Pico we have three ilheus,” My cousin Luis explained, “The Ilheu deitado (the laying down islet), the Ilheu em pê (The standing up islet), and the Ilheu com luzes (the islet with lights, referring to Faial).” The folks from Pico have some beef with the folks from Faial, who they say are rich and snooty. Sometimes this prejudice is just friendly and joking and other times it’s a little bit hostile.

After a moment of settling in, Luis, Miguel and I headed to the port of Areia Larga to go swimming. I knew the moment I would have to jump into the water of the port was coming and I had been a little nervous. I can swim, but not well, and throughout my life my dad had given me thousands of warning against the sea. “NEVER turn your back on the ocean, Mark,” he would say with a crazy look in his eye. But I guess I would be the same way if I had grown up by an ocean that routinely swallowed up my friends. Well, when I jumped in the water it felt like my baptism, and I swam around happily feeling relieved.

After awhile Luis put on his flippers and snorkel and got out his spear gun. My uncle Guillermo and his son Valter arrived. Guillermo is my dad’s brother and partner in crime from his youth, and he spent a long time explaining landmarks to me that were important to them when they were young. My cousin Valter is 26 and a guide for Pico Mountain. I brought him an antler from the hills of San Martin since he is a fellow naturalist. After awhile of watching the ocean together an waiting for Luis to come back, we watched as he climbed out of the water with 7 large sized fish, vejas, which are very good eating. We returned to the house to clean them and drink beer, and Luis bought a kilo of lapas (limpets).

The ladies of the family prepared dinner and we sat around a long time talking and watching the sun go down behind Faial. I took a walk through Madalena with Valter and talked with him about the state of affairs with Pico’s environment. We had similar complaints about farmers who farm badly and developers, connecting in that way.

The moon came up behind Pico, and we walked back into Madalena where I left him. The Filharmonic band from the village of Sete Cidades was playing on the stage in the little town, and I listened to the music nostalgically as I walked away from town. It was late but I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being in Madalena, a place I had waited so long to come back to and I felt like continuing my walk. I started walking up a road that starts behind a church, with a hunch that it led to my grandfather’s old farmhouse.

The house is where my mother grew up, it’s higher up from the ocean in a little area called Cabo Branco. The place sits above Madalena in an area of good deep soil that is far enough away from the coast to be sheltered from salt water spray. Since I’ve been here more than one person has told me how good the soil is.

Our house in Cabo Branco is a little bit ancient by Californian standards, maybe 200 years old. It has survived multiple earthquakes and waited patiently as it’s family left it for America. My mother’s cousin Manuel Narciso has farmed the three good acres behind it for 40 years now, since my grandfather immigrated.

So I had a vague idea of where this house stood, and I wandered the silent streets for awhile looking into the fields of corn, beans, potatoes, at the little neat stone houses that I still remembered. After awhile of navigating under the moon I came on a big banana plantation, and I knew it was the land of Senhora Rosalina, her daughter Ercilia and son-in-law Sergio, the old well-to-do neighbors of my mom who are like family. In a second I spotted our house. It was like I remembered it but a little bit naked – the fig trees and other bushes that I remembered surrounding it wasted away without anyone to tend them and had to be cut. But the field was beautiful, it had corn taller than me had already put out silks. I sighed and spent a long time happily looking over the fence into the field. At least this land is still cultivated.

I walked away from the house back towards Areia Larga, where I would stay for a few nights before moving into Cabo Branco, thinking about the new family characters that have come into the trip and all the catching up there was to do. I also thought about my cousin Manuel Narciso, who I knew would show me my family’s other remaining farmlands in a few days. There were still lights on in the house when I arrived: Luis, Natalia and Elza were waiting up for me. After I was settled in the house became quiet.

Last Week on Terceira

I am on Pico Island now and trying to catch up with narrating my trip. This covers my last days on Terceira before I left for Pico last Tuesday. More to come about this week in the following days. And I’m not lying about those pictures: I’ve been taking plenty but it’s been difficult to get them up because of a slow connection.

Saturday, July 4
This past Saturday I went on another awesome hike with Lena’s friend Alvaro, this time with a group of slightly older kids from the school. Are destination was Serra de Santa Barbara, the highest point on the island of Terceira and the only historically active volcano there, even though it hasn’t done anything for a couple hundred years.

We took a beautiful 30-minute drive up to the mountain, with views of the ocean, the villages along the coast disappearing as we climbed higher. The land is full of pastures with fences made of hydrangeas and tall Cryptomeria, imported japanese conifers that are used for wood. There are dairy cows and fields with 20 or 30 black bulls, that will eventually be destined for the bullfights in Angra and all over the island. The pastures and trees disappeared below us and we ended up on a tall bald mountain with a bunch of cellular and radar antennae, Serra de Santa Barbara. From there, the view of Terceira is beautiful – often on this trip I’ve wondered how my parents could have decided to leave the Azores.

Serra de Santa Barbara is also mostly the laurisillva ecosystem but it also has some features that I didn’t see over near Pico Alto, which is a little bit lower and on the other side of the island. Mainly, the ground is spongy and hard to walk in because your feet are constantly sinking into thick moss. In the low places, there are deep bogs that you can sink into up to your waste.Actually, the hike lasted most of the day, and started with a struggle through a large stand of cedro do mato, after which we ended up on the edge of a deep, menacing bog which almost stole one of the students shoes. After finding the main trail, which by American standards is pretty dangerous and unmarked, Alvaro led the way to the edge the volcanic crater.

We continued around the edge of the crater in attempt to get to a mountain lake that is very beautiful and very hard to find, but that adventure was unsuccessful and at the end of it we were all pretty tired. I was impressed with how much the students knew about the local ecosystem and how comfortable they were with getting soaked up to their thighs with bog water.

After the hike, I came home and tried to get some rest, because that night I knew I would be out late again with Pedro and Lena. We visited a variety of bars at the waterline of Praia and then headed over to Angra to check out 3 or 4 spots there. Towards the end of the night we ended up at  a discoteca, a different this time higher up in the mato, which we stayed at until 5am. Pedro and I were tired, but Lena, being the partyer that she is, complained, “But it’s so early!”

Sunday
On Sunday, the whole family piled into the car and went on the mandatory trip around the island called the Volta Ilha. The day started off with great weather, and we were all ready to go to the beach, but 20 minutes into the trip it started to rain. We stopped in Biscoitos, an area of recent lava flows that is known as wine country because of the poor soil, and there we ate loads of organic strawberries that were being sold by an old farmer man from the area. We passed even more beautiful rocky coast, and also stopped in a place called Serreta. In that area there is another volcano, off the coast in the ocean, that people sometimes see erupting, with large rocks surfacing and then floating back to the bottom.

We all got home exhausted and I spent the rest of the night reading The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho. It’s sort of the preface to his book The Alchemist and describes his trip through Spain on the road to Santiago. The book fits perfectly with my trip. At times Coelho describes how he’s unsure of why he left Brazil on this pilgrimage, when he had his wife, his friends and so many important things going on at home. At other times he’s in a state of euphoria because of the important lessons he is learning about himself and the past and the world.

The moral of the story is that it takes courage to fulfill your destiny and your personal legend, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to do. I left California at a time that was very inconvenient. Veggielution had just made a deal with the City of San Jose, and we had just put half an acre of vegetables in the ground. Recently, especially over the past two years, us San Jose folks have built a community concerned with sustainability and social justice. I’ve felt very committed to being a part of that. I had been with my girlfriend Megan for four months, and our friendship had grown stronger, even with my three month absence looming above us. But I had to go. I knew that it would only become harder to leave for any length of time. I knew that to overcome the initial shock and awkwardness of being in a new country, to see what I needed to see and do what I needed to do, it couldn’t be a quick trip of a couple weeks.

Monday
Over Monday I thought about all this as the rain beat down fiercely outside. I slowly packed my bags and tried to make contact with more farms on the islands and on the mainland and line up stuff for myself over the next few months. In the afternoon I decided to take a walk despite the harsh weather, and I headed out the door into the dense, cold fog. I started up the road that Senhor Antonio took me when we went up to Serra do Cume.

It was dark and quiet, the pastures shrouded in the low clouds, stone walls covered with lichen and dripping moisture and dairy cows silently grazing. I decided to go as high as I could, under the trees that grew along the road, past corn fields and higher where the wind blew harder and I could see even less. To my left I saw a piece of land with no fence, only a thin rope separating it from the road.

I decided to do what I had always done in California when I saw a beautiful piece of land separated by a fence – I crossed over to the other side and was immediately rewarded. It seemed that the wind picked up behind me and ahead I saw a milhafre – the Azores’ native hawk – hovering over me, flying into the wind. After a second it pause and swung off to the right behind a line of incenso – the native laurel – that was growing into a high wall. I walked over to the incenso, plucked some leaves and crushed them between my hands as I had always done with the bay laurel in california, then continued up the hill. I jumped a stone fence and climbed a little more, staring into the fog in the direction of the ocean, listening to the wind in the trees and feeling the cold and moisture seep through my clothes.

After a little bit I started back down the hill, my shoes soaked through but completely satisfied. On the way back I stopped off by the house of Antonio, and said goodbye to him and his wife Fatima. “Perfect! I was just looking for somebody to do some work!” He said jokingly, pointing to a bunch of boxes of tile that he had ready to redo the interior of his house (he was referring to my offer to help him in his fields someday, which he declined with a lot of laughing).

I told them I was leaving to Pico tomorrow but I would be back in August to pick up Megan from the Airport. We arranged to go on a little passeio together to the furnas do enxofre, some volcanic vents where sulphorous gas comes out in clouds. He quizzed me on other places in Terceira that I might have not seen, and satisfied that Lena had taken me to all of them, said that there are still some things to see. “After all,” he said, “Your cousin is from Pico, she can’t know everything about this island that somebody from Terceira would know!” We had a long protracted goodbye and he said not to forget my new friend. That night I went to sleep early knowing that the next day I would be on a boat early in the morning.

The past week on Terceira

My new friends Senhor Antonio and Peixoto; a street bullfight; hike to Pico Alto; and other fun stuff. Take a look at this post during the next few days cause Ill be posting more pictures.

It´s been a little bit difficult to get on a computer to write news of my time here, but generally the week has been beautiful. Last Sunday I spent a slow day at the festa watching a children´s parade with the family and then heading to the carnival, where my cousins pedrinho and Inés played on rides while Lena, my tia Natalia and I looked at the booths where all sorts of things were being sold by Indians and gypsies.

On Monday I spent a slow day at home until around 2pm, when I started down the road towards Porto Martins. Porto Martins used to be a small fishing village until about 30 years ago, when Americans and previous immigrants began building their summer homes there, and now the town is a small colony of ex-patriots from Canada and the United States. There are also some very nice natural swimming pools there and a dock with good fishing. I was about halfway down the road when a dilapidated little truck stopped after passing me. I saw an arm come out the window and wave me up to the car. It was a red faced fat man with hardly any teeth with his family in tow behind in the back seat.

«You going down to the piscina?»  he asked.

I hesitated and said, «Umm yes, wherever»

«Salta» he told me to jump into the back of the truck.

With that we continued down the road past locals walking up from the coast with their beach towels and little old houses lining the roads. On every empty piece of land there is food growing, whether its a vegetable garden, pastures for cows or corn for feed. Iwas sitting at dinner yesterday with Lena´s husband Pedro´s family. His father is a farmer and a long discussion started about their little piece of land behind the house and how sad it was to see the land go to waste. Some ideas were tossed around (Maybe two or three orange trees at least? The land is so good and it´s just sitting there!).

Gardening isn´t so much a hobby as it is a fact of life. It´s as though families who don´t keep a garden when they have a piece of land are neglecting a normal part of housekeeping. Two days ago I was sitting up in my room and looking out a little field full of weeds that belongs to the next house up. I looked down at my book for 10 minutes and when I looked again, there was a whole family in the field working, the parents, grandmother and children. In about half an hour the land was cleared and now it sits empty waiting for the next piece of work to occur. Im curious to see what they plant.

Anyway, the old fat man had just waved me into the car and we were on our way down to coast. We arrive pretty quickly and I jumped off the back of the truck. We were at a little water front with a café and some breakwaters built out into the ocean a little ways to form swimming pools that filled at high tide. Along a road about 1/2 km north along the coast there is another fishing dock with one or two other cafés. Two the south there is an area of rocky coast where two days early Pedro had instructed me that I could catch minhoca, or sea worms, that are good bait.

The man stepped out and introduced himself. His name is Senhor Antonio and he´s a semi-retired farmer who has a job as a gardener working for the city. He had just come down to Porto Martins to water a little field of sunflowers that he maintains in front of the swimming pools. He has a huge paunch and only a few teeth on the right side of his mouth and wears sandals because his toenails are swollen and black with fungus. Out of the car came his wife Fatima, who after two days of visiting with them has only said 5 or  6 words to me, his two little grandaughters and a friend of his whose called Peixoto. Peixoto is another character, he´s a lot smaller and darker than Senhor Antonio and about the same age, late 50´s or early 60´s. He wears a bushy moustache, walks with a limp and talks with a foreign Portuguese accent that later I realized was from Angola.

Senhor Antonio asked where I was from. I explained to him that I was from California, that I started an organic farming project in San Jose and that I was hear to visit with family, take care of some family business in regards to my grandfathers land, and see the agriculture of the Azores. That satisfied him and when he found out that I had come down to the coast to fish, he referred me to Peixoto, «Hey! he doesn´t know how to fish.»

Peixoto nodded and told me to follow him to the rocks that were a little off to one side of the dock. It was as though my not knowing the local techniques of fishing was a problem that had to be quickly remedied. This kind of thing happened all the time, and it was the responsibility of the older folks to take care of it.

He stepped over the rocks lightly even with his limp leg and quickly found some sea snails and one or two limpets I could use for bait. With his help I quickly set up a rig for fishing among the rocks, one with a couple of different sized hooks and a short leader to avoid getting snagged. While we worked he talked to me about his life.

He had grown up in Angola and was in the Portuguese army when the revolution started there. Angola was like Portugal´s Vietnam and I have an uncle who spent some time fighting there – most families have somebody who went there and came back screwed up one way or another. When the fighting turned bad Peixoto had to escape from the country in the trunk of a car. Peixoto has been living on Terceira for about 30 years, working odd jobs here and there and hanging out with Antonio, his best friend.

After I was set up for fishing he left me and joined Antonio in watering the sunflowers. After about 30 minutes I caught one little rockfish. After a little while longer my line got snagged. It was getting cold and about to rain, so after another hour of screwing around I hopped back in the car with them to get a ride back up to the house. Antonio and Peixoto weren´t done with me though, and for the rest of the afternoon we drove around in their truck visiting the local pastures and driving up to a mountain called Serra do Cume. Up the road we chatted about the way the local farmers maintain the fields, the breeds of dairy cattle, the pieces of land that give good corn and the ones that don´t because of poor soil or exposure to wind or whatnot. We also talked about the different areas of the island that produce oranges, olive oil, tomatoes, onions. «In one village they´ll produce olive oil, but just one village. 2 km down the road and the trees will no longer grow. Each place because of the weather can produce different things.» There are many little pockets of hot or cold air and geological history that affect what´s grown.

Whenever Antonio stated something like, «Now look carefully… this land here? You see this land? This land gives corn too, but only small corn. And this corn also is used for feed. They don´t grow corn for flour anymore!» Peixoto would chime in «Oh yes, this land gives corn, yes it does, but only very small corn.»  It was really fun hearing the back and forth

At the top of Serra do Cume I saw experimental wind turbines and a beautiful vista where I could see a big volcanic valley with a mosaic of pastures.

Up at the vista there was an abandoned dog that ran around sniffing us as we studied a map, pointing out different landmarks. At this point one of the granddaughters, who had been with us this whole time, tugged at my shirt and revealed to me that she had already been up there three times today – once with here father and another time with Antonio. After another look at things it was time to head down.

We took the long way home, and Antonio took me around a variety of backroads surrounding Fonte do Bastardo (Fountain of the Bastard), the village where he and my cousin Lena live. I asked if Antonio had lived here his whole life and he said proudly, «Yeah, I live in the same house that I was born in and that´s where I´ll die! I know EVERY ONE of these roads.»

It was really cool seeing the pride of these simple folks in the land that they live on. They must drive up the road to Serra do Cume  hundreds of times each year, and having seen a stranger walking down the road, they already had showing me these places in mind. It was dark now and after dropping off Peixoto at his house, Antonio drove me back to my house. I said thank you many times and he gave me his phone number. We arranged to meet again before I left for Pico next week.

Tuesday  – Bullfight in Villa Nova
It would be very easy to write such a long winded story about each day, but it´s a beautiful day and I want to get outside. On Tuesday I farted around similarly most of the day. I remembered that Senhor Antonio had said there was a street bullfight in Villa Nova that afternoon, so I gave him a call and we arranged to go together. I took a walk through Fonte do Bastardo and passed a tall skinny man wearing an orange shirt and holding an umbrella more than once. I said hello each time but he just nodded his head and gave me a thumbs up. I thought that was curious but put it out of my mind.

At 5:00pm Peixoto came walking by my house to pick me up. Together we walked to Antonio´s house talking about bulls and the dangers of street bullfights and he told me how when he was a young man, he got tossed around badly by a bull, «There are local guys called capinos that are sort of famous and are very good with making passes at the bull. it takes a lot of practice and a lot of knowledge to be able to do that. Be careful! Don´t go in the street! They toss people in the air like they are soccer balls! The worst is when they get you under the belt by the horns, then it´s over… theyll shake you in the air until your dead.»

We arrived at Antonios house and took a few moments to look around his kitchen. Its a very oldstyle house with cast iron pots and walls lined with gourds, traditional staffs for herding cows, and similar such things. Antonio and his wife Fatima were really proud to show me all this, and then we got in the car and headed towards Villa Nova. When we arrived the streets were filled with people from all over the island. A lot of Americans were there too. I saw the man in the orange shirt again, and I pointed him out. «Oh him!» Antonio said, «That´s the village mute of Fonte do Bastardo. He can´t talk but he´s a very good capino, god he loves chasing bulls!»

Antonio took me up to the bull cages and I was impressed by the scene. There were a bunch of local guys standing all around and every once in awhile you could hear a loud boom as one of the bulls angrily smashed his horns up against the side of the wooden cage. We climbed a wall up behind the cages and waited for the first bull to be released. Someone behind me sent a homemade firework up into the air to signal the start of the tourada and the first bull was released.

I was immediately shocked and afraid about the size of the bull. At the ring bullfight I went to last Friday I saw that they were big, but being so close I realized that it was no simple thing to run past a bull. They had tied a thick rope around the bulls neck as a leash, and 10 men held onto the rope from a safe distance to keep the bull somewhat under control. In the street a bunch of young guys ran around chasing the bulls and following it up and down the street to watch the action, while the older men, women, children and tourists sat watching from on top the walls. I think next bullfight I´ll be brave enough to get down into the road, but only from a safe distance.

There were four bulls that each ran for about 20 minutes, and some pretty good shows from the local bullfighters, who worked with jackets or umbrellas sort of like matadors. On the third bull a man didn´t run away and was mauled pretty badly as he was trying to escape around a corner. The bull got him between his horns and smashed him into the wall repeatedly. An ambulance came and after a delay of about 20 minutes the bullfight started again. I was a bit drunk at this point but even then, I was a little bit shocked at how unphased all the locals were.

After the bullfight we drove quietly home, with a little detour through the backroads to see if Senhor Antonio could catch a rabbit in his headlights and run it over for tomorrows dinner. Unsuccesful, we drove home.

Wednesday – Hike to Pico Alto with Alvaro and his students
On Wednesday, Lena arranged for me to go on a hike with her colleage Alvaro to a natural area of Terceira called Pico Alto. I got into a van with a group of 8-10 year old students and spent the day hiking through a natural ecosystem called laurisilva – a forest of heather bushes, local, trees called cedro do mato which used to cover large areas but were cut like the redwoods and cypress in the United States because the wood resists rot and is very good for construction. It was a beautiful day and Alvaro and I spent the day talking about the Azores local ecosystems, geology and the attitudes of our respective communities in regards to the protection of the environment. On the way we passed an immense caldeira, the crater left by an extinct volcanoe. The students were cool and well behaved except when Alvaro informed them that they could collect obsidian there, at which point they all went crazy looking at the ground for the little shiny rocks.  Tomorrow I might go with Alvaro called Serra de Santa Barabara, we´ll see.

Thursday / Today
Thursday was relatively slow – I took the bus into Angra and walked until the village of Sao Mateus. Today, Im in Praia and will spend the day fishing and swimming. I´ve been enjoying my free time and have read several books while Im here – covering some of the last novels I haven´t read by Steinbeck and a few new ones by Paulo Coelho. I´ve also spent a considerable amount of time with my little cousins Pedrinho and Ines, who are sometimes a handful but very sweet. I have no kids in my family back home so its good to spend time with the little ones, learn to supervise them and have fun playing like a kid. However, it has reminded me that I do not want children anytime soon. This morning at breakfast Lena, Tia Natalia and I talked about this and I said, «I think Im going to start with a dog. Im going to see if I can raise one and train it well, and afte that, we´ll see.»

Pedrinho was screaming in the background and causing chaos as usual, «Well at least with a dog,» Lena said laughing, «You can chain him in the back of the house and put a muzzle on him. And children aren´t so easily trained.»

So Im having a great time, but Im getting ready to get on to Pico, my home island. Miss you all and more news next week.