A Tarheel in the Undergrowth

Lips wrinkle outside

Skin cooks red on valley road

The dust dances on

Did people once roam

the valleys beneath Nevada?

Or are they spirits?

Shadows sprinkle blue

Peaks of carpet sage on rocks

A curtain of sky

Summer stretches on

As hot as mountains are tall

Do you see water?

Ant Machines stop short

The roads go on forever

But we don’t have to

Pedestrians using a temporarily closed section of the Voie Expresse Rive Gauche, in Paris (Sunday mornings).

Tuesday morning, regular use.

The following is a modified excerpt from my field notes for a hike done in the NaturTejo Geo Park in Eastern Portugal on Tuesday, May 24^th, 2011:

Hot wheat, same poppy.

Leather man points sheep to field-

Are you the last one?

 Our hike began in Idanha-a-Velha in Eastern Portugal, near the Spanish border at around 10AM in the morning.  We followed the signs for PR-2 that leads to Idanha-a-Nova to the south but the path, which was clearly marked, should take us west along the Rio Ponsul which we think would be an obvious destination for a hiker or traveler, especially under the hot Portuguese sun.  The trail, which is a gravel road, is soft and flat with easy, gradual climbs up the low hills around the village.  In the village, the path is actually cobble, which snakes around the south side of Idanha-a-Velha before coming to the Rio Ponsul, where the path was underwater but we were able to cross by stepping along some tall stone pilings at what was probably a small dam.

Crossing the Rio Ponsul outside Idanha-a-Velha

Monsanto in the distance

Here it turns to gravel and heads west and as you follow the PR-2, Monsanto rises behind you like a giant.  Only when you turn around to see from where you came does it reveal itself.  Only 2 kilometers in we arrive at a pass and our first real crossroads, where we decide to go right (or north), off of PR-2, towards the river so we can cross to get on the Proença-a-Velha side, before the Rio Ponsul becomes too deep to cross.  Our turn takes us into the hills south of the river.  As we climb and slowly go west, bends in the Rio Ponsul start to emerge among the thick, wooded hillsides; the trail is narrow and overgrown—we pass through many spiderwebs.  We pass through the olive groves and meadows of cork oak into the naturalistic vegetation of the hillsides.  We descend to the Rio Ponsul and discover a much wider and deeper river than we anticipated.  The river is green and dark and maybe 50 meters across; we head upstream to look for a crossing.

The Rio Ponsul

 We are out of luck.  The river remains wide and deep.  We change into our swimming clothes, held our bags over our heads and tested the depths.  After boasting about her days as a lifeguard, Kelly immediately went underwater, over her head along with her bag.  The weight is just too much to carry!  Our only choice is to head further up river along the bank, hoping to find a place where it narrows.  Completely back-tracking, we head back towards Idanha-a-Velha.  We finally spot a trail across the river and decide to go for it.  Splitting our belongings into 2-3 trips, we pack small bags and get into the river holding them high above our heads.  The water is calm and warm.  We paddle with our legs across the river, maybe 25 meters across, until we can stand again.  After two crossings we realize we are not the fit young people we once were and with our bags unpacked and our belongings strewn along the bank, we take a short siesta.  It is 1:30PM and we are maybe 2 kilometers from our starting point.

Crossing the Rio Ponsul

We take the road up the hill and find the direction we wanted to go was behind us, so we trekked up a short hill of tall grass and purple wildflowers and onto a new road that takes us into the thick, wooded hills.  The vegetation is coarse and scrubby, and not quite tall enough for shade.  This was the dominant vegetation and landscape type for the remainder of the hike.  We passed through many Eucalyptus plantations along the way.  It is very striking how different these trees are from the rest of the Portuguese interior.  As in California, these trees are ugly and somewhat messy in the landscape—like a fussy child. 

Harvested Eucalyptus plantation

Abandoned structure

Most of the hills we went through were hot and the roads windy.  Monsanto would make appearances periodically, rising and falling behind hills to the northeast.  We did encounter an abandoned structure and a bee farm.  As we crossed a high ridge, some villages to the east finally began to make an appearance.  We could finally see what we thought was Proença-a-Velha in the distance and we set our sights on it and just kept aiming for it whenever we came to a fork in the road.  In the final few miles, we passed out of a Eucalyptus plantation, which was being harvested by a backhoe, and into some beautiful pastures and fields with new wooden fence posts.  As we were rounding one field, a herd of cows and bulls came stampeding along the fence line, our first livestock sighting.  We finished our walk along a quiet stretch of shaded road, which from the skat and tracks we could tell was used to herd goats.  To our right was an old stone wall about 2 meters high and at grade with another pasture. 

Path leading to Medelim

As we closed in on the asphalt road ahead, we celebrated our long trek until we got to the sidewalk and realized we had walked to Medelim, the wrong town, 6 kilometers to the northeast of our intended destination.  Somehow, along the way we had changed our direction, set our sights on the wrong town and walked off the maps we had carried with us.  The trip was excruciatingly hot, yet astounding and there is something to be said for walking off a map and in excess of our destination.  There is a moral here: we don’t ever really know where we are—do we?

“All that hustle and bustle, it’s coming this way, but it ain’t here yet”.  These were the parting words spoken to me by the kind old man at the City Produce Market in Raleigh on Thursday, after he sold me a jar of Peach Jam, which was his recommendation.  The “hustle and bustle” he was referring to was the “anything you can do and see” that I told him the San Francisco Bay Area offered.  After he saw me taking photographs of his jam shelf, he asked me if I was “some kind” of artist, to which I replied no, that I just enjoy taking photographs with my old camera.  I told him I was from the area originally but that I live out in the Bay Area now; he had never been but had seen pictures and said it looked beautiful, I confirmed this for him.  If I had stayed longer, I would have pressed him to tell me what he thought the “hustle and bustle” might be, because for me, waiting for the hustle and bustle, hell even trying to bring the hustle and bustle is what my life is all about.

For the first time in recent memory, I can claim two places, two homes.  One is California, the Golden State, still pursued by those seeking not the sparkle of a stone but the spark in their heart.  San Francisco, a prospector and prostitute outpost still draws the kinds of characters who can’t find a place in their original worlds, so they go there to fit in as well as create something new.  Being such a young city (an even older settlement of course), roughly 150 years as an established area, I find it curious that only a handful of generations can distinguish such a powerful legacy.  Then of course is my other home, my original home, North Carolina, the Old North State, one of the original 13 colonies, where settlers landed and where the landscape, lush and humid in the spring, seems sculpted by god specifically to be experienced from the comfort of a long porch.  Raleigh and the greater Triangle area is a national, sometimes international destination for the right kinds of people and an impressive deposit of progressive thinkers and doers in an otherwise historically conservative region—keep in mind that North Carolina had some of the first black congressman after the Civil War, went blue for Obama for the first time since Carter (and FDR before that) but we are also, in theory, re-segregating schools in Wake County.  Basically, like California, generalizing is hard to do when you really get to know the place.

In my studies and in my quest for understanding our environment this hustle and bustle always comes to mind.  For me, the hustle and bustle is music festivals, light rail, bike parades, gay pride weeks, good coffee, street poetry, open containers, skylines, free internet and a healthy, bizarre public culture.  I wonder what the produce man’s hustle and bustle is?  Being home from a place where a lot of these things exist, I ask myself why they aren’t happening here in North Carolina.  However, it isn’t really fair for me to ask that, because these things very much are happening here, but it is a matter of prevalence and the greater question of why the South, since as far back as Reconstruction has never become quite like other metropolitan areas in the United States.  Most people who know me in California can never remember which Carolina I’m from, assuming they remember that there are in fact two, (people from the Dakotas have a similar identity crisis).  The South is also a place a lot of people have never visited and if they do it was New Orleans, the Appalachian Trail, maybe the Outer Banks and ever so often Asheville and a layover at the Atlanta airport.  I should make it clear that I have no Southeastern Regional Master Plan in mind, nor do I even have any grandiose ideas about how my home city of Raleigh, NC can enter the 21^st Century.  My sentiments come almost entirely from seeing success in other places and wanting those successes back home.  The greatest, most loving, most caring and most genuine people I have ever known all have their roots in the East and mostly the South, so I see it as a natural extension that a region of people that love to be social, to be with family and have a deep connection to home and place would have cities and towns that exemplify this love of people.  Let me put it this way: we’ve been a state for almost as long as we’ve been a nation and Raleigh has nary a bike lane.  Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a city that leveled mountains to build its neighborhoods and draped an incessant Cartesian grid over the most topographic city in the US is perhaps the most bike-able city in America.  How long does an agrarian history inform regions and cities?  Is the South destined to be a mid-density, somewhat sprawled region where change is slow to happen and the connotation of “downtown” still means the emptiest part of the city?  Is urbanity even the answer for the South?  I really don’t know if it is or not, but watching two realities, the West Coast and the East Coast, happening in real time brings all kinds of questions to my mind.

Restlessness, a feeling not unlike boredom may be the explanation here.  I am a particular age, in a particular demographic with a particular education, so I may not be seeing certain things.  Perhaps the South is ahead of the game, resisting this incessant change and the tireless mantra of growth that is shouted from the mountaintops of capitalism.  The hustle and bustle—whenever it arrives—may not take a surprising form, a form not unlike what we’ve seen before or elsewhere.  The question is, can it be steered to meet the needs of Raleigh?  There is a lot of passion in people’s voices about what Raleigh can be when you press them on the issue.  Can it be done, and when?