sexta-feira, agosto 19, 2011

heavy traffic


Summer in Southern Portugal can be relentless. I remember one summer when I stayed a fortnight at a house in a small village in Algarve called Altura. At the time there were no motorways south of Lisbon and the only way to travel within Algarve was a local road than ran more or less parallel to the coast from one end of the region to the other. Altura consisted of a single street connecting that road to the beach, with a row of squat white houses on either side. Oddly enough, the only building on the other side of the busy regional road was the post office, which made posting a simple postcard a somewhat perilous adventure requiring adult supervision:

heavy traffic the flies drone drunkenly on salty sweat


That summer was especially hot, enough to drive everyone indoors for a couple of hours after lunch. Except us kids, of course, who could not resist going to the café across the street to buy ice-cream. There was no shade to speak of, the houses were too low, half-buried in the ground for coolness, and there were no trees. The white walls glared painfully and the smell of melting tar filled the air. It was the most perfectly delicious heat I have ever experienced:

summer noon walking down main street hugging shadows

quarta-feira, agosto 10, 2011

marram grass


I started drawing on my childhood memories to write haiku.
In the summertime we used to go to a beach not far from where I still live. We came onto the beach through a wide expanse of flat grey dune, surrounded by the typical soft tones of the ground-hugging vegetation except for a path of clear sand opened by years and years of beach-goers passing through. Then we came to the primary dune, a steep wall of sand crowned with wispy tufts of beach grasses separating the grey dune behind it from the beach proper:

marram grass and madder climbing on hands and knees over the sliding sand


Many years later I returned to that same beach and was surprised that the dune didn’t seem as tall as before. The dune had gotten smaller, or me bigger, or both. When I was a child, the dune looked like it was ten metres tall. It was an effort to climb it, aided only by planks of wood placed at even spaces in the dune as steps of sorts. These planks, too thick to be ordinary wood boards and too regular to be driftwood or some other sort of discarded wood, were clearly railway sleepers. At the time there were a lot of railway lines being decommissioned, and even as children we were familiar with sleepers, for we regularly used the out-of-use tracks as shortcuts in our childhood hikes and bike rides:

sleepers in the sand there’s no one to shelter from the north wind