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Outside Magazine January 2004

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The Hard Way
Leap Year (cont.)

THREE MONTHS LATER, as I look out from the wide-open window of my office-cum-living room, the mercurial seascape is flat navy blue, as unmoving as an abstract painting. It is late morning, and my daughters, Addi, 11, and Teal, 9, have caught the bus to their Spanish school, their backpacks stuffed with heavy textbooks. Sue, my wife, is taking a long run on the beach and then circling back to buy fresh shrimp for supper. Magdalena, our octogenarian neighbor, who is tinier than Teal, has taken her wee, blind, crippled, octogenarian dog—a beast whose bark sounds exactly like a baby crying (I've daydreamed of surreptitiously easing it into the afterlife)—for a walk, in her arms. Next door, infirm Antonia has flung a pail of mop water into the courtyard, and her grandson is feeding the bright, egg-size canaries in the rock cave beneath her house. Belinda, behind us, is bellowing from her terrace at little Manuelito, in the park two blocks away, to come home. El panadero has made his house-to-house deliveries with the large sack of baguettes; the propane-gas man has lugged an orange canister up to our front grate; el cartero, who buzzes around town on a yellow moped outfitted with yellow saddlebags, has delivered our day's mail from the States. And my father has sent an e-mail telling me not to worry—he fixed the toilet in our house, which churlishly broke after we left Wyoming.

So I guess we've settled in.

In less than 24 hours we had traded the landlocked spread of Wyoming for the sticky, flesh-covered Costa Tropical.

Sue and I talked for years about moving abroad, scheming and dreaming and putting money aside. It was part of my family history—when I was 13, my family moved to northern Holland for a year; my father, a mathematician, was on sabbatical. Although we spoke not a word of Dutch, all six of us kids were plunged directly into local schools. We floundered valiantly out of sheer desperation, quickly learned how to float with just a few words, began to kick a bit, then dog-paddled, and eventually swam (not gracefully, but passably). Submerged in a new culture, that one year abroad altered us all. The world would forevermore be beckoning—vast beyond imagination, resplendent and revolting, perplexingly complex, contradictory, ceaselessly intriguing. Sue and I wanted our girls to have their own eye-widening opportunity.

Being a writer, I'm fortunate enough to have a transplantable job, so that wasn't an obstacle. And yet life got in the way and the years clicked by until one day we looked up, noticed that Addi and Teal were half grown, and realized that it was now or never. It was a simple decision, really: In six months we would leave on a yearlong sojourn. Thereafter, each piece more or less fit into an unfinished puzzle that we solved as we went along.

The high plains of Wyoming are rightfully famous for their brutal weather, and we all agreed that we wanted a change of climate. Sue is fluent in Spanish, hence a Spanish-speaking country seemed sensible. Beyond that, each of us had personal criteria. Sue wanted the girls to learn classic Castilian—the most widely used form of Spanish—versus Catalan, Galician, or Basque. I wanted to be no more than one hour from the mountains and, for my work, no more than two from an international airport. Addi and Teal, realizing we were presumptuously making decisions for them and convinced that they had thus far led deprived childhoods, living 1,200 miles from the nearest ocean, insisted that we be no more than an hour from the beach.

In this way, we chose Spain.

Unspoken but understood was that we wanted a community small enough to perambulate but that also had DSL. A community that was still Spanish—not an expat colony of Brits, Swedes, or Germans—but wasn't hidebound in medieval prejudices. A community that had paella and pizza. A tall order.

"Andalusia. That's where we'll go!" Sue announced one night at dinner.

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