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Outside Magazine January 2004

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The Hard Way
Leap Year (cont.)

I'VE JUST RETURNED from my noon bike ride. The loop begins with a cruise through the groves of cherimoyas—a sweetish fruit that you spoon out of its scalloped green skin—along the broad Guadalfeo River bottom. A gushing canal runs along the narrow strip of asphalt. Beyond the fruit trees, the road climbs into long-ago-terraced mountains, passing through several small villages where old men in berets sit in the shade of somnolent stone churches.

As the road curls deeper into the mountains, it becomes absurdly steep, which makes for a fabulous workout. It is a road steeper than anything ever allowed in the U.S., but rules, wonderfully, are anathema to the Spanish. Speed-limit signs are as rare as traffic police, and people drive as fast as their little tin boxes will move. Drivers give cyclists a wide berth but, oddly, appear to aim for pedestrians. When a vehicle finally comes to a halt, it does so wherever the driver pleases, like a toddler falling asleep in the middle of the living-room floor. Double parking is de rigueur, triple parking fair play. Of course, the narrow cobblestone streets were originally designed to accommodate little more than a mule and a mule cart. Triple parking usually blocks the entire thoroughfare, giving all involved something to honk and yell and wave their hands about, which they seem to enjoy far more than actually getting where they're trying to go.

But this is to be expected—Americans always whine about how foreigners drive, from Madrid to Madras. Now that I'm the foreigner, I've quite happily learned how to park with half the car up on the sidewalk and take joy in using my horn. It's the consciousness of a culture that really matters, not so much its formal regulations. Fathoming this takes time and requires forbearance, a virtue that matures immensely when you choose to live abroad. Suddenly you are an uninformed minority—a healthy experience for an American. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants, yet within only one or two generations we so easily forget how difficult it can be to adapt to unfamiliar territory.

America's immense economic and military strength makes us believe we are a majority on this globe. Nothing could be more ludicrous. There are more Europeans than Americans, more Africans, more Indians, more Chinese, more South Americans. And yet living only in the United States, you could easily imagine that being number one in all things is a divine birthright. This has the potential to breed an ugly closemindedness. Not surprisingly, then, one inevitable outcome of a move overseas is a renewed respect for the teeming diversity of humankind, a recognition that there are at least a dozen ways to skin a cat—and they're all right.

Of course, living abroad—even speaking the language and settling there for years—doesn't make you a true insider. You will always be a foreigner, but if you're lucky you may come away with a perspective on your new home that the locals don't have and find you've become a fledgling connoisseur of red wine and olive oil.

As I rolled back down into Salobreña, it was just after 2 p.m. From every household, the soul-nourishing aromas of home cooking wafted out the open windows and along the streets. Nose uplifted, I gloried like a bloodhound in the different smells: cerdo (pork) sautéing in garlic, papas fritas (fried potatoes), sopa de albóndigas (meatball soup).

We didn't move to Spain to recover some rustic, romantic, agrarian life. That's been gone for some time. Rather, we moved to live surrounded by whatever traditions are here now. As when, at the stroke of two, citizens one and all pull down the heavy metal grates of their work life, physically and metaphorically, and go home to their families for la cena grande—the big meal. Somehow, amid all the shove and shuffle of the modern commercial world, the Spanish have had the good sense to still organize work around life, instead of the other way around. Imagine stopping right in the middle of your fervid workday and taking a three-hour break. One hour to enjoy your meal with your family, one hour to converse extravagantly, using all body parts, and one hour for siesta. Can you think of anything more decadent or more civilized?

Pulling up beneath the kitchen window of my house, I could hear the girls, already out of school for the day, laughing, and I could smell Sue's shrimp paella cooking on the stove.

Vivir la vida.

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