Lanzarote

   We spent five days on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. The first order of business was looking at the boat. Mike is in love with it: he says it is a good boat: well designed, well made, and well maintained and updated. The interior layout leaves a bit to be desired as living space and for guests, but of course its sailing prowess is his priority. It was more expensive than he wanted to spend, but he decided to make an offer. And it was a good offer. The owners are deliberating, as well as considering other potential buyers. We’ll see. He hates the limbo.

    We spent the rest of our time touring the island. Mike had a bad cold and his energy was low, so we didn’t do anything terribly ambitious. Spent some time in town looking at museums and going to the film festival. Took a bus trip north to see the Jameos del las Aguas, a house/ auditorium/ pool / restaurant/garden built in a giant lava tube by Lanzarote’s most celebrated son, artist, sculptor and architect Cesar Manrique. It was very cool. Took a bus trip south to the tourist beach town Playa Blanca. It was just what you’d expect: over run with tourists, tourist hotels and villas, and tourist-oriented businesses. On our last day, we rented a car to go see the national park, which is an ethereal volcanic landscape. Very worthwhile. We drove to the

north end of the island to see the Mirador del Rio, also designed by Cesar Manrique, but it had just closed, so all we got to see was the dramatic view of the ocean and the next island.

   We returned to Barcelona for a short week of Spanish classes. Studying Spanish intensively is exhausting. It is humbling. Almost humiliating. I come to it with a decent background and vocabulary, but it is being taught at a higher, more nuanced level of the grammatical conventions and professional linguistic terminology. I find that I pick up the concepts being taught readily enough, but 24 hours later can’t put them into practice. And the irregular verbs bedevil me: I don’t seem to remember those either. I feel more and more like TR when he was wanting to learn Spanish and not making much progress. There are a number of words that are used differently in Spain and Latin America. In Spain they use the vosotros second person plural which they don’t use in Latin America, so that is new to me. And they use tu all the time for most everyone and rarely use usted. My favorite word in Castillian Spanish is vale, which basically means okay, and is used all the time. I mean tons. More often that any other two words combined.

   Mike’s attorney hasn’t been able to get him an appointment yet with the police to finish his residency process. So we will leave for a week to go to the Pyrenees to finish our hike from last summer. I have made a little progress on writing my book: here is the next installment for you.

Basque Pastoral

   Cows and horses and sheep, oh my! This is the Land of Oz. From an Alaska perspective, cows, horses and sheep are exotic; bears, moose and Dall sheep are common-place.

   France is one of the top meat and dairy producers in Europe. The Pyrénées-Atlantiques region is the number one producer of beef cattle and horse meat, and number two for sheep milk in France; 90% of the farms are concentrated in the mountain and high mountain areas along the southern border. In 2017 there were 4,500 farms with 71,804 head of cattle and 1750 sheep farmers with 490,000 dairy ewes. (France as a whole has over 8 million head of sheep.) Goats and donkeys are also raised. The sector includes over 400 artisanal farmer cheeses.

   Alaska has only one dairy farm left, with about 200 milk cows. They all stay home and don’t roam around in the mountains. But we do have 140,000 bears, 200,000 moose, and 50,000 Dall sheep and mountain goats that roam freely. Anchorage alone—Alaska’s largest city with 294,000 human inhabitants--has 400 resident black and brown bears, 1,900 moose, and 3,100 sheep and goats. The sheep and goats like to hang out in the mountains on the east side of town. About 300 moose live in town parks and greenbelts all year around and can readily be seen browsing the road margins; another 500-700 come into town in the winter to stroll along the plowed streets and sidewalks and dine on gourmet ornamental shrubbery. Unfortunately, they become a hazard to motorists: an average of 150 jump out in front of speeding cars and are killed every year. The bears sleep all winter and spend their summers in the parks and greenbelts eating fish, berries and the occasional moose calf. The brown bears are mostly smart enough to keep out of sight, but the black bears, not so much: some of them like to visit neighbors who thoughtfully have left out garbage, bird seed or pet food. We see them on video surveillance cameras all the time. One year a black bear broke into a house, raided the refrigerator and smeared chocolate all over the white rug. And from time to time a delinquent young male will lose all fear and wander freely through the streets and parking lots, causing fear and consternation for the humans.

   Pyrenean sheep, cows and horses are better behaved and supervised. Most of the herds are escorted to their mountain pastures every spring, and back down to their winter grounds in the fall. The word for this is “transhumance.” (In this era of politically correct language, you can free-associate your own meanings for the term.)  There are more than 6000 farms in the Pyrenees that practice transhumance, so that must mean at least 6000 shepherds moving their flocks up and down the mountains. In many areas transhumance on foot has been replaced by motor transport, largely because walking the flock up the road is hazardous. But loading the sheep into trucks has its own hazards: it stresses and sometimes suffocates the animals. There is some resurgence in transhumance by foot and hoof, in some cases involving bureaucracy and permits, and an increasing tourist interest in the practice. Many Pyrenean communities have organized festivals for tourists to follow the sheep, and of course taste and buy the cheeses, along with wine and music and dancing. 

   Another labor-saving innovation is “virtual shepherding”: a cross-border consortium in the Basque region is testing satellite geo-tracking of the collared animals. The shepherd sits at his computer to monitor the movements and behaviors of the herd to remotely sense grazing activity and signs of health problems. They are also experimenting to see if there might be a way to direct the movements of the herd through vibrations, sounds or electrical impulses.

   But for now, the time-tested technology is sheep dogs. What amazing teamwork!