Location: Ortigosa de Cameros, La Rioja, España
Soul Site: Los montes de Ortigosa de Cameros (the hills of Ortigosa de Cameros)
Alimento: Barbacoa (barbecue)
Highlight: Cows.
Spain is: texting a local friend suggesting an hour long language exchange over a tea or croissant and instead being invited to a 15.65 km hike that has you crawling out of the house at 7:45 AM on a Sunday morning after 3.7 hours of sleep, and returning around 6:30 PM in the evening.
Spain is: absolutely throwing back a black coffee while dashing around packing up a bocadillo and protein bar and tugging on long socks and listening to another episode of Spanish After Hours to give yourself enough language input to confidently chat for two hours in the car driving through La Rioja’s winding bubble-wrap hills.
Spain is: saying “yes” to stay for a barbecue lunch after said hike and finding yourself in deep debate between bites of chorizo about the endangerment of autonomous regional languages such as Galician and Euskara and how primary education can either save or squash them…
This is the story of another thing I said “yes” to.
Let me first introduce you to my good friend, Marta. Between invitations to family holiday gatherings, language exchange dinners at our homes, interviews for various side projects, walks in the park, Friday afternoon jogs, and 30-pound homegrown squash deliveries, Marta has basically become the mother of the La Rioja Fulbright Spain cohort, and I owe her this post. At 7:45 on the morning in question she picked me and her younger brother, Santi, up at the roundabout where I first saw and fell in love with the river Ebro and sped us off to the 200-person village of Ortigosa de Cameros–a pueblo so small it shares half of its name with the other pueblos surrounding it (if you remember my trip to the tiny pueblo of Arnedillo, it had roughly 450 habitants, for comparison). While Marta’s friend zoomed and swerved her very stereotypically European car southwest toward our destination, Santi and I tried our best to keep our breakfasts in our stomachs.
I was technically incredibly deprived of sleep but actually felt zapped to alertness by the energy of our car. The chattering anticipation of the ruta preciosa we were about to traverse had me–definitely not a hiker–on the edge of my little seat (and feeling like I was in a Yes Theory video). When we finally arrived, Marta graciously lent me her daughter’s hiking boots (which, serendipitously, fit me perfectly), jacket, and palo (pole); then, we found the rest of the Viana Trekking group (a group from Soria, Viana, Logroño, with a guide from Slovenia named Henrik who kept shouting encouragement to me in English whenever I’d slow down), deleted another cafe con leche, took a group selfie, and started our trek up the mountain.
My second graders are currently rehearsing End of Year theater performances based on English children’s books, and one of the three sections has selected “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen this year. The hike was incredible; however, in recollection, I think some of the imagery and onomatopoeia in this book will far more effectively describe my odyssey than any words I could write ever would. I will thus paste in a few oddly analogous pages below to help me tell you my tale.
Ortigosa’s hill was quite a bit higher and the grass wasn’t quite this long, but the swish-swash closely mimicked the sounds of our jackets and long sleeves being stripped off one by one as we rapidly realized that the exertion of this hike in pair with the sun would not mix well with so many layers.
“Uh-oh! A forest! A big, dark forest.
We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh, no! We’ve got to go through it.”
We found a very old tree to hug.
I had to clarify to my students the meaning of “trip” in this story as the awkward slipping kind, not the synonym for a vacation. I am sure you can imagine how this altered the choreography of that scene.
Back to the hike: Despite getting some flack in the past from dear friends for hikes not making my list of Top 5 Vacation Activities of choice, I can proudly state that I was down on my hands and knees this day scaling a few more vertical moments and actually enjoying it. Now that my family has moved to the Rocky Mountains, I may even need to consider adding mountain things to my list of preferred weekend hobbies. Despite the scraped knees and exertion, I was genuinely finding the ability to (literally) ground myself…delightful. Maybe Spain truly has contributed to my lifelong goal of becoming more laid-back. Who could have imagined?
“Uh-oh! Mud. Thick oozy mud.”
It had recently rained in this area of Rioja, so we did encounter it…and we had to go through it.
“Uh-oh! A river. A deep cold river.”
Well, it was actually just a stream or two, but my left hiking boot slipped on a rock while crossing so I gained the privilege of trekking with one foot swimming in cold gritty water for about an hour of the 3-4 hour hike.
Now, I need to be honest with you–this blog post does not end with me revealing that I came cara a cara with a bear and that (1) I tactfully danced my way to escape or (2) my new Spanish hiking friends heroically fought him off of me so fast I didn’t even have to go to the hospital. Instead of a bear, we found just a group of scruffy mountain cows lazily chewing on the swishy swashy grass while the bells around their necks chimed holas into the breeze. We moved silently through them, hoping not to startle them or kill the vibe. No one was harmed, and I think the vibes remained intact.
In between stumbles, trips, squelches and sploshes, Marta and my companions and I chatted about my stress about what came next for me, advice for how to keep up with the Spanish I’ve learned, my thoughts on teaching this year, funny quirks of English and Spanish words. I asked everyone their thoughts about growing up in and identifying with the Riojano culture. Why do you love Logroño (or Soria or Viana)? Why do you stay? Why raise a family here, why spend your weekends getting lost and found here; tell me about sources of pride, favorite hikes, hidden gems of places I should attempt to visit before returning to my own culture, my home, my more familiar mountains? People, including myself, it turns out, are incredibly candid when their senses are being assaulted with honey-peppered air and sugar snap grass and a lemonade sun popping in and out of sight every few huffs. I found myself wishing I could make the mountain my notebook and scribble notes with my palo so I wouldn’t forget the gold they were telling me.
After a short pause to almorzar on bocadillos and fruit, we continued on past an even tinier village to Ortigosa’s Iron bridge and re-entered the pueblo, which signified it was time to decide whether to head home or stick around for lunch. Exhausted, I pieced together that Henrik had disappeared around the corner into his finca (country home) to personally prepare a barbacoa (barbecue) for the group, so we had some time to mill about before heading inside to comer. The group I’d driven with needed to quickly decide whether to stay or go–this day had already turned out to be longer than anticipated, and I had left all of my lesson planning to do once I got home (major ups). However, Spain’s social etiquette says it is more than a little maleducado to turn down an invitation to someone’s home, especially when most of the group says sí–something I understood because it is similar to the good old-fashioned manners my mother and grandparents taught me (though I have become a bit lazy about following some of those rules). So, we decided to stay. I am glad we did.
My car mates and I peeled off our hiking boots and entered a wooden door into a cozy country kitchen, joining the rest of the group already stretching tired calves, covering yawns, and re-hydrating with beers and wine around a large picnic table laden with olives, cheese, canned mussels, and pan de espiga (...pieces ripped off by hand and stashed directly on the table, then used as a vessel and utensil for your snacks, because that is the Spanish way).
I grabbed a Coke Zero (maybe the most shameless guilty pleasure / habit I have developed this year) to sip as the bombero (firefighter) in the group tended the fire. Henrik paraded out paper-wrapped kilos of fresh chorizo, sweet morcilla (blood sausage with rice), and another salchichón (sausage). Where I’d squeezed in at the table’s bench gave me a prime vantage point to both warm myself and snag video of the barbecue action, which I tried to record unobtrusively while still participating in the conversations around me.
A hike so great your boot falls apart...
The discussion began somewhere at hiking and morphed into a colorful debate about the inclusion of regional language instruction in schools around Spain. Some in the hiking group either personally were or had family members from regions like Galicia and País Vasco (the Basque Country, which touches La Rioja–it’s called Euskadi in Basque) where, for example, Gallego (Galician) and Euskera (Basque, or vasco in Spanish) are spoken. Gallego is taught in Galicia’s education system, but is endangered. Euskera is also taught throughout the Basque Country and how much depends on the specific model of plurilingual education utilized at each school. Younger generations have less command over some of these languages, but some in the group noted that they are currently observing friend groups of young adults throughout Navarre and País Vasco choosing Euskara as their social language–something very encouraging for them to hear (I assume this is the same with Galician, Valencian, Catalan, etc.). I jumped in and offered my encouragement that proficiency for social use was vastly more impressive than the depth of instruction I’d experienced studying Spanish around the U.S. The chorizo was sliced and passed around with gusto, and the conversation continued, looping back around to loose plans to return for Ortigosa de Cameros’ ruta larga sometime this fall.
I remember picking up my scrap of bread to use as a napkin when encouraged to give the morcilla a try (I was very hesitant but can now assert that sweet morcilla is delicious!), feeling warm, full, exhausted, intrigued: and thinking to myself, huh. It’s May, and wait a second. This is… exactly what I had intended my side project to be.
We finally drove home after a late afternoon coffee and sobremesa around that warm, firelit table. As we traversed back down the hills to Logroño, I felt nothing but gratitude to have experienced this day. Admittedly, it was easy to lose confidence and direction in a project like this one so centered on not planning and people and vulnerability and my craving to shed light on sources of learning and beauty so external to myself. I humbly hope that I have served as a vessel to share them with even a few who are similarly enamored with such stuff.
This blog is for you. Thank you.
And thank you to Marta, and to my new trekking friends, and to these gorgeous mountains of La Rioja–I cannot call this day a bear hunt, but I can collectively call you a bear hug of joy. I caught a big one.
Un abrazo gigante,
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