I ran my hand along the back of the curved terra cotta clay tile feeling its rough inaccuracies before smearing it with mortar and placing it next to the others in alternating concave and convex positions. Each new tile felt like a little victory towards completion of the beautiful, rippling roof that I was working on in northern Spain. This traditional roofing technique was being taught to me by a friend’s dad and owner of this rustic, quaint home nestled in a lush valley in Asturias. I was sixteen and living with my friend’s family for the summer.
Every morning we woke to a milky wet mist that clung to the valley floor before dissipating around lunchtime, leaving dew clinging to the ferns and grasses. Mornings in this valley were magical. Each dew-laden morning, a loaf of bread and a jug of fresh cream would get delivered in the mailbox. After thick cups of coffee, we would eat the fresh bread accompanied by a brick of fresh cheese and salami and go to work on the roof.
Afternoons were for exploring— learning to surf in San Vicente de la Barquera, traversing rocks and sea cliffs on the craggy Asturian coast, climbing rooftops in the coastal town of Llanes, and going to markets along the village streets of Unquera. At night we would take the train to go out; sometimes to Llanes for a late dinner with friends where we would share Basque style tapas and jugs of wine; sometimes to Bilbao or Santander where we would go dancing into the wee hours of the morning, spilling out of the clubs for our last chance to catch the final train home; and often to the beach where we would stay until well after the sun had set and the tide had come in to let our feet dangle in the ocean and watch the illuminated sea life that would come to view as soon as the darkness set in.
My friend and I explored northern Spain up—scaling to the top of peaks in the Picos De Europa, and down—disappearing into limestone caves deep in the mountainous karst topography. We fed our developing curiosities and young naiveties by doing things like, opening doors to moss-covered stone buildings in the mountains to reveal a hog the size of the dank room, following mountaineers up the sheer face of Naranjo de Bulnes, mixing coca cola and red wine to make calimochos on the beach, and getting tangled in sea kelp while learning to surf with cheap boards rented from a handsome French surf instructor.
This early experience ignited a travel lust in me that has never since been satiated. I realized that the world was a placed I needed to see, smell, feel and be a part of in order to understand the complexities of life. The world opened up to me that summer, revealing an expansive wealth of opportunities that can only be realized through continued life experience. Without fully realizing it at the time, I had challenged myself to become a woman of the world. I needed to open those doors, initiate the conversation with a stranger, say ‘yes’ to an unknown opportunity, stumble over foreign consonants when asking for directions, taste the saltiness of an ocean unfamiliar to me, climb that mountain…and that one, and feel the clay tiles to understand how the roof was made in order to fully appreciate it.
The following collection of photos are from several trips to Spain over the last two decades including; a trip to Cataluña where we stayed in a dark castle with a loosely forged contact made from a friend of a friend who we later learned was the heir to Christopher Columbus; a spur of the moment rendezvous in Barcelona with friends from Austria where we rented bicycles and took in every inch of the Gaudi-soaked city; an exploration of Andalucia that was, in part, my honeymoon, and; a rendezvous in Madrid when I was five months pregnant where we met up with a fellow Spanish firefighter with whom I had previously shared a fire training exchange. There are also a few scans of the old film photos from that first ground-breaking trip to Spain that served to set the stage for the next 17 years of my life.
