THE STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR | TRAVEL MEMOIR PODCAST | TARIFA | New Book 2023
SPAIN
Letters to Kody: Travel Memoirs of a Tumbleweed is an upcoming author-narrated podcast of travel vignettes from an unusually nomadic life.
Book to be published early 2023.
My name is D. J. Swales, an author of fiction. This time I wish to tell you a true story . . .
In 2016, a car tragically collided with a fire truck in Kentucky. While on his way to a job at Walmart, a young man lost his life. His name was Kody. He dreamt of seeing the world.
These travel memoirs are dedicated to Kody’s lust for travel. They are an invitation from the open road, from my nomadic life following in the footsteps of my grandfather, an old Irish sea dog who was knocked down the hold of a ship in Hamburg.
Together, I hope we can carry Kody's spirit to the places he longed to see.
Dear Kody,
I rub my palm where the prickly pear cactus fibres have been stuck in my skin since breakfast. Their golden sweetness was less of a shock to the eyes than the same fruit in the Canary Islands, where their juice is redder than blood or beets.
On the way up this hill a crested hoopoe swept across my path, my favourite bird and a sure sign of Africa. In Luxor, far down the Nile, I once saw a flock of hoopoes stalk ants on the manicured lawn of Agatha Christie’s favourite hotel, where she penned a book in her room. Above, irridescent bee-eaters sat on telephone lines. They are my next favourite bird, along with toucans and Philippine Monkey Eagles.
In the blinding light of this Spanish hillside cemetery, the shadows of small trees look like patches of spilled black coffee. The air smells of heat and dust, and lingers in the nose. In one direction the sky reaches to an endless saltwater horizon, where Europe plummets to unseen plains, drowned mountains, and pitch black canyons. Some say that those are the places where Atlantis existed, before the deep ocean’s hunger. Others insist Atlantis lives on, behind walls of mist. I hope they are right.
Cicadas serenade the lizards that flit from my path. Meandering, but with latent purpose, I look down upon the red roof tiles of Tarifa. Raising my eyes I blink, in disbelief, like every occasion that I glimpse the origin of all of us, across a surprisingly thin strip of water. I hope I never become jaded to the sight of Africa, it’s at all possible.
Africa spreads east and west, in long lines of hills and mountains that grey into a mysterious drier interior, that leads to another ocean, of sand. I imagine that the ghosts of Barbary lions and Atlas bears are staring back at me and the mountains of Europe. I wonder if leopards do live on in the fast-disappearing cork, cedar, and oak forests of what is the wettest part of Morocco, though they have officially been declared extinct.
Jebel Musa, Arabic for Mount Moses, is the most singular of the peaks of the Rif mountains, an underdeveloped area of Morocco where a notoriously rebellious spirit lives among the indigenous Berber people, who prefer to be known as Amazigh. Amazigh people call Jebel Musa, Adrar n Moussa. The Rif mountains are among the largest areas of cannabis cultivation in the world, with the pollen haze often reaching Spain and disguising the mountain from all view.
Staring across the water, I could pinch myself to think that Jebel Musa is one of the legendary Pillars of Hercules, the other being the Rock of Gibraltar, just up the coastline here in Andalusia. So many colonial civilizations have ruled both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar, including Carthage and Rome. All had their own names for both mountains, which legend says were once part of the greater mountain that Hercules split them in two with his axe, connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
The two continents look so close, but the perilous nature of many journeys is testified by the dry earth behind me, where white posts mark the final mass-resting places of hopeful yet doomed migrants who drowned in that thin stretch of water, often alone in the dark. I stop, ponder everything, and send them prayers. Another hoopoe flies overhead as I can't help but wonder whose names they had on their lips in their final moments. Somehow, in this palace of death, life is all around. This ground, this place, is an absolute axis of life, whether its in the form of whales and tuna migrating through the Straits, or the billions of birds that use the Pillars of Hercules as landmarks for avoiding Europe's winters and seeking its summer abundance. Countless lines of songbirds, storks, eagles, and others pass through these skies, barely classing the millennia of human migrations as worthy of a downwards glance, if not for the bullets that pluck millions of them from the wing .
In the shadow of a tree, I think of the unknown lives that ended here, in the soil beneath my feet. For some reason, I picture their hundreds of faces staring at the sun, not down in the suffocating earth. Even though she was lost to the sea, with no grave to mark her existence, my mind turns to twenty-one-year-old Samia Yusof, who thrilled the nation of Somalia at the Beijing Olympics. After media fawning, she was conveniently forgotten by international sports journalists and organizations, who should have fought to find her a scholarship and access to safe training facilities. No one knows how many demons Samia faced down before she was knocked or fell from a dangerously overcrowded boat into the rough waters of the Mediterranean, while desperately and courageously trying to reach the London Olympics. She failed to seize one of the ropes thrown from an Italian naval vessel, and slipped from sight. Forever.
Samia received no media coverage, nor resources, when she set out to reach the London Olympics. She had to travel from Ethiopia, through Sudan, and into the chaos of Libya. So many international sports organizations creak at the seams with cash, so it will always remain unforgivable that none stepped forward to help a young woman who arguably represented dedication to sport more than any single athlete alive. Samia never gave into despair. She had the courage to train, day after day, under threat of death from Islamists responsible for murdering thousands of Somalians.
Walking in silence, between the trees, I ask the universe to bless those who did help Samia, in ways they could, and swear that I’ll dedicate my first, and all my books to her. It pains me that her precious body was never found but, as I look out to sea, there is such beauty in the shades of blue and green, and in the mist whipped from the white crests of waves. I hope that her soul has found peace in such an eternal embrace and, more importantly, in the arms of those who awaited her.
A ferry is departing from the port below, where they sail for Tangier and the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, both Spanish since they and the Portuguese reconquered their lands from the Arabs and Berbers (Amazigh), and continued to chase them back across the waters. From parts of Ceuta, Jebel Musa looks like a sleeping beauty, just as the Romans said.
Tangier, my next destination, is now Moroccan, and has led perhaps the most interesting life of any city from the early Twentieth Century until the 1970s, after which it was deliberately neglected by the Moroccan government. But those are matters for another letter.
After a nourishing lunch on the wall of a supermarket car park, eaten straight from a plastic bag, I took a taxi to the beach, where I walked under pines and found a huge scarab beetle in the dunes. The wide sand here is whipped by winds that attract kite surfers from across the world. I'm reminded of El Gouna in Egypt, another mecca for kite surfers. Along with Austin Texas, it is one of only two places in the world I have even owned a home. El Gouna has the Red Sea and the jagged mountains of the Eastern desert, next to the world's oldest Christian monasteries and the quarry where the columns of Rome's Pantheon were carved from the rock; but could there ever be a more epic setting then the two mountain walls of two continents and the Pillars of Hercules? And a tragic and irrestible stretch of water that could fill the ocean with drowned dreams.
Stretches of Algerian and Tunisian coastlines lie to my north. At the southernmost point of continental Europe, I dip my toes in the water and think of Samia. I squint towards Africa, my lips dry. Salt sinks into my tongue as a sole dolphin leaps clear from the waves, then disappears.
D. J.
DISCOVER THE ENTHRALLING BOOKS OF AUTHOR D. J. SWALES:
Don't miss the thrilling history and occult horror of the FITZMARBURY WITCHES SERIES
Be terrified by the short story, PARIS: A CURSE COMES TO THE CITY OF THE CATACOMBS
Immerse yourself in the bestselling darkness of MIDNIGHT'S TWIN: DARK POEMS PENNED IN MIDNIGHT HOURS
Be charmed by the feel-good magical realism of PEOPLE OF BLOOMSBURY
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