Pamplona, Spain - On Hemingway’s and Bourdain's Deaths, or Chasing Islands

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Toreros at work during the tercio de banderillas, one of three stages in a bullfight. Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

The Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

My initial desire to go to Spain grew from a budding obsession with The Sun Also Rises, and its author Ernest Hemingway. His descriptions of fishing in Burguete, with quiet afternoons spent in lounging dappled light, drinking river cooled wine, and the repetitive pleasure of cast and recast sharply mirrored my experiences as a child; and his main character's impassioned explanation of cape work in bullfighting to a wide-eyed heroine seduced beyond the page. One of the most romantic nights of my life was spent watching fireworks in Pamplona, hot on his trajectory. Surrounded by families sharing bocadillos by starlight, we nuzzled in the grass waiting for the show to kick-off. Later, we sipped sangria out of carton in the plaza, talking and laughing among festival-goers. It stood in marked contrast to a past fireworks experience, where people on a grassy hill raged at those who wouldn't sit on pavement beneath them. Here, mellowed by July heat and, of course, death in the afternoon, fathers lifted tired sons onto shoulders.

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Toreros entering the bullring as a part of the paseíllo (opening parade) in the festival of San Fermin, Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

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A torero turns around during a paseíllo (opening parade) at the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

I stood confused in the upcoming weeks at the centre of Ronda's bullring, widest in the world. Tracing handprinted filigree on a burladero (the wooden guard for the bullfighters to hide behind), I vowed to read further. In the attached museum, I poured over black and white photographs of famed matadors, seemingly timeless paragons of masculinity despite 17th century clothes. Hemingway stared back arm-in-arm. Years later, having scoured novels, short stories, and personal letters—and created deliberate mirrored experiences, including hard-drinking, cigar-smoking in Cuba and marlin fishing—I found myself thinking of Ava Gartner naked in his pool and his death alone in Idahoan summer.*

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1 of 3. A matador during the faena of muleta (display with the cape) in the final stage (tercio de muerte) of a bullfight. Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

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2 of 3. A matador during the faena of muleta (display with the cape) in the final stage (tercio de muerte) of a bullfight. Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

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3 of 3. A matador during the faena of muleta (display with the cape) in the final stage (tercio de muerte) of a bullfight. Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

The other man who drew me to Spain has now also died. On his advice, we waltzed into La Tana, Granada, met the stereotypical traveled American businessman. Over platters of perfected sliced tomatoes like encapsulated sunshine, and thinly sliced Ibércio ham his young date wouldn't eat, we talked politics, respective journeys, his divorce, estranged kid. With heads leaned in, we split caviar and cava as she rolled her eyes at his overtures, bravado. Stumbling home heady with wine, my husband and I exchanged affirmations it was the best meal we've had. Because of their strained companionship. Because it was a scene from a novel. 

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A matador raises two banderillas during the tercio de banderillas, Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

We've followed Bourdain to other countries, other meals (Los Angeles, Mexico, Rome). His reliving the unfettered sensuality of his first oyster in Kitchen Confidential caused me to relive each of mine; his choice of knives reaffirmed my own. Now, the storyteller with a rockstar's cavalier has left me wanting, left reliving each taste bittersweet. I think of him fondly teasing Eric Ripert into eating spicy food, and of him selling prized records in the throws of addiction, and of him alone in the hotel room without Eric.** 

It's been said, 'god don't create lonely girls', implying some men, at least, are islands. What of my decision to live largely like these men, traipsing from place to place, living from hotel room to battered suitcase? 

But I am a girl, after all. 

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A matador engaged in his own banderillero work in the tercio de banderillas, Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, Pamplona, Spain.

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A girl stands alone on a balcony after watching the running of the bulls during the festival of San Fermin. Pamplona, Spain.

*Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, subsequent to years of deteriorating health.

**Eric Ripert was a close friend and colleague of Anthony Bourdain's. Ripert had been filming with Bourdain at the time of his death and discovered his body following his suicide.

Haines, Alaska - Where Salmon Sing Like Swans

I've gone on trips like this before.

My childhood was punctuated by annual prodigal returns on the part of my parents—like so many Ontario-born teachers who'd graduated college in the '70s—home not long after summer solstice, completion of seeding, end-of-school gatherings, and the graduation of yet another crop of high school students in our small, farming town: "cartwheels [having turned] to car wheels in the town." With swirling dust devils of Saskatchewan top-soil rising in the air (aggravating my brother's asthma), and ever-greening ditches of June promising baking summer nights, my family would pile clown-car-style into the 70-series Landcrusier that my father let me choose at age 3 (truly), complete with sleeping bags, air mattresses, the family tent, fishing rods, canoe paddles (and a canoe on top), coolers, water-bottles, cassettes/CDs, extra hikers, backpacks, city clothes, camping attire, and, occasionally, a large black dog for good measure. It was something of a novelty, and, around the time my family bounced without proper shock absorption over the rail tracks linking East and West in Canada like a ventricle, our exploits would appear in the local paper: "The McDonnells' are departing once again for Ontario by car." My brother and I would spend the three-day-express/five-day-scenic car-ride reading, making cubby holes to store valued childhood trinkets (shells, would-be gems/rocks, toy cars, etc.), or peering out of our blue-blanket fort through the window at expansive countryside that awed nation makers before us. We'd count familiar town mascots—i.e. Happy Rock in Gladstone, MB, Winnie the Pooh in White River, ON, the giant goose in Wawa, ON—well aware of what it meant in terms of progress; relish in customary stops, like the chance to buy real gems at the amethyst stores in northern Ontario. And—when we eventually rolled, road weary and cramped in our duct-tape repaired vehicle, into 'the Big City', Toronto, to our cousins' laughter as we boiled over one another to get out of the car—any annoyance at the lengthiness of the trip was soon forgotten. There would be endless hours in the pool, cottage-country, trips to the ROM, dim-sum with Bartley, and the Ex! That 'pearl' "would be handed to [you]", to borrow Jack Kerouac's expression.    

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Heavy cloud in Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, BC, Canada.

Perhaps these foundational experiences set the tone for a life on the road; in any case, when my husband suggested a weekend trip to Haines, AK, in the USA, from Whitehorse, YK, Canada that would comprise a ten-hour round trip, I surged for it like a tweaked Neal Cassady champing at the bit. We'd done a similar trip the weekend prior, winding down from chilly late-fall morning to lush coastal forest with hints of gold mid-afternoon surrounding our final destination of Skagway, AK, USA. The salmon were running, he said, so we could take turns fishing on his 6-weight trout rod: a makeshift solution in a pinch. We piled our own black dog into a shockingly unpacked truck, and hit that ol' beat road.

Heading south on Highway 3 following a quick sandwich stop at Haines Junction, YK, the road was barren, devoid of the RVs and camper-trailers that mark summer tourist travel. We quickly lost cell reception. Expansive mauve and burnt-red alpine plains were broken on either distant horizon by rolling mountains. Pocket-sized lakes dotted either side of the road as we climbed upward and upward. Finally, I insisted on a road-side stop beside an eagle perched on a long-forgotten gravel mound to take a photo of the horizon beyond. 

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Sunset in Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, BC, Canada, on the return drive to Whitehorse, YK, Canada.

We hit the border, handed over papers for ourselves and our dog to a lone border-crossing agent near the start of that familiar moisture-laden Pacific forest; where the air formerly had a bracing levity, here it descended, filled-out, became curvaceous with the damp fertility of the place (like a whiff of Guerlain's Jicky). One eagle soon became ten, then twenty, then forty, then fifty, before we stopped counting as we wound alongside an ever-expanding white-washed delta leading us to the ocean ahead. We passed quickly through Haines—a rubber boot town hailing lives lived on the sea—until we arrived, finally, at small parking lot at the end of the road straddling emerald Chilkoot Lake. 

Here, in a breeze smelling of sex and the deaths of thousands of salmon, with corpses strewn on the shore and zombie fish attempting a last mad dash for saltwater (salmon's swan song), the cacophony of hundreds of birds vying for dinner overwhelmed us. Our feet on solid ground, we watched a lone fisherman cast and recast in waning daylight, the mist folding in ghost-like fingers over surrounding mountains.

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A man fishes for salmon at Chilkoot Lake near Haines, AK, USA.

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View from underneath the old ferry terminal pier in Haines, AK, USA.

Images of the rest of the weekend passed like a thousand, agonizingly beautiful cuts: my husband catching a blood-red spawned out sockeye; two pale-green Pinks laid on the shore next to matching pastel waters; communing with a retired Alabamian military man over the quiet joys of fishing; excitedly talking with neophyte fishers about their prospects while simultaneously reeling in a salmon and watching a young black bear amble ever closer down the shore—fishing himself; downing bowls of clam chowder surrounded by working fishermen and fisherwomen as a cloud bank rolled in from off-shore; sharing pizza and wine in a hundred-year-old cannery turned restaurant. Watching our dog catch her first whiff of the ocean underneath a rusted out old pier as my husband poked at flotsam and I snapped a long exposure. Returning to Whitehorse to carefully, deliberately, set-up still lifes in the dark of my temporary kitchen—a private prayer.

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Pinks and Artichoke. Fish caught in Haines, AK, USA. Photo taken in Whitehorse, YK, Canada. 

Keroauc was right that in life what, "makes us sigh and groan, undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced [...] through death," and my afterlife started in Haines.     

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View of Chilkoot Lake near Haines, AK, USA.