29 marzo 2007
Pedaling Wine:
Departure, Day One

You, reader, can you see me?
Can you see me sitting up in bed, the stack of starchy, white pillows behind me, my legs sinking deep down into this giant, spongy old, Old-World mattress, the plastered room so large that the baroque ceiling falls off into the musty darkness?
Can you hear the muffled Uh-uh, Uh-uh ambulance cadence of Palermo outside my window?
Can you hear the clicking of Lu-Lu’s paws on the Signora’s tile floor in the next room?
Can you smell burnt chocolate smells of the coffee roasters warbling up from four floors below?Can you see my over-laden bicycle in the corner, next to a brown and brittle leather couch, my shattered reflectors like broken bits of candy, scattered across the garish and ornately tiled—floor?

Can you sense how nice it is to finally have arrived, how nice it will be to finally begin?

Yesterday our rackety train traveled north up the Salentine peninsula, across the green-green, grassy barley fields of southern Puglia, across the craggy, gray-rocked and goat-speckled fields between towns called, ‘Three wells’, ‘Saint Peter’ and ‘the Friar’s mass’, places where the only inhabitants seem to be old men on rickety bicycles, and their small and yappy dogs: the men seemed to all be waiting for our train to pass at each crossing, their solemn and sober eyes meeting mine each time. Our train continued on alongside the bobbing mussel farms in the shimmering Ionian sea, past the upside-down waxy blue rowboats and rusty crab cages too numerous to count, past yet more old men repairing their nets, their old wooden chairs pulled right out onto the poured-cement piers.

We entered Campania and continued on until we hit the Tyrrhenian coast, with its craggy mountains and sunny little pastel villages tucked in here and there, just so. We headed south into Calabria, past snow-capped beauties and jagged black valleys that looked almost evil, past the silver-green rolling hills of olive trees and then to the flat of the sea, the dinky little holiday huts locked and boarded in that overwhelming sadness indicative of all beach towns in the off season. At ‘Saint John’s Mansion’, our train was divided up into short and engine-less segments, forming perfect spokes across the giant metal floor of the ferry: we crossed the straight of Messina, a watery divide that separates Sicily from ‘Italy’, a distinction only blurry to those that live far away from here.

As the night fell for the second time during the same trip, and with rolling groans, our train was slowly, slowly reassembled and we continued on across the northern coast, past the hydrofoil departures for the dreamy Northern islands, past ‘Saint Agatha’ and on into Palermo, where traffic seemed to accelerate towards me as I wobbled with my disassembled bicycle and saddle-bags, across what should have been nine lanes of oncoming traffic, packed into only six.

‘Just a few nights’ was all I could think to say to the Signora who greeted the black metal cage of an elevator that stopped on her 4th floor. ‘How long will you be staying again,’ she had asked, her dog Lu-Lu dancing at her heels. Her eyes passed up and down me and my bicycle bag: She clearly thought it was odd or even down-right stupid to take a train so far just to turn around and ride a bicycle back again. And it did seem foolish for the first time, even to me, late last night, as I clamped down my elbow around the pillow smashed down over my head in hopes of muffling all the splashing traffic and Ethiopian laughter that floated up from four stories below.

I wondered what it would be like to see again all of the things that flew by just on the other side of the train window, but only this time, slowly, powered only by my own steam, my over-packed turtle of a bicycle, able to actually stop to speak with the old men, to hear their stories, to take the time to scratch the heads of their dogs. I would have the time to hear about their grapes and what they make from them, to really learn more about my favorite wines in the whole, entire world.

to Day 2