Go and ...Return?

Crossing the Tagus River enroute to Plasencia by bus.

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back on a recent event where I was ... stranded, 80kms from home because there were no connections. Click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. 

Eighty kilometres really isn’t far, but after six-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, Caceres seemed as far away from Plasencia as the moon. There was simply no way to get home. What made it more frustrating was that from the heights of The Pearl of the Valley I felt that I could almost see my destination in the distance. There it lie, somewhere beyond the swinging sabers of the wind giants that help power the city. But it’s a three day walk along the Ruta de la Plata and my only option was to wait for the next train.

Sunday was quiet on the streets of Plasencia, but the midday train platform buzzed in comparison. Sleepy-eyed university students leaned on enormous suitcases stuffed with freshly ironed clothes and tupperware filled with their mother’s cooking. Professionals with much more portable luggage stared at their phones, seemingly willing the train to be on time. Parents and grandparents looked on and remembered how the train had once been the key that opened the door to the world beyond these valleys.

The rails run south from the city and then wind their way through the singular landscape that is the dehesa until they reach the barrier of the jagged sierra that marks where Monfragüe begins. The train, which had left Atocha at ten o’clock that morning, then skirted the range until it squeezed through a couloir between steep cliffs hung with garlands of rock roses. Vultures, taking advantage of the updrafts that these narrow valleys produce, circled overhead as the train cautiously picked its way across the sierra. When it finally emerged out on the other side, a treeless, undulating carpet of green unfurled itself towards Caceres and the distant Montanchez on the horizons of the vast spaces of Extremadura.

As the train approaches Cañaveral, the old railway slips under the future. Overhead, a gleaming, blue-fenced electrified track shoots off like an illusory promise over an impressive series of viaducts that give the impression that the track is floating over the furrowed terrain below. Then in a fleeting moment, it’s gone. Lost behind the hilly thickets as the train instead creeps crept further down along the sinuous curves of the 1960’s track that borders the Alcantara/Oriol reservoir.

Decades of broken promises ring in your ears as the train crawls through a series of tenebrous tunnels so narrow that the pressure makes them pop as you roll through. This essential link to the future clings precariously to the banks of the reservoir and, in the same way, to the past. The chimerical promise of a future on equal footing with the rest of the country continues to run just out of sight.

After the queasy twists and turns that zig zag the train out of the confines of this inland sea, you once again catch a glimpse of that blue promise as it beelines towards its destination, only to see it disappear yet again. Another promise unkept, another appeal to be patient.

Trains have always been about freedom. They allow you to chase your dreams and experience other worlds. Ideally, they also allow you to come home, if given the chance.

Liberty or Communism

Chimeras of Communism or Liberty

In this week's Camino a Ítaca, I reflect back on my time in Baku while traveling along the false dichotomies that are leading populist right wing parties to power across the world. Click over to read the original Spanish version or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I spent some time living on the extreme fringes of Europe on a fingertip-like peninsula that juts out into the Caspian Sea. A country that sits on the blurry border between what we call the West and East. The Caucasus mountains rise at Azerbaijan’s back and the Iran of the Ayatollahs stews in front. This was just after the turn of the millennium and the ashes of the Soviet Union were still very present. Since the fall of the USSR, Azerbaijan and its neighboring ex-Soviet states had morphed into dystopian, neoliberal oligarchies under the guise of liberty and freedom. Ruled by 'strong' men who didn't shy away from boiling people alive if they disagreed with their style of freedom.

True, they no longer suffered the yoke of communism, but the only road that had been built and maintained in the previous 15 years was the highway that led out to BP’s oil refinery and pipeline. While the rest of the country crumbled, the oil that had once made Alfred Nobel rich was once again flowing west.

I had always been curious about the Soviet Union and what life had been like under communism. I had heard some firsthand descriptions from my classmates when they took a school trip to Moscow in the early 80’s, but they mostly talked about how much money they had made by selling all of their Levis jeans. The rest of my background knowledge came from Hollywood movies that amplified Reagan’s rhetoric of the evil empire.

So, when the topic came up in class, I would always take advantage of it to listen and learn from people’s stories. One that I particularly remember was when a student told me about what she missed most about the USSR. It was the news. “Back then there was never any bad news, everything was always good and if something bad did happen, it was someone else’s fault. Even if we knew it wasn’t true, at least it wasn’t depressing. Now, everything is about how awful things are and I just turn off.”

The right may have won the cold war but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn from their opponent. Think back to recent rightwing slogans from around the world. 'Make Brexit Happen' or its progenitor, ‘Make America great again’. In order to make it happen, ‘build the wall’. Trump didn’t say he was going to cut taxes that would mostly benefit billionaires, he just said cut taxes. He didn’t say that the American food industry would collapse overnight without illegal workers, he simply said that America needed to be great again. He never explained when or why it had stopped being great. It was somebody else’s fault.

This lesson from the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes has been forgotten by the moralizing left. People don’t want to hear about what they can’t do. They don’t want to hear that they can’t drive certain cars, hunt or go to bullfights. And they certainly don’t want to be publicly sacrificed on the pyres of political correctness for doing so.

'Libertad o comunismo' sounds a lot more attractive than paying more taxes for quality public services. This chimera of freedoms and facile slogans are as seductive as they are disingenuous. A chimera that will only grow if the left continues to forget its past.