the yurt

The demise of the cave led us to invest more time in the yurt on the land, which was a great place for us to lie low while lockdown was on and best of all was seeing the fulfilment of our vision when Gabriela learned to walk unaided around the yurt.

It took quite a bit of time and effort to get the thing up.  Just getting it delivered to the land was the first obstacle.  Jenny ordered a second-hand traditionally crafted Mongolian yurt from the Catalonian company tipiwakan.  On their website they impressed us with their bold claim that they would deliver "a cualquier punto geografico del globo" - to any geographic point of the globe.  In an email I pointed out to them that we wanted it to be delivered to the top of a very steep narrow road with a very tight bend in it.  They can't have paid much attention to this detail because from Santa Cruz they contracted a big lorry who took one look at the tight bend before driving back to Santa Cruz, where the yurt was stored until we hired a van to take it up ourselves.   We had all the component parts of the yurt but first had to build a strong flat floor raised above the ground.  This we achieved with concrete blocks, which supported a frame of wooden planks, which themselves supported a floor of wooden pallets, upon which were fixed chipboard boards.  The chipboards were purchased but the rest was salvaged from refuse skips of building sites, or found lying around.  Getting all this material up there posed a few obstacles.  Jenny bought a second-hand van with plenty storage in the back, but it just wasn't powerful enough to get up that tight steep curve.   Once I got part way up when the wheels began whirring ineffectually on the spot.  I reversed a little bit and tried to give it another go, then reversed again and ended up going forward and back until the van was sitting precisely across the road at the steepest and sharpest part of the curve.  I had already shattered the back window by bumping into a wall and there was no way of going forward at all.  To me the van was well and truly stuck, and I thought that only a helicopter would be able to liberate the vehicle and free up the road.  I walked down to the garage of the village and asked for help.  Bienvenido (whose name, fittingly, means 'welcome' in spanish) had already come to my rescue by pulling the van out of a muddy rut on the land (when I had previously managed to drive up the hill.)  This time I told him that I considered the prospects of extricating the van to be unpromising.  In his graceful rugged masculine way he approached the problem with the coolness of a hemingway hero.  Another villager - the only one with a 4x4 slim enough to fit through the narrow lane which came out above the van - attached a cord to the front of the van and pulled uphill while Bienvenido, with a rope attached to the back of the van, pulled downhill, making the van simply slide across the road and rotate into the right position.  I was greatly impressed by the mechanical savoir-faire of these village gentlemen, and their unfussy willingness to club together to help out a new arrival in need.  A little crowd had gathered to spectate and comment on the happening.  I must have mentioned my gratitude for the men's helpfulness to a woman standing at her doorstep nearby, for I remember her opening words, "we are a small village here in Tierra del Trigo," followed by her simple, smiling, closing remark: "but we have a big heart."  I offered Bienvenido some money for his very welcome assistance, but he brushed my offer easily aside by saying, "let's have a whisky together sometime," and thereby completed for me his credentials for belonging in a hemingway novel.

The yurt herself was surprisingly easy to set up:  first establish position of door, tie together five flexible lattice walls in the desired circumference (these lattices could be set taller whereby the circumference would be smaller, or they could be set shorter in which case the circumference would be larger), set up the central cupola atop two poles (first tied to the door and lattice wall for stability), then as each of the eighty roof poles got slotted into the holes around the cupola and tied to the top of the lattice wall at the other end, the whole structure became very strong and self-supporting.  It could be assembled or dissembled in a matter of hours.  Not one nail or tool of any sort was needed - just pieces of wood tied together.

Then the clothes came last - first an undergarment of white cotton, then strips of thick isolating felt, attached to the walls with cords from the door all the way round to the door again.  and finally a heavy waterproof canvas, with a hole in the middle to allow the sunlight in or the chimney to stick out.  When it rained we took down the chimney and pulled over a square piece of canvas to close the hole.

Making a solid floor off the ground was the part which required most time and effort and planning.  We decided to make a central circular block of stones, which we finished off with cement, and later a mosaic of cracked tiles, on which the stove sat.  The surrounding structure of cement blocks, wooden planks and pallets were all of varying sizes, and this required very precise micro adjusting, digging a hole for a cement block to sit ever so slightly lower here, adding a little more earth to a hole to raise a cement block by a few millimetres over there, the whole time handy with the spirit level to ensure perfect flatness over the 28 square metre surface.  It was autumn when I was working on this, and often rainy.  Many times when the rain came on I would cover all the wood with plastic sheets and had to wait it out - sometimes for days at a stretch - before it was dry enough to work again.  

This waiting while sheltering and sleeping in a tent, waiting and wanting the yurt up, watching the rain and wanting the sun out and having to accept each drop of rain, watching and waiting and wanting: this led to a great feeling of accomplishment when the yurt was finally up.  The fact is that parts of the yurt had been left on the land for months while we were demotivated by our own story and distracted by Gabriela and whatever was going on in the south.  The wooden lattice walls, still wrapped in their plastic packaging, had meanwhile begun to go mouldy and provided a cosy spot for a colony of ants.  If the yurt wasn't put up when it was, if the wooden parts had had to spend the whole winter in the moist air, it seemed that the whole project would have had to have been scrapped.

past conditional

Even with the yurt finally up, it let little stress points seep in between Jenny and I when during heavy rain the water streamed successfully down the outside canvas, collecting on the fringe of the chipboard floor which stuck out all around the yurt, soon forming puddles which encroached into the yurt, pulling us out of sleep in the middle of the night to move mattresses and cushions and soak up the encroaching water with towels and sheets and regularly wring them out out into the rainy night.  I don't know why I made the floor far wider than the yurt.  If I had thought about it long enough it should have struck me as obvious that the water, being shed off the canvas cover, should be able to fall directly and unobstructed into the ground.  In my thoughtlessness I only thought that it would be far better for the floor to be too big than too small, and that it might be quite attractive to have a shelf around the yurt to sit on, or to put plant pots upon.  The final job was therefore to trim the floor so that it stuck out only a few centimetres from the yurt, which involved sawing laboriously through pieces of pallet and reconfiguring points of support.  This has been only partially achieved; one side of the floor now slopes down noticeably where support has not been provided.  Indeed the whole yurt now stands slightly askew; jenny now speaks of waiting till summer and consecutive days of guaranteed sun before taking the yurt down and doing the floor again properly.

The whole project of constructing a living space - a place to live - intertwined with living beings - a panoply of plants - became the most engrossing, endearing, satisfying, all-consuming project to date.  It was an entire life project, marrying artistic eye for detail with real practical needs.  There was always something to be done, a frothing over of thousands of little projects or big projects in our minds.  Often the flow of a day's activities dictated that an activity which in all earnestness I had begun the day intending to attend to got sidelined by brute reality be it rain or the need to reconsider the storage of food after the rats had been busy of a night or the need to dig a big new hole for the compost toilet, which necessitated first clearing away all the brambles and while I was there I might as well saw off those straight strong branches to make a fence at the front while at the same time opening up the view to the sea . . . or maybe there was suddenly the strong desire to restructure the unstable stone steps leading down to the lower terrace, and while I was searching or digging for big buried stones I would come across the most gorgeous moss-covered rock in the middle of the woods and knew it would go perfectly at the side of the rock garden, and that then became the main heaving focus of attention.  I mean a real fizzing over of energy, when there is a slight pang of regret at the end of each day when the tools have to be put away . . . or sometimes not, sometimes still continuing by climbing up the tree by torchlight and working away engrossed for hours with a machete cutting back the rank incredible growth of the brambles which have thick wooden stems of several centimetres and seem about set to take over the world, so intent are they to climb up and smother the tallest of trees and completely cover abandoned terraces.  Vamos, very successful survivors.  Amidst all these jostling desires and needs - to work and improve the land and lick it into beautiful landscape shapes and cultivate vegetables and remove weeds and water all thirsty plants at the end of dry days and gather dry wood from the dead limbs of trees which have taken over the abandoned terraces on the surrounding hillsides and light a fire and get round to making some food and washing Gabriela's dirty diapers and clothes and hang them around the stove to dry before sitting down to enjoy a good plate of food - I say, amidst all this, there is the preponderant need and desire to be with Gaby.  To simply be with her, to lavish her with the attention she craves, to hold her and comfort her and go for a walk with her in the morning to the well to get good drinking water while mama Jenny gets to lie in, or take her out on her wheelbarrow chariot to the local níspero tree and climb up and collect pocketfuls of creamy yellow fruit which Gabriela, satisfyingly, eagerly devours, or to wonder with her under the night sky and hear her little infant voice of wonder at the brightness of the moon, or on a mid-afternoon, to swing her softly to sleep on the hammock while softly singing songs of love to her,

lots of love,

Gabriela,

how come you get to be so amazing?

taubi

 

The pigeon entered our lives quite matter-of-factly but, all the same, the event was shrouded in an air of strangeness.  Why did he choose precisely Jenny's door, among all the doors he could have chosen on the long corridor on the second story of jenny's block of residential flats?  How did he gain entry to the block of flats anyway, all access doors to the street always being closed?  Could he have hatched in some recess on the cliff behind the block, and might his parents have been chased away or murdered by a cat, and could it be that he had somehow escaped detection by the cat, and had come now to present himself at jenny's door, somehow intuitively seeking her protection? 

We first heard his soft call from inside the flat and did not know whence it came and hence thought nothing of it.  Then about twenty minutes later we heard it again, clear and insistent.  This time Jenny opened the door and he waddled straight into the flat, as if he had been waiting to do just that.  He was very small; it seemed that he couldn't have been more than a few days out of his egg.  He had a strange swollen knobbly beak and a self-assured manner.  I thought that he probably belonged the goose family, and suspected that he was of Asian origin.  Jenny agreed that he looked strange, but had a hunch that he could be a pigeon.  After some searching online, sure enough, she came across a photo of a young pigeon whose appearance corresponded exactly with our little chick's.  We learned that the knobbly beak is only found in the young, and is replaced by a stronger one in adulthood.  We learned that of all birds the pigeon family is the most widespread and numerous, and that strictly speaking there is no agreed upon way to say when a pigeon is not also a dove.  

Jenny's childhood on a finca in rural Paraguay was filled with intimate animal friendships, from a horse and cows to pet parrots and a pet monkey, from a pet rat called fred whom she would smuggle into her school classes in the pocket of her coat, to a hen who would follow her as she walked several kilometres to school and wait for her by the school gate to then walk home with her after classes.  Could little pigeon have somehow sensed Jenny's love for all animals or why else would he have waited and called insistently like that at her door?  

In any event Jenny soon took him under her wing, making him a little nest under a leafy plant pot and feeding him by making a bottle of bird paste, pecked at by him through a hole in a condom stretched over the bottle opening (which, Jenny read, simulates the experience of having to reach into mama's beak.)  It wasn't always easy to ensure that he was eating enough and it required a fair amount of patience and dedication on Jenny's part.  

Jenny's love of animals, or perhaps her maternal instinct, made her instinctively help out pigeon, but it was to become a relationship not without its frustrations.  Although I still catch myself calling him just pigeon, Jenny has come to call him Taubi (Taube being the german for pigeon.) Taubi would shit indiscriminately all over the balcony, which hindered hanging up clothes to dry there.  He was free to fly off and discover the world if he wanted to (which any parent or parental representative would have wished of him) but instead he would perch there for hours cooing and purring and dancing himself into a trance.  He is not exactly a normal pigeon.  He is mostly obsessively attached to Jenny, and will flutter over to wherever she is sitting and, cooing all the time, will perform a purposefully choreographed dance in front of her (which jenny, perhaps correctly, interprets to be a courting dance.)  However, he is a single-minded and short-tempered creature, and it is not beyond him to behave aggressively even towards Jenny.   Over time he has warmed a little towards me and doesn't usually mind me picking him up, although when he is feeling truculent he is wont to deal me deft martial art swats with one wing, which always catch me unawares.  Jenny says he is jealous.  Sometimes he feigns to bite all of my fingers, but I don't think he means any harm because it really doesn't hurt.  It just tickles.  Perhaps it is just his way of showing affection.  

We took him to the cave where other wild pigeons would fly past but he never showed any interest in them.  We thought that all he needed was to meet a young female pigeon and he would be sorted for life - pigeons being monogamous - but no, he haughtily ignored any interest from other pigeons and didn't even seem fond of the rocky coast around the cave.  He might stay for a day or two, but would eventually fly the three kilometres or so back to Jenny's flat and be found invariably back on his balcony, coating everything with his droppings and annoying the neighbours with his mad cooing.  

We thought we had found the solution when we took him to the land Jenny had bought above Tierra del Trigo.  Surrounded by forested hills, he did seem to like the place more than the cave.  He was more contented, less given to his catatonic cooing, and would fly around and accompany Jenny on any outdoor project of hers.  However, we soon realised that he only stayed on the land as long as Jenny was also there.  If I stayed alone on the land with Taubi, he might stay for a few days with me, but at a certain point would take wing, and in a matter of hours Jenny would report that he had arrived back at the balcony in the south - a distance of perhaps twenty kilometres as the pigeon flies (and at least double by the twisty roads).  The homing instinct native to Taubi's breed has in his case been set, seemingly irrevocably, on the balcony of Jenny's flat.  Jenny suggests that we could try taking him across the sea to one of the neighbouring Canary islands and see if that doesn't flummox his homebound bind, or, failing that, try mainland Europe.

 

unalloyed love

"what two words come to your mind when you think of this cave?" asked mario when he came by to visit a few weeks before they pulled it down.  "pure love" i said without even thinking.   i suppose "love" would have done; "pure" only served as an intensifier due to the two word stipulation. now that they have pulled it down i reflect that it is wonderful to have loved a place to such a degree for so long at all, even if 'our cave' as such is no more.  as to the question of ownership of or entitlement to the cave, Jenny often reminded any disputer that it was Papa Teide who created the cave, and his creation it would for ever remain.  (El Teide is the volcanic vent which flung all of Tenerife above the sea in the first place.)  

how naïve of us to have imagined that our cave would probably be considered exceptional and exempted from the general cleansing.  "of course they want to remove the messy constructions put up all along the coast" we thought, "but anyone can see how much love and care we have put into this place." the particular beauty of this place is undeniable and overwhelming . . . or so we thought.  others concurred, and commented that this concave fold in the rock deserved be conserved - not inhabited by any one person, but kept open, empty and natural - as a place for contemplation.  we had left behind a fetching image of Jesus, pointing at his sacred heart, wearing a calm inscrutable mona lisa gaze, and with long flowing blonde hair, looking just like a mild-mannered jimmy page.  along with a statuette of the madonna with child, we thought that these icons might emanate peace and awaken an attitude of compassion among the catholic police force.  indeed i found that they had been respectfully removed from the cave and reverently placed under a cactus up the hill, whereas the door and window of the cave - which Jenny had once salvaged from a shipwreck - had been ripped out.  The morning they came to knock the walls down I was hiding out in Pepe's old cave by the sea, feeling like a fugitive because of the security men who came down with bright torches the night before.  I had wanted to spend one last night in the cave.  There was still a group of policemen standing by the scattered stones as I appeared the next morning and attempted to casually walk by.  I saw from their tense faces that they were here on a serious mission: to erase all illegal dwellings along the coast, and that they would brook no dissent. This time they had been much more professional and efficient. Nothing had been burned like in the last wave of evictions but long lines of workers had worked hard to carry everything out.  They barked at me to put a mask on, and to show them my documents, and said that no-one was allowed here while they were clearing up, so I'd better clear off.  I told them untruthfully that I had not lived here; had only spent time here occasionally.  Something in the way I eyed the cave painting - exposed to full daylight for the first time - made them ask me if I had painted this.  I assented and they asked aggressively, "what if we were to come to your country and paint the rocks there?"  I imagined for a moment the Salisbury Crags covered with colours and thought that it might not be that bad, but yes, objections could be raised, and hmmm, yes, in retrospect it would have been better to have left the rocks unpainted.  The irony is that the greatest part of the south coast of Tenerife has been disfigured by indiscriminate hotel building, holiday apartments, golf courses, commercial centres, etc, and elsewhere covered by blanket banana plantations, leaving very little room for any natural environment, compounded by the discarded detritus from construction projects lying all around, and other accumulations of all types of rubbish from careless, throw-away society.  I can appreciate the official stance that, amid such run-away construction, it is worth putting aside one area to be preserved as unbuiltupon land, but why not treat all land as having its own intrinsic worth, to care where possible for its elements of natural beauty, instead of saying:  here we can defile.  here and here and here is all okay to defile, but not over there.   Later I found the window and the door, still intact, on a skip at the top of the hill, and came back to salvage them.  I took them to a strip of land which Jenny had bought above a little village called Tierra del Trigo in the north of the island.  A lot of the plants which I had tended over the years had been squashed by the rubble; I dug them up and took them to the land too.  Mostly the agaves, which can endure much hardship, and a few choice cacti.  I had found one broken off cactus limb lying by a layby, who suddenly blossomed not long ago after I planted him outside the cave, encouraging him with sparing little drinks of water.  I think he was a queen of the night, because of the brevity of his bloom.  I came down to the cave one night and was gradually overcome by the most enchanting perfume filling the air.  It took me a while to realise where it was coming from; in no time this once discarded limb had rooted and drank and had now pushed out the most beautiful scented single white flower, making me feel touched and thanked. At first light next day I took some photos, and the next day the flower had already begun withering.  I found him buried and bruised under the rubble, and have carried him now to the land, where I am sure he will get on fine.  All the aloes I left at the cave; they didn't seem to need much water to grow healthy and strong.

Back in March - just before lockdown - we were delighted to be able to celebrate Gabriela's first birthday at the cave.  Gabriela was radiant and relaxed.  We had invited a discreet group of friends, and had a barbeque and some beers.  

Everyone in la Caleta said that it was the best lockdown they had ever had, which I found a funny thing to say, given that there hadn't been any precedents.  It is true that the caleteros lived it up largely, with no tourists or excursionists to intrude on their idyllic stretch of sun-drenched coast, gathering and playing music on the beach at night, with very little regard for maintaining social distancing, I imagine.  One young German went out fishing with his mate on a canoe and proudly posted a video of it online.  This could have contributed to the triggering of the ruthlessly efficient clearing out that summer, when lockdown had loosened.  Apart from the question of keeping the natural environment untouched, there was a social aspect to it, where local residents resented that their coastline had been usurped by largely socially misfitted foreigners.  Already viewed with suspicion due to their unconventional ways, publicly flaunting lockdown restrictions when all other citizens were kept imprisoned in their homes was taking just too many liberties.  After the evictions the beach in the summer swarmed with canarian families, visibly very happy to have their beach back.  Looking back now, what is surprising is not that they eventually kicked us thoroughly out, but that such free living was tolerated there at all and for so long.  "one of the truest anarchist communities I have came across," Dante said to me recently.  this had its undoubted perks, but its drawbacks too.  Dante wanted to be able to play guitar and sing from full lungs at 4 in the morning, so having no rules was just right for him.  Once Jenny and Gaby were trying to sleep while they were blasting out music from huge loudspeakers powered by a generator above the beach - about half a mile away, but big bass booming right into the cave.  2 or 3 in the morning. I ran round and said to a few people: hey, the baby is trying to sleep, do you mind turning the volume down a bit?  all they did was grin with their party grins and say: "tell them to come and dance with us"  to be fair a fairly well functioning communal space was created above the beach: seating area, shade from sun, fire pit, clay oven, pizza nights, meals made, wood collected, water collected, refuse disposed of.  there were always those who wanted a little more organisation, more participation, not always the same people doing the same tasks.  there was a great range of experiences and stories and motives behind the people who spent time in la caleta.  it can't be denied that the place exerted a powerful influence on certain people; it was a deeply appealing place to be.  many people would initially be passing through, and would end up lingering until in the end they somehow could not leave.  quite a few people went crazy.  jenny used to talk about decorating little bottles and labelling them as the lost souls of hippies, and selling them to the tourists.  it is possible to smirk at jenny's macabre sense of humour here, but thinking about it now, i feel aghast at the mere phenomenon of a lost soul.