España Profunda
In the late afternoon, in the deep corners of Spain, there is a ruined church and the end of the earth.
I’d already been to Salamanca and honestly, it’s not worth another visit: full of college kids and too turisty. I came back for companionship. I’ve been gone for so long now that my desire to see new places is overcome by my need to be in comfortable surroundings. I made friends with some kids in Salamanca back in April, kept in touch, and Andre invited me back. So I went.
Yesterday we escaped from the city, me on a beater mountain bike borrowed from his friend. We rode out of the city, across the freeway overpass, down a two-lane highway and finally turned off into a small village. We intended to visit some people Andre knows there: a preist and a dairy farmer. Neither of them were home. So, we visited the cows and then turned our bicycles onto farm roads and rode out into the country of wide, flat, grassy land. In places it’s so flat and open and then the earth dips and rolls into groves of oak trees and dry ravines. It seems so like California in parts, and then so different. For example, off in the distance we see no mountains nor ocean. And at the end of the road we arrive at the ruins of a church hundreds of years old. There we lay down the bicycles and tromped through the stones, pondering allowed what it would be like to build a such a structure so long ago. We talked about the undeniable and/or dubious existence of God. We talked about languages. And we talked about nothing at all. The light was dull and golden, making everything look more beautiful then it really is.
Back in the little village, we each drank a beer out of a can on the sidewalk across from the church. The sun set and turned the belly of the clouds a highlighter, guava shade of pink and we took off towards the city, racing the daylight. The horizon that had devoured the sun glowed more and more as the rest of the sky darkened. Back across the overpass and we rode up into the heart of the rosy stone city and home.
You, the lighting, the church all combine for a beautiful landscape.