"How to Die in Sardinia," Chapter 2a of WHY LITERATURE STILL MATTERS

Augmented Footnotes for Chapter 2

(the full text can be found in my WHY LITERATURE MATTERS)

In the northwestern part of the island of Sardinia, there’s a small, very Mediterranean town called Alghero, a town the locals call “Barcelonetta,” or “baby Barcelona,” in part because it has a medieval Gothic downtown, like Barcelona, and in part because it has the largest group of speakers of Catalan outside of Catalonia. But the glory of Sardinia, as everyone knows, is the coast. And so, one day, when I was living there with my family, I got up early in the morning and took a taxi from Alghero up to a long cape, which is, by Italian standards, remote and wild. It was once a medieval hunting preserve for the Catalan rulers but is now a small, undeveloped natural preserve on a peninsula.

As soon as I arrived, I walked down a well-kept quarter-mile trail to an old Catalan watch tower.

Easy.

The morning was cool, the views were perfect, and it was still before 8am. The walk had been short, and I had three large bottles of water, so I thought I would venture on, get farther away, strike out on my own, go farther up. After studying my map for a few minutes, my eyes landed on “Cala d’Inferno” (“The Bay of Hell”). Come on! What Dante scholar wouldn’t want to see this?

From the map, it looked like I would have to climb a small mountain, but, once on top of the ridge, I would be able to see the bay. And so, I had a plan: I’d take a jaunty walk up the trail to the top of the hill, see the bay, turn around, come back down to a little town in the valley, find a bus, and be home by lunch. The trails had been so easy and well-groomed so far. Why not fare lo trekking, as the Italians say?

I began my walk just as the Mediterranean sun began to heat up. The magical color of sky and water in the Mediterranean is due in part to the so-called Sirocco, the northern wind, which originates over the dry African Sahara, where, growing in heat, it then comes as a blast of dry, hot wind, like air escaping from an oven. As it blows across the Mediterranean, it burns off all its moisture, which accounts for that famous dazzling azure of summer sky. But as I walked cross country, I also discovered the botanical side-effect of what this dry air means for the plant life in the region.

From a distance, Mediterranean landscapes look enchanting and soft. But we’re often thinking of the cultivated regions: olives, grape vines, and fig trees. The reality is that culture in this climate is fragile, and just a few miles from civilization—as Odysseus so well knew—you can discover what the region would be like without the laborious efforts of tending over millennia. In particular, Sardinia was heavily forested during the unification of Italy, so what we have now are low, squat plants covered in a waxy varnish with serrated edges on their leaves or thorns on their branches, all with the intent to seal in their precious moisture. To my surprise, I discovered that in this shadeless land these squat plants are very tenacious, stiff, resilient, and unforgiving. After all, they can’t let people tear off their succulent limbs with impunity. So they venomously guard their life-force by ripping into you! Ok. Major Mistake One: I was wearing shorts.

I should have been wearing heavy gators. But who, after looking at tourist photos from Google, would have been prepared for that? And so, as I hiked along, I was getting pricked and cut every hundred yards or so. Oh, well. It would be a short hike.

But what you also need to know is that although Italians speak of trails, there really is no such thing when it comes to what they call “trekking.” Rather, what they mean by trail is that a group of disorganized volunteers have designated general and vague directions by piling up little stacks of rocks into primitive markers.

But these piles are confusing, in part because you’re already traveling through a boulder field. It’s not obvious which is the next pile of stones, and sometimes there are multiple little routes set up by different bands of enthusiastic volunteers.

Thus, my progress up and over the crest toward the precipitous coast that promised such fabulous views over the Cala d’Inferno went slower, and was hotter, than expected, and I kept tearing my legs on those nasty plants. And there was no shade, because the plants were too starved for water to bother with height.

 And that’s where things got interesting. I lost my way among those primitive markers in that sun-baked land. I knew vaguely that the coast was on my left, but things had become really steep. And it had gotten really hot. And soon I was out of water.

By now I was breathing hard, and my heart-rate was elevated, and I was starting to get dizzy. And that’s when I felt something switch on inside: I felt myself move into a different mode of being, a more animal-like state. I had come out as a tourist, in shorts, eager to look at a landscape, taking it in with a painter’s eye, but now I had given up caring about looks and landscapes, and even my legs. I needed water. And it was increasingly hard to think. My brain had gone Hemingway on me. Water. Shade. Scuttle, scuttle. Breathing hard. Need rest. Find shade. Get water. I was moving into almost a pure state of animal existence. And I knew I was on the verge of heat stroke. But no one knew where I was. Especially not me. I was three hours of pathless walking from anyone. And that’s when I had to admit to myself: I could die here. My brain could just bake to death, and I didn’t even know how to call the Italian police. And wouldn’t it be embarrassing to have to be airlifted out of this scrub brush, anyway?       

     It is was right around this time that my wife sent me a text:

            “How’s it going?”

            I thought for a while. What do I say? “I’m hiding in 14 square inches of shade to try to get my heart-rate down from a fatal level”?

            Maybe not.

            I wrote: “Um. I’m kind of struggling. Drank all my water. Accidentally took a long cut.”

            She wrote back: “Oh babe. Are you okay?”

            I had to explain: “My phone is almost dead. I’ll have to turn it off. I’ll text you back in 30 minutes, if I make it.”

            After another hour of this animal-level existence, I did make it to the coast. I looked down from the top of a two-hundred-foot cliff to watch the gem-green water, lifted by swelling waves and pulled up against the jagged rocks where it sloshed up into spray.

 It was everything I had hoped for—a glorious and intense symphony of the world’s primal elements: heat and water, air and earth. In fact, standing there (maybe this was my impending heatstroke?), I found myself wanting to leap, to immerse myself into that spacious valley of water and rock.

I knew, of course, it would be my death, and I wasn’t suicidal, but, still, it felt like something was calling me, something alluring and benevolent. It was along this coast that I found an ancient hut of stone. Had it been an ancient shelter for a medieval watchman? Or maybe it was a hermitage for some unknown saint who kept all-night vigils while praying to the stars?

I crawled in through the tiny entrance—people were a lot smaller back then—and instantly felt that it was at least twenty degrees cooler. Pure, dark shade. The floor of the hut was wet and muddy. I leaned my back against the cool stones. I closed my eyes and smiled. And then I smiled at my smiling.

Meanwhile, my poor wife was back in our apartment. She later told me that she had been praying in the bathroom, kneeling on those hard marble panels ever-present in Italian bathrooms, so that the kids wouldn’t be afraid. And it just so happened that after I stumbled out of the ancient hermitage to head downhill, I heard people, for the first time in four hours, coming up the mountain. A French couple, called Marisa and Cedric, gave me a liter of water and saved my life. Clinging to that water, I struggled down hill over the next two hours through wayless scrub, eventually coming down into the valley and finding a dumpy town, where I hobbled my way over to the most mediocre bar in all of Italy. But it didn’t matter. I felt like Odysseus on first seeing Ithaka! I was smiling at the waiters. And I looked so bad—legs covered in blood and clothes stained in sweat and mud—that they made me sit away from the well-groomed customers. But I just kept smiling at everyone, and they kept looking at me with suspicion, turning away to avoid eye contact. I ate a basket of gummy bread, drank a bottle of carbonated water, and then walked down to the coast to lean slowly forward and fall into the water, letting its stinging salt clean my wounds and wipe away my filth. It was the greatest bath I have ever taken.

You’ll note the paradox: I had come to Sardinia, crossed international boundaries, dodged waves of Covid policies, endured dozens of Q-tips stuck deeply up my noise, spent thousands of dollars, endured cancellations and re-bookings, and endured painful hours on the phone with random, unhelpful, hostile, very British employees—all in order to come sit in the mud of a stone hut?

            Yes.

And I loved it. I loved it so much that I’d gladly do it all over again, provided that I could secure my wife’s agreement. And that’s when I began to wonder: is there something wrong with me?

            Very likely.

But, according to C. S. Lewis, at least not in this regard. Indeed, it seems that I had accidentally stumbled upon what Lewis thought was the fundamental characteristic of beauty: that is, when we encounter beauty, it is almost always accompanied by a strange note of sorrow, a sorrow that comes because the experience of beauty feels like something over there, something external to me. And in my gazing upon it, what I find myself wanting is not just to see beauty, but to be beauty, to make that which I see (or hear or read) become a permanent part of my being. I want to make that thing out there something in here. I don’t want to be a tourist. I want to be local. I don’t want to look at a beautiful country; I want to speak its language, understand the subtlety of its jokes, feel its feelings, hunger for its food, and use its curse words. As one of my teachers says, “I don’t want just to see beauty, I want to eat it.” Or to put it another way: I don’t want to stream, I want to download.

“Can I go for a hike tomorrow, too?”