Nothing represents Porto if not the seagulls and men of the streets, a grubby lot cast from a mold distinct from those that form other men. They are skinny and weathered, with narrow features that at times have the quality of clay being squeezed too hard between two palms with noses that protrude impossibly or chins that retreat as if partially inhaled or swallowed by the their own bodies. They appear to have endured something insufferable over the course of their day, or their night, or whatever immediately precedes their being seen. Splattered white paint on their trousers, grease on their calloused hands or time-etched jowels, skin they wear like old leather, cracked and tanned by not one but many brine-marinated bakings on the barges and merchant ships that define this town’s proud history. Porto is a town of the sea, inhabited by the Celts in 300 BC and later the Moors but only maturing into the personality it now inhabits in the late 1300’s as a maritime hub. The ships whose names I learned in elementary school were built here. Columbus and Vasco de Gama and Magellan walked these same streets.
The seagulls are a noisy bunch. They have replaced the rooster of my homeland in a ratio that exceeds 50:1. But whereas the egomaniacal rooster reserves its occasional crow as if its lungs are heavy bagpipes too laborious to fill, the seagull cries with every breath, vocal cords permanently tightened over each exhale. Their calls are contagious as well, dominoes that spread out like bowling pins until one becomes a great wave of falling towers. They swarm the sky and paint our rental car white, their calls mix with the machines and industry of this busy city of steep streets that, blended with the confident shouts of men as they spill their opinions in a language “you want to walk away from,” Cory opined yesterday in a snippet of conversation that our language has become since the day we traded speaking for emojis. What is becoming of our culture, the evolution of man? To think, they once built the ships here that would find new trade routes to India, conquer the dark continent beyond the Cape of Good Hope, circumnavigate the world in just over 1000 days.
I love this city, this Duoro river whose current marks time, these 6 bridges that span its blue blood, these ancient stone walls that march upwards through alleys and boulevards that spill tourists and cars, old ladies who hang out of their windows and watch humanity in its dance. I love the sound of skill saws and the man who paints walls with a brush meant for preschool, the emotions of man in the sounds of the white birds that sweep and arc up above. I love being at once nervous for the safety of my family and touched when one of the scragglers that never sleep smile kindly to my daughters in between staggering and collapsing, never spilling a sip. One man entered the narrow restaurant downstairs brandishing a hammer, the nearsighted owner negotiating its forfeit as we waited for our salmon grilhado. It took us a few days to get our shit together, and Tracey and I would often find ourselves hungry and foodless at 11pm. Maria would feed us despite the incomprehensible language attached to her foods while the kids watched Sam and Cat or Jessie upstairs behind latched doors. She would also serve us the Super Bock beers that were just on the liquid edge of the coldest a beer can scientifically get. Or perhaps the salt that permeates this place lowers the freezing point and in Porto they are colder.
I would have to sneak into the kids journals to give a play-by-play of all that has happened over our week in this flat. And though they have no crushes or cat fights yet to hide, that is a taboo I will never cross. So instead, a typical day. The flat has one wall of stone, giant cubes one foot by two and with depths that are hidden, solid and chewed, with wide grout cutting deep channels in between. They remind me of rivers’ tongues beneath great gorges, a matrix of horizontal and vertical lines that intersect randomly. The kids have found books not of lined paper but of grids, graph paper we used to call it when I was a kid. The little ones make books, Siena’s a story of two bunnies in a race but there’s also a porcupine. Cassie’s an impossible tale of an apple who has a phone for a banana who eats tomatoes as batteries, oh and they have a friend named ketchup who doesn’t talk and may not be real. Sawyers graphed sheets are filled with unit doses, dollars per pound or cents per CD, isolating x in the neighborhoods of algebra, congruent angles of triangles bleeding into geometry. My grids back me as I wake before the rest, my feet resting on their ottomon, my legs my desk. The computer screen stares back as I fill the page with my dreams. I open the wall to ceiling doors and then windows as Superman does his cape, peeling either back to their walls as the hot day and the churchbells fill this living room with the city. I have never been so content to sit insulated inside as life happens outside. Here, life spills in.
Invariably, one will wake. Usually it is Siena, naked and unafraid. She looks at me and alternatively sits in my lap if I move my computer fast enough or sprawls herself on the couch facing me. Today a fog has replaced the 95 degree heat of the last 6 days, changing the feel of this place. I suspect my lap will prove the cozier option of the two. Her eyes still see the magic, though sullied by the other kids’ pre-teen Disney shows filled with relationships complexities and pubertal rebellion to their parents. Before, though, in this magical time between dawn and the older kids existence, she is allowed to swim in her waters of innocence, recounting dreams and confessing her memories of yesterday’s events without the colorings and censorships required when the more cultured 8 and 11 year olds are around. Other times it is Cassidy. She always graces me with her hugs, for that is her role in this family, pleaser of all, deliverer of sweetness. Sawyer always wakes last, his 5 year old orange pajamas still with dinosaurs or the like, their cuffs closer to his knees than his ankles. I give him his space, men in their becoming are funny that way. Everything is awkward, unsure, hesitant and anxious, all in the most confident and self-assured kind of way.
There are different worlds at this interface, to be sure. Inside my imaginations teem, two characters competing for my attention. I have just finished the second chapter of Rob, trying to craft a loveable man whose mistakes can one day be forgiven. It has been difficult for him, this life we all share, and what addict chooses to be addicted, heroin everyone’s devil, nobody’s angel. I am farther ahead with my memoir but long before the steep curve it will take into fiction and darkness. I am anxious to get to that part, explore the depths of sanity and control, and to see if I can make it out, a hero’s journey or a dissolution of the container that keeps it all together. But first, I must fast forward through this life. Presently, I am taking my leave from medical school. I am unsure if I will include the story of the homemade balsa raft as my only tale, or paint pictures from inside my tent that was my home the better part of a year in places so beautiful I’ve mostly forgotten.
Meanwhile, a hurricane whose name may be Lane bears down on my tiny island that is still and once was my home. The lines of cars waiting for gas, the empty shelves of Costco, the stack of plywood under the house that may or may not get screwed onto the windows of my house… they are all so far away. I wrote an email to Dr. Dan last night, called Pete and Christine who are looking out for some of our material possessions. Seems like they have it all together except where they do not. The storm has not arisen such a concern for me to have checked the internet yet. The fog is still thick. The seagulls still making their sounds. And the church bells have turned over once, announcing a half hour has passed since I counted the time.
Usually we just stroll these streets, immersed in the people and sights. Painted statues move for money. Artists hang their wares. There are a few musicians whose voices we like, a left handed black man plays a right handed guitar upside down. We hover like vultures when it appears a street table may clear, receipt rustling in the wind, coffee cup drained and cigarette smoked. They drink beer here with lunch, with brunch, with breakfast. There is always a beer, man and woman, young and old. They are so ubiquitous it is often the first word we learn in a new country, caña in Spain, fino or caneca in Portugal. We order like cowards. The girls have had more hamburgers over the last month and a half than they have in their lives before that. If every restaurant served pasta, Cassidy would now be a noodle.
Eventually we find something. We rode the JetExtreme boat for 20 minutes. Faced with the necessity as tourists in Porto to see the 6 bridges, we opted for the adrenaline one. More fun for the kids was the justification for paying twice as much. We did not expect the pilot who alternated his personalities between stoic grump and fun-loving child to slam the machine into reverse and submerge us under a wave that grew and then drenched. The child turned around to confirm, smiles all around. On another hot day, Sawyer and I climbed the bridge Dom Luis and climbed over the scaffolding. I cannot say I was not unafraid. We jumped the 45 feet or so to the swift moving current as the girls filmed, the feat only accomplished by its evidence on Instagram. The ache in my neck through the afternoon and the next reminded me I am becoming too old to consider myself a worthy companion of the boy. We found the Hard Rock, projecting the kids would enjoy a feel for home. We dined with Alanis Morissette over fajitas and Cobb salads and canecas, hamburgers for the kids. They actually ate vegetables, a rarity in Europe, and a blended variety of their daily ice creams. Cassidy’s exuberant request, “Can we please go back to Rockin’ Good Times?” proved our projections correct. We returned a few days later, happy to see our jovial George Michael waiter again that would sit at our table while we ordered.
We went to play mini golf on an expert course in Foz do Duoro, taking turns at launching our balls off ramps towards nets bordering on impossible. Siena had the round of her life with 4 hole-in-ones. Each kid took turns crying, we Rogoff’s a competitive bunch. We found a pool hall as a family, Sawyer and I a seedy bar with a pool table days before. Super Bocks and blue chalk. Seedy men filtered in and out, safe and friendly, the white paint on their trousers perhaps not borne of paint but of seagulls. The bar tender was missing a leg but smiled in time. The Portuguese televisions apparently don’t play La Liga soccer, opting for its inferior league and probably, from my knowledge of their cousins, the Brazilians, over my career, believing wholeheartedly in its superiority. One highlight for me was the Livraria Llelo, the one must-see that resonated with me from its tiny screen after searching my phone as I do in every city, typing in “best activities in (insert city here)” on TripAdvisor. There a woman standing next to me recommended “The Book of Disquiet” when she saw me studying a collection of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. I feel his multi-faceted soul has merged with mine the way Jorge Luis Borges’ did 24 years ago in South America and I have made a friend who will bring out in me colors I have not yet experienced. The woman disappeared soon after she shared with me her opinions, and I’m still not sure she truly existed.
We almost did an escape or exit game. We tasted Port and chocolate, which resulted in a hangover. Perhaps it was not the Port to blame but myself, the jury is hung. We bought a dress for Siena from a street stall and took a picture of the old woman with my youngest. We rode a gondola to the top of Dom Luis and were disinhibited enough to take a crazy photo and then pay for it at the top. We landed at a Sunday street fair as the sun fell low over the river below, the sky painted in orange and crimson. A DJ filled the ancient sky with beats and we found a way to bypass the very long line at the Super Bock stand by buying cans from the hot dog man. It was a beautiful walk along the top deck of the same bridge we had jumped off, 270 feet above the Rio Duomo. I considered a jump from this higher level would result in certain death, and also concluded that it would have been a good run. This time with family, with my thoughts, pinning words to the page and crafting visions from my imagination as our hands do these orange lumps of clay we bought days ago at an art supply house – it’s been a good run.
Today Cass woke first, then Siena soon after. I was right about the hugs and soon had two naked girls on my aching lap. I had to put the screen down, push pause on the flow of thoughts into words into vulnerability and exposition. They are forming their favorite animals in orange right now, inspirations from the zoo we found after getting lost four times en route. Like most things, I both love and hate AppleMaps.
We are listening to Taylor Swift and Daya and Justin Timberlake these days. These days are no different than the other days. Their catchy hooks bore into my brain when I’d rather sleep. So little has changed, though everything has. Tracey is up now. I hear her phone making sounds that newscasters make when they are talking about hurricanes. Her first priority is my last. Today is check out day. And we have our worldly possessions to pack in the hour that stretches between now and noon. The tribe must be fed. We are out of cereal and have four eggs left. I better get to them before the little seagulls beat me to the catch. There is Jello and blueberries. Creature comforts evolve as weather patterns shift. They will survive. We all will.