Holiday Overshare Just back from boating in Portugal. My cherished companion and I were in Alentejo, near the Spanish border east of Lisbon, where the largest artificial lake in Europe was created in the past decade by damming the Guadiana river at Alqueva. We had four days on a cabin cruiser. It felt a little discomfiting to be chugging widely over a sunken river course, and over territory so recently inundated and expropiated and erased from the landscape. But any such moralising tended to be cut short by the prospect of berthing at the various marinas. These I was expected to approach and tie up stern first, and my attempts were largely hit and miss; there was a lot of hitting and a lot of missing. Only on the last day did I properly cotton on to the counter-intuitive control inputs needed to guide a boat going astern. Luckily, at this time of year there were few others on the lake to witness my pitiful handling. We hit an unexpected burst of sunny hot weather. I have ambivalent feelings about sunshine, and refuse to be impressed by friends returning home from holiday brandishing reports of the heat they enjoyed: “30 degrees every day, 32 degrees, 35 degrees”, “Any advance on 35?” These as just trophy temperatures. In reality, the sun is gruelling and energy-sapping, and I quite understand why people living in such heated latitudes build dark shuttered houses into which they retreat at midday to try and pretend that it’s not really there. All in all, I’ll take Irish conditions. Not for me the brown dusty tracks between hard scrub through olive trees at noon; I prefer a muddy gap at the corner of a field, briary and pockmarked with the muddy hoof-prints of cattle. But anyway, – one reason for our boating in Alentejo was that it’s a designated “dark sky” area. We wanted to see stars, and we struck it lucky. The sun-drenched cloudless days were matched by star-spangled cloudless nights: no moon (we’d chosen the week specifically with that in mind), the Milky Way in splendour, occasional meteors from the Orionids, the binocular challenge of tracking down the furthest planets, Uranus and Neptune. Mooring at a buoy offshore was easier than docking at the marina for the night, and then we lay back on cushions on the deck as the celestial globe wheeled above us while the boat drifted gently around its mooring; the universe in motion. I thought of that other water-borne stargazer, Captainn Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, lashed to the wheel with a marlin-spike and assin’ hissel’ “What is the stars? What is the stars?”, voicing astronomical and metaphysical ignorance. But a preferred quotation was from Clarke’s wonderful poem “The Straying Student”, about the young cleric seduced from his vocation by the allurements of knowledge, passion, and the warm south, announcing triumphantly “And I knew every star the Moors have named”. Me, I could name just some of them, but it was good to think that I was doing so from a place where the Moors had once flourished, before they too were removed from the local landscape. (And there must be a suitable pun there about Moors and mooring, but danged if I can think of it.)
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 18:15:22 +0000
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