Gerund
Trip Start
Nov 13, 2006
1
8
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Girona,
Spain
Sunday, November 19, 2006
My fascination with landscape stretches back into my childhood. My moments of contentment, of awe, were always finding myself very small in the middle of the ocean on a boat with nothing but water as far as the eye could see, or at the base of a mountain range with the tops reaching into the clouds and beyond my understanding.
The extremes pull me. The places of nature that just are their elements -- a mountain is earth, the ocean is water -- tug at me like very little else can. I feel the elements in my body pulling me closer to those extreme examples, calling me.
Earth my body...
So the Pyranees. I wanted to hike through them and I had a very hearty laugh at my silliness. I´m not hiking through anything like that on this trip I don´t think. The trees were still very green through the mountains, a lake in the middle of it all. It was just beautiful.
In Girona our host is Ramone. Ramone with a spanish R that both rolls and catches in the back of my mouth. Ramone is in his late thirties I believe and works with the earth. I never did find out his exact job title, but he is someone I would have loved to shared with Kriosa. He works with plants, and landscapes, and natural habitats. He´s the kind of guy who gathers mushrooms in his spare time and has so many of them that as they´re drying, they cover his living room and patio and he still has too many so he creates a recipe to use the extra mushrooms up with.
Allyways
And this special recipe he serves with duck on Sunday afternoon for us, after we´ve had our first taste of Octopus.
Ramone spoils us. He knows english very well and indulges our attempts in español. That he´s lived in Girona for the last fifteen years is also an indulgence. This means he knows the stories.
I love a good story.
As we walk to the historic town from his apartment, he starts to tell us stories. Along one of the rivers that is currently a stream, there are large white trees. He says that a lot of the people living here would tell us that Napoleon planted them in homage to freedom which Ramone finds vaguely funny. He says of course it´s not true, the trees are much too young to have been planted by Napoleon. But, he says, people here like the legends.
"It´s what they do" he says.
Later, as we´re walking around this gorgeous cathedral with many many stairs, he points out the image of a woman, hidden in the shadows of the church. It´s night so we can barely see her. Ramone says did you notice that all the water spouts here are not images of anything? In Notré Dame, they have gargoyals, here we just have these... except here. Here is the witch of Girona. They say that she was a woman accused of being a witch and every time she was accused she spat on the ground to denounce her accusers. But one day, one day she was missing and then people realized she had attached herself to the church (or was she cursed to stay there he muses) and from then on, the water flows from her mouth. She always spits.
It makes me laugh.
The last story though is the one I loved the best.
Before this was a cathedral, before this was a church, before the Romans had their temple at the top of this very small hill in Girona, before there were many people at all, there lived a cyclops named Gerund. Gerund wasn´t the cyclops that Ulysses blinded, but he was one of the cyclops. Girona is named for Gerund, whose bones are the base of the shrine, of the roman temple, of the many phases of the cathedral.
We have a legend for everything, Ramone says.
I definitely came to the right place.
x
Comments
cyclops bones
I'm glad your enjoying your self
I know a simlar story about bones being a foundation.
Have fun and remeber to watch out for the monkey on the rock.
and don't forget to Smile
Stoney