I am supposed to plan to have the van in the shop on Friday to reinstall the rebuilt transmission. Until then here I am in Arequipa, Rusty is my company and occasionally there are the vagrants in the campground who come and go.
Arequipa is a nice enough town and convenient but nothing much changes. The weather is solid, blue skies and sunshine by day and cold crisp nights. No dramatic storms or floods or anything.
Groundhog Day they say, when the days repeat themselves. I don’t mind so much, it’s nice to take a break from the road and this break was planned anyway. I was just supposed to have a working transmission.
A month here after six weeks spent here last year, is a long time in one place.
The people come and go from the campground. This week we had two small vans with Chilean license plates, but as usual they were occupied by foreigners, in this case one pair of youngsters from France and the others from Czechia, but they came after dark and left the next morning so I said hello and didn’t even get a photo. Then they were gone.
I saw one more German tag on this Mitsubishi, and that’s not unusual as half the overlanders in South America are German and I’ve met plenty. I was not terribly interested in meeting two more passersby. Germans are everywhere not least because they get generous sabbaticals and decent retirement so they get a chance to see the world before they lose interest. Besides I’m pretty self sufficient in my aloneness, but something went wrong, she came up to me and said she’d seen all the flags of the countries we’ve visited. They were young blonde and cheerful plus they spoke excellent English, so they trapped me into conversation. Damn.
They landed in Montevideo, drove to Ushuaia over the past nine months and are on their way to Alaska, then across Canada to Halifax where the pickup would get shipped home. All completely standard normal travel up the PanAmerican. Except they weren’t German… the two blonde kids were Italian. My surprise was nothing compared to theirs. “We haven’t seen an Italian on all our journey,” they said looking at me like I was the second coming. We went to lunch.
I took them to my favorite fish place which also allows dogs. Rusty napped in the gravel while we exchanged life stories. They took jobs in Germany for the money and they made lots. Luca is on indefinite unpaid leave and will get his job back when he gets home. Imagine that in the States. And imagine this: he may not want it because these youngsters have completely lost their taste for the rat race. Travel broadens the mind sometimes and screws your well ordered life up.
What makes it even weirder is that Giulia and I have lived parallel lives. I’ve never met anyone whose biography is as close as hers is to mine. She claims Viking ancestry through the Sicilian side of her family which gave her blue eyes and blonde hair. Much of Europe and Central Asia has marched through, landed on or occupied Sicily since long before the time of Christ. She and Luca met in junior high and it was dislike at first sight. Three years later they discovered they liked to travel and they became buddies. Then they split and went to different schools and learned that they missed being around each other. They speak fluent English, she went to USC and later Hong Kong so she also learned Mandarin. He went South Korea and learned Korean. How do you like that? Childhood sweethearts long since married.
I grew up in a castle in Umbria; her family has a castle in Tuscany, her family is arguing over the division of the family properties just as mine did…unlike my siblings she is tight with her younger brother who lives and works in North Carolina. I felt like she could be my youngest sister, it was the weirdest thing.
We had lunch then we had coffees on a roof top cafe and Rusty shocked the waitress because he looked like the twin brother of her own recently deceased rescue dog. The waitress is a refugee from Venezuela who has lived in Arequipa for eight years and has a habit of rescuing other refugees. She has made a home for eight street dogs, one for each year she has been in exile from her unhappy country. I was caught up in all this and forgot to take photographs of course.
We talked and talked, about politics and the state of the world and the strange times we are living through, the likelihood of war in Europe and changes in the world in which we live. I’m watching the marines being drafted in one more act of destruction of the world I knew. I felt closer to the Venezuelan waitress’ situation than she would ever know.
I can’t imagine taking a 911 call and finding myself dispatching marines to confront civilians on US streets. I am so glad I am retired and away from such decisions. I told Giulia about my grandfather’s resistance and imprisonment in Workd War Two and she told me how her grandfather was the Fascist governor of Rome, on the opposite side. But here we are both on the same side now, in favor of the rule of law and empathy raised on DEI and never tested.
Meeting Giulia brought into sharp focus my dilemma. I can stay here safe and unmolested or I can go home and find a barricade to take a stand on. I know what my grandfather would do.
IN THE DARKEST DAYS
OF GERMAN AND FASCIST DOMINATION FROM SEPTEMBER 1943 TO JUNE 1944
HERE
CESARE PAPARINI
FAITHFUL TO THE TRADITIONS OF HIS ANCESTORS, IGNORING DANGER, GAVE SANCTUARY TO ITALIAN AND ALLIED SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
AND EVERY REBELLIOUS SPIRIT
THIS WHEN TYRANNY RAGED ITS FIERCEST, CAME FORTH FROM THESE MOUNTAINS THE NEVER SUFFOCATED LONGING FOR FREEDOM
FROM THOSE WHO FOUND SAFETY HERE, WITH GRATITUDE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR LIBERATION 15 JUNE 1945
1 comment:
Bravo
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