Name:
Location: Madrid, Spain

I love eating Golden Delicious apples with peanut butter. I shop too much, drive an old car, and save my Starbucks money for traveling. Disillusioned women writers are my inspiration, especially Sylvia Plath and Sara Teasdale. I adore used book stores and fleamarkets.

5.06.2008

La Playa de los Muertos

The current is strong in this small bay, pulling from deep into the Mediterranean Sea. It is named the Beach of the Dead because the current pulls drowned bodies here. The water pulls them, sad and lonely, through its blue and turquoise shades, and lays them on the pebbled shore. Here they lie, perhaps sheltered by the great porous rocks at the southern end of the beach, until a mountain traveller glaces over the cliff edge and spots them far below. At such a height, people are small and the turquoise breakers are a thin strip before the vast hazy blue.

We are here on a much more frivolous errand, having been drawn to the sea by the prospect of sunshine and a long weekend. May 1 is Spain´s Constitution Day, and a large portion of Madrid´s population flocks out of the city on holiday. We are five: John, Leanna, Brynn, Agnieszka, and I, and we snugly fill John´s car.

After Comunidad de Madrid ends, we enter brief farmland and then the mountains, green and winding. Then, coming down onto the rolling land, a desert. They film westerns here, raising wooden store fronts against the mountains, when the southwest U.S. is too far away. Fields of stubby cacti grow straggling out of their rows. The houses are mostly low white stucco, or dusty red to match the hills.

At the very tip of Spain, we stop at Cabo de Gata, joking about Morocco. Can you see land? I think I can, that low shadow in the haze. The beach is littered and narrow, so we move up to San José - small and white built on hills near the curving water. Hippies sell homemade skirts and wooden jewelry along the edge of the beach. One man, crouched near a table, played a wooden recorder. They are skinny, dreadlocked, smiling at the tourists. In the early morning, the sound of their drums floats up from the beach to wake me.

This beach, la Playa de Genovéses, is long and covered with seashell fragments. Agnieszka and I climb the hill at the tip of the beach, and on three sides can watch the sea´s changing shades of blue. At night, we drink wine under the shallow blue sky.

On Saturday, after la Playa de los Muertos, we drive the seven hours back. Back over the desert, the bouldered mountains, the green fields to the city of Madrid, where no picture or description can keep the sound of the waves in our ears.

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