High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [46]
The ferry from Tenerife to La Gomera churned away from a southern resort town with a bleached, unimaginative skyline of tourist hotels. For reasons difficult to fathom or appreciate, the brown hills dropping away behind the port displayed giant white letters spelling out HOLLYWOOD. An hour and a half ahead of us lay tiny La Gomera, where the hills don’t yet speak English or anything else.
Among urban Canarians, La Gomera has a reputation for backwardness, and the Gomerans themselves are sometimes likened to Guanches—the tall, blue-eyed, goat-herding aboriginals whom the Spaniards found here and promptly extinguished in the fifteenth century. No one knows where they came from, though it’s a good guess that they were related to the tall, blue-eyed Berbers who still roam the western Sahara. Throughout the Canaries, the Guanches herded goats, made simple red-clay pottery, and followed the lifestyle known as Neolithic, living out their days without the benefit of metal. They were farmers, not fishers; anthropologists insist these island people had no boats. On La Gomera they used a type of language unique in the world, which was not spoken but whistled. This exotic means of communication, called silbo, could traverse the great distances that routinely separate neighbors on an island cut through and through with steep, uncrossable gorges. (Whistling carries its subtleties over distance in a way that shouting can’t.) I’d been told by many Canarians that the silbo has died out completely. But others claimed it still persists in some corners, along with pottery making and farming with the muscle of human and ox. I made a pact for the crossing: if I see dolphins in the channel, I’ll believe the rest of the story.
The blue cliffsides of La Gomera seemed close enough to Tenerife to reach by means of a strong backstroke. It’s hard to imagine living on islands this small, in plain view of other land, and never being stirred to build a boat. In fact, I know of an anthropologist who studied the archaeological record of the Guanches, but could not convince her colleagues that their culture shunned the sea. People with such mysterious motives seem more legendary than real. That’s the great problem, I suppose, with becoming extinguished.
Just beyond the rushing ferry’s shroud of spray, the dolphins appeared to me, slick and dark, rolling like finned inner tubes in the Atlantic.
San Sebastian de La Gomera is the port from which Columbus set sail for the New World. Elsewhere on earth, the approaching quincentennial anniversary of that voyage had been raising a lot of fuss, but here at the point of origin all was quiet. Fishing boats sat like sleeping gulls in the harbor, rolling in the ferry’s wake. A store in the port sold T-shirts with the ambiguous message “Aquí partió Colón”—Columbus departed from here. So did everyone else, apparently. San Sebastian’s narrow streets were empty save for long shadows of fig trees and a handful of noontime shoppers. I claimed my bantam-weight rental car and drove up a steep, cobbled hill to the parador overlooking the harbor.
The hotel, Parador Condé de La Gomera, is an old, elegant replica of an estate that stood here in Columbus’s time. The massive front door leads to a cool interior of cut-stone archways and dark carved woodwork. Passages open to bright courtyards, where potted ferns grow head high and higher, brushing the door frames. The hallways turn out everywhere onto hidden sitting areas dappled with light, each one arranged like a perfect photograph. Easy enough a life, to stay forever in the paradise of San Sebastian. Columbus came