A boat ride and a very old cathedral (Foz, Spain)

(I wrote this last night but have wifi this morning.)

Seasickness: no laughing matter. I spent most of my twenty-hour fishing excursion from Thursday night until Friday evening as horizontal as possible -- spread-eagled on a bed (so as not to roll over while the ship rocked) or clinging to the deck railing and leaning on the flat surfaces in the bridge in a most undignified manner. And this in perfect weather, with the sea "like a plate." "It doesn't get calmer than this," I was told numerous times by Jose, who was probably thinking, "NEVER AGAIN will I say yes to someone who wants to get on my ship as part of a wacky 'project'." He also said, though, that there was more "mar de fondo" -- deep, long, smooth swells that make the ship tilt in all sorts of wild angles -- than usual, and other sailors told me that they had also been seasick the first few times they'd been at sea. They, however, jumped right back on the ship to get over it, whereas I am appending to my name the words "pathetic landlubber" (as in, "Irene Toro Martinez, Pathetic Landlubber") and chaining myself to a tree the next time someone suggests a boat ride where there might be "mar de fondo."

Whines aside: I did learn a lot about the work of a trawling fisherman. We left the port at Celeiro at around 10:30 pm on Thursday night, after the fishermen on the Pino Ladra had spent an hour taking the previous day's catch out of the hold with a crane and shoveling ice over each box (upwards of 400 boxes per ship, for a total of about 10,000 kg of fish). Jose and the captain of the partner ship decided, by scrambled radio, upon the night's course, and, as his ship is only five years old and equipped with the latest in fancy-shmancy technology, Jose simply put it on automatic pilot and pointed out the line on the screen that we would be following. He didn't rest easy after that, though; almost all of the times I saw him in the bridge, he was talking over the radio with his partner, alerting him to the presence of other ships in the area and discussing possible changes in the plan for the day.

It was at about this time that most of the ten-person crew were eating two "floors" down at the tables near the kitchen and the sleeping quarters. Jose told me that he would join them soon, shortly after eleven, and I made my first disappearance, deciding instead of eating to try to sleep until 6:00 am, when the net would be released. Before going to bed, though, I went out to the deck to look at the stars -- oh, glorious! Wowee! Oof! Not a cloud in the sky, and I even saw a shooting star. I love shooting stars!! I went to my luxurious private room, one "floor" down from the bridge, where the four highest ranking men on the ship sleep (the captain, the second mate, and the mechanics, one of whom was spending the night at home and in whose room I'd been placed), and clung to the raised sides of the bed for dear life (remember: "pathetic landlubber") until I fell asleep.

A 987245984524579-decibel siren sounded at 6:00 am to announce that the net was going to be released. Jose and most of his crew had slept about five hours (one man had stayed in the bridge, because there is always somebody in the bridge), and Jose, at least, wouldn't sleep again until the next night. We were now far from any shore, near the drop-off of the sea floor into deeper waters, surrounded by darkness and comforting little splashing sounds (presumably waves and not monsters from the deep). There were still stars in the sky (wowee! oof!).

Releasing the net is not as easy as it sounds, particularly for a two-boat trawling operation. To begin with, the net is enormous and has various clips and cables that have to be checked as it is unrolled (by machine) -- it takes a long time, and several people on the deck, to get it into the water. Then, since the net is strung across two boats, the other boat has to maneuver close enough for the fishermen of the main boat to toss the other fishermen a rope connected to an end of the net. This is simple enough in good weather; I can't imagine how nerve-wracking it is when the waves are strong. Finally, the two boats have to travel side-by-side, a set distance away from each other, in the same direction in order for the net to be effective (easy when you have a ship with cruise-control). They do this for several hours in the late morning and early afternoon, hope that the net sensors indicate that the net is full, and, at 2:30 pm, the same deafening siren sounds to call the fishermen back to the deck for what ends up being a full afternoon of work.

(Side note: I know that nobody cares about this insignificant detail, but, lest I give an inaccurate account of the mechanics of trawling, I wanted to say that I'm not actually sure when the net is joined from the main ship to the secondary ship. I vaguely remember the other ship approaching in the early morning, but it seems strange to me that they would be catching fish from then until 2:30 pm -- a long time. Since I was mostly out of commission between sirens, they may well have joined later in the morning without my noticing.)

It was more exciting to watch the net come in than it was to see it go out. When it was mostly rolled in, Jose pointed to the surface of the sea and said, "See? Look there. That's the fish." I could see a mass of something just beneath the surface of the water (this is very unnerving -- masses of something just beneath the surface of the water), and, when the other boat came close and took the net, the mass turned into a bag of fish the size of . . . oh gosh, I have no spatial intelligence. A big bag of fish. Really big. The fishermen pulled this really big bag of fish to the side of the boat and used a crane-assisted scooper (like a giant butterfly net) to pour fish into the hold of the ship. The idea is that each ship takes about half of the catch and prepares the fish for the sale; Jose and his crew complained, loudly enough that the other crew heard and laughed, that they always ended up with more than half. The really big bag of fish (now half as big) was returned to the Pino Ladra and its contents poured directly into the hold, where the fishermen spent the next four hours sorting fish by species (mostly bacaladilla and pescadilla) into boxes with the help of shovels and gutting the fish that needed to be gutted. Long and dirty work; Jose told me that they usually finished just as the ship was pulling into port.

I had been looking forward to this -- pulling into port -- for many a long hour, and, when we finally did at 7:30 on Friday evening, I was a happy camper. So were the fishermen! After unloading the boat, they had two days of rest to look forward to. On Sunday night they'd go to sea again. I took the last bus back to Foz and was grateful to the universe for solid ground.

My time in Foz has been wonderfully calm. I decided to take it easy on Saturday (I was dizzy until Saturday morning!), so I spent much of the afternoon sitting on a bench in front of the sea. An old woman named Leonor stopped and talked to me for a while (she said that she will be my first interviewee when I come back to Spain as a journalist -- I said, "Okay!!"), and, later, a young man named Alberto walked by twice and on the third pass started a conversation with me. A nerd after my own heart. We talked for a while (about nerdy things), then he invited me to go to a concert with him that night, and I said, "Sure!" The concert ended up being a bit disappointing, and we went to a club that he liked, where we awkwardly stood and watched a few people dance. Eventually, he asked if I had a boyfriend, and I said, "Nope. I'm gay!" He told me that he wasn't (I'd figured), that he liked girls ("Me too!"), but that he had a gay friend (good!), and then he said, "Well, we can be friends, then." Oh, Alberto. So now I have a friend in Foz, and I'm meeting with him again tomorrow afternoon so that his father can introduce me to a fisherman friend of his. We also agreed to have coffee when I'm in Madrid, where he lives (he's in Foz on vacation for a month). Excellent.

Today I spent walking in the countryside to a small chapel called O Bispo Santo, and then to the oldest cathedral in Spain, the Basilica de San Martin, which dates to the sixth century! Of course, the sixth-century parts have been mostly (but not completely!) covered up by further construction in later centuries; I saw stones that had been placed in the ninth and tenth centuries, and frescoes and murals from the eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is mind-boggling to me that this church has stood through so much history. So many people have lived their entire lives -- birth to death, with love, knowledge, jobs, original and unoriginal ideas, hopes, failures, und so weiter -- while this church has stood, and I don't know about any of them! I can't even imagine their lives! It is exciting to me that I will be one of these mystery hypothetical people to somebody in a thousand years. Maybe they will think about it upon entering the same church.

The church also made me think about something that I love thinking about: What will remain of our time in a few thousand years? Few buildings, I think, are made to last (we just don't use giant rocks anymore), but maybe the road systems will be preserved, or, smaller-scale, things like plastic or glass bottles, airplane parts. Ooh, back to large scale: I can't wait for future archaeologists to unearth particle accelerators and neutrino detectors! Or mirrors from giant telescopes. And satellites -- those will be relics in the sky. And spacecraft on the Moon and Mars -- someday they will have been there for thousands of years, and people will know that. Ours is the time that they will have an abstract understanding of as the "breaking of the space frontier." And here we are now, living it!