1 November 2019
For months, fifteen squares of Mallorcan sunshine sat patiently inside my camera, held delicately in the dark, waiting to be stabilized into positive image and paper. Time, in this way, was frozen: light transformed into traces on silver halides, and traces transformed into visible image through chemical alchemy until — on a cold day in late October — I held in my hands an object that was once a moment. Magic.
Mallorca itself was a revelation. To step off the plane from Edinburgh, cool and staid even in the summertime, into the sultry Mediterranean heat — overwhelming. I was blasted, drenched, baked by the sun as I haven’t been in God knows how long; I was heated to my core, in my bones, crisped and browned and sanded and watered and salted by the sea. On the very first day we wandered through the scorched sandstone alleyways of Palma, licking dripping gelato under draped fig trees. Much later — after a sweaty sardine-can bus ride, a twilight swim, a seafood dinner, and a dream interpretation — we tipped backwards into the still-warm sand under the evening sky to watch stars wheel across the horizon, the night air velvety and the same temperature as my skin.
On a Tuesday we took a bus to a town called Valldemossa, nestled in the dry scrubby mountainous hillside, yellow buildings and polished cobblestone streets winding up and around, quiet and plant-lined after escaping the inescapable circumambulating tourist tunnel. We wandered through the silence of afternoon, the sun burning our scalps, the sound of the heat itself (or cicadas) buzzing in our ears. We drank iced coffee and cold Sprite at a shaded table in the plaza, stepped off the street into a dim Catholic church which smelled of resin and old paper, where the carvings and statues at the altar — a hundred miles away from the last pew where we sat to slip off sandals and press bare feet against cool tiles — morphed before our sun-blind eyes into the many-armed Shiva. I plucked a branch from an olive tree to tuck into my back pocket, breathed deeply of the familiar dry scent of the pines (like home), and watched the sea sparkle past the hills and plain where Palma shivered as though a mirage. We greeted friendly burros through fences and had our palms thoroughly divested of salty sweat, carved up a quartered watermelon with a plastic knife on a stone wall, and filled up on the cold juice before stumbling back to the bus in a sun-dumb haze. Our knees knocked together with the bumps in the road, my inner elbows sticky with sweat, the fabric seats scratchy against the backs of my thighs, and the bus hummed and puffed and sang its way down the mountain.
I don’t usually think of myself as a coastal person, despite having grown up less than a ten minute walk from the beach; consciously, at least, I tend more towards treeless ridges, snowy peaks, dry deserts, and cold winds. But I believe that there must be something in me that always dreams of the ocean, even when I don’t consciously miss it, because the Mediterranean on my skin was pure magic. Intensely salty, warm and clear and sandy soft; falling asleep on the beach, toes buried, still feeling the rocking of the waves with a warm wind drying and tangling my hair. The sea is filled with stories and centuries of human longing and tragedy, and floating in the waves I felt my own stories, ones that I haven’t thought of in months if not years, bubbling up and out through my mouth — tall tales of Josephine Leonilda Casaceli and airships and my father; memories of maps invented as a child, of a game called Myst and of books by David Eddings. Every moment of sunlight and warm air, every patch of sunburn, brought me back into my body in a way that I haven’t been in months, wrapped and layered in northern latitudes. Each day stretched into three days — morning, afternoon, night — and I felt as in childhood: barefooted, freckled, irreverent.
Several weeks before I left for Mallorca, I met a family from California in the cafe where I work. We talked about home, and what they were planning to do on their trip to Scotland, and what I was planning to do when my visa runs out in November. The oldest man — white-haired, bearded, stout, kind eyes — patted my arm: “Take heart,” he said. “You only need one job.”
Several days later, they returned for another meal. As they were about to leave, they stopped me at their table. “We’ve been thinking about you,” said the oldest man, “and we were wondering if we could pray for you.” I said, yes, of course, I would love that, and so I stood still with my head bowed and my hands folded in the middle of the lunch rush and listened to a prayer that could have come from the mouth of my grandfather: please, Lord, watch over her, guide her, open up the right doors for her.
Amen.
They asked my name and I told them, I’m Sierra. “Oh!” said the oldest man. “Like the mountains?” I said yes, and they said, we have a Sierra in our family too — and now I wonder if someday my family, far from California’s dry pines and salty coastlines, will meet another wayward Sierra, and offer her a prayer in turn.
SGBRSH 