"Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"It's coming back around again,
This is for the people for the sun." - Rage Against the Machine
We’ll always own July.
You can say it’s the nature of being American. Our national celebration exploding near the month’s beginning, its resonance shimmering and trailing for the remaining weeks. A flag of exceptionalism and defiance planted where you can’t miss it. At the very start. Unavoidable. Inevitable and indomitable as the summer heat. Schools out, complexions the healthy pigment of abundant vitamin D, nature cooperating to provide our excursions with photogenic backgrounds. A nation of day baseball, gingham, Ferris wheels, lobster rolls, Sperrys, sand castles, cookouts, nautical stripes, Wayfarers, worn paperbacks, seersucker, funnel cake, sunburned shoulders and kisses beneath fireworks.
You can say it’s the nature of being American. Our national celebration exploding near the month’s beginning, its resonance shimmering and trailing for the remaining weeks. A flag of exceptionalism and defiance planted where you can’t miss it. At the very start. Unavoidable. Inevitable and indomitable as the summer heat. Schools out, complexions the healthy pigment of abundant vitamin D, nature cooperating to provide our excursions with photogenic backgrounds. A nation of day baseball, gingham, Ferris wheels, lobster rolls, Sperrys, sand castles, cookouts, nautical stripes, Wayfarers, worn paperbacks, seersucker, funnel cake, sunburned shoulders and kisses beneath fireworks.
And still some of us weren’t content. We turned to farther horizons. When everyone else was relaxing, we chose to run.
"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."
....words I reread as our train approached the city that Sunday afternoon. I closed The Sun Also Rises and put the swollen book in my lap and joined the carriage full of turning heads, mouths charmed open by conversation and anticipatory smiles. Mark, Corey, and Nicole found me to share anecdotes and insights on the San Fermin Festival that they'd garnered in the 3 hour ride from Madrid. Derek sat in conversation 2 cars behind us, Parker, Sandev, Nick, and Damian joining later that night. Together our slow paths traced back to America's farthest reaches. New York, Florida, California, Alaska. Children of the conquered frontiers, in Spain to surmount something more familiar. More personal.
We met the city in the afternoon, on the eve of the explosion. The Basque shopkeepers dressed in their starkest whites, the red bandannas of earlier fiestas knotted around their necks. Townspeople showcasing an annual pride that would soon too become ours. We arrived as tabula rasa, but it was in Pamplona we would gain our reds. Purchased with a few Euros; earned during our three-minute encierro.
It was a village of Christmas Eve, each of us tilting slightly toward the future. We would return to these streets in the morning to stand in front of the town hall for the firing of the chupinazo rocket, tens of thousands celebrating the official start of San Fermin. But for the five of us the Festival began that first afternoon, when we heard the drums. A percussion troupe marching throughout the streets, stopping in a small area behind the Plaza Mayor. A dozen men pounding kettles as dozens more of us gathered around, spilling out of surrounding restaurants and bars, called by their rhythm. It could be adopted instantly for its simplicity, its intrinsic familiarity. Their hands and sticks giving voice to our heartbeats. We had known it before we ever heard it.
On Monday the Festival was born screaming, in showers of sangria that bathed us purple. Parker was held aloft on Derek's and my shoulders in a moment captured by an Associated Press photographer, picked up by newspapers in Spain, Australia, the San Francisco Chronicle, and later one of the Wall Street Journal Photos of the Year. An image that would come to summarize the ultimate bacchanal and its emotions. A god of wine and his unleashed followers. A microsecond to exist outside of mortality. The revelry continued well into the next night as we celebrated our successful encierro with shameless dancing and massive bottles of beer in the Plaza Mayor, beneath dandelions of fire blooming in the sky above.
The sun's rise would chase us from Pamplona, as we would carry the rays of San Fermin to Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, San Sebastian, and later back to America. In the year that followed, we would recall the Festival in different ways. We'd captured it through photographs, footage of the chupinazo and our run, journals and words written here earlier, in cravings for tapas or shouts of "Muy limpia!," or me hours ago, watching news footage at work of this morning's running, on the one year anniversary of ours. Damian purchased the official poster from our year and reprints of past Festivals, perhaps framing the design from the same fiestas that Hemingway attended, or my father's encierro in the 1950's. All our adopted ways of proving tangibly what we already know deeper than words. That even in absence, we are forever there. If not as residents, then as revenants. For every year we have left to live, July 6 and 7 will bring us back to these moments. Focused softly by memory and filtered romantically by nostalgia, but always, always Pamplona.
We did not stay long enough for Pobre de Mi, the candlelit end of the Festival on midnight of the final day. Even when I find myself there again in some undetermined year in the future, wearing fresh whites and old reds, I don't know that I could ever bring myself to watch it close. For me, and for my friends, for anyone who has ever run with the bulls at San Fermin, the fiesta is eternal. It sleeps but never dies. Our 9-day blood red summer sun.
"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."
....words I reread as our train approached the city that Sunday afternoon. I closed The Sun Also Rises and put the swollen book in my lap and joined the carriage full of turning heads, mouths charmed open by conversation and anticipatory smiles. Mark, Corey, and Nicole found me to share anecdotes and insights on the San Fermin Festival that they'd garnered in the 3 hour ride from Madrid. Derek sat in conversation 2 cars behind us, Parker, Sandev, Nick, and Damian joining later that night. Together our slow paths traced back to America's farthest reaches. New York, Florida, California, Alaska. Children of the conquered frontiers, in Spain to surmount something more familiar. More personal.
We met the city in the afternoon, on the eve of the explosion. The Basque shopkeepers dressed in their starkest whites, the red bandannas of earlier fiestas knotted around their necks. Townspeople showcasing an annual pride that would soon too become ours. We arrived as tabula rasa, but it was in Pamplona we would gain our reds. Purchased with a few Euros; earned during our three-minute encierro.
It was a village of Christmas Eve, each of us tilting slightly toward the future. We would return to these streets in the morning to stand in front of the town hall for the firing of the chupinazo rocket, tens of thousands celebrating the official start of San Fermin. But for the five of us the Festival began that first afternoon, when we heard the drums. A percussion troupe marching throughout the streets, stopping in a small area behind the Plaza Mayor. A dozen men pounding kettles as dozens more of us gathered around, spilling out of surrounding restaurants and bars, called by their rhythm. It could be adopted instantly for its simplicity, its intrinsic familiarity. Their hands and sticks giving voice to our heartbeats. We had known it before we ever heard it.
On Monday the Festival was born screaming, in showers of sangria that bathed us purple. Parker was held aloft on Derek's and my shoulders in a moment captured by an Associated Press photographer, picked up by newspapers in Spain, Australia, the San Francisco Chronicle, and later one of the Wall Street Journal Photos of the Year. An image that would come to summarize the ultimate bacchanal and its emotions. A god of wine and his unleashed followers. A microsecond to exist outside of mortality. The revelry continued well into the next night as we celebrated our successful encierro with shameless dancing and massive bottles of beer in the Plaza Mayor, beneath dandelions of fire blooming in the sky above.
The sun's rise would chase us from Pamplona, as we would carry the rays of San Fermin to Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, San Sebastian, and later back to America. In the year that followed, we would recall the Festival in different ways. We'd captured it through photographs, footage of the chupinazo and our run, journals and words written here earlier, in cravings for tapas or shouts of "Muy limpia!," or me hours ago, watching news footage at work of this morning's running, on the one year anniversary of ours. Damian purchased the official poster from our year and reprints of past Festivals, perhaps framing the design from the same fiestas that Hemingway attended, or my father's encierro in the 1950's. All our adopted ways of proving tangibly what we already know deeper than words. That even in absence, we are forever there. If not as residents, then as revenants. For every year we have left to live, July 6 and 7 will bring us back to these moments. Focused softly by memory and filtered romantically by nostalgia, but always, always Pamplona.
We did not stay long enough for Pobre de Mi, the candlelit end of the Festival on midnight of the final day. Even when I find myself there again in some undetermined year in the future, wearing fresh whites and old reds, I don't know that I could ever bring myself to watch it close. For me, and for my friends, for anyone who has ever run with the bulls at San Fermin, the fiesta is eternal. It sleeps but never dies. Our 9-day blood red summer sun.
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