Yesterday’s motorcycle tour of the closest beaches was such a success, I decided to hold onto the bike one more day, and take a morning trip further north, toward the ruins of the old Portuguese fort at Cabo-de-Rama, up past Agonda Beach. Manny had promised a phone call home at nine AM this morning, and as both traffic and the heat of the sun intensify as the day wakes up, we decided to split our paths today, to catch up later. I left Manny in the middle of morning yoga, and headed out into my map of the land, already extended by experience.

I love drawing lines out from a starting point, making wider and wider circles as what is unknown becomes known, becomes conquered by the senses. As a child, the arrival of wheels in my life was also the fall of the horizon, and hours on hours were spent following roads that led further away from, and then back to home. First, following the curve of the land to the bottom of the hill; then out along McCarron’s Lake Boulevard, several blocks until the elastic strands that held my comfort in place began to get too taut. Finally, around the arc of the lake road, even as far as my friend Bob Schroeder’s house. When I reached there, of course, it was obvious that I was more than half-way round the lake, so I continued east all the way to busy Rice Street, and followed it north a couple of blocks to the where Lake Boulevard picked up again. Turning left, I stood up on the pedals to climb the hill where my father’s church, Galilee Lutheran, stood awash in a sea of dandelion flowers; another block past McCarron’s Lake Elementary School, where earlier that year I had won a trophy for Most Words Formed from the Letters of a Single Word. Finally taking the flat, tree-lined lane west and down a slight hill to Western Avenue, right turn past my neighbor friend David Merrill’s house, and back, now back in the driveway, and upstairs for a very large glass of lemonade. 

Those were pretty fine days, and rich with memories. And as we grow and grow, the spiral spins outward, our arms reach to discover, our embrace folds around many places and people and pulls them to our hearts… But we keep returning to the same truth, lived out ten or twenty or thirty years ago, the same desire, the same heart, now returning to a place we know with so many, many miles already traveled.

A Motorcycle Journal

I am winding along the smooth tar roads north of Palolem beach, among rice and grain fields baled high with harvest, women threshing the grains in the early light, cattle wandering toward their morning forage (generally across the road, several abreast), long duckling-lines of school children with their identical dress and individual smiles and eyes, old farmers seeing me and waving reply as I bob my head in hello, birds above and insects below, western ghats rising as a range to my right, and glimpses of the Arabian Sea to my left, as I slowly ride along a path I learned yesterday… then past the point where Manny and I turned, having missed the Agonda road, past the known into another horizon of fields and hills and people rising to the day… and dogs running in front of the bike… cattle and bikes and people trying to all fit in a single crossroads, a sudden glut of traffic in an otherwise empty road, as though their meeting was carefully timed: everybody! let’s meet at the intersection tomorrow at 8.00 am…

A climb up into the hills as the fields drop beside me, the mountains rise ahead, and the sea stretches out forever over my shoulder, forever and forever and forever… over the ridge and down again, past a surprising unmarked temple beside the road… a cultural heritage sign lets me know I am still traveling in the right direction, off the main road, heading toward the water’s edge… small town, then rice paddies already dry stubble, harvested as the grain ripened, and not replanted as this region moves to summer’s drought… a short rise out of a village center… then an expansive view of the sea and its rocky perimeter… a left turn as the road skirts the top of the escarpment, a line of coconut palms framed by the water behind… then a yellow stone house ahead, an abrupt end of the road, and I have arrived at the Fortaleza Cabo-de-Rama.

Though I am an avid bicycler, a bicycle wouldn’t do. This was a man who has inherited the strength of the oil age, a small motorcycle drawing him up and into the wind, up and out of the glut of tourists and hawkers of Palolem Beach, into the spaces that extend almost forever at the edges of his map. Now the lines are clearer, and I am in proud possession of many square kilometers here in the southern reaches of Goa — a possession that cannot be transferred, I am afraid, unless these few words and new pictures do any justice to the travel… which, of course, they do not. Hopefully your imagination can fill in the missing colors and sounds.

The fort was built high on a point overlooking yet another stunning bay, supported in the south by a broad promontory, and capped in the north by a long and apparently narrow spit of rocky land which casts its finger out into the water, pointing west toward… what? Africa, I suppose. Another tiny strip of sand can be seen in the curve of that stone, with fields apparent on the plateau high above the water. I can make out no road which leads there — but my cartographer’s spirit draws my eyes out over the land repeatedly in search of it. There must be a road or a trail. There always is.

Christians in the Land of Older Gods
There are no cars and no people at the fort this early in the day. I have been awake for almost three hours, contrary to most tourists’ timelines, and no one is here to greet me or sell me anything, to tour me around or gawk or smile. Portuguese spirits only, and few of those. I walk through the main bastion through the battlement walls into a courtyard graces only by a Catholic Church, Portuguese style. There is a mozaic-covered shrine to the Virgin Mary underneath a bush of flowering Tres Marias, pink and white tri-petal blossoms in an otherwise dusty field, full of the sign of cattle and small pillars (graves?) adorned with the cross. Behind and along the wall, a stairway rises to a landing midway up the wall, then a ramp climbs further to the ramparts, where cannon are found — a low circular tower whose aspect would allow the gunners to address both town and sea, some 270 degrees of threat.

The human silence is stunning; the sounds of the waking world deafening. At this height, the forest canopy stretches out below me like a green carpet, down to the water and all the way along it to the other end of the bay. In its branches, every kind of bird imaginable is making its morning noise: I recognize parrots or parakeets, some kind of dove (by its song), what should really be cuckoos (by their song) but probably aren’t, these large circling or perching predators which just might be eagles… a flight of geese comes right toward me and past, clearing my own perch, where I sit in the wall-cutout of a cannon sighting, by only a few feet. Literally hundreds of dragonflies are skimming the air above and all around me.

A large rush of leaves and shaking of branches gets my attention — can’t make out the bird, but it must be huge… it’s a bird with a very long tail… a furry tail — Oh! It’s a monkey, probably a couple of feet tall, rushing into the crook of a tree where is finds a comfortable recline, and turns to face me. I wave. It turns away. A smaller monkey, perhaps offspring, leaps down — almost flying, really, with all four limbs outstretched as it sails between its tree and this one — and lies next to the first. It, too (he? she?) looks up at me for a moment. The older monkey begins to groom this one, its hands unbelievably gentle, caresses, as it found and removed fleas or other insects from the other’s back. How sweet, I think, realizing immediately that these creatures are hugely intelligent, enough to contain affection and compassion in their hands and actions. Ignorant humans who decide to be blind to the obvious, the obvious relations, who can even transform other humans into non-humans…

Living Ruins
I could have stayed at my post until the Commander called me in — which would be forever, I suppose; or to leave at sundown, whichever came first — but I decided to explore the grounds more, to check out the old church and what was around it. the church was locked, only presenting its whitewashed face at this time of day. Trails led beyond it into the woods, and I followed one of these in under the branches, leaf litter covering the ground, and the scent of flowers perfuming the air — I know these flowers, I know this smell from the Brazilian countryside, but what is it…? No matter, it is delicious.

Behind the church a number of yards is an enormous, unkempt banyan tree, myriad runners leaching down to find earth, but all round the trunk. Dreadlocks are banyan hair, and vice versa. Two gutted buildings are behind the banyan, their roofs long ago vanished with the weather, likely small barracks or parsonage for the site. The banyan is a tree of life, if any tree could claim it, and like all banyans is full of movement and bird song, the little fruits and shade and immense shelter which must call out to all airborne creatures. A squirrel runs along a small vertical branch, its tail swinging to maintain balance. More macaws and parrots… and the bird whose voice gets into every Tarzan movie — you know the one I mean.

I move to get a better look of the buildings, and suddenly the entire forest canopy comes alive with a rush, as though a great wind were blowing through the forest. I am the great wind. The movement is a congregation of the same large monkeys, their black faces giving me a glance (perhaps not a kindly one) before they flow off over branches and air as though they were one and the same thing. Many appear to be females with young; I watch as one young monkey comes climbing-flying toward a larger one: the larger, apparently the mother, takes off for another tree, and the youth flies into her arms mid-flight, as though a living baton in a relay, and mother makes a monumental four-limbed leap into the air, arriving like a horizontal waterfall in the next tree, flowing like water down along and through its branches, disappearing into the canopy beyond.

Wow. I stopped dead, sat down on the ground, and became still. After a few minutes, there was more movement in the treetops, this time a returning: a few females and their offspring came back into what apparently was their favorite tree, quite conscious that I was there, sitting mostly concealed behind a trunk here, high on a branch there, with their black faces peering out now and then to make sure I was right where they had left me. I slowly reached into my bag to retrieve my notebook, and withdrew it, equally slowly… flight! The monkeys took off again, startled by what might have been… a gun? Monkey no fool.

The day was coming on, and I decided to take an easy ride home, avoiding the weight of the sun. It leans so heavily on my northern shoulders… and makes me bow my northern head. One woman is gathering leaves from a tree in front of a church — I thought it was a Tulip Tree (Catalpa?), but now I guess not, the leaves must be for cooking or something useful. Back on the motorcycle, out of the empty parking lot, out onto the road nearly empty of traffic, out past the schoolchildren, now playing soccer in the grounds outside of their school, their colorful rows of attendance having disbanded into play, out toward the cattle herds slowing my passage, the dogs laying in the roadway minimizing my significance, the shadows shrinking on the earth, Palolem a small buzz kilometers away beneath me.

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