Galician Fire

Introduction:

Forest fires once again surround the city of Santiago with all the cruelty of a blaze that cannot be controlled. As a result, and because they are spreading rapidly, they are on track to completely ravage the ecosystem of the entire province of A Coruña. Something similar has begun in Ourense as well. So much black, so much destruction. It looks like Hell on earth. This is just wrong.

Raging fires are becoming more frequent, as seen on the Pacific coast of the U.S or Australia. And now that the general public is thoroughly familiar with the effects of flames, soot, and extreme heat as shown in the newscasts, it is high time to get past mere description and address the real issues. Sensationalist reporting does nobody any favors. We either do something or we all end up in the oven. Doesn’t anybody care?

Over the years the causes and culprits have been named, but one would be very hard put to recall any legal charges or convictions. The guilty parties may - might - include: paper companies; land speculators and contractors; climate change or global warming; careless idiots who smoke outdoors and toss their butts onto dry grass. Apparently burning the land down to nothing can either be justified or doesn’t matter. The ones with the big bucks just use them to fry more land and animals. They don’t have to live in or near the scorched earth, apparently.

Everybody pays the price when there is a fire that devours hectares on end. There is no need to list animal species, which are many, but in the part of Europe where Galicia and Portugal are located - the western Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, which lies south of the Pyrenees - there are millennial forests. The forests of yew trees are especially valuable. They need to be preserved. Reforestation does not happen overnight. Does anybody know how long it takes a yew to reach maturity? Of course not. Anybody who lives in a city is oblivious.

References to fires really happening are very painful. So are the photographs. To put numbers on the amount of land, or the numbers of trees, animals, homes, vehicles, and persons forever destroyed by the fire - that just adds to the pain, the desperation, the sense of defeat. Everyone knows this should not be happening. The ones responsible should be dropped from helicopters into burning brush, then left to smoulder and smoke. That will teach them!

***

In a nearby village when the winds shift gear and cease fanning the blaze, Lavinia fortunately avoids having to face flames on her way back to Santiago. She decides to have lunch in a local restaurant, O Caçula. (It seems the original owner was from Brazil.) Naturally, everyone there is talking about the horrendous fires and speculating as to how they started and how much they will cost local economy. All this is going on while the windows reveal the hills that now are wearing gray lambswool and the parked vehicles that have begun to sprout a thin layer of hot black fur. Inside the tiny restaurant, the smoke, which used to be from tobacco before it was banned, is now a mist drifting in from the distant hills and the not-so-distant fields of ripe corn. Customers are coughing and their eyes are watery.

Later, as the last of her meal is whisked away and coffee is placed before her on the small table where she has eaten alone, Lavinia realizes there is an animated discussion in progress. As she drinks her coffee, she listens to an old story of how a local gal, from Picaraña, back a few years (which in Galicia can mean up to two hundred or so) had rescued her male companion from a horrible fire. 

(Note: Picaraña is quite a funny name. It means pickaxe. Why would anybody name a village that? There must be a story behind it. Today there are fewer than ninety inhabitants, but it probably always had that many.)

The young lady, according to the customers who are still wiping their weepy eyes and removing the soot from their cheeks with once-white handkerchiefs, affirm that she managed to save her fellow by soaking her long, heavy skirts and petticoat in a nearby fonte in the local square. This maneuver worked because the young woman wore homespun garments, some of linen and others of wool, with the result that when drenched with water, they were both heavy and protective.

Here are the details of how she did it:

There was an explosion and flames burst out in Cruces. They leaped upward, probably a hundred meters, although that might be an exaggeration. After all, nobody was there to measure. In minutes, in seconds, so much went up in smoke and it looked like little Cruces was gone completely. Picaraña was likely to burn as well, although Padrón was just far enough away and out of the path of the winds that it looked like it would survive. The whole area was orange and black, red and yellow, and hot, hot, hot. Everybody who could do so had run off to hide in the nearby Sar River. The Sar wasn’t very big, but at least it was wet.

Aldara - that was the name of the gal, according to the story - saved the young man’s life by fitting him underneath her skirts, laden down with excess moisture. The fountain poured out its life-saving liquid with a bit more than a trickle, or so it seemed to her, but that must have been her fear talking, because the garments captured a lot of moisture very quickly. The soaked skirts dragged along the ground, but that was a good thin.

Ramón, her companion but not her boyfriend, had to crouch down beneath the wet wall of fabric and match his pace to hers. It was not an easy task, because he had to assume a bent over position and he was a lot taller than Aldara. Also, he could not see where he was going. 

The people, even though they had fled to safety and had not witnessed any of the incident, concluded that the young man must have kept his head and hands on or near intimate parts of his companion in order to keep his balance. What else could he have done? He would have had to know exactly where her legs were. Now nobody had ever seen the girl’s legs, but she was quite pretty and what people could see of her was nicely shaped. Her shoulders were soft and curved, her back slender and straight, her face nearly had the form of a heart. Many a young man had his eye on her, but Aldara had not shown any interest.

The head and hands placement was the problem, of course. No self-respecting young lady would allow anything like that before marriage, and this couple was no more than friends, or so they told everybody in Picaraña, the parish of Cruces, and the village of Padrón. That fact, the fact that they weren’t even a couple, made the situation even worse in the opinion of some. Speculation was rampant.

Of course, the important situation was the burgeoning fire and the need to get away as quickly as possible. That was the reason why the young woman decided to throw her reputation to the winds in order to get both of them to safety, escape the fire alive. 

The question might be whether it was worth surviving if Aldara were going to have a tarnish reputation afterward. Some decisions are costly. Nowadays we don’t even consider things like that. You do whatever it takes to make it out alive.

While her initial focus - so unselfish - was on poor Ramón, the lass knew she would also be able to shield herself from the heat by soaking her heavy woolen shawl, woven by her mother, in the fountain. The shawl, black and with an intricate diamond pattern, was very ample. To be exact, it was long enough so that it covered her head when she covered it with the dripping fabric. This created a floppy visor down to her dark eyes, but it still had enough length so that it reached her hips. There it clung, joining the soggy skirts and petticoats in a veritable coat of armor. The only thing to do was to move, because standing still in the face of the terrible fire was not an option.

The odd shape that was formed by small young woman and tall young man stumbled and clumped along at a fast clip, never far ahead of the racing flames, until they came to green corn field. The flames continued along the dry path, while the two young people suddenly tumbled onto the young plants and rolled. There they lay for a few minutes, catching their breath. It wasn’t easy, because the air was laden with dark particles that clogged their nostrils and made their throats so raspy that they coughed and coughed. All they knew was that they had managed to survive, or so it seemed. They went limp with relief.

Eventually some people came to help, once it was clear that the fire was no longer heading in the direction of that corn field. It was a struggle to detach the two young people from one another, so heavy was the cloth and so scared was the couple. Of course every wiggle and stretch received a dubious interpretation, but finally the two were separate. 

For his part, Ramón was more than a little red-faced and never ever spoke about what he had gone through. Aldara had a different reaction, but it was mostly to say how thankful she was and to make the sign of the cross, then join her hands in a gesture of prayer. She credited her faith for having saved them.

 Aldara had not been burned due to her quick reaction, but Ramón would have been burned alive in his thin farmer’s clothing. He had stood there, befuddling, lost, expecting them to die. That hadn’t happened because his companion had known what to do. Had the young man’s pride suffered? The people in the village wanted to know, but they could only speculate. At least it was not the sort of thing they could laugh at, although they could pass judgment on the method the girl had chosen.

Now obviously nobody had ever told Aldara what to do in circumstances like the fire that now some people were saying had burst out of the community oven while others suggested a hay shed had heated too much beneath the cruel summer sun and had ignited spontaneously. Nevertheless, she had shown she had a quick mind. Her idea was purely her own and her goal was to get her companion and herself to safety. It didn’t matter what method they used, nor what what people thought. She had known how to do it and was not about to apologize.

 What Aldara and Ramón did to survive was the (ironically) scandalous proof of her valor and quick-thinking. Wherever the fire had started, it had been sudden and had seemed to explode around them. People to this day don’t agree on where it all started. It probably doesn’t matter much now. Besides, the emphasis in the story that has been told and retold over the course of many years is on whether the girl had been too unladylike, whether the guy had been able to do anything ungentlemanly. 

Any consideration of the fact that neither could have had any thoughts or intentions of that sort, given the perilous situation, was irrelevant.

The story of Aldara and Ramón ended with the village divided and is still told from those two points of view. As a young woman, did Aldara do the right thing or not? Was Ramón a coward for hiding under a gal’s petticoats or not? In any event, due to all the speculation by the people in Picaraña and Cruces, they both had reasons to get married, which was what they did. That appeased the villagers pretty much. 

The couple was happy and went on to have nine children, too. Some of their descendants still live in the village where Lavinia has stopped before returning home, parched from the soot-filled air and slightly hungry. Actually, most of their descendants have remained in the village or close by. None of them would have been born if Aldara had not been such a quick-witted gal. She. She got credit for that, at least.

Dr. Rivers had understood it was best to remain silent during the entire session in which the story was retold and embellished for the hundredth time. She had resisted the urge to lecture the narrators of their local color on its anti-feminist perspective regarding the judging of an act of bravery as a young woman’s act of indecent exposure. It was good that she did, because by the end of the session she saw that the story-tellers themselves - their eyes still watering and their faces still darkened by ash - had in fact been layering a parody of their creation onto the original event. None of the village lasses wore skirts like that any more and hadn’t worn them for at least a century. What held the locals’ attention seemed to be more the image of a a girl inching along with some unknown beast beneath her clothing, kind of like a figure from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights or a grotesquely sculpted capital in a Romanesque chapel.

Nobody in the group knew if the story they were telling was true. Aldara most likely had never even existed, although Picaraña and Cruces certainly did. Instead, there were many Aldaras whose ability to think resourcefully had saved lives. Both men and women had shown valor in the recent fires, either through working to extinguish the blazes that licked and consumed the earth, or by helping others to escape.

Lavinia realizes she has probably been selling the Galicians short, too quick as she had been to defend the lass in her own mind. She wanted to say something to the group that had been waiting for the fires to die down more so they could go out with buckets to put out as much as they could, to help the crews working with helicopters and hoses. Nobody really though forest fires were a joke. Nobody.

As she is leaving, Lavinia spots a little sign that says O Lugar de Aldara, Aldara’s place. In Galician the word lugar or place refers to a certain portion of a village that has a special significance to the entire community. It might be a gathering place or a site with a view. The sign was not an imposing one and it bore the words as well as an arrow. Lavinia knew she would never have understood the meaning of that sign if a real fire, much bigger and menacing, had not led her to stop for lunch in the village where she had just received the gift of an hour of Galician history.

Never assume anything about things you don’t know. The American at least knew that much now, she knew Aldara’s story had survived for so long because of what it meant to the Galicians who lived in the area where it had happened and who were probably the brave woman’s descendants.