Dan Imhoff

Underwater Archaeology

Dan Himhoff — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 17:30:27 +0000

Scuba diving was never my strong suit. I’ve always had difficulty clearing my ears, even in the deep end of a swimming pool. So I surprised myself when I signed up for a 10-day underwater adventure on the island of Menorca. It was November of 2023 and I had been fantasizing about circumnavigating the island on foot via the ancient “horse trail” called the Camí de Cavalls. Then my friend, Tim Weed, called me to consider enrolling in an underwater archeology field school with the Menorca Shipwreck Project. Tim knew the young man, Trevor Wallace, who was organizing the expedition. This was way out of my comfort zone and I had no illusions about finding buried treasure. But after a lot of hand wringing I opted in.

Menorca is an archaeological wonderland, above ground and underwater. It is the easternmost and second largest of the four Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, off of the Spanish coast near Valencia. Its history is one of continual conquest. Early humans, Phoenicians, Romans, Moors, Catalonians, English, Spanish all found their way to Menorca. Around every hillside and cove you find well-preserved efforts to transform an island of stone into human settlement. There are ancient domed structures called Taliots, field border walls, buildings and roads all made of stacked rocks. The islanders were renowned for their abilities to sling rocks with deadly accuracy and velocity. Historical accounts say they trained their children by forcing them to shoot their food out of the trees with sling shots.

Our field school class included Tim and his son, Tucker, herbalist, Sue Mullen, and me. We were headquartered in Ciutadella, a charming hilly city of about 25,000 and one of two primary ports on the island. After surviving a chilly three-day open water PADI scuba certification program, the field school began. Dives took place in Cala de Busquets, a sandy and fairly shallow harbor at the entrance of the port with a view of the silhouetted mountains of Mallorca directly to the west.

Shipwrecks have been common in Ciutadella for as long as humans have been sailing to these shores. Over many centuries, the harbor has been vulnerable to rissagas (literally “hangovers” in Catalonian). These are super low tides followed by crushing giant waves that sink ships and wreak havoc: technically meteotsunamis. Evidence of shipwrecks from various epochs — Roman, medieval, and 18th century — surfaced when archeological drill samples were required for harbor repairs. Trevor Wallace, Vice President of Research and Education at the New York-based Explorer’s Club, founded the Menorca Shipwreck Project with an international team of archaeologists including Xavier Aguelo, who was in charge of the initial archeological survey. Permits took years to acquire. An international team was assembled with all findings to be turned over to the archeology museum in Ciutadella.

The archeologists were straight out of central casting for an Indiana Jones movie. Fit, fun loving, with a facility for history and languages, they hailed from Spain, Switzerland, Siberia and the United States. It was a window into a tribe of historians who travel the globe searching for remnants of human settlement in swamps, on glaciers, on land and under water. Not plunderers or treasure seekers, but archeology geeks piecing together the scattered clues of humanity’s ancient past.

The project’s mission was to reveal as much of the carcass of a 300-year old ship as possible in a month’s time in order to prove that further exploration was justified. The vessel was thought to be the merchant ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, a trading ship out of Genoa that went down in December 1702. She lay beneath three feet of sand and a mat of native sea grass called posedonia. The underwater archeologists wanted to find out whether this was indeed the ship whose manifest reported it to be carrying textiles and mattresses, salt and esparto, goods which were regularly bought and sold along a well established western Mediterranean trading route.

Ciutadella’s harbor is a narrow channel, the walled city on one side, a marina on the other and a view of Mallorca through the harbor mouth. Offseason boat traffic was minimal. A temporary floating dock supported two Honda water pumps which powered the sand suction operation underwater. Given what we’d endured during cold, windy and deep certification dives, I almost opted out of the diving. But on our first day the team uncovered four intact pieces of pottery amidst the slowly emerging deck of the shipwreck. Within hours they were identified as artifacts dating from 1200 and 1700. Not knowing whether I would have another chance weather-wise, I took the plunge.

The harbor was just 15 feet deep. Reaching the work zone still required painfully equalizing the pressure in my ears. But once down at the wreck site I became quite comfortable. The work was physical, suctioning away a few inches of sand at a time and slowly digging a trench that would hopefully reveal the size and girth of the ship. Despite strong tides, I found I could balance and breathe calmly and do physical labor underwater. Every once in a while we swam away for a better view of the emerging deck planks of the ancient ship which no human had touched for centuries.

Dives took place in two hour shifts from 9 am to 2 pm followed by a late afternoon rendezvous at a local bar or archeology museum for an evening class. Nearly every staff member had an advanced degree and took turns presenting about the basics of underwater archeology, island history, modern 3-D photography tools, and ancient fire starting techniques. Truth be told you don’t learn much about archaeology without talking about pottery or how civilizations cared for their dead.

One evening we visited a library in Menorca’s twin port city of Mao to see for ourselves the ancient records of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. The historian wore disposable gloves to show us the 6-inch thick tome that included the hand written and notarized account of ownership, cargo, and salvage efforts as well as the costs related to storage and duties paid to the king for items recovered from the ship.

A storm was blowing from the west on the morning of our final dive. Waves belted the rocks with huge blasts of white spray. Visibility was limited. Our only goal that day was to bring to the surface the four ceramics pots which up to that time were the crowning discoveries of this year’s operation. Tucker and I were the lucky ones chosen along with the amazing husband and wife team of Carolina Sánchez and and Carlos Velasco to bring them up. Trevor documented the scene with his underwater photography gear. By now we had been diving for a week straight. But even with our increasing familiarity underwater I was still nervous. An anchor rope always seemed to catch me by surprise on my way back to the dock. We cradled each pot in two hands in teams of two and I handed it off to Carlos before we got the surface. It was important to submerge the artifacts immediately in water as exposure to the change in atmospheric pressure could cause them to disintegrate.

Tucker and I returned to our respective homes in Cairo and Valencia. Tim and Sue and the team kept working for a few days more. On his last day, Tim, who’d missed a number of dives because of illness, found a wooden bowl between the planks of the ship. The entire site was carefully documented with 3-D cast models, photographs and videos before it was covered with sand once again to prevent looting. Despite all the efforts of the first year of the Field School, it has not been definitively determined whether this in fact was the Nuestra Señora or the remains of another vessel.

There are things you do, places you go, times in your life that require more than you think you have to give. Things that leave you looking back in wonder, ready to return to your comfortable life, but hoping for a chance to return. You never know until you’ve been there and done it. This in itself is a reason to try.

La entrada Underwater Archaeology se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Baseball

Dan Himhoff — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 07:10:57 +0000

It was the morning of my tenth birthday. My dad and I had tickets to see the Phillies host the Astros at Connie Mack Stadium. But outside it was pouring, a typical late August thunderstorm in south-central Pennsylvania. I’d been waiting for this game all summer and it was hard to hold back my disappointment. Being the soft hearted and generous soul he was, my father agreed to make the three-hour roundtrip to Philadelphia regardless of the storm.

We arrived at the ancient ballpark in time for the first pitch, the sun now blasting through the clouds. Except for a few thousand other hard core fans, we had the stadium to ourselves. Connie Mack was originally known as Shibe Park and opened in 1909 as the home of the Philadelphia Athletics. It had a nostalgic vibe with wooden seats and bleachers and ornamental wrought iron posts, the kind of place that came of age when Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were stars. Connie Mack Stadium reached its glory (and highest single day turnout) when Jackie Robinson made his debut in a double header between the Phillies and the Brooklyn Dodgers on May 11, 1947.

The Phillies won that rainy August Sunday and I can say with over 50 years of experience that being a Phillies fan is like having malaria. It stays in your blood for life and at some point every summer you get sick.

Playing baseball was a big part of my identity growing up. Despite severe hay fever I loved the baseball season. Waiting for the pre-season to begin, the chance to play two games a week, the uniform, the crack of wooden and aluminum bats, the snack shop with snow cones and bubble gum and extra treats when we won. I even loved baseball as a catcher wearing all that extra gear in 98 degree weather with 100 percent humidity. To feed my passion I invented my own fantasy league long before anything like that ever existed, using a baseball card game and dice and meticulous score keeping.

The fields were in an industrial area of town. The grass was mowed regularly and the foul lines and batter’s box laid down with fresh lime before every game. There were dugouts made of cinder blocks and painted plywood advertisements on the outfield fences and an electronic scoreboard and an announcer. It was all serious business, which didn’t thrill my dad. He thought we kids should just be thrown in a pit with balls, bats and gloves and encouraged to make up our own rules. Sometimes my grandparents would come to watch. My Dad’s dad, Howard, had white hair and a white goatee and the kids would say, “Hey look, Colonel Sanders is here!” That was my grandpa.

For many years I was a very good player for my age and I think that had to do with my eyesight. When I was ten I hit a double off of Bob Fox who was two years older than me and really intimidating. I ripped a fastball off one of the wooden advertising plaques in center field. I must have been gloating because the next time I came up Bob Fox drilled me in the ribs, which left a bruise for about a week. Still, that double was worth it and foreshadowed the hitter I would become.

I remained an All Star for a number of years. My eyesight changed drastically between my twelfth and thirteenth years. I’ve worn prescription glasses ever since. That made catching harder and curtailed my peripheral vision.

The summer after eighth grade my parents agreed to send me to Mickey Owens Baseball Camp in Miller, Missouri. This was a huge deal. It meant flying on my own to St. Louis and venturing out in the world for the first time away from my family. I met kids from all over the country, including Carl from San Diego who had also just completed eighth grade. He had blond hair and talked like a surfer and his favorite expression was “Alrighty then!” Carl regaled me with stories about nickel bags of marijuana and one of his friends who had gotten his girlfriend pregnant in junior high school. That was a real eye opener. They grew up much faster on the West Coast.

The counselors were athletes who were trying to become pros. They timed our speed between home plate and first base with a stop watch. We had sessions on hitting, fielding, pitching and catching, the ins and outs of sliding. It was all baseball all the time. We played three games per day until the oppressive midwestern sun went down. I was still catching and wearing all that gear but I would soon transition to the outfield. I think it was around this time I began to realize that I might not have what it takes to be a professional baseball player. For a very select few baseball is a field of dreams. For others it’s where childhood dreams die.

I had promised my dad I would try out for the high school football team in return for sponsoring the trip to Missouri. I did try out but got injured very quickly. It wasn’t easy to start football in high school without having played formally at a younger age. I played baseball until my junior year. When I didn’t cut my hair high enough above my collar, I was cut from the team by coach Bushy. He was determined to weed out the Freaks from the Jocks. Somewhere along the line I had lost my competitive drive. Almost immediately I started playing guitar and studying ceramics and experimenting with drugs and alcohol and living closer to the life my San Diego friend Carl had described years earlier in the cabin at baseball camp.

To this day I spend way too much time following the malaria stricken Phillies. For many people it’s way too slow and much more of a game than a sport. I marvel at its innate brilliance, the hundred-mile per hour fastballs, the probability (and improbability) of a catcher throwing out someone trying to steal second base, the home runs and sacrifices and double plays, and just how hard it is to close out a game with a small lead. The one thing I can’t understand is the spitting. Why do they have to spit so much?

I’m offended when I hear someone say that so and so “sucks” when talking about a professional ball player. It’s so difficult to play baseball at the highest level, even though some days watching the pros feels like you’re at a Little League game. To be in that rarified company of people who make their living at a kid’s game is such an extraordinary accomplishment.

I am thinking in particular about a current Phillies player named Mark Appel. He was a high school star from California who went to Stanford and was selected number 1 in the Major League Draft by the Houston Astros. Then he went through a decade of setbacks — mental anxieties, injuries and illnesses. For years he carried the burden of being “the biggest Number 1 draft bust in the history of baseball.” He even stepped away from the game for a time.

Finally, this season, at the age of 30, Mark Appel walked onto the field at Citizen’s Bank in a Phillies uniform. It brought him to tears. In a recent article in the New York Times, after finally achieving his dream of playing on a major league field, Appel said:

“I came into this year knowing each day might be my last. Genuinely I was at a point where I was still trying to figure out what my role was — reliever, starter — do I still have it in me to put up good numbers, things like that. So if each day was going to be my last, I’m going to enjoy it. And I really enjoyed tonight.”*

These are words spoken from the deep well of the human spirit, which, more often than you may realize, finds its way onto a baseball field.

Now if we could only move beyond the spitting.

* “If Each Day Was Going to be My Last, I’m Going to Enjoy It,” New York Times, Victor Mather, June 30, 2022.

Photo: York Dispatch, Summer 1971, (middle row, second from left).

La entrada Baseball se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Almuerzo

Dan Himhoff — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 07:10:40 +0000

When I was working on the Peregrino album I commuted from the Ruzafa neighborhood to Estudio Millennia in La Fontet de San Luis. The walk took 25 minutes and I could use the time for vocal warmups or to meditate on what we were trying to accomplish on that particular day. Recording sessions started at 10:30. Already there were hundreds of people sitting at sidewalk tables enjoying almuerzo, which lasts from 9 to 12 and is the second of the Valencianos’ five daily meals. This always put me in a good mood.

The almuerzo, or esmorzaret as they call it in the local language, is a way of life in the Province of Valencia. It’s a vestige of an agrarian culture where the workday started early and a considerable caloric intake was essential. Transplanted into a 21st century urban environment the almuerzo has evolved into a gastronomic phenomenon that other Spaniards view with awe.

Cured olives and roasted peanuts are a requisite appetizer. Sometimes they serve light green pickled guandillo peppers which are finger-length and pack a vinegary and spicy crunch. The beer and wine are flowing. Next come sandwiches called bocadillos. These are half baguettes, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, brimming with manchego and jamón, fried calamari and alli oli, some variation of the Spanish omelette called tortilla, meatballs, or a myriad offerings. The almuerzo is typically finished off with a coffee. A popular version, called a cremaet, is spiked with a layer of rum and sugar.

There is something tremendously fascinating and uplifting about people who go to bed at 1 or 2 and start the party back up again at 10 a.m. These aren’t just college students. It’s universal: young and old, police officers and heavy equipment operators, grandparents and office workers. At least one part of the world still knows how to enjoy themselves.

I dedicated the last four weeks in search of the best tortilla in Valencia and quickly learned firsthand that there is no such thing. The best tortilla, more often than not, is the one right in front of you. Hopefully you are thanking your lucky stars before digging in.

A Spanish tortilla consists of beaten eggs and a filling, typically potatoes — or onions and potatoes. The filling is cooked in hot oil and strained then blended in a bowl with the eggs. That mixture is poured into a pan with more olive oil over a medium flame. Once the moisture cooks off the spongy omelette is skillfully flipped so it browns on both sides. The thickness varies from one to almost three inches. It should be soft and glistening but not raw or too runny inside.

The Conquistadors brought the potato from Peru to Spain in the 16th century. Whether a tortilla should include onions is a major cultural divide. Everybody has a preference that probably originates in the womb. None of the restauranteurs who I asked were forthcoming about what set their tortillas apart. Was it the olive oil, the cooking time, secret sources of eggs, potatoes or onions, just the right amount of salt?

For me, eating even half a tortilla for almuerzo usually also counts for lunch, or comida. That’s the third meal in Spain’s bottomless quiver of eating and drinking rituals. With a filling of potatoes and onions (my preference!), spring garlic, veggies, or bacalao (a salty cod and potato mixture which is also super good), tortillas are fortifying. I tried them in city markets, a former Communist Party headquarters and in the home of my dear friend, Jorge, who gave me a personal demonstration on the finer aspects of tortilla making. A Madrileña told me the only place you can find a legitimate tortilla in the whole country is in the capital.

In his excellent book, Grape, Olive, Pig, Matt Goulding writes that in the years following the Spanish Civil War, a popular recipe was tortilla de patatas sin patatas ni huevos, (a tortilla without eggs or potatoes). Written by Ignasi Domènech, this was a response to the poverty that gripped southern Europe in the middle of the 20th century. Food was often in short supply. Dirt was added to bread flour. People learned to transform scraps of meat and vegetables into dishes. In this omelette recipe, the rind and pith of an orange mimicked the texture of the potato. Flour and water replaced the egg. Decades later this culture of culinary ingenuity propelled Spanish chefs onto the global stage. Combining traditional techniques with micro-gastronomy and tasting menus, they revolutionized 21 century restaurant cuisine.

My friend, Salva, recounted with relish that one of his childhood favorites was tortilla with potato chips. “It’s nice and crunchy and the chips already have a lot of oil.” This is a common dish in Andalusia. You can even find a recipe for omelette with potato chips from superstar chef Ferran Adrià (El Bulli).

The tortilla has a few hilarious roles in the 1990s social satire “Jamón Jamón.” Silvia, played by the often half-naked 18 year old Penélope Cruz, says that if it wasn’t for helping her mother, who sold tortillas to pay their bills, she would never make another one again. Later in the film, her lover, Raúl, played by her now husband, Javier Bardem, proclaims that Silvia’s breasts taste like jamón and tortillas and chili peppers. This was director Bigas Luna whirling up Spanish cuisine with sexuality in a cinematic blender. It definitely worked for me.

Matt Goulding, Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Food Culture, Harper Wave, 2016. Look for my interview with Matt in the upcoming Season 2 of the Full Expression Podcast.

La entrada Almuerzo se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Rewilding

Dan Himhoff — Sun, 29 May 2022 07:10:22 +0000

A number of years ago I found myself in northern Argentina being chased through a grassland by a giant anteater. It was a large mammal with a tapered snout and nails on its front paws like curly fries. In Spanish he’s known as oso hormiguero gigante. He (I believe it was a male) had been radio-collared and reintroduced in an area of wetlands called the Esteros of Iberrá in the province of Corrientes.

My guide was a veterinarian from Europe working with Tompkins Conservation, now known as Rewilding Argentina. She carried a hand-held tracking device that looked like a small satellite dish. What the oso hormiguero really wanted was one of the milkshakes the recovery team had been occasionally feeding him since his release to the wild. This afternoon we didn’t have one. Hence our dash through the overhead reeds once we’d spotted him from a safe distance. This was a surprisingly agile animal who really wanted his milkshake. My heart was literally beating out of my chest with both fear and excitement.

If you’ve ever seen ant hills in northern Argentina you can understand why someone might want to reintroduce a giant anteater. The ant colonies are unlike any I have ever seen. They move in caravans carrying blades of grass and other materials three times their body length, basically carving inch-wide super highways out of the grasslands. Their ant hills are equivalent to skyscrapers, maybe bigger than ours on a relative scale, about chest high to a human and made of red clay that bakes like adobe. You need a tractor to knock them down and they can cover acres of land. Giant anteaters have thin straw-like tongues and eat ants and termites. They are also endemic to this grassland habitat.

Rewilding is a concept that has been around for many decades. The team at Rewilding Argentina refers to this work as restoring a landscape to “Full Nature.” They are master puzzle solvers who study how ecosystems have been torn apart and then find ways to restore habitats and species and communities to some semblance of natural balance. This idea is gaining interest all over the world. Integral to these efforts are species reintroduction projects on every continent: tigers in India, lynx in Spain, wild horses and donkeys (Kulan) in the Ukraine, wolves in North America, beavers in England, jaguars in Argentina, various marsupials in Australia, large animals in southern Africa. This is an extremely abbreviated list.

We recently spent two days in an auditorium listening to speakers at the First Global Meeting of Translocation Practitioners in Valencia, Spain. The conference was organized by Ignacio Jimenez, who has worked for decades to save endangered animals and spearheaded the giant anteater (and other species) reintroductions for Rewilding Argentina. It took place in the Oceanogràfic, an aquarium complex that is part of the Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias in the city’s old river bed. The backdrop of the stage was the glass wall of an aquarium. Speakers from around the world recounted their tales of relocating wild animals to protected landscapes. Behind the speakers was an ever evolving scene of swimming and twirling and gliding fish and sharks.

Their stories were the stories of the heroic struggle to reverse the extinction crisis. We heard in great detail about their trials and tribulations, successes and failures. All kinds of factors can derail reintroduction efforts: diseases that affect prey and move up the food chain; hostile communities who poison or hunt wolves and tigers; years of successful gains wiped out by drought; the hybridization of wild animals with other species (red wolves mating with coyotes, for example); bureaucratic road blocks.

One of the presenter’s slides was deeply alarming. At the dawn of the human era, 99 percent of the weight of the Earth’s vertebrates and landmass consisted of and supported what we today call wildlife. Out of the wild came domestication. Most of the species that didn’t suit human needs for food, fiber, traction, companionship, indulgences or our sense of security were exterminated or driven to increasingly remote places. Today livestock account for two-thirds of the Earth’s vertebrates and landmass and humans about one-third. Wildlife are down to 1 percent.

The speakers highlighted many lessons learned about Rewilding over the last four decades:

much of the work is political rather than biological in nature;
stories matter more than data;
people are threatened by the concept of rewilding — especially of large carnivores;
talking about community- and nature-based economies is far more relatable than “rewilding”;
there is a bias that farming, ranching, forestry or development are economically superior to land conservation;
biologists are becoming more flexible (and less purist) about the introduction of species from other regions, countries and even continents;
zoos may become important sources of species genetics through captive breeding programs;
the true measure of success for a rewilding effort is the ability to translocate “surplus” populations to other areas;
you can never be too complacent, challenges are always right around the corner.

It’s difficult to hear that restoring the beauty of the natural world is not a compelling enough reason for communities and governments to get behind rewilding efforts. Yet this is what we heard over and over for two days. Local communities must become partners in these projects and they must see that the economic benefits will outweigh the risks.

The good news is that Rewilding is extremely effective at job creation. Meanwhile, agricultural areas around the world are being dewatered, depopulated, poisoned and are dependent upon billions of dollars of government support. Many conservationists have learned that, in addition to identifying and preparing animals for relocation, their main challenge is political. Communities need to understand the natural legacies they have lost. New businesses can be incentivized. And politicians sometimes must be allowed to take the credit once all the work is done.

While Argentina is a relative newcomer to the rewilding movement, South Africa has been at it for decades. Wildlife protection has been monetized on a variety of levels. They have developed an infrastructure of helicopters and other equipment to transport elephants, rhinos, cheetahs, and other very large animals across countries and continents. Conservation organizations and government agencies have invested considerable resources in defending themselves and wildlife against well-armed and sophisticated poaching operations. Most of the conference presenters acknowledged the enormous contributions of the South African conservationists.

There is a sane vision for the future: nature-based economies centered around resilient rural communities, eco tourism and creating the most biodiverse landscapes we can imagine.

Say whatever needs to be said to rewild hearts and minds. Release whatever you can. Save whatever you can. Don’t hesitate. And offer a prayer for the conservation translocation practitioners. Their work is beyond inspiring.

Photo: Oso hormiguero gigante (notice its tongue!), Jackie Russell, DVM

La entrada Rewilding se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Full Expression Year One

Dan Himhoff — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 09:27:09 +0000

I’ve just completed a full year of monthly interviews for the podcast about creativity, which calls for a self assessment of sorts. My grandfather, Howard Imhoff, was a painter and an art teacher. Apparently he used to tell his students that only the masters deserved an A and he would give himself a B. I give myself a B: “not too shabby but with plenty of room for improvement.”

The name Full Expression came from something my friend, Michael Presley, said to me many years ago. He is a serious garden farmer who works fourteen hours a day and we were walking through some raised rows and stopped at a fava bean cover crop. According to Michael, Rudolph Steiner, the father of biodynamic farming — of which Michael is a practitioner — said that plants should be allowed to go to seed so that they can fully express their true biological nature. I took this to heart and began letting all the vegetables and flowers and cover crops in my garden go to seed. In a few years my chosen domesticated plants had become “weeds.” When we came home from Spain and began the Covid isolation in March 2020 we were eating potatoes, zucchini, lettuces and all kinds of other things that had volunteered in our compost piles and garden beds. The sunflowers, calendulas, cardoons and matilija poppies had likewise spread with abandon across the homestead.

Creativity should work this way. As so many of my guests from Season One of Full Expression confirmed, the practice is the art. It’s not that finishing doesn’t matter. But most essential is that you become what you practice during the countless hours when you are actively engaged in the creative struggle for full expression.

I learned a great many things from last year’s conversations. Episode 8 guest Jessica Martin talked about a vocabulary of shapes she has been developing over many decades. She also spoke of the self doubt that often accompanies her creative process. These resonate with me as I know it takes me at least a decade to achieve mediocrity at almost anything. A few months after our interview, Jessica was featured in the New York Times for a project she started with elementary school students — a call line where they can receive pep talks and advice from their peers to help them through these challenging times.

In Episode 3 chef and cookbook author Abra Berens told us that some of her inspiration for flexible menus came from one of her favorite clothing designers who made a dress that could be folded a dozen different ways. Laura Guido-Clark explained that studies show how color waves permeate the skin of the blind, altering their moods. This is just an inkling of the power of color. Photographer J Henry Fair advised activists to have a distribution plan and marketing budget before embarking on a communication campaign in order to successfully get the word out beyond their own echo chambers. Ames Morrison and I talked about how long wine making has been an integral part of our collective human experience. (Much longer than skis which have been around for many thousands of years with remarkably high levels of craftsmanship!)

Just the other day I was walking down Caller Sueca in my adopted neighborhood of Valencia Spain. I came across a large poster advertising the Killers as part of a three-day music festival coming to the city this summer. Their drummer, Ronnie Vannucci, was featured in Episode 4. In fact, he was the person who convinced me to try out this podcast idea in the first place. Among many topics we touched on, Ronnie spoke to me about the need for more communication as a critical and often lacking ingredient in the band dynamic.

How can I forget Alam Khan’s story about his grandfather tying his hair to the ceiling so he would be yanked back to consciousness to return to practicing the sarode. Or Tim Weed playing banjo with the orchestra in an old movie studio. Adam Wolpert painting thousands of branches only to discover that the exercise was as much about himself as it was about making a portrait of an oak tree. Chris Blum describing his film work with Tom Waits as eating the most incredible piece of candy, Shea Breaux Wells’ amazing singing in the Llama Shed and PC Muñoz playing his rhythm stick.

There were times when I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, which is humbling and inherent to the interviewing process. The truth is that I have always wanted to know how someone does something that I am interested in, not just at a shallow or primitive level, but how to be extremely good at it. And I have been pursuing most of the same interests for most of my adult life.

All of these things and a whole lot more are telling me that Full Expression is right on track. I want to thank all of my guests from Season 1 for taking the time to talk with me and for sharing their amazing stories and insights. I’d also like to thank Roberto Carra for our artwork and Patrick Sexton for our audio production.

I promise we will continue to improve and evolve. Look for Season 2 late this summer or in early fall 2022. In the mean time, may the seeds of your efforts become the weeds of whatever you choose to do with your precious time. And thanks so much for listening.

La entrada Full Expression Year One se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Half Life

Dan Himhoff — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 10:24:49 +0000

I learned to ski at a fairly young age, and like a number of activities I participated in early on, skiing became part of my adult persona. We got season passes to a mole hill called Ski Roundtop, where the snow was often man-made and the vertical drop was all of 600 feet. There were two chairlifts and lights for night skiing and the longest run took less than a minute to descend. Still I found skiing exhilarating and something I wanted to pursue.

Thirty years ago almost to the day I had quite a misadventure in the snow. I get to thinking about it every year around the Ides of March because it was a definitive life experience.

I was cross country skiing in the Donner Pass area of California with my girlfriend of just a few months, Quincey Tompkins, a high school exchange student, Philip Shearer, and a black lab Australian shepherd mix named Betty. We had skied a few miles up to a hut for lunch and were returning to the trailhead. I decided to climb up into the mountains for more of a challenge. Betty was wearing a pack with a few essential items like a map and a compass and a little food. After racing back and forth between us, she decided to go with Quincey and Philip.

As I climbed up to the shoulder of Castle Peak the flurries turned into a blizzard. I carved some turns down what I thought was a logical route to our meeting place. But I was turned around. I skied for a long time in the opposite direction of where I thought I was going. The snow fell harder. It got colder. I called out. There was no one around. In hind sight I should have stopped right there and retraced my path back up the peak and down to the hut then the car. But darkness was falling and I decided on another plan: make a snow cave and wait out the storm.

This idea came from a guidebook I had read on backcountry skiing. Somehow I could see the pages on avalanche and emergency preparedness in my mind even though I didn’t have a photographic memory. I found a depression under a huge boulder that was well protected, collected five or six armfuls of pine branches, and climbed in. I hadn’t made a snow cave before and this one wouldn’t have won any prizes. I had dressed for spring skiing with knickers and a fleece top rather than for a winter storm, and needless to say, it was freezing. Snow was falling steadily.

The gravity of my situation was quickly obvious. I made the decision that if I was going to make it back to safety I wanted to do so with all my fingers and toes. I had read a book by John Muir called Stickeen, about a sleety night he spent with a small dog on a glacier in Alaska. He ran in place under a sheltered ledge and I based my plan on his example. This meant scrunching my fingers and toes together inside my mittens and leather boots for a few minutes. My body’s reaction to these simple movements took me by surprise. My abdomen began convulsing somewhat violently for several minutes followed by another bout of hyperventilation. After a few rounds I realized that this was my body’s way of telling me that it wanted to keep the blood around my vital organs. It was perfectly willing to sacrifice my extremities. At least that was how I interpreted it. Either way, I quickly adopted this routine throughout the night: moving fingers and toes, convulsing then hyperventilating until my heart settled down and I could start the exercise all over again.

I slept very little with all kinds of thoughts racing through my head and when dawn broke I felt elated. A foot of snow had fallen, however, and there were no tracks to retrace. I skied energetically for what I thought was an hour in what I thought was the right direction. Then I crossed my tracks. This was devastating. It began to snow again and there was no sun to get my bearings. I was completely lost.

I skied all day heading toward what I hoped was the highway. The wind howled like the sound of highway traffic but I was caught in a drainage far from any paved road and far from where I’d started. I climbed a ridge only to find more ridges beyond that. I worked hard to block out fearful or dismal thoughts. Instead I focused on having a plan. I remember falling down in the powder and needing to use a lot of energy to pick myself out of the snow and saying to myself, “be intentional with your movements! Don’t fall! Think like a rabbit,” whose tracks I had seen, “he uses only the energy he has to.”

I drank water from emerging streams and skied most of the day until reaching a large lake created by the Fordyce Dam. The skiing conditions were incredible. I was flying on old school wooden waxable Norwegian skis. As I crossed the snowy lake I experienced some hallucinations of an imaginary village but made sure to stick to my plan and keep moving. There were a number of cabins around the dam but they were all safeguarded with metal doors and burglar bars. For some reason I decided that following the creek gave me the best chance to find a road out.

Breaking trail around trees and thick scrub and boulders was tough going and I was getting soaked. Darkness was coming, especially down in the drainage and it was time to make a second cave. This one was more igloo like. I made it with big snow balls. It had a side entrance I could slide in and out of and I again laid out a bed of branches. Before I climbed in I had to wring about a glass worth of water from each of my wool socks before putting them and my boots back on.

It was another night of scrunching and shaking. Time passed painfully but I told myself that if this was what had to be done this is what I would do for six nights straight. At one point I sensed a rather large creature on the outside of my cave. Later the clouds lifted and the storm subsided and it got extremely cold. After a number of hours I decided I had to do something to get my body moving. In the predawn blackness I climbed my way back up to the dam. It was freezing. I found a big pile of railroad ties and snuggled in amongst them.

The sun came out and it was a whole new day with a foot or two of glistening powder in all directions that is normally an adrenaline pumping sight for any skier. Again, following the advice of the guidebook I made a sign across the dam with the railroad ties for rescuers to find me: DAN 17. It was the 17th of March. The day before had been my grandmother’s eighty second birthday.

Where the hell was everybody, I was thinking. I had made it all this time, left plenty of clear tracks, why weren’t they looking for me? I sat on the dam as the sun rose in the sky, warming myself, finally getting a bit of rest. I ate half of the pack of Peanut M and Ms which Quincey had given me before we parted.

After some time in the warm sun I decided to explore the maintenance cabins. I noticed a sign for a Girl Scout camp I hadn’t seen before. There seemed to be a road. Exploring this route would be my Plan B if I couldn’t break into a cabin. I chose one that had some known commodities I could see through the window: a box of pasta and a bottle of Wild Turkey. But it was all locked up. I found a plank under a deck and a large stone and I leaned it up against the window. I stood on the board for some time pounding the burglar bars with the rock. For two sleepless nights, I had an amazing amount of strength.

I shattered the glass and tried to force my body through the bars but my efforts were futile. At one point I stepped back from the plank and noticed two troubling signs. I had nicked my elbow and there was an arc of blood in the snow from my pounding. There was also a piece of glass hanging straight above me like a guillotine blade I had failed to notice when I was trying to lunge between the bars.

I was thinking it was time to head toward the Girl Scout camp when I heard chopper blades. A helicopter was coming straight across the lake toward the dam and I waved my arms like the desperate soul I had become. They circled around then landed not far from me, a police unit out of Sacramento. I gathered up my skis and poles and someone helped me into the back. As I climbed into the seat I reached down for some support and the pilot screamed “Don’t touch that lever it could flip us over!”

Quincey and Philip had it much harder than I did. That’s a whole other worthy tale. They spent two days and nights with a wilderness search and rescue team that had been looking for me about twenty miles from where I ended up. Because of the storm, no one could fly. We were all united eventually, after Quincey and Philip got back with the rescue team and I’d been interviewed by the local news and cleared of any injuries except a little sunburn at the hospital emergency room.

This was an undeniably stupid predicament to put myself and all of my friends and family through. It was also life affirming. I had no idea how truly strong my will to stay on this planet was. So rarely have I had to fight like this to make it one more day. Still I look back and think I really got away with one. The angels had my back. A door closed on thirty-two years of living and from then on was the beginning of my second life.

I went on to do many things. I became a husband, a father, wrote books and recorded albums, learned the basics of small-scale farming and forestry. Skiing has remained a constant, although I’ve spent most of my subsequent years in-bounds. I hope I’ve made the most of my time.

In case you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few thoughts, Wiggle fingers and toes, shake, breathe. Always have a Plan A and Plan B. Be ready for the unexpected. Keep the negative thoughts at bay.

La entrada Half Life se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Rescue Dog

Dan Himhoff — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 10:17:33 +0000

In September we left our Bubble of nearly eighteen months and ventured to Durham, North Carolina where our daughter, Willa, had relocated. To overstate the obvious, flying is not what it used to be. Our Dallas connection was delayed. This gave us a front row seat into state of the union, which was neither hopeful nor impressive.

Mask requirements were en force and the airline we chose had stopped serving alcohol in Economy on domestic flights. In addition to Covid, there is an epidemic of belligerent passengers. Some of them might even be stone cold sober. As a result, beleaguered airline employees must now serve as public health officers and onboard police.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A report released last fall by the world’s top climate scientists warns that we have just ten years until we turn things around or reach a critical Point of No Return. Their grim announcement, along with a vaccine booster, figured into our decision to venture out. We know all too well that air travel directly contributes to planetary warming. We also do our best to limit our flying and use it only for destinations where we can’t drive or take a train. However, this type of rationalization is probably why we are doomed as a species.

Durham is a pretty cool city with vibrant neighborhoods, lots of street art, and a thriving local food scene. Vaccine cards were required to enter a bar on our first night, which was also the first bar we’d visited in nearly two years, except for the one in the Dallas Airport. (We had vowed not to spend a single dime in Texas because of recent political developments. Then our flight was delayed, which rapidly shattered that commitment, on my end at least.)

On 9th Street we found an amazing store called Regulator Books. It’s housed in an old building with glass bricks in the facade. Regulator rivals some of my favorite haunts like The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana and Point Reyes Books in northern California and Green Apple in San Francisco’s Richmond District. A great book store is like a spa for the brain. I can spend hours looking at titles, admiring covers, reading staff reviews, skimming pages and browsing the collective literary output of humanity knowing I will never read a sliver of the 50,000 titles published in a single year. I had no business buying any more books but I chose an illustrated biography of the Norwegian painter Edward Munch which they mailed home for my return. On the plane I had started The Wild Trees, a 2009 book about California’s redwood ecosystems and a group of misfits dedicated to climbing and measuring the tallest tree. I dare you to not finish that book. Regulator had a paperback copy in stock, which said a lot.

We visited the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. This is situated in a rambling park with open fields, walking trails, outdoor sculpture gardens and a reflecting pool. The exhibition buildings and an amphitheater are nestled in the landscape. Among my favorite pieces was a painting by Georgia O’Keefe of rural New Mexico (“Cebolla Church”) dazzling with simplicity and primitive color.

One afternoon before sunset we strolled with Willa and her girlfriend, Emma, through the Sarah Duke Botanical Gardens admiring the ambitious mashup of trees and plants from Japan and North America, seeing only a fraction of the grounds. Stunning barely describes this place.

Earlier that Saturday morning the four of us had gone to Durham’s Central Park to see the farmers market. This is a cultural hub just as it is for tens of thousands of communities across the country and the world. It’s one of the first places we go in a new place to find Our People. There we met our very first farmers market poet. He was sitting at a small folding table with a portable antique typewriter and a sign: “Poems Your Topic Your Price.” The typewriter case sat at his feet overflowing with titles and topics written in Sharpie on white slips of paper.

I asked if he was a creative writing student and he said no he taught poetry in a public high school. He could not have been more pleasant. Lots of people were purchasing poems and he clicked away with the hypnotic look of a jazz musician in mid solo. We put $10 in the tip jar and took a spin around the market.

After Durham we were driving to Pennsylvania to visit my 91-year old mother. She had recently adopted a dog that she renamed after her mother who had passed away a few years ago. Polly had already bitten a number of people who stopped by the house to meet her, including two of my brothers and my sister-in-law. This was on my mind when I picked up the felt tipped pen to jot down a topic for our poet. We received:

Rescue Dog

I think you are called that

as you so often rescue those that are worthy

of your smile ..

how dare anyone think we are helping you ..

when the help that you so easily give

is so often effortless and willing

I hope .. we can always be what you give us ..

peace

Rescuing a dog is a bold leap of faith and something I have never undertaken. The poet had no idea about Polly’s history of misbehavior but he intuitively had a sense of my mother’s extremely kind heart and soft spot for troubled beings. The rescue dog’s aggressive outbursts continued for some months and then almost miraculously reversed. I assume it was a combination of unconditional and tough love—along with a lot of patience—on my mom’s part.

On a sunny Sunday we drove the back roads to my childhood hometown in southern Pennsylvania. A perfectly cold but creamy vanilla and chocolate soft serve ice cream in Virginia was the most memorable event of that route.

La entrada Rescue Dog se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Mucha Mierda

Dan Himhoff — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 10:08:44 +0000

In Valencia there is a small club called Bar Centro Excursionista. Many cities and towns throughout Spain have clubs with a similar name but these are typically organizations that promote hiking and camping. This is not one of those. The sign above the door of Bar Centro Excursionista shows a man being beamed up into a flying saucer. The narrow space inside holds about 50 chairs. There’s a small stage bordered by burgundy velvet curtains. Along one wall is a standup piano. On the other side is a juke box. This is an outstanding venue because of its loyal clientele who come to experience live music, especially of the Americana and Spanish pop varieties. As a musician, I appreciate how easily the room fills up and the careful attention to sound quality.

I arrived in Valencia in September with a backpack full of songs I’d been working on for nearly two years. Hoping for a swift return in early 2020, I had stashed three guitars there with friends. But that was before Covid-19 threw a wrench in most of the world’s well laid plans. I wrote more than half of this new repertoire during the often painful isolation of 2020 and 2021 in my studio in northern California. For me, this included recovering from shoulder surgery and sending a few painkiller-inspired verses to my friend Ido Goldberg in Israel who immediately set them to music. I learned to play mandolin because guitar was off limits during the first three months of rehab. Once I got my chops back and most of Sonoma County was fully vaccinated I began practicing with a young bassist named Dylan Juhan. Over the summer, Isha Erskine, a Grammy winning producer, helped these songs evolve with a number of pre-production sessions. By the time I reached Spain I felt more prepared than usual — musically and spiritually— to launch a recording project.

I found my way to Rio Bravo, a gem of a studio in Xirivella (pronounced chee-ree-vā-ya) just west of Valencia. Its owners, Xema Fuertes and Cayo Bellvesser, are both extremely accomplished musicians and also the proprietors of Bar Centro Excursionista. Along with my good friend keyboardist Amadeo Moscardó and a small rhythm section (including Cayo on bass) the fun began. Within a week we laid down tracks for 8 songs. On and off over the next month — with Xema as producer and multi-instrumentalist — we added melodic hooks, vocal harmonies and other ear worms to the grooves I brought from California.

Our recording sessions were usually punctuated by 3 o’clock comidas at the local bar. We sat at tables along a busy street. Depending on the autumn weather we chose either the sunny or shady side. My typical lunch consisted of Spanish tortilla, iceberg lettuce salad and a bottle of Estrella Galicia beer topped off with a cafe solo. I did my best to keep up with the band’s rapid-fire conversations in Castellano and Valenciano.

One afternoon they were talking about an upcoming weekend of shows at Excursionista. They were backing a friend who was releasing his first album. It was dedicated to his sister who had tragically passed away. The shows were completely sold out and he was extremely nervous. Their rehearsals were cutting into our recording time.

I asked if there was a Spanish equivalent of saying “break a leg” before a performance. “Mucha mierda,” someone replied, which literally means “lots of shit.” On the surface this doesn’t seem too encouraging. But surely breaking a leg is much worse. Mucha mierda apparently derives from a time when people arrived at theaters and performances in horse drawn carriages. The popularity of an event could be measured in the amount of waste generated by the horses that helped fill the seats.

“Break a leg” may go back to the ancient Greeks who stomped their feet on amphitheater stones in appreciation. It’s also said that audiences in Elizabethan England applauded by banging their chairs on the floor. In either case, an overly enthusiastic response might break a leg.

I never exactly understood why we wished someone physical harm so that they would do well. But this didn’t stop me from saying it. I’m continually amazed by how much learning a second or third language teaches me about the one I’m supposed to already know.

I hope to release the new album project in 2022 and roll it out in small venues across Spain starting with Bar Centro Excursionista. The vibe is so cool and the Valencianos are so gracious, especially when the house band is playing and the audience gets to sing along. If you think about it, wish me mucha mierda. I will definitely take it in the spirit intended.

La entrada Mucha Mierda se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Lessons of Dislocation

Dan Himhoff — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 09:02:30 +0000

This article originally appeared in a special edition of Agriculture and Human Values, 2020.

On a Saturday morning in early March I arrived at the local farm supply hoping to buy two dozen baby chicks. Just five minutes after opening I found myself number 46 in a queue that wrapped from the store front across the parking lot and around the corner. Blue tape marks were spaced every six feet on the pavement but few people observed the social distancing guidelines recently issued in Sonoma County.

This scene freaked me out. In addition to hoarding cleaning and personal hygiene products—our collective survival instinct was to become personally involved in the food supply. Never mind that the chicks would take at least five months to lay an egg. After an hour I reached the incubation room. Only three of the original fifteen varieties remained. But the Cornish Cross broilers I wanted had barely been selected. In eight weeks these chicks would reach harvest weight. I was determined that they would be raised as healthfully as possible: with sunshine, fresh bedding, organic feed twice a day, and grapefruit seed extract to cleanse their fragile digestive systems.

By mid-April a New York Times article (Corkery and Yaffe-Bellany 2020) reported that meat processing factories had become hot spots for Coronavirus outbreaks. Decades of consolidation have created bottlenecks in our nation’s food system and meat processing is a glaring example. Since the 1980s there has been a broad scale shift from unionized plants in urban centers to rural areas close to feedlots and cheap immigrant labor pools. Only 800 slaughterhouses in the United States now process billions of pounds of beef, pork and chicken per year. They are massive and geographically concentrated. Work on these disassembly lines is insanely fast-aced, grueling and dangerous. Smaller-scale regionally based facilities have all but disappeared, making it increasingly difficult every year for independent livestock farmers to survive.

Concern was rising about a potential meat shortage if these massive slaughter factories temporarily closed or even slowed down. The New York Times article profiled one South Dakota Smithfield pork processing plant that exhibited a 16 percent COVID-19 infection rate among its 3700 workers. It was uncertain whether this abnormally high infection rate was the result of the state’s voluntary social distancing guidelines or the close proximity of workers on the disassembly lines. That single plant processes 5 percent of the nation’s pork.

Threats to food system workers weren’t limited to slaughter facilities. Workers in grocery stores, restaurants, and all throughout delivery chains found themselves on the front lines as well. Meanwhile, with the downturn in commercial markets, the slowdown of meat packing, and a dearth of labor, farmers were dumping milk, culling livestock and allowing vegetables to rot.

Animal factories have been a serious public health issue since the mid nineteenth century. But this crisis has harshly illuminated the severe costs of the monopolization and industrialization and simplification of our food system: the devastation of rural communities, the loss of regional production infrastructure, the war on nature that impacts air and fresh water, countless imperiled species and vanishing habitats.

Each year Congress directs tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars to compensate farmers for inevitable losses through the Farm Bill. This helps to ensure an oversupply of corn and soybeans and other commodities that are mainly fed to livestock, manufactured into ethanol or exported. Meanwhile 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, a significant risk factor for Coronavirus.

I fear this current pandemic may simply be a dress rehearsal, just one crisis in the midst of a long emergency that is going to reshape life as we know it. We can no longer afford to squander time, energy or resources building a food system that is so big and so vulnerable to contamination and dislocation that it will inevitably fail us.

Keeping backyard gardens with laying hens is something all of us who can absolutely should do. But the time is now to rebuild and re-envision a modern concept of food security. Smaller scale, regionally diversified production as well as restoring a healthy relationship between humans and the natural world should be our top priorities.

Reference

1Michael Corkery and David Yaffe-Bellany. April 18, 2020. The Food Chain’s Weakest Link: Slaughterhouses. NYT, web edition.

La entrada Lessons of Dislocation se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.

Plaza de Toros

Dan Himhoff — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 09:01:53 +0000

A Valenciano offered us three passes for a late afternoon corrida or bull fight. Our son, Gardner, was visiting with us for the entire month of March and we attended knowing full well we were entering controversial territory. Valencia’s Plaza de Toros was built in the 1860s and modeled after a Roman theater. It is made of brick with four levels and has beautiful weathered wood doors and bleachers that have been very well maintained and seats up to 10,000 people. Davis Cup tennis matches will be played there this spring. I think I attended a bullfight in Madrid in 1979 but the memory is a bit hazy. It may be too much information clogging up the works, a Hemingway overdose, or simple brain cell depletion.

The corrida started promptly at 5 pm with a show of horsemen and a parade of men in brocaded knickers and big shouldered jackets and Mickey Mouse like black felt hats and fuchsia stockings and leather shoes. The horses high stepped around the clay arena, which had fresh lines of white lime laid in two concentric circles. Our tickets were in a shaded box on the upper level and as we drank cans of local beer we had butterflies in anticipation of the otherness of this Spanish cultural experience and more than a trace of dread as a number of animals were going to be slaughtered.

There was a band in an upper level box with lots of horns playing traditional Spanish music. It was ceremonious and festive, sometimes with a waltzy tra-la-la-boom-de-ay feel, other times like the soundtrack to “Lawrence of Arabia”, one of Gardner’s favorite movies growing up. As the bullfights progressed, the band would start up again to announce different stages of the event letting the crowd know the corrida had reached a turning point.

This was a minor corrida of younger bullfighters and younger bulls weighing only 1,000 pounds. The first bull came into the ring and he was gorgeous with rippling muscles and gray brown hide and a stunning physique and horns that no doubt could do serious damage. The bull pranced and sprinted with a certain majesty, at times leaping on all fours, and raging like he wanted to escape or hurt someone or hurt someone and then escape. I was immediately rooting for the bull.

A half dozen muletas entered the ring, daring the bull to charge them with shouts and flourishes of fuchsia colored capes. They took turns confronting the bull with the aim of tiring him out and probably also to show off their tight gluteus maximi to the señoritas in the stands. If the bull hooked their cape or things got squirrelly the muletas could run and hide behind one of four wooden barriers and a comrade would come to their rescue. These were not good odds for the bull.

With a musical announcement from the band, two picadors arrived riding horses that were blindfolded and wearing coats of serious quilted padding hopefully today made from Kevlar. The two riders were also in fancy outfits and had long lances and the bull soon charged one of the horses and broadsided it with his horns with the intent to lift it off the ground and throw it over his shoulder like a mortal enemy. Meanwhile the picador drove his forked spear into the bull’s back. Fighting on, the bull drove the sidestepping horse back toward the wooden round side of the arena while the picador thrust a second spear into the shoulder muscles. The formidable bull was now compromised and bleeding. The band played as the picadors trotted away.

Once more, the muletas taunted the bull with their fuchsia capes. The charges were becoming less frequent and the bull was breathing heavily. Three of the muletas now arranged themselves around the arena with colorful decorated pokers called bandilleros, which they held high over head and thrust them into the bull’s back after luring it to charge. This was quite a move that I imagine takes serious courage and practice and perhaps a complete lack of judgment as you are taking on the bull with no cape to distract it. Soon the bull had six bandilleros stuck and flopping around in its upper back and the muscles had been severed so it was much harder for him to raise his head in self defense. I guess it was now officially a fair fight because the matador strode into the ring full of bravado in his gold suit and laid his hat down in the middle of the ring.

The matador’s cape was red and he called the bull in with dramatic flourishes and urged it to lunge again and again as he spun like a ballet dancer making combinations of practiced moves which we couldn’t fully recognize or appreciate after which he would sometimes stroll away with his back to the bull and raise his hand and throw his head back to the crowd who would cheer and say “olé!” That’s when you were hoping the bull would charge but he was wearing down and stuck like a pin cushion and on this afternoon there was no such poetic justice.

After five or so minutes of manipulating the bull with the red cape like a puppet master, the matador walked calmly to the side of the arena and was handed a curved sword. The kill was much more dangerous than the cape work and he stood two yards directly in front of the bull with the sword held high and the bloodied horns pointed directly at him, imagining in his mind’s eye where he would plunge it. In a quick move he stepped toward the bull and thrust the sword into its back. But it was not a clean kill. Now the bull had all the bandilleros and a sword in him and was still standing and not even staggering.

The muletas again taunted him with their fuchsia capes and the bull showed the crowd that its heart still pumped with the will to survive. Using the blade of a second sword, the matador flicked out the first sword by the handle. On this next attempted kill, the bull fell almost instantly to its knees and rolled over on its side. A man came and severed the spinal cord with a knife and the bull kicked involuntarily and died and was then promptly dragged across the clay by two horses and the sweepers came out to prepare the bloodstained arena for the next fight. This was extremely exhausting to watch as none of the young matadors killed the bulls on their first attempts and we stayed to watch the first three corridas.

When I explained my dismay with the first experience a professor recommended we attend an upcoming Corrida de Rejones, which features matadors on horses who wear no protection. Gardner and I went this time and it was a completely different yet similar event. The horses were spectacular animals with braided manes and tails and chiseled muscles very much like the bulls. They were able to perform all the amazing feats of coordination and agility that the world class Andalusian horses do: sidestepping, running in place, stepping to the beat of the music, throwing punches with their front legs, spinning on a dime, backtracking, standing on their hind legs. The matadors were dressed more like equestrians with velvet jackets and riding hats and they did all of the elements of the corrida and eventual killing but changed horses after each stage. This contest was really between horse and bull but the former had the true advantage. Bullfighting emerged many centuries ago as a way to train cavalry and no matter how fast the bulls charged, the unprotected horses were always just a step away from the horns. The bulls were much larger this time and could not turn as precisely as the equines and often fell to their knees in the soft clay. The horses themselves took the place of the matador’s cape, the object which the bull chased. The matadors were expert at spinning and moving and sidestepping and backstepping with the horses. A different sword was used for the kill, which in two cases was extremely rapid and direct. Halfway through the Rejones I had seen enough. We had witnessed something that was uniquely Spanish.

No creature wants to die. I have experienced this over many years of participating in the processing of poultry. Our hope has always been that the animals we raise for food have a great and natural life and a very precise death on their only bad day. I completely understand that many Spaniards feel it is way past the time to move on from long established traditions. Some were offended that we would even attend a corrida or lump them in with the rest of their countrymen who still accept bullfighting as part of their culture. Indeed I am offended by NASCAR rallies and snowmobiling in national parks and all kinds of nonsense that passes for popular culture in the United States that I don’t want to be associated with.

The region of Catalonia has already outlawed bullfighting. I do understand how an agrarian society that brought us Flamenco music which is so colorful and disciplined and full of joy and anguish and emotion and technique also brought us the corrida. But I can also imagine that one day, as generations roll into the next, the sun will set on this pageant that once encompassed the bravery and formidable spirit of fighting the bull in a world where life was short and death and war were everyday realities. Maybe then the Flamenco singers will weave into their music and dance a part of the past that once was yet now is a realization of a brave and exciting and lugubrious past. Is it not enough to know and appreciate what once was yet no longer is culturally relevant or appropriate?

Until then I root for the bulls.

La entrada Plaza de Toros se publicó primero en Dan Imhoff.