As I Age Into Insignificance

I am not an intrepid traveler. I am just someone who has watched the world he grew up in fade farther and farther into the review mirror. I am a person who has decided to take a walk out and go on a little explore. Maybe I will find something that makes more sense to me than all the anger and resentment that have bubbled up all around in the place I was living. It didn’t require bravery. It didn’t take courage. What it took was the willingness to just open a door (metaphorically) to a wider world than the one I had been told all my life was the best of all possible worlds. 

Thus, I’ve been travelin’. I’ve been traveling on the macro scale by my move to Portugal and on the micro scale by my jaunts around this new country I inhabit. Recently, I spent a few days poking around the eastern side of Portugal’s Alentejo region. Went to Evora. Evora based on tourism materials I have read has been a center of human endeavor for roughly five millennia. Went to Monsaraz. Likewise, Monsaraz, based on the guides I perused has been occupied by humans since prehistory. But both Evora and Monsaraz were converted to Roman towns during Rome's heyday. Went to the Almendres Cromlech megaliths. These are said to be from seven thousand years ago, particularly the Almendres I megaliths. Damn, that is old.

I set out on this trip because I had never been east beyond Evora. Both Evora and Monsaraz were/are walled cities. Each has narrow crooked streets and buildings steeped in history. Evora has Roman temple ruins. It has an ancient cathedral. Monsaraz is much smaller but it has a castle and you can walk its ramparts.  It also has an Inquisition museum. Let me tell you good times were remembered there, especially if you were a Jew, a Lutheran or a woman who knew something about herbal remedies. Truth is I enjoyed both cities but they were not the high point of this three day explore. The megaliths took my breath away. 

To get to the megaliths you have to travel down one hellatiously rutted and bumpy road. You do not speed down that road from Nossa Senhora da Tourega e Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe, you just don’t. It is a puddled road with cavernous ruts waiting to rip your oil pan off the bottom of your car. What would take three minutes on black top takes twenty minutes on this poor memory of a dirt road. At some point as you bounce side to side and jolt up and down your ass asks you, “Is this really worth it?” But then you pull into the parking lot and you see the stones. Wow.

In a field of green I was awed by the rings of stones.  95 granite stones stand in a large circular pattern. Experts think they existed for religious and astronomical purposes. The stones are big, really big. To think that ancient peoples so far removed from me that there is no written history of their lives and culture could create this monument was both startling and overwhelming. Twenty years after I am dead nobody is going to say, “Remember what Jay said that time?" Nobody is going to stare at anything I assembled, say that really large IKEA table in my dining room and exclaim, “Wow, that’s so impressive.” But a group of nameless people responding to the changing seasons left something that stands today just as awe inspiring as when it was first erected. Just wow.

After visiting the megaliths, we stayed at a quinta (ranch) house near Monsaraz. Tired from the road and trekking a rather arduous path/goat trail to see an additional megalith standing in the midst of a different field, I fell asleep almost instantly. I had four serial dreams and when I woke up I remembered them all. Most have faded but one remains. In that one memorable dream I was traveling and I somehow knew I was traveling back to my hometown in New Jersey. I might also have been heading to my old high school. But as I turned to set off on that path a cop gave me the flat hand palm forward and told me, "That road is closed to you…for good." I wasn’t upset when I was barred from that path. In my dream I knew that particular road had in reality been closed to me for decades. I turned to head down another dirt road to another wonder that awaits me in the short time I have left. And it felt good.