I stood there in a light drizzle with my camera tucked under my coat as a wet, cold north wind whipped time worn olive trees, waiting for the clouds to part and for light to do its magic. I was in Portugal, visiting my 85 year old dad and was hoping for some zen time trying to capture some landscape images that showed the natural raw beauty of the place. It rained all week and I wasn’t having much luck. This is the town where I was born, Serra de Santo Antonio, named after St. Anthony, the franciscan friar who contrary to Italians claiming him as Anthony of Padua where he died, was actually born in Lisbon, Portugal around 1195.
I was also thinking about how hard it must’ve been generations ago to extract an existence out of these hostile lands. Portugal had been one of the poorest countries in Europe and has seen much change and progress since its independence with a peaceful revolution from a military dictatorship in 1974. Today my town attracts tourists who come to view some of the most beautiful caverns in Europe, weekenders and returning expatriates who have built magnificent new homes and restored old ones, taking advantage of the eucalyptus scented mountain air and scenery. Most of the area around the town is now part of a national nature preserve. And they also come to marvel at the stone walls.
With miles and miles of stone walls crisscrossing the hillsides as far as the eye can see like a giant jigsaw puzzle, it is hard to capture the expansiveness of the experience in a photograph. Stones were a major obstacle in order to work the land and corral the animals. These walls, which are even depicted on the town’s coat of arms, along with stone houses and barns, are now historically protected monuments to the resiliency and endurance of past generations. One can get a better sense of the grid work of walls further up the hillside where there are fewer houses and vegetation. Almost every walled piece of land also has some olive trees, once an important part of the local economy but now replaced by larger industrial operations elsewhere.
Because I left for Brazil when I was 2 years old, this is a land that I only remembered from black and white photographs in family albums and my parents’ nostalgic tales. Places where everyone seemed to be known by their nicknames and lived in strange sounding neighborhoods. Visiting the town cemetery to pay my mom a visit, I walk past crowded rows of tombstones noticing all those names and faces that were so much a part of my parents lifetime, faces I remember captured in photographs always around some kind of festivity with food, wine and laughter – now forever silenced.
My father sitting on the stoop of the stone house where he was born and where his family lived for generations.
In his time, dad built many of these stone walls. I was always impressed at his craftsmanship, but he dismissed it as no big deal. “Everyone here builds walls”, he would say. He worked for the town for many years, building and moving walls as roads were widened and was a mentor to many apprentices carrying on the tradition.
My humble attempts at stone masonry. (Gotta find smaller stones!)
All of the walls around my 220 year old house in Connecticut are not original, but were actually built by my dad years ago – I’d put him to work whenever he came to visit even though he preferred working more with his native hard limestone than with our soft brownstone. Building a stone wall seems like it would be deceptively simple, but like everything else my father taught in my life, there’s always a method.
My father no longer builds stone walls but his legacy like that of many others is forever part of the town’s character and history. That’s why as an antidote for the daily high tech world I live in, I sometimes find solace in building or fixing another stone wall, creating some order out of all those loose stones. Not that it is ever needed, I just have to do it – it’s in my blood.
