Travel - bridges

It has been much too long -- 2 years 4 months -- since I was last in Mediterranean countries. Introduced to those seductive shores as a soldier during and immediately following World War II, even then the horrors of a world gone mad, a devastated Europe, could not quell the gut-feeling that much of my future intellectual and spiritual growth lay there. Essential to my existence have been the subsequent rich hours, weeks, months of study, exploration, and beauty embraced in Italy, France and Spain, in Greece and on Crete, aboard various vessels, large and small, plying blue swells between Piraeus and Gibraltar. How many cities have I walked from end to end, savoring neighborhoods rarely visited by foreigners, stumbling upon unpublicized festas and memorials, encountering individuals of every stripe, finding in some friends for life.

The desire to study the architectural works of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona and see the Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao led me to join a study tour of Catalonia in year 2000. At the time, merely 77 years old and with open-heart surgery (who, me!) 6 years in the future, I felt fine, did the customary miles of tramping, for the most part independent of the travel group. I learned that Gaudi's renowned patron bore a version of my surname, and hiked from one to another of the far-flung spectacular Barcelona sites financed by Eusebi Guell i Bacigalupi. I did sport a walking cane, conscious that one's balance wasn't quite what it used to be, and the hills and cobbles of Catalonia warranted cautious footing.

Gehry's Guggenheim Museum -- the building, not its exhibits -- was a magnet from which I could not tear loose all three days we were in Bilbao. I forfeited group city excursions except for one which bussed into the hills to look down on panoramic views of the museum, and skipped meals, to circle again and again the perimeter of that extraordinary structure. I tired, but there were benches, and what better between ramblings than to sit and contemplate the sculptural forms of the glistening facade, their undulating reflections in moat-like pools. Daylight was usually fading when I'd concede that it was time to return to the hotel, more than a mile away on the other side of the River Nervion.

With my final farewell to the Guggenheim, feeling exceptionally fatigued, I opted to try a short-cut for the walk to the hotel, using a footbridge across the river which could be seen from the museum. As I approached the bridge, legs began to ache, breath came short, there were no benches to be seen, naught to do but push on. Yet, despite apprehension that my strength would not hold out, the graceful beauty of the bridge as I neared it mitigated pain. I'd not then heard of or seen the work of Santiago Calatrava, but knew instantly that I was gazing on architecture, engineering, building contemporarily significant and equal to that of the nearby museum. The bridge held open arms, come enter me. The first step upon it vanquished all concepts of conventional pathways, earthly materials. This was walking in air, on a cloud, a structure so light that one felt it floating above the river rather than anchored to its banks. I was aware that this crossing marked a personal bridge in my life -- time to surrender evasion, acknowledge that age would entail limitations. Travel in the future could mean certain concessions, less independence, less walking. But if one had to span that psychological bridge, what place better than here to accept it. Here, on Senor Calatrava's glorious passage from one shore to another.

There were subsequent travels, quite a few, all enjoyed and some surprisingly active, even strenuous. Then, suddenly, one's an octogenarian. And in 2006 at age 83 came the open-heart surgery. That puts one on another bridge -- road to recovery, which is no walk in the clouds as that I knew in Bilbao. Yet it's going somewhere, and I look forward to its exodus, what lies beyond this span. The Mediterranean? Torna, torna, whisper the winds. Awake or asleep, at work or tasks which I continue to do, I hear the sirens of Odysseus calling to him from distant shores. Unlike that ancient sailor, I do not ask to be tied to the mast to resist joining them.