I chose the house for its patio, a generous walled-in crescent of paving with expansive vistas of open land and sky. The name confirms it—the distinguishing feature of this traditional Algarvian village home—Casa do Pátio. It’s one of a dozen or so, hunkered together in the hamlet. I say hamlet, but Daroeira isn’t even that. A lugarejo, then—a small place, as it translates from the Portuguese. A place so insignificant it’s hard to find on a map, like many settlements scattered across the coastal hinterlands of the Sotavento, in the eastern Algarve. Tiny clusters of dwellings, tethered to the world by single-track dirt trails that wind their way through the semi-desert landscape, until they finally intersect with tarmac. A landscape that continues to intrigue in its simplicity, from the cabin window of a plane en route from London to Faro. And now I’m here again, within it, on the hard-baked ground.
At a glance, there’s seemingly little to see beyond the dazzle of white-washed walls. The color palette is limited and stark: a low, gentle roll of tinder-dry scrub hills split with clear, Mediterranean skies. Ochre and azul, earth and sky, drenched in light. Carobs stud the hillside. Evenly spaced, their dark, leafy canopies appear like rivets, fastening red earth to rock, holding its mass together, one crest folding into another. Each tree is a dial, its shadow set by the sun—leaning long and westward into the morning, pooling under branches at noon, then sliding and casting east at dusk, holding fast to the fading light.
I could set my days by it, reclined on a sun lounger, entranced by the play of light over the scenic backdrop of tree-lined slopes. Just watching from the patio for the tiniest increments of change, trying to catch the sun out, its stealth too subtle for my eye. The clouds too are tricksters, slipping in from the far horizon, casting their dark shadows over the land. Promising rain but rarely delivering.
Sounds reverberate through the valley. An old motorbike rattles past on the track below, trailing petrol fumes. Jet engines whine from high above, contrails tracing their northerly flight. A farmer, concealed in his tractor cab, spends the morning turning over topsoil, scouring the hillside along its contours. The toil of machinery clangs the air. Back and forth he goes, clearing between the trees until the job is done. Then the air stills again. Not much else stirs for the rest of the day. Guest linen appears on the washing line outside Dona Eulália’s porch. While she’s out cleaning one of the casas, her off-duty tabbies lie about in the shade—as do I—watching the birds. Pool-dipping swallows, sparrows and other small browns, the occasional eye-catching Iberian magpie. The ambient chants of woodpigeons coo through the day, as crickets chirp by night—neither seen, only heard, like the dogs that bark in other, distant hamlets.
I could spend the rest of my week here absorbed in a book, cooling off in the pool, and think no more of my surroundings than this; holed up with a supply of groceries, safe within the comfortable confines of the casa and its patio. A traveler, just passing through, as I have been on previous trips to these parts. After all, what great interest does such an arid landscape hold, besides the almost guaranteed, unbroken sunshine? Isn’t that the reason I keep coming back to this corner of the Algarve? A sun-seeker, like so many others, no more than that? But it’s not just my happy place, discovered between lockdowns. That’s not why I’m here. I’ve come inland this time, away from the beaches and coastal resorts. I’m here to find a little piece of desert, or as close as I can come to it, for now. Desert is what I’m looking for, what I think I need.
The word “desert” comes from the Middle English for barren, dried up. Its origins are in the
Latin “dēsertum,” an abandoned place, formed from the verb “dēserō,” to forsake, to literally undo the links. It is a word loaded with meaning and associations, that conjures immediate images of wilderness and wasteland: bleak and unforgiving, barren and desolate, a soulless and solitary landscape. Fierce, confusing, paradoxical. A place of godlessness and death, of sacredness and salvation. Where life is somewhere other, elsewhere, beyond.
Desert lands are defined by what they lack: principally rain but also shelter; plant, animal, and human life. Whether subtropical, semi-arid, coastal, or polar, all deserts are dry and windswept with extremes of temperature, their flora and fauna limited yet highly adapted. Drought-resistant. But, to my mind, the desert is not so binary, so all-or-nothing or absolute. Nowhere is just a patch of arid land, to be feared. The desert is still a home. It constitutes a unique biome: a community of living things connected to this particular kind of terrain. I’ve come to understand how intrinsically linked we are, the desert and me. It’s part of what I would call my “autogeography”: who I am and where I am in my life; where I’ve been and where I might be headed. It’s why I’m here again, in the Algarve—to touch base with the land, with myself.
Instead of a holiday read, I’ve brought with me Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and today I’ve turned to her second chapter on “Seeing.” To pay close attention and revert to my more youthful self, full of unbounded curiosity. To see, as it were, through a child’s eyes. Micro-focused, immersed. I think this is what Dillard is getting at, and it creates a subtle shift in me, a change of perspective that makes me restless. I realize that I want to care, as she does—to be “a lover and a knower”—if it’s not too late. It’s no longer enough to simply gaze out at the scrub hills, to dismiss the shallow riverbed winding through the desiccated valley below. This is not the kind of landscape that supports an “astonishing bloom of life,” as she observes at Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Far from it. This land is one of scarcity, not abundance. But still, I’d like to try to see this place the way she sees hers. And for that, I need to become a pilgrim, to leave the casa’s shaded patio behind and walk out into this place. Small wonders, Dillard promises, are hidden in plain sight.
Pilgrims traverse the land on long-distance waymarked trails, but there are no such well-trodden routes around here, no caminho for me to follow. I’ll consider myself a novice then, instead, not a pilgrim so much as a wanderer, finding her own pathway. To wander is a different kind of practice, I believe. It requires a particular state of mind, a certain freedom of movement and thought, a lightness of spirit—there may even be an art to it. Over the decades, I seem to have forgotten how that works and how to be one. As a girl, I would venture out, benefitting from the lax supervisory regime of a large family, in an era marked by its “benign neglect”—moreso in my case, as a middle child, as the daughter of an absentee father and a stoic, long-suffering mother, caught up as she was in his cyclonic, addictive behaviors.
Overlooked and semi-feral, I’d spend weekends and the long days of summer roaming the
Wirral, as far from home as a bus fare and daylight would allow. My first encounter with the Wild West was there—or so it seemed to me, as a drifter on my own frontier, a lone scabby-kneed clamberer—at Thurstaston Common, with its towering sandstone escarpments, all red rock and gorse. That must have been where my fascination, my affinity, with desertscapes began, on the exposed Triassic bedrock of that peninsula. On ancient land, laid bare.
To see through a child’s eyes. I mull over Dillard’s suggestion and the naivety it implies.
Look again, look anew, as the innocent you once were. It seems tinged with menace, a bristle of fear. It asks something else of me, something darker: take yourself back, what else do you see? I’m not entirely clear, even now. Maybe I stared too long at the sun, back then.
My earliest impressions of my father are like the negatives in a reel of over-exposed 35mm film, the kind of images that were returned from the photo lab with quality control stickers, marked “light damaged.” Images that have burned further away over the years so that I see him only in glimpses. Detached and at a distance, as some kind of demi-god, a dark Adonis: dashing, vital, seemingly omnipotent. A solar flare. An athletic, alpha male who always won the sports day fathers’ race. Animalistic, with his ’70s wolverine sideburns and hair-trigger aggression, sending six kids scattering for the nearest exit and the safety of outdoors. I see him through a crack in the lounge door, stretched out in front of the television on our old three-seater settee, accompanied by the murmur of a cricket match commentary; asleep in his weekend dominion. Or awake and exuding a malevolent, oppressive presence; a grey smoke that wasn’t just a plume from his full-strength Capstan cigarettes. He infused the air of every room in the house. When he was there, that is.
I turned ten in 1974, the year that Pilgrim was first published. Dillard was twenty-nine. I bought my copy a few weeks ago, based on an article I’d read about how Dillard had written the book from observational notes made through the seasons she spent at Tinker Creek whilst recuperating from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. It inspired me to come back here, as part of my own recovery, both of us on a spirit quest, searching for the restorative balm of nature—hers in the evergreen mountains, mine in these drylands. I’m glad to have her as a travel companion, albeit only in paperback form. And I take her with me, in my thoughts, as I leave the patio behind and head off on my first excursion into the hills of the old parish of
Conceicao, a name that remains despite the dissolution of its council and congregations. I have water in mind, as a destination beyond the aqua blue of the casa’s chlorinated pool. From my window seat on the flight over, I’d spotted other kinds of scattered pools—metallic grey, like drops of mercury reflecting light, caught within the landscape’s faults and folds.
Bodies of water, lakes or reservoirs, it was hard to tell at altitude. There’s one on the other side of the next hamlet, Malhada de Peres, indicated on the brown metal sign I find at the end of the dirt track from Daroeira: three wavy lines below the word “barragem,” a dam. I turn left onto the road toward it, hot tarmac under my soles as I make my way west.
By noon, the sun is hot overhead. I’m wearing a cap and high-factor cream to fend off nose and shoulder burn. The heat and light are jarring—harsh, even. The kind of harsh that feels like harm, an assault of sorts on the senses, on my fair, freckled skin. On the land. Reddish-brown clumps of stone and earth are what passes for soil here, along the flat riverbanks. Screed covers the surrounding slopes. And yet, things grow here. I leave the road at a ford to explore the dry creek, stumbling in my sweaty trainers over its stony bed, and find it lined with rushes ten feet tall, lush and swaying, despite the lack of water. It’s been four months since the winter rains. The Ribeira do Zambujosa last flowed through here in January.
There are no Tinker Creek turtles, no carp or green frogs in the mudbank. No mudbank. There’s no sign of surface water, just the semblance of it—a pearlescence to the grey shale where the creek bows out and cuts back in again, at the edge of the hamlet nestled in the hills up ahead.
My father was an active alcoholic for the first six years of my life. I don’t remember seeing him drink, only drunk and reeling at the end of the garden path, warded off, railed against by my mother from the safety of the front step. All too often I heard him thunder and saw him rage but rarely strike. I remember how he would say, “I’m going to see a man about a dog,” and me believing him, in the promise of a puppy, too young to know the euphemism, old enough for his words to wear thin. He meant, of course, the Rose & Crown at the end of the road. There was a dog—“the demon drink,” as he called it—that bit him so hard in the end, he was hospitalized at thirty-three with hepatitis. I bore witness to his rock-bottom fall, as we all did, at our mother’s side, to that strange, yellow-eyed, sallow-skinned man with liver damage whose arms were pricked by IV drips. My father, barely recognizable save for his signature toothy grin. He was sober after that. An aspiring architect, he designed a way out for himself, and we trailed behind, leaving the Wirral for the flatlands of Suffolk. On from there to the most northernly suburb of Johannesburg, so far out that only bush lay beyond. And on again, to the humid subtropics of Hong Kong—too far, this time, for us to follow. He worked with a vengeance all those years, and when he played it was not with us but “away from home.” His multiple affairs broke the marriage and our family apart. My father, always driving, chasing, go-getting. But the thing about go-getters is that you have to let them go. I’ve come to realize and accept that now, in theory at least. And that what I saw as a child, what I experienced, was a form of abuse: neglect. That abstinence, in my father’s case, meant absence, an empty driveway stained with the slick of engine oil.
All the infrastructure is here, visible on either side of the road: a wide riverbed; deep Vs of man-made roadside gullies, jagged runs of natural gorges cut into the hillsides, a bank of caged boulders reinforcing the road at the river’s bend. I pass the low, rectangular cement walls of empty irrigation tanks among the citrus and carob groves, a system that would once have watered cattle and crops. Attempts to direct or capture that one vital, missing element.
Bone dry, these structures have no agency, no utility.
I feel a vibration all around me as I walk through the next hamlet and on toward the dam, or I imagine it—the anticipation of the blessed relief of seasonal rains, hoping they will come. Meanwhile, the land waits.
I have a deep sense of this place, a land filled with absence and illusion, and a timeworn patience. More than anything else, its hushed holding of breath. It resonates with me. I am a parent myself, the mother of a son with long-term addiction issues. My older brother is a recovering alcoholic; my younger brother, debilitated by poor mental health. It is, as my father always said, a family disease. Yet more devasting, it has turned out to be intergenerational. I’ve often thought of my experiences as a daughter, sister, and mother as a kind of waiting area. I’ve been in enough, after all: school receptions, doctors’ surgeries and psychiatrists’ offices; A&Es, hospital wards and rehab centers. For the sake of my father, brothers, and son. I have been there. Earthed by pain and powerlessness, embedded in guilt, shame, and fear. Theirs and mine. Yes, I’ve known places just like this, for much of my life, where time slows and I’m held in a kind of stasis. Hoping, always, for change.
I walk on, my legs heavier now on the uphill track from the road, the heat swelling my feet and hands, burning at the nape of my neck. When I reach the dam, its reservoir of windruffled water appears as an oasis, a cooling salve for the eyes and skin, and natural-looking, at first glance, with shallows of soft green grass, floating pontoons of lily pads, a central island that makes me want to jump straight in and swim over. The air on the banks is fresh and mineral, the water a blueish-green and fathoms deep. I see a flicker of broad wings as a large bird takes flight, too swift for me to name—cegonha-branca, perhaps, the white stork, returned from its winter break in central Africa. A municipal sign comes into view as I approach the waterline, warning off bathers, anglers, and even dog walkers—all PROIBIDO. I wonder about the water quality, its hardness and agricultural pollutants, and the quantity—chalky deposits ring the reservoir’s edges, indicating the higher levels of wetter years.
At the casa, it’s not possible to drink straight from the tap. To make it safe, the guest notes advise boiling it for fifteen minutes, which seems ominously long. Instead, I buy spring water from the supermarket to make drinks and rinse off fruit and vegetables. In settlements like these, boreholes pump from aquifers to supply the Algarve’s domestic and agricultural needs, its private swimming pools and thirty-one golf courses. For how long is this sustainable?
Drought is no longer cyclical here but structural. I’ve read about dryland expansion and desertification in southern Europe, and the warnings from climate scientists. These hills that surround me could be desert by the turn of the next century. I’m conscious of the bottled water warming in my backpack, its plastic content – and mine for that matter, the traces synthesized inside me like rogue genes. Of how ill-equipped I am and inconsequential in the grand, critical scheme of things. But I am here and I am noticing, taking steady steps—one day at a time.
My father’s running days are over, time having finally caught up with him. These days, he walks to keep fit, in the same way he has always walked—headlong, chest out, his upper body cantilevered over his hips—in a hurry to get wherever it is he’s going. Cartoonish, almost, like the Coyote-pursued Road Runner. He spends most of the year in his main, spiritual home, in high-rise, high-energy Hong Kong, with his third wife, thousands of miles away from me and his other nine children and as many grandchildren. His choices, he says, are climatic: he craves the heat. Like a migratory bird, he returns to England only in the summer months. I’m more conscious than ever of how tenuous this arrangement, his own pattern of survival, has become. Though, at eighty-six, he’s still quite agile and pursues his daily step count with rigor, thanks to half a century of sobriety and, more recently, cardiovascular technology. His legs are taut and tanned to leather like a desert-dweller’s, his gnarled feet strapped into hiking sandals. From what I see of him now, on those brief occasions we’re together, he seems content, though just as hard to catch, and to hold. When I call round, he’s often out, cutting his way across the Wiltshire fields, pressing on through its country lanes, his ears plugged against the wind, against the wild.
For now, there is a supply of ground and surface water here, though the summer months are to come—a test of capacities. It is set to be another drought year, according to local predictions. My view of the dam distorts, as cloud shadow inks its surface; my vision disturbed by the hard, unnatural lines that cut through: steel pylons, concrete sluice channels, the tarmac road, a series of red hunting zone signs. I retrace my steps around the water’s edge, taking my time, stopping to examine an expanse of field flora. It opens up, embraces, offering solace. The afternoon has cooled a little, but my desire to really see this place has been rekindled, sparked by the determination of its plant life. Diverse species of trees line the track that leads back down to the road: fig, olive, and almond; the occasional cork and holm oak. Amongst these, I spot sun-loving lavender, tall spikes of sweet fennel and jimson weed, weld and rockrose. There are fan palms and swathes of wild oat, their blonde heads streaming west with the wind, like mini weathervanes. All kinds of life survive here, and thrive even, despite the conditions. I pull at a dried flowerhead of lavender and feel its dense kernel, a protection against the elements, in the rub of my fingertips. And find it still there: that subtle floral musk of its scent.
I come to three miniature cairns of gathered stone by the track edge, each a foot high, impromptu sculptures left by fellow wanderers. I stop for a while to admire their handiwork as a solitary amber-winged butterfly flits by. It’s the Southern Gatekeeper, common to these shale hills and scrublands. My eyes trace its flight path, watch it land on a stem and fold its wings together, as if in prayer. In contrast, the shade of its underwings matches the buff tones of stem and ground. Instinctively, the Gatekeeper knows this one simple movement; this sleight of wing is all it needs to disappear and take its rest. Following its lead, I drain the last tepid drops from my water bottle and lean back against the flattened side of a boulder, its surface and mine warmed by the late afternoon sun. I crouch down and set about building a cairn of my own, to stand alongside the others, naming them as Irmãs, the Sisters, in a sudden rush of sentimentality. I wish mine were here with me. The four of us are close, a bond nurtured by mutual support, and by the strengthening balance of our mother’s love and the time she gave us, in abundance.
Dusting off dirt from the scrabble of stone stacking, I pull out my notebook to record the plant species identified so far. For those that are unfamiliar, I use an app on my phone. I scrawl a note to self that reads: start small, find ways to expand from this place. And the Dillard-inspired line: Let your body go the way of your fears. Like a child. The tarmac road is in sight, below the descending track, offering me some ease on the return leg. I stand and stretch, then wend my way down to meet it.
In her writing, Annie Dillard promises nature’s gifts, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t wonder of it all. Open up to a landscape’s particularity, she urges, look again at its details and you’ll find yourself dazzled, surrounded by the four powers of the natural world: “mystery, death, beauty, violence.” Nowhere is this more evident than in desert regions, forged as they are by the elements, in extremis. I’ve seen glimmers of these forces in action, in the few short hours spent in this small, dry scratch of land, wandering the creek and this valley. I’ve sensed them acting on me, moving through me—unsettling, stirring up dust. And I’ve felt that familiar, punishing absence, the one I’ve carried inside for so long, the one that subdues all that’s around me now, as I make my way back from the dam. But, at the same time, there’s a miraculous, undeniable presence here—of life. I feel that too.
As I approach the turnoff to Daroeria and the casa, I spot a clump of sage by the roadside and take a sprig of its wisdom with me as a token, a symbol that I have much to learn, but I’m in the right place.
***
Photographs courtesy of Julie FitzGerald
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