Roberto (l) from La Alameda de Hercules and his army
buddies (and my wine drinking and flamenco buddies) on the train from
Sevilla to El Puerto de Santa Maria (my stop) and San Fernando (their
stop). Photo by Gerry Dawes 1969.
Before
I was stationed in Spain in the United States Navy, my experience with
wine—except for plying girlfriends back in Illinois with the occasional
bottle of pink “Champagne”—came in California in the mid-1960s. On
weekends on the mystical white beach at Carmel, with my buddies—all of
us students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of
Monterey—and I shared the jugs of cheap California wines, along with
bread and cheese from the Mediterranean Market in the village.
One
night under Monterey’s decaying old wharf, I helped two others polish
off a gallon jug of Mountain Red—with miserable results. And once in a
while on a payday weekend, I would splurge on abalone and a bottle of
Almaden Emerald Riesling or some such at a restaurant on Monterey’s
then-not-so-touristy Fisherman’s Wharf or have spaghetti and a
wicker-wrapped, aptly-named fiasco of Chianti on Cannery Row, which at
that time still had vestiges and whiffs of John Steinbeck’s time.
And,
one August weekend in 1967, surrounded by a bristling, rifle-armed,
weekend warriors of soon-to-be-sent-home National Guard Troop (for a
rock concert?), we watched and listened in wine-soaked reverie at the
Monterey Pop Festival as Janis Joplin, Big Brother and the Holding
Company, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix,
Canned Heat and Otis Redding became international stars right before our
mesmerized eyes and passed into legend.
At Southern Illinois University I had sporadically pursued a
journalism major until 1965, when the Lyndon Baines Johnson-led United
States government—opting first, or course, for those “who had not worked
continuously towards a degree”— decided that they needed even more
carrion candidates for Vietnam. I volunteered for the Navy as soon as I
felt the hot breath of my local draft board breathing down my neck. To
avoid the possibility of two years of infantry duty and possible death
(certain in my mind), I enlisted for four years of life in the Navy,
astutely calculating that aircraft carriers didn’t normally invade
Vietnamese rice paddies.
Ironically,
I damned near died from a bout with spinal meningitis that I contracted
during basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, where recruits were
allowed some four hours sleep a night, which greatly contributed to a
meningitis epidemic among them during that epoch. (In the middle of the
night, we took turns guarding a laundry room, just in case, we surmised,
the Viet Cong somehow managed to penetrate the heartland in the dead of
a Lake Michigan winter to stage a surprise laundry raid).
After
a four-month stay in the hospital, on the telephone I pestered the Navy
bureaucrats in Washington until they sent me to the Defense Language
Institute at Monterey, California, where I miraculously graduated as a
poor-to-mediocre linguist. I left Monterey barely conversant in pidgin
military Russian, but did learn to sing a transliterated version of
“Dixie.”
After graduation, we were
transferred for several months to Defense Department’s Top Secret
Security School in San Angelo, Texas, a training assignment made
memorable by a monumentally ignorant Chief Botswain’s Mate, who lined up
a mostly college-educated crew of linguists and threatened to charge us
for mutiny for failing to show up for a useless meeting after an
all-night class. He punctuated his blustering by proclaiming the
“ignorance in Botswain’s Mates went out with the sailing ships,” which
caused the incredulous officers watching this absurd,
worthy-of-a-M.A.S.H.- episode performance to stifle guffaws. The mutiny
squelched, we survived to graduate. Just before we graduated, one day in
class when my field assignment was announced as Spain, someone blurted,
“You lucky bastard!” As it turned out, life’s lottery had handed me a
winning ticket. As soon as class was over, I went straight to the base
library and checked out the few books I could find on Spain.
Rota, January, 1969. Photo by Gerry Dawes.
Because
of the military’s infinite wisdom and logic-defying precision, I was
assigned for two years to the Rota Naval Base in Andalucía, from which
periodically I was sent out riding the plane captain’s seat of
antiquated, 1950s’ vintage, un-armed airplanes, including the great
swept-wing hog, the A-3 Skywarrior, a converted fighter-bomber. Staging
out of Greece and West Germany, we flew on electronic eavesdropping
missions off the coasts of Egypt, Libya, East Germany, Poland, and
Russia. It was my job to listen on a radio receiver and tape Russian
military conversations. The first time I heard a MIG on our tail
pretending to lock on with a missile, which would have turned us to
toast in just a few seconds, I momentarily longed even for a rice paddy.
Nevertheless, during my two-year tour of duty in Rota, between flying
missions, I had time to begin discovering Spain and I began to develop
an afición, a passion, for the country that has continued to grow for
more than 45 years.
I
was glad, deliriously glad, to be in Europe and not in Vietnam. By
August of 1968, a year after that momentous Monterey Pop Festival, I
found myself in a steamy second class train car rattling south through
Andalucía towards El Puerto de Santa María with a group of Spanish
conscripts, who would become my friends over the course of that summer
as we traveled back-and-forth between our respective military
assignments in Cádiz province and weekend R & R in their
beautiful, mystical Sevilla, the quintessential city of southern Spain,
which was rapidly becoming my adopted hometown.
On
that slow rocking train in southern Spain, Roberto, one of my new
Spanish soldier friends—most of whom came from La Alameda de Hércules, a
Sevilla working class barrio—taught me how to cut a V-shaped wedge out
of either side of a cork pulled from the label-less bottles of coarse,
ice-cold, red vino corriente that I would purchase at station
when the train stopped in heat-baked Utrera, south of Sevilla. Roberto
would shove the cork back in the bottle and pass the wine around for all
to share bota-style, each in turn tilting up the bottle and allowing
the wine to flow in a stream into the drinker’s mouth without allowing
the bottle to touch his lips. During the summer of 1968, I nearly
mastered the art of hitting my mouth with a stream of red wine while
standing in the passageway at the end of the swaying train car, through
whose open doors warm air gushed, considerably increasing the degree of
difficulty.
Soldiers on a Train: Roberto, far left, second right, soldier holding the bottle with the cork in the bottle with a V-cut in the cork.
Roberto.
Wine-stained
shirts and few bottles of wine were a small price to pay for many hours
of the conviviality of these fun-loving Spanish soldiers. In addition
to learning a modicum of unorthodox wine-drinking etiquette from Roberto
and his friends, I picked up some Spanish by osmosis and was treated to
impromptu flamenco singing accompanied by the staccato rhythms of my
friends clapping palmas (which they also taught me). I was also given a
share of Roberto's mother's superb tortillas españolas (Spain's
classic potato omelettes that are sliced into wedges and eaten cold—then
a traveller's staple in Spain). Each week, when we arrived in Sevilla,
Roberto and his friends told me which train they would be taking back to
their base in San Fernando. No matter what shape we were in after
drinking multiple bottles of wine on the two-hour train ride, my new
amigos always made sure I got off at El Puerto de Santa María, the great
sherry town on the bay of Cádiz, where I would catch the shiny little
local train to nearby Rota. There were big abrazos (embraces),
waves, and good wishes from my new-found friends as I dis-embarked, then
they were back to clapping and singing flamenco as their train creaked
to life and rolled on to San Fernando, two stops down the line.
The sharp, metallic, chilled wine--which tasted far better with the good tortilla,
Spanish olives, and rough country bread--was never more than poor to
mediocre, but it was the camaraderie and conviviality of Roberto and his
Sevillano friends sharing their food, songs, jokes, and stories with me
that made those train trips so memorable and the ordinary wine and food
a feast. On those wonderful “wild and weary” train rides through tawny
summertime Spain, I also learned an indispensable rule about drinking
vino—the most important thing about any bottle of wine is the people
surrounding it. And in the process I developed a passion for Spain,
Spaniards, and Spanish wine and food that has endured to this day.
My experiences with those Spanish soldiers set the tone for the stories that follow.
Gerry Dawes©2017
gerrydawes@aol.com
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