Altitude is safety, sure. Still, the beeping of my altimeter won’t let me relax. Perhaps it’s because the thing alternates too rapidly between beeping regularly and erratically, or perhaps—more likely—the beeping of my altimeter has nothing to do with it. Perhaps I’m not relaxed because I shouldn’t be flying here under any circumstances.

Valiantly, Boris trots beside me as I leisurely stroll through Christmas-decorated streets, keeping an eye on Boris, who, time and again. interrupts his trotting when he encounters a scent worth sniffing on a facade. Time and again, I patiently wait until he’s done sniffing and makes a clumsy attempt to lift a paw.

The twelve hundred olive trees on the plot of land on which I once lived near the Andalusian village of Coín were about a hundred and thirty years old, planted after phylloxera had destroyed the grapevines that grew there until 1860. To properly grow and bear fruit, each olive tree had twelve meters of space in every direction, and whether rain was abundant or scarce, the harvest was substantial every year. And every year, for a hundred thousand pesetas—about nine hundred dol

“Son tan importantes, músculos grandes?” our girl next door asks from her doorway as I pass, bike in hand. Twenty-five, twenty-six years old. Every morning, half past nine, she leaves on her electric scooter, helmet on her head. Every evening, she comes home just after eight. Fifteen minutes later, sure as sunset, there is the sound of the pizza delivery guy’s moped coming and going. Two days a week, our girl next door is at home. She eh… she is not playing volleyball on the

Peeking past the rock in front of me, I see Heidi, far below me, hiking back to our Berlingo. When I look up, I see vultures circling above a mountain goat that’s staring down at me. Yesterday, fiddling with Google Maps on my computer—for a moment unable to concentrate on my work—I came across a symbol near our cave house in the Spanish town of Antequera. Next to that symbol, I read the words via ferrata, Italian for klettersteig, which, loosely translated, is German for fun

Tumult last night. I flew out of bed, crossed the living room in two steps, flew down the steps to the kitchen, and through the window next to the front door of our cave house, I saw beams of light on the patio. I didn't understand what was going on, but how something could be going on was obvious. The steel door that gives access to our patio jams when the sun shines on it. It sometimes happens that Heidi and I start working early, lose track of time, and can't open the pati

“Il y a un porte-bagages dessus it has a roof rack on top,” the old man across from me in the grass replies with a smile when I ask him how to recognize a Moroccan plane. August 30, 2024. It wasn't until five o'clock this afternoon that Heidi and I finally managed to leave Antequera, heading a thousand kilometers north toward the storage unit we're renting in the Catalan village of Roses, near which we still lived only three months ago. After leaving Catalonia, we traveled t

It’s warm. Dry, warm, pleasantly warm. The spicy scent of the surroundings. The clear blue sky. The sun, low on the horizon. Black dots in the vast fields we overlook. Toros bravos! Some twenty meters in front of us, six enormous specimens drank water from stone troughs. Motionless, they now stare at us, seemingly menacing. They are beautifully proportioned, heavily armed, and muscular and dry, like bodybuilders in competition. Relics from the days when life was still life. I

It’s strange to see Heidi sitting alone on a stone bench, writing in her diary, in these medieval surroundings. For twelve years, Moos the German shepherd sat beside her in similar situations. Moos died a few months ago, and eh... Heidi without a dog, I realize with a pang, is only half a Heidi. “Well?” she asks as I sit down next to her. I glance up at what I know is called the Tour César, rummage through my backpack for what I need to make tea and coffee, and answer, “We

At two hundred and seventy kilometers per hour, we race through the night. We race north, and in the passenger seat of a large Mercedes with a powerful engine, I feel as I felt in a previous life in the back of an American Humvee—I’m Dutch, by the way—that carried me across the Afghan province of Uruzgan. The Americans who had taken me under their wings in Uruzgan usually drove as fast as the terrain and the situation allowed—never faster than about sixty kilometers per hour—