Lands Of La Mancha

[Gene Cryder]

Seymourwas a small green frog who used to appear on the second floor balcony of Spence Manor, where I lived before I moved into the Hermitage. I was surprised the first time I saw him, but apparently frogs are better climbers than you might think. I kept cigars on the balcony, and whenever I saw Seymour I would light one and puff on it while I spoke to him.

La Mancha, like every magical kingdom, needs its Fairy Folk. Elves, Sprites, Brownies, Nymphs, Pixies, and Leprechauns. These magical beings live among us but belong to another world, an older one that existed before science exploded our myths and drove the darkness from our land.

There is something compelling about reaching the end of the line, going to the place where civilization ends and wilderness begins. Behind is the safe and familiar, all you know and everything you have survived. Ahead is the mystery of possibilities and the birthplace of the stories you will tell when you return from that far country.

I call it Star Church. There are no doors, anyone is welcome, and all you have to bring is your phone. The doctrines, rules, and practices of this church could be written on my thumbnail, which suits me just fine.

I captured a dark moth tonight as he thrashed about the globes of my lamp. He was the darkest purple there is, the last color on the spectrum before the whole thing falls into black. Within my cupped hands I felt the powdery softness of his abdomen as his velvet body rubbed against my fingers.

Beyond Engelbrecht and the Lost Boys, where civilization ends and the Western Wild Lands begin, there is an enchanted gravestone embedded in the ground and designed specifically to be urinated upon. This arcane ceremony is generally performed by inebriated wizard students after their long days of study at the Tower.

And just like that Foxy Brown is back. I was reading on the back porch of the Hermitage, looked up and saw Foxy moving eastward out of the Western Wild Lands into La Mancha. I grabbed my phone and managed to get a single, blurry image.

I have found solitude to be beautiful and terrible, uplifting and overwhelming, nurturing and destroying, a source of joy and of pain. There is a heaviness to solitude when it comes rolling at you low and hard and constant. When it is every night. When your life has called you to it and you must obey. When you long for human contact but there is none to be found.

There is a pole near the International Bocce Court at the end of Gallagher Lane. Atop this pole is a bright lamp that is never turned off. All night long it blazes away, slashing beams of light through the trees and opening great wounds in the darkness of the Valley.

Roxi works on the landscaping in La Mancha. I met her months ago and we talk sometimes when I come across her and her dog Elijah working in the flower beds. But I never really saw Roxi until the big freeze.

Do I believe that when I become quiet in my soul and sit long enough in the Valley that the modern world falls away from me, I can hear the ancient echo of drums, a sound not heard in this valley for a hundred and fifty years?

There are two boys from the Valley who sometimes take a shortcut through La Mancha. The other day I saw them meandering down Gallagher Lane, talking and laughing and jostling. Stones were thrown into the Valley. Rocks were turned over for examination and discussion. En garde was proclaimed, followed by a brief sword fight with sticks.

There is a sword embedded in the wall of the Tower. If you stand near the lions on the Causeway and look up, this sword points to North Star. I wandered over to the sword and looked down upon the Fang & Feather, Welcome Center, Spence Manor, and the rest of the Village.

The pilgrimage involves two acts of physical discomfort. These are not acts of penance. You are not being judged for things that happened before you were born. You are embracing discomfort so that your soul can understand why our culture remains at odds with creation.

I was hiking deep in the northern part of the valley, down near my humble place of beginning. My eye was drawn to a smooth river rock lying near a jagged limestone outcropping. We have gullies but no rivers in La Mancha. There are no smooth rocks native to this land.

Meadow Lane, running east and west, curves gently around the base of First Mountain, which dominates the landscape of La Mancha. The lane is well named, for it was nothing more than a sparse and rugged meadow when the Wizard came to this land roughly twenty years ago.

Beyond Engelbrecht Inn & Tavern and the Lost Boys is a crude trail leading westward toward the Gully of the Wild Things. There are some painted rocks along the trail. If you come across a collection of animal bones on a crude shelf wedged in the branches of a tree you are getting close.

Our blessed Lady Dulcinea granted me this beatific vision and assured me that others may see something similar. I hope you also receive this vision, pilgrim, for the Land of La Mancha came alive and opened herself to me as if I had walked through a portal into another world.

On beyond the Lost Boys Cabins you leave everything human behind. I found a comfortable rock out there and sat upon it as the sun slipped below the horizon. I sat for quite some time, as day turning to night takes longer than most people realize.

The vineyards fall in 182 municipalities: 12 in the province of Albacete, 58 in Ciudad Real, 66 in Cuenca and 46 in Toledo, although certain modifications are underway to exclude areas that are not up-to-date on their registration.

The strength of tradition in the area's viticulture reflects a series of intrinsic and natural conditions that favour grape cultivation and wines with well-defined qualities. La Mancha is ideal vineyard country because, although the yield per hectare is not very high, the quality of fruit, the ripening cycle and the health of the vines are extraordinary.

Long gone is the image of La Mancha as an immense plateau of arid lands that produced great quantities of wine with no thought to its quality. Nowadays, they have undoubtedly won their place among the world's more prestigious wines.

La Mancha is also the world's largest wine producing area, with a total of 164,553 hectares of vineyards, a truly remarkable figure that allows the production of a large proportion of all the wine produced in Spain.

Regulatory Council

Consejo Regulador DO La Mancha

Av. Criptana, 73 - Apartado 194

13600 Alczar de San Juan

Ciudad Real

Tel.: +34 926 541 523

con...@lamanchawines.es

www.lamanchawines.es

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As all good things must come to an end, our stay in Granada drew to a close. We absolutely loved the grand Moorish city and actually overstayed there by three extra days. However, it was time to head north and slowly start crawling toward northern Europe. Germany was still quite far and we had France and Belgium to cross before reaching home. So we left Granada one late evening, said goodbye to the honey-hued Alhambra, and headed towards the plains of La Mancha. Our destination was Zaragoza via Cuenca and we had a very long drive ahead of us. The distance on the map showed 725 kilometers and we wanted to cover it with ease in about 9 hours. Night driving through Spain is quite relaxing and we were going to travel through the historic plains of La Mancha.

That is quite a pity because the plains of La Mancha are astonishingly pretty, offbeat, and diverse. At first sight, however, the beauty of the plains of La Mancha does not shine through and a vast bare bone plain is met by the eyes. Summers are scorching there and winters are bitter. The Arabs called it manxa meaning a steppe from which the region derives its name La Mancha. However, once you delve deeper and go closer to the northeast, craggy mountains take over the patchwork of buff and green fields and you find yourself in the lush wine-growing agricultural belt of Spain.

Our drive through La Mancha was exceptionally memorable since we actually saw the landscape change in diversity with our very own eyes. It was like watching a travel movie and the mountains near Cuenca gave way to featureless brown plains in a seamless manner. While the mountains were stunning with their forests, gorges, and blue-green streams, the plains too were quite fascinating. Punctuated by occasional farmhouses, which seemed like they belonged to another century, obscure villages, and forts, the brown plains of La Mancha looked like something out of a storybook. The vastness was something very striking about the region and we were quite startled by how less visited it was. We hardly passed any car during the entire drive and it was like stepping into a movie. Even the gas stations and other highway facilities seemed too far off from one another and the landscape changed once we neared Zaragoza.

Traffic became heavier, the local population looked more multicultural, and heavy industries lined the highway. Here and there, the ephemeral patches of villages mushroomed among swathes of purple wildflowers, which seemed to cover the district of Aragn in spring. Zaragoza arrived sometime around mid-day and we stayed there for only one night before crossing over to France via San Sebastian. So, apart from the unforgettable reflection of the multi-domed Baslica del Pilar on the still waters of Ro Ebro, we saw nothing of Zaragoza, which is ironically the hometown of my favourite painter, Goya. But the drive from Granada to Zaragoza was so fulfilling that I have no complaints and we also inadvertently followed the footsteps of the Christian Reconquest hero, King Ferdinand. He was born in Aragn and traversed this route to snatch Granada from the Moors. Now, that is a full circle.

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