Remix

Portugal, 2006. BOOM Festival. I’m — never mind how old, what matters is that I’m old enough to know who I am and not old enough to grasp that “who I am” is an open question with an unpredictable answer, and that treating it as a settled fact is still premature.

We flew with Katya, a school crush, on Ryanair to Faro: tickets there cost the price of lunch in the Bonch cafeteria. Young, students, no money, but that wasn’t yet a problem so much as a constraint of the puzzle. Faro is a small white airport in the south of Portugal, in the Algarve: palm trees, salt wind, the smell of kerosene and lavender. You step onto the tarmac and the heat hits like an open oven.

From Faro we cobbled together rides to Lisbon: four hours by train through the Alentejo. Endless sun-bleached plains the color of a lion’s hide, cork oaks with their bark stripped (orange-red trunks like fresh wounds), olive groves, storks on bell towers — and not a single person. A landscape in which history seems not to have happened yet and might not bother.

From Lisbon to Castelo Branco — by local train with two transfers. At Entroncamento, the junction station, the trains change direction like thoughts in the head of a tired traveler. From there the northeast opens out, with pine forests, eucalyptus plantations, and granite boulders; with every kilometer it gets hotter and drier. At Castelo Branco you step onto the platform and the air rings: cicadas, forty degrees, white walls and empty streets under the August sun.

From Castelo Branco to the lake on foot. Sixty kilometers, the last stretch along the shoulder of a provincial road, past cork oaks and stone walls. In the backpacks: a tent, a sleeping bag, three liters of water, and the faith that the world is kind. Portuguese farmers were selling watermelons off the backs of pickup trucks. Old women watched from doorways — either with sympathy or with horror. Hundreds of others were walking the same shoulder: dreadlocks, drums, rainbow flags, bare feet that got shod again quickly because the asphalt was melting. A pilgrimage to a temple that appears on no map.

And then you climb a hill — and below lies the lake: turquoise, framed in ochre and scorched earth, like a mirage. Around this lake stands a city that wasn’t here yesterday and won’t be here the day after tomorrow.