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Outside Magazine January 2004

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The Hard Way
Leap Year
Travel is one thing. But uprooting your family and moving abroad is a much deeper plunge into adventure.

By Mark Jenkins


	Illustration by Jorge Colombo

WE AT LAST ALIGHTED on the south coast of Spain. A family of four from America, traipsing through the Málaga airport with overstuffed daypacks and four bulging duffels, four bulging bicycle boxes, and two sturdy computer cartons. Disheveled and greasy with the residua of transit, so exhausted that our two daughters' heads were bobbing, in any other country (especially our own) our huddled little mass would have been easy prey for customs officials with a taste for harassing tired refugees. Fortunately, this was España. The officers had trim Franco outfits but a languid indifference, and we barreled our laden carts straight out into a sweltering Iberian afternoon, no one even bothering to check our passports.

We had hoped to catch a bus, train, or taxi up the Mediterranean coast to our destination, the pueblo of Salobreña, but none would accommodate our small mountain of possessions. Instead, we rented an absurdly large moving van, loaded up our bags, squeezed into the cab, and set off just after dark along a winding contour line of asphalt. My wife and girls fell instantly into dreams while I navigated a causeway suspended between an indigo sky and the sable sea, two voluptuous bodies winking at each other like old lovers.

Creeping into Salobreña, I parked by moonlight and woke my family. The air was moist and perfumed with jasmine. It was not possible to drive to our new house. The road coming up from below was six feet wide, and the "street" dropping down steep steps from above was about the width of my shoulders—"la calle más estrecha de Salobreña," the narrowest passageway in town. So we half-sleepwalked up the cobblestone lane to our oblong courtyard, gladly leaving our ponderous luggage in the van. Traveling light we were not, but then we weren't traveling—we were moving.

At noon the next day, eyelids heavy from jet lag and cascades of sunshine, we set about exploring. Our new casa was old whitewashed stucco, and its big windows faced south, like all the other houses built into the hillside. We shared walls with our neighbors, who shared walls with theirs, and so on—a contiguous community called El Barrio de la Fuente, situated just below the ruins of a tenth-century Moorish castle. There were stone-tile floors and ceramic-tile walls, a porch lined with potted plants, and two terraces: a lower one, which looked out over a clanking welding shop and the town park, and another on the rooftop, affording a 270-degree panorama. To the west spread the hazy, azure Mediterranean, with Africa out there somewhere; straight ahead, to the south, the ancient alluvial sugarcane fields and the new condos inexorably consuming them; and to the east, the dusty brown foothills of the Alpujarras set against the cool whaleback of the Sierra Nevada.

It didn't feel like home, but that was the point.

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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