The Mayor of Port de la Selva

all photos c. Lluis Sala

Genís Pinart, the mayor of the little Catalan fishing village of Port de la Selva, stands on a steep scrub-covered hillside overlooking an impossibly azure Mediterranean bay. Mountains rise around us in a bowl shape, creating a natural barrier to the tramuntana wind, weather, and men. The village below us, and the sea, face outward to the world. He points to a huge triangular carved flat stone at our feet, placed on top of three supporting perpendicular stones, and says, “The prehistoric people of this region built this ten thousand years ago as a tomb. It is older than Stonehenge.” Nobody knows now what the carvings mean.

this photo only:c.Pere Gali

He is actor-handsome with short gray hair, an honest smile, and the tanned lined face of an outdoorsman and I realize that one day, a long time ago, another man who carried those same genes in his own blood stood here on this spot and ordered the lifting and placing of this massive stone dolmen by his fellow tribesmen. He had to have vision, and charisma, and strength to be able to get people to follow him and organize around his ideas. Now this mayor’s hand sweeps the hillsides, which are terraced with hand-built rock walls at narrow intervals to hold the soil up, and tells me that when he was a boy here, they were covered in grapevines and olive groves. Hundreds of hectares then, but now only a few vines are left. First the phyloxera killed most of them, then the changing times kept them from being replanted even after the Texas wild vine rootstocks came to save the winegrowing industry of Europe. “Young people don’t drink wine anymore. We drank wine with every meal, as a normal thing. Now they drink whiskey, and beer, and try to be modern.”

After the grapes went away, the hillsides went fallow and fishing was the only way left to make money. Then as the primary assistant to the previous mayor, Pinart realized that the village was in inevitable decline unless something was done. He saw that tourists were beginning to arrive, slowly at first, but in ever-increasing numbers from places that were rainy and cold like Britain and Germany and Holland, to this Costa Brava area of Catalonia between Barcelona and the French border. He saw the way. As a builder himself, he could have pushed for unlimited building codes the way most places did, resulting in tacky, sprawling overdevelopment along the coast, turning the beautiful hills into an uninspiring parade of boxes-as-housing, concrete, and desultory little cafes and souvenir shops for miles. Instead, he did something seemingly contrary to type, and pushed for local building codes that closely regulated the type and placement of construction, and limiting the height that anything could be placed on the bowl of mountains around their town. This vision meant lower initial profits for men like him, but now that Port de la Selva has remained beautiful and unspoiled, the steady flow of money and visitors into the village has turned it prosperous and beautiful, a fine destination indeed. He says he is ready to turn over his office to a new person, but he worries that inexperienced people will succumb to the enormous new pressures that large corporations are putting on places like his town, to allow all sorts of unaesthetic structures to be thrown up. He says, “I may be a liberal, but I am not stupid; I know how to push back, hard. I worry that a new person may not be tough enough.”

As we look at the little white village, I suddenly notice that, unlike most of Mediterranean Europe, nearly everything in the town is new. He points at the north shore of the bay, saying, “Just over that mountain there is France. During the Spanish Civil War the leftists were bringing munitions and supplies into our village. Hitler found out about it and sent his planes to bomb us. They bombed every building in the village to the ground, and later they came back and did it again just to underline the point. Then the army came in and took control of the port. When the war was over, they lined up the last 25 young men in the village and shot them all dead and left.” So, Port de la Selva has been literally and figuratively rebuilt from scratch, a tribute to a people who, along with their prehistoric, Celtic, Greek, Roman, Visigoth, Arab and Frankish ancestors, have had the kind of spirit and determination to raise everything from huge stone tombs on high hillsides to thriving, artfully conceived vacation destinations on those same brown and gold hills and somehow never bow to the pressures of the elements, or war, or diseases of the body or the vine. Port de la Selva is the story of Catalonia, of the Mediterranean spirit, of European ingenuity and gentle understanding in the face of horror, of mankind.

As my friend and photographer Lluis Sala and I climb back into the Land Rover the Mayor says “I have something for you” and gives me a clear unlabeled bottle of pure green virgin olive oil from his thousand-year-old grove, and bottles of deep red wine from his vines. We tour the vines and olive groves that lie between the mountains and the flat lower lands. They are dotted with little stone huts made without mortar, stacked into circles of ever-

decreasing diameter until they meet in a dome overhead. It was refreshingly cool inside the hut, even on a warm spring day, a place of refuge from the hot afternoon sun after working in the vineyards and the olives. The stone that covers the final hole in the center of the roof can be removed, he says, to let smoke out, for a fire in winter. Some long-forgotten genius, a self-taught architect and construction wizard, did this and many more like it scattered around the slopes.

Nobody knows how to do it now. An eighty-two-year old man tends the vines, the vineyards planted in old-style field blends of red and rosé and white grapes with names like “Lledoner" and "Macaveo” that are the local dialect names for the ancient Greek and Roman varieties that throve here, Carignagne, Grenache Noir, Pedro Jimenez, Muscat, Picpoul, some of them lost to the rest of the world but preserved here in the hidden places in the hills, varieties that will one day be suddenly recognized as wonderful “new” wines, merely thousands of years old in truth. He has crusaded to save these old vines and odd varieties, and planted them in his and in the village’s own new vineyards in a cleft in the hills where the soil is just deep enough and the water just present enough for the grapes to thrive there. He has campaigned for twelve years now to revive the wine and olive culture before they disappear, as they nearly did, and slowly, the ancient stone hillside terraces have begun to bloom with green grapevines again and the dark black of the olive trunks amidst the cork oaks and juniper trees and cactus. The terraces are so narrow that only a mule or a tiny little special tractor can negotiate them. They will return, just like Port de la Selva, and the brown scrub and the golden wildflowers will give way to color and life again here. It takes people with vision, and heart and leadership to make things like this happen, as a grower coaxes a plant from the ground.

Men and women have always turned to natural leaders in times of turmoil for hope and intelligent direction and it is with special urgency that I write these thoughts in the midst of the U.S. presidential elections. I can only hope that this once-great nation can at last select a person who can do those things once again for us, and with us. ¡Visca Catalunya!

My Dad Was a Hero

“Well hello there, my it’s been a long, long time…” Thanks, Willie, for giving me a nice lead-in today. I’ve been away from this space doing the final mixes for Kimmie Rhodes’ next CD “Walls Fall Down” and I finally got it mastered and in the mail to the pressing plant this morning, so it is time to hit the keyboards again.

Whilst I was off in Musicland, I have been thinking about a lot of different things. We watched all of the Ken Burns series on WWII, which I thought was riveting and brilliantly done, and it set me to thinking about my father. He fought in that war, so the PBS series was very personal for me. When I was a kid I became very interested in war, in guns and tanks and ships and planes. I read Sergeant Rock comics and built models of all the WWII ships and planes and was really just all ate up with it, I know not why. I still am, I guess, and have several large sections of my bookshelves lined with books about it.

I used to ask my father about the war, not being old enough to realize that it might be painful for him, but he would tell me about his experiences in a low-key manner, never exaggerating or playing the hero. He was a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Helm. When war broke out, he realized he was about to be drafted and, not wanting to crawl through the mud holding a rifle, being shot at like many of his buddies already were, he opted to join the Navy instead, and being a recent college grad, they made him an officer. When they found out he was an avid hunter and a great shot, they sent him to gunnery school at Notre Dame. There he learned the ranges, types, and various abilities of the guns aboard the U.S. ships, and how to man the gunnery tower on a large ship, which coordinated targeting and set the ranges on the ship’s weapons.

This little enclosed perch, like a gun turret, sat on top of the central tower of the ship, over the bridge, and was the topmost thing. It rotated 360 degrees and contained the Gunnery Officer and his sights and rangefinders. The anti-aircraft weapons were literally hooked up to him, so they all fired in unison at the same target. He also calculated the ranges and angles for the big guns that lobbed heavy shells, some as big as a small car, into enemy targets many miles away. This made him a very important part of the ship’s ability to shoot, and so all of the enemy planes would aim for him and his little rotating box.
The USS Helm underway. You can see Joe Gracey, Sr. perched on the roof of his Gunnery Turret, inside of which were his sights and rangefinders. You can also see the depth charges sitting on the rear deck, ready to be rolled into the sea.

He shipped out of San Diego for the Pacific and was assigned to the destroyer USS Helm. He would spend the next three years fighting in every major battle from Coral Sea to Okinawa under Admiral Chester Nimitz (a Fredericksburg Texas German). A destroyer, relatively small and fast and lightly armed with only 5-inch cannons and 40-millimeter antiaircraft repeaters, had several duties in the fleet; one was protecting the outer perimeter of a battle group, headed by a cruiser or battleship, and usually containing at least one carrier. Enemy subs were always prowling around the groups, like giant silent steel sharks, looking for a way in to sink a carrier, so they had their sonar on looking for subs all the time. Several times, he told me, they thought they had a sub detected. A sub which thinks it has been located would generally dive to the bottom and sit there, engines off, silent, hoping the stalker will move on. The Helm had 60 gallon oil drums filled with TNT and a depth sensor on it, so they would set the depth sensor to go off at the depth they thought the sub was at. They’d roll these things over the side of the ship, where they would sink silently through the cold and when they reached the programmed pressure, the dynamite would blow. He told me that several times they did this and soon after, bits of flotsam floated to the surface, along with pieces of human beings, usually lung tissue because it floated. He said it made him feel sorry for the men down there who died. They pulled in some bodies, too, and had to bury the Japanese submariners at sea. They did this many times with American boys too. When a man was buried at sea, they strapped the body to a 5-inch gun shell for ballast and slid him over the side into the icy sea. I never heard my father utter words of hatred for the men he had to fight and kill. I heard him express sadness at their deaths. I don’t think he was particularly fond of the Japanese, or their prewar culture, but then most Americans of that era felt the same way, for good enough reasons. But he didn’t go to war out of hatred but rather out of desperation, literally to save his homeland from evil.

He said that towards the shank end of the war, the Japanese were sending out Kamikazi planes, dedicated suicide pilots, who would make of themselves a flying manned bomb and fly into the decks of our ships. Twice he managed to

Kamikazi plane attacking the Helm

cripple a Kamakazi plane and the pilot attempted one last dying crash into his tower perch, but the planes sailed mere feet away, over the deck, and into the sea. He could see the look on the pilot’s face as he went by, just kids really. He was only 22 himself.



He was there all the way to the end, when they went ashore in Okinawa harbor. He brought back a Japanese officer's sword and a liking for Aussie mutton, and a disdain for shipboard cooking. He and his mates said that “chicken soup” on the menu "meant hot water that the cooks had let a chicken run through once…"

I realized years later that my father suffered from depression, related no doubt to post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody called it that in those days and he just suffered and we all suffered too. But, he was a hero. A genuine, no-bullshit hero, who just had a terrible job he had to do and he went and did it. He often took us bird hunting and fishing and he was an ace shot because he had such good hand-eye coordination, which I seem to have inherited. Sometimes he comes to me in dreams to tell me things and I know now how much he really loved and admired me, even though he was too frozen to ever say it to me. He was a good man, and a good father, and I wish I had managed to tell him I thought so before he died. I guess this is me telling him now, wherever he is.

So, a toast to Lieutenant Junior Grade Joe Gracey Sr., and Walter Caven and Bostelman and Crimp!, and all of the men who went off to fight in the most honorable war this country has known, if there is such a thing. They were just boys, but heroic boys, and they paid a terrible price that nobody else ever truly understood. Good men all, may you Rest in Peace at last.

A Number Two Dinner

With this post, you now have all the proper fixins (yes, Texans say "fixins" in everyday speech, meaning "ingredients". We also say "I'm fixin' to...", meaning "getting ready to", which bowled them over in Ireland for some reason.) for an authentic Tex-Mex Number Two Dinner, just like it would be at Matt's El Rancho or Casita Jorge's. Two enchiladas, rice and beans. All you need is the chips and salsa and a cold Negra Modelo, if you are a guy, and a tall glass of beaded, sweating iced tea, if you are a girl. I do not know why this is, but it is a valid generalization. Maybe because women, being smarter than men, realize that alcohol makes a person fat, stupid, and subject to ED, except that isn't really a problem for most of them. Guys don't usually care if they become fat, stupid, etc. I know I don't.

Texans Bobby Earl Smith, Joe Gracey, Willie Nelson, and Colman Andrews, editor of Modern Lounging Magazine, before drinking too many Negra Modelos

Kimmie and I are going off to cook 100 meals for my mother and freeze them for her so that she can have good food and not have to rely on frozen store-bought garbage or the kindness of friends so much. It is an interesting exercise and one that I shall probably write about here, so I will not be posting here for a few days, most likely. These Tex-Mex recipes should keep you busy until my return. A drum roll, please:

Frijoles Refritos

If you were a Native Texan 400 years ago and you had a mess of beans and vegetables, then your first idea would be to throw them all in a pot and stew them together. Most of these things grow wild in Texas and Mexico so the cooks of the bunch developed this soup/stew. Earthenware is still the best type of pot to cook this dish in, just as it was ten thousand years ago.

1 pound (about 2 1/4 cups) Pinto or Anasazi Beans, soaked overnight, water discarded
2 yellow onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tomato, chopped, or a small can of diced tomatoes
salt and pepper (careful, the pork adds salt)
Salt Pork, blanched and cubed, or a handful of bacon, chopped up, or a smoked ham hock
Lard, preferably unhydrogenated, or bacon fat, Canola Oil or Corn Oil


Drain the beans. Cover with water plus a few inches, add the vegetables and the salt and pepper and pork. Simmer partially covered until the beans are done, about two hours. (Anasazis cook faster than Pintos, so check often or they fall apart.) Check frequently and put more water in if needed. Taste for salt and pepper. In an iron skillet heat 1 tablespoon of oil for each cup of beans and "fry" them, mashing with a fork, adding bean liquid until a smooth puree is formed. Makes 10 small servings.