We had to get up early, around 6 AM, to do some mission to help Blai. Jonathan woke me up with a hot cup of coffee. I appreciated the gesture, but then I took a sip. It was double hot, spiked with rum. I was kind of annoyed, but drinking it was easier than brewing myself another cup.
The mission had something to do with moving some scaffolding on Blai’s property back to his friend’s place near town. Blai moved one of his vehicle’s, the one with the trailer attached, down the hill to where the scaffolding was stored. The trailer was probably the roughest, most cobbled together and repaired a thousand times piece of junk I’d ever seen. The walls were being held together by straps and it seemed to sag in every direction. Somehow we were supposed to load all this scaffolding in here, then take the 10 or so mile drive over winding and pot-holed dirt roads down the mountain. Well, I didn’t have a lot of faith in this working, but Blai and Jonathan have a lot more experience with this kind of work, so I just helped where I could didn’t express my doubts. After loading all the scaffolding, the joint sagged between the trailer and the vehicle. Even they were laughing about how janky this looked and seemed skeptical about the success of our mission.
When we got closer to town, we had to stick to side roads, as this vehicle was definitely unregistered and was probably visibly committing several violations just for being outside of a garage. Luckily Blai knew his way around what almost seemed informal dirt pathways under bridges and overpasses. We arrived at his friend’s place, which was just a big grassy area with a couple of trailers and rough looking vehicles scattered about. It was kind of similar to how Blai was living, minus the old stone farm house and scenic location. We unloaded the scaffolding and headed out. I saw his friend jump on a mountain bike and take an adjacent trail, eventually meeting up with us again nearby. The mountain bike had a haphazard coat of black paint on it, making it look pretty rough, but on closer inspection the components all looked clean and well-maintained. This guy knew how to keep a bike in order, even if its provenance looked dubious.
We parked on a nearby street. I never really knew what we were doing. Blai tends to only explain the minimum of what you need to know. Sometimes it feels like its because he doesn’t trust you, but I think it just has more to do with years of living a lifestyle on the edge of society. Information is important and valuable and if you have more than someone else, well, it gives you the upper hand. Jonathan and I talked about this sometimes and we just kind of laughed about it, not taking it personally. A guy got out of the beater of a car parked in front of us. He came and greeted Blai warmly. It was another one of his Catalan punk friends, but he now lived on the French side of the Pyrenees. He was just around for a visit and to talk some business with Blai. We went to a nearby cafe where the scaffolding friend caught up with us. We were a rough-looking bunch of guys with a couple of huge dogs, but the server, an impish guy in his 50’s seemed to welcome us like family. We sat at a table outside so the Catalan crew could smoke their cigarettes. It was cold, but these guys were all wearing winter clothes that would have looked at home on Brooklyn hipsters, but these were probably like straight up hand-me-downs from the 80’s or 90’s. We ordered beers, coffee, plus pan con tomate with big slabs of pork belly on top. A real macho breakfast.
On the way home, we stopped at a store to pick up some apples and onions we would need for Blai’s birthday meal. I got myself more mushrooms that I hoped not to burn again, and Jonathan and I went half on a bottle of Pujol Rum.
Back at Blai’s we started working on the meal for the next day. He had been defrosting a leg of boar and a big chunk of deer meet for a day or so. I would say that Blai had hunted the boar, but I think he just heard some of them in front of his house one night, so he just walked out on his front step and shot one down with an arrow. The deer, well, I’m not sure where that came from. I quickly sharpened up a knife and started trimming the meat and cutting it into big chunks. Then we browned the two types of meat separately, and stewed them with a bunch of onions, apples and tomato sauce. The meat was smelling pretty gamey. While this was all happening, a lifelong friend of Blai’s and his wife and 3-year-old daughter had arrived. They were the type of people that live a bit more in mainstream society than a lot of the people around Blai, but they also had a camper van and longed to get out of the drudgery of city life. They were sweet and calm. They quietly prepared a really bland looking vegetable soup for themselves while we worked on the game stew.
Day 5
Today was Blai’s first day of his two-day birthday celebration. Saturday was the day for friends, while Sunday would be for his family. People started rolling in between 11 and noon. It was a varied mix of outdoor-style punks and various outlaws of various ages with a few kids in the mix. They were all friendly enough. One person brought a jug of vermouth and I started to see how much of a staple the drink is in Spain. I was already somewhat aware from seeing it often at bars, but this was my first time having it in a social setting. We drank it in the classic Spanish way, with a couple of olives, an orange slice, ice and perhaps a bit of sparkling water. We also started the meal with some basic aperitivo dishes, like tomatoes with olive oil and garlic and some marinated anchovies that the couple that had arrived the night before had prepared. They were really good. Then we had the meat, served with a slightly messy pilaf style rice. The meat was really good. I was surprised that I actually liked the deer more than the boar. While I may have prepared it in a different way if I had been in charge, the stew was mildly flavored enough that you could really tasted and appreciate the unique flavor of the meat.
After lunch, Jonathan and I went on a walk through the forest. There were wild herbs like rosemary, fennel and even a bit of thyme growing everywhere. There was also signs of wild boar all over the place. Blai could probably just live off wild boar meat if he wanted to. It felt good to walk after stuffing myself with so much meat and rice. We reached a chain strung across the trail, indicating the edge of Blai’s property. So we decided to turn around and head back to the party. On our way back, we noticed that Blai had a teepee set up somewhere between the house and the edge of the forest. Jonathan really wanted to spend the night in it. We also figured that with so many people there, (maybe 12 or 15) at least some of them might be staying over and need a place to sleep in the house. We were happy to give up our beds which we didn’t really like that much anyway. We also didn’t know if Blai would be weird about us staying in the teepee so we decided to do it sneakily. We devised a plan. While everyone was distracted (or just you know, hanging out with each other) Jonathan snuck around the basement and the second building (filled with freezers, solar batteries, building supplies and assorted junk) and found stuff for making the teepee a bit more comfortable. He got some chunks of styrofoam for pillows, cushions from lawn chairs to use as mattresses, some tarps and a couple blankets. I discreetly gathered some fire wood and hauled it up to the teepee. As we were were sneaking around, we came across a ping-pong table in the second building, which seems like it was probably for livestock at some point in time. So we played a couple of games. I think we each won one, vowing to settle the score later. A bit later in the day, when people started to either trickle out or figure out sleeping arrangements, we blew our secret. Jonathan offered our beds to a couple that was asking Blai where to sleep. Blai got curious and started asking a lot of questions. Well, the jig was up and we told Blai about the teepee plan. He didn’t seem to understand why we would want to sleep there, but didn’t seem to mind. Anyway, we still pretended that we were on a sneaky mission. A bit later, we snuck some beers up to the teepee and started our fire. It was cold outside, but with the fire and our blankets we were pretty cozy. It was a far better sleeping arrangement than we had inside the house.
Day 6
The next morning I woke up late, like at almost 11. I knew that Blai’s family was supposed to start arriving between 11 and 12, but I didn’t hear too much noise of vehicles or people. I figured they weren’t there yet and I could relax in bed a bit longer. Jonathan was still fast asleep. I laid there for a while, but eventually got up to pee. I stepped out of the teepee and saw that a few vehicles had indeed arrived and things looked like they were starting to move down below. I went down to see what was going on and most of the family (Blai was expecting around 30-40 people) was already there. They all fully awake, buzzing around, busy preparing food and setting up the tables. I walked through the kitchen and greeted some of Blai’s aunts, cousins and sisters. I went to the room to get some clothes and things from my bag to put myself together. I was a real mess and surely smelled like campfire and beer. I went back to the teepee and did my best to clean myself up. I changed clothes, brushed my teeth and put my hair up. When I went back down, I looked for something I could do to help so I went back into the kitchen. Everyone started greeting me and introducing themselves again. I realized that they thought I was a different guy from before and that was fine with me to have a second chance. That first guy was a real loser.
Blai’s family was throwing this feast together like a well-oiled machine. Apparently the family gathers at someone’s place pretty much every Sunday so everyone knows what to do. Blai’s grandpa was hunched over the sink, carefully removing the seeds from some roasted peppers. His sisters were chopping vegetables with some freshly sharpened knives. His dad was setting up the paella pan over a very wide portable gas stove. His uncle was slicing the ham that Blai had hung to cure about a year earlier. His kookie aunt was just walking around with a plate of ham and a bowl of melon, offering it to everyone. I got busy peeling a big basket of onions with Blai’s grandmother. That only lasted so long, so I kept going into the kitchen, looking for more things to chop or other ways to contribute. I thought people would be impressed with my knife skills, but Blai’s sisters were all pretty handy with the steel.
Neus, Blai’s girfriend, was being kind of shy and staying out of the way. She later told me that she was intimidated by the family and that she was ashamed of her poor Catalan. She was raised in Catalonia, so her education was in Catalan, but since her parents were not Catalan, she never spoke it at home. Antimo, an Italian guy who had drove in the night before was also surprisingly shy. He and Blai had met in Australia and then traveled together in Mongolia, where they were in a truck crash while joyriding in the steppe together. We had been speaking Spanish together (his Spanish seemed pretty much perfect to me) until I found out that his partner of twelve years is French and that he lives in southern France. So we switched to French and our conversations got a lot better. He spent a lot of the time helping Blai’s dad with the paella. That was the best job to have gotten. You get to stay outside, work around a giant, hot pan and learn something. Eventually Jonathan joined the party. Of course he made a big splash and everyone seemed incredibly charmed by him. The confidence this guy has, especially with his insane Spanish, is just unreal. At times it’s impressive and at times it’s insufferable because it seems so performative. I mean, he kind of plays the clown, which puts everyone at ease, but at the same time, it seemed to make some of us (Antimo, Neus and I) even more shy and withdrawn. The rest of the family was so charmed and in love with him that they didn’t even seem to notice Blai’s other friends.
When the meal was ready everyone gathered around the long tables outside under a tree. We started with appetizers. There were marinated anchovies, tomatoes with garlic and olive oil, roasted and marinated peppers, Blai’s homemade butifarra, or Catalan sausages, and, kind of oddly, guacamole and pico de gallo. The latter two clearly got a little Spain-ified, with the use of parsley instead of cilantro and olive oil instead of neutral oil. Then the paella came out. Blai’s dad had sprung for a lot of the best seafood to go into it, including locally caught shrimp and some kind of roe that got mixed into everything. Everyone loved the paella, but I’m not so used to such fishy dishes. I ate it happily, but it wasn’t my favorite thing.
As the meal wound down, Blai turned on some music. There was a bit of dancing. Blai also brought out a chess board and played each of his grandparents. They both beat him, but barely. It was very sweet watching him with his family. I didn’t know this at the time, but Blai told me later about how he had not been very close with his family for years. He was basically out of the house in his late teens, and was became an outcast in his family. He was seen as some kind of no good punk troublemaker. I remember visiting him in 2011 and when we stopped by his family’s home for a few minutes, I remember his mom and one of his sisters being extremely cold. At the time, I just thought it was how they were, but after seeing the warmth and love of the family, I realize that it wasn’t normal. Blai was able to get back in good standing with his family after he (with a lot of their help), bought this piece of property and they saw how serious he was about building something for himself there. They were impressed with his initiative and his abilities as well as his willingness to help out members of the family when needed. This change seemed really important to Blai and while he is still not attending most of their weekly Sunday gatherings, he was really enjoying all the love and attention he was receiving.
After the meal, the family turned the work machine back on and had everything cleaned up, table cleared, dishes washed, and leftovers transferred into boxes within minutes. I was so fortunate to be able to attend this family gathering. Not only was it a good time, but it was one of those cultural experiences that you just can’t get unless you know someone. It felt like the end of one of those episodes of an Anthony Bourdain show where the whole extended family or large group of friends gathers for a nice meal together. The kind of thing that almost feels exotic from the perspective of a lot of Americans.
After the family left it was just Jonathan, Blai, Neus and Antimo. We hung out around the fire, while I occasionally went inside to sneak some little pieces off Blai’s ham. After having a lot of my own meat curing failures (but successes too) it was really impressive that Blai had managed to make a really delicious ham, which is arguable the most challenging piece of charcuterie to make, on his first try. I didn’t feel too bad about sneaking ham, as I really felt like I was appreciating it more than most. Eventually Jonathan and I went back to the teepee and had another fire.
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