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12/13/2005: "Quiet Days in Malta"

It's a rainy day, here in the Santa Maria Estates that sprawl down a valley off the Mellieha Ridge , down to Mellieha Bay, to a little sandy beach called Ghajn Zejtuna. Too cold to swim, though the water is pretty when the sun is out. I did see a miniature jellyfish down at the beach the other day though – also pretty, but unpleasantly so. I've been going on long runs down along the bay then back up a switchback road to the hilltop town, some 520 feet upwards – then back down another road to this villa. Running up the switch back is difficult though because of all the diesel engines here and the fumes hang in the valley and are painful to breath. I got terribly lost on my first run (which always seem to occur at night, a dangerous thing with so much uneven pavement here) – the assumptions I made about how streets attached to each other were totally off, as was my internal compass. In Toronto, the grid can always be counted on, and even where things get a bit screwy, you'll end back on something you know will lead you to familiarity. I'm a little better now, after a week of being here. Like getting over jet lag, I think there is a process of de-grid-ing that has to take place. It's much more instinctive navigation here. Malta is small though and it's impossible to get really lost – but in the car while driving in the more continuous built up areas, I've gone on some unintentional detours that seemed to get deeper and father away from where I was going, then suddenly I'll pop back out onto the main street, a kilometer backwards.

But I'm stuck indoors with CNN and the internet today. Malta is a very out-doors sort of place (no real malls, no underground city), so when it rains there isn't much to do. The water today runs down the long downhill road outside like a river. Thunderclaps that sound like truck crashes. There are reports of the usual flooding in low-lying areas of Malta. The regularity and normalcy of floods and rains in the Maltese consciousness (people text radio stations telling them where the water is) reminds me a little of the way Joan Didion wrote about Malibu and Los Angeles in her collection of essays The White Album, where a general feeling of impending doom was always there. There's no sense of doom here, exactly, but things like floods aren't so common in Toronto. The lake will never rise up and consume us, the ground unlikely to tear open and swallow us. Things are pretty calm.

In Malta the ground is rocky and the buildings made of stone. All hard surfaces, sharp corners and nothing that gives in anyway. It makes me imagine the sound of snapping bones. Last night while falling asleep, in the basement of this villa, on the side of the house that is directly below the huge rock wall that supports the huge villa above owned by some Russian guy, I started to wonder how easy it would be for the hill just to let go, and let all that limestone and rock slide down over me. I would be no match for it.

Living in a valley is strange too. You can hear voices and dogs barking in the night, coming from strange angles. It also reminds of how Didion described that night in the Hollywood Hills when the Manson clan went to Roman Polanski's house. She says their screams could be heard all the way down the valley. Here, no screams, but loose dogs and feral cats sometimes cause a jolt when they pop out of the thick brush at the bottom of the valley. The houses are all behind big gates, and thick prickly hedges. The more private things are, the more my anxiety about that place increases. It feels lonely here -- like when rock gives way, nobody will help each other. The opposite may be true, but I can't tell. Dogs whine behind walls sometimes, a few feet away. Other times they bark from above, somewhere.

The picture above, taken a couple hours ago, shows the massive waves pounding the other side of the bay. Everywhere the last few days there have been these huge waves, even in the sun, making them seem even more strange and powerful – the sun can't stop them. I drove out to the top of that ridge the other day. You can just make out the chapel that is up there.

There is a lone statue of the Madonna there too – I think the date on the back was late 1800s, but it was in Maltese so I can't be sure. It watches over that bit of coast, the Rdum tal-Madonna. There is a cross placed on some impossible rock way below. I walked along the cliffs for a while, but backed away after I noticed that giant pieces of the land were laying in the sea. The sun was out and the wind blew at just the right speed. Some people back by the chapel -- it looked like they had boxes of produce or something -- were packing their stuff up. There had also been some people kneeling by the statue when I arrived -- I figured it was for Madonna or something -- but they were gone when I returned. I went to see why they were leaving flowers, as it looked like there was something else attached to the ground. There are plaques and memorials (mostly statues of the Madonna by the roadside that always have candles buring) -- people built them on their own. This one marked one terrible moment.



Also nearby was guy with a minivan and a bunch of boxes. I didn't think much of him until I walked close and realized all the boxes were moving and jerking around. They were filled with birds. The guy would pull one out, clamp something on the leg, then let them go. One after the other. I wanted to ask him what he was doing but a man with birds shouldn't be approached I figure. Some old women were sitting in the van waiting. I've since learnt there is a big carrier pigeon community here. Sometimes they take the birds over to Sicily and release them waiting for them to return to Malta. I watched for a while, then left, careful to put the car into reverse. You could drive your car straight off that cliff into the sea below.