After that journey to Baja I threw myself into learning Spanish with all the discipline and motivation of a young boy in his mid-teens. That combined with the academic rigors of public school in Western Nevada produced an astounding outcome: After three years of high school Spanish I was still unable to speak a coherent sentence. 

University was better and we upped the learning ante by having Spanish parties. The idea was to get together with a bunch of other learners at someone’s house, eat Mexican food, have some drinks and speak nothing but Spanish. Classroom learning is one thing, but using the tenuous new skill in real life is entirely another. Our language abilities, however, were so bad that all pretense of speaking in Spanish would be abandoned within fifteen minutes. Nonetheless I’m sure that eating chips and salsa and drinking Tequila created a foundational preparation for understanding the nuances of the language. 

The thing about learning a language is that it is a complex skill that requires discipline, persistent practice, time and patience. Of those four things the only one I really had a handle on was time. And I may have been more adept at wasting it than using it wisely. So, for years, my dance of learning Spanish was of a very simple choreography; one step forward, one step back. Repeat.

There was that one day sitting in class in the old building called Founder’s Hall up on the hill with the wall of windows that made the chalkboard glow. A student who wasn’t in our class came in and spoke to the professor for a moment in front of all of us about who knows what. She looked like she could be any of us. But she wasn’t. Because for a full minute she had a flowing, animated conversation, in Spanish, of the sort we’d only ever dreamed of. She didn’t stop to think of each and every word she was going to say and how to translate it into Spanish. She didn’t fumble with the tenses. She rolled her R’s. She even laughed in Spanish.  It was as if this was the most natural thing on earth. The university was located in a small town in the most northwestern possible corner of California. Aside from the professors who were imported from Spain, no one I’d ever met spoke Spanish there. 

My face probably mirrored that of everyone else in our level 2 Spanish; a mixture of awe and envy tinged by a secret, but overwhelming wish to be just like her… but never, ever to invite her to our Spanish parties. Put it all together and what you had was a classroom of slack jawed wannabes with dopey eyes and creased brows transfixed on this person in the front of the room. 

She pretended like she didn’t notice. But I think that moment made her entire semester. I know it would have made mine. It also showed me something; Spanish was actually possible.

It rained a lot there. During the four years I was there it almost never stopped, despite, I was told, those years being drought years. The biggest trees on earth grew just up the road in the stunning redwood forests. I was born and raised in a desert. I spent my time between classes hiding from the rain in the library where I had three favorite activities. 

The first was looking at the bulletin boards, particularly the one that had posters about study abroad. There was a program in Florence. Another in Venice. I was studying art. Months on end in Italy painting, sketching, exploring. Oh yes!! I didn’t know anything about Italy. It didn’t matter. Daydreams of places far away.  Price tag for that Italian experience: $20,000 for the year. This was 1989 and my tuition was $2,500, which was just about what we could afford. Italy would only be a daydream. 

The second was, well, looking at books. At some point in my rotation through art classes I’d taken a pottery class. From the moment I stuck my hands in clay I was hooked. Some kids just like to play with mud and fire. I was one of those kids. In the library I had found a way to combine my new love of clay with whatever it was inside of me that pulled me to dream of far away places. So while the rain dripped down the library windows, I'd be lost between the pages of books with images of potters and pottery and villages in other lands. Again and again I’d go back to the page in a book called Africa Adorned that showed a stack of well-patinaed round pots stacked, one on top of another,  in a round earthen room and sunlight streaming in from an opening in the ceiling. Or a black and white photo of a potter in a little Mexican village called Rio Blanco. She wore a shawl over her head and had the strong hands of someone who works with tools. She was staining her pots in a wild pattern with boiled oak bark, of all things. I’d sit back and imagine this place that in my mind felt more than anything like someplace wild and ancient. 

These images were my sunshine in that wet land. Pure vitamin D for my eyes. I would look and day dream and wish and try to feel those places with every cell in my being. To me those images resonated ‘rightness’. Hand made pots used for cooking and carrying water, rural villages, kilns made of stone, earth beneath the feet and a total absence of the material pollution of the industrial world. Could there still be places where they made pots by hand in some ancient way and fired them with wood in stone kilns? The books were old and in our clay studio we fired our pots in electric kilns with name brands on them. How fortunate were those, I thought, who had been able to see those places while they still existed. 

Imagining and day dreaming about such things on gray days, I’d fall asleep. Which was my third favorite library activity.   

And then one day a miracle happened. The fog and clouds and mist and rain parted and a ray of sunlight pierced the sky. It came right through the pane of the wet library window and its warm brilliance glistened on a piece of paper tacked to the bulletin board. It was next to the full color posters about Florence and Venice, but it was just a black and white thing that read: “ Humboldt State University Oaxaca Program. Semester Abroad in Mexico. Spanish Immersion. Limited Space.” My very own school was offering an international experience!!  It said there would be an informative meeting about the program in two weeks. 

And! And! And the price was listed. $2,500 with lodging.  Transport not included.  

Though I couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Oaxaca’, I was able to find it in an atlas. It looked far away and deep in the south of Mexico. Then I remembered that photo of the potter by the stone kiln in the village called Rio Blanco...that was also in this place called Oaxaca. I found the book on the shelves and flipped through the pages. There were many old photos of potters in Oaxaca. And they were wonderful. What if some of those potters still existed? I must, I thought, be one of the students to get one of those limited spaces. 

And guess what? I did. 

See you next week.