More exploring in Navarra: at the source of rivers

One of the great things about Pamplona is that we are so close to nature. The city itself has a population of about 250,000, and in just a few minutes, you are out among small farms and villages. In less than an hour, you can be in a nature preserve.

With some quarantine restrictions relaxed, we are now allowed to travel within the province of Navarra. So we rented a car on two successive weekends and headed out.

The sacred salmon

About two weeks ago a Pamplona guy bagged a 10-pound salmon within minutes after the season officially opened. He caught in the Bidasoa River near Bera, a place we visited on Sunday (May 24). It's up in the mountains quite close to France.

A restaurant in San Sebastian offered him 500 euros (about $550) for the lehenbiziko (first salmon, in Basque). But David Miranda thought it would dishonor the lehenbiziko. He saved it for a celebratory family dinner. Basque culture and customs run deep here. The writer for the Diario de Navarra newspaper adopted a dramatic, literary style to tell the tale.  The salmon population has been recovering in recent years. Dams have been removed and pollution reduced.

We visited Bera on a Sunday morning a few days later.

The town hall (ayuntamiento) and square in Bera. At 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning, there normally should be a crowd of people coming up to the church. This day, no mass. There were small gatherings of people at cafes and restaurants, tables six feet apart.

In 1813 a small group of British troops "fighting heroically for the independence of Spain" defended this San Miguel bridge against a much larger division of Napoleon's army.

Bera's location near the border has made it a focal point in historic conflicts. During the Civil War, 1936-39, thousands of Republicans fled the Fascist regime to the friendlier France. Bera is the marker farthest north on the map below.

The map shows the places we visited during five days of feverish travel after being confined for two months because of the corona virus.

A nature hike

Among the other places we visited on Sunday was a park called Bertizko Jaurerria Parke Naturala in the town of Mugairi. It has an arboretum, and it is the jumping-off point for several hiking trails. There was one 4-mile route we thought we could handle. For the first mile or so it was all uphill, very steep. Then we traversed a ridge through forest that started out as mainly oak, then European chestnut (castaña in Spanish, used to make castanets), and then beech.

The European chestnuts are supposed to be quite long-lived, some for more than a thousand years. They seem to survive by creating new selves within the old.

European chestnut.

We crossed dozens of little streams along the ridge.

Purple foxglove, one of many wildflowers in Bertizko Jaurerria Parke Naturala

Abárzuza and the Irantzu River canyon

But before we got to Bera that weekend, Cindy picked out a hike up the canyon of the Irantzu River. The trail starts at a historic monastery near Abárzuza, southwest of Pamplona.

In the Irantzu Canyon. The river, at this point just a stream, runs along the left.

In one of the nearby villages, Mués, is a sculpture garden that is a memorial for local people assassinated by the fascist forces in 1936. The sculptures, by a local man named Pablo Nogales, actually seem inspired by some of the wind-worn and water-abraded surfaces of the Irantzu canyon. We saw Nogales sculptures in several of the nearby villages. Some in medieval style, like the one of the pilgrim below, and others more abstract. 

Related:

 

A town in need of some consonants: Aoiz

The north coast of Spain and the birthplace of Ignatius Loyola

Exploring Navarra: the source of the rivers
The walled city of Artajona and ancient burial grounds

 

A pilgrim. Mués is on the Camino de Santiago.

A couple and child (to the right). The texture recalls the rock faces in the Irantzu canyon. 

Some pre-quarantine travels to Albarracín and Teruel

We did some travel over Christmas--Pittsburgh, New York City, Karlsruhe, Germany. And after Christmas, before the corona virus hit, we went pretty far southeast, to Albarracín and Teruel, where there was still a lot of snow.

Albarracín is famous for its Moorish wall and fortress.

Cindy above Albarracín

The towers of Teruel.

A snowman in the sculpture garden in Teruel

Teruel's aqueduct dates from the 1500s.

We also went hiking through a nearby park that was famous for its rock paintings, which are 5,000 to 7,000 years old. Actually, these pictures give you a better idea of the rock paintings than the ones we were able to get.

We enjoyed the hike in spite of the snow and cold.

The rock paintings are protected, hard to get close to.

Lots of rocks to choose from for a rock painter.

We explore the province of Navarra: mountains, churches

Two weeks ago, the government lifted some quarantine restrictions in some areas of Spain where there have been fewer cases of covid-19. Since then we have been exploring Navarra.

On Friday, we drove about a half-hour northwest of Pamplona to the Sierra de Aralar, which has lots of mountain hiking trails. I can hear Cindy on a video call with her siblings right now, and she is describing it as "awful". It was sunny, 85 degrees, uphill. What's not to like? Seriously. I enjoyed it.

We were lost, however. The maps of the various trails were very confusing (here's the map of the trails leading from the village of Iribas, where we started), and we weren't sure exactly where we were except that we were somewhere on a mountain. At one point, as we tried to figure out where we were, we stopped to rest, and some cows came down the trail from the direction we were headed.

We were a little bit scared. The cows entered the clearing where we were resting and blocked the trail in both directions. And they were so close, they looked enormous, even though they were very docile. We don't know from cows.

Economists ask, What is a mother worth?

Sunday was Mother's Day, which got me thinking about our Mom and how much we appreciated her. You can't put a price on that. Or can you? Should you? I think we all should put a price on motherhood.

It took economics for me to change a lot of my thinking about mothers and motherhood. Actually, those ideas had been changing slowly over a long period of time. But things really got started when I read an article about, of all things, the history of the statistic we know as the Gross National Product, or GDP. 

I was preparing to teach several courses at the University of Navarra in Spain. They had invited me as visting professor of communication, and I was supposed to teach economics and the economics of media. I was fearful of being revealed as a fraud.

Although I had written about business and economics for most of three decades, my formal education in the field consisted of a solitary but memorable introductory course taken in college a century ago.

Not our university, but one like it.

My new teaching colleague had written a book in Spanish called Economics for Communicators. Reading it made me realize that, although I had been applying economics theories in my journalism for years, I did not know or understand those theories well enough to be able to explain them to a bunch of 19-year-olds. Nothing is scarier than confronting a classroom of skeptics eager to expose your ignorance with ruthless glee.

So I was doing my homework on microeconomics and came upon an article in the Financial Times: Has GDP outgrown its use. 

What GDP doesn't capture or value

The article made a couple of points that got me thinking about how society values what women do, and mothers in particular. GDP really grew out of the Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to know, in essence, how bad things were and which government policies could make things better, as Diane Coyle describes in the article mentioned above.

Letter from Spain: Living in isolation, Day 24

View from our balcony in Pamplona. Outside, it's spring.

I felt the first impact of the corona virus on March 12. Attendance in my Economics class was abnormally low, only 11 of the 24 students. Normally, I have attendance rates of close to 90%.

What happened? The numbers of sick and dead in Spain had started to rise. The fear was Spain might become another China, Iran, or Italy, where the virus was infecting and killing thousands.

I heard that students from Latin America and Asia were getting phone calls from worried parents, telling them to come home. News of growing numbers of infections in Europe had spooked them. Besides, the Easter break was nearing, and they wanted their kids home for all the traditional family gatherings.

My Chinese students told me by email that they had gone home because health standards were higher there than in Spain, where people were still behaving as though there was no danger. They would be safer in their home country, they believed. (These two students and a Japanese student were immediately put into quarantine upon arrival back home. As of a few days ago, all are safe.)

Still, the Universidad de Navarra, where I teach, had not yet canceled classes in Pamplona. I told students that for our next class, as an experiment, we would have class virtually, via a Zoom teleconference. "Just an experiment," I told them.

Then I went for a swim at a public pool. Far fewer swimmers than normal. Afterwards, I asked the lifeguard if I was taking a risk of catching the virus from other swimmers. After all, the water is in and out of people's mouths and noses. "Nah, no worries," he said. "The chlorine will kill anything in the water." Still, I made a mental note not to use the pool again. The next day, city authorities closed all the pools and community centers.

The art of the obituary: summing up a life

Back when newspapers existed only in print, aspiring journalists had to make their bones writing obituaries. While those of literary pretensions considered this beneath them, writing obituaries actually requires mastery of the basics of good journalism--accuracy in the who, what, when, where, why, and how. And, if possible, capturing the spirit of a human being's life in just a few hundred words.

Today, many newspapers have outsourced the writing of obituaries to funeral directors and legacy.com, which means much of the art is lost.

In my first newspaper job, at the Painesville Telegraph in Ohio, the readership included a large community of Finnish immigrants who came to work in the salt mines under Lake Erie. Spelling all the family names correctly in an obituary represented a mighty challenge. Some random Finnish names will give you the idea--Armas Oiva Sarkkinen, Toivo Suursoo, Jukka Kuoppamaki.

Immigrant obituaries offered the possibility for fascinating stories. When and why did they emigrate? What was the journey like? How did they meet their spouse? Where were they stationed during the war? (because there is nearly always a war in these stories).

I remember an editor telling me, "This is often the only story that will ever be written about that person. Their family members clip and save the story. You have to get every detail right." A well written obituary is sometimes the best thing in a newspaper. The drama of one person's life: pain and glory.

When Elijah Cummings sang along with Garth Brooks

This column was originally published in the Baltimore Business Journal 17 years ago (
Dec 23, 2002, edition). Cummings died on Thursday,

Cummings, from Getty Images in Politico

It takes a big man to admit he is wrong, and it takes an even bigger man to admit it in a public forum. That makes Congressman Elijah Cummings a very big man indeed.


Cummings, a Democratic congressman representing Baltimore City and Baltimore County, was recently named head of the Congressional Black Caucus. In this role he will be expected to speak up for African-Americans all across the country, especially when they may be slighted because of their race.


In a speech at a business breakfast last summer, Cummings admitted that he once was guilty of a bit of profiling 
himself. Cummings was invited with other congressmen to a reception at the White House by President Bill Clinton to hear a variety of musical acts, including Gladys Knight and the Pips and other pop music icons.