In the mountains of Austria with Bridget, Phillip, and Will

 

Cindy likes water falling over rocks. We saw a lot of that on our hikes around the ski resort town of Mittelberg, Austria. We were having a reunion with our daughter, Bridget, her husband, Phillip Ens, and their son, William (Will). Phillip was having a reunion with his old opera-singing pal, Heinz, whose wife's family owns the Leitner Hotel, a fabulous place for hikers and bikers in summer and skiers in winter. 

 

Mighty new timbers strengthen this old covered bridge. 

William and his Dad. They had fun throwing stones into the mountain stream.

We're mostly on the same side, but there is money to be made by driving us apart

It is heartbreaking to watch people I know and respect and love tearing each other apart. There have always been at least two sides to every argument, but now it seems there are only two extreme arguments. Anyone who is not 100% in agreement with our position is assumed to be ignorant or immoral.

What happened to moderate opinions? Where is the middle ground? Actually, the middle ground still exists, but not in the world of social networks and much of online media. Why? There is a lot of money to be made by polarizing people on the internet. This tendency fuels Cancel Culture, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The middle finger

In social media, people seem to revert to the most primitive forms of behavior. It is as though we are in our car with the windows rolled up and find something annoying about another driver. We shout, we curse, we honk, and we even give the other driver the finger. This is behavior we would rarely if ever use in a face-to-face conversation. But social media insulates from us the other person. The other person becomes the Other.

Public drinking and parties drive new coronavirus outbreaks, but sports give us some relief

Local boy Miguel Indurain celebrates his 5th Tour de France win 25 years ago

The virus has come roaring back in our province because of parties. New rules this week in our province of Navarra after big outbreaks of the virus among young people:

- Bars and discos have to close at 2 a.m. rather than 6 a.m.

- No public drinking of alcohol is allowed on the streets between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Which must mean that in the past it WAS permitted to drink alcohol on the streets between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.

- From these new rules I conclude that after 6 a.m. you CAN drink alcohol on the streets. Is this a great country or what?

I'm part of the Dawn Patrol at the local cafe, which opens at 6:30 a.m. during the week and 7:30 a.m. on the weekends and has both daily newspapers. Having a coffee and reading the paper in the cafe is a ritual. I wear a mask between sips and maintain social distance. 

Up all night

The only time that young people show up that early is if they've been out all night. In Spain, among teens and young 20s, it has always been a thing to stay out all night with your friends. You come home at dawn. Parents expect it. We of the Dawn Patrol see young people only when they are staggering and talking loudly with extravagant hand gestures. They're not dangerous because in this country, not everyone is carrying a gun.

We visit the home of the vultures and the eagles

Eagles, vultures, and hawks build their nests in niches of the rock faces.

The bridge spans an old rail line, now a bike path.

It takes only about a half hour to get to the town of Irurtzun and the hiking trail known as "the vultures' overlook" el balcón de los buitres.

The trail itself is only about three miles in a loop, but it rises about 900 feet (a map of the trail is here).

The first third of the trail is quite steep and challenging before rising above the town and valley.

The Sunday we were there we heard the pipes and drums of a traditional Basque band playing 
below us in the town.

The town in need of some consonants: Aoiz

Cindy picked Aoiz for a day trip because it had a hiking trail to a famous hermitage or some such, so why not. When we arrived in the parking lot at the head of the trail, we were struck by this view of a medieval bridge. (Photos are from June 5; it was still cool here.)

This bridge across the Irati River dates to medieval times.

The Irati River, which it spans, is the same one that Hemingway fished in during his first visit to Pamplona. It had wonderful trout. That fishing trip was fictionalized famously in his first and best novel, "The Sun Also Rises", also known as "Fiesta". (Perhaps his worst novel is also about fishing and is the one that is most read, "The Old Man and the Sea", but we won't go there).

Speaking of old men, we ran into one by the map at the trail head. I asked him how local people pronounced the name of the town. "ah-oh-EETH", he said. I repeated "ah-oh-EETH", but evidently something was not to his satisfaction. So he said it again, a little louder and more emphatically. And I said back to him again what I thought I heard.

We went back and forth like this, but apparently I was a hopeless case. We chatted some more. The gentleman said he was 87 years old, retired for 27 years, walking with the help of a cane. He had worked in a furniture factory, if I'm not mistaken. He gave us some advice on what we should absolutely not miss on the hiking trail and headed off.  I should have taken his picture.

Senderos balizados, "marked trails" around Aoiz (Agoitz in Basque) and the reservoir.

The walled city of Artajona and ancient burial grounds

The walls and tower of Artajona date to the 12th century.

Cindy loves castles and walled cities, and there are plenty of them in Spain. One is less than an hour away, in the town of Artajona, which has 14 towers. The fortress was first built about 900 years ago. Invading armies have found an easy path into and out of Spain through Navarra.

  Local history is a chronicle of kings (who are like warlords) and princes (who are like gang leaders) pillaging back and forth, taking each other's land, goods, and people. The winners then build churches to honor the divine powers and saints who made it all possible.

We took the scenic route to reach the dolmens of Artajona.

Before arriving there, though, we wanted to look at the nearby funerary dolmens that have been dated at between 4,000 and 5,000 years old. Little is known about the people who built them except the tools they used and the types of animals and plants that were part of their diet. 

The North Coast of Spain, and the birthplace of Ignatius Loyola

Getaria is a beach town between San Sebastian on the east and Bilbao on the west.

Hondarribia, with the river Bidasoa and France in the background.

Zoom in on the map to see more detail about these places.

Last week we made a couple of trips to the North Coast of Spain on the Bay of Biscay. At the bottom right on the map is Pamplona, and on the upper right is Hondarribia, a Basque town separated from France by the Bidasoa River.

Hondarribia had a strategic location, so over the centuries, the occupants fortified it with high walls all around. They built and rebuilt it many times since the Middle Ages. Cindy loves castles and walled cities. This wall is one of the best preserved. Normally in June the town would be overrun with tourists, many from France.

But the border had been closed because of the coronavirus. We visited on June 22, the first day we could travel outside of Navarra (Hondarribia is located in the neighboring Basque province of Guipuzcua). It was also the first day the border was open with France.

The University of Navarra, No. 1 with employers

The University of Navarra, where I work these days, has the best reputation among employers of all Spanish universities. This according to QS World University Ranking 2021.

In the category of "employability", Navarra, a private Catholic university, also ranks 71 among all universities around the world among employers. The ranking is based on a survey of 50,000 employers. Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where I worked for two years, ranks 6th in this global ranking. (MIT was first.)

Both UNAV and Tsinghua rank among the top 100 (51-100) in media and communications programs, where I teach. In Spain, UNAV ranks second, behind the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

QS has been doing these rankings since 2004. This year the rankings include 1,200 universites from 80 countries. The rankings are based on academic ranking, reputation among employers, number of students per professor, percentage of foreign professors, and percentage of international students. Seventy percent of the information for the ratings comes from research by QS or third parties and 30 percent from the universities themselves.

Having worked at UNAV for five years now, I can say that the administrators and professors all take seriously the notion that we are trying to "formar buena gente", which roughly means to develop our students into good citizens (literally translated, it means "to shape good people"). They live it and breathe it. QS doesn't actually measure that in the rankings, but the result shows up there.

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.