Nature | Venice: I am not making this up

Acqua alta update

November 10, 2010 No Comments

Watching the various weather signs yesterday morning as closely as a jungle tracker (or desert tracker, or suburban mother looking for a parking place at the mall), I realized fairly early that the Warnings which I was following were turning out to have been perhaps slightly excessive.

Caution is a superb thing and we should all have more of it, except for when we shouldn’t, I mean. But I have the sensation — and so does Lino — that a certain amount of exaggeration has crept into the whole business of predicting acqua alta. Why?

This is what water announced by the siren plus one tone looked like at 11:30 outside our house. The tide was just about ready to turn.

One reason, and I’m just hypothesizing here, could be that the people in the Tide Center (particularly its battle-hardened director, Paolo Canestrelli, who would feel perfectly at home with Field Marshal Montgomery) are up to here with the shrieking imprecations from people inconvenienced by a change in the situation from the earlier prediction to the reality suddenly underfoot.

As I have already noted, the weather picture can change. Get over it.

Another reason — here, let me move that firing-range target to the side and stand there in its place — could be the relentless need for the many forces involved in the MOSE project to instill public dread of water on the ground. Even brief articles in the Gazzettino which mention a (not “the,” but “a”) possibility of high water the following day don’t bear down too hard on the word “possibility.” They like the effect the words “acqua alta” have on people, if put in a way that makes it sound as if you need to head for the storm cellar.

In any case, just remember that any article that you may read that implies, or even says, that “Venice was flooded” is a bit excessive. We didn’t get any water on our ground and we’re in Venice. Is San Marco’s high water better than ours? Prettier? Wetter?

If you have any interest in the damage water can seriously do to people, places and things, don’t get fixated on Venice, but look at other areas of the Veneto such as Vicenza and Verona, and even in Tuscany, over the past few days. Torrential rains, bursting riverbanks, highways and roads blocked and even broken by racing water, mudslides obliterating houses and the helpless people within them (like the mother and her two-year-old son whose bodies were dug out of their mud-filled house, still clinging to each other) — these are events involving water which deserve more publicity than they get.

Actually, “mudslide” is too innocuous a word for what happened in Tuscany after days of rain. Essentially a huge chunk of melting mountain just broke off and fell on this family’s house. Just like that. No warning sirens, no time to do anything except die. There are many families who have lost everything. Some people have drowned.

Parts of the Veneto have now been declared disaster areas. Venice was not on the list.

Food, Nature, Water

Something fishy

July 17, 2010 No Comments

Last night we had an especially delectable dinner, focusing (as often happens) on fish.

Sometimes we buy them, sometimes we catch them, and sometimes they thrust themselves upon us.

Two gilthead sea bream (orate) on the left and center, and the very strong, daring, not very clever gray mullet on the right. It was an impressive jump, but our plate was not his original destination.

As in this case: “Orate” (gilthead sea bream) are highly prized around Venetian restaurants, and are vigorously cultivated in the various lagoon fish-farms. We bought these two specimens from our neighborhood fisherman a few hours after he snagged them.

The other little guy, the slender one at the right edge of the plate, is a cefalo (“siegolo” — SYEH-go-yo — in Venetian), or gray mullet. Very delicious, but very snobbed these days by restaurants who prefer to offer the very trendy orata, at preposterous prices.

Your basic gray mullet, or cefalo. They come in various sizes and variaties, and we catch them with a simple gillnet when they're not practicing for the high-jump event in the fish olympics.

A few hours before the picture above was taken, our little siegolo had been swimming blithely along, zipping through the water thinking whatever busy ichtheous thoughts oppress teenagers of the Mugilidae family.

Suddenly, he felt like leaping. This happens to mullet of all sizes, I don’t know why, but it strikes usually in the morning, sometimes in the dead of night. You can be rowing along and they’ll just bounce out of the water as if there were a trampoline down there somewhere. And it is not at all unusual for them to land, not with a splash, but a thud, as they hit the bottom of our boat.

The first time this ever happened to me, we were rowing in a four-oar sandolo at midnight back from Sant’ Erasmo all the way to the Lido. Summer nights are luminous in the lagoon and back then there weren’t quite so many motorboats tearing around all night, or at least not enough to drown out the pensive voice of a nightingale that came out of the dark woods as we rowed along the canal between the two islands called the Vignole, or the lovely, solitary note — just one — of the owl they call a soeta. It was magical.

Suddenly there was a thump in the bottom of the boat, and it kept thumping. In the dark I thought it was a bottle or something similar that had fallen over in the midst of our various voyaging detritus. But no — it was a fish. A big, strong mullet, who evidently had rejoiced as a strong man to run a race to see just how high out of the water he could hurl himself. He found out how high, but he hadn’t calculated on the landing. Fish don’t get to go home again any more than people do, at least not those who launch themselves anywhere near us. His future was pretty simple at this point: The skillet and a slather of extravirgin olive oil.

Anyway, sorry as I am to see a mullet’s morning, or evening, ruined by being taken prisoner and then executed, I know we appreciate him more than a lot of people do. Maybe more than his friends and family do. (Do fish have friends?)

Boatworld, Nature, Water

Afa: get to know it

July 15, 2010 2 Comments

I was going to write about something else but it’s just too hot. Every summer we get a heatwave around about now, but I’m not sure I remember one quite this heavy. Or long-lasting.

We’ve been having temperatures up around 100 degrees F. (39 degrees C) during the day, slightly less at night, for at least a week. Yesterday the weather report indicated that it was hotter here than in New York. I can tell you without consulting anybody but myself that it’s hotter than the hinges of hell.

Looking toward Murano at 8:30 this morning.

In addition to simple heat, there is the element called “afa,” which means sweltering, sultry, breathless heat, the kind of mugginess that makes you feel like an old sponge that has been left in a dark damp corner next to things that smell.

There are only two places I can think of where this weather would be even more intolerable. One would be anywhere along the Po River plain, where the fields stretch for long, desperate distances with no shade. Where there is shade, among the poplar plantations lining the river, there is no oxygen. Whatever is taking the place of oxygen does not move, because the world has stopped.

Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The heron is happy, but herons don't sweat. — Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The egret is happy, but egrets don't sweat.

The other place where the heat is torment is the mountains. Mountains are made to be cool, at least at night. If I had to endure this kind of heat at 4,000 feet, I’d have to think long and carefully about my revenge.

Clamming takes your mind off the fact that you're suffocating.

We’ve gotten through it so far by going out in the lagoon in a small mascareta, to a place where there is virtually always a breeze. And enough water to immerse myself for ten hours or so. Other people go to the beach on the Lido. Other people go shopping at the small supermarket off Campo Ruga, where the air-conditioning is set to cryogenic depths. We go clamming. More fun, for us. Probably not so much for the clams.

I’m off to bed now, planning to dream of the freezers at the Tyson chicken-processing plant. Do not wake me.

Food, History, Nature, Venetian-ness

Saint Peter’s mom, bless her heart

July 1, 2010 1 Comment

The period around St. Peter’s feast day (June 29) is notable for two things beside the annual bacchanale at the church, as described in my last post.

The littlest ones are St. Peter's pears. They'll only be around for a brief time and that's why I like them, even if they have almost no flavor at all. — The littlest ones are St. Peter's pears. They'll only be around for a short time and that's why I like them, even if they have almost no flavor at all.

The two notable things are: “St. Peter’s pears,” which I haven’t been able to identify in any other way (maybe they’re here so briefly that Linneaus was never quick enough to nab them with a name), and thunderstorms. Everyone expects thunderstorms in this period (we’re still waiting, oddly enough, though this year the weather has been very strange; last week it snowed in the mountains. Maybe St. Peter is trying something new with water).

St. Peter's fish (John Dory) by TK MacGillivray — St. Peter's fish (John Dory) by William MacGillivray.

For the record, there is also a fish, not necessarily associated with the feast day, which is commonly called “St. Peter’s fish” (Zeus faber), known in English as “John Dory,” who wasn’t a saint as far as I can discover. This fish has a particularly gobsmacked expression which doesn’t resemble any saint I could ever respect, but maybe everybody in the Dory family has that look, not to mention the underbite.

June weather coming in: Roll out the barrel.

Back to the storms. Around here, the ones that crash down around us in this period have long since been associated with the Big Fisherman; well-meaning adults reassure their little people that the scary thunder is nothing more than the sound of St. Peter cleaning the wine barrels.

But there is one folk-tale, recounted by Espedita Grandesso in her exceptional book on Venetian expressions (Prima de parlar, tasi, Edizioni Helvetia) that puts the blame squarely on his mother. As told in Venetian it has an irresistible back-porch-stringing-beans atmosphere, as if the speaker were talking about a fractious family known to everybody in the neighborhood. I’ll do what I can to render it here.

ST. PETER’S MOTHER

Well, St. Peter’s mother was so nasty and so nasty that when she died, even though her son was such a honking big deal as a saint, he had to send her to hell.

When she got to hell, she got up to so many shenanigans, busting everybody’s fishing lines [polite euphemism for “balls”] and complaining and whining and calling her son at all hours of the day and night, that the saint went to Jesus Christ to tell him He had to let his mom into heaven.

“Can’t,” said Jesus, “she’s just too bad.”

Saint Peter wasn’t very happy because, when you get down to it, she was his mother, and the Lord was so sorry to see this that he told him, “Well, you know, Pete, if, maybe, she were to have done at least one good deed…”

Peter was quiet for a while, because his mother, as far as good deeds were concerned, had never done one in her entire life. Then he remembered that, one time, his mother gave an onion to a little old man who was begging.

“Okay,” said the Lord, to make a long story short, “take this onion that’s got a few little roots still on it, and, if you can manage it, pull her up here with this onion.”

T-shirt design for the festa of San Piero in 2008. No onion, no roots, no mom. He looks so happy.

Peter went to the mouth of hell and said to her, “Mom, grab onto the roots of this onion and I’ll pull you up here.”

“Onion roots? You nitwit! How do you think they’re going to support me?”

“Don’t worry about that, just grab on.”

The old lady, grumbling, grabbed onto the roots of the onion and she started to rise off the ground, but she didn’t make it as far as the mouth of hell because a batch of other souls, who wanted to get out of hell too, grabbed onto her skirt and her ankles.

St. Peter’s mother started to go crazy, screaming “Get out of here, you disgusting damned souls, the onion’s for me, it’s mine, and my son is St. Peter!!!” [This is undoubtedly one of the best moments for the person who is telling this story to imitate the meanest, crankiest woman in the neighborhood.]

Onion roots do not inspire as much confidence as, say, a steel cable.

Seeing that the souls were still hanging on, she started to kick them to try to get rid of them.

At that point, the onion roots tore off, and St. Peter was left holding the onion while the old lady fell back down into the very center of the flames.

“What the heck have you done, mom?” St. Peter said. “All you had to do was have a tiny bit of charity and you’d have made it out and so would all those other souls. Now you’ve got to stay in hell forever.” [Pause for cheers from the kids who must all be imagining whichever of their relatives–obnoxious big sister? busybody aunt?–would most deserve this doom.]

BUT [the kids suddenly stop cheering], being that not even the Devil himself could stand to have this hellion among the damned souls, and also, well, it wasn’t exactly decent that the mother of St. Peter, he who carries the Keys to the Kingdom, would have to stay in hell, the old shrew got pulled out and stuck in a corner and given the task of washing the barrels of heaven before the season of new wine.

Wine barrels at the Robert Mondavi winery, Napa Valley, presumably not washed by St. Peter's mother. (Photograph: Sanjay Acharya).