Father and Son Run the Bulls: Royalty, Rabble, and Raw Cruelty

With my son, Eli, in front of the bull ring in Pamplona, 1993

Now, there was a summer--1993. We were living in Germany, Eli had recently graduated from high school. We had tried to reach Pamplona the summer before but a strike by French truckers blocked all the highways between Germany and Spain and we had to turn around, just barely making it back into Switzerland before running out of gas.

But now prospects looked good. No strikes on the horizon, a hot little Opal sedan with a four-on-the-floor and an engine that screamed at 100 mph. We hit the autobahn, crossed the French border in two hours flat, and slipped onto the peage, the French highway system. Down we zoomed, as I recall, Eli behind the wheel, six feet from the car ahead of us, the pedal to the metal. My heart in my throat, I began negotiating and finally, disgusted with my faint heart, he pulled over: "Alright, fine. YOU drive."

Across France, along the Pyrenees, toward San Sebastian, then up and over them and down into Pamplona, that Spanish town of Hemingway's greatest and continuing myth. Where to stay? We planned on camping and now found, a couple of miles outside town, a campground already filled to overflowing with an international cast of characters, prospective bull runners all. They were mostly from New Zealand and Australia, young men--and a few young women--off on "walkabout" for a couple of years.

We set up our tent right outside the men's latrine, under glaring lights that never shut off. Everyone was, of course, drunk and intensely involved in the process of getting drunker. The latrines were unspeakable with vomit and smeared feces. But, in the end, it didn't matter: We didn't come to Pamplona to sleep.

We walked into town and got there just before noon on the day the feria started--let me say, exploded. I went into a bank to get some cash, this being in the days before automatic bank tellers. While I was standing in line, a gun went off outside somewhere. A bank teller raised a glass of champagne, toasted the air, and drank: The party had started.

Once outside, I saw everything had changed. Where before the crowd was just milling around expectantly, everyone was now dancing, forming long conga lines and  swaying  around the square and along the streets. Music seemed to come from a thousand places, from the air itself. People sang, kissed, hugged, and most of all, drank sangria from glass bottles that, when empty, were simply smashed on the sidewalks or on the cobbles of the town square. Men urinated freely in alleyways and then, at night, anywhere and everywhere until the town was filled with the smell of it all: sangria and old urine and cigarette smoke and, always, always, always, twenty-four hours a day, loud rhythmic Spanish music.

Here's shot of the running I got off the Internet: Thanks, it's a good one.

They run bulls, six of them, every morning at 8:00. They are released from a pen across from a cathedral in downtown Pamplona some distance from the bull ring. A rocket is fired off to announce the opening of the gate and then another to signal the exit of the last bull into the street. You want the rockets close together because that means the bulls are running in a bunch and there is less danger of a single rogue wreaking havoc. You are in a crowd, you have a red bandanna around your neck, you hear the first rocket and the crowd starts to move, walking slowly, raising a rolled up newspaper in the air and chanting, "Ola! Ola! Ola!"

You have been told that the real danger is getting knocked down and stomped on by fellow runners--the danger from the bulls is secondary. This turned out to be true. In those days, though, I was still pretty fast, pretty agile, so when the crowd stopped walking and started running, I was with them, dodging and leaping. As we ran, we looked back over our shoulders for the first sighting of the bulls.

They came in two bunches of three, as I recall. The streets of Pamplona are narrow and so as the first bulls galloped by, I could  have easily lunged out with my newspaper and touched one--that's the purpose of the newspaper, to just touch a bull: count coups, display courage. I instead stepped aside into a doorway and watched them pass. Then, back out into the street, running, dodging, leaping until the next three came along.

I managed to get to the bullring in time to get through the gates before they closed them and now found myself in a crowd in the middle of the ring with thousands of people in the seats cheering us on. But what were we supposed to do?

The bulls we had just run were herded out of the ring and another group of younger steers were released into it. Now I understood: We were supposed to touch these steers with our newspapers for the entertainment of the crowd. I had become a bull fighter of sorts.

But anything more than touching a young steer with your newspaper is forbidden. One drunken young Aussie actually leaped astride a steer, went for a short ride, and fell off. When he stood up, a young Spaniard ran up to him and roundhouse punched him in the face, splattering blood and sending the Aussie to his knees; punishment for breaking the rules.

Then it was over. The steers were herded out of the ring and we were too, back out into the streets. It was all a heady experience.

But here are my last thoughts on this great adventure: Later that afternoon I went to the bull fights--I watched the bulls I had run that morning die in the ring. They were literally tortured to death. Stabbed first by mounted picadors, the animals were left to bleed, their neck muscles torn. When they had been sufficiently reduced, the matadors took them on. This was dangerous enough, of course. Though bled out and exhausted, the wounded animals famously take their toll.

I, one of the rabble, found myself seated in the stands among what seemed to me to be royalty--beautiful Spanish people, the young women stunning. They were cheering, applauding, thrilled to be there. I was feeling sick: nauseous, weak, light headed. At first I though it was something I had eaten on the street, but no--it was the shock of slaughter--the blood and the torment that had gotten to me. There is a very short list, it is said, of Americans who have watched two bull fights.

On the way back to Germany, as we drove along the foothills of the Pyrenees,  we stopped at Lourdes, the now garish town that caters to faithful Catholics who seek cures for their ailments by anointing themselves with the famous waters. In a line of the hopeful, I walked through the cavern, splashed myself, and asked for a cure for my imagined learning disability. That didn't work out for me. Perhaps I should have asked forgiveness for what I had done in Pamplona.

Hemingway in Pamplona: Royalty and Rabble embracing raw cruelty.

Hot Summer, Giant Pumpkins, and Good News Writing

The Pumpkin Plant that Ate Onancock

Dusty hot summer, mostly rainless. Even the sky is dusty, even the ocean and the Bay. But it is, apparently, a good summer for books, boats, reunions and raising  giant pumpkins.

It's also a good summer to be a writer, if you're me. I just received this email from the new publishers of the Prague Revue, the literary journal that published one of my first short stories back in the 90's:

Mr. Arvidson,



I wanted to notify you that we are relaunching The Prague Revue. Beyond inviting you to submit any new material at the provided address, I would also like to inform you that your story The Foreigner has been selected to be part of a web retrospective highlighting some of our favorite stories over the years. It will have a featured spot on the front page of the website, which we plan to go live with sometime within the next two weeks. If we could obtain your permission to include this story on our webpage we would be very grateful. I trust the writing is going well and look forward to hearing from you. If you have any further questions or comments please e-mail back at this address.


Thank You,


Shaan Joshi
Managing Editor
The Prague Revue
V Jámě 7 110 00 Praha
thepraguerevue@gmail.com

So, that was very gratifying. I haven't written a short story in many years but his has me thinking.

 As are the reader responses to Brothers of the Fire Star which, though not officially released until October 4th, is being sold locally:

 I just finished reading your latest book. Congratulations! A great read AND you got all the facts right! Can we sell this in the Guampedia bookstore? Everyone in Micronesia should read it. You, my friend, did a great job in portraying a moving story with lots of history and culture of the Marianas and the Carolines.  Shannon M., Guam



I just finished Brothers of the Fire Star... one of the best books I have ever read, & sure to be one of the most memorable... I'll be thinking about that ending for some time before I move on...Larry R, Okinawa


That's just a couple. Happily, all the reactions I've received run along those lines. Happily? Actually, no, it's thrilling. When you read a review like that, your heart races and your stomach jumps.

As for the giant pumpkin plant, the story goes like this: I've always wanted to grow a giant pumpkin. You know, the kind you see on news reports, the kind that weighs a hundred pounds. And so, my son-in-law says, "Well, we bought a giant pumpkin last Halloween and I saved some seeds." He handed me a sealed plastic bag. It felt slightly illegal. I looked over my shoulder; had the neighbors seen this transaction?

So, in May, I planted three of them. One grew a stunted plant that went nowhere. One grew a smaller shoot that is doing okay. But the last one is almost scary. It is growing a foot a day, the vine moving along the ground like a sentient creature, the lead shoot standing up like a green snake with its tendrils reaching out, finding the way. I grew up on a farm with a big garden and I never saw anything like this. I keep watering it, feeding it, talking to it. Maybe I should stop. It's getting out of hand. I don't dare lie down on that chaise lounge--I could wake up inside a pumpkin.

4th of July with Family In the Perfect American Town

The Arvidson-Scarborough Family, July 4, 2012

Torrid, sweltering, overwhelming heat here in our little town, temps climbing up into the mid- to upper-90s bolstered by plenty of humidity. With a houseful of family, we found it too hot to go outside except for short intervals to the store for beer/wine/hot dogs/hamburgers/corn on the cob/tomatoes/chips/ potato salad/baked beans. All good for a 4th of July weekend with the family together for the first time in years.

Front row, above, left to right: My son, Eli, his long-time partner, Bailey who is holding our daughter Jenny's infant son, Kiernan. Then there is Terry and next to her, our older grandson, Konrad, Jenny's first child, who will be four in September. Back row: Jenny and her husband Rob and then me, leaning, as usual, on Terry for some sort of support.

But the crowded house was happy and things bubbled along wonderfully. One day we drove up to Chincoteague and spent the day on the beach followed by ice cream. We bought a small splash pool for the kids and set it up in the back yard. We had a hammock set up in the shade, we marched in a mad little parade down through town to the harbor, and we had good attitudes and nothing to be cranky about. We loved it all. It was all very perfect.

We're ready for the Do-Dah Parade, a mad hatter event for sure.



Winter Reading Done and Thanks to Mr. Chekov

(Note: Douglas Arvidson's new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, will be released in October 2012)

In Praise of Dr. Chekov-and thank you, thank you, sir.

These days, in the first official year of my undeniable aging, I spend an inordinate amount of time, usually at wee hours of the morning as my wife sleeps next to me and the cats scratch around outside our door, worrying about how little time I have left.

This focus on the inevitable came on suddenly, not long after I left my day job and embraced the wonders of a comfortable literary retirement. Having nothing much else to worry about, I was left with just the near horizon of my demise to cause me to sweat through the haunted hours.

Yes, I said my own demise. Horrid, this obsession with termination, especially in view of my relatively robust health.  Nothing wrong with me that's not covered by medication. I work out, I'm not in pain and I can still see fairly well. My heart sometime likes to keep it's own rhythm but that's fine as long as there is a rhythm.

No, the problem is only that I need, I want, more time to work--to write. More time, like another fifty years or so. That being unlikely, I turned to Dr. Chekov, the master of the modern short story, the great Russian playwright, the consumptive who was dead at forty-four.

I spent the last dregs of this past winter with Chekov by my beside, reading him for an hour or so every night until my eyes warped and burned and I surrendered myself to death's livelier twin. All right, that's a bit much-- I read until I fell asleep. And a lot of Chekov passed me by, unfathomable, uncomprehended. I really needed a professor of Chekov to guide my reading--to help me along the way. But I persisted through The Ravine and Peasants and a thick wad of other stories and finally a play or two (The Cherry Orchard--his last play about the dying Russian aristocracy, written while he himself was actively dying, was the last.)

Chekov is a little hard for the modern reader to breeze through like you can breeze through say, Hemingway. Chekov is a little more Faulkner-esque in that one has to--or at least I have to--re-read a lot of the sentences to grasp the 19th Century syntax/style. But never mind--I enjoyed him immensely, will miss our time together, and will continue to pursue an increased understanding of his brillance.

But just today, I realized something else important, other than his greatness: He started writing in college, say in his twenties, and died at age forty-four. That's maybe twenty years of production, most of it knowing he was dying of TB--and look what he accomplished. I've got nothing to worry about except to keep busy. I'm only sixty-five.

 Chekov with a dog and with Tolstoy

Beset by Languid Days, We Take to the Water and Find a New Paradise

A summer day on the Chesapeake Bay: Our Alberg 30, Seawind, sails the wind, full and by.



I don't resent these long-anticipated, languid days of summer that everyone is now complaining about. Amongst the press of book promotion, home-improvement projects, lawn mowing, and tending my few flowers I, with noticeably little effort, convinced a couple of new friends of ours to out flank the heat by go sailing with us.

Lassitude is the operative word when the temperature and humidity rise up to slap-your-face levels and you can taste the first dish of summer, spicy-hot in the nose. A friend of mine, ever the word smithy, used to say about summer: "It's not the heat that gets you, it's the humility."

But we denied both humility and humidity on this day and set sail with great pride and some fanfare for a day out plying a light breeze. A little wind in the sails, a glass of wine, and some excellent conversation was the way to start the summer off.

The Pocomoke River: Our Little Amazon

But the Bay is bright, the light glaring, the water salty, and the air heat-saturated. Was there another place to go for some relief? I had always wanted to stretch out my local boating adventures and go farther from home and had been eyeing the Pocomoke River, about a forty-minute drive north of us, just across the Maryland border. After sorting out a couple of pesky boating glitches (registering the trailer, paying $1500 to get the outboard working right) we were ready. We packed a lunch, hitched the boat to the truck, and headed up the road to Shad Landing State Park.

Lovely stuff, this place--a real paradise for the heat-tormented, especially if you're eager to be rid both heat and people. The park is situated in a big, dark forest and the headquarters/camp store are right on the river. There's a fine, protected little marina tucked back off the river itself and best of all, there was no one there.

But the river itself is the thing: its deep, cool water is brackish and dark brown from the tannic acid that leaches from the cypress bogs. A nearly unbroken wall of tall, green trees along the banks hides you from humanity and makes it easy to imagine you somehow took a wrong turn and ended up in the wilds of Borneo or Amazonia. And the river is seventy-three miles long, so there's enough room to wander all day and not see what is around every bend.

And then we found the country club. Such a thing: unobtrusive, the clubhouse barely visible amongst the trees, and a sign that said, "Boaters Welcome," a rare offering for a country club. We regretted the 18-hole golf course that was invisible from the river but rumored to have been carved out of the surrounding forest. We did appreciate, however, the cool bar with inexpensive wine. After a glass of Pino Grigio and a pleasant chat with the bar tender, the golf pro, and a fellow-retired teacher who apparently spends much of his free time astride a bar stool there, we were back out on the water where we shut the engine off and drifted with the incoming tidal current. We swam, we watched bald eagles, we congratulated ourselves on our find: Paradise within paradise.

Between boating adventures, I do have a summertime job: Promoting my new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star. Here I am on the porch of the Eastville Inn. The book will be officially released in October.

We Visit Tall Ships and Give the Crew a Book

Generous to a fault, I donate a copy of my new novel to the good (tall) ship Lynx.

I had a great weekend. Seems that after the Sultana (see previous blog) left our hometown, she met up with other tall ships, including the lovely Lynx, a replica of an American war ship from the War of 1812, that were calling at Cape Charles, Virginia, right down the road.  Terry and I spent Sunday down there, ogling the gorgeous lines and rigging and perfect paint and wood and lusting to go out for a sail in a brisk wind with everything up, full and by. 

That was not to happen, but we did get to walk about and chat up the crew. Nice kids, really--kids in the sense that they were adults, competent and fully matured, but still so much younger than us. I couldn't imagine running a ship like that when I was their age. From where does such youthful competence come?

So I asked that young man standing next to me in the picture. He said he started on tall ships up in New Hampshire when he was fifteen. (The Lynx hails from Portsmouth, N.H.) and never stopped and so here he is, second in command and still so young. Or so he seemed to me. I mean, could he even be thirty?

See them there, way up in the rigging? 

That's the key, then: start early and stick with it. A rule for a successful life? I suppose. Hard to argue with the evidence. 

As always on tall ships, I was fascinated by the intricate details: the coiled lines, each in its place, each perfectly maintained. The shining woodwork (ah! wood, lovely wood everywhere, warm and rich and smelling of oil and tar).

This stuff fascinates me. Look at the detail. Imagine the maintenance.

We went down below and were greeted by a couple of sweating crew in the main saloon selling hats and t-shirts. It was just fine and glossy down there, but no air conditioning and no "windows" (port light/holes) and it was a warm day. The young woman I bought a hat from said she had a degree in chemistry and was taking a little time off before deciding what to do with it. I asked her who maintained all this in such faultess condition. She said they did--she and the others. Chemistry?

Here are a couple more pix. If I were a billionaire, I'd buy one of these and live aboard and sail around the world until I wore a permanent furrow in the sea.

(That's my wife, Terry--a very good sailor.)



In Praise of Tall Ships: The Sultana Visits Onancock

Last week our little town of Onancock was honored by a visit by the tall ship Sultana. She is a replica of a British war ship from Revolutionary times. Below are some photos of her details--and tall ships are all about details.

Sultana is escorted in from the Chesapeake and up Onancock Creek to the town harbor by kayaks, sailboats, and power boats--and lots of cannon shots.

I get to stand on the deck. Note the cannons behind me on either side.



My wife, Terry, lived with me on a sailboat on the island of Guam for ten years. She's right at home.

After a long weekend, she departed, getting great applause as the (female) captain edged her off the dock with great expertise. She admitted that, with her broad bows, sailing Sultana is like sailing a snowplow. She was headed to Cape Charles to join other tall ships in celebration of the War of 1812.