Madeira Whine
Wandering, wondering on a small scale and large
Staying in London was not an option. I couldn’t just sit, here, feeling so heavily the absence. I had to go, move, will myself to leave. It’s a first world problem, the forced vacation, but first world problems can be as spiritually heavy as any from the second or third world, or however many there are these days.
But that’s how it felt, facing the break in schedule, in spirit, the flipping of the calendar, wondering what, where, why. It’s different when you’re going with someone—hell if it’s the right person, where you go doesn’t even really matter. When you’re alone and escaping, though, well… motivation can be fleeting.
Late December, Regent Street in full electric snowflake bloom, palpable anticipation of upcoming celebrations, storefronts in spectacular technicolor, both locals and tourists in consumptive throngs. The holiday season in London is beautiful, the streets alive with kinetic wide-eyed energy, the people festive, loaded, lit up like the lights and just as twinkly.
Everyone I knew was gone already, or going. Going to France, to Spain, to Suffolk or Scotland. Going to families and warm welcomes and piles of presents, feasts and reunions. I’d bring up Google Flights three or four times a day, plug in ‘Africa’ or ‘Asia’ or ‘Mediterranean’, to see what was available, affordable; what could pull me out of the cold. I’d sworn last year in Jamaica, Negril, that this was it, the last of many a solo holiday jaunt—a lifetime, it feels, of late-night decisions taken alone, searching for sun, solace, romance, answers.
And here I was again, December 21st, the day before the office I sporadically frequent shut down, checking flights, looking for a destination to help clarify the journey.
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We’d decided a week prior we’d go somewhere together, spend the holidays reaffirming connection, love, future. And shortly after, countries apart, alcohol flowing, things changed. I asked for space, she took thousands of miles, and so, Madeira.
I’d heard of the wine of course but hadn’t thought to link it to a location, to provenance. Adjacent to Morocco, floating 700 km off the African coast, a little creviced volcanic Portuguese island, rugged cliffs, blue water, tropical flora, a small central town. And temperatures reaching into the high 60’s during the day apparently, water bearable enough for a December swim – warmer, actually, depending on the sunlight – and the cost of a good night out in London, perhaps less, for the flight.
From what I could surmise Madeira is known for three things: the eponymous wine, international sexlebrity and soccer star Cristian Ronaldo (the airport bears his name), and a fervent determination to celebrate Christmas harder than anyone else. From the airplane, descending at night, the steep cliffs were zigzagged in extraordinary shards of temporary, colored lights, knifing through the darkness in horizontal Tron-like vectors. The cab driver, possibly inspired by the video game or perhaps desperate to get home on time, raced at fantastic speeds across freshly paved roads and through tunnels carved in to the slopes, the neon blue and red of his dashboard panel almost serene juxtaposed to the holiday hillside light spectacle.
I arrived to Funchal, the capital, Christmas Eve, approaching midnight, and after dropping my bag at the hotel, left to stretch my legs and get acquainted. Carnival rides and concession booths overran the pier and the waterfront, every street corner and park redolent with holiday pomp—animatronic Santas, garden gnomes in Christmas hats, reindeer in full jump. Opposite the esplanade a slim stretch of road angled down and away from the main drag, peppered with mostly empty nightclubs and tourist bars. Two floors up an open window, music blaring, drunk young men singing happily out the window, smoking, smiling, beckoning me to joint them.
I stopped to admire a small botanical garden, turtle ponds and lush, tropical plants. I stared out from a hillside at the docked cruise ships, imagining how Madeirans hundreds of years ago might react to seeing something so enormous floating and electrified in the harbor. I watched 20 minutes of the Dallas Cowboy game on my phone, wanderlust be damned. They were driving toward the end zone when my free view ended. And then I found the party.
The Funchal cathedral was finished in 1517, and tonight, its doors were thrown open wide, with what felt like the entire island there, crowds pushing politely in to the nave and spilling out to the surrounding streets—massing at midnight in their churchiest of outfits. Funny how the heart overpowers the mind, how nostalgia can overwhelm the present. I stood watching people I don’t know celebrate a religion I don’t follow on an island I’d only just learned existed. There’s something magical about community, connection, faith—even if they’re not your own.
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Christmas day, the spoils of a European hotel breakfast, a meandering stroll along the waterfront, a jarringly cold splash in the ocean. I hiked through steeply sloped parks, up steeper cliffs and severely angled roads, liberated joy alternating with mournful solitude; and a slow aimless winding back down. A funicular to the crest of the mountain, an endless horizon, the Monte Palace gardens, a cliché backstory (English Consul, pleasure estate, financial hardship, rotating owners, exclusive hotel, flamingos and floating gardens).
In the evening, after a workout and sunset, I set out in search of dinner, a celebratory holiday meal at one of the restaurants I’d seen written up as must-try. There are moments and lessons from traveling alone essential for personal growth. You learn volumes about yourself, your natural proclivities in the face of surprising stimuli, what you need vs what you want, the depths of your resiliency, the joy of selfishness without compromise. And, occasionally, that sense of getting one over when you find the one empty seat at a fully-booked restaurant, the first few bites of something otherworldly, and the voyeuristic wine-fueled freedom to surmise the back (or fore) stories of those around you.
Christmas in a Catholic country, though, and the four places I tried were shuttered. The last of the light gone, I made my way back through narrow streets to the main square, and one last chance, an open kitchen, a wide outdoor terrace. I asked about tables and a waiter hurrying past assured me that, sorry sir, we are full, the open tables reserved.
For good or ill, as those who know me know, I’m not one to quickly take no as no—at least when it comes to getting a table, finding a ticket, figuring a way. Convincing a pizzeria to refund a basketball team, procuring a private tour of the floating palace of Udaipur, free tickets to see Santana in Auckland—where there’s a will (and I usually will), there’s a way.
I also know my way around a restaurant. There’s hardly a job I haven’t had in the industry, from California to DC, Australia to England—washing dishes, bussing tables, waiting on guests, working the door, managing a staff, tending a bar, even a brief stint as a head chef. There are always tables to be had.
More people came to ask, took no for an answer, wandering off. I had nowhere else to go and no one else to satisfy, and, increasingly hungry, waited by the door, not yet ready to quit. As I saw guests paying on the far side of the terrace, I (kindly, politely) pulled a manager aside, inquired, and was told the table was, indeed, available. A Christmas miracle.
Patient, relieved, superficially smug, I waited for the table to be cleared. Not for the first time I noticed a young man who’d also been lurking. I’d seen him ask about a table as well, get rebuffed, continue to linger. He was short, in black pants and a black hoodie, with a thick, tapered black beard and sideburns – not quite James Harden but a good start. His fingernails too were painted black, matching the wide studs in his ears, and his big round black hat was half-Amish, half-D-Nice. He had a camera bag and scores of silver rings, and his eyes were kind.
“Hey man,” I nodded, “are you waiting for a table?”
“I am, yeah” he replied, looking around forlornly. “Christmas...” His accented voice trailed off.
“Christmas indeed,” I said. “Listen, they’re setting me up on a four-top, and it’s just me. You’re welcome to join if you want. I’ve been in your shoes man, happy to share.”
He paused, looked at me, considered, looked again. “That’d be great, actually,” he said. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”
We waited in awkward silence for the table to be cleared and reset, sat down opposite each other, ordered wine (separately), and started talking. His name was Josh and he was from a small town a few hours north of Amsterdam. He too had come to Madeira to nurse his heart.
“I usually never go anywhere by myself, but none of my friends wanted to come and I thought fuck it, I need to just go” he said. “My mom died last Christmas and I never really processed it, and I feel I need to, and so I came. I wasn’t really sure what to do.”
He had been adopted at a very young age, connected again with his birth parents (who’d passed), and was now newly re-orphaned. And there was a girl too of course, a woman he’d dated as a teenager. She’d married shortly after they’d separated, stayed that way for a decade, and, recently single, they’d reconnected, reignited. She was the one, he said. She always wanted kids but hadn’t had them with her ex-husband. Josh wanted kids. But a recent stupid fight, plus an even dumber miscommunication, and, well, Madeira, on his own, processing the women in his life.
“I can relate,” I said, finishing the wine, ordering more. We had time on our side—the restaurant mixed up both orders, brought cold food that wasn’t ours—and so we sat, two strangers in no hurry, happy for company, wiling away Christmas. He couldn’t get over the gesture to share a table—“from an American!” no less. The camera bag wasn’t just a hobby; he was a photographer, specializing in two separate subjects: sports cars and funerals.
“Wait, funerals? Sports cars and funerals?”
“Yeah, funerals. I sort of fell into it. Turns out it’s quite a big market, and not many photographers focus on it. So business is good.”
“So, like, the services, or the bodies, or the behind-the-scenes emotions of it all?”
“Both. Some families want to remember the day, the emotion, behind the scenes. It’s a little like a wedding. Not as happy.”
Two glasses in, and the irony of randomly sharing a table and a meal with this man, who spends his time capturing the grief of those in mourning, here, now, grieving his own loss, trying to process the jarring finality of loss, began to seep into the intoxicated musings of my own journey, the unrepeatable-if-I-tried cascade of decisions both conscious and random that led me here, at this moment, on this little floating rock in the middle of the ocean. The fluid, soul-opening, no-holds required conversation enabled by the collision of passing strangers, men missing women, on Christmas, Madeira wine.
“I don’t usually talk about things like this,” he said, semi-perplexed. “I’m usually a private person outside of Instagram,”. He was showing me pictures of cars, mourners, girlfriends. He was staying far up the mountainside, in a remote cabin, to isolate as much as he could. He’d rented a very fast car.
“This feels like therapy, but good therapy.” He laughed, and in the pleasant relief of getting lost in someone else’s pain, I was again reminded of how often, how easily, strangers open to me, intimate stories come pouring out. Part of it I think is my own willingness to share, to open, to establish trust; part of it is my (lack of tact? Ignorance of social mores? Willingness to probe?) good fortune.
We walked off dinner along the waterfront, poking our noses up small stair cases and into dingy bars, sniffing around for any action or excitement. I sipped a rum and juice I’d bought at a take-away stand; he took pictures of mostly inanimate objects. We shook hands at his car, and I watched his taillights disappear up the mountainside on his way to his cabin, and tomorrow.
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I remember reading a story in a magazine years ago that in Korea, after one hits 50, social expectations recede like hairlines and ‘elders’ are free to be themselves, to step away from societal expectations and indulge freely in their hearts’ desire. Dress codes dissipate, neatly combed hair grows long and unruly, language and behavior escapes in inhibition. Perhaps it’s the Eastern culture that forces them to wait so long.
Day two, and after a workout, still wet from the effort, I made my way to the hotel’s rooftop for sunset. I’d popped up the previous evening as well, speaking briefly with two Danish women who were demolishing cocktails with vigor and chain-smoking rollies. The mother was a decade or so older than me, and her daughter two decades younger. They were here again, back at it, all smoke and inebriation, and the mother smiled, gesturing me over with a little wave.
Mom—loquacious, unconcerned with elegance or pomp, comfortably rumpled in colorful layers—was celebrating a long-overdue divorce, and her youngest—quiet, lithe, pleasingly not on her phone—drank along, either unconcerned by or likely well-versed in her mother’s description of her father’s behaviors. They were, these two, frequent travel companions and, even at home, weekly drinking buddies.
One round turned to three, the sun did what the sun does, and conversation quieted as we watched a massive cruise liner ease out to sea underneath the fading shards of pink and orange. Passengers cheered and waved from the upper decks. We waved back. Fireworks exploded. The ship slowly vanished into the blurring vortex where water met sky.
Talk of divorce veered to family, love and upbringing; to inspiration, aspiration, and the year ahead—rituals, promises, letters written not to be sent. In the years I spent backpacking, and in subsequent travel, I’ve become great fans of the Scandinavians I’ve met. There have been exceptions of course—the small elderly blonde-bearded sailor with whom I shared a room on a night ferry from Poland to Sweden who kept the tiny bathroom door open, talking to me while shitting and drinking beer as the vessel pitched back and forth in strong waves—but for the most part, they’ve been kind, humane, a little stiff until drunk.
Thinking about it now, again, snapshots of a life lived long ago leap to mind with clarity and fizzle quickly into more memories—the group of women on the weeklong coach adventure down the West coast of New Zealand’s South Island; the brother/sister pairs just north of Adelaide in Australia; the school friends in Fiji, on a small fly-infested island with magical phosphorescent seas, bottles of vodka and warm, sensual rainstorms; the relentless Norwegian in the youth hostel’s outside stairwell…
Tropical darkness slowly replaced the fading sunlight, the moon took center stage, and, having like new old friends, we decided to find food together, mother daughter and me. To the water, and left, walking East to Funchal’s oldest warrens, narrow streets with wide wooden doorways, art bars and sole proprietor galleries, leathery men in wide-brimmed hats, tourists in flowing linens of yellow, white and blue. We found an outside table at a fish restaurant on a thin cobblestone alley, under fairy lights, the clinks of silverware on plates and the inebriated laughter of holiday-makers and the warm kitchen light pouring out into the ancient pedestrian thoroughfare.
Calamari and mussels, shrimp and white wine, espada com banana e manga— we drank and shared and ate and laughed. Young boys sang acapella for money, matronly women passed food through side doors to hungry neighbors, and the conversation got deeper, drunker, wider in scope. Mom started asking more about my life, where my parents were, how I grew up, their connection as parents post-divorce. At one point she asked specifically about who I’d lived with, if that had colored me as a child, how that influenced me now, as a man.
“Actually, it was a pretty even split, half with mom and half with my dad” I said. “I actually lived with a lot of people—maybe 45 or 50, in 15 or 20 places, before I got to high school.”
“How is that possible?” she asked, laughing, “were your parents in a lot of relationships?”
“Normal amounts for single people I suppose, but they were finding their way as young single-parents,” (hindsight, therapy) “and I moved back and forth frequently. At first it was every six months, and then every year, and often, when I returned, that parent would have moved home again—mom from a commune to a rustic cabin, dad with a different set of single parents in a different house.”
“So you just went back and forth, to different places, in different cities, every 6 or 12 months?” She seemed perplexed.
“Well,” she said, summarily, “that’s a situation that suits the parents, not the child.”
Like a lot of people I’ve met—only children, children of divorce, people who write, people who grew up hippy in Northern California—I’ve spent a lot of time recounting the past, plumbing emotional depths, doing the work, processing the pain in an effort to move beyond it, wistful for decisions made or not, narrating old stories in news ways, wondering how closely memory aligns with fact, knowing I’ll never know. And I’ve spent countless hours talking to friends and therapists, lovers and strangers, about my particular journey. It’s not a very common upbringing, this life of mine, this rich tapestry of change and adaption. But it’s one I’ve looked at it from a lot of different angles, with a lot of other eyeballs.
There was something in the simplicity in which she played back what I’d shared, though, how she’d framed it in a way perhaps only a mother—a Danish one at that, freshly in the throes of divorce, tequila and pinot grigio—might frame it, cut through the liquor and fish in striking fashion.
“‘A situation that suits the parents and not the child’,” I repeated. “I’ve never really heard it said that way before. And I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people.”
She smiled at me, quickly, absently, picked up her glass, carried on drinking like it was nothing, as if she’d observed a stray dog ambling past. It took me a minute, there at the table, with two relative strangers in that little alley with fairy lights strung horizontally above the paving stones in soft-bending curves; took me a minute to ingest this fresh framing of old news, in the noise of buskers and the amplified conversations of other diners; stopped me cold, arrested my attention, caused me to put down fork and cocktail, napkin and knife.
A minute later I was back with them, present, re-seated in my body, eating and drinking, on to the next subject, or none at all—for some I can’t quite remember much else from that evening.
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Ponta del Sol, an hour or so West of the capital on the bottom of the island, occupies a pizza wedge of land between jagged, terraced cliffs (rock walls, planted palms, coastal succulents, bright flowering shrubs, trees ripped from the pine forests of Tahoe). A colleague is from Funchal, and on her list, this town, for a drink at The Old Pharmacy. I’d rented a car and spent the day driving over the steep pinnacle of the island, exploring small beaches, old stone walls, rocky ocean lookouts, and I drove back across the mountains in time for sunset, finding a parking spot miraculously available, barely visible at the bottom of sheer cliff, a hairpin bend away from the beach. My aunt used to say you’re only lucky in love or parking, and I’ve never had trouble parking.
It was late afternoon, and getting out of the car I noticed a thin walkway leading to a concrete-lined entrance in the side of the mountain. There was no signage as I approached, just an elevator with a single button. Years ago, wandering the beach in Waikiki, following the paving stone path adjacent to giant tourist hotels and avoiding the sand for no particular reason other than the joint I’d smoked with an off-duty children’s clown who’d picked me up hitchhiking, I’d come upon an elevator, similarly unmarked, at the side of a building. Curiosity being what it is, that elevator delivered me from the Hawaiian-heat into a blissfully chilled and profoundly unoccupied hotel dessert kitchen.
I’d been traveling for a couple months at the time, scrimping on a small budget, and high hot and hungry, alone in that cavernous cold room full of epic dessert, felt proof to me of an even higher being. I grabbed a spoon and dipped in to pristine tubs of as yet undefiled tubs of ice cream, sampled bites of cream puffs and chocolate cake, apple tarts and exotic fruit pastry. I remember the elation of that moment, stuffing muffins and a few bananas in my backpack, exiting via the same elevator, unseen, feeling as if I’d ‘won’ the game of travel. (Karmically, perhaps, only a few years ago in New York, leaving a rooftop happy hour with drunk colleagues and the CEO at a new agency, I was stuck in an elevator for many hours, with one woman vomiting and our exit coming only after multiple fire trucks, hydraulic tools, shattered glass, blood and panic—but that too is a story for another day…).
This elevator, in Madeira, opened to a glass enclosed walkway, which ended at the front desk of a clifftop hotel with spectacular, unimpeded ocean views, the afternoon sun 40 degrees above the horizon and setting slowly. Waves crashed peacefully far below out of site, creating a soothing sort of natural metronome. As it happened, I hadn’t yet booked any place to stay for the night, waiting for the universe’s gentle guiding hand.
“Hi!” I said as optimistically and quietly as Americanly possible to the man at the front desk. “This place is beautiful! Any chance you have a room for the night?”
“I see,” he said, looking at me in shorts and t-shirt, no bags, a baseball cap. “Let me check.”
Around the corner from his desk was a grand piano, a small bar, a few well-aged customers, and a terrace with a handful of couples taking afternoon coffee, reading the paper, beginning the nightly liver pickle. If there’s a balance to be had—and you can afford it—I’d say explore like a backpacker and lodge like a financier.
“I’m very sorry,” the man said, interrupting my little daydream (of being a financier), “but we do not have any vacancies at the moment.”
“Oh. Hmm. Huh.” I exhaled audibly, looking around. “That’s a shame. I, uh, well I just got here and I don’t have a place to stay. It really would just be for one night, are you sure there’s nothing, or maybe you could recommend something similar? I’m sort of at a loss.”
He looked again at me, a man roughly my age, much more elegant, beautiful suit, coiffed hair, catalogue-model stubble, kindly eyes. Had I overstepped my bounds questioning his answer? Was he calmly waiting before having me escorted off the premises? Was he simply perplexed I’d persisted?
“Why don’t you wait a moment,” he said, “there is one thing I might check.”
He shuffled through some papers on his desk, made a phone call, looked at his guest books, and made another phone call. He got up and went into a back office. He returned, shuffled through some papers, answered two phone calls.
“Well, sir, there is one room actually,” he said, his stern face breaking ever so slightly. “We don’t generally rent it out you see. There’s not much of a view, and I’m told of a potentially faint odor. But if you’d like to take a look, I can offer you a discount.”
I took the key, ascended two wide, outdoor flights of stone steps, and turned down a carpeted hallway. King bed, waterfall shower, crisp linens, sliding glass doors, private terrace, shade tree, no smell whatsoever. And a discount. Sold.
After thanking the clerk profoundly, I checked in, dropped my bag and went to explore the grounds. An outdoor pool surrounded by verdant landscaped lawns, an indoor pool with a jacuzzi and a walled window looking back into the valley of the mountain, stone-terraced hillsides with flowering plants in bloom, and a view all the way East across the bottom half of the island. Idyllic.
As I walked to the top terrace to see the view, a small group of impossibly beautiful humans were talking softly underneath a thatched hut at the very edge of the property, the southernmost tip of the mountaintop, wearing athleisure and smiles. Laid out in front of them were candles and incense, flowers and tarot cards, small mugs and a thermos. A lanky, beatific older woman smiled welcomingly and told me they were getting set to begin a Cacao ceremony—"to mark the last full moon of the year, and a spiritual transition.” For 15 euro I was welcome to join.
Zeitgeist, it seemed, was again on my side. I grabbed my yoga mat from the room and took my seat in the circle between two beautiful women, opposite the host, back to the hotel, gazing out at the setting sun. We closed our eyes and breathed deeply. We stood and stretched. We chanted. We turned to one neighbor and stared for 30 seconds silently into each-others’ eyes. We repeated the exercise the other way.
Breathwork. Ecstatic dance. A fat, Cassius-looking cat plucking out laps. Hot cacao. More chanting. Silent meditation. We were instructed to write for two minutes. What would you Do or Don’t Do if you had a year to live? Start again, 30 seconds, what if you only had a month. Then again, a week. A day. An hour. A minute. Answers moved from profound to profane, selfish to selfless.
Sing and dance, I wrote, sing and dance for my last minute. (The answers for the last week were far less innocent). And then I picked my card. An elephant Ganesh, playing sitar, “cultivation,” I was told, and an explanation of the power of music to heal, the vibrations doing the work to align, release, enable. The sun set. The group dispersed. The emotion lingered.
Yes please. Yes.
At 7:45 pm, as much as intimacy as a telephone allows – about love and family, sex and the future, ambitions and vulnerability. At 11 pm, requesting distance, to date others, while still dating. And the spices from the cacao took hold, the vivid dreams arriving intensely as promised, insecurity in vibrant color. I wrote it down hours earlier, I did. DO love wholly, say yes, breathe. DO NOT live in fear, undervalue.
These fucking tests, they arrive with celestial rapidity and smack you in the face like a bird into a window. They keep coming, don’t they, the same test in different disguise. Until finally we pass, and the next test comes immediately with that familiar thwack.
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I spent the last few days in relative isolation, driving across the island, hiking up mountains, swimming in frigid rock pools, experimenting with synthetic THC, chasing sunsets, finding less-romantic last-minute hotels. I caught up with a colleague and her friends at a free concert at a beach club in Funchal, local band turned big, crowds of all ages, singing, drinking rum from paper bags. I stood at the edge of cliffs and screamed into the wind, I laughed at the wide-open sky, I stood silently at night watching the moonlight sparkle on the water, listening to the sound of couple’s laughter, of breaking waves.
New Year’s Eve-day, I picked up an employee of the rental car company at a parking lot on the side of the road, drove us to the airport, and gave him the car. Long lines of visitors were coming through customs, chattering loudly, anticipating pouring Madeira’s famed celebration and firework show. Making my way to the gate, the departure lounges were quiet and mostly empty, the flows of humanity arriving instead. Familiar, this feeling, against the tide, zigging while they zag. I remember looking back at the island as the plane took off, imagining the celebrations to come on the streets I’d just walked through. And then I turned and looked forward, unsure again of what lay ahead.
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