Challenges and the can't-do-can-do mentality

One of the things that attracted me to my wife before we married was that she’s very much an “in at the deep end” kind of person.

I like the boldness. I like the challenge. I like the sense of achievement.

There have been moments that this can-do attitude has faced me with challenges I wasn’t sure I could handle. Starting with the first occasion I met it. Danielle decided it was time to make a skier of me. I could by then just about get down a nursery slope with only a couple of falls.

“Let’s try this slope,” she told me.

“Not too hard?” I asked

“Nothing you can’t cope with.”

The start was great. Skiing down pleasant slopes, perhaps just a tad too steep for me, but with pine trees on either side and the crisp snow under my skis, it didn’t matter. The pleasure was memorable.

Not that I was skiing well or anything. I was skiing fast, but I hadn’t yet worked out that this is the easiest part of the sport. Put your skis parallel with the slope, and you’ll soon find yourself skiing fast. Very soon. The problem arises when you want to stop or even turn. Difficult enough at the best of times if you’re not much of a skier. Impossible if as well as being incompetent, you’re travelling at speed.

The result was that I would keep overtaking the young lad who would soon be my stepson and who knew what he was doing. I’d zap past until the next curve, at which point I’d fall over. I’d pick myself up and drag myself around, as he shot ahead of me, and then, with my skis lined up once more with the slope, set off at speed and sail past him again, until the following curve.

That was fine until we hit the last stage of the course, and I at last understood why it had been classified black, marking it as hard. It ended at an ice face. It clearly wasn’t actually vertical, but to my terrified eye, that’s how it looked.

The mind’s response to trauma has blanked from my memory how I got down it. All I can remember is that it involved using my backside a great deal more than the skis. And eventually I was back at the bottom, on my bottom.

Forty years on, things haven’t changed that much, except that we’re all a lot older. One of the sports we engage in a lot is walking, especially along the many excellent trails in the hills around Valencia where we live. Now, in the high summer we do rather less of that, because of the heat. But we’re about to go out with a group for a three-day hike in a couple of weeks, and it’s clearly time to get back in shape. 

I hadn’t realised how out of shape I was. It’s one thing to go out for walks with the dogs locally, even for a couple of kilometres or three. It’s another to tackle fourteen kilometres up in the mountains.

That’s about as far as we generally go. Long behind me are the days when I used to sail through 25 or 30 miles on Dartmoor, tough terrain in southwest England. Those days were over half a century ago, and today my energy won’t take me much beyond fourteen or fifteen kilometres – not even ten miles.

“I’ve found a walk we should try,” Danielle announced. And off we went. Danielle, our son Michael who’s visiting us and I.

The river Turia at the start of our walk

It turned out to be a seventeen-kilometre walk.

By the end, I was in no doubt of how out of shape I was. I knew just where the flabby muscles were. I knew just which parts of my feet would suffer from a relatively long walk, which was every inch. I knew I needed practice before tackling our planned hike.

We got back to the starting point of our walk in mid-afternoon. That was a village called Bugarra, close enough to “bugger off” for me to think the name was giving me a warning I should have heeded. 

We decided it was time to have a drink, perhaps even a bite, before travelling home.

That turned out to be a wonderful way to wrap up the day. The café owner gave us a telling display of what I think of as a key element in the Spanish psyche. The Americans are justly proud of their can-do approach to life. In my experience, many Spaniards go for a can’t-do-can-do attitude.

“We’re closing,” he told us. “Well, in twenty minutes.”

“That’s fine,” we said, “we just need a drink.”

“Perhaps a sandwich?” asked Michael.

“I’m afraid we have no sandwiches.”

We settled for drinks alone.

“Well,” said the owner, “I could do you a sausage, perhaps.”

“A sausage would be fine,” Michael and I chorused.

“OK,” said the owner, “two sausage sandwiches coming up.”

“Sandwiches?” we asked.

“Or would you prefer them on a plate?”

No, no, we were happy with sandwiches if he could prepare them that way. 

The café owner with can’t-do-can-do attitude

I won’t describe the sandwiches in any detail, for fear of offending any vegetarian who might be reading this piece. Let me just say they were copious and delicious. And they contained several sausages each, of three different types. Plus a little green pepper, as a nod to a healthier kind of diet. A small nod.

We ate and drank quickly, in order to be out of the place before it closed. As we were about to pay and head for the door, the café owner surprised us again.

“A coffee before you go?”

So we had coffee.

The whole thing was a telling demonstration of the Spanish can’t-do-can-do attitude I appreciate so much.

Truly, one of the charms of life out here.