Principal of Tides

When I tell Spaniards about Minnesota, sometimes I start with the Mall of America. Then they find out the Mississippi River begins in Minnesota, and they wonder why I didn't start with that fact. With some irony that is no doubt loss, I assure them the Mall of America is very big (there's an amusement park inside! A walk-through aquarium below!) Truthfully, I am much prouder of my state's claim to the origins of one of the world's most important rivers. I have visited Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi, several times. A friend of mine and I once walked the first few hundred meters, the river shallow and narrow around our ankles. We walked until the water reached our knees; when it reached our thighs, we turned around. It was only then that we realized the strength of the downstream current. Every step against the current was laborious.

Last night I experienced a similar sensation, except the tide was one of humans (reeking of alcohol, covered in face paint, shouting, slurring, spitting) and it was not constricted to my calves. Welcome to Carnaval in Cadiz, arguably the largest celebration of its kind in Spain.

I arrived in the center of Cadiz last night around midnight with Patra, Hilary, and my Spanish friends Ana and Jose (who own an apartment in Cadiz and invited us to witness the spectacle). In such a crowd, you quickly learn to recognize the costumes of your friends, and thus I spent much of the night making sure I was near Patra's blue and orange homemade (awesome) mask, Hilary's pink flower and matching pink coin-embellished skirt, Jose's silky turban, and Ana's red devil cape and trident. We pointed out other costumes to each other (my favorites were three boys as Munch's "Scream;" we also saw inordinate number of chickens and cows), but mainly just tried to stick together. In the plaza in front of Cadiz's cathedral, this was almost impossible. As we were exiting the plaza through a ridiculous bottleneck, I contemplated seriously the amount of pressure it would take be squeezed to death. Somehow I felt strangely comfortable, though, knowing I hardly had to place my feet on the trash-, liquid-, scum-covered ground to be moved along. The five of us held hands, linked elbows, and followed Jose's upheld trident to guide us out of the fray.

In the midst of this mess, I witnessed my favorite sight of the evening. Not an ingenious costume, no, but two old women in their regular clothes moving slowly toward the plaza we'd just fought our way out of. They were so small the tops of their heads barely met my shoulder, and I noticed the bright speckles of confetti adorning their white hair. They looked determined, yet calm, and I hoped the currents would be kinder to them than they had been to us. We were sand in the spray of the waves, they the rocks at the ocean's bottom, moving inches every eon...perhaps they knew what they were doing after all.