Radio and Travel Inspired Ramblings

 Traveling in foreign countries can be fun and/or challenging, depending on where you are going and where you're coming from :-)  But actually living in another country for a few years has different challenges.

  In 1972 I went from growing up in the U.S. in a suburb of St. Paul, MN to living in southern Spain. I was stationed there in the Navy and decided to live off-base, renting a house with another American, also in the Navy. We lived in a small village about 8 miles along the Atlantic coast from the Navy base.  I bought a 1971 Seat (pronounced SAY-aat), a Spanish-built Mini 1000, a small car with 10 inch wheels and a short stick shift that was perfect for driving on the twisting, narrow roads of the old Spanish cities.

  I don't intend for this description of life in Spain in 1972 to be mean or derogatory in tone, but life in this part of Europe was quite different from a medium size city in the US!  The house we rented was half a block down a dirt street from the 2-lane road along the coast. The family that owned the house moved into a smaller house they built on the property behind their 2 bedroom house we rented.

  Spanish houses and most buildings were built with red bricks, then a tile floor added. A groove was chiseled in the bricks of the walls for electrical wiring to be laid into, then plastered over. The wiring was about 1/2 the size of a light weight extension cord you would find in the US today.

  I don't know when electricity came to this part of Spain, but the power system couldn't handle much load. In the evening when people turned on lights in every house, the line voltage went down to 80 volts and lights were really dim!  As it got later in the evening the voltage would increase as people went to bed, and would climb to 140 volts or higher !!  Americans with their stereo systems were always blowing them up, the transformers in the stereo burned up because of the too-low or too-high voltage. 

  My roommate and I, being ham radio operators and electronics technicians for a living, had a Heathkit Line Voltage Monitor and a variable transformer for our stereo equipment.  Multiple times every evening we had to turn off the stereo, change the tap on the transformer to get 120 volts, then turn it back on.  One time we plugged in a vacuum cleaner we borrowed from someone. The vacuum cleaner drew enough power that it burned the small wiring that was plastered into the wall to the outlet, smoking it and leaving a brown line all along the walls to the main power connection. Oops, no more American appliances with THAT house wiring... 

   Heat in the fairly mild winters was from portable butane space heaters. Butane bottles (like bottled gas for barbecue grills) ran the stove and water heater, too.  The bathroom was pretty small, we frequently used our bathroom as a darkroom for developing 35mm film and printing pictures that we took while traveling.  We had an old Russian enlarger with a Nikkor lens for making the B&W prints.

  Spain was still ruled by Francisco Franco, the dictator that came to power in 1939 after the Spanish Civil War.  The Guardia Civil was the national police force and patrolled rural areas and highways.  They were usually just called 'Guardias' and always traveled in pairs, riding small motorcycles or 90cc mopeds.  They were always armed and had a small black leather box on the back of their duty belt.  We were told the box contained a small take-down submachine gun, although I never saw a Guardia deploy one in anger.  The coast areas of southern Spain were known for lots of smuggling and the pairs of Guardia were always seen patrolling local roads and beaches.  The Navy warned us to NEVER walk on the beaches at night as that was inviting being shot by the Guardia first, with questions asked later.  The Guardia Civil was mostly feared by the local populace and people always deferred to them, although they were always very polite when foreigners talked to them or asked questions.  A Guardia and his family lived down our road a few houses, none of our neighbors ever looked at him or spoke to him but he was always friendly to me. One time I asked a Guardia (in Spanish) if it was OK to go into the old WW2 concrete gun bunker on the beach near our house, he laughed and said sure, go ahead, probably amused by the silly American climbing in there with the stagnant water and rats.  The Spanish coast had lots of big bunkers left over from WW2, it had only been 27 years since the war ended.

  Houses in our part of Spain didn't have screen doors, many people just left their front doors open when they were home until they went to bed.  Neighbors could frequently be seen talking, or more likely shouting gossip to each other, from house to house along the street and kids played in front of the houses. Like much of Europe, the fronts of houses bordered the street, each house adjacent to the next.  I don't remember how trash was eventually collected, but household garbage was deposited outside the front door of the houses, along the street. To keep rats away, rat poison was liberally applied to the piles of garbage. 

  My roommate Paul and I and another friend in the Navy, Gil, adopted two dogs from a litter in 1973.  Gil named his female puppy Cory, we named our male puppy Bo.  They were medium-size and mostly white with some black spots.  The dogs were always underfoot and were very gregarious.

  Our dog Bo was funny, he couldn't jump.  He liked to sleep in my bed with me at night and I had to help him up onto the bed, he just couldn't figure out how to jump!  

  My job in the Navy entailed working on various ships for a few weeks to a few months at a time, so when I was gone Gil and Paul would help take care of both dogs.  One time when I was gone Bo was at Gil's house for a while.  Gil wore cowboy boots with a hard heel, and accidentally stepped on Bo's leg and crushed the bone.  They took Bo to the American vet on the Navy base (a LARGE Navy base!) and the vet screwed a metal plate to the bone sections to hold it together.  When I got back from my trip working on a ship Bo was completely healed.

  An amazing result of Bo's injury and recovery was that he could JUMP !  When I went to bed he just hopped right up in the bed with me :-)

  We had been warned not to let Bo out to run around as there were no stray dogs in Spain.  The joke was that they became tapas (small plate of snacks served in local bars), but more likely they got into the rat poison.  We were always really careful when coming home to keep Bo on a leash and no running loose, but of course it had to happen once.  In those few seconds he must have grabbed something with rat poison from a neighbors trash pile.  

  Bo started to get blisters on his skin, his nose and pads of his feet.  Of course this happened when the American Navy vet was in the US on leave in late 1974, so we were told to take him to the Spanish vet in Rota, the town next to the Navy base.  It turned out that the vet's office was in the middle of the big slaughterhouse for the meat packing industry.  Paul and I took Bo into the vet, I carried him through a huge white room with long racks of beef carcasses hanging from the ceiling, blood all over the floor.  The vet looked at Bo and said yes, he had eaten rat poison and there was nothing that could be done,  we could leave Bo there and he would, well, take care of it.

  That vets office was the most disgusting place I had ever been in so far in my life, and there was no way Paul or I were going to leave our dog with that vet !!  Paul and I looked at each other and we got out as fast as we could, horrified at the thought of leaving Bo there.  With no other vet to go to, we had to put our dog, Bo, to sleep ourselves.  Being guests in a foreign country we didn't have any guns.  The only thing we came up with was to put Bo to sleep using gas from a butane tank.  We got a large cardboard box and a butane tank and drove east on a dirt road into the countryside.  There were lots of open fields along dirt roads in this agricultural part of Spain.  We stopped at an isolated field, put Bo in the box with the hose from the tank and turned it on.  We had to hold the box closed and he did struggle for a bit.  We buried Bo in the field.

  Many Americans that were stationed at the Navy base at Rota had a great time.  The weather was mild, there were lots of bars with good food, music and plenty to drink for the party crowd.  It was generally a nice place to be, with nearby cities to go sightseeing and beautiful, ancient historical places to see.  Some ex-Navy Americans even live in southern Spain now.  But for me, that experience with the Spanish vet and our dog has been the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me, and it stays with me to this day.