Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes. Proud to share it with my neighbor Steve Lawrence, foodie brethren Wolfgang Puck and maker of fine country music Toby Keith. Also proud to still be doing what i love and sharing my life with a great lady, my brilliant wife, Cara, and our beloved pups. I dont like to remind her how old I am, but it dawned on me five minutes ago that exactly half my life ago I was in Pamplona, channeling Hemingway (in lifestyle not skill). It was a riot. Literally. That night during the bullfight, after our 8 a.m. run (with three students from Duke University), all hell broke loose. It started with drunks pelting some policemen pwith seat cushions. The cops in turn, and in classic overreaction, started tossing tear gas into the crowd. And the riot was on. I was just arriving at the bullring with my movie camera so I shot footage of the ensuing chaos until I was nearly shot. Should have listened to people who warned us Americans to never point a camera at the Guardia Civil. After a tense hours-long standoff in the plaza outside the bullring, the now-reinforced police counter attacked the plaza because cop cars had been overturned and burned. This wasnt college kids celebrating spring. This was pure rage, on both sides. And where was I when the charge came? I had the bright idea of climbing a metal pole in the middle of the plaza, with the movie camera around my neck. As I reached a point where I could drape myself over a street sign, I didnt even get the camera pulled up when a barrage began of tear gas and rubber bullets. I slid down the pole like it was greased and sprinted like hell, since i was now the closest target to many of the cops. The crowd scattered. As i ran down a sidewalk toward the river, something loud and whooshing went past my right ear and landed in front of me, with tear gas bursting. Missed my head by inches. Pamplona was pitch black that night. No streetlights, no lights in the packed bars. Just an occasional police rocket that illuminated the famed cobblestoned streets amid sporadic gunfire. While wandering the streets about 3 am I came around a corner and realized i had walked into a large, very quiet crowd. Several hundred. In the dim light they were watching someone climbing up the facade of a huge stone building. Then I saw figures in many windows. It was a police station and the climber was nearing one of the windows where police waited with machine guns. I got the hell out of there. Had enough adventure for one night. A day later the headlines in the Paris Herald Tribune reported several killed in the Pamplona riots. I felt like I had lived out a chapter in a Hemingway book.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 14:47:20 +0000
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