You Don't Really Know Best

Might as well make peace with it

To call the road that I live on a road is to perform an extreme act of generosity. The pavement ends at the top of the hill a thousand meters or so from my door. Delivery vans always stop there, the driver shifting into park to call me and say, “Where is your house exactly?”

“Down the hill,” I tell them, “pela rua de terra.” On the dirt road.

In the winter, the hill washes out. There is no road engineering out here in the sticks, no ditches to bracket the road and give the rain a place to run. So the water finds its own way down, carving deep gullies that criss-cross the road wherever they damn well please.

Every so often, an end loader appears, along with a dump truck of fresh gravel. To be clear, there is already enough gravel on this road for a street five times its length. The trouble isn’t the rocks. It’s the design.

But several times a year, we hear the roar of the yellow machine as it smooths a soft layer of crumbled stone into the crooks and crannies, and then trundles off to go do whatever end loaders do. And we and all our neighbors spend the next few weeks trying not to get stuck in the fresh drift of gravel until enough people have driven over the stuff enough times to pack it down into some semblance of traversable crust.

Elsewhere in the area, the roadsides are overseen by tall cement power poles. But those are the real roads, the ones with asphalt and painted center lines. On our seldom-used track, the power poles are wooden, unevenly spaced, and suspiciously wobbly. There was one halfway down the hill that took to leaning into the road a couple of years ago. Every time a strong wind blew through, we’d drive under it gingerly and wonder aloud when it would fall.

The power company has been called, multiple times by multiple neighbors, but the only attempt anyone made to right the listing pole was when a neighbor pushed the pole back into alignment, then jammed rocks and inanimate objects around its base in a bid to keep it upright. This was a maneuver he’d perform near-weekly this past winter. For a while it seemed he was winning. Then came the string of severe storms this January and February, gales against which not even our biggest tree could stand. The only surprise was not that the pole was leaning more dramatically than ever, but that it was doing any sort of standing at all.

And then: amputation. Last week I drove under the pole on my way to pick Mirtilo up at school. Twenty minutes later we returned home and were stopped in our lopsided gravel tracks to stare in wonder at what had become of the power pole.

Someone had come by with a saw of some kind, cleaved the pole in two and taken the longest length of it with them, leaving the upper stump to hang like a ghost.

It’s been eight days now. The pole is still hanging. The power company has been called, but there’s no telling how long this ghosting will last. As my neighbor Arthur says with a laugh and a shrug, “It’s Portugal!”

What I’m saying is they do things differently here.

After nearly 5 years in Portugal, I can say that curiosity and humor have served me far better than any American instinct to tut, like: That’s not how things are done. Because it is how things are done. Here, it is.

I can wonder why—and I often do—but that wondering doesn’t come with a sense of superiority. I’ve observed so many Westerners here smugging it up. So many Americans, in particular, acting as if the way things are done back across the Atlantic is far better than the way things are done here. As if Americans are more civilized—we, who have been at war for most of our 250 years.

And sure, maybe sometimes you do know better. I, for example, am no road engineer, but I know that a good road needs a ditch of some kind. Perhaps when I overheard an American guy giving a Portuguese chef unsolicited advice about how to make a better pizza I didn’t know that he was a renowned maker of pizzas back on his home turf. It’s possible that he did indeed know best. But it’s not the point.

Immigrant or tourist, expert or non, I think we’ve got to stop thinking we know everything. Have to stop wanting to be right. That exceptionalism we Americans were spoon fed since birth is an ugly and dangerous feature. A little inquisitiveness, paired with humility, goes so much further toward making real human connections.

Recently, in the Palmela farmácia far from any beaten tourist track, I had taken my senha and was waiting stoically for my number to be called when an agitated older man in a gnarly ponytail pushed through the door and immediately walked behind the counter (a no-go zone) to flap his arms at one of the young and bemused pharmacists.

“Parlez anglais?!” he hollered, only he didn’t say it like French, he said it like: “PAR-LAY EEEEN-GLAZE?”

Turns out he wanted some antacid and he wanted it NOW, and he didn’t want to accept the pharmacist’s offer of Gaviscon syrup or pills.

“NO, NO, NO! DON’T YOU HAVE TUMS?!” he wailed. “I WANT THE CHEWABLE ONES.”

A few moments of phone googling would have enlightened this fellow that he was in Portugal, and he could say, “Fala ingles?” to find out if indeed the person behind the counter spoke English. A little bit deeper dive, or a few moments of quiet observation, would have shown him that upon entering the farmácia, everyone takes a number and then waits their turn. Even more research might have enlightened him about the cultural nicety of beginning your query with a polite “Bom dia” or “Boa tarde.” And then if he had come with the understanding that he was not, in fact, in Boca Raton and so this establishment probably did not carry a quick roll of Tums, his agitation would have been greatly lessened.

Moving about the world with a sense of entitlement and a lack of interest in how other people/countries/cultures may do things makes you and everyone around you more miserable.

I’m not immune, of course I’m not. I swallowed that toxic American elixir too, for years. And so when I was in Amsterdam recently, I was mortified when I wandered aimlessly into the bike lane and nearly got run over by a tall young man on a bicycle.

My friend and I had just walked out of a building and were still adjusting our scarves and wiggling our fingers into gloves and clutching each others’ arms to keep from falling on the icy sidewalk. I didn’t even notice we had strayed into the very clearly marked bike lane until the guy dinged his bell, slowed his bike, and said firmly but rather gently, given the circumstances: “Here, we walk one-and-one.”

We flailed our apologies but he had already pedaled on and I could feel my cheeks burning inside my hood.

How dumb, I reproached myself, acting like a stupid tourist.

The thing is, I was a stupid tourist who had been trying to convince myself that I was better than. That I was a good one. Exceptional, even.

Look, we all fuck up when we stray into cultures that we don’t know very well. When we’re in new situations, new neighborhoods, new countries. We don’t know all the rules, we cue up the wrong language, we take up all the space, we come off as rude because we desperately need a heartburn remedy. Even if we’ve done our research and our language lessons and we know where the bike lane is, we’re going to get some things spectacularly wrong.

The fuck-up isn’t the problem. The lack of curiosity is, and the assumption of accommodation. Of forgiveness. Of hearing your own language all the time. Of moving through the world as if it owes you precedence. As if your rightness is preordained.

A Portuguese friend told me: “We always say that British people act like they own everything, and Americans act like they know everything.”

It’s ok to admit we don’t. Own everything. Know everything. It’s liberating, even. To move through the world—even the parts of the world that are strange to me—with a sense of wonder is a mindset that has eased my passage.

So I’m not stressed about the hanging ghost of a power pole. Or about the endlessly washed out gravel road. Or about the way I had to say “secretária” four times in a row before I got the pronunciation right in my Portuguese class yesterday. Or even about our looming deadline for residency renewal this summer, a convoluted process that is prone to extreme bungles of bureaucracy even at the best of times.

Stress would be easy to come by, if I were sure that I knew the right way for all of these happenings to unfold. I’m choosing to hold these things lightly, instead. To sit with the wonder and find a ridiculous sort of beauty in the mystery of it all.

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