Grande Culo!

I walk behind my two sons, who skip in front of me with delight at the sight of the approaching ferry.

The hour and a half drive from my wife’s hometown near Lake Como, the parking, the kilometer walk from the car down the hill to the town, the purchase of tickets at the bar, and the hurried shuffle down to the dock had put us here just in time to make the boat.

I can’t stress how lucky we are to be on time. Driving in Italy’s not the same as Colorado. It’s twisty, sometimes taking five or ten consecutive roundabouts to go the roughly the same direction but one that leads to the source of cheese A instead of wine B. There are tolls where you have to pick the correct lane or else you’re dead to the people behind you, or times where your wife tries to figure out what the hell is going on with Google Maps while you’re circling aforementioned traffic circles and the kids are in the back seat asking for snacks at that same moment and you yell for them to shut up and notice the in-laws in the car behind you are no longer behind you and you pull over to figure out where the heck they went with a phone call and cell reception has decided to vanish.

But that’s all over for now. So I smile, taking in the scene with relief.

Lago d’Isola is Italy’s sixth largest lake, picturesque like Como, where my wife is from, with smooth water shimmering in the mid-morning sun. There is an island in the center of the lake, and on the island, an ancient-looking castle is perched on the highest hill, an amazing piece of architecture which is our ultimate destination for the day.

My two sons, William and Luca, and I go out onto the jetty, waiting for the rest of the group and to watch the ferry’s arrival. The boys climb up onto the railing lining the raised dock, and I stand behind them.

“There’s the ferry,” I say, patting my oldest on the shoulder, rubbing my youngest’s head. “We’ll ride that over to the island. And then—”

I stop talking because my two sons have turned around with alarmed expressions.

William climbs off the fence and looks down at his feet, and I see he’s wearing one shoe.

I push between them, lean over the edge to look at the water a couple meters below, and see the shoe bobbing in the water. My son’s tiny piece of footwear floats upright like a canoe. The odds of that happening have to be pretty low, I think. Maybe not Yahtzee on the first roll, but maybe a first roll full house. (We’ve been playing a lot of Yahtzee in our down time on this trip.)

Cazzo.

I turn to Cristina, who arrives steps behind us.

I interrupt her conversation with her mother. “William just dropped his shoe into the lake.”

She blinks, shakes her head, and sees my son’s socked foot.  

Her eyes widen and she looks over the railing. “Porca miseria, William!” 

William’s mouth turns downward, his brow arching upward, and he lets loose crying.

Nonna, Cristina’s mother, flings some more expressions into the humid air, turning nearby peoples’ heads. Nonna’s friend joins the disappointed brow beating session. Nonno, my wife’s father, and his friend stop their conversation and stand with open mouths. Everyone sees. Everyone raises their eyes to the sky, then drops them down on William.  

I can see my son wants to crawl somewhere and hide, to reverse time, but there’s nowhere to go but stand and bask in the humiliation of the here and now. Tears stream down his face and he wails, but the sound is drowned out by the blaring ferry horn, which is now less than a dozen boat lengths away and approaching fast.

The women huddle, speaking rapidly and knitting the air with furious hand gestures. Cristina points toward a group of stucco buildings back and up the hill the way we had just traversed.

I don’t understand most Italian, but they’re saying stuff like, “Maybe there’s a shop, and maybe that shop has shoes. Kids shoes? I don’t know. We have to check! When does the ferry leave? Cinque minuti! When’s the next one? Another hour! We’ll miss the caretaker for the castle!”

My father-in-law, his friend, and I smile to each other. Five minutes? Ha, yeah right.

The boat slows, the diesel engines roaring, the water gurgling around it as it slows at the dock. We men distance ourselves from the chaos. What can you do? Maybe get an espresso?

I look down. The shoe still floats upright, still on its sole. I snap a photo with my phone. Nobody’s going to believe this.  

William stands in one sock, surrounded by feminine energy that’s been whipped into a cyclone, pushing aside all bystanders dumb enough to stand near it. His arms are by his sides, his face a tear-streaked mask of embarrassment and horror. Life is over.

Poor guy, I think. But I leave him alone. I leave everyone and move off the jetty to the walkway lining the edge of the lake—sufficient distance to take a breath.

Across the water the castle beckons. We’ve already been briefed there will be plenty of walking once we’re over there on the island. That’s not happening with one shoe on one of the kids.

But I also know my wife is a fighter. I know I’ll have orders in a matter of seconds, orders that involve me sprinting uphill, dragging my eight-year-old behind me by the hand, entering a shop and trying to purchase children’s footwear with rudimentary Italian. Or, probably more likely, my wife will have to join us on the errand, and we’ll shoot for fastest-known-time. Either way, it’s going to be ugly.

I inhale the scent of fishy lake water and distant food saturating the air, and I exhale the tension, trying to let calm wash over me before the action, and I reflect on the persistence of these kind of situations that arise in this country.

A few years ago, my wife and I spent ten months living in northern Italy, and in that time I developed a theory that occurrences that test (or shatter) the limits of human patience happen in Italy at a greater frequency than anywhere else in the world. Or, at least, anywhere I’ve been.  

I once told an Italian man about this and he scoffed, telling me I had no idea the depths of this truth, illustrating his point by showing me a YouTube video of a man who somehow got stuck trying to turn around his tiny Fiat on a Naples road. In the video the car was perpendicular, the front and back bumper inches away from a cars parked along the street in front and behind. The car blocked traffic both ways, which led to people getting out of their car and yelling at the guy, which led to blocking a clan of Italian Harley Davidson enthusiasts who had driven up on their choppers, who also got off their bikes and joined in, which blocked a walking funeral procession, which joined in, until the guy finally moved, ending the scene in a crescendo of sarcastic cheering. You can visit YouTube and search “Italy’s worst driver on the road (Naples parking fail)” to see said video. It’s real. And it’s only in Italy.

Now, my initial shock worn off, standing on the shoreline walkway of this beautiful lake, watching my wife and the rest of the group still caught in the grip of mayhem over on the jetty, I shake my head, my conviction of the true existence of this force stronger than ever.

The ferry’s engines rumble in reverse, pulling me from my reverie. The water roils again, and waves are pushed off the front of the boat. I look down at the fallen soldier footwear and notice the waves are pushing the shoe away from under the jetty toward me.

Great, the shoe has been set into motion toward me, I think, but the shore here is nothing like one would find in Colorado. The edge of this lake has long been concretized and raised above water line two to three meters, probably hundreds of years ago, I have no idea.

Below me the waves split on wooden pillars on which the walkway stands, whooshing against a wall somewhere beneath and out of sight.

Slowly, I walk further along the path, following the shoes trajectory, and stop where the shoe will pass underneath in moments.  

The only plan that comes to mind is I could climb over the iron railing and down the algae-slick wood pillars, fall in, soaking myself with an unplanned swim, grab the shoe, try and climb up, rip off my fingernails, then swim up shore fifty-plus meters where the land finally meets the water, and where a large male swan will attack me, and the ducks and seagulls will join in eating my entrails.

I contemplate recruiting a fisherman to snag it, but there are none around.

I resign myself to knowing the shoe will go down, smashing against the ancient wall underneath this walkway, where it will sink and remain, where archeologists a thousand years from now will pull it from the strata and wonder “Who is New Balance?”.  

I pull out my phone, thinking I might make a video of the shoe as it disappears, but decide I’m not that guy, so I pocket it.

The women are still chatting, and now William has been pulled into the conversation. I can tell they’re giving up on the idea of getting footwear before the boat leaves. People are now walking off the arrived ferry and down the gangway toward land, others are waiting to get on, all of them keeping their distance from the family caught in the throes of a horrible, unknown, tragedy.

And meanwhile, the shoe, the fallen soldier that nobody is paying attention to any longer, is almost directly below me.

Leaning over to look, I lurch as the railing in front of me moves, the portion of iron in my right hand swiveling outward a few centimeters. I startle upright, blinking. I lean over again, and I see a ladder leading straight down and into the water. My hands are clutching a gate that opens to access the ladder.

“Hey,” I murmur to myself. I twist around with bulging eyeballs, startling an Italian man. He scurries past and I ignore him, turning back to my discovery.

I reassess the trajectory of the shoe, now with acute interest. It’s moving straight to where the water and ladder meet. If not precisely, then damn close. If I don’t climb down fast, I will lose my chance to intercept.

I take off my backpack, drop it on the walkway, and I move, thinking I’ll have to climb the gate, but it’s Italy, so it is broken, and so will be forever broken for the rest of human civilization, and it swings towards me on rusty hinges.

Move, man!

I get down to my knees. I reach my foot over and it connects on a rung, which reverberates like a sickly church bell. I get over the edge and I descend, my hands grasping the railing and, below it, thin, slick, algae-covered welded rebar. The ladder vibrates, wobbling back and forth, creaking with each step.

I fly down, ignoring the thought of plunging into the chilled, Alpine snowmelt. It’s too late now. I’m all in. Five or six rungs later I’m there, my feet a few centimeters above the water. I sag backward, reaching with one hand and gripping with the other, hoping the ageless structure holds, hoping the shoe stays on target for that final meter, hoping I can reach it.

And I can. I don’t even have to stretch.

I pluck the shoe off the crest of a ferry wake wave, and as I do the Italian expression of Grande Culo comes to my mind. We got a front row parking spot? Grande culo. We found a Euro coin on the ground? Grande culo.

This situation? The largest of butts.  

I shake water off the shoe, and then I climb up using one sure hand, the other clutching the prize, and I pause to think about how the broken gate above was probably made by the same guy as this ladder. But it holds strong under my weight, and I make it to the top, throwing the shoe to the walkway and gaining my feet, triumphant Indiana Jones music blaring in my head.

As I swing the gate closed I look over, and my wife and my mother-in-law, her friend and the two men, and my two boys are all still gathered, debating whether to go into action or give in to hopelessness.

Nobody looked my way. Nobody saw a thing.

I put on my backpack, and I walk fast, reaching the jetty, where I push between Nonna and Cristina, startling everyone into silence as I deliver the shoe to my son’s chest, only breaking stride long enough to see his eyes pop wide with amazement as he clutches it.

Continuing, I walk down the gangway toward the boat, smiling to myself as I hear the disbelief, the amazement, the confusion, and then the cheering, like I’m some superhero walking into the sunset after winning a fight against one of those psychotic Italian swans.  

But then a guy wants my ticket, and Cristina has it, so I stop and turn around.

And good thing I turn around then, because I see the joy on all the faces, the wonder and awe, and my son smiling, wiping his tears away on his sleeve, the pain forgotten and anticipation for the day renewed as he sits on the dock and slips on his shoe.

I field questions as we board the boat and sit down. I point at the ladder, and tell how I stumbled upon the gate, climbed down, and scooped the shoe off the water.

And as the inquiries get more specific, I realize how little I had done other than react to forces playing out that slapped the solution in my face. I had opened the broken gate, climbed down the ladder, stuck out my hand, and climbed back up. I’d burned maybe five calories.  

The boat speeds away from the dock and we turn toward the island, the wind blowing through my hair, my youngest son on my lap, the joy still coursing through us as I reflect on the dumb luck.

Sometimes sweating, bleeding, and all the exertion in the world isn’t enough to avoid failure. Sometimes the shoe lands upside down, and there’s no hope from the beginning.

But that day the shoe landed upright, and all I did was watch, doing nothing but remaining conscious and curious. And then I accomplished everything, got all the credit, and the prize of admirable hugs from my two boys.

What a great deal. I got all that, and all I did was sit there, growing my grande culo.