By Eva Dias Costa in Noted, Unresolved — 03 Aug 2025

Drunk Pelicans and Iberian Oddities

Dispatches from a journey through Kallaikoi land – where even the sea is conscripted, and history clings to the asphalt.

I went sailing off the north coast,
where the Kallaikoi still speak.
But the water had been conscripted –
yellow Canadairs:
low-flying,
with the grace of drunk pelicans
and the moral authority of hazard tape.
Scooping fire from the mountain tops
by dipping into the bay –
as if it were soup.

So I drove back to the port of Cale,
southbound through Spain,
to where the road began
to question its own identity.

At the old border, now twelve-starred,
good asphalt gave way to patchwork –
four kilometres of guessed-at allegiance,
existential drift.
It belonged to no one,
or to anarchic ideas:
a place without custody.

They say the Romans dared not cross the Lima,
mistaking it for the Lethe,
the river that erased the soul.
Perhaps that was the very stretch.
The curves still feel haunted.
The tarmac still pauses
before choosing a side.

Then came the highway –
concessionised into submission.
Even the painted stripe
seemed newly obedient.

But the drivers –
Portuguese.
Bold in the way cliffs are bold:
unconcerned with proximity or consequence.
Indicators blink for the national anthem.

Even the Spaniards adapted.
The absence of a king
confused the brakes.

Is republicanism contagious?
Does the fever spread at borders?

New motto:
no crown, no command,
no rearview mirror.

Near Bracara Augusta:
a billboard outlasting the election.
A man rehearsing emergencies
with a script of staged devotion
and historical misunderstanding.

Family values. Race purity.
A cosplay aryan
in a country that once boiled sugar
for five continents.
We mixed before we mapped.

This provoked unpatriotic thoughts.
The kind the wind has
when it skips the checkpoint
and heads straight for the rigging –
old trade routes,
older kinships,
a coastline that never consented to division.

Finally home.
I climbed the stairs.
Opened the window.

The Douro and the sea stretched out –
honest, used,
still moving things.
Cruisers. Yachts.
Spectres of caravels
aching for reenactment.

Nothing ever really changed, they screamed.
Everything simply kept going.

Cale.
Kallaikoi.

Names older than christendom,
traces of the proud Celts
pressed under the asphalt –
disclaimers no one reads.

We remember nothing,
and drive impressively fast
on solar-powered machines –
guided by satellites,
along Roman paths.

The future rushes forward,
always on old maps.