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# Drunk Pelicans and Iberian Oddities
- URL: https://www.layersofzoe.net/republic-of-asphalt/
- Published: 2025-08-03T18:30:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-05T12:38:29.000Z
- Author: Layers of Zoe
- Tags: Noted, Unresolved, maritime, administered cruelty, history, the peninsula

*Dispatches from 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 sampling 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.

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 feel watched.  
The tarmac pauses  
before choosing a side.

Then came the highway –  
*concessionised* into submission.

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.

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, worked,  
still moving things.  
Cruisers. Yachts.  
Spectres of caravels  
aching for reenactment.

They insisted nothing had changed.  
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.* 

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