The town beneath us five thousand feet and four miles to the west and the paramilitary police taking no prisoners, using dogs, whips, CS gas, and water cannon and this time the rioters were being rounded up like sheep. Fires burned and the helicopters came and went and it was ending now, we could tell.

“Agua,” we asked a herder and he showed us a stream and we followed it another thousand feet up into the hills where, at a stone wall, it formed part of the boundary of a hacienda. We vaulted the wall, got about a quarter of a mile before a man in a suit appeared on a three-wheeled motorbike and asked us what the hell we thought we were doing. And not about to let Goosey do the talking I explained that we were innocent kids fleeing a riot down in Playa de las Americas. The man adjusted his sunglasses and said something into a walkie-talkie. He escorted us up to the hacienda, where a beautiful woman in her forties sat us down at an oak table under pine beams and gave us water and brandy.

“Muchas gracias, bella señorita,” I said and the woman laughed and muttered something to the man in sunglasses and he went back outside and then she said to me in English that she was married and was no señorita anymore and not even beautiful either. To which I sincerely disagreed and she laughed again and asked me what exactly had been going on at the beach and I told her, leaving out our part in the proceedings.

She fed us and gave us directions to the town of Guia de Isora.

By the afternoon our supplies were gone and we were lost in a region that had an uncanny similarity to the place the NASA robots keep landing on the planet Mars. Rocks, stones, thin red soil. It grew unbearably hot. Goosey started swaying a bit, and all around us desert, black lava, and the baking sun. We sat under a rock and decided to move again at night. The sun set, it grew cold, above us we saw what God had made when he was getting things ready for the Earth. A million stars. A billion. Blue and red and Doppler-shifted ultraviolet.