Journal of a Sabbatical

August 17, 1999

a herd of mouflon and istván's new printer

It poured rain last night. The wind howled and even the dogs shut up long before their bedtime. The rain pounded so hard on the roof it woke me up. Good thing because the balcony door had blown open and rain was blowing in. I got up to close the door and make sure all the windows were closed. I lay awake for awhile listening to the rain before I finally dozed off again.

In the morning the rain had stopped but everything was overcast. It is definitely not a good day for birding, and marginal for sightseeing. I decided not to take a long trip but to explore some of the side roads around Budakeszi and Telki.

When I settled up with the landlady this morning, I think I told her we don't have tomatoes in Massachusetts. I was trying to tell her that her tomatoes are really good and I am from Massachusetts, in response to her questions in German (which I don't speak any better than I do Hungarian).

Saw a whole herd, 17, of mouflon in Telki. I recognized them from their heads on the wall of the hunting lodge (wild boar and mouflon paradise). They were running through a field near the road and disappeared into the forest. I wonder if they are actually wild or the park operators breed them and turn them loose for the hunters. I don't want to think about it. [BTW, I checked the dictionary and sure enough mouflon is the English word for mouflon.] In Páty I came across a different sort of herd - some goats and cows tended by a shepherd (cowherd, goat herd) in traditional dress. He stopped in front of a concrete industrial building to talk to some guy in Lycra togs on a bicycle. But by far the better picture was when one of the goats jumped up on a concrete slab and started head butting the cow. The other interesting sight in Páty was a church with no roof.

Back at the white house, István informs me that the laser printer is about to be delivered any minute. I give him 5000 forints toward it, which seems woefully inadequate.

The printer arrives with a technician to install it. There is a problem with the BIOS setup. The technician is mystified. I look at the help files. I am mystified. The technician calls someone on his cellphone and an hour or so later the printer is humming along. At long last detailed specimen labels!

I borrow some cardboard and sponge and string to pack up the wild boar painting so it won't get damaged in my luggage. I scribble in my diary to try to get it caught up.

István gives me some work to-do, sorting through some of the Arnold Arboretum specimens to ferret out their numbers and prepare them for the laser printed labels. Something about the specimens - which are very dusty - brings to mind the dusty creepy relics at the Esztergom basilica. I try to describe being creeped out by them. I ask István if he's ever been to the basilica - yes, once a long time ago but he doesn't remember the relics (actually the martyrs may still have been alive when he visited the basilica - they're recent martyrs [Nope, I checked the guidebook and they're 17th century martyrs who were canonized recently by Pope John Paul II.]). I worked some more to get the creepy martyrs out of my brain.

The only people around the white house today are István, George, and me. We sit down to a light supper made from the stock of sandwich fixings in the dining room. When I tell George about the mouflon he says he's sure they raise them here to be killed. I picture mouflon and wild boars on vacation visiting the hunting lodge to venerate the heads of the martyred mouflon...

After supper, it's off to Zsolt's mother's house in Budapest for the night. Her place is right near Moskva tér, a major transportation hub in Budapest, and it should be easy for me to return the Suzuki Swift tomorrow and get a cab to the airport.

Despite my having already eaten, Zsolt's mother insists on feeding me more tomatoes and bread and cheese and salami as well as a cup of tea. I speak no Hungarian and she speaks only a little English, yet somehow we have a conversation. She tells me Budakeszi didn't used to be forest like it is now and that Zsolt had been there before. She pulls out an old photo album with black and white photos of the Chain Bridge in ruins during the war, and toddler Zsolt and his sisters on a terrace in Budakeszi. Pretty amazing if you ask me.