I reached into my pocket for the house keys and realized he was gone. I stopped dead in my tracks, my mind racing back over the past couple of hours. Up one street in the old town centre of Iglesias, a peek into a kitchen store, a tour through a book store, down another street, up and down the aisles at the large indoor farmers’ market, into a grocery store, and then back to the start of it all, the Gato in Tazza—our go-to coffee shop, which houses five feline residents. Where did I lose him? I handed Ulysse the keys and turned around to retrace my steps, feeling a strange panic considering that I was looking for a lost bookworm…as in a bookmark, made out of yarn, resembling a worm.
Now, this wasn’t just any bookmark. This little bookworm had taken on a life of his own, though I hadn’t quite become crazy enough to have given him a name. He came to me four years ago. My parents have never opted to get online, and while I often wonder if they aren’t the wiser for it, this also presents some challenges. The first time that Ulysse and I took off on one of these extended trips, my mom arranged for me to send email updates to their internet-savvy neighbours down the street, a couple of clowns. Literally. These two are lively characters, originally from England, who in their retired years have taken up clowning. They perform at care homes for the elderly as Buttons and Big Toe, and Buttons is crafty beyond belief. She must go through a trunkful of yarn each year with all of her creations, which include handmade bookworms, complete with a tuft of hair, googly eyes, and a big red nose. When I met these two after returning from that first climbing trip to Europe, Buttons presented me with my very own bookworm.
We went to Malta and Sicily the following year. Buttons was to, once again, act as the email emissary for my parents. I happened to have the bookworm with me, marking one of the books I took along for the journey. Partway through the trip, I thought it would be funny to send a picture of the worm looking alive, crawling on a Bird-of-paradise flower that bloomed in the yard of our rental house. From then on, the worm came with me on every trip I made to a foreign country. In an attempt to amuse the clowns, I photographed him looking goofy in Malta, wrapped drunkenly around a bottle of wine in the Priorat region of Spain, looking suave in Grasse, France. Here in Iglesias, I thought it’d be funny to photograph him with the cats at the Gato in Tazza Cafè. Unfortunately, his danger pay was not sufficient to cover being bitten and clawed, and so, by the time I returned home after the photo shoot, he’d put an end to his modelling career by escaping from my pocket.
We are immune to you insignificant little dogs! 
A cheeky resident of Gato in Tazza
I really did look everywhere I could think of, retracing steps, this side of the street, then that. Imagine the look I received from the lady at the bookstore when I tried to explain, in my broken Italian, that I was looking for a piece of yarn that looked like a worm. Fortunately, I had some recent photographs on my phone to redeem myself in her eyes…at least a little. But in the end, he was nowhere to be found, about which I was rather sad. I consoled myself by imagining that he was picked up either by a child, skipping down the street, spotting something colourful, or by a hunched old lady with an eye to the ground. I hope whomever found him will cherish him as much as I have. Goodbye, goofy little worm. Fare thee well!
I thought of the worm again a few days later, when, after relocating to the seaside town of Cala Gonone, we came to what would have been a beautiful spot for another photo: The Millennium Cave. Every description about the visit to that cave requires a superlative: the approach was the most heinous, the cave was the most enormous and beautiful, the climbing was the hardest thus far on the trip.
Let me start with the approach, which was unlike anything I’ve ever done to get to a sport climbing area. It commences routinely enough, a ten-minute stroll along an infrequently used, rocky road, and then a foot path cutting down from the road, steep and switch backed but quite manageable. Then comes the point where, especially with your heavy climbing pack throwing off your balance, you’ll want to dig out your harness and a sling to tether yourself to the handlines. These handlines seem to go on and on, with enough of a gap between bolts that even tethered in, you’d likely be seriously hurt if you fell…but at least you wouldn’t plummet all the way down the sheer, rocky cliffs to the sea below. There are times where there is nothing remotely flat on which to place your feet, and you must lean outward toward the steep drop, holding fast to the handline, and shuffle your feet along the steeply inclined rock face, hoping that the texture of the rock provides adequate friction. After hundreds of metres of this, you reach the grand finale: a vertical face with a sparse collection of via ferrata rungs to help you through the worst parts. When we finally reached the last section of normal trail, I joked that perhaps I should take a shot of whiskey before we make the approach again: I was frazzled!
But then we came to the cave. And what a cave! Larger than the famous Grande Grotta in Kalymnos, with white tufas dangling from the from the ceiling and slithering down the arched walls among unexpected cracks and pockets. The cave floor is covered in beautiful white sand, free of goat poo. There are lovely old trees at the mouth, and then there is the sea, perhaps 40 metres below, the sound of the waves echoing serenely throughout the cave. On that day, there was sun, but it was tempered by a cooling breeze off the water. And the climbing was challenging and physical, but ever so fun and three-dimensional. Once again, we were alone there. In short, paradise!
During our lunch break, I spotted two trees that would make perfect anchors for a hammock. Ulysse had given me a very lightweight hammock for Christmas because I am often musing about how nice it would be to take time during a day of climbing to relax and read for half an hour. We never seem to do this though—only recently have we even started taking a short lunch break! I’ve not yet used the hammock, so once I saw those trees, I decided then and there that I would return to this cave, on a rest day when we weren’t climbing, and just put up that hammock and read for a while.
The only thing missing will be my bookworm.
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