The random souls you meet in the world are really remarkable. There are a couple new additions to the rustic farm crew, one of which is a French guy named Pierre who happens to have a car. This is a commodity that has thus far been so out of reach that we haven't even considered the things we could do with one. We decided to go on a field trip after work to go see a bear in a nearby town. The town is called Campostella and is built in a circle around this pit that looks like the caldera of a volcano. The houses are stacked up around the rim with only one road extending down to circle the pit. We were standing in one of the local hangouts, a lookout with a view of the pit and the rolling hills behind it, where old men come to drink beer and coffee and bullshit about the day. We asked one of them why all the houses were built around the edge and no one lived in the pit.
       "Would you want to live alone like a cockroach in cold dark pit?" was his response. I told him no.
In recent years they have fenced in the pit and put a walking trail around it to provide a small sanctuary for bears. There were mixed stories about the solitary bear that was the current resident. One man told us it had belonged to a guy who's house had been possessed by the police because he was crazy. No idea what he did, just that he was a crazy old man with a bear in his basement. The other story was that the bear had wandered out of the hills of the nearby Abruzzi park. Regardless of how it got there the bear is a brown hulk that looks like a black bear with the massive head of a grizzly. I was really sad that I had forgotten my camera as the bear crawled its way up the crumbly dirt bank to the fence where we were standing to smell our hands. I have seen a handful of bears in my days, and this was by far the clumsiest, slowest, and least confident ursine creature I've ever seen. There was talk about scaling the fence to race the bear, but sense won over in the end.
          We were shooting the shit over coffee and beer, watching the sun change the streaks of high clouds to royal colors over the strange circular town. The buildings, bundled together and piled atop one another as they are, took on the golden glow of the end of the day and the whole town stopped to watch. There were three old men leaning on the balcony over the hole with us, drinking beer.
      "Italian beer, the best in the world." One of them said. Italian men love to highlight certain aspects of their life and declare it "...best in the world." It's a recurring theme and spans from makes of car, pomegranates, wine, food, women...etc. We told him that we were sorry, but Peroni, the Italian beer of choice, was terrible. He thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard and went to tell his friends what we'd said.
      After the sun set the residents all went back to their various lives and we were left alone aside from one old man leaning against the wall. As we were walking past him to leave he waved at us and said,
   "Where are you from?" This was shocking as there is no one in this part of Italy who speaks a word of English.
   "South of San Francisco," I said, the standard way of describing the Santa Cruz area.
     "I've been there. I've been to San Jose." This was doubly shocking as no Italian that I've run into has traveled outside of Europe. He was a short man who looked as if he could have been seventy. He wore glasses on a big nose and wore a blue baseball cap, jeans, and an old beige knit sweater with black buttons.  It turns out that he was an artist who painted murals and various decorations in houses. He spent four years near Stanford painting the dome of some Villa. He had painted various buildings in San Jose and spent another four years painting another dome in Florida. He had spent his whole life traveling around the world painting for people. I promised him that when I made it back to California I would go to find his dome.