A Man for Off-Season

We had stopped for a snack of dollar-a-pound cheeses (each island produces its own varieties; they're all good) and baguette in the parking lot near the mammoth hilltop statue, and a gust of wind snatched the bag out of my hands. It finally became entangled on some brambles, far out of reach. I wanted to leave my mark on the Azores, but not this way.

As it was, Faial was even lovelier and lusher than Sao Miguel, 40 minutes away by air, and the thought that I'd done anything to detract from its beauty was disconcerting.

Mount Guia, the remains of a volcano, separates Horta's waterfront into two bays, while a vast green crater sits in the island's center. Small houses with tidy gardens and stone roofs dot the coast, and everywhere there are cows. If they ever mobilized, the bovines could easily overtake the population of 15,000.

In September 1957, an underwater volcano began erupting near the Capelinhos lighthouse, on Faial's western tip. The event, which lasted more than a year, forced 2,000 from their homes (many fled to the United States) and added more than a square mile to the island. Somehow, the lighthouse survived.

Today it's part sentry to the past, part parents' nightmare. The structure is breathtakingly accessible; you can't climb to the top of the beacon, thank goodness, but you can poke around its partially demolished base. Just a few yards away, there's a precipice plunging to the Atlantic that would stop any mother's heart, and the black sand covering the landscape takes flight at the slightest provocation. When subtle stinging became full-fledged dermabrasion, we fled.

In contrast to the moonscape at Capelinhos, Horta is a seafarer's-seafarer sort of place, with a harbor filled with workaday fishing boats, whale-watching vessels and multimillion-dollar yachts. There's a small business district and a market, but the town's real charm lies in the waterfront promenade -- complete with fountains and the requisite dead guys on podiums -- running its length.

In one plaza, sailors have left behind graffiti on walls; it would look like a mass invasion by vandals in most spots, but here it's endearing. Elsewhere, stones have been set into sidewalks in the shape of sailboats, anchors and other maritime images. We always stepped over them, as if to preserve great works of art. And in a way, they were.

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When the weather is clear, you can climb Pico's volcano and admire the view. When it's not, you can wish you could climb Pico's volcano and admire the view.

I'm no outdoorsman, so I wasn't too distraught when told that hiking the volcano would be ill-advised. But when the clouds atop its peak dissipated during our late-afternoon ferry ride from Horta, I knew it was a big deal: Every member of the boys' soccer team sharing the boat's upper deck with us whipped out their cellphones and started taking pictures.

Our sole purpose for visiting the island was to stay at Aldeia da Fonte, an inn on Pico's south coast. About a half-dozen stone buildings make up the hotel, which sits on a high bluff, surrounded by forest and vineyards. When we checked in, I asked the innkeeper if we were the last to arrive.

"You're the first," she said, "and the last."

That night, after a cheese-to-more-cheese feast of salted cod and a bottle of tinto in the inn's Hocus Pocus restaurant, we settled in early. The roar of the Atlantic pummeling the rocky shoreline was our Azorean lullaby.

But in the predawn darkness, an otherworldly shriek jarred us awake. Another came a few seconds later, then another. The warbly cackling was now more comical than frightening, as if a couple of munchkins were enjoying a good laugh in the trees outside our bedroom window.

It was the wakeup call of the resident Cory's shearwaters, seabirds that descend en masse in the spring. Evidently, a few had arrived a bit early and were overjoyed to be there.

We could relate.

Then the screeching faded, the sky turned rosy, and we rolled over and went back to sleep.