El pes que portem a l'esquena (III)

There is a very strong emotional link with Olzinelles and Matadepera, the study areas of this thesis; they are our home and body. And there is also a strong concern for being threatened by something. 'It was at the end of the 1950s when we the children and young people from low Montseny grew up playing in Tordera River, while our adults kept their harvests going with the irrigation waters from Tordera, when suddenly the first pollution events appeared. At the beginning we were amazed, because water changed color overnight. But soon jokes made way for fear when we started seeing the death of fishes until they completely disappeared, and how our parents’ harvests were scorched when irrigated with polluted water'. In my case, the large fire of Sant Llorenç del Munt in August 2003, with five people killed and thousands of hectares of forests devastated, made me feel absolutely helpless since I was living in the Italian Dolomites and I could only watch it on the TV. Although the flames did not reach Matadepera, many volunteers and firemen from the town took part in the extinction works. Some friends of mine were almost burned alive when trying to escape from the flames with the fire engine, while others like Pintoret Junior had to run for hours across the mountains with the fire front advancing without respite in their back.

Photograph by N. Valldeperas (2010)