Water cascaded out of the mountains, poured from fountains carved out of the rock along the path. The temperature lingered around 50 Fahrenheit and the gray clouds surrounding us had started to spurt. I heard a low rumble that I thought could have been the wind. Around the next bend I saw it, the Cascata do Risco. The noise of it was tremendous: roaring like thunder, like a bomb exploding, like a thousand bombs exploding. High in the clouds the water started, raining over rocks and over the trail and into the Ribeira da Janela below, from there tumbling further until it flowed into the unseen Atlantic Ocean. A locked gate blocked the path under the waterfall and beyond I could see the trail had been cut away by a mudslide. As we climbed almost a thousand feet, well over a mile back to the car, heavy, thick, cold sheets of rain fell, like strangers hidden in the clouds were throwing buckets of water.

View from the lighthouse at Ponta do Pargo, Madeira. Photograph provided by the author

We were on the beautiful Portuguese island of Madeira off the coast of Africa. The island bills itself as a place of sun, where the sea is always as calm as glass, where the temperature is never very hot, never very cold. In winter, the average low is a mild 55 Fahrenheit, but that’s at night, when the sun isn’t even shining. During the day, the sun is supposedly bright and warm, with an average high of around 66. Though rain falls at times, it usually lasts only a few minutes and then blows away. Usually.

This is not a common destination for Americans. We were asked quite a few times, “Why did you pick Madeira?” True, there are islands closer to the U.S. that offer warm sandy beaches and a better exchange rate. Our answer was always the same: we spun a globe, closed our eyes, and poked. Truth was, we had come to Madeira looking for sun, and that’s exactly what we wound up doing while we were there.

In the late afternoon we finally found the car, hidden in the smoke of gray clouds high in the Paul da Serra Mountains. The silver Renault Clio hatchback was parked facing the obscured valley below. A fierce wind blew rocks across the parking lot. Soaked through the thin waterproof jacket I’d brought—turns out it’s only water resistant—I turned over the ignition, eager for the heat. Unfortunately, the car was in gear and I, unused to a manual transmission, neglected to depress the clutch. The car, pointed towards the cloud-obscured cliff and valley below, jumped forward, scaring both me and my traveling companion. I held my hands up in the air, not touching the wheel or the key, my heart in my throat. The car hadn’t moved that far; we weren’t parked that close to the edge. But the fright was there nonetheless.

The highest point on the island, Pico Ruvio, sits at 6,109 feet. The lowest is, well, sea level. Cliffs rise from the ocean to some of the highest elevations in Europe. The most famous sea cliff, Cabo Girão, rises 1,932 feet. We took a side trip to a telefèrico (cable car) in the village of Achadas da Cruz. A steep road twisted straight down to the edge of the cliff where three men argued at the cable car’s top tower, one of them gesturing pointedly toward the sea. I smiled at them as I passed and approached a metal guardrail, then recoiled like it was electric. I had expected a cable car like I’ve seen in Disney Land or the Bronx Zoo, a pleasant sight-seeing journey that also takes you to the other side of the park. This was a cable that dropped vertically nearly 1,000 feet to a small village nestled along a stretch of coastline. As the three men continued to argue in Portuguese, I wondered what had happened to the cable car. It wasn’t at the top, nor was it at the bottom. It was, simply, gone. Another cable, a few feet away, held a small metal contraption with a hook. This was the cargo cable, where supplies were lowered to the village.

Because the cable car seemed to have vanished, the only way out for the people below was via boat. The sea, though, was rough. Huge waves, some as high as 30 feet, crashed over black rocks, sea spray washing over thatched roofs. The sea itself was white with foam. It looked like beaten egg whites, like the white sands of New Mexico swirling in a breeze, like a huge soapy bath, like boiling milk.

Madeira has been pummeled by rain since November. Locals told us they hadn’t seen this much rain in more than 14 years. The week before we were scheduled to arrive, a wall of mud flowed out of the mountains and ripped through the center of Funchal, flooding parking lots and streets and stores. Boulders the size of our little Clio stood in the middle of streets. Sidewalks were caked in mud. More than forty lives were lost. We debated canceling our trip, but were reassured by friends and the owners of our hotel that all was fine, the island would return to normal. The sun didn’t get the memo.

One day, as we were driving in search of the sun, rain began to fall. Wind whipped trees and branches and leaves across the road. The car’s thermometer read 4°C (forty Fahrenheit). The rain turned to sleet, jabbing the windows. The sleet turned to hail the size of pencil erasers. White pellets bounced off the pavement, off the car. Five minutes of hail falling so fast the road was white with it. The black macadam looked like the whipped white waves. I worried about the comprehensive damage waiver (CDW) I had refused to purchase and Europcar’s warning that I’d be liable for the cost of the car, 13,110 euros, if it were damaged. I searched for a tree under which to hide, but the roads on this island are so narrow that only one car can pass at a time. To stop by the side of the road would be to stop in the middle of the road, and there was a bus behind me that didn’t seem interested in stopping for anything. Around the next bend, though, the hail stopped—like we had walked through a door into a different room where the sun was shining.

By the end of the week, I was exhausted from driving. Not because I did all of it—my companion could not drive a stick-shift—but because of the winding, twisting roads that switched back and hair-pinned through dark cavernous tunnels hundreds of years old and turned corners to face down cliffs that dropped 500 feet, sometimes more, into an abyss I couldn’t even see. Often there was nothing between the car and the ocean below but a cement pylon no bigger than a block of dry ice. I clutched the wheel like a life preserver. I shifted gears quickly because I feared having only one hand on the wheel. I mumbled to myself that there was no cliff, that trees or a road bed would protect a fall. Once, I had driven towards one of those ancient rock-walled tunnels without realizing that the road, just wide enough for one car, was closed, blocked by fallen rocks. I maneuvered a ten-point U-turn facing a crumbling shoulder, a sheer sea cliff ten stories high, and the wide, rough ocean. Each time I shifted into first I worried that I would gun the engine and find myself slipping down the side of the mountain into the rocky shore below, Toonces-style.

Later, in a small village, cross-traffic forced me to stop just below the crest of a hill. The streets were wet from rain and my left front tire was on a metal grate. When I shifted into gear, the wheels spun. A woman emerged from her home to investigate the smell of burning rubber. I let out the brake and rolled backwards down a windy road between two rock walls while wishing I hadn’t refused the CDW. Eventually I managed to get the car moving and surged through the intersection in the blind hope there would be no cross traffic.

We stole away from Madeira in the middle of a clear night. A sleepy-eyed night clerk roused himself from a wicker sofa long enough to watch us through glass lobby doors. The storms, for the nonce, had abated and the seas were calm, a gentle rustle over the rocky shore. For only the second time in a week I could see stars. The yellow lights of Funchal guided me to the airport; I pretended each lamp was the sun that had spent the week eluding me. Despite the stormy seas and the wind and the sleet and the hail and the rain and the paralyzing heights, I felt a little sad as the plane took off into a bright, blue sky. The sun was rising. It was going to be a beautiful day in Madeira.