Pictures from Arizona

Exploring the Desert on Horseback in Los Cabos

Chacho, black and lustrous and every inch the bull, notices us as we approach the Cuadra San Francisco ranch and rises from his resting place under a tree next to the corral to meander over in very un-bull-like fashion to be petted.

“What is he here for?” I ask one of the ranch hands as I run my hand up and down along the sleek path between Chacho’s eyes and mouth.

“He’s our dog,” the ranch hand tells me with a little smile, and indeed, despite the two very visible, very sharp horns between Chacho’s ears, his big, long-lashed, bovine eyes communicate nothing but gentleness and a doglike craving for affection.

“We also use him to train horses for bullfighting.”

My mind immediately shuts down on that idea before the full implications of it can take hold; it is, however, pretty clear that Chacho won’t meet the same fate as many of his bull brethren. In a bullring, he’d pose about as much of a threat as Ferdinand, the flower-picking bull of the children’s book.

Twelve hours earlier, I was leaving my house in the cold blackness of a February morning in New Jersey. I’m a little disoriented as a result of now finding my very travel-weary self on the opposite corner of the continent, between the Sea of Cortez and the desert and mountains of Los Cabos, surrounded by free-roaming, shiny roosters, all manner of horses, and a pacifistic bull named Chacho.

A few minutes later, I’m being carried across the desert among cacti and canyons of granite by a 9-year-old white Arabian mare named Paloma, who, having assessed my riding skill or lack thereof right off the bat, picks her way over the sand and stones of the Baja peninsula desert with as much delicacy as if she were treading on broken glass. She’s the equine equivalent of a Segway, responding to my intention to ask something of her before I actually have to ask.

Valente Barrena, in what appear to be brand-new jeans, an immaculate blue-checked shirt, and a straw cowboy hat, rides alongside of our little group of city slickers on his muscular quarter horse, swinging a lasso which, I presume, would be used in the unlikely event that one of our horses spooks and makes a run for it. Enrique, a ranch hand who speaks no English, leads our little procession, turning every so often to lean his hand on his horse’s rump and make sure that all is well with us.

Valente is the son of the ranch’s owner, Francisco Barrena. Francisco spent much of his life in San Diego, training horses and riders for dressage, polo, jumping, and the like. When he was ready to retire, he returned to San Jose del Cabo to relax with eight horses, the desert, and the sea. It didn’t quite work out that way. There are now about 50 horses on the ranch, where the animals are trained and bred, and where human animals who want a break from the party culture of Cabo San Lucas and poolside margaritas at the resort can come to ride along the beach or a canyon trail, or take riding lessons.

“The difference is we love horses,” Valente tells us, comparing Cuadra San Francisco to other equestrian outfits. It shows—all of the horses on the ranch are sleek, spirited, and well fed.

I’ve been told that there are coyotes, rattlesnakes, bobcats, and roadrunners in this desert, but, to both my relief and disappointment (it hasn’t taken me long to come to trust Paloma’s discretion in unexpected circumstances), we don’t see them. There are only doves saying goodnight to one another up in the hills.

By the time we reach the end of the trail and are ready to turn back toward the ranch, my fatigue and disorientation have been transformed into a serene bliss that mere landscapes don’t often inspire in me. The light has gone soft and pink, the sea is on the horizon, and the only sounds are the calls of the doves and our horses’ hoofsteps in the sand.

Paloma, hungry and tired from being ridden badly for the past two hours, wants to go home. Her slow, patient gait occasionally breaks into a trot. My legs are aching from being in one position for so long.

“Yo no se si yo puedo caminar despues de este,” I tell Valente and Enrique in terrible Spanish as we approach the ranch. And I’m right—for the first few minutes after I dismount and turn Paloma over to the care of Enrique, my knees are locked into semi-bowlegged position. It seems a small price to pay. I stroke Paloma’s neck and thank her for her patience and forbearing; she responds with a shudder that is the equine equivalent of, “Whatever.” The ranch is settling down for the night. Even Chacho doesn’t rise again to say goodbye as we leave.

Valente has told us that they are thinking about doing full-moon night rides through the desert in the future. In the moonlight, these canyons, hills, and dry riverbeds must look like some starkly beautiful ghost-ridden planet. Put me back up on Paloma, and I’ll be up for anything.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Tunisia

(I wrote this several years ago--NB.)

Grape vines, fields of lavender. Perfect rows of olive, almond, pomegranate, and pistachio trees laid out along the hills. Square fences constructed out of live, flowering cactus plants. To the west as our bus heads south from Tunis to the island of Djerba, the Atlas Mountains run back in low-lying layers and peaks back toward Algeria, pale and hazy in the morning, richly shadowed at twilight. Women and their children tend herds of sheep and goats by the side of the road, or fill jars from wells, or languidly ride atop donkey carts loaded with hay or branches of palm. Closer to Djerba, camels and their tenders drink water and rest in the last, dusty light of the day.

In the villages, schoolchildren and old men sharing sheesha pipes and tea watch our bus pass with mild curiosity. The younger children wear pink school uniforms, and the older girls wear jeans, sneakers, navy-blue tunics, and headscarves. They hang out together under the shade of trees or bus stops, eating ice cream, jostling each other the way schoolkids do everywhere.

Mesmerized by the passing landscape for eight hours, I’m thinking, What the hell was I afraid of?

Packing for my trip a few days earlier, I had a very clear idea of what I might have to fear in Tunisia. For weeks, every day’s news seemed part of a conspiracy to make my visit an increasingly bad idea. Did I really want to be an American in a predominantly Moslem country during the Iraq war, when sickening pictures of abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners were leaking out every day, and when the Middle East road to peace had run off into another ditch? Not to mention the fact that I was visiting the country in part to cover the annual Jewish pilgrimage to the La Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, where only two years ago terrorists had blown up a truck and killed more than 20 visitors.

I’m not Arab-phobic‹quite the contrary, in fact; my rants about my belief that racism against Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis is still condoned in the U.S. have often made me something less than the most popular girl at the American party. I am, however, Al Quaeda-phobic, and, it was a real struggle against what I felt to be a shameful paranoia to make the decision to go.

But how often would I have the opportunity to go to Tunisia, a place with one of those names that never fails to ring in my mind like a particularly evocative line of poetry? And just when could I honestly expect the world to become a much safer place?

I had to go. I would simply stay away from large crowds and maintain the same indefinable "safety practices" that I practice when riding the subways in Manhattan.

******

On my first evening in Tunis, our group (I was traveling with other writers and some representatives of the Tunisian Tourism Board, who I’d already managed to annoy with my pre-trip questions about security) toured the artists’ village of Sidi Bou Said. Built in the 15th-century by Arabs who had just fled Andalusia, it’s an insanely beautiful labyrinth of cobbled streets, white houses with Mediterranean-blue trim, and the same interior courtyards and fountains that one finds in Seville. Tunisia, I was thinking, just might be one of those rare destinations that live up to live up to my hard-to-live-up-to dreams of them.

There were, of course, vendors everywhere‹friendly, about an "8" on the 1-to-10 vendor-pushiness scale, and eager to talk. That evening I had the first few of the encounters that repeated themselves everywhere I went in Tunisia:

"Hello! English?"

"No."

"French?"

"No."

"German?"

"No."

"Czech?"

"No." (Here I would smile.) "American."

Skipping only about a half of a beat, my questioner would raise his eyebrows and exclaim, "Ah! American! But how do you like Tunisia?"

Here I would take the opportunity to mix things up a little more by speaking Arabic. "Quais. Helwa (nice)."

"Ah! You speak some Arabic?"

"Shwaya-shwaya (just a little)."

No one, it seemed, expected to find an American‹much less one who could speak a little Arabic in their beautiful country (it was often pointed out to me, however, that I spoke "Egyptian Arabic", but that I was forgiven). As it turned out, every day gave me more reason to be glad that I was one of those rare creatures.

******

Only on a few occasions did the subject of politics, or terrorism, or the war in Iraq, come up in my encounters with Tunisians, and I was usually the one who started the conversation. No one I spoke to was anything less than measured and polite in their responses. The general feeling seemed to be that the war was very bad and that the Bush administration was, shall we say, somewhat less than honest and sympathetic in its dealings with the Arab world, but the people I talked to seemed to believe that most Americans did not share the administration’s outlook. (One of our hosts, who spoke no English, did a very funny impression of George W. Bush. Screwing up his face until all of his features seemed to sink into one another, he muttered, "Saddam!" and started shooting erratically into the sky with imaginary pistols pulled from imaginary holsters all over his body.) In Tunisia, at least, where income from American tourism has decreased dramatically since 9/11, people simply seemed happy to have an American visitor find the country "Quais."

And only once did anyone mention 9/11, in an odd, benign exchange on my first evening in among the stalls in Sidi Bou Said. After the usual "Where are you from?" conversation, a vendor of jewelry and assorted Tunisian-style trinkets, a very handsome young man with honey-and-gold-colored eyes asked me in insufficient (for the subject) English if the "very big place" in New York was still there. I didn’t understand what he meant; he clarified by saying, "the big things that we blew up." His use of the word "we", at least as I interpreted it, sounded less like a form of alliance with Al Quaeda than a simple attempt to make a distinction between Americans and Arabs that an American might understand.

"Don’t you know?" I asked him in Arabic.

He seemed genuinely confused. A French girl, it turned out, had either told him that the World Trade Center was still there, or that something else had already been built in its place. The girl, who had apparently spent a few days at his house and had not kept her promise to stay in touch after she left, was clearly the bigger issue in our conversation.

"Americans are very gentle, very nice," he told me. "French people are not so nice." Being jilted by a European girl, it seemed, was much more troubling to him than the state of world affairs, or perhaps amounted to the same thing.

******

During our first dinner in Tunisia, over grilled loup de mer, many glasses of (surprisingly good) Tunisian wine, and boukha (a fig-based liquor which tastes like the Tunisian version of moonshine), I learned that my fellow travelers shared my concerns about security at the Djerba festival. I was relieved, at least, to find out that if I was, in fact, being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing, I wasn’t the only one.

That night, standing on my balcony overlooking the city of Tunis, I gazed at the yellow lights spread out along the dark horizon like strings of blazing yellow diamonds, and listened to the sounds of traffic, laughter, music, and barking dogs that echoed up the hill from all over the city. In the morning a rainbow straddled the hazy hills and whitewashed houses of the city, and the deep blue harbor.

I couldn’t believe that I was in North Africa.

******

There were policemen all over Tunisia. From a distance, their dark, white-trimmed uniforms looked sharp and imposing; close-up, however, I could see that they were worn at the edges, and that the white gloves had holes in them. The officers were stern, but polite and respectful.

As we approached Djerba after our long drive south, there was even more of a police presence, and there were quite a few roadblocks. The Tunisian government seemed to be taking security very seriously, especially where the trouble had happened several years earlier.

We were exhausted by the time our bus reached the Djerba ferry terminal, and it was dark. I stood on an upper deck on the boat, shivering in a cool breeze that would, a few days later, develop into a furious, cold dervish of a wind spiraling up from the Sahara. Below me, the police were checking parcels, peering into cars, questioning passengers. Jews and Arabs got out of their cars to breathe in the sea air and watch the approaching lights of Djerba. If they took notice of anyone, it was the American journalists watching from above for signs of trouble.

There was no trouble.

******

Jews and Arabs have coexisted on the island of Djerba for almost 1,500 years. It was very important to our Tunisian hosts that we see how peaceful that coexistence has remained, even through the worst of times in the Middle East.

The worst of times for Djerba came in 2002, when a truck loaded with explosives detonated outside of the La Ghriba synagogue at the height of the festival. The majority of those killed were German tourists (Jews from around the world make the pilgrimage every spring). The Tunisian government first called the explosion an accident, but it soon became clear that Al Quaeda was responsible for the attack.

One of my fellow journalists tried to reassure me about our visit to the festival by saying that terrorists tend to strike a target only once. Someone reminded her about the World Trade Center.

******

On the eve of the festival, we gathered after dinner on the vividly colored cushions of our hotel’s sheesha room to have a smoke and some boukha. Ali, our funny, charming waiter (who retained his dignity even while wearing a rather silly costume and pointy, upward-curling shoes‹he looked much better after work in his elegant suit) brought us different varieties of tobacco to try. My favorite was delicately flavored with apples.

A group of men and women came in, in chic European dress. Accompanied by the hotel’s oud player, the women began to sing in Arabic, beautifully. Ali (who had also noticed my "Egyptian Arabic") told me that the songs were those of Um Khaltoum, the much-beloved Egyptian singer (her American counterpart might be Rosemary Clooney, or Billy Holiday). When I stood closer to listen, the best of the singers, who resembled Jeanne Moreau, invited me to sit with them. I was fascinated by the pleasure they took in singing; everyone knew the words.

Although they spoke no English, they were able to tell me that they were a group of Moslem, Jewish, and Christian Tunisians, now living in Paris. They were in Djerba to help promote understanding and tolerance among the religions. It seemed to me that their songs should do the trick, but then I was just an American writer obsessing about her own safety.

******

At the entrance to the La Ghriba festival stood a guard with what I assume was an AK-47 (I’m not much of a gun aficionado; in any case, it was huge). In the parking lot, however, police officers and tour bus drivers gathered around radios in the buses, listening to a particularly important soccer match.

The synagogue, from the outside, appeared much smaller than I’d expected. There was no sign of the damage the explosion had caused; everything was white and pristine. The crowd was not nearly as big as I’d expected‹or, I imagine, as the promoters had hoped.

Past the main gate, there were two buildings, one on either side. In a courtyard in the building on the right, there was singing, celebration, souvenir and food vendors, and an auction involving scarves and the menorah that would shortly be carried about the village streets in a procession.

On the left was the synagogue itself, predominantly blue, softly lit by shafts of light from above, and filled with worshippers. The floor was covered with shoes, and sticky with what I took to be boukha (which is a popular refreshment at the festival) and orange soda. Men and boys prayed in the first, larger room, and in the second room children handed out candles to be lit and added to a long row of burning ones. The atmosphere was serene and vibrant at the same time.

Later, from a distance (in keeping with my solitary safety rule), I followed the raucous procession as the menorah was paraded through the streets. If I’d had any doubts about the seriousness with which the Tunisian government took security, they vanished then. Streets were barricaded with buses. Guards were stationed on rooftops and all along the procession route.

This was where the "peaceful coexistence" would be put to the test. Moslems stood in the doorways of their homes and shops, watching, occasionally selling ice cream to Jewish children participating in the procession. From one store I thought I heard a song in Arabic about Mohammed; I wasn’t sure what to make of its intent.

I decided to leave the procession route and explore the back streets of the village. Here, Moslems watched the festivities from behind barricades, or sat talking in their doorways. Children played ball, and sometimes a deep blue door would open to reveal a Moslem woman shyly watching me, and then close again. No one addressed me, but they answered politely when I asked them a question. My Arabic wasn’t good enough to ask if they were watching the procession from so far away because they wanted to, or because they had been told to do so.

I passed some Moslem women and children returning home from shopping. They were stopped by security people, and made to take a different route home. That, I supposed, was the answer to my question. It seemed an extreme measure, but it was remarkable to me that, in a predominantly Moslem country, such precautions were being taken to ensure the safety of a handful of Jews.

Walking back toward the synagogue, I passed a very severe-looking police officer. Maneuvering around the barricade he was guarding, I remarked, "C’est comme New York!" He cracked up.

******

Several days later, on my flight home from Tunisia, I met two women and a man from central Pennsylvania. They seemed the most unlikely people to find in North Africa, but they were already planning their next trip to Tunisia. We talked about the unspoiled beauty of the country, the elegance of the resorts, the kindness of the people. I told them that I’ll be returning in December to see the Sahara festival. We were like a secret society--Americans who have been to Tunisia and fallen in love with the place.

******

The news of my first day back is that Al Quaeda has beheaded a civilian from Pennsylvania in Iraq. Long, jagged, out-of-season strands of lightning hit the ground all afternoon, as they also did in Frankfurt during my trip home. The green hills, blue-trimmed white houses, and tranquil, dusty streets of Tunisia seem more like a dream now than they did before I left home.

Being Somewhere, for a Day, in Coney Island

Lorenzo is at his computer, studying an online map of the New York City subway system as if our survival depends on his ability to decipher the message hidden among the tangle of colored lines, numbers, and letters, and to find our escape route before the sand runs out of the hourglass. It’s Memorial Day, and we’ve made an early-morning, pre-coffee decision to get out of New Jersey and spend the day at Coney Island. I have misgivings about allowing my directionally challenged husband to plan out the route for our little impromptu excursion, but I have, of late, lost the instincts necessary to navigate the New York City transportation system on the fly. So I leave it in his hands; it’s up to him to decide whether we take the A to West 4th Street and pick up the D train, or start downtown and get the F somewhere.

We’re doing something that we haven’t done since my relatively new incarnation as a travel writer began to allow me to regularly pick up and go to distant destinations and call my journeys ”work,” thereby satisfying to some extent my near-constant drive to go somewhere. With no passports, no luggage, no e-tickets, and no transportation option other than to surrender ourselves to the vagaries of the subway system, we’re simply making a traditional New York daytrip.

It’s the kind of thing that Lorenzo and I did a lot in our proverbial poor-but-happy newlywed days. Sometimes we’d even go to Coney Island in winter; we’d walk the empty boardwalk, listening to the calls of gulls circling in the gray sky, watching the Russians who make up much of the local population wander serenely in and out of the freezing surf, and speculating on the reason why all of the Russian restaurants along the boardwalk serve sushi. On other weekends we might take the M15 bus downtown for a ferry trip to Staten Island, or a series of buses for a two-hour journey up to the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters. (We could have taken the train part of the way and cut an hour or so off of those trips, but a good part of the fun was the journey itself.) At the end of the day we’d straggle back to our one-bedroom apartment, exhausted but exhilarated by the fact that, for the price of two subway fares and a couple of snacks, we’d seen something, and been somewhere.

Route chosen (A to D), animals fed, snacks packed, we head out. I ask Nicco and Alessandro, our sons, if they remember a trip we made to Coney Island over four years ago, but Alessandro was still in a stroller then, and Nicco was half the height he is now, and much more child than man at that point. Nicco remembers something about a game in which one shoots at targets in a kind of old western town; Alessandro remembers nothing, but he’s up for anything that involves a train ride and a boardwalk.

Port Authority is crowded with couples and families in their weekend clothes, making their way, like us, to the places most likely to make them feel that their day off has been spent well--most likely to seem, if only in a small way, like an adventure. Everyone is freshly showered and dressed for summer. I remember this from years ago—the atmosphere of relaxed optimism that you can breathe in on a summer weekend morning in Manhattan. People who, whether by choice or because they lack the means, are not leaving the City for the weekend, collectively affirm that We don’t need no stinking Hamptons, or, for that matter, anywhere else that can’t be reached by public transportation.

We’ve explained to Alessandro that it will take a long time to get to Coney Island, and that the subway ride is part of the adventure, but my little vagabond-in-the-making already knows. He’s up on his knees watching out the window as the D train emerges from the tunnel into the light, thrilled with the concept of a subway that runs outdoors, and the pigeon’s-eye view of streetscapes, backyards, laundry on the line. Below us, the familiar landscape of Chinatown seems, from this perspective, wondrously unfamiliar, as does (although we used to live a block away from it) the East River. We can’t even figure out which bridge we’re crossing into Brooklyn.

Nicco is sitting next to three Russian girls, who are dressed, at 11 in the morning, in full spaghetti strap-and-sequins nightclub regalia. He’s listening intently, and very conspicuously, to their conversation. He notices that we’re watching him, and smiles.

“I’m only getting about half of what they’re saying,” he says. Lorenzo and I are a little confused, because the girls are speaking Russian, and Nicco studies French. No matter. He’s enjoying himself, and he’s smart enough that he may well be picking up on some of what they’re saying.

The trip seems shorter than I remember. A child at the other end of the subway car yells, ”We’re here! We’re here!” as the silhouette of the Wonder Wheel comes into view ahead. The train looked fairly empty while we were on it, but once we get into the terminal at Coney Island we’re caught up in a current of people. They’re carrying beach chairs and children and coolers; the party, it seems, has already started, and we’re part of it.

The terminal is a brand-new, futuristic construction of glass and metal—nothing at all like the decrepit place I remember from a few years ago. I, however, like decrepitude, at least in certain places, and I’m hoping that no one’s gone and completely erased the gaudy, Arbus-esque tawdriness of the boardwalk a la the recently sanitized Times Square.

My fears are put to rest once we get outside, cross Surf Avenue, and head up Stillwell toward the beach. Even in the full, flat light of midday, the carnival colors are magnificent. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs has had a little work done, but it still looks pretty much the way it did when it opened 85 years ago (I’m not remembering, thank you very much—I’ve seen pictures). The Parachute Jump and Wonder Wheel have been painted. But Coney Island is still in its iconic, kaleidoscopic, decrepit glory, and as much of a beautiful assault to the senses as ever. Bells ring, buzzers buzz, children shriek, and music of every kind blares simultaneously in cacophonous layers. There are flea markets, freak shows, arcades, souvenir shops, photo booths, cotton candy stands, churro vendors. The air smells of candy apples, salt water, and fried chicken. Rides of every kind swirl, plummet, twist, and swing. On the boardwalk, a full-scale Gospel chorus and orchestra proclaim the world-view of the God (heart)NY Ministry Tour 2005 with inspirational swells that roll across the beach; cheerful people in black t-shirts are dispensing free Bibles and advice of a very specific nature. At the same time, we hear the subversive rhythms of an impromptu drumming session from the pier at the other end of the beach. In Coney Island, nothing matches, but everything fits.

The beach is crowded with young Latino men playing volleyball, Indian women in saris, Asian families, black families, white families. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses sits in the sand. Hasidic children, their wigged mothers keeping watch, ride the fire truck and Willy the Whale rides at Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park. Moslem children, their mothers in hijab, do the same. I could travel for a year and never see such as many nationalities as I do in these few blocks of Brooklyn.

Nicco is quiet, taking it all in, winning tickets for his brother to redeem in the arcades, taking me up on my challenge at the shooting gallery (neither of us wins). Alessandro, every inch a 6-year-old at a carnival, bounces from ride to arcade to beach and back, asking for stuff. Bystanders, perfect strangers, cheer and coach him when he tries to win a prize using a fishing pole. He has also, somehow, become a damned fine skeeball player. Lorenzo, who hasn’t had many opportunities lately to take pictures for fun, rather than for work, frequently wanders off to compose a shot.

For the most part I am, like Nicco, content to absorb it all, and to make sure that Alessandro doesn’t disappear into what is by late afternoon a tidal wave of people churning through the amusement parks and arcades. The continual stimulation of my various senses is inducing flashbacks. When I look down at the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of the beach, I’m thrown back 35 years or so to the miraculous (or so it seemed at the time) moment when I pulled a sopping wet 20-dollar bill out of the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of Jones Beach (New York’s other great democratic beach getaway). From there, memory drops me into the front seat of the baby-blue Rambler convertible that used to take my mother and me there. I remember with near-perfect clarity watching the heat rise from the pavement and the hoods of the hundreds of other cars with whom we crawl along on the Long Island Expressway toward the beach, and the promise of a day’s escape from the familiar.

On the way home, I’m thinking about which shards of images from today might embed themselves in Nicco’s and Alessandro’s memories and reveal themselves, decades from now, as unexpectedly and in such vivid detail as mine have a tendency to do. I wonder about this every time we travel.
But can our little daylong escape from the familiar be called “travel?” How far from home does one need to go to have the right to say, “I traveled?” And if a day’s excursion can’t be considered travel, does that mean that the thousands of people hauling their (now sleeping) children, their coolers, their towels, their Frisbees and their picnic lunches all through the boroughs today, seeking escape, and those who may never have the means to get to Europe, or the Caribbean, or even Disney World, have not really been anywhere?

I seem, of late, to constantly come across someone’s opinion of what separates the traveler from the tourist, and what constitutes ”authentic” travel. Here’s mine: I believe that you’ve traveled when, because your mind is open, and you’re willing to hang back and allow things to happen that might not happen anywhere else, you’ve had the chance to see something that you ordinarily would not, or to see things that you thought you knew in an entirely different way.

It’s not that I don’t believe that it’s incredibly important that people get out and see as much of our world—the mundane, the magnificent, the tawdry—as possible. But the number of miles you’ve racked up is less important than whether or not you come back home at the end of the day, or the week, or the year, feeling that there’s a little bit more to you than there was when you left—even if it’s just a few new memories to remind you that there are places, and ways of living, other than the one you know.

At home, shaking the fine, dirt-brown New York sand out of Alessandro’s jeans, I’m content to know that we’ve seen something, and we’ve been somewhere.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

A 6-Year-Old Gives Snorkeling a Try in Turks and Caicos

“Eric,” remarked my 6-year-old son, Alessandro, to the similarly aged son of the S/V Atabeyra’s skipper, “this boat is half boat, half paradise!”

This spontaneous declaration was greeted by our fellow passengers with wholehearted agreement. After all, we’d spent the day sailing among the white, deserted Caicos Cays aboard the elegant schooner, stopping for a swim in phosphorescent, aquamarine waters, and eating our lunch of skewered chicken, shrimp, salad, wine, rum punch, and homemade cookies in the shade of Atabeyra’s sails. We’d seen dolphins arcing in and out of the water alongside the ship (apparently for the dubious pleasure of feeling the engine’s vibrations against their bodies). We’d even watched, transfixed, as the long, archetypal shadow of a shark slipped through the water to a point a few feet away from the shore onto which we were about to disembark, and then slowly turned away again (“Nurse shark,” explained one of the crew. “Bottom feeder. Vegetarian...mostly.”). Who could complain?

But I, quietly, blissfully watching the blue and white seascape with the tropical breeze in my face and a glass of cold white wine in my hand, knew perfectly well that, these days, Alessandro was capable of turning on a dime from joy to discontent, regardless of his surroundings. The phase was also a monster with two heads: it could either take the form of a sudden, groundless crankiness, or a stony refusal to try anything that Alessandro hadn’t tried, and approved of, before. It wasn’t the kind of monster that you wanted to bring along on a family vacation, but–judging from Alessandro’s elated pronouncement--it seemed to have been banished from the schooner Atabeyra for the time being.

There was, however, still a challenge to be dealt with. Once we reached what Eric’s father deemed a suitable spot, we’d stop for some snorkeling.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I’m an overprotective mother. Watching Alessandro’s new friend Eric, so obviously a seasoned child of the sea, cavorting monkey-like along the railings of his father’s schooner had me covering my eyes half the time, and reaching out unnecessarily to keep him from falling into Grace Bay the other half. Had Alessandro been so bold, I might have lost some of my shrimp, salad, and cookies out of sheer anxiety.

But snorkeling–so natural and simple an activity that even I had mastered it–was something that I’d wanted Alessandro to experience ever since he’d gotten used to being in water that was over his head. At times, we seemed to be making progress toward that goal. In the swimming pool at the Ocean Club Resort, where we were staying, Alessandro had been willing to try out the little mask-and-fin set that I’d brought along for him, but then he’d quickly ditch it on the pool deck in favor of an unencumbered game of Marco Polo with his friends.

The day before our Atabeyra excursion, Alessandro had also surprised me by agreeing to do some kayaking, simply because he’d “never tried it before” (the monster must have dozed off). Encouraged, I said, “You know that we get to go snorkeling tomorrow, too. Won’t that be fun?”

“Maybe,” he’d answered, gazing out inscrutably at the water.

When the Atabeyra reached the area where we’d be snorkeling, I must admit to some parental trepidation. The water just then had gotten pretty choppy, and its translucent blue-green had gone quite a bit darker. There’s no way that Alessandro will agree to this, I was thinking with just a hint of relief.

But Eric was already pulling on his fins, and, to my astonishment, Alessandro was right behind him (not wanting to be out-machoed really does start early, I was thinking). Fine. Once some of the older children and adults on the ship had gone into the water, Eric, Alessandro, and I climbed down the ladder into the lurching sea.

It was clear that this wasn’t going to be a hang-out-at-the-surface-and-marvel-at-the-fish snorkeling excursion. Aside from the fact that the water had become too cloudy to see much of anything, I was more concerned with making certain that Alessandro’s unexpected spirit of adventure didn’t get snuffed out by any mishaps. Eric, it seemed, was more than comfortable, and Alessandro continued to follow his lead. I just needed to watch.

Suddenly, though, something changed. Eric wasn’t comfortable any more. His life jacket, he said, kept floating up behind his head. He looked scared. “Do you want to get out?” I asked. He nodded.

I looked at Alessandro, who seemed to be watching for signs to let him know how he should be feeling about things. Clearly, I’d have to get them both back on board the Atabeyra right away. Looking around, though, I saw that the other snorkelers had wandered quite a bit farther away from the ship than we had. We were on our own.

Somehow, fighting against small waves that seemed intent on pushing me up against the side of the boat, I got a hold of both boys and began making my way back toward the ladder (to be honest, I can’t quite remember how I did this). But it was rough going.

“I need some help here!” I called toward the ship, trying not to sound panicked and scare Alessandro and Eric any more than necessary. “Help!”

At first, no one heard me. I was less frightened than angry–angry that Alessandro’s first brave foray into snorkeling was going like this. He’d never try anything new again.

Finally, miraculously, one of the passengers–a British man, whose name I never learned but whom I will love forever–heard me, dove in, swam over, and grabbed Eric. Now I could get a good grip on my son, and quickly get us back on board.

“Don’t be scared,” I kept saying. “Just let the water carry us back. We’ll be fine.” Alessandro, braver than I’d ever expected, said nothing, and concentrated on doing exactly what I told him to do. I loved him even more than I usually do.

Back on board, Alessandro related his adventure to the other passengers like an old sailor just back from sea. I shakily retrieved my glass of wine and marveled at the fact that he didn’t seem to have been traumatized by the incident a bit (or at least had no intention of acting traumatized in front of Eric).

A little later, having calmed down somewhat as we sailed toward land in the warm, late-afternoon light, I asked Alessandro if he’d ever try snorkeling again.

“Maybe,” he said, gazing out inscrutably at the water.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Floating Among the Islands and Icebergs of the Antarctic Peninsula

Sailing southward down the scoliotic, fractured spine of the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the M.V. Marco Polo, I got a sense of what it might be like to dally with a mild and very pleasant madness. The delineations and markers that I’d always taken for granted as means to gauge things like time, shape, size, and distance—the accoutrements of a reasonable mind—began to smudge, fade, or disappear altogether once we’d crossed Drake’s Passage and began cruising among the glaciated, volcanic, or merely rock-strewn hunks of land that lie off the peninsula’s western edge.

Nighttime, no longer defined by darkness, became more of a concept than a reality. Gray mists and long, pale cloud-strands obscured mountaintops and mimicked the horizon, making everything beyond the ship’s deck a nearly colorless floating world at whose dimensions I could only guess. Icebergs could resemble crouching lions, or distant desert palaces, or—no less marvelous--icebergs. At times it became hard to tell whether the ship was moving, or the land was moving, or nothing was moving at all.

It wasn’t much easier to will my mind into perceiving this place as a reality here than it had been at home, when I would stand staring at its pale-blue, shattered rendering on the National Geographic map on my son’s bedroom wall. In the evening (when the sky might have darkened ever so slightly) I’d sit in the ship’s Polo Lounge with a glass of Calvados, watching the passing seascapes and landscapes through the windows, and silently repeat to myself: I’m in Antarctica. This is the only place in the world that no one owns. This is the farthest south that I will ever be. I’m in Antarctica.

It rarely worked, and when it did, I was confronted with a disconcerting question: should such a fragile place be written about in such a way that might encourage others to come? It was, of course, a question I’d had to deal with at other times as a travel writer, but never with such a sense that there was so much riding on my answer. (Not that there are millions of readers counting the moments until my next pronouncement about where they should go, but every so often I seem to make an impression—and, in a place inhabited for the most part by only penguins, whales, seals, sea lions, and seabirds, every so often could make all the difference.)

******
Allan Morgan, Expedition Leader for our 8-night Antarctic journey aboard the Marco Polo, gave an orientation talk on the rules and procedures for getting off the ship on the second afternoon of the cruise.

“I’m glad to see that so many of you have joined us for the mandatory briefing,” he greeted those of us who had shown up with his deadpan, Robert Redford affect. With help from the other members of his team, he demonstrated what fifteen feet looks like for those of us with less-than-perfect grasps of measurement (we were, he explained in no uncertain terms, not to get closer than that to the wildlife we came across unless they approached us of their own volition). He explained why wool socks are preferable to cotton ones, the procedures in place for getting penguin guano off our boots, how to get on and off the inflatable zodiac boats that would take us to shore, and how long one might survive if he or she fell out of the zodiac and into the freezing waters of Antarctica (bottom line on that: don’t fall). He made it abundantly clear that, here in Antarctica, the comfort level of the wildlife took precedence over the comfort of human visitors; the continuing survival of the animals depended on it, whereas, at the end of the day, we humans could return to our cozy ship, shower, have dinner, and get a good night’s sleep.

At the end of the orientation session, Allan took questions from the passengers. A hand went up.

“Do I have the right to defend myself if I’m attacked by a penguin or a sea lion?” asked the hand’s owner.

Allan appeared to measure his response very carefully before quietly asking, “What kind of weaponry are you planning to carry?” Next question.

Another young man asked if we were allowed to pet the penguins if they came close enough on their own.

The rest of the audience responded in unison: “NO!” Most of us had, it seemed by then, gotten with the leave-things-as-you-find-them program.

******
The first test of how well we’d absorbed Allan’s instructions came on the third afternoon of the cruise, when we reached Cuverville Island. (It was, actually, more of a quiz than a test, as we would only be cruising around the island in zodiacs and not setting foot on land.)

Walking single-file down a long corridor on one of the Marco Polo’s lower decks, outfitted in long underwear, regular and waterproof pants, rubber boots, shirts, sweaters, ship-issued red parkas, gloves, mittens, and hats, we looked like astronauts making their way toward a launch pad; someone should have been playing the music from The Right Stuff. Filipino crew members in insulated orange jumpsuits helped us onto the zodiacs.

Settled safely (to my surprise, as I am nothing if not a klutz) into the zodiac, I looked up and out at what surrounded us, and gasped. If our passage along the peninsula thus far had been a colorless, ghostly dreamscape, this was a Technicolor Munchkinland. From the water, mountains that from the ship had been merely breathtaking were now gargantuan as gods. Icebergs, taking every possible form and punctuated with turquoise striations that appeared to be lit from within, drifted by. There was blue in the sky.
I was so stunned by the magnitude of everything that it took me a minute to notice the Gentoo penguins (I may have noticed the unmistakable—now that I’ve smelled it—smell of penguin guano first). But there were hundreds of them on the rocky shore, and more clambering like toddlers up toward the tops of the island’s hills. Still more, restored to the grace that eluded them on land, performed synchronized dives and leaps in the clear water around us. A seal teased the passengers of a zodiac just ahead of us, who were nearly falling into the water to try to get a shot of her.

And then someone yelled, “Whale!” At lunch, we’d seen dozens of spouts and flipping Humpback flukes alongside the ship. As thrilling as that was, getting close to one in a zodiac would be another thing altogether. We turned just in time to see a fluke disappear into the water, and our zodiac driver took off in its direction.

My instinct, of course, was to yell, “Faster!” or to take control of the zodiac and catch up with the whale at all costs. Still, at the same time, a voice inside my head said, We shouldn’t be chasing him. He’s gone already. The voice, of course, was right. The whale, who passed by shores littered with the skeletons of his slaughtered forebears every day, wasn’t about to hang around for photo ops.

******
In the days that followed, we went ashore on islands where it was impossible to be more than fifteen feet away from nesting Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins, the parents standing guard over their chicks, regurgitating krill into the babies’ beaks, stealing pebbles from other penguins’ nests, or simply staring off in some kind of penguin reverie at a spot between the sea and the sky.

During his onboard lecture about the avian wildlife of Antarctica, ornithologist Chris Wilson (whose great-uncle, Edward Wilson, had died along with his expedition-mates while returning from Robin Falcon Scott’s unimaginably tragic 1912 expedition to the South Pole) had shown us a photo of a penguin chick being eaten alive by a predatory seabird. Ashore at Port Lockroy, I told him that the image had haunted me, and that I wouldn’t know what to do if I saw a chick being attacked. Chris reminded me that the chicks of the seabirds had to eat, too.

“It’s hard to know whose side to take,” I said.

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Chris answered. “You can’t take sides.” My natural inclination to interfere, he was politely telling me, would need to be curbed in a place like this.

The Marco Polo’s Expedition Team members, experts in ornithology, marine biology, climatology, geology, and the like, spent their time onshore among the passengers, patiently giving amazingly knowledgeable answers to questions that ranged from clueless to complex.
Every so often, a passenger would cross one of the orange lines set up as delineations between human and penguin territory, taking a “Harry, get a picture of me with the penguins” pose.

“Ma’am,” a team member would say, as if repeating a mantra, “please move back behind the line.”

“We’d rather not be Penguin Police,” Allan Morgan told me during our morning on Half Moon Island, a delicately beautiful mile-and-a-half-long pile of black stones, teeming with Chinstraps. Their time was much better spent when they were explaining to passengers what, exactly, they were looking at as they picked their way among the rocks and penguins with their cameras. I took the opportunity to ask him if he felt that tourism would help or harm Antarctica.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. He told me about a small canyon, known pretty much only to “adventure types,” not far from the Grand Canyon. The canyon had recently been flooded, because not enough people had known about it to protest the flooding. The Grand Canyon, he said, was not likely to meet the same fate, because people knew about it, and would always want to visit it. If Antarctica remained the province of scientists, and was never revealed to the general public, he implied, no one would know that it was a place worth protecting from exploitation. Handled responsibly, tourism might actually help to save Antarctica.

******
By the last day of the cruise, passengers—oil executives, retired Naval officers, self-described Nebraska farmgirls, software designers, schoolteachers, and world travelers who had been aching to set foot on Antarctica before they died—wandered around the ship with beatific grins. They raved about penguins with the same affection that they might use to talk about their own children; they complained, in some cases, about spouses who had refused to join them in Antarctica and who had consequently missed what everyone repeatedly referred to as the “trip of a lifetime.” It was as if we’d been collectively lifted off to one of those distant ice palaces by some unseen force and been given a good spiritual cleansing before being sent on our way.

The Expedition Team convened a final panel discussion about the future of Antarctica, which depends to an enormous extent on adherence to the Antarctic Treaty. In effect since 1961, and with 44 nations signed on at present, the Treaty is a framework for keeping Antarctica in its pristine state, protecting wildlife, seeing to it that the continent is used solely for scientific and peaceful purposes, establishing guidelines for responsible tourism, and banning drilling or mining until at least 2048. The Treaty, biologist Neville Jones told us, had been working remarkably well so far; on the other hand, it hadn’t yet been tested very vigorously. Now that we’d seen Antarctica, he suggested hopefully, maybe we would be inspired to be active in supporting the Treaty’s mission.

Allan Morgan, dismissing us at the conclusion of the panel, gave us our orders. “Go,” he said. “You are all now ambassadors for Antarctica.”

And so here I am, hoping that I’m doing the right thing.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Malik Enti?

This is the link to my first real travel story, which is about visiting my crack-addicted, taxi-driving Egyptian boyfriend's family in Cairo many years ago. It's very long, so it seemed to make more sense to provide the link to Boots 'N' All than to paste the story in here. Enjoy!

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/05-03/malik-enti-egypt.html

To Zero and Back: On the Road Where the Wild Things Are

I was having such a good, obsessive time competing with my fellow Delta Song passengers (identified only by first name and seat number on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of mine) to get the most correct answers to a music trivia game in the shortest amount of time that I barely noticed when we began to descend over West Palm Beach. Someone named Natalie (seat 31C) had been giving everyone a real run for the money, but I scored big on Frank Sinatra’s middle name, and on the name of Iggy Pop’s band (as a reward for reading this, I’ll tell you: Albert, and the Stooges). My son, Alessandro, was oblivious to the life-or-death competition being played out all around the plane; he’d found the Cartoon Network on his seatback screen. We both might have stayed on for the return flight had our screens not gone black shortly after we landed, giving us the leisure to remember that we were about to meet my husband Lorenzo (who had the misfortune to come down from New York on a different, game-and-cartoon-free airline), pick up a rental car, and embark on a roadtrip adventure through the Florida Keys.

The easygoing, friendly flexibility of the staff at the Alamo counter in the airport made me remember once again that Florida is a place where inconveniences are not the norm, and life is supposed to be easy and pleasant (as opposed to Manhattan, where the greatest rewards go to those who can endure humiliating inconveniences with the most Christlike tenacity). The exception to this endearing state trait became evident after we passed through Miami and continued south in our little red economy something, at the point where I-95 abruptly ends and becomes U.S. 1, a 2-lane mess of slow-moving cars, with traffic lights every 3 or 4 blocks. Our aggravation at that point was compounded by the fact that Alessandro, the 5-year-old with what is usually the most exquisitely hip taste in rock-‘n’-roll, decided that a Journey song he heard on the radio was the best thing he’d ever heard, and forced us to listen to it from beginning to end. (The song was still playing in my head when I woke up the next morning in Key Largo, where a Jimmy Buffett song would have at least made more sense.)

U.S. 1 became increasingly decrepit and strange—kind of what I’d imagine a Texas backroad somewhere near the Mexican border to be like. For almost an hour we drove, stopped, and drove some more past pawn shops, gun shops, flower shops (useful for funerals resulting from the merchandise acquired from the latter two), pet shops, strip-mall sushi places with odd names, and vacant lots out of which grew what appeared to be enormous, ancient bearded fig trees. Lorenzo and I entertained ourselves by trying to imagine what must go on during a radio segment called “Drunk Bitch Fridays”, which was being promoted by the station we were listening to. It was, unfortunately, only Thursday, so chances were we’d never find out for sure.

Suddenly, though, we were on a straight, pristine causeway (Lorenzo couldn’t help quoting one of his many favorite lines from “The Godfather”: They shot Sonny on the causeway. He’s dead.) where there was nothing on either side of the road but stretches of marsh out of which, here and there, grew bare white birches. Osprey nests hung precariously from the tops of telephone poles along the road, and the birds themselves hung almost without motion above us, changing direction with only the slightest tip of a wing. Drunk Bitch Fridays no longer seemed relevant.

Soon we were seeing the first signs for Key Largo. It quickly became evident that our MSN driving directions would be pretty much useless here, and I finally remembered that the Keys were best navigated using a “mile marker” system. I’d expected the numbers to be inscribed on quaint little pillars of stone or coquina; instead, we discovered that they are more like subliminal blips on tiny green signs along the road. It became clear that the mile markers would be our guides and our masters over the next five days.

Eventually we found Ocean Pointe Suites, in Tavernier, where we would spend the night. Our “room” turned out to be an enormous, spotless 2-bedroom condo with a balcony overlooking brush and graceful, flat-topped trees, beyond which the bay, or the channel (I never quite figured out which was which) sparkled. Lorenzo called Alessandro and me out to the balcony and pointed down to the path below, where an amazingly corpulent raccoon and several skinny cats were milling about. The raccoon, noticing our presence, stood up on his paunchy haunches and looked at us expectantly (apparently not everyone had been obeying the “Please don’t feed the raccoons” signs posted all around the property). Later, making our way along a secluded, tree-lined path toward the hotel’s beach-and marina-front bar for some celebratory we’re-here cocktails, we half-expected to be accosted by a fat, masked, furry assailant looking for treats.

But we saw only a family of Egyptian (yes, I can tell) Moslems headed over to the pretty little beach, the women’s heads, arms, and legs covered despite the damp, salt-heavy Florida heat. From the bar we watched them make themselves comfortable, alone on the beach, the men and boys swimming shirtless while the women playfully wet their feet at the water’s edge. The scene was as tranquil and incongruous as a Matisse painting at a de Kooning exhibit, and yet just right.

The following morning, Lorenzo and I sat on our balcony, having our coffee, while Alessandro slept. A single cat watched us from below. The only sounds were the hisses of the leaves blowing around on the trees, the muffled hum of motorboats passing by in the distance, and the calls of redwinged blackbirds, doves, and egrets. This was shaping up to be a wildlife kind of trip, which was fine with me.

Our goal for the day was to reach Key West—home of Mile Marker Zero. There was, I thought, something kind of Zen, or something, in having Zero as one’s destination. We had 92.5 markers to go, but we weren’t in any particular hurry.

One of the pacts that I made with myself when I became a mother was that I would never subject my son (or my husband, or myself) to the kinds of marathon, we-won’t stop-for-the-night-until-the-driver’s-eyes-are-completely-closed death-drives that seemed to be the norm among family roadtrips when I was a child. Our drives would be civilized, leisurely, and humane. We would stop when we felt like it, or when anyone needed a snack, a drink, or a bathroom break. No one would be screaming by the end of the day. In short, as long as Journey could be kept off the airwaves for the next few days, we would actually enjoy our, um, journey through the Keys.

Once we got on the road again, the wildlife thing started in earnest. Our first stop was the Wild Bird Sanctuary, just a mile marker down the road. I’d been expecting a wooden-plank walkway through the woods and marshes, and occasional glimpses of egrets in the distance—nothing that I couldn’t see from the lanai of my mother’s house in Palm Coast. But as soon as we pulled into the dusty little parking lot, I realized what the place was, and yelled with joy. This was a WILD BIRD RESCUE AND REHAB CENTER!

O.K.—not everyone would find that terribly exciting. But to me, Nancy Bevilaqua, rescuer of crippled pigeons, crazed bird lady of Hoboken, NJ, and savior of drowning bugs, this was nirvana. Lorenzo likes to tease me that, whereas others get their kicks prowling around porn websites when they get some time alone, I find peace and happiness trading bird stories and advice with my buddies in the Feral Pigeon Rescue Central Yahoo group. Once they realized where we were, Lorenzo and Alessandro groaned (good-natured groans, but groans nevertheless).

We were to meet Laura Quinn, who runs the center, but first we had to pass muster with her husband, who was sitting alone in the one-room structure that serves as kind of a gift shop and wildlife education center (posters explaining how to remove fish-hooks from bird wings and the like). He wore dark glasses, from behind which he looked me up and down as if I’d arrived unannounced at the door of the Oval Office wearing unseasonably bulky clothing. What, he demanded, did I want with Laura?

I was in the middle of explaining what I wanted with Laura when, to my great relief, she walked in. Small in stature and perhaps in her late 60’s, she clearly had more important things to do than show writers around. But she was gracious as she led us through a city of aviaries where red-tailed hawks, amputee pelicans, barred owls (whose eyes looked like the dilated pupils of someone on a permanent acid trip), egrets, baby herons, and—yes—pigeons wait while their broken wings or legs mend, or safely live out their days if their injuries prevent them from ever going back into the wild (unlike some rehabbers, Laura doesn’t euthanize her “unreleasables”, and thus gained immediate admission into my pantheon of personal saints).

Suffice it to say that I was elated by the time we got back in the car to continue on our way. Even Lorenzo was impressed (but no doubt relieved that, back home, my bird rescue fantasies would still need to be tempered by the realities of living in a small apartment in an almost-urban town).

It seemed as if there were opportunities for animal encounters every few mile markers. At Robbie’s Marina in Islamorada we paid $2 for a bucketful of fish to feed to the huge, emerald-green tarpon who hang out around the dock like gluttons at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Alessandro, noting their big, upturned mouths and big, upturned teeth, demurred, but Lorenzo’s communion with the tarpon seemed so complete that he made the mistake of trying to let one of the big guys (I’m talking maybe 4 feet long) take a fish from his hand. The scream he let out upon feeling tarpon teeth against his skin amused Robbie and his friends a great deal (and I may have found it, um, slightly…hysterical).

In Marathon we toured the Dolphin Research Center, where the staff’s enthusiasm and affection for the dolphins verges (understandably) on giddiness, and where any dolphin who comes to live at the Center is guaranteed a home for life. The dolphins repay this solicitousness with leaps, flips, dolphin talk, and excellent shark imitations. They also work with disabled children, the interaction helping to bring about miracles like the movement of a hand that wouldn’t move before.

At Big Pine Key, we didn’t even need to get off the road to see where wildlife stands in the general scheme of things in the Keys. Anyone who couldn’t take a hint from the flashing caution lights along the road, the fences meant to prevent any flustered deer in a hurry from making an ill-advised dash across the road (the concern, presumably, being more for the deer than for the impact on someone’s bumper), and signs proclaiming that SPEED KILLS KEY DEER, could probably use a little mental stimulation therapy from the dolphins.

We arrived in Key West relatively cool, unruffled, and ready to commune with the wildlife on Duval Street, where there seemed to be a strange preoccupation with Lynard Skynard songs This was clearly preferable to Journey, but not exactly what I’d expect in the land of rainbow flags and Hemingway (of course, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find rainbow flags in the land of Hemingway, either). A passing storm that lasted a good 45 minutes drenched us, nearly ruined my frock (OK, it was a tie-died wrap skirt kind of a thing), and had us sloshing through ankle-deep puddles to find a place to eat.

But at lunch the following day the storm might have been a dream. At an outside table at the Doubletree Keys Resort we ate Cuban food served by a Nicaraguan waiter who reminded me of a calmer version of Hank Azaria’s barefoot houseboy character in “The Birdcage” We watched propeller planes take off against a backdrop of blue sky, white clouds that looked as if they’d exploded up from the sea, and palm trees; the scene needed only some swanky 50’s lounge music, martini glasses, and a few women in pearls, beehive hairdos, and fabulous white-rimmed sunglasses.

In the evening we took the Doubletree shuttle bus into town again, and boarded a huge catamaran with what would have been, were we not intrepid seafaring people, an intimidating name—Fury—for a sunset snorkeling cruise. And once again the subject of not messing with the wild things was brought up in no uncertain terms by a beautiful, lithe, and very strong blonde girl in braids (sort of a Heidi as a 20-something) named Anna, with whom Alessandro flirted shamelessly. We were, Anna said, to touch and take nothing from the reef, because it is a living organism. She described, with the help of some of Alessandro’s vivid, vocal imaginings, the various mechanisms with which coral attempts to protect itself (the fire coral really got my son’s brain going; lately he’s been into Superheroes and things that “shoot fire”).

And I, intrepid, seafaring, New England-stock voyager and lover of the ocean, got seasick for the second time in my life (the first time being when I made the mistake of going out on a fishing boat when I was 6 months’ pregnant). While my fellow passengers emptied pitcher after pitcher of the all-you-can-drink (and they could drink a lot—not well, exactly, but a lot) beer, and howled and made sizzling sounds as the setting sun hit the horizon, I had to sit with my eyes closed and my sleeping son sprawled across my lap. Lorenzo graciously took up the slack created by my nausea at the thought of anything liquid.

In the future, perhaps, I won’t have such an attitude toward people who sport those little anti-nausea patches behind their ears on cruises. On the other hand, I have a short memory.

Back on the road the following day, heading north (we never actually saw Mile Marker Zero, which made the whole thing even more Zen, or something), we made the final stop on what had become our wildlife pilgrimage through the Keys. In Marathon, after a long search for the only place in the Keys for which no mile marker hint was offered, we pulled into the parking lot of a little green motel. This, and a nondescript concrete building next door, comprised the Turtle Hospital. Go figure.

The motel office was the Museum of When Bad Things Happen to Good Sea Turtles. There were pictures of turtles in surgery, turtle tumors, and turtles on the mend. Most disturbing was a display of the contents removed from a single turtle’s digestive system, post-mortem: a rubber glove, the sole of a shoe, candy wrappers, fishing line, etc. Here was yet another chance to lecture my son on helping to keep the ocean garbage-free.

If Alessandro had never completely grasped the concept of making choices to protect the creatures of the air, land, and sea from, at least, human-inflicted misery, he got it here, in the Keys. It was a pretty good souvenir for a family roadtrip.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua2008

Alessandro, I've a Feeling We're Not on the East Coast Any More

The name floated up toward the outer layer of my consciousness over a period of weeks, much like a strange phrase or a line from a song that makes its way through a night’s worth of dreams until, just as you wake up, it demands that you acknowledge its existence, and say it out loud.

The name, when it reached my lips, was Carlsbad.

It did take some time for me to focus enough on my son’s near-constant, enraptured monologues about his newest obsession—a collection of robotic-looking creatures called Bionicles, which have magical powers and mythical-sounding names, and which were created courtesy of the Lego company and an imaginative (and no doubt, by now, quite well-off) man named Greg Farshtey—to realize that this place, Carlsbad, was real, and that it was in California, and that it was the hallowed location of Alessandro’s new idea of paradise—Legoland. And that we were, one way or another, going to have to get there. Soon.

I confess to having an addiction of my own as well—making my son happy. It’s just that when something makes him happy, he’s really happy. It’s a beautiful thing to see. And it usually takes very little. Giving him a dollar at the supermarket so that he can buy himself a Matchbox car entitles me to a big hug and a perfectly sincere “Thank you, Mommy!”—my version of a good fix.

Getting out to southern California, of course, was going to cost a little more than a dollar. So, as with any addiction, getting my super-fix was going to take some wheeling, some dealing, a bit of cunning, and even a little sacrifice.

Enter my mother.

Now, I love my mother, and so does Alessandro. But let’s just say that her personality and mine don’t always exactly co-exist in the kind of harmony necessary for a pleasant travel experience. She’s a good, relatively adventurous traveler (although, these days, in terrible shape physically), but our traveling together can pose certain risks to my emotional well-being. Going to California with her, though, would make the whole trip more feasible, economically speaking. And it would actually do my heart some good to see her be made happy by a visit to southern California, which she loves, and by stays at some fabulous resorts in the warm southwestern sun. I did know better than to think that her happiness would be as undiluted and easily elicited as Alessandro’s, but, these days, anything at all would be an improvement.

Long story short: a few delicate negotiations, lucky coincidences, and good deals on airfare later, we had tickets, hotel reservations, and a plan that involved a rental car, stays in San Diego and Palm Springs, and finally, arrival in the Promised Land of Carlsbad, California and a pilgrimage to Legoland.

My hopes for peace were challenged as soon as our plane reached its gate in San Diego, and we realized that Alessandro, as a result of our wandering around Las Vegas airport so much in awe of the fact that we were in Las Vegas that we almost missed our connecting flight, had left his backpack there. The backpack contained his stuffed bunny, whose name is “Bunny,” and who, for the past five years, has helped him sleep wherever we find ourselves sleeping, and two prized Bionicles. I feared the worst. But Alessandro seemed so relieved that I wasn’t angry, and so trusting of my assurances that we would get everything back, that, miraculously, he wasn’t upset. (Privately, I was envisioning turning on CNN in our hotel room to find that Las Vegas airport had been evacuated due to the discovery of an unattended backpack, and that one of those robotic bomb-testers was in the process of blowing it up out on the tarmac, scattering bits of Bunny and Bionicle against a backdrop of dry hills and the Luxor Hotel’s pyramid.)

Disaster averted, we turned our attention to the fact that we were in southern California, where, in spite of the fact that I went to college on the West Coast, I’d never been. On Coronado, where we’d be spending our first two nights, the air was heavy with the sweetness of thousands of vividly colored, mysterious (to me, anyway) flowers.

The Hotel del Coronado is a 115-year-old turreted confection of a place. It’s got a huge, gilded birdcage of an elevator (complete with elevator operators in maroon costumes and those little bellhop caps), and a chandelier designed by L. Frank Baum, who also wrote much of The Wizard of Oz there (I’m certain that the scene in Munchkinland must have been inspired by all of those aforementioned big, weird flowers). “Some Like It Hot” was filmed there. It’s been a hideaway for celebrities and movie stars since the turn of the century, and it even has a good ghost story associated with it.

“Impressive,” remarked my little son-of-a-travel-writer.

With no complaints whatsoever from my mother as she settled into the bed for an afternoon of CNN-watching (this translates as “impressive” on her part as well), we were off to a good start.

Bunny and Bionicles located, undetonated and on their way home from Vegas, the following morning, we set out to explore San Diego. But my mother has what I consider to be a very good quality in a traveler—behind the wheel of a car, she tends to drift in whichever direction her whims take her (she also possesses the less desirable quality of drifting from lane to lane). Instead of going into the city, we found ourselves driving south along wide, empty beaches, compounds of Navy housing (there’s a base on Coronado; that aspect seems a little out of sync with the Oz thing), and strip malls.

“We’re almost at the Mexican border,” said my mother. I hadn’t realized how close we were. The idea of passing in and out of Tijuana in one day had the appeal of a glorious, campy adventure.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I’d envisioned parking the car in the midst of some desert sagebrush and a few armed border patrol guys, and simply walking into Mexico. Maybe I’d pick up a Mexican blanket, some tequila, or a bottle of prescription-strength something (just because I could), but it was not to be. Caught up in a 4-lane current of cars, we were swept through a huge tollbooth-like structure into Tijuana, where getting out of the car was not even an option until we made a u-turn into a half-hour’s worth of traffic crawling back toward the States. Mexican men and women selling churros, ices, portraits of the recently deceased Pope, and gory, gilded portraits of Jesus, made their way among the steaming cars. Alessandro, not nearly as impressed with the idea of visiting another country for fifteen minutes as I was (and not much in a mood to pay attention to my motherly lecture about how lucky we were not to have to make a living by weaving among fuming cars, selling trinkets), fussed about the heat and the seatbelt around his belly. Again, my mother had no complaints.

Things were going exceptionally well.

That night we had dinner at the Del Coronado’s restaurant, Sheerwater. Just as we were getting up from the table, I overheard someone at the table next to ours say “No one drinks Chardonnay anymore.” Having just polished off my third delicious glass, I began to question my own suitability for southern California.

This train of thought continued the following day, as we headed for Palm Springs on another too-fast-for-my-taste (at least when my mother is weaving/driving) highway, passing fields of windmills and, much to my consternation, the Lawrence Welk Resort (as a child, I was subjected to nightly screenings of the Lawrence Welk show in my granparents’ TV room). Southern California, I was thinking, is like a beautiful language whose words I’m familiar with, but whose necessary subtleties I can’t understand. Tijuana, perhaps by virtue of its sheer, reassuring grittiness, seemed more familiar.

As we drove, my mother asked Alessandro if he liked the Del Coronado.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I’m happy we’re leaving.” Huh?

“Because then I can miss it, “ he explained. Boy logic, I thought. It starts early.

We passed some signs for the town of Temecula, and my mother told me that there was a guy there who owed her $2,000 (these strange, mysterious tidbits from her past life often come up when we travel). I suggested that we go get it; it might come in handy at one of the casinos in Palm Springs.

“Nah,” decided my mother.

In Temecula, to my great relief, we turned off the highway and onto a narrow, winding road that runs through the dry hills and parched valleys, blackened skeletons of trees, puritanical clusters of cypress, sudden fields of yellow and purple flowers, and moonscapes of enormous boulders of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains. The air felt wonderfully desert-like.

“There’s a lot of useless land in California,” my mother observed.

At that point we were starving, but Mom was pulling a mom thing, and vetoing the few restaurant possibilities that we passed in search of some indefinable place that would suit her.

“Why do you get to decide where we eat?” I asked, feeling the same helpless annoyance I remembered feeling 30 or 40 years ago.

“Because I’m driving,” she answered, using the maddening logic of a lawyer (which she is) with control issues (which she has). The peace had suddenly become Northern Ireland-fragile.

My mother wove back and forth across the two lanes, staring to the right or left as I sat in the back seat with my arm across Alessandro’s chest in a protective gesture I recollected from when I was a small child riding in the front seat in the unrestrained ‘60’s. We climbed higher up into the hills.

At 4,000 feet my mother pulled into the parking lot of the Cahuilla (pronounced as Elmer Fudd would pronounce “Korea”) Creek Casino. I was dispatched to go inside and find out if they served lunch, and if it was OK to bring Alessandro in.

“Sure, honey,” said the very sweet blond lady with a couple of missing teeth at the front desk of the place. “Just go all the way to the back and to the left.” Having been temporarily blinded by coming in from the desert sun into the dark, I had trouble seeing much beyond the first few rows of slot machines, but I was too hungry to worry about it, and I went outside to get Alessandro and my mother.

Once inside, after we were seated at a nice little table covered with a clean white tablecloth, my mother (who, back home, owns 6 or 7 various pieces of real estate) got up to play the penny slots. I’d been pissed about her pickiness, but now I appreciated it. A Native American-owned casino with a restaurant in the middle of nowhere among desert hills suited me just fine. The food was pretty good, too.

After lunch we drove even further up into the hills. Suddenly Palm Springs lay spread out flat as a piece of paper in the valley below us, and the road turned steeply down, becoming more tortuous and running closer to the edges of various precipices. My mother, anxious to get where we were going, drove like a demon around the switchbacks, refusing to slow down. My arm was rigid across Alessandro’s chest.

Having gotten completely lost as we searchd for the La Quinta resort (in part because everything in Palm Springs seemed to be named “La Quinta”) we were a hot, cranky bunch by the time we finally checked in.

“You’ll feel better after a swim,” one of the bellhops told us. “We have 42 pools to choose from.”

We thought he was kidding, but he was not. In our room on the upper level of a little villa, Mom got back into bed to hang out once again with Wolfe Blitzer. Alessandro and I went out to swim in the closest of the 42 pools. The resort smacked of Old Hollywood Hideaway (which it was; Errol Flynn had slept, presumably not alone, there). Everything was white stucco and Santorini-blue, and flowers, drooping in the afternoon heat, released their scent from every available space around us. One of the brown mountains we’d just traversed loomed protectively between us and the setting sun.

That night, we had one of the best Mexican dinners any of us had ever had at La Quinta’s restaurant (biting into his burrito, Alessandro, could only say “Whoa!”).

I could have stayed there forever.

We were scheduled to tour the desert and hills with an outfit called Red Jeep Tours the following morning. The temperature was already pushing 90 when our guide, a no-nonsense lady with braided long hair named Morgan Levine picked us up at the resort. I was really looking forward to this.

Our first stop was to be the San Andreas Fault. Morgan explained plate tectonics as we drove on the paved road past the uniformly sand-colored buildings of Palm Springs (all built low to the ground in deference to earthquakes). It occurred to me that we were visiting the Fault on Friday the 13th. Well, I’d been hoping for a good adventure.

Morgan turned off the paved road onto a very much unpaved one, and took us to the Fault. I’d kind of been expecting a large crack in the earth, but it was only a patch of land punctuated with oases and unmanicured palm trees. Here and there water from the unseen springs below ran along little ridges. We got out of the jeep and walked around a bit, and then Alessandro fell down. I could feel the vibrations of an impending earthquake erupting from his core. This could get ugly.

But Morgan knew how to deal with earthquakes of all kinds. She loaded us back into the jeep and took us to a real but transplanted mining town tucked into the chalky hills.

“Have you ever panned for gold?” she asked Alessandro. The vibrations stopped cold. He had not, but he was going to now. Sweet but somewhat mercenary child that he is, he panned eagerly alongside Morgan and found five gold nuggets. Another disaster averted.

As we drove back to the resort a couple of hours later, Morgan told us about the Cahuilla tribe (“Cahuilla” translates as “master” or “powerful”), who own 42% of the valley. She rattled off the names of all the resorts in the area sitting on land leased to them by the tribe. The Cahuilla, Morgan said, are not your “usual Indian story.” The don’t need charity; in fact, the tribe donates about $100,000 a month to local charities.

My mother asked Morgan if she was part Native American. Morgan nodded.

“Cahuilla?” my mother asked.

“Honey,” replied Morgan, “if I was, I’d be poolside with a margarita right about now.”

On the evening of Friday the 13th, on the private patio outside of our room at La Quinta, the inevitable blowup happened. I’d known it would come, my mother knew, and even Alessandro, based on past experience, knew. I brought it about by suggesting (gently, I’d thought) at what was apparently the wrong moment that perhaps she wouldn’t be so exhausted all the time if she got some exercise, ate better, and drank some water once in a while. It depresses her that she has so much trouble getting around lately; it depresses me that she lies on the bed for much of every day watching soaps and CNN.

But no, she told me, I was what depressed her. Soon we were both too angry to speak, which was probably fortunate. Alessandro had the good sense to sit inside and watch the Cartoon Network.

Thinking about it a little later, it occurred to me that perhaps she wonders every time she travels now if it will be the last time. Maybe she thinks about the pilgrimage we made with my grandparents to Cape Cod fifteen or so years ago, shortly before my grandmother fell ill and died (followed soon thereafter by her husband of almost 70 years). Personally, regardless of her lousy health, I think that my mother is just too damned feisty to die. Ever. Death, I tell her all the time, would come by to pick her up and then decide that she’d be way too much trouble
.
By the time we were back on the road the following morning, headed toward the fabled land of Carlsbad, CA, it was as if nothing had ever happened. This had been the usual pattern throughout my life. We really had no choice but to get along.

It was early afternoon when we reached the La Costa resort, in Carlsbad. This was no Old Hollywood kind of a place; it was definitely much more a New Age place. Everything was pure white and looked brand-new. There was a quiet Jacuzzi in the pretty courtyard just outside our room. The Deepak Chopra Center was somewhere on the grounds. It was very Southern California. In the Jacuzzi with Alessandro a little while later, I got inspired to Improve Myself (although I wasn’t quite ready for Mr. Chopra’s help).

“Let’s do the Spa Thing,” I said to my mother, who was back in bed with her usual televised company. “We’ll just have juice, and fruit, and salad…”

“OK,” she replied. “We’ll see how long it will last.”

I had my doubts, too.

Alessandro and I headed out to one of the pools, which, at one end, has a sand “beach” that slopes into the water. The place was swarming with families, the children frolicking in the water, the adults having margaritas poolside (Morgan should have been there). I hadn’t expected to find such a comfortable atmosphere for children in such a luxurious, pristine place. It was great.

Looking around from behind my sunglasses, though, I observed immediately that no one was even close to being fat. All of the mothers were gorgeous, or at least very well groomed. Everyone seemed to know each other (the resort, apparently, also serves as a kind of country club for the locals). In the pool, parents were teaching their children how to surf on boogie boards. Once again, I felt as if I’d been dropped into a country in which my grasp of the language and traditions was completely inadequate. I was also feeling decidedly un-gorgeous.

But it was still wonderful to sit by the pool and look out at the green hills around La Costa, and to watch Alessandro doing his usual kid thing:

“What’s your name? Mine is Alessandro. Wanna be friends?” Sometimes it worked, and sometimes the other child just looked at him. Apparently unperturbed by the latter response, he was having a fabulous time on the “beach.” It took a lot of coaxing to get him to come out so that we could go get ready for dinner.

My mother had been right—the Spa Thing didn’t last into the evening. Just before dinner we sat outside on our little patio and had some of the customary 5 p.m. bourbon that my mother brings along on trips.

A little later, over dinner outside at La Costa’s restaurant, we watched hot air balloons drift toward us in the distance (a continuation of the Oz thing), and golf balls flying off in the opposite direction. Straggling back to the spa idea, we all ordered tofu and vegetables.

Then things began to deteriorate again. My mother’s face gradually took on the familiar, mean expression of a petulant little girl, and she began to complain about Alessandro’s behavior (he was actually being quite well behaved, or at least I thought so). She glared at me when I ordered a glass of wine. I knew that this was the result of her being tired, and of being depressed about being tired, but I was determined to ignore it. I talked to Alessandro about the balloons, and the little birds darting around above us.

Southern California had completely iced over by the time we got back to our room and got into bed (the room, fortunately, was a big 2-room suite). Once again, we were both speechless with anger.

But at around 2 in the morning I woke up, still furious—too furious not to say something. I stormed into my mother’s room, where she was still watching TV.

“We will NEVER, EVER travel anywhere with you again!” I growled. I knew that I should have had more self-control.

She just looked at me. “What are you talking about?” she said.

The next morning was the beginning of the Big Day—it was time to go to Legoland. Alessandro got up, brushed his teeth, put on his Bionicle t-shirt, and waited impatiently for us to get ready.

My mother opted out of coming with us, so I was to be alone with my gasket-blowing son. I was looking forward to it—I was about to get my super-fix, and so was he.

Alessandro spent the day building Bionicles, buying Bionicles, riding Bionicle rides, and reciting dialogue from various Bionicle movies word-for-word. He even met the formidable Tahu Nuva, a heavyweight in the Bionicle world.

We did try a few non-Bionicle-related rides. One was a boat that took us past re-created “cities” like Washington, Boston, and New Orleans—all built using millions of Lego pieces. As we passed “Manhattan,” I remarked to Alessandro that the World Trade Center wasn’t there. A man behind us leaned forward and said, “You know, before 9/11, the Twin Towers weren’t considered such a big deal.”

“We’re from New York,” I replied. “We thought they were kind of a big deal.”

That evening, after getting lost for a couple of hours in the maze of roads around Carlsbad, my mother and I were sniping at each other about who should decide where to eat.

“I’m not deciding,” I told her. “Because if you hate it I’ll have to hear about it for the rest of the night.”

“Just pick something,” my mother snapped back.

Alessandro the Sage, in the back seat with his new Bionicles, observed, “It’s crazy. You guys just get mad at each other because you’re both trying to be nice to each other.” That shut us up.

We had two nights left in California (the last of which we spent at the Four Seasons Aviara Resort, where we were lavished in somewhat less New-Agey, but no less fabulous, luxury, and dined like decadent royalty on s’mores made over the resort’s open grill). The peace was interrupted only by the mild, occasional skirmishes that have always been as much a part of our travel experiences together as setting our toothbrushes out next to the sinks in our rooms. We’d managed to get our respective fixes while navigating, once again, the treacherous mountain passes of family relationships, and we were exhausted.

I’d like to plan a trip to Thailand sometime soon. My mother has always wanted to go to Thailand.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

My Night Out in Santo Domingo

Julie knew exactly where she wanted to go; she just didn’t know what it was called or where, precisely, it was. It was, she thought, sort of near the beautiful ruins of the 16th-century Hospital de San Nicolas de Bari (now inhabited by hundreds of very contented-looking pigeons), which we’d visited earlier in the day. Julie, having gathered that the place she was thinking about was the hottest club in Santo Domingo (Carlos, our guide, had told her that, and Carlos was born in Santo Domingo, and could barely walk down the street without dancing a little merengue), was dead-set on getting there as soon as we finished dinner. There was another place called Liquid that we could go to if all else failed (although we didn’t know where that was, either), but Julie had her heart set on the place by the ruined hospital.

For my part, I didn’t really care if we never found the hottest club in Santo Domingo, or, for that matter, any other club (I’m 44, and got most of that stuff out of my system some years ago); I just wanted to see what the Colonial City, once home to such 16th-century luminaries as Hernan Cortes, Ponce de Leon, and Diego Columbus (neighborly competition must have been fierce back then), looked like at night.

We’d had dinner, and a number of bottles of wine, at the brand-new Hilton Santo Domingo’s Sol y Sombra restaurant. Over cocktails beforehand, we’d been introduced to the U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, who’d strolled into the hotel bar for a drink. If she’d thought of it then, Julie probably would have invited him out to the club too—and he was so amiable that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d taken her up on the invitation. (The Hilton seemed to be a magnet for Santo Domingo’s see-and-be-seen crowd; we’d attended the hotel’s opening party the night before, as had the President of the country and his bodyguards, who spoke into their sleeves and who almost ran me and my glass of champagne and my little plate of shrimp over as they escorted the President out in a kind of human riptide.)

Over dinner, Julie was doing her best to convince us all to go downtown with her; I’d done my best to resist until I remembered that I might not have a chance to see the oldest city in the Americas by night again anytime soon. So I went up to my room to brush my hair and tell my Hilton-assigned roommate, a pink Siamese Fighting Fish whom I’d named Hidalgo, that I wouldn’t be getting back in until late. My big, comfy bed, with its starched white duvet and pile of pillows, looked really appealing at that point, but out my window I could see the dark sea and the lights along the Malecon, and I got the familiar feeling of longing that always draws me out into the night in unfamiliar places.

In the hotel lobby I found Julie, Allison, and a man I didn’t know, at the door and raring to go (actually, only Julie was raring). Julie had somehow convinced the guy, who was dressed in khakis, a candy-apple-red shirt, and the big, squarish, ‘80’s-style glasses that serial killers tend to favor, to drive us downtown so that we could find the club. Allison and I exchanged this-seems-like-a-bad-Natalee-Holloway-kind-of-an-idea looks, but Julie was already marching out the hotel doors into the warm Dominican night, a veritable force of nature.

There was an SUV waiting just outside, and we all climbed in. The serial killer guy (who, it turned out, was actually a Canadian utility executive named Tom, who was living in Santo Domingo for business reasons) wasn’t driving. Instead, he had a burly driver who apparently spoke no English—or who perhaps thought it wise to pretend that he didn’t—and who claimed to have no more of a clue where the club was or where the crumbling pigeon hospice might have been than we did. We drove along the Malecon, the black sea to our right, a series of big hotels to our left. It made me think of my first trips to Spain, when I was a teenager having her first taste of nightlife in a foreign country, crowded into the back seat of some Spanish boy’s father’s Volvo with my new international friends, riding through the night toward some nightclub.

Julie, as we drove, made increasingly manic attempts to convey to Tom and his driver the importance of finding the ruined hospital, and hence the fabled club. I tried to help out in lame Spanish—“El hospital viejo, el club esta acerca del hospital viejo.”

The Colonial City at night was no disappointment. Neon lights of green, red, and purple flashed through the windows and doors of 500-year-old buildings. Columbus, de Leon, and Cortes would have had the shock of their lives to see the clubgoers and party animals that roamed their ancient streets, congregating in excited little groups at the entrances to discos and bars.

Suddenly Julie yelped—we’d found the ruined hospital, ghostly as a skull lit by candles in the dark, and even lovelier than it was during the day. Tom (no doubt relieved) told his driver (no doubt sick of the ordeal) to park and let us out in front of the club.

Julie sauntered past a couple of bouncers who seemed in no mood to do any bouncing; we followed like obedient ducklings. If there was a cover charge, Tom must have paid it when we weren’t looking. He seemed to have ascertained the role that Julie had chosen for him for the night.

Suffice it to say that the club looked like a club. I’d hoped that would have been, at least, a merengue place, although my ability to dance merengue was even more sadly inadequate than my ability to stand in one spot and make semi-seductive moves with some correlation to club music (I’d been able to in college, but that had quite a bit more to do with the college lifestyle than with dancing ability, if you get my drift). Tom, a natural in his role, bought us a round of drinks.

And then Julie was gone. We were mildly concerned. She wasn’t at the bar, and she wasn’t in the blue and pulsating room where people were standing in one spot, etc. Then Allison pulled back a beaded curtain across from the bar, and there was Julie, alone in what seemed to be some kind of VIP lounge. She was sitting on a big couch in the corner of the room, looking both regal and utterly oblivious. I pulled the ladylike little cigar that I’d been given earlier in the day in a cigar factory out from my bag, and we all sat down to participate in the VIP fantasy.

But Julie was not content to sit for long; she seemed to have people to meet and plans to make. In a little courtyard behind the club, we watched her swing on a big white swing that hung from an ancient tree, chatter with a preppy-looking Dominican boy (who’d attended prep school in Connecticut), and alternate between engaging Tom in serious conversation and mocking him. Undeterred, Tom (who, I’d ascertained in a quiet moment, was a twice-divorced bachelor with several children to his name) engaged her in a tale of how two of his co-workers had been murdered in some mysterious, nefarious, corporate-mob way.

“He says his car is bullet-proof,” Julie exclaimed to Allison, the Preppy Dominican, and me. “And that his driver is really a bodyguard. We could have been killed tonight!” She seemed to find the whole idea both utterly ridiculous and absolutely delicious. Tom didn’t seem to understand why she might find his story in any way amusing. Having learned that she was a writer, he went on to offer her ten thousand dollars to investigate and write about the murders, but Julie had already turned her attention elsewhere.

Allison and I, amused but not nearly as much as Julie, were beginning to worry about getting stranded in downtown Santo Domingo (Julie was now making plans to go to some party with the Preppy Dominican, who explained to us that there was public transportation in Santo Domingo only in theory). It was becoming clear to me that someone was going to have to make a firm decision to leave now if we were going to avoid finding ourselves coming out of the club onto the streets of the Colonial City at dawn, with only the nonplussed bouncers and the Preppy Dominican to rely on (I’ve never much trusted preppy guys of any nationality—think Robert Chamberlain, think the Dutch son-of-a-judge in Aruba).

“I’m leaving,” I announced, hoping that saying it would somehow make it so.

Fortunately, Tom seemed to have gleaned by then that he wasn’t going to make any headway with Julie while her attentions were so widely dispersed by the goings-on at the club. “I’ll take you back to the hotel,” he said.

So, after somehow convincing Julie that there were many parties to be found elsewhere, we left. The Preppy Dominican had followed us out without our noticing; he came very close to running us over with his father’s very spiffy car in his eagerness to get Julie to accompany him to a big party on the beach. Julie saw a great deal more wisdom in that idea than Allison, Tom, and I did, so Tom (who had sent his driver home for the night, leaving us vulnerable to corporate-mob hits) told her very firmly to get into the SUV, where she could use his cell phone to make further plans with P.D. It took some doing, but she eventually acquiesced.

For a while, the Preppy Dominican followed us through the narrow streets of Santo Domingo while Julie talked to him on Tom’s cell phone, making profanity-laced, sketchy arrangements and yelling orders at the ever-patient Tom. The plans, however, seemed to fall through at some point in the conversation, and Julie was finally content to be driven back to the welcoming Hilton.

We spent some time, and a good deal of Tom’s money, in the hotel casino, playing blackjack with yet another guy from Connecticut and twin sisters with beautiful Taino faces and an intricate understanding of the game. Coached by the sisters, and taking advantage of the remarkably relaxed Dominican casino rules--which seemed to include do-overs--I won quite a few hands. (In my own defense, I did hand my winnings back to financier Tom as I went; I really did feel kind of sorry for the guy, whose imminent disappointment I anticipated.)

The anticipated scene happened just outside the Hilton’s glass elevator, on the floor where our rooms were. Julie cheerily and very firmly wished Tom a good night, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

“I guess I was just the chauffeur,” said Tom, with just a little bit of an edge in his ever-patient voice. But Julie made some vague promises about getting together the following evening, and took off in the direction of my room.

“I know what floor you’re on,” Tom said, and the elevator door closed. It occurred to me that we’d really had no reason to think that Tom wasn’t less of a potential psycho than anyone else. I pointed out to Julie that, thanks to her, he also now knew which room was mine, but this seemed to disturb not her in the least. She wandered back to her own room when the coast was clear.

When I was, at last, alone in my plushy room, with my floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the serene Caribbean, my big, comfy, duvet-covered bed, and my very friendly and accepting Siamese Fighting Fish, I got out of my smoke-scented clothes, brushed my filmy-feeling teeth, and took a couple of Tylenols. It was a ritual I’d performed many times, and in many places, in my life. I fell asleep congratulating myself for seeing the lovely, ghostly Colonial City by night, and for once again getting back from a late night out unscathed.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008