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

Coming Home

I’m back in New York, back on New York time, being transported down the Van Wyck Expressway from Kennedy Airport toward Manhattan in an airport shuttle bus whose Russian driver’s right-off-the-bat rudeness is like a slap that knocks me out of a travel dream and onto a cold sidewalk in the middle of Times Square. He’s messed with the wrong passenger; I’ve just spent 23 hours in economy class from Singapore and, to quote the Rolling Stones, I’m a little bleary, worse for the wear and tear. I’m spending my time on the bus thinking about how to put him in his place when I get off at Port Authority. At the very least, he’s not getting a tip.

There’s a lot of traffic for noontime on a Wednesday, and it looks as if it’s going to be a long ride into town. Gradually my fantasies of revenge give way to the much healthier task of thinking about where I’ve been (the driver, however, is still not getting a tip). Twenty-four hours ago, I was almost exactly on the other side of the world, farther away than I’d ever been from my home and family, in countries where, uncharacteristically, I hadn’t even managed to learn the local words for “please” and “thank you”.

My mother and I spent 11 nights in Asia: four in Singapore, seven on a Star Cruises voyage that took us to Ko Samui and Bangkok in Thailand, and to Sihanoukville, Cambodia. It had been my mother’s dream–and my own--for some time to see Southeast Asia, but her recent poor health (she had triple-bypass surgery a few years ago, and has never fully recovered) has left her with no stamina whatsoever. The heat and humidity hadn’t helped (Singapore is less than 100 miles from the Equator), and we spent a lot of time sitting on benches or steps in unfamiliar surroundings, waiting for her to get her breath back before proceeding on our way to wherever it was we were trying to go.

As I think about Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia now, on the Van Wyck Expressway at noon, with a mind misted over by jet lag, I can’t remember much of anything that seemed strange, or “foreign,”–they were simply far away from my home. Aside from odd moments here and there, I never really felt disoriented, or out of place. This is the case more often than not when I travel, and it makes me wonder if I might be going about things in the wrong way. I go somewhere–Tunisia, Antarctica, Cambodia–where the landscapes and ways of life should, at least temporarily, knock me out of my usual orbit and make me feel like a visitor from another planet. The places may be beautiful, the customs different, the languages intelligible to me either only in part or not at all, but I return home feeling that, in spite of the distances, I haven’t drifted so far away from my own orbit after all, and nothing has really happened.

But gradually, in the first few hours or days of being home, I begin to think about the details of whatever journey I’ve been on, and I’m relieved to find that the feeling of detachment that I’ve been experiencing comes not from having failed to see, to relate, to be taken over by the sense of wonder that’s always been my motivation and my joy in travel, but from thinking about the trip at first as a completed whole–a notch in my belt, an activity that I’ve enjoyed and photographed and scrawled notes about in my journal, and that is now over. Once I start to remember the little fragments that make up the whole, however–the odd conversation, light falling in a certain way in a certain place, or a strange scene glimpsed from a bus window-- I finally begin to feel as if I’ve been somewhere, and done something that has, if only in the smallest way, changed me.

As we pass, at last, through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and into Manhattan, I focus on details of our journey to Asia. It occurs to me that it’s just after midnight in Bangkok, and that some of the children in the orphanage that my mother and I visited might be clutching as they sleep the little stuffed horses that I picked up for them in Singapore. I remember Ultra Man and Spider Man, cleverly disguised as 6-year-old Thai boys whose parents, for whatever reason, are not able to care for them, eating their lunch of rice and vegetables in the orphanage just like mere mortals. And the little girl, left alone and without any stimuli whatsoever when she was a baby so that now there is nothing but a vacant darkness in her beautiful eyes, responding to nothing except, tellingly, my mother’s breasts.

I think about Muong, the soft-spoken Thai driver from the port town of Laem Chabang, who spends most days of the week making the two-and-a-half-hour-long, traffic-clogged drive (which he hates) into and back out of Bangkok, ferrying cruise ship passengers into the city so that they can shop and he can afford to send his 9-year-old son to school. His cell phone rang just as we had almost reached our ship again; it was his wife, asking him to bring some dinner home for “the baby.” He immediately made a u-turn to pick up some chicken from a vendor; he’d waited for us in the suffocating heat of Bangkok all day (and, against all odds, had found the orphanage for my mother and me), but we were going to wait so that his son could have his supper–and thus the other five passengers had a reason not to tip him. I showed him a picture of my own 7-year-old “baby” when we reached the cruise terminal. Holding the picture up to the light, he smiled and nodded approvingly.

At a Buddhist monastery in Sihanoukville, a young monk tried to arrange his robes properly so that I could take his picture, and giggled because they were giving him such trouble. (Here I also encountered a monkey who, like the most practiced of beggars, gently put his padded little hand on my leg and looked with studied innocence into my eyes, and then decided that it might be more satisfying to simply bite the leg.)

I recall how beautiful Singapore looked just before a thunderstorm from the Executive Lounge on the 27th floor of the Singapore Marriott, and that leads me to thoughts of the British family that included a little girl of about ten who was clearly undergoing treatment for cancer. The three of them showed up in the lounge every evening to have something to eat and drink; they kept mostly to themselves, playing cards and telling each other jokes, laughing softly.

On the ship, there was the South African Zulu photographer, who seemed to find it difficult to look into people’s eyes. He said that he wanted to shoot fashion, but his photographs of tribal ceremonies were the most eloquent in his tattered portfolio. There was also the white South African man who had lost his partner of thirty years and his beloved dog within the past year. He waxed nostalgic about his days as a British colonial in Rhodesia, and complained bitterly about what was happening to “his” country. When the photographer found himself short on the funds that he would need to get back to Durbin, though, he gave it to him with no reservations. It worried me when I found him one morning on deck, staring at the heaving turquoise water below.

And I think about my mother, gasping for breath in the heat of day, telling me stories about my father over cool drinks at Singapore’s Fullerton Hotel at night. I remember how, unable to climb the hill up to the monastery in Sihanoukville, she spent her time talking to two little Cambodian boys who counted in English and recited the alphabet for her while she waited for me to come back down the hill. That, she said, was enough to make her happy.
It occurs to me that this trip has been like listening to a symphony of little prayers (including my own) whispered in various tongues; it’s a music that I will play over and over in my mind for a long time. It will, no doubt, have an effect on how I conduct my life. Perhaps another reason for my lack of disorientation when I travel is that, on the ground among people simply living their lives in the world, nothing really is that foreign, and everything is an opportunity add some depth to one’s own life.

The surly Russian bus driver’s cell phone rings as we travel west on 42nd Street. From what I can tell, the person on the other end is his doctor, apparently asking him with some urgency to come in for an appointment. Politely, in a soft voice, the driver tells him that he is working too much, that he has no time, that perhaps he can try to come in next week.

He drops me off at Port Authority. I tip him. “Thank you,” he says, with a gentle little smile. I collect my bags and go home to see my family.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

My 9/11 Weekend in Lower Manhattan

(I wrote this back in September--obviously--of 2004.)

The stairs really threw me off. Just one flight of gray, concrete stairs, still (almost three years later) covered with dust and chunks of concrete, leading nowhere, on the north side of the now-phantom building that I used to go out of my way to pass through on my way to work. People were walking by without even glancing at the crater; clearly they’d been passing it every day for 2 1/2 years, and it had become as much a part of the usual scenery as the Towers had been for me 5 or 10 years earlier.

But, aside from a quick trip over by ferry from New Jersey (where I now live) to the World Financial Center one cold March day a couple of years ago, when I spent most of my time standing near the river and listening to glass from my beloved Winter Garden being broken by workers, I hadn’t seen the site. So I stood gawking at the truncated stairway, trying to replace the emptiness around it with mental images of what had been there before. To the left of them, it seemed, there would have been a Sbarro’s; to the right and back a bit, the bakery where I used to buy walnut rolls for breakfast. Around the corner, a Gap, a bookstore…But it had been so long, and I couldn’t be sure of anything.

So, having made, pretty much by accident after a dinner in Chinatown, my first foray back into the disorienting landscape of post-9/11 lower Manhattan, I decided that it was time to reclaim and rediscover what had been, at one time, one of my favorite parts of the city.

Several weeks later I returned, this time by the PATH train that runs from Hoboken to what is still called the World Trade Center station. My son, who as a 3-year-old had sat impatiently in his stroller while I watched the flaming towers from a hill across the Hudson, was with me (his impatience, as it turned out, was fortuitous, because it made me take him back home just before the first tower fell, sparing both of us from seeing it firsthand). I hadn’t known that, upon leaving the tunnel, the train passes right through the crater, taking, I suppose, the route it always has.

We were meeting my husband at the A & M Roadhouse, a restaurant just a couple of blocks north of the site. The bar of the place is, apparently, an after-work hangout for people working on the reconstruction of the area; many of the patrons still had their hardhats on. I don’t think that I was imagining the mistrust with which they regarded my husband’s monopod and big black camera bag as we walked through.

After dinner, I went outside to have a cigarette on a bench that had been placed there for the benefit of those whose smoking habits have not yet been altered by Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on smoking in bars. I started talking to a man who was having his smoke standing. I asked him if he worked at the Roadhouse; somehow he looked as if he belonged there.

“No, not me, he answered, and pointed vaguely west. “I work over there.”

I had to ask. “Were you here on 9/11?”

“Yeah, I was here. Wouldn’t want to live through that again.”

Next door to the Roadhousewas the New York Dolls gentlemen’s club. Pretty young women were getting out of cars in front, and going inside. Others were on their way out.

“Changing of the guard,” my smoking buddy remarked. “How are you doing?” he asked one of the girls.

“Good! Will we see you later?”

“Uh-huh!” Once the girl had passed, he muttered, “Not in this lifetime.”
******

It wasn’t my intention to be staying at a hotel just next to the World Financial Center on the third anniversary of 9/11; it just kind of worked out that way because I wanted to be in town to research an article I was writing (part of my efforts to rediscover lower Manhattan for myself), and that weekend was open. I wasn’t unaware that it might be, as I put it to my friends just before going, “a little strange” to be downtown on that particular date, but otherwise I didn’t give it much thought.

Once again I made the trip over by ferry with my husband and my son. The view from the water, this time, seemed much changed. It was, first of all, a warm late-summer afternoon rather than a gray March one. The promenade along the river was congested with bikers, roller bladers, runners, and families out walking, and there were new buildings all around (I couldn’t remember exactly which buildings were there before, and which were new, but there were definitely more). Yachts and sailboats bobbed on the water in the marina in front of the World Financial Center, and the shattered glass of the Winter Garden had been replaced.

That evening we went to the lounge where the hotel’s very generous and very long cocktail hour is held nightly. The scene was strange and incongruous; music by the Cure (not just one song, but an entire album of very melancholy, very 80’s new wave pop) was being played, while at the tables nicely dressed, midwestern-looking women, some with children, sat drinking margaritas and eating popcorn and tortilla chips. It finally occurred to me that all of the people in the bar might be “the families”, in town for the memorial service that would be held the following day at Ground Zero, a block away. All except us, anyway.

There were also big tables occupied by big groups of big men. At one, a man (whom I had thought to be a hotel security guard because of the way he was dressed) stood passing bottles of beer between the bar and the group sitting there. It seemed a strange thing for a security guard to be doing, and I pointed him out to my husband.

“He’s not a security guard,” my husband said. “He’s a fireman.” (I never claimed to be the swiftest travel writer in the world.) I finally began to notice that there were firemen everywhere. New York firemen were talking shop with British firemen, Scottish firemen were having drinks with Australian firemen, and Italian firemen, for the most part, were keeping to themselves. We would have been well covered had someone dropped off to sleep in his room without first extinguishing his cigarette.

******

I have no gripping 9/11 stories to tell, and no one I knew died on that day. I try not to give in to a tendency toward melodrama to which I have no right. September 11th, 2001, was, for me, simply surreal, and the weeks, months, and years thereafter became more so. I have nothing to cry about unless it is out of sympathy for those who died, and those who lost the people they loved, and a new, daily awareness that next time I might not be so lucky.

The day after we arrived at the hotel was September 11th. The weather had the same September sparkle that had made the day that much stranger three years earlier. Inside the hotel, over breakfast, we could hear the reading of the names of the victims from Ground Zero on TV. Outside, the names bounced from loudspeakers out around among the flag-draped walls of nearby buildings. If I didn’t know what day it was, I might have thought that there was a well-publicized street fair going on.

That night the cocktail hour lasted even longer, and the hotel bar was even more crowded than it had been the night before. The atmosphere was like that of the tail-end of a wedding reception; the people around us looked as if they had been, at least temporarily, released from something.

Outside, the twin beams of blue light created as a memorial to the Towers blazed up from a lot just next the hotel. Children played in a little park at the base, while adults stood staring up at the sky. Toward the tops of the beams there were what looked liked hundreds of tiny, blazing stars darting in and out of the light. No one, even the New York City cops watching the crowd, could say for sure what they were.

******

The following morning, my husband and son left early. I was planning to stay behind until checkout time, go to the fitness center, take a bath, enjoy a Sunday morning alone in a nice hotel.

But about fifteen minutes after they’d left, there was a knock on the door. It was my husband, on whose finger was perched a tiny green bird. Behind him was my son, breathless with excitement.

“Look, Mommy!” We found another birdy for you to take care of.” (I’m always taking in sick and injured birds.)

My husband told me that they had found the bird just outside. He’d been sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, apparently too sick or too dazed to move. When my husband put his finger under the bird’s breast, he stepped right on and stayed—through the hotel lobby, on the elevator, down the hall, and into our room.

I took him into my hand to try to warm him. I’d never seen another bird like him. His bright eyes kept closing, and I told my son that there was a good chance that he wouldn’t live. It occurred to me that the darting stars in the lights the night before might have been birds disoriented by the heat and brightness, and that this one, in his confusion, had flown into the wall of a building sometime in the night.

We took him with us as we headed for the ferry that would take us home. I didn’t have much hope that he would make it that far. But as we walked under the trees near the promenade, he began to try to flap his wings. He looked up; he was listening to the calls of the birds in the branches above us. Then he looked directly into my eyes.

“See what happens if you open your hand,” my husband said. I was afraid that he might have just enough strength to fly a bit and then land in the river, but he was really moving now. I opened my hand, and he took off for the trees, which were filled with birds just like him.

For someone with a tendency toward melodrama, not to mention a writer’s addiction to symbolism, there could have been no better way to end the weekend.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

More Photos

Leyden, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Slainte, John Byrne

John Byrne, the most erudite tour bus driver I’ve ever met (one of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, in fact), is telling us about being in his mother’s kitchen as a child, watching her make the Christmas pudding. At first, I barely notice that he’s talking. We’re at a big table full of tired, hungry people at a restaurant called Beatrice Kennedy, in Belfast; we’ve spent most of the day driving (courtesy of John) up from Dublin, and people are making toasts, ordering food, and playing with the Christmas toys that we all received when we came in. A good quantity of wine has already been put in its place. We’re loud, and John (who’s come in a bit late after finding a place to park the bus) speaks quietly, deliberately, with no great desire to call attention to himself.

But eventually I tune in. The tale is nostalgic and meandering—a child’s Christmas in Ireland. I’m still missing bits and pieces of what he’s saying, but a picture is forming in my mind: John as a little boy in tweed britches (his imaginary apparel no doubt a product of the influence of Irish Spring commercials I watched in my own youth); a big, bright kitchen with a window opening onto a green field (same influence); his mother in a dress and apron, setting the pudding out to cool, gently chiding her son for his impatience. John recites the ingredients of the pudding; they sound as warm, sweet, and full of Christmas as sugarplums. I tease him a little with a line of Tiny Tim’s from “A Christmas Carol”—“Come hear the pudding singing in the copper, Peter!”—but I actually find the tale enchanting. John is a grown man, sturdy and serious, with a face that no one would mistake as being anything but Irish. Yet he describes the making of the pudding with such care, and in such detail, and with such affection for both his mother and the tradition, that I find myself thinking that I hope my own son will speak of me and our Christmases together with such undiluted fondness when he’s grown.

It’s only my second day in Ireland, and John has been weaving himself in and out of my consciousness since he corralled our punchy, sleep- and shower-deprived group into a bus at Dublin Airport, just before dawn, and drove us to our hotel. Inside the airport, I’d walked right by him, even though he was standing in full sight, holding a sign identifying himself as our driver. He’d said nothing, and instead waited for me to wake up, turn around, and find him. “Walked right by me, did you?” he’d said, with a little smile that indicated that he’d watched this scene play out many times in the past while waiting for the various groups of dazed Americans that he’d been hired to shepherd around Ireland.

It was still dark as we drove into the city, and almost no one was in the streets except for a few lone souls heading out to work, or back home. Even at that hour, John was talking, pointing out streets and buildings, but I was too tired to listen. I’d do that later. The only time I really paid attention was when John mentioned the G.P.O.—the post office building where, in 1916, Padraig Pearse, James Connoly, and various other ill-fated comrades staged the sadly miscalculated Easter Rising in 1916. I’d been reading about that, so as to have a clue.
******

The morning after we arrive in Dublin, we are rested, caffeine-enhanced, and relatively clean and presentable. We’re on our way up to Belfast. I’m eager to get there; I’ve been fascinated (but ill informed, as it turns out) by Northern Ireland since I was a child. As we drive, a voice from the front of the bus is talking about everything from Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz’s role in the Easter Rising, to a statue of James Connoly that we pass, to the head of Saint Oliver Plunkett, which is preserved and on display (for those with strong stomachs) in a church in the town of Drogheda. Sitting toward the back of a bus, I’m assuming that the non-stop, astonishingly detailed monologue is being given by a tour guide who must have boarded the bus when I wasn’t looking. It’s hard, at times, to separate the speaker’s words from his accent, but I envy the effortlessness with which his narrative moves through centuries of Irish history—the recounting of battle strategies and the ways in which the British have oppressed their Irish subjects, the relating of anecdotes that give life to historical facts, the thoughtful answers to our questions. It’s something that I would never be able to do.

It isn’t until we’ve crossed the invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and stop to pick up a tour guide that I realize that there has not been one on the bus since we left Dublin.

“Was that John?” I ask one of my fellow travelers.

It was.

Like the sound of his voice in the predawn hours in Dublin, and through the laughter, clinking glasses, and competing voices at dinner at Beatrice Kennedy, John’s presence verges on the subliminal; he arrives almost unnoticed in any given scene, and then disappears again. None of us knows a thing about him, other than that he has intelligent answers for any question we can come up with about Ireland, that he can tell a funny story, that he seems to have a passion for acquiring and imparting knowledge, that he doesn’t get us killed or lost on the highways or the narrow country roads, and that his mother used to make a fine Christmas pudding.

After dinner that first night in Belfast, our group decides to do research on the various pubs and clubs around the city. In order to make certain that our research is thorough, and our information accurate, we find it necessary to drink a great deal of beer and port, and to stay out until the early morning hours. Our final stop is at a brand-new club, about which I can say very little now other than that it was very loud, and very yellow, and that I met a very nice Irish couple who clued me in to what the “O.C.” in the American TV show of the same name stands for, and who told us that they could tell we were liberals just by the fact that we had passports, and used them.

At some point I become, once again, aware of John’s presence. It’s clear that he would feel much more at home (as I would) in a pub, but he looks content enough sitting at one of the tables, watching the crowd, nursing a drink.

Our research complete, we walk back toward our hotel, among many other researchers, in a fine mist of rain. Halfway there, I stop.

“Where’s John?” I ask. No one had thought to tell him that we were leaving the club.

Feeling very guilty (and very much as if I’d participated in a pub-crawl the night before, rather than doing important research), I apologize profusely to John as we board the bus the next morning. He seems unfazed.

“Did you think that I’d be crying, ‘boo hoo hoo—they’ve left me?’” he asks.

No, I suppose not.

Later that day, John shows up at St. George’s Market (kind of an indoor farmers’ market), where I’m Christmas shopping with another woman from our group; it’s a good thing, because our ability to come to any sensible conclusion about how much money the piles of pounds and pence in our hands actually amount to is minimal, and he tells us (not much, but more than we’d thought). He shows us the cockles and mussels at the seafood stand, and even goes so far as to sing a few bars of “Molly Malone.” I tell him that it upsets me to look at the live shellfish, waving their claws in vain.

“You’re not one of those tree-huggers, are you?” he asks, smiling. I confess that I am. Serves me right for quoting Tiny Tim at dinner.

On the way back to Dublin, John talks about the history of Belfast’s Troubles. I make my way up from my accustomed seat at the back of the bus (I’ve been hanging out with the bad kids) to the one just behind him; the Troubles, for some reason, is a subject that I can’t seem to hear enough about. We’ve had other tour guides on this trip, and they’ve explained things quite thoroughly and well, but John is telling us about Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strikes of the “H-block Martyrs.” He describes what happened with the same slow precision that he used to tell us about the preparation of the pudding. Twenty-three years after the hunger strikes, I finally understand why they happened. It’s as satisfying as clicking the last piece of a tricky puzzle into place.

******

As John helps us load our bags onto the bus on our final morning in Ireland, I return the copy of the archaeological magazine that he’d handed to me a couple of nights earlier, with instructions to read a particular article (he’s been handing out books and scholarly magazines to all of us at various points during the trip; if we don’t get around to reading them he has no problem describing their contents and explaining their relevance). He points out the pockmarks on the otherwise pristine building we’re standing in front of; they were made by British bullets during the Easter Rising, while Constance Gore-Booth Markewicz and her comrades held their ground inside (during the course of the trip, I’ve noticed that John, and many of the other Irish people that I meet, gossip about the country’s historical figures and writers as if they are contemporaries). The pockmarks are not something that I would not have noticed on my own, and it’s a shock to see such tangible evidence of what I’d only read about, casually pointed out, in the bright early-morning light and only a few feet away.

At the airport, John tells us that he’ll come inside to say goodbye to everyone as soon as he finds a place to park the bus. Once we get inside, however, it’s obvious that he will never be able to find us among the aisles of ticket desks. He’s gone again. I imagine that he’ll get rid of the bus, go home, fix himself something to eat, and sit down to catch up on his reading.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Teach Your Children

Palm Coast, FL, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

(This was originally published in Big Apple Parent, and was subsequently reprinted in ASPCA Animal Watch in November, ‘04. It's not a travel story, but as Editor-in-Chief here I get to make the editorial decisions. This is fun.)


The sky over Meschutt Beach is overcast, and the beach is empty except for three or four families and a lot of seagulls. At the water’s edge, a small group of adults and children gather. They are looking down at something in the sand, and I hear someone say something about a jellyfish. I get a sick feeling in my stomach; I know what’s coming next. A boy of about twelve reaches down and picks up a rock, and I turn away as he raises his arm. I don’t hear the sound of the rock hitting the jellyfish, but I hear the approving, mock-disgusted “Ohhh’s” uttered by the adults as the creature is crushed. I’m glad, at least, that my son is busy shoveling sand into his bucket, and isn’t aware of what happened.

A few minutes later, a man and his son walk up the beach toward where we’re sitting. The boy, who is about nine, is throwing rocks at a pair of young seagulls swimming together just offshore. His father is coaching him with regard to his aim, which is getting increasingly accurate. “Don’t throw rocks at birds!,” I blurt out, disgusted. The father turns toward me, angrily, but doesn’t say anything. He and his son continue on up the beach.

I’ve been told that I’m too sensitive about such things (personally, I don’t consider this to be a problem), and that I should keep my mouth shut because it will get me into trouble one day. Yet what I’m about to write has little to do with my own feelings of disgust and sorrow when I see something needlessly hurt or killed, or my personal beliefs about how far up on the evolutionary ladder a creature needs to be in order for it to be considered sentient enough to be spared being hit with a rock. But in my lifetime I’ve seen and heard about too many of these parent-condoned random acts of cruelty (in “good neighborhoods”, with “educated” parents) to be able to console myself that they are committed only by the occasional miscreant. For example:

*My cousins used to amuse themselves behind their nice, suburban-Connecticut home by putting firecrackers into frogs’ mouths and blowing them up. Their parents were fully aware of what they were doing.

*In the Hamptons, a father fished while his daughter passed the time stomping on the (still-living) fish he’d already caught.

*Somewhere else on Long Island, a couple of boys found an injured red-tailed hawk. They tied it to the back of a bike and dragged it around for a while, then lit it on fire. The bird had to be euthanized. (In this case, I don’t know where the boys’ parents were, but it’s hard to hide a beautiful bird with a 6-foot wingspan in a suburban neighborhood).

*In Florida, a toad made its way across a grocery store parking lot. A teenager, on break from his job inside the store, grabbed a broom and slammed it down on the toad, then went back to hanging out with his friends. (They laughed about it; I cried all the way home, and later called the manager to complain.)

*Also in Florida, at a zoo at which children were allowed to interact with some tortoises in an outdoor area, several of the children took advantage of the opportunity to kick the tortoises in the head. Neither their parents nor the zoo’s staff said a word about it.

*As a child in Connecticut, I was playing with a friend in the back yard. We caught a moth with my new butterfly net, and one of us (I swear that I don’t remember which one of us actually did it; such a convenient lapse in memory can only mean that it was me) tore its wings off.

I must have been about five when we caught and killed the moth. My friend, holding the wingless creature, remarked that it was dead. “Good,” I said. At that point my mother, who was nearby, said something which shaped my feelings about cruelty to living creatures for the rest of my life. “Don’t say that it’s ‘good’,” she told us. “It’s not good when something dies.” She didn’t yell, and she didn’t punish me. But I never did anything like that again. (I only wish that she had stopped us before we killed the moth.)

In raising my own son, I’ve made it a priority to teach him that it’s never (except in self-defense, when all else fails) O.K. to hurt or kill a living thing, whether it’s a worm, a bug, a bird, a dog, or another person. I rescue injured birds, and he helps me to care for them. He’s never intentionally stepped on an anthill, or (unlike his mother at the same age) pulled the wings off of a bug. He wouldn’t dream at throwing a rock at an animal, whether it was a jellyfish or a horse. When he sees something that has been hurt, he wants to help.

What’s most remarkable, though, is that Alessandro’s respect and concern for all living things has extended into his relations with other children. At the playground, and in school, he has a reputation for being kind and nonviolent (yet never passive). I do believe that he was born with a gentle disposition, but I’m also quite certain that his being taught compassion and empathy from the beginning of his life has shaped his personality.

Yes, I am self-righteous. I’m proud of my son, and I’m horrified when I see parents stand by and watch, or even express approval, as their children stomp on, pull at, chase, and throw stones at animals. I’ve come to believe—to my great sorrow--that human beings are naturally inclined to want to inflict harm on creatures more vulnerable than themselves . But parents have a responsibility to curb and correct this instinct just as much as they do to toilet-train their children (it’s often mentioned that cruelty to animals in childhood is a predictor of violence in adulthood). Because, regardless of how you feel about jellyfish or insects or frogs, it matters. Cruelty and compassion are the same in that, if they’re nurtured, they know no bounds.

It’s often noted that cruelty to animals is a predictor of violence in adulthood. Serial killers from the Boston Strangler to Jeffrey Dahmer had histories of torturing and killing animals. The transition from killing animals to killing people is, apparently, fairly effortless for such people. Yet, depraved as these murderers were, they were human, and at one time they were children.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Depressed at Disney World

I was at Disney World, and I was depressed. I wasn’t depressed because I was at Disney; the two phenomena just happened to dovetail unexpectedly, like a pair of unusual weather systems colliding by chance, creating the conditions for a possible worst-case scenario, a perfect storm. I don’t need to do into detail as to the reasons for my depression here, but suffice it to say that, in a nutshell, working on a book about someone I loved who died 16 years ago has put into play the grieving process that I never quite allowed myself the first time around.

When, a couple of months ago, I originally made plans to come here, to this Small World, and to stay at the most luxurious of its resorts–the Swan and Dolphin–I had no idea that any of this would happen. I looked at the mini-trip (no pun intended) as something of a lark–three nights without my husband or children, as a grown-up on her own in the Land of Mickey. But, as the dates for the trip grew nearer, and I found myself immersed so deeply in grief that I didn’t know how I’d get out of it, the lark turned into a looming nightmare. In my state, I was afraid, a single encounter with a Character, or just a few bars of “It’s a Small World”, could send me right over the edge. The thought of it was almost as terrifying as the prospect of a ride through the vertiginous blackness of Space Mountain.

To make matters more surreal, I would be in Orlando less than three weeks before Christmas, ordinarily a holiday for which I wait every year almost as eagerly as I did when I was a child, but whose sparkling magic this year had not even begun to insinuate itself into my psyche. Time was quickly running out on my prospects for Christmas spirit, and I had serious doubts that the makers of magic at Disney would be able to help, no matter how hard they tried. In fact, it seemed, the more vigorous the attempts to inject me with holiday cheer, the smaller the chances of success would be.

(Just to be clear–I’m not usually such an enormous bummer; I’m often cheerful to the point of obnoxiousness, particularly around Christmas, theme parks, and luxury hotels. This just wasn’t my year.)

There was, however, one thing that I was looking forward to with the maniacal single-mindedness of a child: the Space Shuttle was set for a night launch on the night of my arrival. I am something of a Space Freak, and seeing the launch from such a close distance, against the backdrop of a dark, clear Florida sky, would be my idea of witnessing magic. I did, however, know that NASA could not be trusted not to let pesky little things like low-lying clouds, rain, or strong winds get in the way of my launch. Given my emotional state, though, I figured that they might be somewhat more flexible than usual. They’d have to be; the forecast for that night called for low-lying clouds, rain, and strong winds.

My last trip to Disney World had been about five years ago, when my son was three. We were staying at one of Disney’s less-expensive, less-fabulous hotels. I remember very little about that trip, but I have a clear image in my head of sailing past the Swan and Dolphin in one of the water taxis, the three of us looking wistfully at its whimsical but elegant Michael Graves architecture like immigrants on the deck of a ship, gazing at the promised land of Ellis Island. I promised myself that, if we ever returned to Disney, we’d stay there.

Pulling up to the Dolphin’s front door on the day I arrived, I did whatever last-minute girding-myself-against-the-onslaught-of-Disney-ness that I was about to encounter. Inside, I walked toward the lobby under a ceiling painted sky-blue and sparkling with little stars of light. Nice touch for the heavens-obsessed. Just ahead was the biggest, most festive-looking Christmas tree (not real, but none the worse for it) I’d ever seen; I was nonplussed, but appreciative in a detached sort of a way. I also became cautiously aware that there was not a Character to be seen, and that the Christmas music played quietly in the lobby did not even remotely resemble the dreaded “It’s a Small World.” The place, with the exception of the tree, was downright understated, and just plain pretty. So far, so good.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my Heavenly Bed, checking the weather forecast every so often, glad to have the time alone to work on processing whatever it was I was trying to process. The odds for a shuttle launch were about 40% for most of the day, but the weather outside looked pretty good to me, so I saw no reason for NASA to see things differently.

NASA saw things differently. After dinner, still hopeful, I boarded the FantaSea (a very much-more-upscale version of the African Queen, with a fully stocked bar and a delightful and mercifully laid-back crew) with a few other people, at a little landing just outside the Swan and Dolphin. Eating chocolates and drinking wine, we sailed slowly east toward my destiny with space history, and came to rest under a low bridge. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, and on the pathways along it; if nothing else, the nightly Disney fireworks display would be happening shortly. But the time for the launch came and went.

The fireworks, however, were absolutely dazzling. I remember occasionally turning away to look at their reflections on the surface of the water beneath us, and feeling the increasingly familiar heaviness in my chest as I thought of my friend, but I wasn’t so lost that the beauty of the lights in the sky didn’t affect me, as fireworks always had since I was a child.

I did have a secondary goal for my trip to Disney World–to go on the Mission: Space ride at Epcot. Doing it alone, as a sad, 45-year-old woman without the excuse of having children to entertain, would, at least, amuse my fellow standers-in-line. Fortunately, my frame of mind did not incline me to worry too much about what others thought, so on my second Disney day I boarded a water taxi to Epcot. The boat wasn’t crowded, so I had the opportunity to focus my attention on a young man dressed completely in black sprawled across one of the benches, scribbling something into a notebook, and occasionally glancing at me. He wore the type of black sunglasses favored by the most punk of punk rockers in the 1980's, and he was carrying a very large black bag that did not seem to be suited to carrying stuffed Mickeys, or any other type of Disney paraphernalia. I’m really not the type of person to be perturbed by strange-looking people dressed in black and carrying bulky bags for no apparent reason, but he just seemed so utterly out of place among the families with their strollers and mouse ears that I must admit to being relieved to see that everyone was subject to a bag search that put the TSA’s methods to shame before entering the park.

The other thing that caught my attention, and made me thoughtful for the first time in a while about anything other than my friend, was that so many families were there with their obviously very sick children; I tried to keep from thinking about the likelihood that these were people fulfilling a last wish—a childlike, and seemingly so simple, wish to come to Disney World and allow the magic to happen, and not let it be diluted by cynicism or thoughts of the future or the past. And I noticed that these people looked happier than anyone else in the whole place, wheeling or being wheeled in their wheelchairs, laughing with excitement, simply happy to fulfill a wish. I couldn’t miss the obvious fact that, in their company, my own resistance to magic (except, so far, for that of the fireworks the night before) seemed churlish. Even if I couldn’t feel it in my present state, I sincerely hoped that the magic worked miracles on all of them.

I had no idea where to find Mission: Space, but I knew that it was my destiny, and that I would get to it one way or another. Passing through country after country in the World Showcase area, I had to smile at bits of conversation I heard as I passed my fellow world-travelers–things like, “We’ll try to meet you in England, but we might end up in China or Norway.”

It was Christmas in England, Ireland, France, Canada, and the other countries I passed through. There was Christmas music, poinsettias blooming red and green, a story-telling Santa who looked as if his off-season occupation might be woodcutting in the Yukon Territory, and, of course, a lot of gifts available for purchase. I still wasn’t feeling Christmas, but it wasn’t as if they weren’t giving it their best shot.

By cleverly keeping that geodesic dome thing in my sights—making it my own personal Star of Bethlehem for the time being—I eventually found myself at the entrance to Mission: Space. Before going in, you’re asked to choose between the More Intense and Less Intense versions of the ride. Well, if I was going to come all this way, having been let down by NASA the night before, and make a damn fool of myself in front of all these people around me, then I certainly wasn’t going to wimp out now. I told them I’d take it straight up.

It was a mercifully slow day at Disney; the lines weren’t bad at all, and I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t the only adult in line riding solo. There were mechanical voices (with British accents, of course) mingling with the real ones in the dark halls where we all waited for our orders, pleading with the hardcores in the More Intense line to be sure that we could take it, or change lines before it was too late. I started to feel a little uneasy, until the face of Gary Sinise appeared on a monitor above me. Gary, it turned out, would be guiding me and my assigned team through our space mission. Aside from the friend about whom I was grieving, Gary was only second in line to George Clooney as my perfect Mission Control fantasy guide.

Standing on little circles drawn on the floor with my three other crewmates, I waited at attention until Gary was ready to give us our assignments. I was, of course, appointed Commander; even in my sadness, it must have been obvious to Gary right off the bat that I was Right Stuff material. My engineer was another lone adult woman, who looked even more depressed than I felt; I wasn’t so sure that she could be trusted to perform her assigned duties of putting us into hypersleep, or extending the wings, at the critical moments. My other two crew members were an emaciated, tall guy with very long hair, and his wife. I looked at them and tried to catch their eyes, just to remind them who was in charge, but they seemed oblivious to me and my superior rank.

I won’t give away the details of the actual mission, except to say that my engineer put us all in danger by not, as I’d predicted, obeying the orders that had come down from the top (Gary), and that (unlike my remarkably dour crew, who were in all likelihood not even mourning anyone) I giggled helplessly throughout the ride, pushing the necessary buttons at the proper times, so as to ensure the success of our mission. Clearly, Gary will see to it that I’m on NASA’s short list for upcoming flights.

But then I got outside again, and walked back through most of Europe to the dock for the water taxi, and the heaviness came back again, as if my heart itself had taken on water and started to sink.

The Disney people had their work cut out for them. I returned to the Swan and Dolphin and the refuge of my Heavenly Bed until it was time to go to dinner at the hotel’s Japanese restaurant, Kimonos, where I tried to imagine myself doing one of the moodier numbers on the karaoke menu (which consisted almost entirely of songs much better left to the professionals, or Bill Murray, than to moody writers) later on. The image wasn’t pretty, and my being sad was no reason to ruin my fellow guests’ evenings by trying to sing, say, a Joni Mitchell song. It was back to the Heavenly Bed for me; I was quite content to have a glass of wine and watch the heavenly fireworks from my window.

Even at my best, I’m not much of a spa person; I’m just not very good at relaxing, and allowing a stranger to attempt to relax me further, particularly when I have no clothes on. On the other hand, I have had one or two spa experiences in my life that temporarily put me into an orbit closer to heaven. Besides, any astronaut who had completed a tricky mission as well as I had deserved at least a chance to wind down, be pampered, and, ideally, experience bliss. I had an appointment at the Swan and Dolphin’s Mandara Spa for a massage and something called a Lime and Ginger Salt Glow (appealing because it sounded a little like an exotic cocktail) the day after the mission, and I kept it, although I knew full well that there was a chance that I would start to cry with my face down in the face hole on the massage table. At least no one would see.

As it happened, every one of my allotted 80 minutes took me a little closer to being the glowy, wobbly, and damn-near-happy thing I was when it was time to sail into the spa’s Meditation Room, where other glowy, wobbly beings sat quiet and limp in their robes and slippers, sipping tea. I got myself a cup of green tea, sat down on a lounge chair in the sun, pulled a throw over my legs, and seriously reconsidered my bad attitude toward the whole spa thing. But it didn’t take long for my thoughts to settle back around the space in my head in which I keep my memories of my friend. Thinking about him there, watching the sunlight shifting on my soft throw and sparkle on the water of the lake just outside, my body relaxed in a way it hadn’t been in quite a while (since I started writing my book, anyway), I had a few minutes to remember him in a different way, without the heaviness in my chest and stomach, without the grief. I’m not saying that I recommend that anyone in mourning go running off to a spa; I was just lucky enough to have been put skillfully into that state of mind, in that pretty, peaceful place in the sun, for those few minutes. It was hard to get myself to leave.

Once I did, I still had the sadness in me, but it seemed lighter. It wouldn’t stay that way; I knew that I still had some serious grieving ahead of me, but the sun was out, and the shuttle launch had been rescheduled for that night, and it was finally warm enough outside to have my lunch at the hotel’s Cabana Bar and Grill, in the sun.

It was, it seemed, my lucky day at Disney World. My veggie wrap and glass of Chardonnay were served to me by Oscar, who was probably the sweetest, most upbeat (in a sincere way) waiter I’d ever encountered. At first I thought that he was in his early 20’s, but I was shocked to learn that he was close to 40. He told me about how a relationship he’d been in had ended, and how he lost 30 pounds because he’d been too depressed to eat—“like somebody died,” he said. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have wanted to hear about a stranger’s personal problems while I ate, but Oscar told his story in such an endearing, un-self-pitying way, and with such candor, like a good friend whose troubles you don’t mind hearing about because he’s a nice person, that I was truly touched, and enjoyed my meal in the sun even more. I suppose that the Disney people would frown on their “cast members” relating personal stories to guests, but, as far as I’m concerned, Oscar should be presented with an award, at the very least. He, and some of the other people I’d seen, and some of the experiences I’d had over the past two days made me think that the world is, actually, kind of small. And I didn’t have to hear the song, even once.

That night the stars were aligned in their proper places—proper enough for NASA’s purposes, anyway--and the Shuttle went up. Standing outside the Swan and Dolphin, with the tiny white lights of the Boardwalk glittering across the lake and a bright pregnant moon watching slackjawed as the Shuttle drew a long, fiery line across the sky, heading toward wherever Heaven might be, I considered that there are certain kinds of magic that, although no one at Disney could have possibly dreamed them up, can be stumbled across anywhere—even when you feel that you might never find magic again.

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Quit Drinking

I found myself thinking about college during the two days it took to travel by train aboard the Rocky Mountaineer between Vancouver, B.C., and Banff. It's possible to think about almost everything that's going on in one's life, or almost nothing at all, on a trip like that. I'm not sure which extreme I came closest to, but I did think about college; maybe remembering what can be remembered of those halcyon days between 1979 and 1985 (never mind the math on that one) was a good substitute for NOT remembering the things I'd promised myself that I'd allow myself to forget about until after the holidays. (We boarded the train on December 21st, so I was running out of time for forgetfulness.) I was traveling with my 9-year-old son, but he was happily spending most of his time raising hell, being precocious, and voicing restrained, hedging-his-bets skepticism about the existence of Santa Claus with the older children among his new friends, so I was left pretty much to my own devices until I'd get to missing him and go drag him back to our dome-top car to entertain me. I can be a real handful when we travel.
For one thing, I hadn't been in the Pacific Northwest since graduating from Reed College in Portland--what? almost 23 years ago?. I'd forgotten how even the big cities in that part of the country feel small and intimate, and I'd forgotten how green and wet it is even in the middle of winter. We boarded the train in Vancouver just as the sky was beginning to get light and the mountains around the city, snow-covered and with mists pouring down like liquid through the spaces between them, revealed themselves. The crew immediately passed out mimosas and muffins, and we were on our way. (I had told myself that I was going to have a couple of wholesome, relatively alcohol-free days on this trip, but who can resist free mimosas at dawn? No one else was, as far as I could tell.)
I had my iPod with me, and as the train slid through deep green fields through which horses galloped and from which Canada geese rose in silver formations, I began to realize how many of the songs on it were by people from Canada--Joni Mitchell, K.D. Lang, Gordon Lightfoot (don't laugh--go back and really listen to "If You Could Read My Mind" when it's not being played on one of those Lite radio stations), The Band (I think), Crosby and/or Stills and/or Nash, and definitely Young, and probably a few others. I'd only been to Canada once before the trip, and that was on a very short cruise to Nova Scotia years earlier. I swear the songs by the Canadians suddenly seemed to make more sense here in British Columbia in December.
In particular, I was listening to songs from Joni Mitchell's "Blue" ("It's comin' on Christmas/They're cuttin' down trees/They're putting up reindeer/And singing songs of joy and peace/I wish I had a river/I could skate away on..."), which I hadn't really listened to since college, when my voice could actually reach Joni's endless high notes with ease (and did so on a regular basis--in the '80's, in college, girls and womyn alike listened to Joni and Patti Smith with maniacal fervor, especially in the midst of bad breakups, which tended to happen every few weeks).
And then there was Thadee (there's an accent on that first "e", but I can't figure out how to put it there now), the senior, very French-Canadian member of our ridiculously charming and attentive crew of four (the others being David, Matthew, and Jennifer). I can't remember how it came up, but there came a moment when we found out that we both speak some Arabic (Thadee, it turns out, has worked all over the world as a tour guide and probably knows quite a few other languages as well in which to toss out his funny, barbed, French-Canadian-laced remarks on things such as, oh, waterboarding and Tasers and the glee with which certain members of the American and Canadian administrations view such disciplinary options). "How did you learn Arabic?" he asked me. "Egyptian lover?"
Well, yes, as a matter of fact--I did learn most of it with the help of an Egyptian lover back in the early 1990's. Didn't everyone? But what got me thinking about college in this instance was the use of the word, "lover". In college, people rarely used the words "boyfriend" or "girlfriend". "Lover", or, in some cases, "Sweetheart", was the preferred way to refer to the person one was sleeping with between Joni- and Patti-fests. I hadn't heard anyone use the word since shortly after 1985, and I realized how much I missed it. "Boyfriend" and "husband" really don't cut it when you're in the midst of something. Or maybe I just miss being in the midst of something, and the wild, cold, open spaces of Canada reminded me of what I miss.
The Rocky Mountaineer, in western Canada, was only the second place in which I've found people who are willing to throw together a hot buttered rum for a stranger; the first, of course, was Ireland. Good luck finding anyone other than a lover who will do that for you, and good luck turning it down (whatever your resolutions) just before Christmas, in a place called the "Land of a Million Christmas Trees", where everything sparkles with ice and spotless snow, and people refer to lovers as "lovers", and the light of the moon slices the darkness, and you can see every star you're meant to see in the black sky, and your child is still thinking about Santa Claus, and you're on a train in the middle of a frozen nowhere where the only interference would be a landslide/avalanche, and the people around you are singing Christmas carols with only the slightest sense of irony. It's not about drinking, really. It's about how clear everything was when you were in college, or younger, and everything was about choosing just the right elements to complete a perfect moment.

More Pictures from St. Augustine

Marineland, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Fiesta Falls Mini-Golf II, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Drying Out in Los Cabos

(This article appeared in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8/05. The photo was actually taken in Jamaica, but it's MY blog and I don't need to burden myself with perfect accuracy.)

“GOD, I wish I had some whiskey!” remarks a man with a North Carolina accent and a Jeff Foxworthy mustache, after kicking the wall adjacent to where the bar would normally be.

“Tequila,” his girlfriend corrects him.

“Alcohol is important,” a Mexican crewmember observes, philosophically, and with empathy.

“Yes. It’s sad,” agrees the girlfriend, equally philosophical. “Do you have any?”

There’s a strong breeze off the Pacific, and, beyond the monolithic stone structures called Los Arcos just off the shore of Cabo San Lucas, the sun falls in a leisurely fashion toward the sea. White fountains of water spurt up here and there among the waves in the distance; there are whales around, but they’re more elusive than usual. From up on deck, the seascape is magnificent, and every one of us, whether we like it or not, is watching it stone cold sober.

This is not some outing for tourists in recovery. It’s a dinner cruise. Ordinarily there would be an open bar, enthusiastically patronized by vacationers just warming up for a night of barhopping among the notorious bars of Cabo San Lucas. It is, after all, a Saturday evening in February, and it’s cold back home, and they’ve paid good money to come to Mexico, and to take a sunset sail on which the liquor flows freely.

But this weekend the government of Baja California Sur has its own plans: elections are taking place, and they want things to go smoothly. No fights. No one too drunk to go to the polls. Therefore, at midnight on Friday, the ley seca went into effect. Dry law. No one, including tourists, is to be served or sold any alcohol whatsoever until midnight on Sunday.

******

Los Cabos is one of those lovely, tropical destinations where the t-shirts displayed most prominently in the souvenir tiendas provide anatomical information (“The liver is evil. It must be punished.”), or personal information (“I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a drunk.”), or offer the gentle suggestion that if one hasn’t arrived with the intention of partying, one might not want to (expletive) show up.

In Cabo San Lucas, ground zero for those who have arrived with the intention of partying, there is, I’m told, a ritualistic protocol to be followed at night. The first stop is the Giggling Marlin Bar and Grill. Next, you’ll march over to Cabo Wabo, once owned by Eddie Van Halen, but now presided over by Sammy Hagar. After that, with any luck and, perhaps, the help of some new friends, you’ll find your way over to El Squid Roe (whose façade is covered with graffiti-like slogans like, “You know you’re old when Happy Hour means Nap Time,” and “Don’t drive any faster than your guardian angel can fly”) for a nightcap or six.

*******

I first hear about the ley seca from Angelica Zamorano, who works for the Hilton Los Cabos Resort, on Friday, the morning before the decree was to go into effect.

“We just got the letter from the government yesterday,” she says. “Last time it was O.K. for the tourists to drink, but this time no.”
“So it’s even in the hotels?” someone asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to honor it?”

Angelica shrugs. I will see the same “Que sera, sera,” shrug many times over the following weekend, but only from Mexicans. They’re used to it (although I imagine that, for the resorts, and especially for the bartenders who make their living on tips, the loss of a weekend’s alcohol revenue is no joke). Americans, unforewarned and not especially concerned about the outcomes of Mexican local elections, are not quite as likely to take the prospect of a dry weekend in Mexico so casually. I’m envisioning riots outside of the bar, uprisings around the pools.

But it is, so far, only Friday. I’m on my way from the tranquil and as-yet cheerfully drink-producing Hilton to Cabo San Lucas go out on one of the whale-watching/snorkeling excursion boats. The dock is a carnival of tourist delights: souvenirs, cigarettes, bottles of liquor, Mexican men and children selling tickets for all manner of vacation activities, a man with a photogenic snake wrapped around his neck. Tourists wander among them like dazed, happy children trying to decide which ride to go on next.

Pez Gato I, which is the catamaran I’ll be sailing on, is not, technically, one of the “Booze Cruise” boats that bob merrily on the water. Before we set sail, though, we are asked to sign waivers, and told with great earnestness that no alcohol will be served until after everyone has finished snorkeling—there have been much fewer accidents since that policy was put in place, we’re told.

Ten minutes out, however, the crewmembers come around with cups of beer. They’re playing music by the Doors, and making guacamole and ceviche below deck. We are, apparently, here to party.

******

On Saturday morning, still not quite believing that the liquor fairy won’t be making any stops in Los Cabos this weekend, I go to the Hilton’s Deli to see if I can buy some tequila to bring home to my husband as penance for the fact that I’m in Mexico, and he’s not.

“Es possible comprar tequila hoy? I ask the shopgirl in something resembling Spanish.

There it is again. The shrug. She shakes her head, and smiles.

I ask her if I’ll be able to buy liquor at the airport when I leave the following day. She’s not sure, so she asks a few guys who also work at the hotel. They shrug. They don’t think so.

“But I’ll be leaving!” I say. “I promise that I won’t change my mind and come back and vote!” They laugh, and shrug.

That afternoon I tour the little artists’ village of Todos Santos, an hour up the coast. This place, I’m thinking, might be off the government’s radar. At lunch in a pretty restaurant called Los Adobes, someone in our group asks our waiter for a margarita. We all wait to hear his answer.

“No, no te puedes,” the waiter tells her with the patient but firm voice of a father telling his little girl that she can’t have any candy.

Fortunately, the mahi-mahi tastes very nice with only a Diet Coke to accompany it.

*****

On the way back in to Los Cabos for the dinner cruise that night, our group speculates as to whether or not drinks will be served on the ship.
“We’ll be offshore,” someone says, hopefully.

But no. An announcement is made as soon as everyone is on board that no alcohol will be served.

“Yeah, right,” I’m thinking. “And no drinks until after everyone has snorkeled.”

But the bar is bare of bottles, and I’m offered a virgin pina colada. It tastes like ice with pineapple juice, which is basically what it is.

Now, even in my pre-children, out-until-the wee-hours days, I never understood the point of flying to some warm, exquisite place only to drink oneself to the verge of incarceration or emergency hospitalization, and return home a week or so later with the right to boast that one remembers next-to-nothing about the trip. I have every intention of remembering every waking moment of my first trip to Los Cabos.

But I do like margaritas, especially when they’re served at sea as the sun sets, and dinner without wine always seems a little lackluster. I can’t say that I’m not disappointed—not quite as disappointed as the man with the Jeff Foxworthy mustache and his girlfriend, but disappointed nevertheless.

The food served for dinner is delicious, and the floorshow afterwards is fun, if a little hokey. I’m sure that the performers are used to a more exuberant audience, and more enthusiastic participation in the sing-along portions of the show.

Back in Cabo San Lucas after the cruise, the streets are almost empty. On the docks, there are no vendors, no snakes, no cigarettes, and no liquor. A few depressed-looking Mexicans sit waiting for customers in their stores, and a few depressed-looking tourists walk around in the dark stillness of a party-free night in Los Cabos.

When we get back to the hotel, though, we’re greeted with a miraculous vision: the bar is open. Several of us waste little time going in, where a girl with an incredible voice is singing disco songs, and where we’re gratified to find that several of the drinks have our names on them.

We don’t bother to ask why this wonderful exception is being made.

******

At breakfast at the hotel the following morning, I notice that the restaurant tables are mostly populated by big, polo shirt-wearing men with the accents of Texas CEO’s. They’re talking about their days as football players in high school and college, and about their days as golf players now. They’re not the guys you’d find on one of the booze cruises, or at El Squid Roe.

A little later I go to the open-air lobby to check out. Chairs, couches, and tables have been arranged around the fountain.

“What’s all this for?” I ask the woman at the desk.

“Super Bowl,” she tells me. Oh, that. I’d forgotten.

On the counter in front of me is a flyer advertising margaritas for five pesos during the game. Not only are they serving drinks at the hotel, they’re selling them at half-price.

I guess it’s true that you don’t mess with Texans, especially when they’re on vacation, and there’s a Super Bowl to be watched.

By Nancy Bevilaqua (c) 2008

Fiesta Falls Mini-Golf, St. Augustine, Nancy Bevilaqua (c) 2008

Getting Lost in England

Roundabouts are tricky, unforgiving things, tossed like so many circus hoops across England’s landscape by some daft, peevish traffic planner. You have the choice of either choosing, on half a second’s notice, what you pray will be the correct ray (out of three or four) of road jutting out from the circle, and risking finding yourself heading down miles of minimally marked, spotlessly clean road in the wrong direction, or simply driving around and around the thing, if only to calm your rattled, right-side-of-the-road-oriented nerves. All of the roundabouts can be classified as either intermediate or advanced, the latter being the dreaded double roundabout. There are no roundabouts for beginners.

We were absolute beginners, absolutely. We had, however, had the good sense to turn even more of our near-worthless American dollars over to the car hire (note how handily I toss about the English terms after only 6 nights in England) company at Heathrow in exchange for the luxuries of air conditioning and an automatic transmission in our little space capsule of a car. My husband, Lorenzo, by virtue of being the one who had bothered to renew his driver’s license, was the designated driver. My task was to scream, “Look to your right!” every few miles.

We’d come to England courtesy of American Airlines, from whom I’d won two round-trip tickets to any of their destinations the previous summer. (With only three weeks left before they expired, I decided where we’d travel with them using a method only slightly more sophisticated than closing my eyes and stabbing my finger at a random place on a map. I chose London because (1) neither my husband, my son, nor I had ever been there, (2) there is a Legoland in nearby Windsor, ensuring that my son’s first trip to Europe would, failing all else, be a glorious memory in at least one way, and (3) well, I’m not sure that there was a third reason.)

After two unspeakably expensive nights in London, and another two truly pleasant ones at the Hilton St. Anne’s Manor (a Hilton equivalent of Brideshead, complete with horses, deer, rabbits, and rolling lawns set up for croquet) near Legoland, we decided to get in our space capsule and hit the roads in earnest. The porter at the Hilton St. Anne’s–an sweet, elderly man straight out of a film adaptation of a Dickens book–considered our vague, Quadrophenia-influenced plan to head for Brighton, and gently suggested that we reconsider and go to Bournemouth, another seaside town to the west of Brighton. “Not so crowded there,” he advised, and traced his finger along a route by which we could stop and see Stonehenge on the way. It all looked so simple–get back on jolly old M3 (along which we’d managed to travel more-or-less without incident from Heathrow to the hotel two days earlier), which would eventually become A303, and then turn off to A344 to get to Stonehenge. From there it would be M3 pretty much all of the way to Bournemouth. I got online and made a haphazard reservation at a hotel in Bournemouth, and printed out directions from Expedia, just to be certain (one thing that my husband does not have is a sense of direction, and I fully intended to be nearly speechless with fear of an accident as we drove, and therefore unable to help much).

There is something exhilarating about traveling to a place you’ve never been before, and–at least for part of your stay–having little or no idea where you’ll end up. Frankly, I thought that it was very cool of us to simply head off in our space capsule into the not-all-that-vast English unknown, especially with a 7-year-old in the backseat, waxing nostalgic already about his day at Legoland Windsor. We were American pioneers in England, intrepid and not restricted by the chains of conventional tourism.

We got lost immediately. I believe that it was one of the advanced-level double roundabouts that catapulted us off course the first time (there were to be many more). It may even have been an intermediate-level single roundabout. In any case, there we were on the minimally marked, spotlessly clean road that ran for miles through a beautiful, bucolic nowhere. It was now past lunchtime and, in my family, things get ugly fast if the men don’t eat on time. Back home, of course, there would have been exits every few miles, and we could have taken our pick of the culinary offerings of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, the occasional Outback or Hooter’s. Here there was one small sign, which may even have been hand-painted, for something called The Swan. With no alternatives in sight, we turned our space capsule in the direction of The Swan.

Naturally, this turned out to be one of those serendipitous occurrences that intrepid travelers like us are always hoping to stumble onto–a reward for carelessness, a glimpse into a place not mentioned on the Expedia map. We found ourselves in the preposterously picturesque, tiny town of East Ilsley, which, aside from a few cars, looked pretty much exactly as it must have in the Middle Ages, when it was the site of a corn market, a see-and-be-seen sheep fair, and a number of taverns catering to the corn-sellers and sheep-exhibitors (this all according to an informational postcard we picked up at The Swan).

The Swan itself was at least 400 years old, but the food was fresh. We ordered Ploughman’s lunches and a couple of pints, and gloated. A small, slightly bent man brought us our plates; it turned out that his name was Willy, and that he’d been a jockey for 26 years, and that he’d lived in Atlanta for a while. Having been obsessed with horses and horse-racing as a child, I was thrilled to speak to an actual jockey; I gathered that Willy was equally happy to have someone to talk to about his career.

“Have you ever been thrown during a race?” I asked him.

Proudly, he held up one four-fingered hand. Enough said, especially as he had just told us that racehorses can run at speeds up to about 45 miles an hour.

Assuring Willy that we’d take him up on his offer to take us to the races at Ascot if we were ever in village again (and we fully intend to be), we reluctantly left The Swan, strapped ourselves in to the space capsule, took off, and cheerfully waited to get lost again.

Coming to England, we each had goals for the trip. My husband wanted to see the insides of a few quaint, musty old pubs (done, although further research was not out of the question ). My son’s first priority was Legoland; he also thought that the Tower of London should provide some good, clean, torture- and beheading-related fun (done, but the latter ended up just kind of freaking him out). I’d gotten it into my head that we needed to see Stonehenge.

Stonehenge, I now know, does not exist. It’s a pretty lie dreamed up by some daft, peevish British tourism person to lure unsuspecting Americans far out beyond their depth in the English countryside in retaliation for some long-ago slight. Print out your own Expedia driving directions and find out for yourself. Go on–take M3 to A303 and simply keep right onto A344. If you find it, let me know. (In the States, of course, there would have been billboards every few hundred feet proclaiming the glories of the given attraction, and its exact whereabouts, as well as clusters of motels, souvenir shops, and fast-food restaurants gleaming with the brightness of the Star of Bethlehem for those who had made the pilgrimage. In England, tourism is a much more intuitive activity. Which is good. Except that we were not blessed with that kind of intuition.)

Having learned that the Mystery of Stonehenge is actually simply a matter of where in hell A344 is, and having passed the same sign for a crematorium in Basingstoke several times, we eventually gave up that particular quest and headed for Bournemouth.

The good citizens of Windsor and its neighboring towns are proud–and rightfully so–of the preponderance of roundabouts in the area. Clearly, however, the ones who do the (understated) bragging had never been to Bournemouth, where, in lieu of the daft and peevish traffic planner who had tossed roundabouts around the rest of the country, someone had hired an independent contractor, a roundabout artist, a mad genius with a vision to rival Da Vinci’s. Although we’d managed to get from “Stonehenge” to the outskirts of Bournemouth without incident, our space capsule was thrown into one dizzying orbit after another once we got into town. Undeterred, and finally humble enough to ask someone for directions (although his answer was unintelligible except for the word “fliver”–we think–he motioned in the right direction), we found our hotel, but in nowhere near the time indicated by our Expedia directions.

“Bob’s your uncle!” said my husband, several times, giddy from the circles. He now firmly believed that there was a conspiracy, put into practice in Bournemouth by the man who had give us directions, to confuse off-course Americans by speaking a made-up language that sounded like British English, but was in fact nonsense.

And yet, in spite of having driven in circles, and up and down the same pristine, Stonehenge-free roads, all day, it was all OK.

By Nancy Bevilaqua (c) 2008

Hang-Gliding in the Land of the First Flight

I’d almost think that it’s a mean prank perpetrated by the state of North Carolina and U.S. Airways.

I’m on my way to the Outer Banks, the barrier island where the Wright Brothers first took their flimsy Flyer twelve feet over the dunes at Kitty Hawk and started this whole ill-advised (in my mind, at least) business of sending thousands of pounds worth of people, luggage, pretzels, beverages, and combustible fuel five miles into the air by way of a winged aluminum can. Through the window of the gate at Laguardia, just below my line of sight, is a little Saab 340B turboprop deal. As I board, I mention to the flight attendant in a shaky voice that this is the first time I’ve ever flown in such a tiny plane (it is, to be honest, my second time; I once spend a hellish half-hour in a 2-seater with a brand-new boyfriend with a brand-new pilot’s license who, after a 4-bounce landing on the runway meant for takeoffs, was not my boyfriend for much longer).

One of the other passengers points out that “at least these things can land,” which affords me some solace until the flight attendant asks the passengers (all six of us) to move to seats at the back of the plane “for balance.” I am, at least, not worried about terrorists. Even the Idiot Shoe Bomber would be more ambitious than to target this dinky little thing.

Twenty minutes later, in the air and still wiping the sweat off of my palms, I’m silently damning Wilbur and Orville to hell for not being content to hang out on the beach and admire the soaring of the seabirds, when there were perfectly good trains, ships, and horses available to take people where they needed to go. I’m thinking Buddy Holly and Patsy Cline, I’m thinking Lynard Skynard, and I check out the other five passengers to see if any of them look like musicians, who seem to have particularly bad luck with small planes. At this point, the plane tilts to the right just as the biggest man on board, wearing a cap bearing the name of a funeral home, gets up and crosses the “aisle” to that side. Balance, balance.

It’s not that I don’t understand about dreams of flight. I dream all the time that I can flap my arms and lean forward a bit and rise up—albeit not too far—off of the ground and away. My body’s memory of the feeling remains so vivid even after I’m fully awake that, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I’m absolutely certain that I was once a bird. (Contrary to the opinions of Freud, et. al., my flying dreams are not sex dreams; I do know the difference.)

In North Carolina (provided that I reach the ground in Norfolk and arrive at the Outer Banks alive and unharmed), I will be getting a sense of what it feels like to be lifted up by the wind without the help of propellers, or engines, or dreams. I’ll be learning to hang-glide just a couple of miles from where the Wright Flyer made its first flight. That idea doesn’t really scare me; if anyone is going to screw up while I’m in the air, I’d be much more comfortable if it’s me.

To my surprise and relief, I do make it all the way to Nag’s Head, where I’ll be staying at one of the very pretty, misleadingly-named “cottages” (the place I’m staying in has 12 bedrooms, and can easily accommodate 32 people) along the beachfront. Over sweet potato rolls and a cocktail or two at Kelly’s Tavern that night, my host counsels me to do exactly what the hang-gliding instructors tell me to do; if I do that, she assures me, I will fly. She talks about the need to “flare”, but I have no idea what she means, and she speaks of it as such a commonplace that I’m embarrassed to ask (I’m guessing that it means that I’ll need to take some kind of spread-eagle position against the sky).

She also mentions something about landing upside-down and hanging helplessly from the harness, but I try to put that out of my mind.

The next day is hang-gliding day. In the morning, presumably for inspiration, we visit the Wright Brothers Museum at Kitty Hawk. The “First Flight” proclaimed on North Carolina license plates took place here, on a freezing-cold day in December, 1903. It lasted for 12 seconds, the Flyer reaching a comfortable altitude of about 15 feet and a distance of 120 feet. The whole thing was witnessed by a handful of locals; Wilbur and Orville hadn’t had much luck in the P.R. department, apparently.

Each of the Flyer’s four flights that day went a little farther, the last one making it 850 feet down the “runway”. Our guide at the Museum stresses that the Wright Brothers had not only to design their airplane properly in order to realize their flight fantasies, but to learn how to fly it by sheer trial-and-error as well.

There were 30-mile-per-hour winds on the day of the Wright Brothers flight. I’ll be making my own first flight on a fairly warm October day in winds of only about 10 mph, at a place called Jockey’s Ridge State Park, just down the road from Kitty Hawk.

We get to Jockey’s Ridge at about 2:00, and get started on filling out release forms at Kitty Hawk Kites right away. The forms seem to mention injury, paralysis, and death a lot, but I’m undeterred. This is my destiny.

Just to pass some time before the rest of the students arrive, our good-looking, relentlessly upbeat instructor, Steve Bernier, starts us out with a video about speed-gliding competitions over Telluride. For my part, speed-gliding and mountaintop takeoffs will have to wait. The next video is the training video, which begins with a black screen and a voice intoning more about injury, paralysis, and death. Having covered that topic thoroughly enough, the video goes on to tell us that we’ll be learning to hang-glide on the tallest natural dune on the Atlantic Coast, and that hang-gliding is the “purest form of manmade flight”. We will be flying “just like a bird.” That’s what I want to hear, and it definitely sounds better than “just like a Saab 340B.” (One scene does show an unfortunate first-time “pilot” hanging upside-down from her upside-down glider, but, once again, I allow my thoughts to move right along to a more optimistic place.)

When the video’s over, Steve recites the Rules: relax, breathe, look straight ahead (looking down at the ground will only take you there faster than you’d like), run until the wind lifts you up without jumping, and HAVE FUN. If we want to look especially cool in the air, Steve says, we should try to bend our knees and cross our ankles behind us. I’m pretty certain that I won’t have the presence of mind to look that cool, but I vow to myself that, at least, my legs will not keep “running” after I’ve left the ground.

By the time we head out for the dunes, I’m psyched. Any apprehension I had about hang-gliding has left me; I will be the one in control when I’m in the air, and the lesson has convinced me that the act itself is simple, graceful, and as close to the flight of birds as I’m going to get in my present incarnation.

We walk along a valley of sand that runs between two mountains of sand. There is, in fact, nothing out there but sand, soft and forgiving. The place looks like a set out of “Lawrence of Arabia”. In the distance to the east and west, we can see the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway, but they might as well be mirages.

I volunteer to go first. Steve guides me under the glider and helps me strap myself onto it. I bonk my helmeted head on the bars a few times, and do a hang check (to make sure that I’m attached properly to the glider and not too close to the bar that I will use, God willing, to control it). Finally I stand, pull the bar in toward my stomach as directed, and run.

My bare feet leave the sand, and for a moment I feel myself sinking. Somehow, though, through the blur around me, I hear and respond to Steve’s commands, and I fly. I even cross my ankles behind me; I’m in the air, AND I look cool. Presently I flare, which turns out to mean pushing the bar straight out, and I land. On my feet. I feel as if I’ve summited Everest.

Over the course of the afternoon I get to try three more times. Each time, it seems that I go a little higher, a little longer (probably not even the Wright Brothers’ twelve seconds, but I’m not counting). Only once do I fall as I land. It’s painless.

My reincarnation theory still stands.
******

The plane that takes me home is even smaller than the one I arrived in; I’m now one of four passengers. On the way to the airport, I hear a report over the radio about a twin-engine turboprop that has crashed out in the Midwest. It’s a long, nerve-wracking ride back to New York. I’m well aware that I’m acting like a coward, but at least I now know one way to be in the air, in control, and unafraid.

By Nancy Bevilaqua (c) 2008