TO ZERO AND BACK

Pictures from Arizona

2008-08-19T12:09:00.003-04:00

Exploring the Desert on Horseback in Los Cabos

2008-03-28T09:57:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Tunisia

2008-03-09T20:42:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

"Hello! English?"

"No."

"French?"

"No."

"German?"

"No."

"Czech?"

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

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

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

"Ah! You speak some Arabic?"

"Shwaya-shwaya (just a little)."

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

There was no trouble.

******

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

******

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

Being Somewhere, for a Day, in Coney Island

2008-03-01T17:40:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

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

2008-02-26T09:16:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Floating Among the Islands and Icebergs of the Antarctic Peninsula

2008-02-11T17:42:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Malik Enti?

2008-02-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

2008-02-05T08:36:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-02-01T10:01:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Enter my mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s go,” I said.

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

Things were going exceptionally well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nah,” decided my mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could have stayed there forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cahuilla?” my mother asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had my doubts, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just pick something,” my mother snapped back.

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

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

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

(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

My Night Out in Santo Domingo

2008-01-30T08:57:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-28T09:22:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

(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

2008-01-24T08:06:00.001-05:00

More Photos

2008-01-24T08:01:00.000-05:00

Leyden, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

Slainte, John Byrne

2008-01-23T16:50:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-21T14:39:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-20T14:10:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

Marineland, (c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008

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

Drying Out in Los Cabos

2008-01-19T10:05:00.000-05:00

(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

2008-01-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

Getting Lost in England

2008-01-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-17T15:32:00.000-05:00

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

Missing Mardi Gras in Mobile

2008-01-17T15:09:00.000-05:00

It was the first week of March in Mobile, and no one seemed to be ready to let the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras pass from reality into memory just yet . Mardi Gras beads, blue and green and purple, hung (and would remain hanging unless removed by some force of nature) from tree branches, clocks, and statues, or lay sparkling in the morning sunlight on nearly deserted sidewalks on and around Dauphin Street. Stores were still selling feathered, fantastic masks, beads, puppets, and things that light up–some letting them go at 50% off, and others stubbornly selling them at no less than the price they commanded during Mardi Gras, which had been officially over for about a week. In the windows of the marvelously eclectic Bienville Books on Dauphin Street, books by Bukowski and Burroughs took a back seat to those chronicling, for example, Mobile’s succession of Mardi Gras Queens between the mid-1800's and the mid-1980's–books which people were still buying.

It had, after all, been a long year for anyone living on the Gulf Coast (although clearly less horrific for the people of Mobile than for many of their neighbors to the west), and there were still signs of the damage incurred along the causeway that runs across Mobile Bay between downtown and the Eastern Shore–boarded-up restaurants, skeletons of gas stations, portions of the causeway itself still being rebuilt. Mardi Gras this year must have been particularly cathartic, its crowds of revelers made significantly bigger by people who simply didn’t have the stomach just yet to party in New Orleans. (Mobile is actually where Mardi Gras originated on the Gulf Coast; the celebration spread along the rest of the area later. From what I’d been told, Mardi Gras in Mobile is a somewhat more wholesome–if not exactly G-rated–and less tourist-ridden party here than it is in New Orleans.)

The poor planning on my part that resulted in my visiting Mobile for the first time a week after the official end of Mardi Gras was for a short time a source of outraged conversation among the regular patrons of Veet’s bar, whose neon-lit and guitar-filled windows convinced me, in spite of the place’s status as the sole sign of life on the otherwise empty street behind the Riverview Hotel, where I was staying, that it was my kind of place. On a Friday night, just after an exquisite meal at a local restaurant called The Pillars (where the waitress, who had a face straight out of a Vermeer painting, was studying electrical engineering so that she could build NASCAR cars), I went in.

I wasn’t sure how my presence would go over. One of the many lessons that I’ve learned by traveling is that any thoughts I may have that I’ll be able to blend right in with the locals in the places I visit are delusions. In spite of the fact that my bland (to my ears) Yankee accent inevitably slips into an unintended, mild drawl when I’m in the South, it’s clear that some kind of “Yankee” symbol becomes evident on my forehead as soon as I hit the ground south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

There are some mean-looking guys in Mobile. On my first morning in the city, after walking along bright, silent Dauphin Street for a while, I stopped in to a little convenience store with bars on the windows and doors, in search of a couple of bottles of water. A sign outside still heralded the store as the place to go for all one’s Mardi Gras needs. The man behind the counter looked as if he’d just done 30 years’ hard time and was only waiting for the next opportunity to get himself arrested on a felony. He was, however, as charming and helpful as a Boy Scout, his gentle yet slightly mischievous Cajun accent soothing as the sea.

The man at the door at Veet’s looked only slightly less fearsome, but he waved me right in with a grin. It was just ten o’clock (pretty much midday for the bars and clubs in New York), but the place was already just-about-jumping. Couples danced to a country-western band while others sat in the darkness watching. The bar seemed like a good place to start. I sat down and ordered a gin gimlet, which is no more than gin, ice, and a splash of Rose’s Lime Juice. The bartender was very sweet and friendly, but I might as well have ordered one of those complicated, fruity concoctions that people like to drink on cruises and Caribbean holidays. They didn’t have Rose’s Lime Juice at Veet’s.

“I could just put a lot of limes in it for you,” the bartender offered helpfully. I opted for a one-ingredient drink instead.

“Excuse me,” said a woman seated to my right. “Would you do me a favor? When the man I’m with gets back over here, will you tell him what a great dancer I am?” Her date, evidently, didn’t think much of her dancing style, but she made it clear that she wasn’t all that impressed by his, either.

In a couple of minutes the date came back. I did the requested favor, but I’m not sure how much impact it made on their dancing relationship.

But the man had me just about speechless. “Do people tell you that you look like...” I started.

“Robert Duvall,” said the woman. Oh, yes. This was no mere vague resemblance–in face, expressions, gestures, and voice, this man was Boo Radley grown full-fledged into the Apostle. But he was, it turned out, a plumber, and not all that concerned about his doppelganger.

He did, however, buy me a drink, after unsuccessfully trying to get me to dance. He tried to guess what I was doing in Mobile.

“Great sex with a southern boy?” I pointed to my wedding ring, and shook my head.

“Great sex with a southern girl?” Same response.

He gave up. I finally clued him in that I was in town to write about Mobile.
“That shouldn’t take long,” he said. He paused, and gave the matter some more thought. “Mobile,” he explained, “is a dichotomy.”

“A dichotomy of what?”

“Rednecks and smart people.” I asked him to define “smart people,” but he had more pressing concerns: (1) that I would convince a lot of Yankees to come live in Mobile, and (2) the previously mentioned outrage that I had come to Mobile the first week of March, and had missed Mardi Gras. What, he wanted to know regarding the latter, was the point?

I explained that I’d been having a great time and great food in Mobile, but admitted to having lousy timing. Having apparently found his entire interaction with me frustrating and bizarre at that point, he grabbed his date and went off to dance.

While waiting in line to get into the lockless ladies’ room, I got into a conversation with a girl who talked about how long it had taken to get into the bathroom during Mardi Gras. I came clean right away this time, and confessed that I was a travel writer, and from New Jersey, and that I’d missed Mardi Gras. She, too, found the latter information shocking.

Back at the bar, watching in horror as the bartender laid long rows of Jaegermeister shots and chasers of Red Bull out along the bar, I got a tap on the shoulder.

“New Jersey!” It was the girl from the ladies’ room line. “Come on over here and meet the band. We want to show you some southern hospitality since you missed Mardi Gras, and get you a drink.” This, perhaps, was my chance for atonement; I followed her to the other end of the bar, where a very happy-looking and rather sweaty greeting committee had formed.

The girl (whose name I never got) introduced me to one of the band members, his girlfriend, and another, somewhat older man. “This is Nancy. She’s a writer from New Jersey. She missed Mardi Gras.”

“New Jersey, huh?” said the musician, affably. “Which exit?”

I’d completely forgotten about that joke over the years, and confusedly tried to explain which exit (on the New Jersey Turnpike) my town is closest to. No matter. The musician promised to play a Springsteen song in my honor, and went off to do the next set.

Turning to look at the older man, I saw it–the mysterious symbol that identifies Yankees for the benefit of Southerners. O.K., I didn’t actually see anything, but my antennae went up.
“Where are you from?” I demanded.

The man gave a little smile indicating that he’d been identified plenty of times in the past, too. “Brooklyn.” He drew me closer and whispered, “I’ve been down here since 1974. It’s the best place to be, Nancy. The best.”

The Chairwoman of the Veet’s Southern Hospitality Welcoming Committee presented me with some Mardi Gras beads, gave me her blessing, and sent me on my way. I wore the beads proudly as a headed out past the dancers, who were now locked together in slow-dance mode, oblivious to everything but the music. I waved at the mean-looking gentleman at the door, and he waved pleasantly back. This, I was thinking, is the kind of place I’ll want to come back to. And I’ll be damn sure to do it at Mardi Gras time.
By Nancy Bevilaqua (C) 2008

Keith Bellows, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Me

2008-01-17T11:42:00.000-05:00

Word on the street (that would be 17th Street NW in Washington) is that an essay that I wrote for National Geographic Traveler MIGHT make it into the March, '08 issue. If so, it will have been almost two years since the day Editor-in-Chief Keith Bellows wrote to me and told me that they wanted to buy it--the day, in other words, on which I would have been perfectly happy to spontaneously combust and disappear in a shower of ecstatically blazing sparks, because I could ask no more of the gods. Keith was (and still is)a rock star right up there with Kurt Cobain (albeit alive and sans Courtney) in my mind; the truly odd thing is that he's also apparently a really nice guy, too. Go figure. They even PAID me to publish something that I'd written simply because I wanted to.
That kind of thing doesn't happen too often. If you're a travel writer, you know that. There are plenty of websites and magazines that will publish your most cherished, personal pieces without burdening you with the need to invoice them for the sum total of their zero-cents-a-word rate, and some even offer to relieve you of all rights to said writing (and please don't think that I've always been above allowing them to do it--well, they didn't get the rights, at least).
I figure that if opportunities to do the kind of travel writing that I really love to do and get paid for it by top-quality publications are going to be so rare that spontaneous combustion seems to be a perfectly good response when they do happen, and my only other option is to write for free, then I may as well as least hire myself as the Not-So-Nice, Zero-Cents-a-Word-Paying, Rights-Hogging Editor-in-Chief of my own blog.
So this will be my own personal travel-writing playground. Fortunately for you, I often write pretty well, and I travel a lot, and it's quite possible that you'll glean either some useful information, or pure entertainment, or both, from reading the stuff I accept from myself for publication.
As Editor, Publisher, Writer, and Photographer, I grant all rights to everything I publish here to myself. In other words, it's copyrighted. In other other words, if you publish any of it anywhere else without my express permission, I will hunt you down and kick your ass (mentally insert that image of Courtney here).