In the University of the West Indies library, I overhear an exchange between what must be a teacher and student in the psychiatry stacks. The student says, “I wish I wasn't struggling so much with it”--something like that, I haven't tuned into the conversation yet; the teacher responds, “Through struggle you learn, so struggle is a good thing.” Kind of rapid fire, as if this is part of his professor patter, but at the same time he really means it. And then they say something else while I'm fussing with my computer cord and by that point they've moved a yard away and I hear the teacher say, “Manhood isn't something you're born with or given. You earn it. And this is how you earn it.” And the student says, “Thank you. I'll do my best tomorrow.” And he walks away standing a little bit taller, I could swear it, and I think I can see his shoulders square. I'm pretty sure they're talking about a test that the student has to take tomorrow, but they've ended up affirming what seems like a beautiful principle. I realize I've never actually heard anyone talk like this. And it makes me want to ask them, What is manhood? And is there any way that I could earn some, too?

In St. Thomas

Of late I’m impatient with children’s books. Though, thinking back, I remember I read Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish translation to Tallulah as she nursed, two or three months old, soliloquies in Hamlet as lullabies, and Sandra Cisneros’s La Casa en Mango Street before she was two, and she was happy. Lately she revealed an interest in The Odyssey, and sobbed uncontrollably when Beowulf died, and requested repeated chapters of The Sun Also Rises, intrigued by the fishing and the bullfighting and the drinking. (She knows from drunk mans.) She began to invent games featuring Lady Brett Ashley. Hemingway wrote some nice, simple, prose—like a kids’ book, kind of, yet so much more satisfying. (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”) The Odyssey and Beowulf, though—they were meant to be spoken. The emotions and motivations emerge stark and spare, like hillsides of granite.

I took a walk to the ferry dock at an unaccustomed hour. It had gone dark. I passed the usual detritus, the plastic bags and go cups and empty Medallas shining under the streetlights. The wind was coming from the sea on the other side of the hill as I listened to the sound of the coquís, and one of the men playing dominoes outside the bar lifted his plastic cup of liquor and called out Hi, loudly in English.
Is it tristes tropiques, whatever those are, exactly? (I look up Levi-Strauss on the internet.) Are tristes tropiques like cruisebummers—that haunted sense of something missing, a void to be filled in paradise? I passed the house of a woman we’d known. She had died of cancer two days ago. She’d gone up to her old home in Vermont to die and because I never saw her leave I couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t. I walked past the empty restaurant where a young chef we’d met had started working, when the tourists didn’t come to her restaurant up the hill.
Then I understood that melancholy was something I was looking out of, into the night--displacing it to this other world presumptuously from the world in my own head. The feeling that I don’t belong here, and I can tell, somehow, that I never will. And the places I’ve loved—are they closed to me, indefinitely? That’s the thing about wandering, for me, the intensified awareness that things are always changing and temporary, the craving for difference alternating with the need for certainty, some place that is safe and unchanging. Some place that I now know, and always will, does not exist and yet—like those beautiful archetypes—it is, it must be.

Since turning forty, some things have become clear to me. For example, that bachata music is beautifully overwrought, like the kind of poetry you can write in Spanish—like this one, for example, from a book of poetry for Puerto Rican schoolchildren :

Madre mía, hoy es tu día
y yo te doy mi alegría,
que es lo que te puedo dar.
Madre mía, yo quisiera,
que tu pena fuese mía.
Qué más puedo desear?

“My dear mother, this is your day, and I give you my happiness—for that's what I have to give. Oh my mother, I wish your sadness were mine. What more could I desire?”

Or this, from “Itinerario para náufragos”—náufragos meaning “the shipwrecked”:

Vivir el movimiento que habita las palabras,
conocer la apariencia, amar la soledad
de los frutos caídos y que, ahora,
con la luz de la tarde
desvelan el pasado en las ruinas del tiempo.

A sorry translation: “To live in the movement that inhabits words, to understand the meaning of surfaces, to embrace the solitude of fruit that has fallen—and now, with the afternoon light, they keep the past from sleeping among the ruins of time.”

This translation is lame partly because I’m not sure how the infinitives in the first two lines fit with the third person plural in the last. But who cares! What is this about? I have no idea. I just find it strangely stupendous. I’m moved by poetry in Spanish more than any poetry in English except maybe Walt Whitman, because he, too, gives voice to the most vague, exalted sentiments in unrestrained, unapologetic flights that sometimes choose not to return, leaving you high.

On the other hand, I’ve been clued in to the value of balance. Such an ordinary thought--banal even. I was wondering the other day why I intermittently fantasize about a totally different life in which I’m one of those people who search out props and necessary items for movies, or scientific operations. In a book I read I learned that this job has a name. It isn’t “procuring.” Anyway, it boils down to hunting for interesting things in a new place and then buying them with someone else’s money. Perfect for me. In my other life, I participate in a floating household that tries to maintain a high degree of self-sufficiency, give voice to its creative longings, earn money, and raise a small child far from most of our friends and family. And things break. Like, relatively important things. Or someone gets sick. Someone gets in a snit. What is wrong? I used to blame it on the boat, lack of money, bad food, isolation, whatever. Now I realize those are just excuses. Deepak Chopra spoke to me in a dream. He said, This moment is perfect. And I said, I like that better than This Moment Bites. And I said, When we feel crazy, let’s shout—silently, if necessary—OM! And he said, Do whatever you need to do. And I said, Deepak, it actually works!

Tutu in the tidepool

Plus ça change, they say in French, plus c’est la même chose. That line makes sense to me on and off. Sometimes it sounds like something that’s supposed to be clever. Last week it seemed like the unvarnished truth. We set off from Culebra, reached St. Croix—did things there now vague to memory—and prepared to journey on. We were careful, of course, because as any sailor knows, particularly one as half-assed as myself, you do not mess around with the weather. So we had our weather relay and we had our diesel and food that probably would not induce seasickness and our wits about us, as much as you can hope for at any given point in time. The only problem was that a few things went wrong. One of them was: While lying low, keeping my nausea tuned to a manageable level, riding it out, I looked up and saw smoke eagerly billowing from the closed door of the engine room. Look! I shouted. Smoke!

Leaping up from where he was nursing his own juice-induced nausea (it’s an art as well as a science, figuring out what to eat underway, and in each new port it seems I’m tempted by something that soon proves deadly), Adam dove into the smoke. Long and short, there wasn’t an actual fire, but the engine had gone dead.

Sailing engineless is nothing new for us, of course. We hadn’t even been using the engine. Later, though, the port side sailtrack ripped out of the deck. Adam jerry rigged something or other—I have no idea what it was because I was trying not to be sick while reading some kids’ book aloud down below or getting food for Tallulah, who seems to recover from her own little flares of seasickness with stunning speed. But no engine and a compromised rig in someone else’s boat in unfamiliar waters during hurricane season adds up to Not OK. You have to be able to get away from the storm. I used to be kind of blasé, but after evacuating New Orleans at dusk with the electric bite in the air of pressure dropping, along the empty highways—then, weeks later, driving with a will back into the ruined city to touch things that the storm had left behind, dripping with prisms of mold—I find my cells shudder at the notion.

But at some point after we decided that the safest thing to do was return to Culebra, a thunderhead like a mushroom cloud possessed the horizon. It staged a bloodless coup. It was so big it didn’t need to make a sound and it looked marshmallow soft. Long jagged clouds the color of pewter balanced across it as the sun shot that soft whiteness through with pink gold. When it reached us, it was sheeting warm rain and blowing 45-knot gusts in the darkness while the boat plowed the waves like some Greek’s mythical horse.

We knew this—this Invest 92, this tropical disturbance we’d been watching for days and now, with our change of plan, it was tickling the edge of our westward trajectory with its long white plume. And we prayed, for the first time in years, because sometimes in the dark ocean you hope there really is some kind of benevolent higher power, even if that idea seems unfathomable in the clear light of day. Because sometimes if you’re not calling out to the heavens for mercy you’re singing all chirpy in your head, “The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost…”

It’s a fact of life when sailing that plans are not that relevant. A fact not always pleasant or easy to deal with, sometimes one of the most frustrating axioms for me of life aboard. Because I’m pretty good with uncertainty but not that good and that’s probably why I live on a sailboat, because I have to learn my lesson. Maybe. I’m not really sure. Anyway, we went sailing. And now we’re back.

I have been earning some money this week, mostly fixing other people's writing, all the little matter out of place, which makes me want to write imprecisely, scattering commas. It's a textbook, and I think about the readings, arguing with them, inserting comments in the margins, which someone will read, eventually, and perhaps become irritated. I proofread an article about the origins of religion. Ages ago, it said, everyone knew religious myths were metaphors. 
    I remembered something that happened during the months I spent at a Buddhist retreat center in Junction City, California, the summer before I started graduate school. A series of special teachings was taking place. As part of this, a Tibetan monk came--to give a talk, exist. He was a short man with eyes as dark as a snow man's. He was called a Terton, which means someone who reveals--knowledge--maybe buried in a rock somewhere. Maybe in a dream. He spent a couple of days at the gonpa and on the day he left, everyone lined up on either side of the long drive leading out to Route 299, and Redding, Yuba City, Sacramento. Some held flowers ready to toss in his path. I stood there with a pink cosmos. As the Terton passed, in the back of a red Jeep Cherokee with the windows rolled down, I reached out to give him the flower. I think our hands met, but I'm not sure. We looked each other in the eye. It was as if I'd touched an electric fence. The world went white. I lost a few minutes of ordinary time.
    Later somebody said to me, He zapped you, huh? I saw you afterward, kind of standing there. Um, yeah, I said. And wandered away. Names are coming back to me now—it might have been somebody named Chris. Chris and Sonja, who were so in love they decided that they needed to give each other up. Tall, blond Chris, who worked on the roof, tiny, dark-haired Sonja, keeping to herself. I ate Oreos and watched her surreptitiously across the room in the basement dorm we shared. It was a mistake to think I had forgotten details. Is who I am now somehow a result of being charged, overloaded, by that single passing glance?
    I was taking to Diane in the heath food store the other day. She had just watched someone die. An old man, a jíbaro, from a long line of Culebrenses who talked in the old way, who remembered, or claimed to remember, the way things used to be. The man was bedridden, surrounded by family who did not want to see that he was dying—she said—for whom dying, it seemed, meant giving in, being subject to. Quieres sembrar cocos? they demanded. No? OK, then eat your food.
    What does it mean that to die is to go plant coconuts? That death holds pastoral boredom? Or unending labor? Is this a tropical heaven? Or a vision of hell?

Typical Culebra

"I'm begging to go to the beach. So, what can we do about that?"

Lori the librarian is seriously one of the nicest people on earth. Seriously.

Top of the world.

Since arriving in Culebra, Tallulah has fallen victim to a variety of fevers, colds, coughs, and fungal and staph infections. She has drunk bleach and eaten bread containing BHT. Now add to that list: Playing with the fruit of the most toxic plant on earth. That's right, good family fun was had today tossing manchineel fruit hither and yon in the gentle surf of Electric Beach. The fruits are like little green apples that float. Perfect for water games. Mom was intrigued by said fruits and peeled back the skin to sniff at the flesh. Hmm, I thought. Sweet. Tantalizingly so. I showed Tallulah the interesting large white seed within. (One of our hobbies, across the world, has been dissecting the local flora. And on occasion, fauna.) I saw more, scattered along the sand, and wandered around collecting them, intending to look them up in the field guide at “home.”
    Then a little voice in my head started to whisper. It's a little intuitive voice I have, and it's been there for a long time, probably thanks to the fact that when I was a little girl, my own mom used to take me out into the fields and woods and teach me the names of plants. And it was getting more urgent. It was saying, manchineel. Manchineel. This was after I'd lifted one of those sweet little fruits and brushed it ever so delicately against my lips, savoring its siren sweetness.
    Several minutes later I felt an uncomfortable sensation in my mouth, a certain numbness, a certain tightness, and I thought I could feel the right side of my body go slack and then my heart jolted, possibly with adrenaline, or just wrongness. I sat down.
    When we came back to the boat and looked it up, we found out that the Caribs used to poison their arrows with this stuff.
    Why am I quickly being disqualified as a parent? Well, partly because it's the full moon. Is there some Scorpio in this one, or some Aries? Astrologers, help me out here. I've been tense and edgy. I'm full of delusions of grandeur on the one hand, fear of failure on the other. I've been wearing myself out with thinking about how to make some money without sacrificing family life, because lately our finances have been like buffalo meat (you know, very healthy).
    So I'm in the process of finishing the next airport bestseller, but in the meantime I'll be launching my new business: Fear Grin Productions. Copyediting and Proofreading Services. No Job Too Large or Too Small. I'm a Virgo, ergo a perfectionist, and when you're talking about comma splices or “which” versus “that,” perfectionism is a good thing. (That comma before “because” in the previous paragraph? Technically, it shouldn't be there.) I'm considering this as a tagline: If there's one thing I can get right, it's your writing.
    (Curtain.)

   

Forty years ago, when the Marines were here, the economy of Culebra was heavily dependent on laboratory rats. The US government had set up a rat factory--this was their way of keeping the locals happy. Then they decided they wanted them unhappy. People were getting in the way of artillery shells, and bombs, and secret posts for listening to the ghostly whistling, the squawks and bleats of our friends and enemies flying, invisible, across the airwaves.
    The factory is by far the largest building in el pueblo. I can only imagine what is inside. That dim decay of abandoned offices, the laboratories where the rats were bred, the sterility necessary to places where life is experimented with.
    We went over. A couple of horses graze on the grounds. Tallulah had spotted them when we went foraging for mangoes one afternoon beside the fire station. The horses were eating green mangoes right off the tree. Their long, rubbery lips reached up, grappling with the crunch. They were also open to eating grass shoved through the chainlink fence. The next day, she insisted we return. She ran happily to the fence looking for horses, but they were nowhere in sight. When I explained, the local firemen said, They're back there. But is it safe? I asked. They looked at each other, shrugged and nodded. One of them pulled open the gate.
    So we wandered into the rat factory. We found the horses. We petted and discussed them. Then we left, because I couldn't get the flattened face of a woman I knew in New Orleans out of my head. She was kicked by a horse and the doctors never could fix her bones. It struck me that I may be unfit for modern life. I can find things to worry over even in the most innocuous, bucolic places. Then again, maybe this time it's to do with the posted warning signs, the industrial shower that accompanies a place where toxic substances collect, the odd metal cages. Maybe something's clinging to this odd intersection of manipulation and things bred to die that the simple practice of ordinary life has yet to overcome.

It seemed like an ordinary, well-intentioned act. Something responsible people would do, good for
everyone. Because even two of us can't do it alone. She hasn't played with other children in months. She can learn Spanish, how many times have I heard that kids this age are like sponges? I did the research and found a preschool approved by adults. But I can see it now, sort of—the way you see a gyrating disco lit by a strobe. There are women in hairnets issuing mysterious commands. The kids are speaking in tongues. And no one to love her, not really.
I finally understand why theater director Richard Schechner defined performance as “twice-behaved behavior.” Tallulah watches and then she acts. And acts out. She plays again on her little stage the dramas she has witnessed and been subject to. No, don't do that, she says to the kitten. Sientate. Eat. You can't go outside. And, later, I know it's hard. But you can do it.
I keep trying to write about the things that work beautifully about the way we live now—the unhurried ride to school in the dinghy, flowers and fruit and lizards, the symphony of language. Rainwater to wash dishes, a refrigerator running on sun. But the best part is that I can say I won't leave my child screaming in the arms of a stranger again, and mean it.

Going Places

any information

visitors


I read recently that travel can cause people to lose the core of themselves, to become disoriented and unsure, depressed. And I remember strange hotel rooms in my past--as a college student, for example, spending a few weeks in Mexico, not knowing the language, soon to be struck by monumental gastric illness but for now clutching a paperback, lying on a hard, flat bed covered by a thin wool blanket. Trying to think of something to do. And it occurred to me that over the past few years I have become what might be called seasoned. I have some technique for getting into things. A walk around, attuned to the sensuality of a new place. Its smells, the food, the heat or cool of it, the look of people, their expressions as we smile, knowing we are strangers. We are at a sort of loss here, but not a disadvantage. We look, wonderingly, to find the local culture. Knowing that we must begin with its most obvious and perhaps deceptive forms. A lacuna has opened in us and nature abhors a vacuum. Information pours in. Who knows what details will appear as the blur resolves into focus? And who knows how we will have changed after a month in this place? Four weeks--that seems to be the period which must elapse before a place will begin to reveal itself. During this time you will become a character in the play into which you have wandered, in medias res. You appear in a particular guise for its purposes: white, in our case, with apparently unplaceable North American accents, tanned and dressed in faded clothes. Arrived by boat. Carrying a small child. And you smile, with feeling, and offer money.

Culebra

Until the mid-seventies the marines were here, speaking their clipped language, that imperialist stutter, firing rounds into the azure of the sea, dropping bombs on the scented hillsides. We are here, rocking gently in the bay, the myopia of everyday life making ordinary things blur into each other and loom large. I came upon a little book in the bilge about the Virgin Islands, "in full color." The colors are the colors of remembered vacations, dreams, cookbooks with faded yet somehow vivid photographs of ham and cakes with soft billows of icing. A confection of experience, old sugar mills framed in bleeding heart vine, tourists beside a chlorine-blue hilltop resort pool, palm fronds pendent across the bright sails of beached dinghies in two-dimensional perfection. It is not only the lack of three dimensions but the silence that, against all odds, perfects. This is what I found out the other day when I dove into the reef. Suspended above the swaying coral--pale purple, yellow, olive--watching the fish move in their separate society, live rounds of ammunition crusted with life, I saw the clear blue underside of a wave. It bowed up like the mystifying sine curve from high school math, and I thought how obvious some things become if you examine them in their natural setting.

in paradise

Flying Circus in paradise
"coffee" in paradise
first day of preschool in paradise
non-native species in paradise
blue eyes in paradise
toe nails in paradise

One side of the hill browned and blackened, charred locusts at the edge of the burn, a high patch of cacti and tamarind still green, the road red dirt. A flock of young peacocks pecking in the dry, rocky ground rush across the charred landscape in their way, heads jerking. The road curves again, toward a house built in the West Indian style, like the houses planters built with European minds, their bodies moored in the New World–long, wide galleries and the lower floor set nearly into the dirt. In the distance the house looks empty, shuttered, the only movement a windvane turning in the lazy breeze. Everything brown and pale yellow, a sepia photograph, the gray pile of gravel meant for the new road standing out brightly against the stretch of burn and the shadowed house that seems to murmur to itself, saying things the earth tells it.

portrait w/ sunflowers

mmmm, salty

burdened vessel

jeeves, would you bring the car around?

T and Aunty Robin

Path of the Blazing Sarong stutters to life again, born, as usual, of frustration and wonderment. Without that feeling, it seems I have nothing to say. Since last November, I've devoted myself to the project of learning to write fiction, which is something I suck at. So, I haven't been writing much of anything else because that is so impossibly hard and takes all my willpower and time stolen from the rest of my life. This amorphous thing, motherhood, seems in fact to have unlocked any fragile/occasional talent (today is a day for pessimism, tristes tropiques), which is something I should write down. Anyway, my attempts to develop a plot recently devolved into a multiple choice game, one like How to Survive a Disaster, which I found in the children's section of the local library.
Why did the man disappear?
a) He was murdered.
b) He was having an affair.
c) No real reason--he was always unreliable.
I should have a firm grasp of whatever logic is at the heart of this story, and everything should be turning inevitably on that fulcrum, as solid as industrial steel, be taking shape as ineluctably as sea water turning into rain. The other world has to be real. Oh well.
Now we have passed through Tortola and Virgin Gorda, the bliss of coral sand and aquamarine the Caribbean sells. On an isolated beach across the sound from Richard Branson's private island, I rushed into the surf, which constantly renewed its clarity. Tallulah and I roamed the beach, finding shampoo bottles and shoes obscured by vegetation at the high tide mark.
Sea Wolf is back in Moorea, still for sale, and we've had the good luck to become custodians of a Bahamian ketch, a former charter boat 45 feet long and 14 feet wide. Headroom.
At the moment, and likely for months to come, we are anchored in a bay in Culebra next to the island's only town, called simply el pueblo, rather than the name Dewey which, unpleasant in English, was forced on this settlement by the US Marines. We've been here for two or three weeks and my knowledge is superficial. I walk past the small houses of families who might have lived on the island for a hundred years, their doors open to catch the night air, gathering words here and there, windows, or your sister, or a package of galletas, the everyday things that people say to each other and I feel the familiar longing to share in their understanding of what things mean, to be initiated so that the way the s's tumble off the ends of the words might perfectly express my own relation to the world. Tallulah used to go and stand next to people we'd encounter and look at them, waiting, as if to say, Tell me what you know. Give me your culture. I look on with the desperate irritation of unrequited love. And yet I find I have come to accept myself as bourgeois, occasionally amusing, and awkward. It fits as comfortably as anything else, one of my disguises.