What we've been doing lately

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.

We' ve been attending the weekly "Tahitian dance show" at the Club Bali Hai here in Baie de Cook. Every Wednesday the plastic chairs under the palm trees fill with honeymooners and timesharers, their faces eager, expectant. I think of Captain Cook's sailors leaping into their rowboats and making for these same verdant shores, brownskinned women beckoning from the beaches. The beat of the drums accelerates and the dancers appear, their sexuality unembarrassed, sly, hilarious. Young girls are adorned with fragrant couronnes de fleurs, holding bouquets of ferns like castanets. The dancers smile at each other, singing, playing to the audience but mostly caught up in a world of their own making from which we are joyously excluded. During the audience participation segment near the end of the performance, awkward and untrained westerners become the stiff colonial mirrors of the dancers' vivid jerks and fluid rotations. Tourists who want to unbend, who, prodded by the dancers (“You get up here, now!” the MC barks one evening at a reluctant young man in the back. “And you too!”) sway, a little drunk, goggling at the energetic bursts of their native partners, unable to, even uninterested in controlling their self-conscious expressions. Is the point of this to shame or to liberate? To liberate through shame? And those eighteenth-century perfumed Tahitians, what were they thinking as they welcomed Cook's hungry, unwashed crew? Tallulah leaps from her chair, rushing to an open space in which she spins. As the dancers exit she runs across the grassy expanse of the performance space, lit by a crescent moon under the black cliffs, gathering the waxen frangipani blossoms that tumbled from the dancers' sinous bodies. (The frangipani has no economy, is profligate with its scent, lies broken on the roadsides after heavy wind.) Nelly is on duty at the reception desk tonight. She often wanders, chainsmoking, shouting into her cellphone. I try to pay her but she waves my money away. “Bof!” she says, as if we are old friends.

Walking alongside the market in Papeete, its high-ceilinged acres, I glimpsed tiers of mangoes, unattended, on tables in the dim warmth of late afternoon. I went toward them, stopped, stood waiting for someone to appear. “Tiare!” a voice called from the shadows, and in a moment a vision burst forth, one arm upraised, fingers snapping as if the aisle between the clusters of mangoes were the runway of a Harlem drag ball. “Oui?” she inquired with a moue, a raised eyebrow, having caught all the laughter in the world, just barely. So radiant that I stumbled over my words, trying to explain that I wanted some mangoes, not too green. She chose three for me, palpating them gently, putting them into a plastic bag. As she disappeared again the way she had come, she called to me over her shoulder. “If you want them to ripen quickly,” she said, “keep them in the shadows. Les fruits mûrissent le soir." Fruit ripens at night.

At the Musee Boutique, He'e T'ai Inn, Nuku Hiva
Watch out for the dog. She bites. Don't let her come up behind you.
Welcome.
Yes, that's a canoe they used in "Survivor."
I have some beautiful pieces. Such a shame you didn't come here with your mother-in-law.
Oh, I've been collecting for years.
Well, my husband brought me here thirty-five years ago to do research. We came by sailboat. From California.
We just fell in love with these islands. My husband and I built the hotel. You know, we opened the Marquesas to tourism.
Everyone came to happy hour. We had island dancing, pig roasts—that’s what I became famous for.
After he died sixteen years ago, I sold it.
But I'm going to start a First Class California Motel on the hill up there.
It's in those shipping containers.

"Mars"

Today we visited a building in Tucson where U of A scientists are orchestrating the latest space hoax--a spaceship on Mars, suuuuuure. We thought it would be educational for Tallulah to see how these kind of games are played with the American public. It was also the last day the place was open to the public before they shipped their demo model off to the Smithsonian. During an animated video (why couldn’t they show us the real video????) we caught glimpses of several tells.



Notice the green rope clearly visible in our un-doctored photo. Case closed.

Here’s the take home: if we can pretend to put a man on the moon and a robot on Mars, surely we can build a real car that gets 300mpg.

We return from Guadalajara on La Linea más Cómoda. The little girl in front of us keeps coughing extravagantly without covering her mouth (I never really cared about this before!) while her little brother screams. The man behind us coughs in a lower register. We don't know it yet but we're getting what they have. Somehow I feed the baby while we’re swinging down the curving highway above Manzanillo. Back in Barra, mosquitos fall on us joyfully. A hurricane passed through while we were away. We open the door and find mold growing on the bed. It’s on kitchen utensils and the big pot we cook pasta in. There are probably four different kinds of ants living in our room. I think they were all here before, but now they seem to have asserted the inevitable rights of the natural world over the veneer of human habitation. A giant black and yellow beetle and a huge spider crawl along the tiles.

Somehow a bug has drilled through this can of pineapple, acquired in Bahía Tortugas, halfway down the Baja peninsula. At the time I wondered why Adam would buy canned pineapple in Mexico. Some vestigial memory of life in western New York, where his mom bought canned pineapple at the Shurfine, and he would eat the acid sweet rings right out of the can?


And this stuff is still here. All the way from Berkeley. It sounds innocuous—Sunflower seed butter, kind of weird, but no red flags. It tastes like sweet dirt--forget that, it puts the butt back in butter, this stuff is NASTY.


We have new neighbors for a week. They're Canadian. They hang out in the palapa drinking beer and chainsmoking. I hear the woman shout at her husband, "That guy saw you and he fell on his ass laughing!" maybe ten times at the end of a long day of tequila and cerveza. Tourist Mexico at its best.


The baby keeps them up at night.

Burping is hard.

When they leave, everyone goes outside.



Except me. I've spent over a week being cooped up in this apartment because I can't figure out how to use the damn baby carriers and plus it's like a million degrees out there. I remember shortly after she had her baby my friend Kathleen said, "I just want to go to Starbucks." I really want to go to Starbucks--though downtown Barra will do.

If we lived here, we might pay our parking tickets

They say, here in Santa Barbara, that the Santa Barbara Courthouse is "the most beautiful courthouse in America"; everything looks like it should be in a movie (about heroic Spanish explorers, with stilted dialogue spoken by tan white people). Judges are movie stars, and maybe the outlaws are movie stars too. All this was designed after the "real" (Victorian) downtown Santa Barbara was destroyed by an earthquake in 1925, and civic boosterism bursts from the "educational" murals. In the Meeting Room, tourists can walk around and take pictures even when there's a meeting going on. I tried not to accidentally insert myself into the commemorative photos of a commitment ceremony and a quinceañera as I wandered, imagining myself enthusiastically heading to my court date.

Tiny Seawolf rests in the shadow of the great mountain

After my attempt to infiltrate Hearst Castle on foot failed, we took the bus up the hill for a tour. The driver told us to be on the lookout for strange animals.

We had decided on Tour #2, which meant you got to see Hearst's mistress's bedroom. And Hearst's own bathroom scale. In his dustless dressing room, a pink silk nightshirt hangs. But Hearst's beloved Castle seems almost empty of echoes. I was listening hard, in between trying to figure out if the tour guide was going to give us any good dirt. As she gestured toward dull tomes and ancient Greek drinking cups in the guest library, with a rustle of skirts a blonde starlet, hearing something herself, quickly put down her hard-backed volume and rose up from the couch, vanishing.

Seawolf vs. Hearst Castle

One night, we went to bed and everything was fine. Our things were neatly stowed. Clean. Tidy. It was hard to figure out what went wrong. Could we also wreak havoc in Hearst Castle?