Going Places

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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

chocolate cake

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