Voyager: Travel Writings (5 page)

Seen from the bow of
Big Bird,
Anguilla, a pale pink and light green hummock lying low in the water, resembled not at all the eel that Columbus on his first sail-by thought it resembled and named it after. Like Anegada in the British Virgins, it is a coral island, not volcanic, surrounded by shallow reefs and long beaches
with sand as white and soft as talc. The island is windblown and dry, and the economy is defined by the sea—commercial fishing, sailing, and, of course, beaching. There were a half-dozen small hotels and even a few new resorts, like the chic and luxurious Malliouhana, most of them clustered near the settlements of West End and Sandy Ground. In the late 1980s, large-scale tourism had not yet taken root here, and the local population sounded ambivalent about its coming. They needed the income that tourism and new construction would bring—every Anguillan male, besides being a fisherman, seemed to be an unemployed stonemason and carpenter as well. But the Anguillans had seen what had happened to Dutch Sint Maarten and were not eager to follow suit.

The island is, after all, very small—thirty-five square miles, less than the land area of a New England township—with barely seven thousand people back then, many of whom lived off-island, working illegally and sending money back to family in Anguilla, where they fully expected to return in a few years to fish or drive a taxi to the beaches and the hotels from the landing at Blowing Point. All over Anguilla, neat cinder-block bungalows under slow one-man construction attested to young couples’ long-range family plans.

In the 1980s Anguilla was essentially a country village that happened to be an island with four or five spectacular beaches. But my mood had changed. I was not happy here. If all one wanted out of the Caribbean was a week or two lying in powdery sand and bathing in water clear enough to read through, this was the place to be. But if, like me, one was not a sun worshiper and found Caribbean country villages boring or impenetrable, as they usually are to outsiders, and if an arid landscape with little more than sea grapes, prickly pears, and other types of cacti clinging to it was tedious to one’s eye, then one might want to limit his stay to a day or two before moving on down the archipelago.

The truth is, while on Anguilla I became inexplicably restless and dissatisfied. When I remembered that I had not finished my
account of my first marriage, my mood was no longer inexplicable. Unfinished business: it always makes me restless and dissatisfied. I had not told Chase how my marriage to Darlene had ended and had not acknowledged to myself that I did not want to tell her that story. I was courting Chase, remember? It’s not a good idea when courting a woman to reveal how selfish and hard-hearted one was when young. She might suspect that possibly, even well into deep middle age, one is still selfish and hard-hearted. I did not know if she believed that a man’s character was capable of change. I was not even sure I believed it myself. So I kept silent on the subject and tried to hide my anxiety as much from myself as from Chase, and instead focused on the logistics of the transition from Anguilla back to Sint Maarten and on to Saba.

In the distance, we saw Saba, a green cone surrounded by a turquoise sea, looking like a volcanic island rising out of the South Pacific. From the air, Mount Scenery (aptly named), three thousand feet high, made the island look as tall as it was wide and long. A lower ring of mountains plummeted straight into the sea below, where we could make out huge black rocks and crashing waves. Not a beach in sight. And then we saw the landing strip, no bigger than a basketball court, stuck out on a promontory with sheer cliffs at both ends and a long drop to the sea.

Scary, especially in a rattling old STOL. I was seated just behind the pilot and over his shoulder had his view of the approach, which I’d rather not have had: we were headed straight for a rock wall when suddenly he cut the engine back almost to a stall, and we dropped and then skidded to a stop a few feet from the precipice.

It’s a Dutch island, a five-square-mile circle with just over a thousand residents, mostly fishermen and subsistence farmers, and four tiny villages. The population was approximately half black and half white, and there appeared to be no racial tension between them. Whites and blacks alike tipped their hats and smiled and
greeted one another equally. Everything about Saba was miniaturized, squeaky clean, and green. The half-dozen tourists we passed appeared to be day-trippers from Sint Maarten. Like us, they gawked at the scenery, which was enchanting, climbed the thousand steps to the top of Mount Scenery for an otherworldly view of the entire island, and descended for a simple lunch at one of the two or three pleasant outdoor restaurants. You could see it all in a half day, which is what most visitors chose to do, and return to the discos and gaming tables in Sint Maarten.

But you wouldn’t have penetrated the quaint surface of the place to the interesting microsociety that existed beneath it. For 250 years, fewer than a thousand white and black Sabans have lived on this tiny island side by side without the presence of tourism and the tortured history of the slave-powered plantation system to dehumanize the residents and their descendants and threaten the island’s fragile ecology. It was idyllic, a pocket-sized tropical province made possible because the inhabitants could grow enough to feed themselves year-round and thus needed to import very little, with nothing left over to sell to foreigners—no sugarcane, no white sandy beaches, no drugs, no bauxite, no oil. There was, therefore, no crime and no overweening wealth and no apparent poverty. The soil was fertile, the climate perfectly suited to the natural bodily needs and physical comfort of
Homo sapiens
. Most Sabans lived in small, neat white hillside cottages with gingerbread eaves and red tile roofs and a kitchen garden in back. The Sabans we met were shy, but hospitable and curious once they knew that we had more than a day-tripper’s interest in their island. There was a single narrow road paved with hand-cut stones that wound across the island from the airfield and passed through the four settlements (one can’t call them towns or even villages) of Upper Hell’s Gate, Windwardside, St. John’s, and the Bottom. Until the late 1940s, when the road was built, everyone walked everywhere. Most people, despite the recent availability of ten rental cars, still walked everywhere.

We set up at Scout’s Place, one of the four or five small bed-and-breakfast guesthouses, run by Scout Thirkield, an expatriate American who had left Sint Maarten twenty-five years earlier because it was too crowded, whose cook, Diana, served wholesome, spicy West Indian food in an open-air dining room with grand views of the hills and the sea fifteen hundred feet below. This was the late-twentieth-century expatriate’s fantasy of the Caribbean, where the last few centuries seem almost not to have happened. Saba looked and felt outside time, at least modern time, like a Benedictine monastery in Tuscany or a Shaker settlement in rural New Hampshire.

Later that first evening, as we walked beneath wide swaths of stars from Scout’s Place downhill to the settlement of Windwardside, I silently mused that if I ever wished to escape my past or, indeed, my present, I could slip away to the Dutch island of Saba. Yes, I could rent a little house on the side of a hill just beyond one of the villages. Perhaps the very hill we are now descending. I might plant a vegetable garden behind my house—maybe that whitewashed stucco cottage over there in the moonlight beside the road. To pay for my few living expenses I can learn from Scout’s chef, Diana, how to cook creole style and open a four-table restaurant in the shaded terrace. Once a month the packet boat or plane from Sint Maarten will bring me a replacement batch of books from the lending library in Philipsburg and batteries and tubes for my Hallicrafters two-way shortwave radio and a stack of English-language newspapers. I might begin a benign, low-key love affair with a Saban widow who has taken over her late husband’s position as the island postmaster. Our love affair will gradually intensify, until either the widow moves in with me or I move into her whitewashed cottage down in the settlement. Then the question of marriage will arise . . .

My past and my present will have caught up with me again. My longing for escape will have begun again.

If one is an escape artist, and one has finally managed successfully to escape—to the island of Saba, for instance—where does one
run to then? Is it an infinite egress? I was surprised that even here, in the company of the woman I hoped would become my fourth wife, I had seduced myself for the hundredth time, if only briefly, into inventing a story about the possibility and pleasure of running away from my interlocked past and present and the future they portended.

My compulsion, if that’s what it was, momentarily embarrassed me. Perhaps that’s why I was able to summon the courage to resume telling Chase the true story of the end of my first marriage. Or maybe I sincerely believed that, despite my past and slowly fading escapist fantasy of the present, this time my future really would be different, and thus I could risk revealing my past. Maybe, now that I had fallen in love with Chase, I was at last no longer an escape artist.

There was no way in this for me to make myself look good—or even mildly sympathetic—and still tell what happened. Or what I thought happened. Or, on the island of Saba some twenty-eight years later, what I remembered as having happened. Or now, more than a half century later, what I imagine happened. But these were the indisputable facts. In May 1960, Darlene gave birth to our daughter, whom we named Leona. In September 1960, Darlene and Leona left Boston by Greyhound for Darlene’s parents’ home in Pinellas Park, Florida. Or was it November 1960? Or December? I don’t remember. I do know that I was still twenty years old and Darlene was still nineteen. I tried, and am trying again now, fifty-five years later, to recall how I made this take place, how, without my leaving our small, one-bedroom, third-floor apartment on Peterborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay, I managed to abandon my teenaged wife and infant daughter.

But except for that deep knowledge—that it’s I who was responsible for it, that Darlene did not want to leave me or the city of Boston and the hardscrabble, bohemian life we had made for ourselves there, and did not want to raise our child without me beside her—I have almost no sequential, linked memories of the events of
that summer and fall. I know only that somehow I managed to convince her to return to her parents in Florida and raise our daughter there alone. I did not abandon my wife and daughter; I drove them away.

Over the years I have retained only isolated, disconnected scenes and images. If I tried to connect them now it would create a false narrative. I told Chase that I remembered packing and shipping Darlene’s and the baby’s clothing and bedding and photograph albums and the other personal possessions that she had asked for. We owned very little else: furniture mostly found on the street, a mattress on the floor, some Sears and Roebuck pots and pans, minimal kitchenware, a record player, books and records, many of them stolen. I remembered weeping guilty tears as, alone in the apartment, I sealed the boxes and wrote Darlene’s married name and her parents’ Florida address on the labels, and on the return labels my name and our Peterborough Street address.

It was as if I had leaped from a cliff and was now in free fall, my life controlled solely by the force of gravity. Memories and desires and fears flashed past as I plummeted—not falling to earth, but out into deep space, as if drawn neither up nor down but away by the irresistible gravitational pull of an uncharted black hole located light-years beyond my personal planet. It was the first time, and by no means the last, that I had deliberately rejected the forces that had taken control of my life.

No, that’s not quite true. I had done it at least twice before. Trial runs, as it were. Practice launches. In fact, my mother liked telling friends and strangers alike that even as a baby I was a runaway: in San Diego during the war, when my father was attached to the naval base there and I was three years old, I managed to untie the rope that she’d used to leash me to the back porch banister while she tended to my baby brother Steve inside, and rode my tiny tricycle across a four-lane highway into a cemetery where the police finally found me dipping VFW flags in a puddle. It was a story she enjoyed telling. And I have a clear memory of bicycling at the age
of nine from our tenement apartment in downtown Concord, New Hampshire, five miles to the airport, where I planned to stow away on an outgoing flight to . . . where? I remember only the impulse and what it drove me to, not the plan, and the Concord police catching up with me at the airport. Perhaps I had no plan, no chart or map, only an impulse, liftoff, aimed at no destination other than the whole wide endless sky.

In April 1956, my mother and her four abandoned children were living in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Two weeks after I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license, my high school pal Dario Morelli and I stole his father’s 1953 Oldsmobile 88 and lit out for the territory, heading west by southwest on Route 66. Eight weeks later, after a lengthy stop to raise gas money by working the night shift flipping burgers at a White Tower in Amarillo, Texas, we pulled up at the Pacific Ocean in Pasadena, where we got a room at the YMCA and jobs selling shoes at a Thom McAns. This time I had a plan. Morelli and I were planning to escape to Australia, but it wasn’t clear what or whom we were trying to escape from—our recently glimpsed fates, I suppose. Then one Sunday Morelli, who was Catholic, went to Mass and confessed to the priest what we had done, and the priest turned us in to the Pasadena police. Morelli’s father did not press charges, and we had enough gas money to drive the Olds back to him. Morelli got sent to military school, and I managed to make up three months’ lost high school homework in the remaining few weeks of the semester. The escapade became a line item in my academic record, however, and kept me from being offered a scholarship at Yale. But at Colgate University, where the administration was trying to broaden the student demographic without admitting too many blacks or Jews, my white, Presbyterian, fatherless family’s extreme poverty embellished my SAT scores and athletic achievements sufficiently that I was given a free ride—room and board and full tuition and a grant for books.