When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (12 page)

There were a lot of vacations we took after the Grand Canyon trip . . . vacations that could have made us look better in print. There were rare moments when we actually functioned like a close family. But I chose the raft trip for a reason.

This was the summer of our discontent with one another. We didn't hang out together. We rarely talked or ate with one another. We didn't even seem to need one another. But we survived it. (I gained three pounds and lost four toenails.) But something important was happening to us on this trip that we didn't even realize was happening.

For the first time we could remember, we were a family who gave one another space to be ourselves. We had never done that before. It was as if we all knew that this was the end of a chapter in our lives and the beginning of a new one. The umbilical cord that had bound us together as a unit for nearly two decades was about to be severed. I realized for the first time it was as frightening for our teenagers to contemplate as it was for us as parents. They had been dealing with it with hostility. We had countered with one last rush of superiority.

From that day on, our lives would all turn in different directions. In many ways it was like the Colorado River. It would wind and twist with a promise of a new experience at each turn of the bend. There would be smooth waters for long stretches, then suddenly a patch of rough rapids that would test us and take away our control. It would demand everything we had to hang on and get back on course again.

We had had hours on the trip to think and to observe one another away from stereos, telephones, schedules, friends, and conversations that sounded more like bulletins. What better place than the solitude of a river.

It would be several years before we planned another family vacation. We all had a lot of thinking and growing up to do ... a lot of things to prove to ourselves. But strangely, this was the trip that we all talk about and remember, the pictures we pore over in family albums. We have never said it to one another, but it was the last summer of the child . . . the last summer of the parents. From that day on, all moved to become contemporaries.

“Let Me Entertain You”

I live in Arizona where tourism is big business.

One night at one of our popular cowboy steak houses, I watched a group of visiting Japanese men. They had watched a shoot-out, visited a saloon, and allowed themselves to be photographed wearing cowboy hats and six-shooters over their hips. When they sat down to dinner, one of them must have ordered his steak well-done, because he was served a dusty boot on a plate. Just as their steak knives were poised over their meat, a waitress came by with a pair of scissors and cut all their neckties in half. They just sat there—not speaking—as she stapled half of their ties to the ceiling with their calling cards.

They had to wonder how we won the war.

Countries are not unlike hosts and hostesses. The first thing they try to do for visitors is to entertain them. Historic sites and cathedrals are a given, but they want to send you home with something you will remember.

I have discovered most guides who want you to have a good time put you on the back of an animal and take your picture. It doesn't matter what kind of an animal: camel, mule, horse, or elephant. Anything, so long as it terrifies the rider.

We aren't in a country twelve hours before we are perched on the back of some beast of burden. We rode mules to the top of Henri Christophe's Citadel in Haiti and mules down narrow paths in Greece's Santorini. On Easter Island, we rode them wild.

If you want to see the enchanted ruins of Petra in Jordan, you barter for a mule the size of a dog with a little wooden saddle and a raggy blanket. At the end of an hour you feel like a wishbone at a Thanksgiving dinner.

Like the Japanese in cowboy hats, guides enjoy nothing better than dressing you up and taking your picture.

In Jordan, my husband was outfitted in Yasir Arafat headgear. He looked like an Irishman wearing a tablecloth. In Zimbabwe, we wore diseased animal skins and danced around a campfire with shields and spears. In Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, we posed as a Viking couple with horns growing out of our heads. And in Australia, I have a picture of a koala bear zonked out of its mind from the eucalyptus leaves hanging around my neck.

Every country comes alive for tourists after dark. New Zealand's Maori dancers stand in front of your face and stick out their tongues like serpents, and you don't know what happiness is until you've sat through a comedy store in Rio where all the jokes are told in Portuguese.

Many countries you visit like to enlighten you on their history with a musical pageant. This happened in Ireland. Normally, it might be the hottest ticket in town. But when you have just flown for eight hours, climbed on a bus, and been fed an eight-course banquet in a castle, it is not high on your list of things to do.

I knew I was in trouble when they opened the presentation with the arrival of the Celts in 300 B.C. I was hoping for something more current, like the visit of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

By the time the Danes pillaged the land in 1014 and the potato crop failed in 1846-47, I had dozed off. I didn't wake up until Padraig Pearse led the final uprising in 1916 and brought independence to the country.

Folk dances are popular. So are cabarets, ballets, and circuses. Inhibitions are thrown to the wind. You'll never see these people again, so you put on a hula skirt and shimmy or stand on stage and yodel with a Swiss band.

I have made an absolute fool of myself in most of the major capitals of the world. I'm a tourist and I act like one.

Every country has its share of comics. At the Folies-Bergere I was sitting near the stage when the emcee leaned over with a blinding spotlight following him and said, “Madame, would you be so kind as to seal this envelope for me?” I stuck out my tongue to lick the flap and he announced loudly, “Ah, I see you are French.”

In Istanbul, it was Shecky Abdul. His entire act was to play an international audience by drawing them on the stage and having them set their respective cultures back two hundred years.

One must look upon all of this as a growth experience—performed before people you will never see again.

There's a bar in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico where they string you up by your feet, hoist you into the air, and you hang upside down next to a cardboard marlin who is wearing dark glasses and holding a fishing pole while they snap your picture. You have to ask yourself, “Do I need to have this good a time?”

Antiquity

The big thing to remember about “antiquity” is that it is never found close to the parking lot. I don't care if it's an old monastery, a fort, a ruin, a city, or an old pot, you have to walk a country mile to see it.

I respect history as much as the next person, but to climb eight hundred forty steps to lie on your back and kiss a stone that doesn't kiss you back is not a must-see on my itinerary.

The fact that Americans drag around the world by the busloads to glimpse the past probably has something to do with the youth of our own country. We revere anything older than George Burns.

My husband, a former history teacher, is disposed to read every single sign on every single exhibit in every single museum. If there is a button to activate a voice, he will push it. If there is a guide who will explain how paint dries, he will listen. If there is a mountaintop where he can view Islamic graffiti, he will scale it.

I gave Stonehenge ten minutes.

It's not that I don't respect age. I respect anything that has been through children and is still standing. A mother cannot view the Acropolis without observing that if just once the Athens jousting team had won the city championship, they would have trashed that site in ten minutes and there would be nothing left to see. It's just that you have to pay such exorbitant prices. I didn't mind taking a train ride to see Machu Picchu in Peru, a cable car to visit Masada in Israel, or a cab ride to walk among Jordan's Roman ruins at Gerash. But those are exceptions. Most trips to antiquity are death marches. I spent a half day crawling up a mountain of cinders in Indonesia to do what? To stare into a hole called Krakatau. It looked exactly like the big hole I stared into in Italy called Vesuvius. The problem is I don't see a volcano all year. Then for two weeks, that's all I see, and I get burned out.

Same with museums. Same with churches. Same with ruins.

My husband and I do not look for the same things on these trips. He is focused, asks questions about the size of the bricks and the date the cathedral was restored. He maintains a diary of where he has been and what he has seen.

My observations include the IQs of women who wear heels on these excursions, how late the gift shop will remain open, and how do we know if Mary, the mother of God, really lived in that house? Did they find monogrammed towels marked BM for Blessed Mother?

I get the feeling that in many countries, especially those in the Mideast, male guides are put off by Western women's assertiveness and independence. They are used to women in a subservient role who wear gray, keep their mouths shut, and hang on to every male word.

Never was it more obvious than our visit to Ephesus, a group of Roman ruins in Turkey. At ten in the morning the temperature was 104 degrees. Our guide was a history buff who never tired of telling long, complicated stories about each rock. The word “menopause” had no meaning for him. Every two minutes he would stop and launch into a long historical harangue in Michener-like fashion, going all the way back to 88 B.C. Somehow he must have sensed that he did not have my complete attention. As he lectured, I was either searching for a restroom or a water fountain. From time to time I would stalk a bird to catch its shade when it landed. As I collapsed on a rock bench in the amphitheater, he said, “I have a story that will interest you.” I brightened.

“This is the spot where Artemis-Cybele was worshipped,” he said. “They were a group of women who were dedicated warriors—archetypal women's libbers.” He paused and his eyes met mine. “These women had sex with men once a year so that the race might not die out. The male children were left to die at birth.” He had my attention. “Artemis is always shown as an Amazon,” he continued, “one breast bare, the peplum draped over the right shoulder to hide the scar where the other breast had been cut off to allow full freedom for the bow arm.” I nodded blankly. “But then you could relate to that.” He smiled.

I looked down at my own bust and wondered what he meant by a crack like that. And all that because I opened my own car door.

When the opportunity came up for a trip to Greece, my husband was ecstatic.

“Don't you want to see the site of the first marathon?” he asked. I shook my head.

“Don't you want to see the Temple of Apollo at Delphi where the oracles hung out?” I said no.

“Do you want to die without seeing something older than yourself?”

We got a guide who was right out of central casting. He wore a cap and a scarf under his tweed jacket, and he puffed on a pipe he could never keep lit.

He had a way of demanding your complete attention when he spoke. As we filed on and off buses at each historic site, I felt like I was in the fourth grade on a field trip to a power plant. I was becoming paranoid that everyone on the tour had asked a question except me and he knew it. I knew that one day when I least suspected it, he would glare at me and ask, “You! The one with the Dixie cup of ice! How do you think the excavations at the palace of Knossos, Gortyna, compare with those of Phaistos in the Mesara?”

More than once our eyes had met. We were in Thebes and down to the last day before returning to Athens. The pressure was more than I could bear. My time was running out. There were perhaps thirty of us standing around when there was a silence and he looked straight at me and asked, “Have you no questions?”

He didn't want to hear my real questions. Since I had arrived in Greece, I wondered why all the male nude statues were missing the same sexual biological appendage. What happened to all of them? Were they stored somewhere? Were the museums denied funds until they removed them? Did the militant Amazon women of Turkey hold their convention in Greece? Was it the first thing to crumble? What?

Instead, I said quietly, “Does this lion I'm leaning against have any historical significance?”

Thirty people stiffened in anticipation of what was coming. He glared at me for several seconds before he spoke. Then he said, “You were not paying attention. I told you not two seconds ago it marks Thebes' defeat by Philip of Macedonia in 338.”

I mentioned my husband keeps a diary. To show you how crazy Americans can get over antiquity, we were in Spain and someone in the bakery one day mentioned a great old church called St. Lucas. We got in the car and my husband handed me a sheaf of papers from a yellow legal tablet with directions on how to get there. Fasten your seat belts.

Go NW from Palagrugel—C-255 (road to Le Bisbal)

About 5 k turn rt. to torrent—3k to dead end

Turn left to pals (14c castle/tower)

Continue on NW plus RV. ter to Torrdella (13 castle/view)

Return same road to RV ter. Turn it. at once!

At Serra de Daro turn left to Ullestret (11 c church)

Continue on to Vulpellach (14 c castle)

Take Main Rd. rt. W. to Le Bisbal, go left SW to Cruilles. 1st rd. to Cassia de la Selva. Same direction next rd. turn r. to San Saduri to Monella (?)

Turn south to S. Sebastian—Then La Franc (lighthouse) to Callella to Cabo Roig.

A footnote. When we arrived, St. Lucas was closed. The church was built in 1936. We were born before that.

Sick

There is nothing more miserable in this world than to arrive in paradise looking like your passport picture.

Yet our doctor will bear us out on this. Our entire medical file is composed of vacation-induced maladies, injuries, and mysterious fevers. We return from a trip sicker than we left. His medical opinion is that if we don't stop relaxing and start staying home, travel will eventually kill us.