When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (15 page)

“Are we evacuating ship?” I yelled after him.

“I hope not,” he shouted back.

Disappointed, I fell back into bed. It was that kind of a day.

An announcement was made later that someone had been smoking in the exercise room (how's that for irony?) and set off the smoke alarm that triggered the bells to abandon ship. It was my last hope of getting off alive.

It soon became evident that other than the breathtaking views that surrounded us, the riches of Alaska were making themselves invisible to us. At the Iliasi Pass, we were promised a peek at fresh lava flows ... if the weather was clear. It wasn't. We were teased with a chance to buy Tlingit art at a museum in Klawock. It was closed. We were to tour Cordova for a view of the Million Dollar Bridge. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of it had been carried away by moving glaciers. By the hour, the fishermen became more surly and the nature people more moody. The flora and fauna people began to drink.

Every morning when we met for briefings, it was like ninety siblings who all should have been an only child. On about the twelfth day, the leader announced, “We'll drop off the fishermen at 1430. At 1600 we'll combine the other two groups to tour a totem park and a fish hatchery. There will also be a performance of traditional dancing.”

That was agreeable to the nature people, but the wildlife people became quite ugly. They were promised a film on the Kittiwake Rookeries, which seemed to settle them down. However, when the fishermen were picked up at 1930 and still had not caught fish, the resource person for fishing was fired on the spot. These people played hardball.

“Where is he?” I asked my husband.

“Gone.”

“But we're out on open seas in the middle of nowhere.” I could only assume he was set adrift on a floating iceberg because we never saw him again.

I hung out with all three groups. I sat in a zodiac in a cold rain for three hours and watched a brown spot on shore that half of the group said was a black bear. The other half said it was a tree stump. When it didn't move for three hours, I changed my vote to the tree stump theory.

I found the bird people to be quite extraordinary. Some of them kept track of the number of birds they spotted. I calculate I saw more in an hour from the fantail of the ship following the garbage than they did in two weeks. One day one of them was quite excited about a dark bird with a seven-foot wingspan. It turned out to be a mosquito.

I guess my favorite group would have to be the fishermen. You have to admire these people who are willing to go the distance for their sport. They'd sit around the table and spin stories of how they could taste the salmon they were going to catch in the months to come. My only experience with fishermen had been on the early Saturday morning television shows. There was always some guy named Bubba standing up in the boat with not another single boat around him. He had a friend named Roy who talked constantly and would say things like, “I never kissed a fish with bad breath, did you, Bubba?” And they'd laugh. Every time their lines hit the water, they got a strike. Every time.

It wasn't like that for the fishermen in Alaska. They would sit in the boat for hours at a time. One day one of the men got a hook caught in his lip. I would have been air-evac'ed under heavy sedation to the Mayo Clinic for a week. Not him. He just reached up and said to his wife, “Give me a hand with this, Bev.”

One morning as my husband pulled on his fishing boots he said, “What are you going to do at Cordova?”

“I think I'm going with the A group and watch glaciers calve (I have no idea what that is) from the Million Dollar Bridge. On the other hand, the B group is going to tour a salmon sonar counter station.”

“Why don't you come with the C group? We're going trout fishing and maybe have a bear sighting at Clear Creek.”

“Someone said the A group is hiking McKiley Lake Trail and will meet both B and C on the bridge,” I said. “Besides, the B group is really going to get ticked off if the C group sights a bear and they don't.”

“The C group didn't complain when the A group dragged everyone to their stupid rain forest with the B group,” he growled.

“The A group really gets on your nerves,” I said.

“You're the A group,” he said.

I was losing it.

All of this sounds grim, but somehow I have a strange feeling that in terms of an expedition, this cruise was a roaring success. People on these trips expect to suffer. It's part of the adventure. Part of the seduction. Could you come back from planting a flag on the summit of Mount Everest without frostbite? Could you find the mouth of the Nile without getting malaria? Could you return home from a fishing expedition to Alaska with salmon that didn't cost $516.12 a pound?

On the last day, as we were on our way to Prince Rupert, both of us were once again in our beds nauseated beyond belief from the rolling seas. In a few hours all of this would be a bad memory. I rolled over and said to my husband, “Do you know what I am going to do before we make port?”

“What?” he asked.

“I'm going to do something on behalf of all these poor unfortunates who survived on this bucket for two weeks. I am going to leave this cabin, march straight to the captain's deck, take his palm tree out of the pot, and throw it overboard. Then I am going to knock on his door and announce, 'Captain! I have just thrown your—'”

“You're not going to do that,” he said tiredly.

He was right. I didn't do that.

But there hasn't been a day since that I don't hate myself for not doing it.

Working Vacations

Combining work and play on a vacation never worked for me. Doctors are good at it. They go on a cruise, swim all morning, and laze around the pool. Around two, they attend a lecture on how to treat “Statement Printout Anxiety” and later view a style show on paper gowns. They dance until two a.m. and write the whole thing off.

On a couple of occasions, I have been lured into doing a book tour in some country where I am promised some free time on my own. In your dreams. You try to sell books to 3 million sheep in New Zealand and tell me how much time you have to relax.

A few books ago, I toured Australia and New Zealand for a month. Beginning at Perth, I worked my way across Australia's 2,966,200 square miles.

Do you think I saw Mel Gibson? Colleen McCullough? Or Crocodile Dundee throwing a few shrimp on the barbie? Get real.

I saw one koala bear with runny eyes, bubbling sulfa at Rotorua, a staged Maori dance at the hotel, a geothermal plant, and two kangaroos from the car. Oh yes, I bumped into Jim Nabors and Jackie Collins on a talk show.

It was the same in London. I heard people talk of a place where you could see the crown jewels of Britain. I heard there was a beautiful river Thames that ran through the city and that the queen lived in a palace with guards at the gate.

I didn't so much as get to the hat factory where they made all those hats that Princess Di and Fergie wear to deliver their babies in. Where was I? I was inside a building called the BBC. Every morning I would sit in a little room by myself with a pair of headphones. When a little red light went on, I would say, “Good morning, Ireland” or “Good morning, Wales” and I would talk about my book. For that, I shaved my legs.

It is rare when your work takes you to a place you really want to go. It is doubly rare when your reason for being there opens doors to you that you would never get through if you were on holiday.

Such was the case with Russia.

Russia

When my husband and I made our first trip to Russia in 1977, the journey had all the giddiness of being extradited to a Georgia penal institution. We were guarded closely, counted every time we went to the bathroom, and sequestered by Intourist services. God forbid we would see or talk with a Soviet citizen.

From the time our tour group left the ship in Leningrad, where we boarded the Red Arrow train to Moscow, we were never left alone. If Russians were interested in us, they didn't show it. Their eyes focused on the ground in front of them. We were mothered through Red Square, folkloric performances, and state shopping stores. We were fed in private dining rooms. It was reminiscent of being in a kindergarten class and holding hands in a single file when you visited the airport.

Since our time in Moscow was short, three couples were assigned to a dayroom at an Intourist hotel to “freshen up.” As my husband and I sat on a bed in the awkward silence of being with four other people we didn't know, the young woman from Canada broke the silence with, “Anyone for a nooner?” I could visualize a poor KGB agent in a basement somewhere rummaging through English dictionaries trying to figure out what a “nooner” was.

Visiting this beige, bland, unleavened strip of Europe was akin to chewing on a stalk of celery—no enjoyment, but you could at least say you ate. I left it with a burning curiosity about the people who lived in these stark, colorless high-rises. Who were these emotionless faces we saw from the windows of touring buses that never slowed down? Maybe if I had been able to look into just one pair of eyes, I could have gotten a handle on what they were all about.

It was to be ten years before we returned to Russia. We were on a cruise and made port in a small town called Nakhodka, the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Word of glasnost and perestroika had reached the cruise ships. The rumor had filtered down to Nakhodka . . . but just barely.

I had an aunt whom we once called to tell her we were going to drop by for a visit for a few hours. With fifteen hours' notice, my aunt wallpapered the entire house, painted the lawn furniture, landscaped the front and back yards, fixed the toilet, hung new draperies, plastered the kitchen, laid new carpet throughout, had her hair cut, and bought a new grill to cook out. Nakhodka people did the same thing.

An invasion of tourists from an American cruise ship was not a thing that happened every day in this little town and they were going to make it memorable. They put together a luncheon where the tables groaned with food. A small orchestra played at eighty-six decibels. Hostesses smiled and offered you drinks. They thought of everything but chairs and silverware.

For entertainment, they staged a gymnastic exhibition in the school gym. As we filed in, we nearly passed out from the paint fumes, but we slid onto the bright blue benches to watch Russian children perform with the style and grace for which they are noted. When they finished, my husband leaned over and said, “We can go now.” I whispered back, “You can go. My shoes are stuck to the floor.” Looking around, I realized they weren't the only things embedded in the paint. Those who couldn't get a seat carried away paint on their slacks and sweaters from brushing against the doorways.

All of it was awkward—like two countries on a blind date. But then an extraordinary thing happened as it can only when people are left to their own devices. Our buses had pulled up to the Nakhodka Museum, a dreary collection of maritime memorabilia and restrooms that didn't work. As the Americans sat on the steps, a few took yet another picture of yet another Lenin statue that dominated the square. Mostly, we were killing time. From a distance came a parade of the town's citizens. Mothers in their best dresses pushed babies in strollers. Men appeared in suits and ties, and from somewhere a group of musicians started to play music on the museum steps. The townspeople made a circle and began to dance for us. The Americans made the circle even larger. We couldn't begin to communicate with one another, but somehow there was a strong feeling that if we both reached out, we would remember this day for a long time.

I did.

The following year I was invited to Russia along with eight other American women to have a dialogue with members of the Soviet Women's Committee. It was a working visit sparked by Ellen Levine, editor of Woman's Day magazine, and an organization called Peace Links created by Betty Bumpers of Arkansas. We hoped the meeting would result in an exchange of problems, followed by an exchange of solutions.

As I sat at the long table, tilted on the side of the Russians by sheer numbers, I at last had a chance to look into the eyes of these people. Maybe if we cried about the same things and laughed about the same things there was hope for the world.

Since I was introduced as a humorist, I began my remarks by telling them that the major problem of American women was that for every pair of socks put into the washer, only one sock came back. We figured it went to live with Jesus.

It wasn't the first time I had told a joke and died. It was, however, the first time I felt they were going to outline my body in chalk. How could Russian women possibly relate to washing machine stories when no one owned one?

Moving right along, I told them the second major problem in America was men who sat around and watched one hundred and eighty-seven football games a weekend. At this point, the entire Russian delegation snapped to life and the chairman interrupted, “Mrs. Bombeck, you have just touched upon a global problem. What do you do in America about husbands who watch too much TV?”

I told her I had mine declared legally dead and his estate probated.

The laughter came. It was a Laughnost breakthrough. From there on in, we became a good-ole-girls network trying to pinpoint our concerns and how we could deal effectively with them.

One woman told us how Russian women were given the incentive of 200 rubles ($336 in U.S. currency) for giving birth to triplets. She added dryly, “You don't see anyone racing for the door, do you?”

Another one complained about the reticence of the Russians to talk about sex. “There is no sex education taught in schools. My only instruction was from my mother who said, 'You'll get sick of the whole business soon enough.” (The unmarried American delegate on my left mumbled, “Don't I wish.” The translator broke up.)

At one point, one of the women, who held a doctorate in education, excused herself from the table. When we asked where she was going, we were told her grandchild was home ill and she wanted to check on him. They had caring grandmothers . . . even in the Evil Empire. Imagine that.