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Article Excerpt
1. On board the Arahura (which, in Maori, means Pathway to Dawn), the imposing steamer-size car/passenger ferry from Wellington, North Island, New Zealand, to Picton, South Island, New Zealand, this past winter. I don't know that we've been happier (knock on wood, as my dear late mother used to say). The weather was fair, bright sun, and once the large auto and passenger ferry pushed out of Wellington harbor--all the colorful houses smiling down at us, the facade of an antipodean Trieste--it churned around the point into the Cook Strait where we met head on a strong chill breeze, reminding us of where we found ourselves, along the forty-first parallel, facing south toward Antarctica, where the waters of the South Pacific rushed to embrace and meld with the waters of the Tasman Sea.
I had a goal, to write a travel story about this small but fascinating dual-island nation, and K. was traveling with me. This was our lovely life together, sometimes bending toward my work, sometimes, on those extraordinary evenings when ten months of her work bloomed in twelve minutes on stage when dancers performed her choreographic creations, inclining toward hers. Who knows where we'll be when you read this, dear stranger or friend--under the ground or under the water, our ashes long scattered to milder winds than these? (If anyone at all will read this!)--but know that as far as we have traveled it has been good.
Standing on the captain's bridge of that ferry, a privilege bestowed on us by virtue of my assignment, we knew no better course than to go where the captain would lead us, and enjoy the moment-to-moment amazements of the three-hour voyage. Here a leaping pod of dolphins! A pod of clouds sailed above us as if in some sort of mirror image of how we moved along the water. All brightness now upon the waves. It was summer down here when the powerful currents of the Strait were less fickle than in other seasons.
This meeting of the two oceans--ferries had gone down in storms here twice in the last century--nothing like it in the northern hemispheres. The embrace of the ferocious flows, where one begins the other ends. A love affair of fierce currents. The kind of love that comes in youth, when you know nothing and feel that you have an eternity, or later in life when you have almost everything and know that you will lose it. That kind of ferocity! Those clouds seem to descend, and where it was clear suddenly we're seeing through a mist. Storms come up like this, and boats go under. But we press ahead, blithely, the radar showing nothing but blissful emptiness ahead. And then the fog cleared and we caught sight of the other side, the upper coast of the South Island, a line of tree-strewn cliffs and small fjords and channels. And K. and I turned to each other, holding hands like children about to play a game, and felt the pleasure of knowing we were almost there, wherever we were going.
2. December, six years before: on board the Royal Viking Sun, embarking from Rio de Janeiro, a voyage that began for us in great happiness. To dance with the samba school while in port! And then to sail out along the Copacabana strand and turn north along the coast to stop at Bahia, the colors of the houses there, the sway of the way the people walk! And soon, in a few days, our destination is the town of Belem, where the Amazon spills into the Caribbean, a dream of mine born of reading novels and histories and maps--to reach Belem.
Nothing more elegant on the water than this cruise ship. Only four hundred passengers and four hundred crew. Carefully appointed cabins, lovely dining, the desserts, the wines. Who could have traveled this way ever before in history? No king or Roman emperor could have found such comfort and ease on the ocean. Modern life, modern times, the fruits of democracy, where anyone--who can pay for a ticket of passage--may be treated like royalty!
Though we are guests of the shipping line, since I'm giving four lectures in exchange for our passage, so sort of a court jester, to get a luxurious free ride on the ocean in exchange for intellectual entertainment. "The Idea of Paradise" in Latin American literature--"The Nature of Brazilian Fiction"--these are the kind of confections I'm purveying on this voyage.
What did Columbus seek? How fearful was he when he made his first voyage? What did he find? How did he express it in his letters? To what metaphorical illusion was he in thrall? And us? What is our metaphor of America? What do we think of where we are, where we are going?
At the first talk, about twenty people gather--not bad, I suppose, twenty out of four hundred interested in such matters. That's about right. Two hundred showed up for the samba dancers on our night in Rio, but a number of the older audience members walked out because they found it too risque. Oh, the haunches on those...
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